The Latin Church Between Tertullian and Augustine, Newly Translated from the Latin · First Edition (2026)
Since the Lord warns us and says, "You are the salt of the earth," and since he bids us be innocent in our simplicity yet prudent even within that simplicity, what else befits us, beloved brothers, than to take care for ourselves, keeping anxious watch so that we may both grasp the snares of the crafty foe and guard against them — lest we, clothed as we are in Christ, the wisdom of God the Father himself, should appear to fall short of wisdom in the keeping of our own salvation? Danger is not confined to persecution alone, nor to those assaults that press forward in open warfare to undermine and topple God's servants; where the threat stands plain, vigilance comes easier, and the heart braces itself for the fight the moment an adversary shows himself. Far more to be dreaded and watched against is the enemy who creeps in unseen — who, wearing the mask of peace, worms his way in by secret paths, whence indeed he earned the name of serpent. Such has always been his cunning, such his blind, lurking treachery in circling round mankind. Thus, from the world's earliest days, his deceiving began: flattering with lying words, he ensnared the untried soul through careless trust. In just this way he attempted to tempt the Lord himself, creeping in secretly as though he might again slip by unnoticed and deceive — yet he was recognized and beaten back, and so lay overthrown, because he had been known and exposed.
From this we are given a pattern: to flee the way of the old man, to walk instead in the footsteps of Christ who has already conquered, so that, careless again, we do not slide back into death's trap, but rather, wary of the peril, hold fast to the immortality already granted us. Yet how can that immortality be grasped, if we fail to keep the very precepts of Christ through which death itself is defeated and undone, since he himself gives this warning: "If you would come to life, keep the commandments," and again, "If you do as I command you, I call you servants no longer, but friends"? Such men, at last, he calls strong and unshaken — founded on rock with solid weight, made secure against every storm and gale of the age with a stability nothing can shake or move. "Whoever hears my words and acts on them," he says, "shall be compared, in my telling, to a prudent man who set his house upon rock. Down came the rain, the rivers rose, the winds blew and struck against that house — yet it did not collapse, since it was grounded on rock." We are bound, then, to cling to his words, taking as our lesson both what he taught and what he did, putting it into practice ourselves. For how can anyone claim to believe in Christ, by Christ's own definition of belief, while refusing to do what Christ commanded be done? And how will one reach the reward promised to faith who will not keep faith with its command? Such a person must drift and stagger, carried off by a spirit gone astray, scattered like dust before the wind — his walking will never bring him nearer salvation, since he does not hold to the true path that leads there.
But we must be on guard not only against what is open and manifest, but also against what deceives by the subtlety of cunning fraud. And what is more cunning, what more subtle, than that, once the enemy had been exposed and cast down at the coming of Christ — after light had come to the nations, and the healing light shone forth to save mankind, so that the deaf received the hearing of spiritual grace, the blind opened their eyes to the Lord, the sick recovered lasting health, the lame ran to the church, the mute prayed aloud with clear voices in petition — he, watching his idols stand abandoned and, through the swelling ranks of believers, his shrines and temples emptied, should contrive a fresh deception, cloaking it in the Christian name itself to catch the unwary? Hence his invention of heresies and schisms, meant to topple faith, taint truth, and tear unity apart. Those he cannot restrain within the old road's blindness he snares and misleads through the error of a different one. He plucks men straight out of the church, and even as they imagine themselves already close to the light, already free of the world's night, he unknowingly floods them with fresh darkness, so that, no longer standing on the gospel of Christ, its observance, and its law, they still style themselves Christians — walking in shadow yet supposing they possess light — flattered and duped by the enemy, who, as the apostle says, disguises himself as a bringer of light, dressing up his agents as though they served righteousness: naming night as day, calling ruin salvation, dressing despair in hope's clothing, treachery in faith's guise, and antichrist in Christ's own title, so that through plausible lies he robs men of truth by sheer cunning. This comes about, beloved brothers, because men fail to turn back to where truth begins, fail to look for its head, and fail to hold to the heavenly Master's teaching.
If anyone weighs and studies these matters, no lengthy discourse or elaborate argument is needed. The proof lies ready to hand, compact and convincing in itself. The Lord tells Peter directly: "I say to you that you are Peter, and on this very rock I will raise up my church, and the gates of the underworld will never overpower it. I will hand you the keys to heaven's kingdom: whatever you tie on earth will stand tied in heaven too, and whatever you release on earth will stand released in heaven." He builds his church upon a single man, and though after rising he confers equal authority on all the apostles alike, saying, "Just as the Father sent me, so I now send you; receive the Holy Spirit — if you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven; if you hold anyone's sins bound, they remain bound" — even so, to make unity visible, he fixed by his own authority the starting point of that unity in one single man. The remaining apostles were certainly what Peter was, sharing alike in both honor and authority, yet the origin springs from oneness, so that Christ's church might be revealed as a single body. This same single church the Holy Spirit likewise marks out in the Song of Songs, speaking as the Lord, saying: "My dove, my flawless one, is one alone — she alone belongs to her mother, singled out by the one who bore her." Does the man who will not hold to this unity of the church still suppose himself a believer? Does the man who fights and stands against the church still trust that he belongs within it? For blessed Paul the apostle teaches this same truth, unveiling the mystery of oneness when he says: "One body, a single Spirit, one hope in your calling, a single Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God throughout."
This is the unity we bishops, presiding as we do over the church, must grip fast and defend above all others, so that the episcopate too may be shown as a single undivided whole. No one should mislead the brotherhood with falsehood; no one should taint the faith's truth through deceitful pretense. Bishops are many, yet the office itself cannot be split apart: every single one grasps his portion of it complete and undivided, entire in itself. There is but one church, spreading outward into a great multitude as her fruitfulness grows — much as the sun casts many rays yet gives a single light, or a tree throws out many branches yet draws its strength from one tenacious root; and when countless streams pour down from a single spring, the water may look scattered wide in its overflowing abundance, yet its unity is kept intact at the source. Snap off a ray from the sun's disk — the light's oneness will not permit the beam to stand apart. Snap a branch from its tree — once cut away, it can never bud again. Sever a stream from its spring — once severed, it withers dry. So it is with the Lord's church: flooded with light, she casts her beams across every corner of the earth, and still the light remains one wherever it spreads, nor is the body's unity broken apart by that spreading. She reaches her branches out over the whole earth in the richness of her fruitfulness, and lets her flowing streams run ever wider; and yet there stands a single head, a single source, a single mother, made rich by the ongoing increase of her fruitfulness. From her we take our birth, on her milk we are fed, by her breath we are given life.
Christ's bride cannot be turned into an adulteress; she remains pure and untouched. She knows a single household; with modest restraint she guards one bridal chamber's sanctity. She is the one who keeps us for God, who claims for the kingdom the children she bore. Whoever breaks away from the church to join an adulteress forfeits the church's promises, and no one who has deserted Christ's church will ever reach Christ's rewards — such a man stands outside as a stranger, unholy, an enemy. He cannot claim God as father who will not claim the church as mother. Just as none could have lived through the flood outside Noah's ark, so none can survive standing outside the church either. The Lord gives this warning: "Whoever is not on my side stands against me, and whoever fails to gather with me is scattering." To break the peace and harmony Christ gives is to work against Christ himself; to gather anywhere apart from the church is to scatter what belongs to Christ. As the Lord puts it: "The Father and I are a single one." And again, concerning Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Scripture records: "these three are a single one." Can anyone truly believe that this unity — rooted in divine steadfastness and bound together by heavenly mysteries — could be ripped apart within the church, split by the divorce of colliding human wills? Whoever will not keep this unity keeps neither God's law, nor faith in Father and Son together, nor life, nor salvation.
This mystery of unity, this bond of concord holding together inseparably, is shown forth when, in the gospel, the tunic of the Lord Jesus Christ is not divided at all nor torn, but, as they cast lots over the garment of Christ as to who should rather put Christ on, the garment is received whole, and the tunic is possessed intact and undivided. Divine Scripture speaks and says: concerning the tunic, because from the upper part it was not sewn but woven throughout in one piece, they said to one another, "Let us not tear it, but let us cast lots for it, whose it shall be." He bore a unity coming from above, that is, from heaven and from the Father, which could not at all be torn by the one receiving and possessing it, but held its whole and solid strength inseparably, once and for all. No one who rips apart and splits Christ's church can rightly claim to possess Christ's own garment. By contrast, when Solomon died and his kingdom and people were being torn apart, the prophet Ahijah, meeting King Jeroboam in the field, tore his own garment into twelve pieces, saying: "Take for yourself ten pieces, for thus says the Lord: Behold, I tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon and give you ten scepters, and two scepters shall be his, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen, that I might set my name there." When the twelve tribes of Israel were being torn apart, the prophet Ahijah tore his own garment. But because the people of Christ cannot be torn apart, his tunic, woven throughout and holding together, was not divided by those who possessed it; undivided, joined, and knit together, it shows forth the coherent concord of our people, who have put on Christ. By the mystery and sign of the garment he declared the unity of the church.
Who, then, could be so corrupt and disloyal, so crazed by the frenzy of division, as to believe God's unity, the Lord's garment, Christ's church, capable of being torn — or to dare attempt it? He himself gives this warning and teaching in his gospel: "There will come to be a single flock and a single shepherd." Does anyone imagine that in one and the same place there could be several shepherds, or several flocks? In the same way the apostle Paul, pressing this very oneness upon us, pleads and urges: "Brothers, I ask you," he says, "in Christ Jesus our Lord's own name, that you all voice the very same thing, letting no divisions exist among you, but standing united in one mind and one judgment." And elsewhere he adds: "Bear with each other in love, making every effort to guard the Spirit's unity through the tie of peace." Do you suppose that someone who pulls away from the church can go on standing and living, setting up for himself different seats and separate dwellings elsewhere? Recall what was told to Rahab, in whom the church was foreshadowed: "Bring your father, your mother, your brothers, and your father's whole household together to yourself, inside your own house — and whoever steps outside that house's door will bear the guilt himself." In the same way, the Passover mystery in the law of Exodus means nothing else than that the lamb, slain as a type of Christ, must be consumed within a single house. God says: "It is to be eaten in one house; do not carry the meat outside that house." Christ's flesh, the Lord's sacred thing, cannot be thrown outside, nor is there any dwelling for believers apart from the single church. This house, this shared home of one-mindedness, the Holy Spirit points to and announces in the psalms: "God settles those of one mind together in a house." Within God's house, within Christ's church, the like-minded dwell together, persisting in harmony and singleness of heart.
For this reason the Holy Spirit came in the form of a dove: a simple and joyful creature, not bitter with gall, not savage in biting, not violent in tearing with claws, loving human dwellings, knowing the fellowship of one house, bringing forth its young together, keeping close together in flight when it comes and goes, spending its life in shared company, recognizing the concord of peace by the kiss of the beak, fulfilling in every respect the law of one-mindedness. This is the simplicity to be recognized in the church, this the love to be attained, so that brotherly affection may imitate doves, and gentleness and mildness match that of lambs and sheep. What business has the ferocity of wolves, the rabid madness of dogs, the deadly venom of serpents, the bloody savagery of beasts, in a Christian breast? We ought to be glad when such men separate themselves from the church, lest they prey with their savage, poisonous contagion upon Christ's own doves and sheep. Bitterness cannot mix and bond with sweetness, nor darkness with light, nor rain with clear skies, nor war with peace, nor barrenness with fertility, nor drought with flowing springs, nor storm with calm. No one should suppose that the righteous are able to leave the church behind: no wind sweeps away the wheat, and no gale topples a tree rooted firmly and deep; it is only the empty husks the storm flings about, only fragile trees the whirlwind's onslaught brings down. Such people the apostle John denounces and condemns: "They departed from our company, yet they never truly belonged to it — had they been part of us, they would have stayed at our side."
From this same source heresies have repeatedly sprung up and go on springing up, since a twisted mind knows no peace, and disloyal unbelief cannot hold to oneness. Yet the Lord permits and allows it to happen, leaving the will's freedom untouched, so that, even as he tests our hearts and minds through the ordeal of truth, the faith of those proven may blaze out manifest in open light. Through the apostle the Holy Spirit gives this advance warning: "Heresies must also exist, so that those tested and proven may stand revealed among you." In this way the faithful are tested, in this way the disloyal are unmasked; in this way, well ahead of judgment day, the souls of both the just and the unjust already stand divided here below, and the chaff is sorted out from the grain. From this same root spring those who, on their own impulse, place themselves at the head of reckless bands of malcontents with no divine sanction, who name themselves leaders without any lawful ordination, who take up for themselves the title of bishop though no one has made them one. Of these the Holy Spirit speaks in the psalms — men enthroned in the seat of pestilence, plagues and blights against the faith, deceiving with a serpent's mouth, craftsmen of corrupted truth, spewing out deadly poisons with pestilential tongues — men whose talk creeps like a cancer, whose discourse pours a deadly venom into the breast and heart of every listener.
Against such men the Lord raises his voice; he holds back and calls home his wandering people, saying: "Pay no attention to what the false prophets speak, since the visions born of their own hearts deceive them. Their words do not come from the Lord's own mouth. To those who throw aside God's word they promise, 'Peace will be yours,' and to everyone walking after his own desires: 'Whoever follows the error of his own heart — no harm will touch you.' I never spoke to them, yet still they prophesied. Had they stood within my counsel, had they truly heard my words, and had they instructed my people, I would have turned them back from their wicked schemes." These very men the Lord again singles out and condemns, saying: "Me they abandoned, the spring of living water, digging for themselves cracked cisterns unable to hold any water at all." Since no baptism can exist except the one true kind, they nevertheless suppose they are baptizing; having turned their backs on life's spring, they hold out the promise of water that gives life and saves. There, men are not cleansed but rather soiled further; sins are not washed away but rather piled higher. That birth comes not from God but breeds children for the devil instead. Begotten through falsehood, they never grasp truth's promises; conceived out of faithlessness, they forfeit faith's own grace. Those who, in discord's madness, have shattered the Lord's peace can never arrive at the reward peace brings.
Some may try to deceive themselves with a hollow reading of the Lord's words: “wherever two or three have gathered together in my name, I am among them.” Gospel-corrupters and dishonest interpreters seize on the closing clause while skipping past what precedes it, holding onto one fragment and craftily burying the other — and just as they have torn themselves away from the church, so they tear apart the meaning of a single passage. For the Lord was urging his disciples toward oneness of heart and toward peace: “I tell you,” he said, “that if two of you should come to agreement on earth about any matter you ask for, it will come to you from my Father who dwells in heaven. For wherever two or three have gathered together in my name, I am among them” — showing that the greatest weight falls not on sheer numbers but on the shared purpose of those praying as one. “If two of you should come to agreement on earth,” he says: oneness of heart came first in his order, the harmony of peace was set down before anything else — he taught, with faithfulness and firmness, that mutual agreement is what matters. Yet how can a man be in agreement with anyone at all, when he stands apart from the church's own body and from the whole brotherhood? How could two or three be joined together under Christ's name, when it is evident that they have cut themselves off from Christ and abandoned his gospel? It was not we who broke away from them; rather, they broke away from us — and once heresies and schisms had subsequently sprung up, as men built for themselves scattered and rival assemblies, they left behind the wellspring and origin of truth. Now the Lord is speaking of his own church, addressing those who remain within it, so that — if they hold together in agreement, if, following what he ordered and urged, even a mere two or three pray as one — few though they be, they might win from God's own majesty whatever it is they ask. “Wherever two or three shall be, I,” he says, “am among them” — meaning among the guileless and the peaceable, among people who fear God and hold fast to what God commands. He declared he would stay present with such a pair or trio in the same way he stood by the three boys inside the furnace: because they kept themselves guileless before God and of one mind toward each other, he gave them life amid the surrounding flame through the breath of dew; likewise with the pair of apostles locked away in prison — since they were guileless, since they held one mind, he himself was there, he himself unbarred the prison gates so they could go back out to the public square and hand on to the crowd the message they had faithfully proclaimed. So when he sets it down among his precepts and declares, “where two or three shall be, I am among them,” he is not splitting people off from the church — he who founded and built the church in the first place — but, rebuking discord among the disloyal and, through his own words, urging peace on the faithful, he reveals that his presence favors two or three united in prayer over a crowd locked in rivalry, and that a small band's harmonious plea gains more than the clashing petitions of many can obtain.
That is also why, when he was laying down the rule for prayer, he added: “and when you stand to pray, release whatever grievance you hold against another, so that your Father in heaven may likewise release your sins.” He recalls from the altar a man coming to offer sacrifice while still at odds with someone else, telling him to make peace with his brother first and only then return and present his gift to God in peace — for God did not even look with favor on Cain's offering, since no one at odds with his brother through the strife of envy could truly have God at peace with him. So what sort of peace do these opponents of the brethren promise themselves? What offerings do these rivals of the priesthood suppose they are performing? Do those who assemble apart from Christ's church really believe Christ stands with them when they meet?
Even should such people be put to death while professing the Name, that stain is not rinsed clean even by their blood; the fault of disunity is beyond atonement and severe, and no amount of suffering washes it away. A man estranged from the church cannot be counted a martyr; he cannot reach the kingdom, having deserted her who is destined to reign. Christ gave us peace; he directed us to live in harmony and share one mind; he laid on us the duty of keeping the covenant of love and affection whole and untouched — and no one who has failed to preserve love for the brethren can present himself as a martyr. Paul the apostle affirms this and stands as its witness: “even were my faith so strong as to move mountains, I would be nothing without love; even were every possession of mine distributed to feed the hungry, and even were this body handed over to burn in flame, lacking love, none of it would do me any good.” Charity is generous, charity is gentle, charity does not envy, does not swell with pride, does not lash out, does not scheme, does not harbor ill will, cherishes all, trusts all, hopes all, endures all. Charity never fails. Never, he says, will charity fail — for this alone will endure forever in the kingdom, this alone will last eternally within the tightly bound unity of the brotherhood. Discord has no path into the kingdom of heaven; whoever has trampled the love of Christ through disloyal division cannot share in Christ's reward — Christ, who declared, “this is my command, that you love each other just as I have loved you.” Whoever lacks charity does not possess God; so runs the saying of the blessed apostle John, that God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God remains in him. Those unwilling to hold one mind within God's church cannot remain with God. Even if, handed over to flame and fire, they are burned, or thrown to beasts and give up their lives there, it will not be faith's crown but disloyalty's sentence, not the glorious close of a devout courage but the collapse of despair. Such a person can be executed, but he cannot be crowned. He calls himself a Christian in just the way the devil often falsely poses as Christ — the Lord himself gave warning of this beforehand, saying: “many will come in my name saying, I am the Christ, and they shall lead many astray.” Just as that impostor is not truly Christ despite borrowing the name, so a man who does not remain within Christ's gospel and within the truth of the faith cannot rightly be regarded as a Christian.
To prophesy, to drive out demons, and to perform great mighty deeds on earth — these are certainly lofty and impressive things; yet no one found doing all of this reaches the heavenly kingdom unless his course keeps to the observance of the right and just road. The Lord announces and says: “many will tell me on that day, Lord, Lord, was it not in your name that we prophesied, in your name that we drove out demons, and in your name that we performed great mighty deeds? And then I will answer them: I have never known you — get away from me, you workers of iniquity.” Righteousness must be practiced, so that one may win merit before God the judge; obedience to his commands and warnings is required, so that our deserts may earn their reward. When the Lord, in the gospel, was setting our path of hope and faith on its shortest course, he taught that our God, the Lord, is one Lord, and that it is with one's whole heart, whole soul, and whole strength that this same Lord God must be loved. This commandment stands first, and a second resembles it: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On this pair of commandments the entire law and the prophets rest. Through his own instruction he taught unity and love together, folding all the prophets and the whole law into two precepts. Yet what unity does that man keep, what love does he guard or even give thought to, who, driven mad by the fury of discord, tears the church apart, tears down the faith, throws peace into disorder, scatters love abroad, and defiles the sacrament—
—evil. This, most faithful brothers, had already taken root some while ago, but now the destructive plague of that same evil has spread further, and the poisoned corruption of heretical distortion and of schisms has begun to swell and take root even more — since this too had to happen as the world approached its decline, just as the apostle foretold us and the Holy Spirit gave warning in advance: “in the last days,” he says, “difficult seasons will come. Men will love only themselves, will be arrogant, conceited, greedy, blasphemous, unwilling to heed their parents, thankless, godless, without natural affection, without loyalty, given to slander, lacking restraint, brutal, hostile to what is good, treacherous, rash, swollen with self-importance, loving pleasure above God, keeping up an appearance of devotion while rejecting its power.” Among these are those who worm their way into households and prey on foolish women weighed down by sin, women dragged along by assorted desires, forever taking instruction but never arriving at any grasp of the truth. And just as Jannes and Mambres stood against Moses, so these people now stand against the truth — yet they will not advance far, for their ignorance, like the ignorance of those two, will become obvious to everyone. All that had been foretold is being fulfilled, and now, as the world's end draws close, it has arrived through the joint test of men and of the times. More and more, as the adversary rages, error misleads, madness inflates itself, jealousy sets fires, greed strikes blind, wickedness corrupts, arrogance puffs up, discord embitters, and rage rushes headlong.
Even so, let the sheer runaway faithlessness of so many not shake or unsettle us; let it instead reinforce our own faith through the very fact that what was foretold has come true. Just as some began behaving this way because it had already been predicted, so let the remaining brothers be wary of people of this stripe, since this too was announced beforehand, with the Lord himself instructing us: “but be on your guard — see, I have told you everything in advance.” I urge you, keep clear of people like this, and drive their ruinous talk away from your presence and your hearing as though it were a plague of death, just as scripture says: “hedge your ears about with thorns, and refuse to listen to a wicked tongue.” And again: “bad company ruins good habits.” The Lord teaches and cautions that we ought to step back from such people: “they are blind,” he says, “guides of the blind; and when a blind man leads a blind man, the two of them will tumble into a ditch together.” Anyone cut off from the church needs to be avoided and escaped on that basis alone. A person of this sort is twisted and sinful, condemned by his own doing. Does he imagine himself joined to Christ, this man who works against Christ's priests, who severs himself from fellowship with the clergy and the people? He carries weapons against the church; he fights back against God's own arrangement. He turns his hand against the very altar and rises in revolt against Christ's own sacrifice; his profession of faith rings false, his profession of religion is sacrilege — a servant refusing obedience, a son gone wicked, a brother become an enemy. Scorning the bishops and abandoning God's priests, this is the man who dares set up a second, rival altar, offer a different prayer with words that are forbidden, and corrupt the true offering owed to the Lord through false sacrifices, never realizing that anyone who fights against God's own arrangement will be struck down by divine punishment for the recklessness of that presumption.
So it went with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who tried to seize for themselves — against Moses and against Aaron the priest — the right to offer sacrifice; they paid the price for that attempt on the spot. The earth's frame split open and its depths gaped wide; the yawning chasm of the receding ground swallowed them up standing and still alive. Nor did the wrath of the offended God strike down merely the ringleaders responsible: fire, bursting swiftly from the Lord in vengeance, also consumed the two hundred fifty companions bound to them in the same madness, who had joined them in that presumption — a plain lesson and demonstration that whatever wicked men, by their own will, try to do against God's arrangement is done in opposition to God. So too King Uzziah, seizing the censer and forcing on himself a sacrifice contrary to God's law, refused to yield or obey even when Azariah the priest resisted him; struck with confusion by divine anger, he was marked on his forehead with the mottled spots of leprosy — branded, in the very part of his body that had offended the Lord, at the same spot where those who please the Lord are marked. And the sons of Aaron, who set on the altar an alien fire the Lord had never commanded, were struck dead immediately before the avenging Lord's own sight.
These are plainly the men whom others imitate and follow — those who, spurning what God has handed down, chase after foreign teachings and introduce doctrines of merely human devising: the Lord rebukes and scolds these very people in his gospel, saying, “you set aside God's commandment in order to establish your own tradition.” This offense outweighs even what the lapsed appear to have done, since they, at least, standing in penitence over their fault, beg God with complete satisfaction. Here the church is sought out and petitioned; there the church is opposed outright. Here necessity could have been the cause; there the will itself is caught in the wrongdoing. Here the one who lapsed harmed only himself; there the one who has tried to found a heresy or a schism has misled a great many by dragging them along with him. Here only a single soul is at a loss; there many are put in danger. The former, at least, recognizes his sin, laments it, and grieves over it; the latter, swelling with pride in his own wrongdoing and even taking pleasure in his own offenses, tears children away from their mother, lures sheep from their shepherd, and throws God's sacraments into confusion. And whereas the lapsed sinned a single time, this other man sins every day. In the end, the one who lapsed, if he later attains martyrdom, can still receive the kingdom's promises; the other, if killed outside the church, cannot arrive at the church's rewards.
Nor should anyone, dearest brothers, be astonished that even some confessors go as far as this, and that a number among them likewise commit sins so shameful, so serious. Confession does not render a man immune to the devil's schemes, nor does it shield someone still living in this world with permanent safety against temptation, danger, worldly assault, and attack; otherwise we would never afterward have witnessed among confessors the deceit, the fornication, and the adultery that we now see in some and mourn and lament over. Whoever that confessor may be, he is no greater, no better, and no dearer to God than Solomon was — and yet, for as long as Solomon walked in the Lord's ways, he retained the favor he had won from the Lord; once he turned from the Lord's path, he forfeited the Lord's favor as well. And so it is written: “hold on to what you have, so that no one else takes your crown.” The Lord would hardly warn that the crown of righteousness could be taken away unless it were bound to happen that, once righteousness withdraws, the crown withdraws along with it.
Confession marks glory's starting point, not yet the crown's reward; it does not round off one's praise but merely opens the door to standing, and since it is written, “whoever holds out to the very end will be saved,” whatever happens short of that end is only a rung by which one climbs toward salvation's peak, not the final marker where the summit's height is already secured. He is a confessor — yet after the confession the danger only grows, because the adversary has been provoked all the more. He is a confessor — all the more reason, then, for him to stand fast with the Lord's gospel, since it was through that gospel that he won glory from the Lord. From the one given much, much is demanded; and from the one credited with greater honor, greater service is required. Let no one be ruined by following a confessor's example; let no one pick up injustice or arrogance or disloyalty from a confessor's behavior. He is a confessor: let him be humble and calm, let him keep his conduct restrained and disciplined, so that one called a confessor of Christ might actually imitate the Christ he confesses. For since Christ himself said, “whoever raises himself up will be brought low, and whoever brings himself low will be raised up,” and he himself was raised up by the Father precisely because, on earth, the Word and power and wisdom of God the Father brought himself low — how could a man love self-exaltation, when it was Christ who by his own law commanded us to humility, and who himself, as humility's reward, received from the Father the loftiest name of all? Being Christ's confessor carries a condition: Christ's own majesty and dignity must not later be blasphemed through him. Let the tongue that once confessed Christ not turn abusive, not be heard causing an uproar with insults and quarrels, not fling the serpent's venom at the brothers and God's priests after having spoken words of praise. But if he later turns culpable and detestable, if he squanders his own confession through bad conduct, if he stains his life with shameful filth, if, in the end, abandoning the church where he became a confessor and tearing apart the harmony of unity, he trades his earlier faith for a later faithlessness — he cannot congratulate himself over his confession as though singled out for glory's reward, since it is precisely from that same confession that the penalties owed him will grow all the greater.
For the Lord likewise chose Judas among the apostles, and yet Judas later betrayed the Lord. Even so, the apostles' steadfastness and faith did not collapse on that account, simply because the traitor Judas fell away from their company. The same holds here: the confessors' holiness and standing are not immediately reduced merely because the faith of some among them has been shattered. The blessed apostle writes in his letter: “for what if some among them fell away from the faith — did their faithlessness cancel out God's own faithfulness? Certainly not; God remains true, though every man may prove a liar.” The larger and better share of the confessors stands firm on the foundation of their faith and on the truth of the Lord's law and discipline, and they do not part ways with the church's peace, remembering that it was within the church, through God's favor, that they obtained grace; and by that very fact they earn an even greater tribute to their faith, since, having separated themselves from the disloyalty of those who once shared with them the bond of confession, they have withdrawn from that crime's contagion. Genuinely lit by the gospel's radiance, shining with the Lord's own pure and brilliant light, they deserve as much praise for guarding Christ's peace as they earned for prevailing in their encounter with the devil.
I truly wish, dearest brothers, and I equally counsel and press for it, that if it can be managed, not a single one of the brothers should be lost, and that the mother, rejoicing, might gather into her own embrace one united body of an agreeing people. Yet if sound counsel proves unable to call back to salvation's road certain ringleaders of schism and instigators of division who remain locked in blind, stubborn madness, let the rest — whether caught up through mere simplicity, or misled by error, or taken in by some deceiver's cunning craft — be freed by you from deceit's snares; set their wandering steps loose from their errors; let them come to know the straight course of the heavenly road. This is the apostle's own testimony: “invoking the Lord Jesus Christ's name, we direct you to withdraw from every brother whose conduct is disorderly and does not follow the tradition they received from us.” And again he says: “let no one deceive you with empty talk, for it is on account of such things that God's wrath comes upon the sons of disobedience; do not, then, become their partners.” We must withdraw from wrongdoers, indeed we must run from them, so that no one, by joining himself to those on the wrong path and traveling the roads of error and crime, might himself stray from the way of the true road and be held guilty of the very same crime. God is one, Christ is one, his church is one, the faith is one, and the people are one, welded by the glue of harmony into the solid unity of a single body. Unity cannot be torn in two, nor can a single body be split apart by a break in its framework, its inner parts ripped and shredded into pieces. Whatever has broken away from the source cannot go on living and breathing apart on its own — it loses the very substance of its salvation.
The Holy Spirit warns us, saying: what man wants life and desires to see good days? Hold your tongue back from evil, and do not let your lips utter deceit. Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. Whoever knows and cherishes the bond of love owes it to himself, as a child of peace, to pursue peace and hold his tongue back from the evil of discord. Among his divine commands and saving teachings, as his passion drew near, the Lord added these words: I leave you peace, my own peace I give you. This inheritance he bestowed on us; every gift of his promise, and its rewards, he pledged in the preserving of peace. Being heirs of Christ, we ought to abide within Christ's peace; being children of God, peace is what we owe one another. It is said: blessed are those who make peace, since they will be named as God's own children. To be named children of God requires making peace, being gentle at heart, plain of speech, unified in feeling, and bound to one another faithfully by the knots of a single mind.
This oneness of mind once prevailed among the apostles: thus did the new people of believers, keeping the Lord's commands, hold fast to their love for one another. Scripture bears this out where it says: now the multitude of those who believed were of one soul and one mind. And again: all these continued steadfastly with one accord in prayer, alongside Jesus's mother Mary, the women, and his brothers. And so their prayers were effectual, and so they were able to obtain with confidence whatever they asked of God's mercy.
Among us, however, this oneness of mind has so dwindled that even the generosity of our giving has withered along with it. In those days they sold their houses and their estates, and laying up treasure for themselves in heaven, they brought the proceeds to be distributed to the apostles for the use of the needy. But now we do not even give a tenth from our estate, and though the Lord bids us sell, we instead buy and add to our holdings. Thus our faith's vigor has withered within us; thus the strength once found in believers has wasted away. It was with our own age in view that the Lord, in that gospel of his, posed this very question: when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith at all on earth? That prophecy of his is being fulfilled before our eyes. Faith is nowhere present — not in reverence toward God, not in righteous conduct, not in love, not in action. No one gives thought to the fear of what is to come; no one considers the day of the Lord, the wrath of God, the punishments in store for unbelievers, the eternal torments appointed for the faithless. Whatever our conscience would fear, if it believed, since it does not believe, it does not fear at all. But if it believed, it would also be on its guard; and if it were on its guard, it would escape.
Let us rouse ourselves, dearest brothers, as much as we are able, and, breaking off the sleep of our old sluggishness, let us keep watch to observe and carry out the Lord's commands. Let us be such as he himself commanded us to be, when he said: gird your waist and keep your lamps lit, and be like men awaiting their master's return from the wedding feast, so that when he comes and knocks, they may open to him at once. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, on his coming, finds watching. We ought to be girded, so that when the day of setting out comes, it does not catch us encumbered and entangled. Let our light shine and blaze in good works, so that it may itself lead us, out of this night of the world, into the light of everlasting brightness. Let us wait, always watchful and wary, for the sudden coming of the Lord, so that when he knocks, our faith may be found awake, ready to earn its watchful reward from the Lord. If these commands are kept, if these warnings and precepts are held fast, we who are watchful cannot be overcome by the devil's deceit while we sleep; as servants keeping watch under Christ's rule, we shall reign.
Behold, most beloved brothers, peace has been given back to the church, and what recently seemed impossible to the faithless and unbelieving has, through divine help and vengeance, restored our security. Minds are returning to joy, and now that the cloud of the storm's pressure has been dispersed, tranquility and serenity shine forth again. God deserves our praise, and thanksgiving must accompany the celebration of his kindnesses and gifts, even though our voice never stopped giving thanks, even throughout the persecution: for the enemy can never hold so much power that we — who love God with our whole heart, soul, and strength — would fail to declare his blessing and his glory everywhere and always. The day every prayer had longed for has arrived, and after a long night's dreadful, foul gloom, the world has burst into light, radiant with the brightness of the Lord.
We gaze with joyful eyes upon the confessors, bright with the renown of a good name and glorious for the praise of their courage and faith, and we embrace those we longed for with holy kisses, with a divine and unquenchable desire. Here stands the shining company of Christ's soldiers, who broke the raging violence of the pressing persecution by steadfast resistance, ready to endure prison, armed to endure death. You fought bravely against the world, you offered a glorious spectacle to God, you became an example to the brothers who would follow. Your devout voice spoke Christ's name, confessing that it had once for all believed in him; your illustrious hands, accustomed only to godly works, resisted the sacrilegious sacrifices; your mouths, made holy by heaven's food, having received the Lord's own body and blood, spat out the profane contagion and the remnants of idols. From the wicked and criminal veil with which the heads of those sacrificing were there covered, your head remained free and unenslaved; your forehead, bearing God's own mark, could never carry the devil's crown, but kept itself instead for the Lord's crown. With what a joyful bosom does mother church receive you as you return from the battle! How blessed, how rejoicing she is as she opens her gates, that you may enter in gathered ranks, bringing back trophies from the fallen enemy! Together with the triumphant men come women too, who along with the world have conquered even their sex. Virgins come as well, their glory doubled by their calling, and boys who have surpassed their years by their virtues. And the remaining crowd of those still standing firm follows in your glory as well, their footsteps trailing yours with marks of praise nearly equal to your own. Their hearts hold that same sincerity, their faith that same unshaken integrity. Anchored deep in the immovable foundations of heaven's commandments, and fortified by what the gospel handed down, they were not terrified by prescribed exile, by appointed torments, by the penalties threatened against their property and their bodies. Days were set for the testing of their faith: but whoever recalls having renounced this world owns no day that belongs to the world, nor does he reckon earthly time any longer, once he hopes for eternity from God.
Let no one, brothers, let no one diminish this glory; let no one weaken by malicious detraction the unblemished steadfastness of those who stood firm. When the day appointed for those who would deny had passed, whoever professed his faith within that day confessed that he was a Christian. The first title to victory is to confess the Lord when seized by pagan hands; the second step toward glory is to be reserved already for God by a cautious withdrawal. The one is a public confession, the other a private one; the one conquers the judge of this world, the other, content with God as his judge, keeps a pure conscience through integrity of heart; the one shows a readier courage, the other a safer carefulness. The one was found already ripe as his hour drew near; the other was perhaps only delayed, one who withdrew after abandoning his estate precisely because he was not going to deny — he would certainly have confessed, if he too had been seized.
These heavenly crowns of the martyrs, these spiritual glories of the confessors, these greatest and choicest virtues of the brothers who stood firm, are all saddened by one grief alone: that a part torn from our very vitals has been struck down by the violent enemy in the ruin of his onslaught. What am I to do here, most beloved brothers, tossed by the varied surge of my mind — what or how am I to speak? Words fail here; only tears can express a grief like this — the wound dealt to our body, the widespread devastation of a once-numerous people now calling for lament. For who is so hard and iron-hearted, who so forgetful of brotherly love, that standing amid the manifold ruin of his own and the mournful, defiled remnants, he could keep dry eyes and not, before any words, pour out his groans in tears the moment weeping breaks forth? Brothers, this grief is mine as much as yours, and neither my own untouched health nor my private security brings me any relief, since a shepherd feels the wound to his flock even more sharply than his own. I join my heart to each one, I share the mournful weight of grief and loss. I mourn with those who mourn, I weep with those who weep, I believe myself to lie prostrate with those who lie prostrate. My own limbs alike were struck by those darts of the raging enemy, the cruel swords passed through my own vitals. A mind could not be untouched and free from the assault of persecution: in the fall of the prostrate brothers, love itself has laid me low as well.
Yet, most beloved brothers, an account must be kept, nor should the dark gloom of this hostile persecution so blind the mind and understanding that no light at all remains by which the divine precepts may be discerned. If the cause of the disaster is known, the remedy for the wound is also found. The Lord chose to put his household to the test: a long peace had eaten away at the discipline handed down to us as a divine gift, and so a censure from heaven stirred our faith back to life after it had fallen and, I might almost say, gone to sleep; and though by our sins we deserved even worse, the most merciful Lord so tempered everything that all that has happened seemed rather a testing than a persecution.
Each one was intent on increasing his estate, and, forgetting what believers had done under the apostles or ought always to do, they devoted themselves with insatiable eagerness for gain to enlarging their fortunes. In the priests there was no devoted religion, in the ministers no whole faith, in works no mercy, in conduct no discipline. Men corrupted their beards, women painted their faces with false color; eyes were falsified beyond what God's hand had made them, hair was dyed by deceit. Deceit and cunning schemes preyed on simple hearts, and treacherous plots ensnared the brothers. They bound themselves in marriage to unbelievers, handing over Christ's own members to pagan defilement. Not only did they swear rashly, but they even committed perjury; they scorned their superiors with proud contempt, cursed one another with poisoned tongues, quarreled among themselves with unrelenting hatreds. Many bishops, who ought to be an encouragement and example to the rest, scorning their divine stewardship, became stewards of worldly rulers, abandoning their sees, deserting their flocks, wandering through foreign provinces in pursuit of the profitable trades of the marketplace. While brothers went hungry in the church, they wished to possess abundant silver, to seize estates by cunning frauds, to increase their wealth by multiplying interest. What punishment do we not deserve for wrongdoing of this sort, given that the divine censure had already warned us long before and declared: if they forsake my law and do not walk in my judgments, if they profane my ordinances and do not keep my commandments, their wrongdoing will be punished with the rod, their transgressions struck down with scourges?
These things were foretold to us, predicted beforehand. But we, forgetful of the law given to us and of its observance, brought it about by our own sins that, while we despised the Lord's commands, we came to need harsher remedies for the correction of our fault and the testing of our faith; and even at this late stage we did not turn back toward fearing the Lord enough to endure his correction and testing with patience and courage. At the very first words of the threatening enemy the greatest number of the brothers betrayed their faith, and were not struck down by the assault of persecution but laid themselves low by a voluntary fall. What unheard-of thing, I ask, what new thing had come to pass, that the sacrament of Christ should be dissolved by headlong rashness, as though some unknown and unexpected event had arisen? Did not the prophets foretell this before, and the apostles afterward proclaim it? Did they not, full of the Holy Spirit, always preach the trials of the righteous and the ever-present injuries of the pagans? Did not the divine scripture, always arming our faith and strengthening God's servants with a heavenly voice, say: You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve? Does it not, showing the wrath of divine indignation and warning beforehand of the fear of punishment, say again: They worshiped what their own fingers had made, and man was bowed down and made low, and I will not forgive them? And again God speaks, saying: he who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, save to the Lord alone. In the gospel too, afterward, the Lord — instructing through his words and fulfilling through his actions, practicing exactly what he taught — surely gave warning beforehand of everything now taking place and still to come? Did he not fix beforehand eternal punishments for those who deny and saving rewards for those who confess?
For some, sad to say, every such thought vanished utterly from mind. Rather than waiting to be arrested and interrogated before denying, they climbed the platform unasked. Battle lines had not even formed before a great many surrendered, falling without any struggle, not even preserving the appearance of unwilling idol-sacrifice. Unsummoned, they raced to the forum; they rushed toward death as if they had craved it for years, as if grasping at a long-hoped-for chance. So many were held back by magistrates as evening approached, and yet begged not to have their own ruin postponed! What force can a man plead in his own defense, when it was he who forced his own downfall into being? When they came to the Capitol unbidden, when they went of their own will to carry out that dreadful act — did their steps not falter, their eyes not dim, their insides not shake, their limbs not buckle? Did their minds not reel, their tongues not stick fast, their voices not fail? Could someone who had already renounced the devil and the age stand there and speak, renouncing Christ instead? Was that altar he approached to die at not simply his own pyre? Should he not have recoiled from that devilish altar, reeking with its foul smoke, and fled it as though from the very tomb and grave of his own life? What offering, wretch, what sacrifice do you bring as you go to beg mercy? You came to the altar as the sacrifice yourself, you yourself were the victim; there you offered up your salvation, there your hope and faith burned away in those deadly flames.
And for many their own ruin was not enough: by mutual encouragement people were driven on to destruction, death was passed from one to another like a deadly cup. And that nothing might be lacking to the full measure of the crime, even infants, placed or dragged by their parents' hands, lost as little ones what they had gained at the very beginning of their birth. Will they not say, when the day of judgment comes: We did nothing, nor did we of our own will hasten from the food and cup of the Lord to profane contagion; another's treachery destroyed us, we found our parents to be our murderers. They it was who denied us the church as mother, they who denied us God as father, so that while we, small and unwitting and ignorant of so great a crime, were joined by others to a share in their guilt, we were caught by another's fraud?
Nor, alas, is there any just and weighty cause that could excuse so great a crime. One's homeland had to be left behind, and the loss of one's estate accepted. For to whom, whether being born or dying, is it not appointed sometime to leave his homeland and suffer the loss of his estate? Christ himself must never be abandoned; what should be feared is losing salvation and forfeiting an eternal home. Behold, the Holy Spirit cries out through the prophet: Depart, depart, go out from there, and touch nothing unclean; go out from the midst of her, separate yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord. And should those who serve as the Lord's vessels, the very temple of God, fail to withdraw and go out from the midst, at risk of being forced to touch what is unclean and be defiled and violated by deadly food? Elsewhere too a voice is heard from heaven, warning what the servants of God ought to do, and saying: Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins and be struck by her plagues. He who goes out and withdraws does not become a partaker in the sin, but he who is found a partner in the crime is struck by the plagues as well. And therefore the Lord commanded withdrawal and flight in time of persecution, and both taught this should be done and did it himself. For since the crown descends by God's own reckoning and cannot be received except when the hour for receiving it has come, whoever remains in Christ meanwhile withdraws, not denying the faith but awaiting the time; but he who fell because he did not withdraw remained one who was going to deny.
The truth must not be concealed, brothers, nor should we pass over in silence what has caused and produced this wound of ours. A blind love of their own estate deceived many, and those whom their possessions bound like fetters could not be ready or unencumbered for withdrawal. Those were the chains for those who remained, those the fetters by which their courage was held back, their faith weighed down, their mind bound, and their soul shut in, so that they became prey and food for the serpent who, by God's sentence, devours the earth — those, that is, who clung to earthly things. And for this reason the Lord, the teacher of good things, warning us in advance for the future, says: If you wish to be perfect, sell everything you possess and give to the poor, and treasure will await you in heaven; then come and follow me. Had the wealthy acted this way, their riches would never have ruined them; storing up wealth in heaven, they would no longer harbor an enemy and besieger inside their own household; their heart and mind and understanding would be in heaven, if their treasure were in heaven, and one whose means of being conquered lay not in this world could not be conquered by this world. He would follow the Lord unencumbered and free, as the apostles did, and many under the apostles, and not a few since, who, leaving behind both their possessions and their parents, clung to Christ with undivided bonds.
But how can those follow Christ who are held fast by the chain of their estate? Or how do they aim for heaven, climbing toward what is lofty and sublime, when earthly cravings drag them down? They believe they possess, when rather they are possessed, slaves of their own wealth, enslaved not so that money serves its master but rather so that the master is bound over to his money. This is exactly the age, these the very men the apostle points to when he says: those wanting to grow rich fall prey to temptation, to a trap, to countless harmful cravings that drag a person down into ruin and destruction. Greed for money is the root from which every evil grows; certain people, chasing after it eagerly, wandered away from the faith and impaled themselves on many griefs. Yet what reward does the Lord hold out to us for despising worldly possessions? What payment does he offer in exchange for these slight, passing losses we suffer now? No one, he tells us, gives up house, field, parents, siblings, wife, or children for God's kingdom without receiving seven times as much in return during this age, and life without end in the age to come. Once we grasp this and take hold of the truth of God's promise, such a loss deserves not fear but eager longing, since the Lord himself proclaims it again and admonishes: Blessed shall you be, when they persecute you and separate you and cast you out and revile your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day, for your reward waits, great, in the heavens.
But then came the torments, and grievous sufferings pressed upon those who resisted. He may complain of the torments who was overcome by the torments; he may plead pain as his excuse who was conquered in his pain. Such a one may well ask and say: I truly meant to fight with courage — remembering my sacred vow, I armed myself with devotion and faith — yet as the contest wore on, the shifting torments and drawn-out agonies broke me down. My resolve held firm, my faith stayed strong, and for a long while my spirit resisted, untouched by the torturer's pains. But when, under the renewed savagery of a most cruel judge, the whips now tore my already-exhausted body, the clubs now battered it, the rack now stretched it, the claws now tore it open, the flame now scorched it, my flesh gave way in the struggle, the weakness of my body yielded, and it was not the mind but the body that failed under the pain — such a case may quickly deserve pardon, such an excuse may well be pitiable. So the Lord once forgave Castus and Aemilius in this very way, so in a second contest he made victors of those who had been defeated in the first encounter, that they became stronger through fire, having once given way before fire, and conquered by the very thing that had once conquered them. They pleaded not with the mere pity of tears but with their wounds, not with lamenting voice alone but with the laceration of their bodies and their pain; blood flowed in place of weeping, and gore ran down in place of tears from their half-burned flesh.
But now, what wounds can those who were defeated show, what gaping wounds of torn flesh, what torments of limbs, when faith did not fall after engaging in the struggle, but treachery ran ahead of the struggle itself? Nor does necessity excuse one overwhelmed, when the crime is one of the will. Nor do I say this to burden the case of the brothers, but rather to spur the brothers on to the prayer of satisfaction. For since it is written: those who praise you as blessed are in fact misleading you, throwing the path beneath your feet into confusion — he who flatters a sinner with soothing indulgence supplies fuel for sin, and does not check the offense but rather nourishes it. But he who reproves with sterner counsel both instructs and advances his brother toward salvation. Those whom I love, says the Lord, I reprove and chastise. So too the priest of the Lord ought not to deceive by indulgent compliance, but to provide for healing by wholesome remedies. He is an unskilled physician who handles the swollen recesses of a wound with a sparing hand, and by preserving the poison shut deep within the flesh only makes it worse. The wound needs cutting open, and only a stronger remedy can heal it once the rotten matter has been carved away. Let the sick man cry out and complain and protest, impatient under the pain — he will give thanks afterward, once he feels himself restored to health.
A fresh disaster has now emerged, dearest brothers: as if the persecution's fury had not been savage enough on its own, a further calamity arrives to finish the destruction — a wrong dressed up as compassion, a deceit that flatters even as it destroys. Certain men, rashly defying the gospel's strength and the law of the Lord and of God, hand out communion carelessly to those still unready — an empty, counterfeit peace, harmful to whoever gives it and useless to whoever receives it. They look for no patient road to healing, no genuine remedy through amends; repentance finds no room in their hearts, and all memory of so serious and final a sin has been erased. The injuries of these dying souls are papered over, and the fatal wound, buried deep within, is hidden simply by masking the pain. Coming straight from the devil's altars, hands still fouled and reeking, they approach the Lord's sacred things; breath still nearly reeking of the death-dealing offerings to idols, still exhaling the stench of their crime and its deadly contagion, they seize hold of the Lord's body — and this while scripture itself cries out: Every person who is clean may eat of the flesh, but whoever eats flesh from the peace-offering of the Lord while still unclean shall be cut off from among his people, that soul shall perish; and the apostle likewise attests, saying: You cannot both drink from the Lord's cup and from the cup of demons; you cannot share both the Lord's table and the table of demons; and this same apostle warns and threatens the defiant and stubborn, declaring: whoever eats that bread and drinks from that cup unworthily, doing so without discernment, bears guilt for the Lord's own body and blood.
Setting all this aside and treating it with contempt — before the offense is atoned for, before the crime is confessed, before the conscience is purified through sacrifice at the hand of a priest, before the wrath of the offended and threatening Lord has been calmed — his body and blood are subjected to outrage, and such people offend the Lord now with hand and mouth even more than when they first denied him. They imagine this to be peace, a thing certain men peddle with deceitful words. It is not peace; it is war, and no one severed from the gospel remains joined to the church. How is an injury renamed a kindness? How is impiety relabeled piety? Why do they pretend to offer communion to those who instead ought to be weeping without end and pleading with their Lord, shortening the mourning proper to repentance? Such men are to the fallen what hail is to crops, what a dark storm is to trees, what a plague of pestilence is to herds, what a savage tempest is to ships. They strip away the comfort of hope, they overturn from the root, they creep with sickly speech toward a deadly infection, they drive the ship onto the rocks so it cannot reach harbor. Under this so-called leniency, peace is withheld rather than granted, and instead of communion the road to salvation is blocked. This is another kind of persecution, another kind of trial, through which the cunning enemy, still bent on destroying the fallen, wages a hidden campaign of ruin — so that lamenting might cease, so that grief might fall silent, so that memory of the offense might fade, so the groaning of the heart might be stifled, so the weeping of the eyes might be checked, and so the fallen might not, with long and full repentance, beg pardon of the Lord they have gravely offended — even though it is written: remember from where you have fallen, and do penance. Let no one deceive himself, let no one be deceived. Only the Lord can show mercy.
Pardon for sins committed against himself can be granted only by the one who bore our sins, who suffered on our behalf, whom God handed over for our sins. God towers above every man, and no servant may, through his own leniency, remit or excuse what has been committed as a graver offense against the Lord — lest this too be added to the crime of one already fallen, should he fail to know it has been foretold: cursed is the man who places his hope in man. The Lord must be prayed to; the Lord must be appeased through our own satisfaction — he who declared he would deny whoever denies him, to whom the Father alone entrusted all judgment. It is our conviction that the merits of martyrs and the deeds of the righteous will carry great weight in the presence of the Judge — yet only once the day of judgment arrives, when, after this age and this world have passed away, his people stand before the tribunal of Christ.
But if anyone, made reckless by hasty impatience, imagines he can grant everyone forgiveness of sins, or dares to override the Lord's commands, he does the fallen not merely no good but active harm. To incite wrath instead of abiding by the sentence, to refuse to seek the Lord's mercy in prayer first, and instead, spurning the Lord, to rely on one's own leniency — this and nothing else is what such conduct amounts to. Beneath God's altar the souls of martyred believers cry aloud, saying: holy and true Lord, how long before you judge and take vengeance for our blood on the earth's inhabitants? And they are told still to wait in patience and rest. Can anyone then imagine that scattering forgiveness and dispensing pardon without discrimination makes a man good, when it works against the Judge's will — or that, before he is himself vindicated, he can stand as another's defender? If the martyrs ask that something be done, so long as it is just, so long as it is lawful, so long as it does not run counter to the Lord himself through a priest of God, let compliance be ready and willing, provided the petitioner shows devout restraint. If the martyrs ask for something not written into the Lord's law, then before doing what they command, it falls to us to learn first whether they secured it from the Lord — for a pledge made by human promise cannot straightaway be taken as granted by divine majesty.
For Moses too interceded for the sins of the people, yet even after pleading he did not win pardon for those who had sinned. I beg you, Lord, he said: this people has committed a grave transgression. Now if you will pardon their transgression, pardon it — but if not, erase me from the book you have written. And the Lord answered Moses: whoever has transgressed against me, I will erase him from my own book. That friend of God, who spoke with the Lord face to face so often, could not obtain the thing he asked, nor did his own plea soften the offended wrath of God. God praises and exalts Jeremiah, saying: before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came forth from the womb I set you apart and appointed you a prophet to the nations — and yet, to this very man, though he pleaded and prayed again and again for the sins of the people, he said: do not intercede for this people, and do not petition on their behalf in prayer, for I will pay no heed when they call to me in their season of distress. What could be more just, indeed, than Noah — the sole man found righteous on an earth overrun with sin? What more glorious than Daniel? What more resolute in the firmness of a faith able to endure martyrdom, more favored by God, having conquered so many times in the contest and, after conquering, lived on? What more ready in works than Job, more resolute under trial, more patient in suffering, more submissive in fear, more true in faith? Yet God said that even these, were they to plead, would not obtain it. When the prophet Ezekiel interceded over the people's transgression, God said: whatever land sins against me by transgressing, I will stretch out my hand over it, break its store of bread, loose famine upon it, and strip it of both people and livestock. And even if these three — Noah, Daniel, and Job — stood in its midst, they would not rescue son or daughter; only they themselves would be spared. So true it is that nothing requested rests on the claim of the one who requests, but on the judgment of the one who grants — human resolve claims and appropriates nothing to itself unless divine judgment also assents.
In the gospel the Lord speaks, saying: whoever confesses me before men, I too will confess him before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me, I too will deny him. If he does not deny the one who denies, then neither does he confess the one who confesses. The gospel cannot hold firm on one side while wavering on the other — it must be valid throughout, or it forfeits its force entirely. If those who deny are not guilty of the crime, then neither do those who confess receive the reward of their courage. Further, if the faith that has conquered is crowned, then defeated faithlessness must likewise be punished. So the martyrs either have no power at all, if the gospel can be dissolved — or, if the gospel cannot be dissolved, then those who become martyrs through the gospel cannot act against the gospel. Let no one, beloved brothers, let no one defame the dignity of the martyrs, let no one demolish what glory and crowning they have earned; the vigor of their uncorrupted faith stands untouched, and one whose hope, faith, courage, and every glory rest in Christ cannot say or do anything against Christ — so that whatever is done by the bishops against God's command, they cannot be held its authors, since they themselves carried out the commands of God. Or is anyone greater than God, or more merciful than the divine goodness, that he would wish undone what God has allowed to be suffered, or think that God had less power to protect his own church, so that we should suppose ourselves able to be preserved by his help alone?
Unless these things happened without God's knowledge, or all of this came about without his permission — let holy scripture teach the untaught and remind the forgetful, for it speaks and says: who handed Jacob over to plunder, and Israel to those who despoiled him? Was it not God — the very one they sinned against, refusing to walk his paths or heed his law? And so he poured out over them the fury of his indignation. And elsewhere it bears witness and says: is the hand of God not strong enough to save, or has his ear grown heavy so that it cannot hear? But your sins separate you from God, and because of your sins he has turned his face away from you, that he might not show mercy. Let us take account of our offenses, and weighing our deeds and the secrets of our hearts, let us measure what our conscience deserves. Let it return to our hearts that we have not walked in the ways of the Lord, that we have cast off God's law, that we have never wished to keep his commandments and his saving counsels.
What good can you think of such a man — what fear do you suppose he had, what faith do you credit him with — a man whom even fear could not correct, whom persecution itself did not reform? His neck stands high and unbent, not humbled even though he has fallen; his spirit, swollen and proud, is not broken even though it has been defeated. Lying there among those who still stand unhurt, wounded as he is, he makes threats — and because he cannot at once receive the Lord's body with defiled hands, or drink the Lord's blood with a polluted mouth, this sacrilegious man rages against the priests. And — oh, madman, what excessive folly is yours! — you rage against the one who strives to turn God's wrath away from you; you threaten the one who begs the Lord's mercy on your behalf, who feels the wound you yourself do not feel, who sheds for you the tears you perhaps do not shed. You keep piling up and adding to your wrongdoing, and yet, remaining unyielding yourself toward God's bishops and priests, do you suppose the Lord could be softened toward you?
Accept instead, and take to heart, what we say. Why do deaf ears not hear the saving precepts we urge? Why do blind eyes not see the path of repentance we point out? Why does a mind shut off and estranged not perceive the life-giving remedies we learn and teach from the heavenly scriptures? Or if for some unbelievers there is less confidence in what is to come, let them at least be terrified by present things. Consider the punishments we see befalling those who have denied, the grim ends of theirs that we mourn! They cannot even remain here without punishment, though the day of full reckoning has not yet come. Some are struck down meanwhile, that the rest may be set right. The torments of a few stand as an example for all.
One of these, who had climbed the Capitol of his own accord meaning to deny Christ, fell mute the moment he denied him. The punishment began exactly where the crime had begun, so that he could no longer even beg, having no words left for a plea of mercy. Another, a woman, while at the baths — for this alone was missing from her crime and her evils, that she should go straight to the baths after losing the grace of the life-giving washing — there, seized by an unclean spirit, tore with her own teeth at her tongue, the unclean instrument that had wickedly fed and wickedly spoken. Once the accursed food had been taken, the frenzy of her mouth turned its weapon against her own destruction. She became her own executioner, and could not survive long after, wasting away, racked with pain in her stomach and entrails.
Hear now what happened, with myself present as witness. Some parents, fleeing in fear and taking too little thought in their haste, left their small daughter behind in the care of her nurse. The nurse, once she was left with her, brought the child before the magistrates. There, at the idol to which the people were flocking, since she could not yet eat solid food because of her age, they gave her bread mixed with wine — itself left over from the offering made for those who were perishing. Later the mother took her daughter back. But the child could no more tell or reveal the crime committed against her than she had been able earlier to understand it or prevent it. So it happened, through simple ignorance, that the mother brought her along when we were celebrating the sacrifice. But the little girl, mixed in among the saints, could not bear our prayer and our offering — now shaken with weeping, now tossed about in a fevered restlessness of mind — and, as if under the compulsion of some torturer, her still-simple soul, young as it was, betrayed by whatever signs it could the guilt of what had been done. And when, the rites completed, the deacon started offering the cup to those in attendance, and when her turn arrived as the others were receiving it, the little girl, by the prompting of the divine majesty, turned her face away, pressed her lips shut, and refused the cup. Still the deacon persisted, and, though she resisted, poured some of the consecrated cup into her regardless. Then came choking and vomiting. In a body and mouth so violated the eucharist could not remain; the drink made holy in the Lord's blood burst back out from the polluted insides. So immense is the Lord's power, so immense his majesty: the secrets hidden in darkness were exposed beneath his light, and not even hidden crimes could deceive the priest of God.
This happened with an infant, who had not yet reached an age at which she could speak of a wrong not even her own. But there was another, older, a woman fully grown, who slipped in secretly among those offering sacrifice with us, taking not food but, so to speak, a sword — swallowing, as it were, a deadly poison into her throat and breast — and soon began to be choked and gripped by a churning of the spirit, and, suffering the pressure not now of persecution but of her own sin, she collapsed, trembling and convulsed. The crime of a hidden, dissembled conscience was not long unpunished nor long concealed. The one who had deceived a man felt God as her avenger. And when another woman tried with unclean hands to open her own chest, in which something of the Lord's holy sacrament lay, fire rose up from within and drove her back in terror from daring to touch it. And another man, likewise stained by having taken part in a sacrifice performed by a priest, dared to take a portion secretly along with the others — but he could neither eat nor even hold the Lord's holy thing; he found he was carrying only ashes when he opened his hands. This single case made plain that the Lord pulls back once he is disowned, and that what is received brings no benefit toward salvation to one who does not merit it, since saving grace, as the holy thing takes flight, turns to ash. How many every day are filled with unclean spirits, how many are shaken by fits of madness to the point of losing their minds entirely! There is no need to go through the fates of each one, since across the world's countless ruinous falls the punishment of sins varies just as much as the multitude of those who sin is great. Let each one weigh not the suffering another has undergone, but what punishment he himself has earned, and let no one believe he has escaped simply because his punishment has for now been deferred — he should fear all the more, the one whom the wrath of God the Judge has kept in reserve for himself.
Nor should those flatter themselves out of doing penance who, even though they did not defile their hands with the abominable sacrifices, nevertheless entangled their conscience with certificates. That too is a profession of denial, a declaration, made by a Christian, of what had been a refusal. He said he had done what another actually did by doing it, and though it is written, you cannot serve two masters, he served a worldly master, obeyed his edict, gave heed to human command rather than to God. He may see whether he has made public before men, with less shame or less guilt, what he committed — but he will not be able to flee or escape God as judge, since the Holy Spirit says in the psalms: your eyes have seen my imperfection, and in your book all shall be written; and again: man sees the face, but God sees the heart. The Lord himself issues this warning in advance: every church will come to know that I am he who probes the heart and mind. He looks into hidden and secret things and considers what is concealed, and no one can escape the eyes of the God who says: I am a God who draws near, and not a God far off. If a man is hidden in hiding places, shall I then not see him? He sees the hearts and breasts of each person, and, about to judge not only deeds but also words, he examines the intentions and thoughts of everyone, conceived still in the innermost recesses of a closed breast.
In the end, how much greater in faith and better in fear are those who, though bound by no crime of sacrifice or of a certificate, since they had nevertheless even thought of it, confess this very thing before the priests of God with grief and simplicity, making confession of conscience, laying open the weight of their soul, seeking a saving remedy even for wounds that are slight and modest, mindful of the scripture: God cannot be made a fool of. God cannot be mocked or outwitted, nor deceived by any cunning trick. Indeed, the one who sins more gravely is the one who, thinking of God in a merely human way, believes that, having avoided open commission of the deed, he has thereby escaped its punishment. Christ says in his precepts: whoever is ashamed of me, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed. And does someone consider himself a Christian who is ashamed or afraid to be one? How could someone belong with Christ, when he is ashamed or afraid to be counted as Christ's? Clearly he has sinned less by not gazing on idols, by not profaning the sanctity of his faith before the eyes of a surrounding, mocking crowd, by not defiling his hands with accursed sacrifices nor his mouth with wicked food. This makes the guilt lesser, but it does not make the conscience innocent. He can more easily attain pardon for his offense, but he is not free from offense; nor should he cease to perform penance and to beg the Lord's mercy, lest what seems the lesser degree of sin be piled higher by neglected satisfaction.
Let each one, I beg you, brothers, confess his own wrongdoing while the sinner still walks this earth, while his confession still stands a chance of being accepted, while the satisfaction and forgiveness made through the priests are still acceptable before the Lord. Let us direct ourselves toward the Lord with our entire mind, and expressing repentance for our crime with true sorrows, let us beg for God's mercy. Let the soul prostrate itself before him, let it make satisfaction to him with grief, let all hope rest upon him. He himself tells us how we ought to pray: return to me, he says, with your whole heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning, and tear your hearts and not your garments. Let us come back before the Lord wholeheartedly; as he himself instructs, let us calm his wrath and offense through fasting, weeping, and mourning.
Do we imagine that she laments with her whole heart, that she implores the Lord with fasting, weeping, and beating of the breast, when from the very day of her offense she frequents the baths daily, when, fed on lavish banquets and swollen with a still richer diet, she belches up her surfeit the next day, and shares neither food nor drink with the poor in their need? She who steps forth cheerful and gay — is that how she mourns her own death? And though it is written, "You shall not mar the shape of your beard," she plucks her eyebrows and adorns her face. Does she now labor to please anyone, she who displeases God? Or does that woman groan and grieve who has leisure to put on costly garments, who never stops to think that Christ's own garment is what she threw away, yet takes up precious ornaments and wrought necklaces, and does not weep over the loss of the divine and heavenly adornment? Though you clothe yourself in foreign attire and silken robes, you are naked; though you deck yourself with gold and pearls and gems, without the beauty of Christ you are deformed. And you who dye your hair — stop now, even amid your sorrows; and you who trace the lines around your eyes with black powder — wash your eyes now with tears instead. If you had lost someone dear to you to death, you would groan in grief and weep; with your face untended, your garments changed, your hair neglected, your countenance clouded, your face downcast, you would show every sign of mourning. But you, wretched woman, have lost your own soul; you have begun to live on here though spiritually dead, and, still walking about, to carry your own corpse — and yet you do not grieve bitterly, you do not groan continually, you do not hide yourself either in shame at your offense or in unbroken lamentation? See here wounds still worse than sin itself: to have sinned greater sins and not make amends, to have transgressed and not weep over the transgression.
This is what Ananias, Azariah, and Mishael did — illustrious and noble boys — in order to render confession to God, and they did not cease even amid the flames and the raging fire of the furnace. Though well aware of their own innocence, and though they had often earned the Lord's favor by their obedient faith and reverence, they did not, even in the midst of that glorious martyrdom of their own virtue, stop holding to humility and making satisfaction to God. As the divine Scripture tells it: Azariah stood, prayed, opened his mouth, and, joined by his fellows there amid the blaze, confessed to God. Daniel too, after the manifold grace granted to his faith and innocence, after the Lord's favor toward his virtues and praises so often renewed, still strove to earn God's favor by fasting; he rolled in sackcloth and ashes, making confession in grief and saying: Lord God, great and mighty and to be feared, who keep covenant and mercy with those who love you and keep your commands, we have sinned, we have committed wickedness, we have been impious, we have transgressed and abandoned your precepts and your judgments, we did not listen to your servants the prophets, who in your name addressed our kings, every nation, and the whole earth alike. To you, Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us confusion of face.
These things the meek, the simple, the innocent did, in order to win the favor of God's majesty — yet these very people, who denied the Lord himself, will not even offer him satisfaction or pray to him now! I beg you, brothers, submit to remedies that will save you, obey the better counsels, join your tears to ours, unite your groans with our groaning. We ask you so that we may be able to ask the Lord on your behalf; we turn to you first with the very prayers by which we beg God to have mercy on you. Do full penance, prove the depth of a grieving and lamenting spirit!
Nor should some people's reckless error or empty stupor move you, people who, though held fast in so grave a crime, have been struck with such blindness of soul that they neither understand their offenses nor mourn them. This is the greater blow of an angry God, as Scripture has it: "And God gave them a spirit of stupor"; and elsewhere: "They refused the love of truth, and so were not saved." And for this reason God sends upon them a working of error, that they may believe a lie, so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness. Taking unjust pleasure in themselves, and deranged by the estrangement of a stupefied mind, they scorn the Lord's commands, neglect the healing of their wound, refuse to do penance. Reckless before the crime was committed, obstinate after it, neither steady beforehand nor humbled afterward — when they ought to have stood firm, they fell; and now, when they ought to fall down and prostrate themselves before God, they imagine themselves standing. They have seized peace for themselves though no one granted it, deceived by a false promise; joined to apostates and traitors, they take up error in place of truth, they count as valid a communion with those who are not in communion, they put their trust in men against God — men who did not put their trust in God against other men.
Flee such people as much as you can, and by wholesome caution avoid clinging contact with them. Their talk creeps like a cancer, their conversation spreads like a contagion, their harmful and poisonous persuasion kills all the more through the very persecution it inflicts. There, where the true way remains, penance still avails to make satisfaction. But those who take away penance for a crime close off the path of satisfaction. So it happens that while, through the recklessness of some, a false salvation is either promised or believed, the hope of true salvation is taken away.
But you, brothers, whose fear of the Lord is prompt, and whose mind, though set down in ruin, is nonetheless mindful of its own wrong — look closely at your sins with penitence and grief, acknowledge the heavy charge weighing on your conscience, let the eyes of your heart be opened so your offense is understood, never giving up hope in the Lord's mercy, yet never presuming pardon is owed you either. As much as God is indulgent and good in the tenderness of a father, so much is he to be feared in the majesty of a judge. As greatly as we have sinned, so greatly let us mourn. Let not a careful and long remedy be wanting for so deep a wound; let the penance not be less than the crime. Do you suppose that God can be quickly appeased, whom you renounced with treacherous words, whom you preferred your estate over, whose temple you violated with sacrilegious contact? Do you think he will easily have mercy on you, you who said you did not belong to him? One must pray more earnestly and beg, spend the day in mourning, pass the nights in vigils and weeping, fill all one's time with tearful lamentations, lie prostrate clinging to the ground and ashes, roll about in sackcloth and squalor, after losing the garment of Christ wish for no other clothing, after the devil's food prefer fasting, devote oneself to righteous works by which sins are cleansed, press on constantly with almsgiving, by which souls are freed from death. Let Christ receive what the enemy was carrying off; that estate by which one was both deceived and conquered ought no longer to be kept or loved. It is a thing to be shunned as an enemy, fled as a robber, feared as a sword and as poison to those who possess it. It will profit only so far as what remains is used to redeem the crime and the guilt. Let the work be done without delay and generously; let one's whole fortune be spent on healing the wound; let the Lord, who is to judge us, be the one to whom our wealth and resources are lent. Thus faith flourished under the apostles, thus the first believing people kept Christ's commands: they were ready, they were generous. They gave the whole to be distributed by the apostles, and they were not then buying back offenses such as these.
If someone prays with his whole heart, if he groans with true laments and tears of penance, if he bends the Lord toward pardon for his offense by righteous and unceasing works, God can have mercy on such a one — he who has himself declared his mercy, saying: "Once you turn back and groan, salvation will follow, and you will know the place from which you came," and elsewhere: "It is not death for the dying man that I want, declares the Lord; rather, let him turn back and live." And the prophet Joel, prompted by the Lord himself, declares the Lord's tenderness: "Turn back," he says, "toward your God the Lord, since mercy, kindness, patience, and abundant compassion belong to him," and one who will bend his sentence back from the harm he had decreed. He can grant pardon, he can turn back his own sentence. To one who does penance, who labors, who prays, he can graciously forgive; he can credit as accepted whatever the martyrs have asked and the priests have done on behalf of such people. And indeed, if someone moves him further still by his own acts of satisfaction, if by just entreaty he appeases his anger, the offense of his indignation, God gives back again the weapons with which the conquered may be armed anew, he restores and strengthens the powers by which renewed faith may be quickened. The soldier will renew his fight, will re-enter the battle line, will challenge the enemy, made all the stronger for combat through his suffering. Whoever thus makes satisfaction to God, whoever through penance for his deed, through shame at his offense, conceives from the very grief of his fall a greater store of virtue and faith, being heard and helped by the Lord, will make joyful the Church he had lately grieved, and will merit not only God's pardon but also the crown.
You do well to remind me, dearest Donatus: I remember that I made a promise, and this is exactly the right season to make good on it, now that the grape harvest is in and the freed mind can take up its yearly, customary respite from the exhausting year. The place matches the day, too, and the pleasant look of the gardens, soothing and warming the senses in the gentle breezes of a flattering autumn, agrees with it: here it is delightful to spend the day in conversation and, through discourse devoted to study, to school the conscience of the heart in divine teaching. And so that no profane onlooker may hinder our talk, or the unruly noise of a chattering household dull it, let us seek out this retreat: the secluded grounds nearby offer withdrawal, where the wandering shoots of the vine, creeping in hanging tangles along their supporting canes, have made a leafy roof over a colonnade of vines. Here we do well to give our ears to study, and while we look upon the trees and the vines, we please our eyes with a delightful view, feeding both the mind through hearing and the sight through gazing — though for you now the only pleasure, the only concern, is our conversation; scorning the allurements of pleasurable sights, you have fixed your eyes on me, and with mouth and mind alike you are wholly a listener, and this out of the love with which you love me.
But as for how much, or of what quality, may pass from me into your heart, the meager and narrow measure of a slight talent brings forth only thin produce; it does not swell with the abundance of any fertile ridge of soil. Still, I will make the attempt with what capacity I have, for the subject matter itself is on my side. In the courts, before the speaker's platform, let rich eloquence be paraded about with fluent ambition: but when the topic is the Lord and God, the plain sincerity of the voice does not rely on the powers of eloquence for proofs of faith but on facts. In short, receive words not polished but strong, not painted with cultivated speech to charm a popular audience, but plain in unadorned truth, fit to proclaim the divine mercy: receive what is felt before it is learned, and is not gathered through the long, laborious acquaintance of tradesmen, but is drawn in by the shortcut of a grace that ripens quickly.
When I myself lay in darkness and blind night, and when, tossed about on the storm-driven sea of this restless age, I drifted uncertain and wavering, not knowing the path of my own life, a stranger to truth and light, I thought it a hard and difficult thing indeed — given the character I then had — that divine mercy was promising for my salvation: that a person could be born again, and that once quickened by the washing of saving water into a new life, the person he used to be could be shed entirely, and, even while the body's frame stayed as it was, the man himself could be transformed in soul and mind. How, I used to say, is so great a change possible, that what has hardened, whether by the nature of one's own inborn matter or by long habit grown old with age, should be stripped away suddenly and swiftly? These things sit fixed with a deep, deep root. When does a man learn frugality who has grown used to lavish feasts and rich banquets? And the man conspicuous in costly dress, gleaming in gold and purple — when does he lay that aside for plain, common attire? One who delights in the fasces and honors cannot bear to be stripped of them and left without glory. Surrounded by throngs of clients, honored by the escort of a dutiful crowd, he counts it a punishment to be alone. Always the old, clinging allurements must, as before, invite him to drunkenness, puff him up with pride, inflame him with anger, disturb him with greed, goad him with cruelty, delight him with ambition, hurl him down with lust.
These things I often said to myself. For I myself was held bound by very many errors of my former life, from which I did not believe I could be freed: so compliant was I toward vices that clung to me that, in despair of anything better, I even indulged my own faults as though they were already my own and native to me. But after the water of new birth washed away the stain of my former life and poured down a light, pure and from above, into my cleansed heart, after, having drawn in the Spirit from heaven, a second birth remade me into a new man — in wondrous fashion at once what had been uncertain grew firm, what was closed opened, what was dark shone with light, what before seemed hard now became possible, what had been thought impossible could be done — so that one could recognize that what had before lived in earthly, fleshly birth, liable to sin, was now beginning to belong to God, now that the Holy Spirit gave it life. You know for certain, and recognize along with me, what this death of sins has taken away from us, and what this life of virtues has conferred. You yourself know it; I need not proclaim it. To boast of one's own praises is an odious thing; though it need not be counted boasting, but rather gratitude, when what is attributed is not credited to a man's own virtue but is proclaimed as God's gift — so that not to sin any longer belongs now to faith, while sinning belonged before to human error. All that we can do, I say, is God's, all of it. From him we live, from him we thrive, and from that vigor received and conceived we, still placed here, gain foreknowledge of signs of the future: only let fear stand guard over our innocence, so that the Lord, who has graciously flowed into our minds by the descent of heavenly mercy, may be kept there by right conduct as a welcome guest in the delighted lodging of the soul, lest the security we have received breed carelessness and the old enemy creep back in.
But if you, for your part, hold to the path of innocence, of righteousness, with the unslipping firmness of your steps, if you are suspended toward God with all your strength and your whole heart, and remain only what you have begun to be, then as much license is given to you as spiritual grace is increased in you. For it is not as with the custom of earthly benefits, where there is some limit or measure in receiving a gift from God. The Spirit flows forth abundantly and is not confined within any bounds, nor reined in by enclosing barriers within fixed limits of measure. It flows continuously, it overflows generously: let only our heart thirst and lie open. As much as we bring there of a faith capable of receiving, so much of the flooding grace do we draw in. From this comes now the power, with sober chastity, an untainted mind, a pure voice, to quench the venom's force as a remedy for the suffering, to cleanse the corruption of deranged minds by restoring health, to command peace for the hostile, quiet for the violent, gentleness for the savage, to compel unclean and wandering spirits who have thrust themselves into men to conquer them, to force them to confession under threatening rebukes, to drive them out with harsh blows, to stretch them, as they struggle, wail, and groan, under mounting punishment, to beat them with lashes, to scorch them with fire. What is done there is not seen: the wound is hidden, but the punishment is manifest. So over the portion of us already made new, the Spirit we have received now holds its own dominion; the part of us not yet transformed — body and limbs — remains darkened still under the haze of a fleshly, worldly gaze. How great is the power of the mind here, how great its force — not only that a man is himself withdrawn from the destructive contact of the world, so that, once purified and clean, he is caught by no stain of the assailing enemy, but that he grows still greater and stronger in strength, so that he rules with commanding authority over the whole army of the raging adversary.
And so that the signs of this divine gift may shine forth more brightly once the truth is laid open, I will give you light for understanding; I will wipe away the darkness of evils and reveal to you the hidden shadows of the age. Imagine yourself for a moment carried up to the lofty summit of a steep mountain: gaze upon the appearance of the things lying below you, and, with your eyes stretched out in every direction, being yourself free from earthly contacts, look upon the storms of this heaving world: then you will pity the age itself, and, warned about your own condition and more grateful toward God, you will rejoice with greater joy that you have escaped it. See the roads closed by bandits, the seas beset by pirates, wars scattered everywhere in the bloody horror of camps. The world is drenched with mutual bloodshed: and when individuals commit murder it is a crime; it is called valor when it is done in the name of the state. Impunity for crimes is won not by any reckoning of innocence, but by the sheer scale of savagery.
Now if you turn your eyes and face toward the cities themselves, you will find their crowded life sadder than any solitude. A gladiatorial show is prepared, so that blood may gratify eyes grown cruel in their craving. Bodies are fattened on richer foods, and the mass of flesh grows sturdy and heavy on the frame of the limbs, so that, once fattened, it may die more dearly for the spectacle. A man is killed for another man's pleasure, and to be able to kill is a skill, a practice, an art: the crime is not merely committed, it is taught. What could be said that is more inhuman, more bitter than this? It is a discipline, that a man may be able to kill, and it is glory, that he does kill. What, I ask you, is that scene, where men are thrown to wild beasts whom no one has condemned, in the prime of life, of quite handsome appearance, in costly dress? Living, they are decked out for a death they walk into willingly, wretched, and yet glorying in their own misfortunes. They fight the beasts not for any crime but out of sheer madness. Fathers watch their own sons; a brother stands ready in the arena, and a sister too, and though the price of the spectacle may be swelled by a more lavish outlay for the show, so that a mother may be present at her own grief, this — sorrowful to say — a mother even pays for. And amid such impious, such dreadful spectacles, they do not think their own eyes guilty of a parent's murder.
Turn your gaze from here to the equally regrettable contagion of a different spectacle: in the theaters too you will see something that will bring you both grief and shame. The tragic buskin recounts ancient crimes in verse: the old horror of parricides and incests is replayed in action, represented to the very image of truth, so that what was once committed does not fade away as the ages pass. Each new generation, simply by listening, is taught that what has once been done remains repeatable. Never do offenses die with the age's passing; never is a crime buried by time; never is wickedness laid to rest by forgetting. Things that have already ceased to be actual crimes are turned into models. Then there is delight, in the mimes' school of shamefulness, either in recognizing what one has done at home or in hearing what one might do. Adultery is learned by being watched, and, with the corrupting evil of public authority acting as a pimp toward vice, the matron who came to the show perhaps chaste returns from the show unchaste. And beyond that, what a ruin of morals, what fuel for disgrace, what nourishment for vices, to be defiled by the gestures of actors, to watch, in defiance of the compact and rule fixed by one's own nature at birth, a submissiveness deliberately trained into shameless indecency: men are made womanish, all the honor and vigor of their sex softened by the disgrace of an enervated body, and there it pleases all the more, whoever has broken a man down into more of a woman. It grows into praise out of crime, and the more shameful a man is judged, the more skilled. This is watched — shamefully — and gladly. What could such a man not persuade an audience of? He stirs the senses, he softens the feelings, he storms the conscience of even a stronger heart; nor is there lacking the flattering authority of disgrace, so that through gentler hearing ruin creeps in upon men unnoticed. They act out an unchaste Venus, an adulterous Mars, that Jupiter of theirs who is no more the ruler of his kingdom than of his vices, burning with earthly loves along with his own thunderbolts, turning white now with a swan's feathers, now falling as a shower of gold, now, through his bird-servants, swooping down to seize boys on the edge of manhood. Ask now whether the one who watches such things can be whole or chaste. He imitates the gods he worships: wretched men, their very devotions become their offenses.
Oh, if only, set upon that lofty height, you could also thrust your eyes into secret places, throw open the closed doors of bedchambers, and lay bare to the conscience of your sight their hidden inner rooms: you would see done by the shameless what a modest brow could not even bear to look upon; you would see that it is a crime even to see, you would see that men, maddened by the frenzy of vice, deny having done what they hasten to do again. In mad lusts men rush upon men. Things are done that cannot even please those who do them. I am lying unless one who is himself of this sort reproaches others, the shameless defames the shameless, and believes he has escaped as a witness to his own guilt — as though conscience itself were not enough. The same men are accusers in public, guilty parties in private, judges and offenders at once against themselves: they condemn abroad what they do at home, they commit gladly what, once committed, they denounce. It is sheer boldness acting in league with vice, and shamelessness matching the shameless. I would not have you marvel at what such people say: whatever is now committed by that mouth in mere words is the least of it.
But after treacherous roads, after countless wars scattered across the whole world, after spectacles either bloody or shameful, after the disgraces of lust, whether prostituted in brothels or shut up within the walls of a home — where the more hidden the guilt, the greater the boldness — the forum, perhaps, may seem to you untouched, free from provoking wrongs, polluted by no contact with evil. Turn your gaze there: you will find more things there to loathe, and you will turn your eyes away from it all the more. Though the laws be engraved on the Twelve Tables and rights be posted openly on bronze, though they be publicly proclaimed — wrong is done in the very midst of the laws, sin is committed in the very midst of the rights, and innocence is not preserved even there, where it is being defended. The madness of feuding parties rages back and forth, and, with peace broken among the men in togas, the forum bellows insanely with lawsuits. There the spear, the sword, and the executioner stand ready, the claw digging in, the rack stretching, fire burning — more torments than limbs, for one human body. Who truly comes to the rescue amid all this? The advocate? He betrays and deceives. The judge? He sells his verdict. The one who sits to punish crimes commits them, and, so that an innocent defendant may perish, the judge becomes the guilty one. Offenses blaze everywhere, and everywhere, through countless kinds of wrongdoing, a poisonous corruption works through wicked minds. One man forges a will; another draws up a false document at the risk of his life; here children are shut out of inheritances, there strangers are given the goods; an enemy brings a false charge, a slanderer attacks, a witness defames. On both sides the venal boldness of a prostituted voice runs rampant into the lie of accusations, while meanwhile the guilty do not perish along with the innocent. There is no fear of the laws, no dread of the investigator or the judge: what can be bought off is not feared. To be innocent among the guilty is now itself counted a crime; whoever does not imitate the wicked gives offense. The laws have conspired with sin, and what is common practice has begun to be lawful. What shame for these matters can there be, what integrity is possible, where there is no one left to condemn the wicked, and you alone are left to be condemned?
But perhaps we seem to be choosing the worse things on purpose, and, in our eagerness to tear things down, leading your eyes through sights whose grim and repellent appearance offends the face and countenance of a better conscience: now I will show you those things which the ignorance of this age supposes to be good. There too you will see things to flee. Consider the honors, the fasces, the abundance of riches, the power in the camps, the show of purple in the magistracies, the power of license in the highest offices: the poison of these flattering evils is hidden, and the smiling face of wickedness is indeed cheerful, but it is the alluring deception of a hidden calamity. It is like a kind of poison, where in the deadly draught, sprinkled with sweetness by the cunning skill of deceit, the cup one drinks seems a pleasant thing; once the drink is swallowed, the destruction taken in runs its course. For consider the man you see, conspicuous in a brighter cloak, who seems to himself to gleam in his purple: with what filth did he buy this gleam, what arrogant disdain did he endure beforehand, what proud doors did he, as an early-morning caller, besiege, how many insolent footsteps of the puffed-up did he, surrounded by throngs of clients, go before, so that he, once greeted, might afterward have a procession of companions go before him in turn — a homage owed not to the man but to his office. For he has not earned to be honored by his character, but by his fasces. See, in the end, the shameful downfall of such men. When the fickle flatterer of the times has withdrawn, when the deserting hanger-on has laid bare the poverty of the private man's side: then the wounds of a shattered household strike the conscience, then the losses of an exhausted estate become known, by which the favor of the crowd was bought and the fleeting, empty breath of popular applause was sought. It is truly a foolish and vain loss, to have wanted to purchase, with the pleasure of a deceiving spectacle, what the people would not even accept and the magistrate would only lose.
But even those you suppose to be rich, joining estate to estate and, having shut out the poor from the boundary, stretching their fields ever wider without limit, men to whom belongs the greatest weight of silver and gold and either piled-up heaps or buried hoards of vast sums of money — even these, amid their riches, are tormented by the anxious worry of an uncertain mind, fearing lest a robber lay them waste, lest an assassin threaten them, lest the hostile envy of some wealthier rival disturb them with slanderous lawsuits. Food brings no ease, nor sleep either: such a man sighs at his banquet, though he may drink from a jeweled cup, and when a softer couch has settled his sluggish body, weighed down with feasting, into its deep cushions, he lies awake on his down, and the wretch does not understand that his torments are merely made to look splendid, that he is bound and held by his gold, possessed by it rather than possessing it — and, oh, what a detestable blindness of minds, what a deep fog of insane greed! — though he could unburden and relieve himself of these weights, he presses on instead to brood over his oppressive fortunes, presses on to cling stubbornly to heaps that are his own punishment. No generosity toward clients comes from it, no sharing with the needy, and they call it their own money, which they guard at home, locked up and anxiously watched over as though it belonged to someone else, from which they give nothing to friends, nothing to their children, nothing even to themselves; they possess it only for this, that no one else may possess it, and — oh, what a strange perversion of names! — they call it 'goods,' though they make no use of it except for bad ends.
Or do you suppose those men safe, at least secure with a stable firmness amid the trappings of high office and abundant wealth, whom the tutelage of watching armed guards surrounds, gleaming with the splendor of a royal court? Their fear is greater than that of others. He is compelled to fear as much as he is feared. Loftiness exacts its penalties equally from the powerful, even though he be hedged about by a band of guards and his flank kept closed and shielded by a numerous escort. As much as he does not allow his subjects to be secure, so it is necessary that he himself not be secure either: his own power holds in its grip, before all others, the very men it makes terrifying: it smiles, in order to rage; it flatters, in order to deceive; it exalts, in order to cast down. By a kind of usury of harm-doing, the greater the sum of his rank and honors has been, the greater in turn is the interest exacted in punishments.
There is, then, only one calm and trustworthy tranquility, one solid and firm security: if a man, drawn out from these storms of a restless age, finds his footing anchored in a saving harbor: he lifts his eyes to heaven from the earth, and, admitted to the gift of the Lord, already near in mind to his God, he glories that whatever seems lofty and great to others in human affairs lies beneath his own conscience. He who is greater than the world can no longer crave anything, can desire nothing more from the world. How stable, how unshaken a guardianship, how enduring in its blessings is this heavenly protection: to be loosed from the snares of an entangling world, to be cleansed from earthly dregs into the light of eternal immortality. Whatever destructive plot the hostile enemy once waged treacherously against us, we are compelled to love all the more what we are going to be, since we are now permitted both to know and to condemn what we once were. Nor is there need here of bribes or ambition or force, so that the highest rank or power of a man might be won by laborious effort: it is a free gift from God, and an easy one. As the sun freely gives its rays, as day gives light, as the spring gives its flow, as the rain gives its dew, so the heavenly Spirit pours itself in. After the soul, gazing up to heaven, has come to know its Maker, it begins to be higher than the sun and loftier than all this earthly power — namely, what it believes itself to be.
As for you, whom the heavenly army has already marked out for its spiritual encampment, hold fast to a discipline that is uncorrupted, hold fast to one that is sober through devout virtues. Let prayer be your constant occupation, or else the reading of Scripture. Converse with God in this hour, and let this same hour belong to God speaking back to you. May his commands be the ones shaping you, his guidance the one directing your course. The one whom he has made rich, no one will make poor. There can no longer be any want, once the heavenly nourishment has filled the breast to the full. Then the ceilings picked out with gold and the dwellings clothed in panels of costly marble will seem cheap to you, once you have learned that it is yourself who must rather be cultivated, yourself who must rather be adorned, and that this house is the better one for you, the house where the Lord has settled himself as though it were his shrine, the house where the Spirit of holiness has taken up his dwelling. Let us paint this house with the colors of innocence, let us light it with the light of righteousness. This house will never sink into ruin through the decay of age, nor will it be disfigured by the fading of wall-paint or of gold. Whatever is merely painted on is perishable, and gives no lasting confidence to those who hold it, since it has no truth of possession. But this house endures, ever alive in its adornment, whole in its honor, lasting in its splendor. It cannot be destroyed or extinguished; it can only be reshaped for the better when the body itself returns.
These few words for now, dearest Donatus. For although an easy patience born of goodness, a mind made steady in the Lord, and a faith secure in wholesome hearing delight you, and nothing is so pleasing to your ears as what is pleasing to the Lord, still we must set a measure to what is said, since we are joined together and shall speak often again, and since this is now a time of rest and a season of leisure. Whatever remains of the day, as the sun now leans toward evening, let us spend it in gladness, and let not even the hour of our meal be without a share of heavenly grace. Let a sober banquet resound with psalms; since your memory is retentive and your voice tuneful, take up this task as is fitting. You feed your dearest companions all the more if we have some spiritual hearing among us, if a devout sweetness charms our ears.
Although in most of you, dearest brothers, the mind is sound and the faith firm and the soul devoted, so that it is not shaken by the present abundance of mortality, but like a strong and steady rock breaks rather than is broken by the turbid onrushes of the world and the violent waves of this age, and is not overcome by trials but proved by them — still, because I notice that among the people some, whether through weakness of spirit or smallness of faith, or the sweetness of worldly life, or a certain slackness peculiar to their sex, or, worse still, through a mistaken grasp of the truth, stand less bravely and fail to call up the divine, unconquerable strength lodged in their own breast, this matter ought not to be passed over in silence. So, as far as our modest ability allows, let the sluggishness of a delicate mind be checked by vigorous words drawn from the Lord's own reading, so that a man who has already begun belonging to God and to Christ may come to be counted worthy of them both.
Dearest brothers, a man enlisted in God's service, stationed already within the heavenly camp and hoping now for what belongs to heaven, ought to recognize this: since the Lord himself foretold everything now coming to pass, no fright, no disturbance of any kind, should touch us amid the storms and gales the world stirs up. By the urging of his provident voice he readied his church's people, instructing and teaching and toughening them for whatever endurance the future would ask of them; he proclaimed and foretold that wars, famines, earthquakes, and plagues would break out across the earth, region by region, and, so that no sudden, unfamiliar terror of such hostile events might catch us unprepared, he warned well in advance that hardships would keep multiplying as the last days approached. Look — what he spoke of is happening now, and once these foretold events run their course, every remaining promise will likewise be fulfilled, since the Lord himself pledged it, saying: 'But when you see all this taking place, know that the kingdom of God draws near.' That kingdom, dearest brothers, has already begun drawing near: life's reward, the gladness of salvation without end, joy that never ceases, and paradise regained after its loss — all this arrives even as the world passes away; heavenly things already replace earthly ones, greatness replaces smallness, the eternal replaces what decays. Given all this, why should anyone here feel fear or unease? Who amid such things could remain timid and gloomy, unless hope and faith have deserted him? Fearing death belongs only to one unwilling to go to Christ; and unwillingness to go to Christ belongs only to one who cannot believe he is beginning to reign together with him.
It is written: the just man lives by faith. Suppose you are just and live by faith, and suppose you genuinely believe [in God] — then, being destined to be with Christ and assured by the Lord's own promise, why not embrace the fact that a summons to Christ awaits you, and take joy in your release from the devil? Consider Simeon: a man truly righteous, who kept God's commands in full faith. When it had been divinely disclosed to him that death would not come before he had seen Christ, and Christ, still an infant, was brought with his mother into the temple, Simeon perceived in spirit that the one foretold to him had now been born, and having looked on him, knew his own death was near. Glad, then, that his death was now close and untroubled by the approaching summons, he took the child in his arms, blessed God, and cried aloud: 'Now, Lord, you release your servant, according to your word, in peace, since my eyes have seen your salvation' — thereby showing and affirming that only then is there true peace for God's servants, only then true liberty, only then tranquil rest, when we have been drawn out of these worldly whirlwinds and have sought the harbor of rest and everlasting safety, when, this death cancelled, we arrive at immortality. That, indeed, is our peace; that is our trustworthy calm; that is our lasting, firm, and perpetual security.
For what else does this world wage but a daily battle against the devil, a constant struggle carried out in unceasing clashes against his darts and weapons? We contend against greed, against unchastity, against wrath; against ambition there is engagement too, and a continual, wearisome wrestling against fleshly vices and the world's enticements. Besieged and hemmed in on every side by the devil's assaults, the human mind scarcely manages to meet them one by one, scarcely holds its ground: let greed be thrown down, and lust rises in its place; suppress lust, and ambition steps forward to succeed it; scorn ambition, and wrath provokes, pride swells, drunkenness beckons, envy tears concord apart, jealousy cuts friendship off. You are compelled to curse, though divine law forbids it; you are forced to swear, though it is not permitted.
So many persecutions the soul suffers day by day, so many dangers press on the heart — yet is it pleasant to linger here long among the devil's drawn swords? It ought instead to be desired and longed for that, with Christ's aid, we hurry all the more swiftly toward him by way of death, as he himself teaches us, saying: 'Amen, amen, I say to you, that you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall turn into joy.' Who would not wish to be rid of sorrow, who would not race to reach joy? And as for when our sorrow turns to joy, the Lord himself declares it again, saying: 'Again I will look upon you, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away.' Since, then, to see Christ is itself to rejoice, and there can be no joy for us unless Christ has been seen, what blindness of mind, what madness is it to love this world's pressures and punishments and tears rather than hurrying toward the joy that can never be stripped away!
This happens, dearest brothers, because faith is in short supply — because no one trusts that what the truthful God promises is real, God whose word to those who believe stands eternal and firm. If some serious and respected man made you a promise, you would put your trust in him and would not think yourself cheated or misled by one you knew to be reliable in both word and deed. God speaks to you directly, and yet you waver, faithless, your mind full of doubt? God pledges immortality and eternity to whoever departs this world, and still you hesitate? Not to grasp this at all is not to know God; to sin through unbelief in this way is to insult Christ, the very teacher of belief; and though established within the church, to lack faith while dwelling in the household of faith is exactly this.
Christ himself, the teacher of both our salvation and our good, showed how great a benefit it is to depart this world: when his disciples grew sorrowful on hearing that he would soon withdraw, he spoke to them, saying, 'If you had loved me, you would be glad that I go to the Father' — by which he taught and showed that when those we love pass from this world, the fitting response is joy, not grief. Recalling this very teaching, the blessed apostle Paul says in his letter that living, for him, means Christ, and that dying is his profit — he reckons it the richest profit of all to be freed at last from the world's snares, no longer answerable to sin and the flesh's failings, but, delivered from crushing burdens and released from the devil's venomous grip, to set out at Christ's call toward the gladness of salvation without end.
Yet some indeed are troubled that this disease strikes our people equally along with the pagans — as though a Christian believed on condition that, untouched by any contact with evil, he might enjoy this world and this age happily, rather than being reserved for future joy after enduring every hardship here. Some are troubled that this mortality falls on us in common with everyone else. But what in this world is not shared with the rest of humanity, so long as this flesh still remains bound to the law of our first birth? As long as we remain here in the world, we are joined to the human race through the sameness of flesh, even while separated from it in spirit. And so, until this corruptible thing puts on incorruption, until this mortal thing takes on immortality, and until the spirit brings us home to God the Father, whatever afflictions belong to the flesh we hold in common with the human race. Just so, when the earth lies barren from a failed crop, famine spares no one; just so, when some city falls to a hostile assault, captivity lays waste to everyone together; and when clear skies withhold their rain, the same drought touches all; and when rocky shoals break a ship apart, shipwreck claims without exception everyone aboard; and eye-ache and the onset of fevers and the failing of every limb we bear in common with the rest, for as long as this shared flesh is carried through the world.
Rather, if a Christian knows and holds fast to the terms, the very law, under which he came to believe, he will understand that more labor falls to him in this world than to others, and that he must wrestle harder against the devil's assault. Divine scripture teaches and gives this warning beforehand: 'My son, when you come near to serve the Lord, prepare your soul for testing, standing firm in righteousness and fear'; and again: 'In sorrow, hold on; in your humbling, keep patience, for gold and silver are proved in the fire.'
So Job — after losing his possessions, after burying his own children, and grievously afflicted besides with wounds and worms — was not defeated but proved; amid the very struggles and griefs he bore, he displayed the patient endurance of a devout mind, saying: 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return beneath the earth. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken; as it pleased the Lord, so it has come to pass. May the Lord's name be blessed.' And when his wife pressed him, hoping the pain he could not bear would draw from him some bitter, resentful word against God, he answered her that she spoke as any foolish woman might, and asked whether, having accepted good from the Lord's hand, they should now refuse the bad. Through everything that happened to him, Job committed no sin with his mouth before the Lord's face. And so the Lord God himself testifies concerning him, saying: 'Have you taken note of my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him — a man beyond reproach, a true worshiper of God.' And Tobit too, after magnificent deeds and after the many glorious reports of his mercy, suffered blindness of the eyes; yet fearing and blessing God amid his troubles, he grew through that very ruin of his body toward praise — he too whom his own wife tried to turn aside, saying, 'Where now are your righteous deeds? Look what you are suffering.' But he, steadfast and firm in reverence for God, armed by religious faith to bear every kind of suffering, did not give way to his weak wife's grieving provocation, but rather won greater favor with God through his patience — he whom the angel Raphael afterward commends, saying: 'To disclose and acknowledge God's works is a worthy thing. For when you and Sarah were praying, I brought the record of your prayer before the glory of God; and when, without hesitation, you buried the dead, not delaying to rise and leave your meal but going and laying the body out, I was sent to test you; and again God sent me to heal you and your daughter-in-law Sarah — for I, Raphael, am one of the seven holy angels who stand in attendance before God's glory.'
The righteous have always kept to this same endurance; the apostles, too, held fast to this discipline drawn from the Lord's own law — not to grumble under hardship, but to meet whatever befalls in this world with courage and patience, since the Jewish people always failed on this one point, murmuring against God far too readily, just as the Lord God testifies in the fourth book of the law, where he says: 'Stop their grumbling against me, and they will not die.' Dearest brothers, we must not grumble under hardship, but must endure whatever comes with courage and patience, for it is written: 'A broken spirit is the sacrifice acceptable to God; a heart crushed and humbled God will not spurn.' Through Moses, likewise, the Holy Spirit gives this warning in Deuteronomy: 'The Lord your God will afflict you and bring hunger upon you, so that it becomes known in your heart whether you have kept his commandments well or not'; and again: 'The Lord your God puts you to the test, to learn whether you cherish him with your whole heart and your whole soul.'
So Abraham pleased God, because in order to please him he did not shrink from the possible loss of his son, nor refuse to carry out what would amount to slaying his own child. As for you, who cannot even lose a son through the ordinary law and chance of mortality — what would you do if ordered to kill your own son? Fear of God together with faith should ready you to face anything. Let there be loss of household property; let there be the constant, bloody torment of the body worn down by harassing disease; let there be the sorrowful wrench of parting, through the deaths of wife or children or other departing loved ones — let none of this become for you an obstacle, but rather a battle, something that should neither weaken nor break a Christian's faith, but rather display strength in the struggle, since trust in the goods to come ought to make one despise every wrong done by present evils. Without a fight going first there can be no victory; once victory has come through the clash of battle, only then is the crown given to the victor. A storm reveals the pilot; the battle line tests the soldier. Boasting is cheap where there is no danger; but where hardship brings real conflict, there truth is proved. A tree rooted deep is unmoved by leaning gusts, and a ship built solid with strong joints is struck by the waves yet not broken open; and when the threshing floor beats out the grain, the strong and sturdy kernels scorn the wind, while only the empty chaff gets swept off on the passing breeze.
So too the apostle Paul, after shipwrecks, after floggings, after many grave torments of flesh and body, says he was not tormented by these hardships but corrected by them, so that the more severely he suffered, the more truly he might be proved. 'A thorn in my flesh was given to me,' he says, 'a messenger of Satan sent to beat me, so that I should not grow proud. About this I begged the Lord three times, that it might leave me, and he told me: My grace is enough for you, for power comes to its fullness in weakness.' So then, whenever some weakness or frailty or devastation spreads, that is when our strength reaches perfection; that is when faith, once tested and standing firm, is crowned — just as it is written: 'The furnace proves the potter's vessels, and the trial of tribulation proves righteous men.' This, in short, marks the difference between us and those who do not know God: they complain and grumble under hardship, while adversity does not draw us away from the truth found in virtue and faith, but rather confirms us within our suffering.
That the body's strength is now being drained by a flow loosening the bowels; that a fire kindled deep within the marrow flares up as sores in the throat; that constant vomiting convulses the intestines; that the eyes blaze from a rush of blood; that in some the feet or other parts of their limbs are cut away because rotting disease has infected them; that through the wreck and loss of bodies as sickness breaks out, walking is weakened, or hearing blocked, or sight blinded — all of this serves as evidence of faith. What greatness of heart it takes to face so many onslaughts of ruin and death without the soul's strength being shaken; what loftiness, amid the wreck of the human race, to stand upright rather than lie flat alongside those who hold no hope in God at all, and instead to rejoice and seize the gift the moment offers — since, while we hold firmly to the profession of our faith and, having endured the labor, press on toward Christ along Christ's own narrow road, we may receive, by his own judgment, the reward belonging to that road and that faith. Let the man fear death truly who, unreborn of water and spirit, is handed over to Gehenna's fires. Let him fear death who bears no mark of Christ's cross and passion. Let him fear death who will pass from this death into the second one. Let him fear death whom, as he departs the world, an unending flame will torment with endless punishment. Let him fear death, the one granted this delay only so that his suffering and groaning may for now be put off.
Many among ours die during this mortality — which is to say, many among ours are being set free from this world. This plague is a scourge to Jews and pagans and enemies of Christ alike, but for God's servants it is a beneficial departure. Because it strikes without regard for status across the whole human race, the just perish along with the rest — do not therefore suppose that ruin falls equally on the wicked and the good. The just are summoned to refreshment, while the unjust are hauled off to punishment; protection comes swiftly to the faithful, punishment to the faithless. We are careless and thankless, dearest brothers, toward what God gives us, failing to recognize the gift bestowed on us. See how virgins pass on safely and at peace, carrying their glory with them, unafraid of Antichrist's threats and corruptions and brothels. Children escape the risk of their unstable years, arriving happily at the reward due their innocence and restraint. The pampered matron no longer dreads torment, having gained through the swiftness of her death freedom from fear of persecution and from the executioner's hands and cruelties. Those once fearful are set on fire by dread of this deadly hour; the slack are drawn taut, the idle roused, deserters forced back into the ranks, pagans driven to believe; the church's older faithful are called to their rest, while for the coming fight a fresh and plentiful army gathers with sturdier resolve, prepared to meet the battle unafraid of death whenever it comes, since it enlists for service in this very season of mortality.
What, then, dearest brothers, of this — how fitting it is, how relevant, how necessary, that this plague and pestilence, horrible and deadly as it appears, should test each person's righteousness and probe the disposition of the whole human race: whether the healthy tend the sick, whether kin show devoted love to their relatives, whether masters take pity on their ailing slaves, whether physicians refuse to abandon patients who beg for help, whether the violent hold back their fury, whether the greedy, even out of fear of death, quench the ever-raging, insatiable fire of their avarice, whether the arrogant bend the neck, whether the wicked temper their boldness, whether the rich, even now, give something to their dying loved ones and make bequests though they will die without heirs. Even had this mortality granted nothing else, it has given Christians and God's servants this above all: that we have come gladly to seek out martyrdom, in the process learning to set aside the fear of death. For us these are training exercises, not funerals — they lend the soul the glory that comes from courage, and by teaching contempt for death, prepare it for the crown.
But perhaps someone will raise an objection: what troubles me in this present mortal state is that I, who had readied myself for confession and had pledged my whole heart and full strength to endure suffering, find myself deprived of martyrdom because death arrived first. In the first place, martyrdom is not within your own power to grant, but rests on God's judgment — you cannot claim to have lost something you cannot even know whether you deserved to receive. Furthermore, God examines the depths of the mind and heart, beholding and understanding what is hidden; he sees you, commends you, approves you, and rewards with the wages of courage the one whose readiness for it he alone perceived. Did not Cain already carry murder within before he had actually slain his brother, even as he brought his offering to God? Yet God in his foreknowledge had already condemned the fratricide his mind had conceived. Just as that wicked thought and destructive intention were foreseen by God before it happened, so among God's servants — those whose confession is inwardly resolved and whose martyrdom is formed in thought alone — a spirit given over to good receives its crown from the Judge who is God. It is one thing for the resolve toward martyrdom to be absent from the soul, another for the martyrdom itself simply not to occur. Whatever condition God discovers you in at the moment he summons you is also the condition by which he passes judgment on you, for he himself declares this truth in scripture: 'and all the assemblies will recognize that I am the one who searches heart and mind.' What God seeks from us, after all, is faith, not blood — Abraham was not put to death, nor Isaac, nor Jacob, yet through the merit of their faith and righteousness they were honored as first among the patriarchs, and to their banquet gathers everyone found faithful, righteous, and worthy of praise.
We must remember that it is not our own will we are to carry out but God's, since the Lord himself taught us to pray for this every day. How backward and twisted it is that, while asking for God's will to be accomplished, we refuse to yield instantly to what he commands the moment he summons and calls us out of this world! We push back and struggle, and like unruly servants we are dragged into the Lord's presence in sorrow and grief, departing under compulsion rather than through willing consent — and yet we still want heavenly rewards from the very one we approach so unwillingly. Why, then, do we beg in prayer for the coming of heaven's kingdom, if captivity to this earth is what pleases us? Why do we ask and plead, repeating our prayers again and again, for the swift arrival of that kingdom's day, if what we truly want more, what we long for more strongly, is serving the devil down here instead of ruling alongside Christ?
Finally, so that the marks of divine providence might appear even more plainly — since the Lord, foreseeing what is to come, looks after the true salvation of his own — a certain one of our fellow priests and colleagues, worn down by sickness and troubled about his nearing death, was praying for some respite, when, as he prayed and lay almost at the point of death, a young man appeared beside him, venerable in honor and majesty, tall of stature and shining in appearance — one whom the human eye could hardly bear to look upon with mortal sight, except that a man on the verge of leaving this world could already glimpse such a vision. With a voice and bearing touched by something like indignation, he cried aloud: 'You dread suffering, you refuse to go — what then am I to do with you?' This was the voice of one both rebuking and warning: a man untroubled about the summons of death, though anxious about persecution, does not yield to the wish of the present moment but takes thought for what lies ahead. Our brother and colleague, though dying, heard this said for the sake of others; the one about to die heard it so that he might pass it on — he heard it not for his own benefit but for ours. What, after all, would he still need to learn, standing already at the point of departure? Rather, he learned it on behalf of those left behind, so that, once we discovered that the priest who had asked for respite was rebuked, we might know what serves us all.
To us too, though we are the humblest and last of all, revelation has come again and again — God's condescension has instructed us plainly and repeatedly — that I should testify without ceasing, that I should declare openly, that we ought not to grieve for our brothers when the Lord's call releases them from this world, since we know they are not lost but sent on ahead, that those who depart merely go before us, just as travelers setting out on a journey or a sea voyage are typically missed rather than mourned, and that mourning clothes should not be worn here once they have already put on white garments there; that no excuse should be handed to the pagans to reproach us — justly so — for weeping over as though extinguished and lost those whom we ourselves claim live on with God, and for failing to demonstrate through the witness of heart and chest the faith we proclaim with mouth and voice. We betray our own hope and faith if what we say comes across as pretense, falsehood, and disguise. Displaying courage in speech accomplishes nothing if our deeds undermine the truth.
The apostle Paul indeed condemns, rebukes, and blames those who grieve at the passing of their own. 'We do not wish you to remain ignorant, brothers,' he writes, 'about those who have fallen asleep, so that you do not grieve as the rest do, who have no hope: since we hold as true that Jesus died and was raised, God in that same way will bring along with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.' According to him, grief over the death of one's own belongs to those without hope. We, however, live on hope: we hold that God is real, and we are confident Christ suffered on our behalf and was raised, remaining joined to Christ and rising both through him and within him — so why would we refuse to leave this world ourselves, or grieve and lament over our own as though they were lost, when Christ our very Lord and God gives this warning: 'I am the resurrection. Whoever puts faith in me, even having died, will live, and everyone living and believing in me will never die.'? If we put our faith in Christ, let us trust his sayings and his assurances, so that — since death will never truly hold us and we are instead to live and reign with him without end — we may approach Christ with a confidence full of joy.
Our dying now, for a time, is simply the passage by which death leads us into immortality, and eternal life has no way to follow unless we first manage to leave this place. This is not termination but transition — a crossing into eternity once the course allotted by time has run out. Who would refuse to hurry toward something better? Who would not want, as soon as possible, to be transformed and refashioned after Christ's own likeness and the dignity granted by heavenly grace? As the apostle Paul proclaims: 'our citizenship exists in heaven, and it is from there that we await the Lord Jesus Christ, who will reshape our lowly body, making it conform to his own body of glory.' This is the future Christ the Lord himself promises us, since he petitions the Father on our behalf so that we may dwell with him and share his joy in the everlasting abodes and celestial realms, saying: 'Father, I want those you gave me to be with me where I am, and to see the glory you gave me before the world came to be.' Someone approaching the throne of Christ, entering the splendor of the heavenly realms, has no cause for grief or lament — rather, trusting the Lord's promise and true faith, such a person should welcome with gladness this departure and passing over.
In just this way we learn of Enoch's removal, granted because he found favor with God, as sacred scripture attests in Genesis: 'Enoch found favor with God, and afterward could not be located, since God had taken him away.' Standing in God's favor meant earning release from this world's corrupting touch. Through Solomon, too, the Holy Spirit teaches the same lesson — that those favored by God are withdrawn from here earlier and released all the sooner, so that lingering too long in this world will not stain them: 'he was carried off,' the text says, 'so that malice would not warp his mind, since his soul stood in favor with God — for this reason God hurried to bring him out from the midst of wickedness.' In the Psalms likewise, a soul devoted to God through spiritual conviction rushes toward him, as it is written: 'How dear are your dwelling places, Lord of hosts — my soul longs and races toward the courts of the Lord.'
Wanting a long stay in this world is fitting only for someone the world charms — someone the age flatters, deceives, and lures in with the bait of earthly pleasure. But given that the world despises the Christian, why keep loving something that despises you, instead of following Christ, who both ransomed you and loves you? John, in his letter, calls out and urges us against loving the world through the pursuit of fleshly desires: 'Have no love,' he writes, 'for the world, nor for what belongs to the world. Whoever loves the world does not have the Father's love within him, since everything the world contains — bodily craving, the craving of the eyes, and worldly ambition — comes not from the Father but from the world's own desire. And the world is passing away, together with its desire, while whoever carries out God's will remains forever, just as God himself remains forever.' Instead, dearest brothers, let us stand ready for the entirety of God's will with an undivided mind, unwavering faith, and sturdy courage; shutting out the dread of death, let us fix our thoughts on the immortality it opens onto. Let our conduct match our convictions, so that we do not grieve the loss of those we love, and when the day of our own calling arrives, we may go to the Lord promptly and gladly at his summons.
Since this is something a servant of God ought always to do, it should be done all the more now, when the world is already collapsing and is beset by the whirlwinds of assailing evils, so that we who see that heavy trials have already begun and know that heavier ones are imminent may reckon it the greatest gain if we depart quickly from here. If the walls of your dwelling were tottering with age, if the roof above were shaking, if the house, already worn out and weary, threatened imminent ruin as its structure gave way with old age, would you not move out with all speed? If, while you were sailing, a turbulent and stormy tempest with waves violently roused announced shipwrecks to come, would you not make for harbor all the faster? Behold, the world totters and is collapsing, and testifies to its own ruin not now from the old age of things but from their end; and yet you do not give thanks to God, you do not congratulate yourself that, by a more timely departure, you are being withdrawn and freed from the ruins and shipwrecks and imminent plagues that threaten?
It must be considered, beloved brothers, and pondered again and again, that we have renounced the world and for the present dwell here as guests and strangers. Let us embrace the day that assigns each of us to his own dwelling, that restores us, snatched away from here and freed from worldly snares, to paradise and to the kingdom. Who, established abroad, would not hasten to return to his homeland? Who, hurrying to sail to his own people, would not eagerly wish for a favorable wind, that he might quickly embrace his loved ones? Paradise, we reckon, is our true homeland; already we have started to regard the patriarchs as parents of our own. So why do we hold back from rushing there at a run, eager to look upon our homeland and to greet our own kin? A great company of our loved ones awaits us there — a full and abundant crowd of parents, brothers, and children longs for us, secure now of their own safety, yet still anxious for ours. What great joy, both for them and for us together, to come into their sight and embrace! What pleasure of the heavenly kingdoms is there, without the fear of dying and with the certainty of living forever — how supreme and everlasting a happiness! There is the glorious choir of the apostles; there the exulting company of the prophets; there the innumerable people of the martyrs, crowned for the glory and victory of their struggle and suffering; there the triumphant virgins who subdued the desire of flesh and body by the strength of their self-control; there the merciful rewarded, who did the works of righteousness with food and gifts for the poor; there those who, keeping the Lord's commands, transferred their earthly inheritance to heavenly treasures. Toward these, beloved brothers, let us hasten with eager longing, that we may wish to be with them soon, to come to Christ soon. May God see this our thought; may Christ look upon this purpose of mind and faith, ready to grant the greater rewards of his love to those whose longing for him has been the greater.
Dearest brothers, God's mercy — the Father's and Christ's alike, generous and never withheld — has done great things for our salvation, and does them still. To keep us alive and restore what was lost, the Father sent the Son; the Son, for his part, agreed to be sent and to bear the name ‘son of man’ so that we might become sons of God. Laid low, he raised up a fallen people; struck with wounds, he brought healing to ours; bound in service, he led the enslaved out into liberty; submitting to death, he opened immortality to those who die. These are vast and generous gifts already. Yet a further mercy, no smaller than the rest, still watches over us: a plan meant to give more thorough care to a man once he has been ransomed. When the Lord arrived, he healed the wounds Adam had borne and drew out the serpent's old poison — then, to the man now cured, he gave a law and a command: sin no more, or something heavier will follow. That confined us, penned within the tight limits of a rule demanding innocence. Human weakness and frailty would have had nowhere to turn, if divine goodness had not stepped in again, displaying works of justice and compassion and clearing a path by which salvation could be kept safe — so that any filth we pick up afterward, we might scrub away through mercy shown to others.
Scripture carries the Holy Spirit's own words: through almsgiving and faith, offenses are washed away — though not the offenses already committed beforehand, since those are cleansed by Christ's blood and by sanctification. Elsewhere it says the same thing differently: sin is put out by almsgiving the way fire is put out by water. The point being proved is this — hell's fire is quenched by the bath of saving water, and in just the same way, works of righteousness and almsgiving smother the flame that sin produces. Baptism grants forgiveness once; but ongoing, unbroken good work, modeled on baptism's pattern, keeps drawing God's pardon back down on us. The gospel makes the same point through the Lord himself. His disciples were criticized for eating without washing their hands, so he answered: the one who made the inside made the outside too. Instead, give what you have to the poor — and suddenly everything is clean for you. What he was teaching, plainly, is that hands are not what needs washing; it is the heart, and the grime inside must go before the grime outside does. Whoever scours what is within has, by that very act, scoured what is without as well — once the mind is clean, the flesh and body follow into cleanness. He then went further, pointing to the source of this cleansing: giving to the poor is required. Being merciful himself, he calls for mercy from us; and because he means to keep safe those he bought back at such cost, he assures us that anyone stained again after baptism's grace can still be washed clean.
Beloved, let us own this healing gift of God's indulgence: none of us is free of some wound in conscience, so let spiritual remedies tend to whatever sins still need cleansing and purging. No one should flatter himself over a spotless, untouched breast to the point of thinking, on the strength of his own innocence, that no medicine belongs on his wounds — for scripture asks: who can boast of a pure heart, or claim to be free from sin? And John, in his letter, puts it plainly: to say we have no sin is to deceive ourselves, and the truth has no place in us. Given, then, that nobody escapes sin altogether, and that calling oneself faultless is either arrogance or folly, how fitting, how generous is God's mercy — aware that even those already healed will pick up fresh wounds afterward, he has supplied saving cures for healing them all over again.
Never, indeed, dearest brethren, has the divine admonition ceased or fallen silent, but always and everywhere, in the scriptures both old and new, God's people have been urged toward works of mercy, and everyone, instructed by the singing and exhorting of the Holy Spirit toward the hope of the heavenly kingdom, has been commanded to give alms. God commands and instructs Isaiah: cry aloud, he says, and spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet, announce to my people their sins and to the house of Jacob their wrongdoings. Only after commanding that their sins be exposed before them, after laying out their wrongdoings with the full weight of his anger, and after declaring that no prayer, no supplication, no fast, not even rolling in sackcloth and ashes, could calm God's wrath or answer for their offenses, did he finally reveal — in this last section — that alms alone have the power to appease God, adding these words: break your bread for the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see one naked, clothe him, and do not despise the members of your own household. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your garments shall soon rise up, and righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of God shall surround you. Then you shall cry out, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking he will say: here I am.
God supplied, in his own words, the remedies for winning back his favor; divine teaching spelled out for sinners exactly what was required — righteous deeds satisfy God, and the merit of mercy washes sin away. Solomon puts it this way: hide your alms away in a poor man's heart, and it will plead your cause against every misfortune. And elsewhere: whoever shuts his ears against the cry of the weak will himself cry out to God one day and find no one listening. A man cannot earn God's mercy without first being merciful himself, nor will he win anything from God's goodness through prayer if he showed no humanity toward the prayers of the poor. The Holy Spirit confirms this same point in the psalms: happy is the one who considers the poor and needy — the Lord will rescue him on the day of trouble. Daniel kept these commands in mind: when King Nebuchadnezzar was tormented and burning with dread over a threatening dream, Daniel offered him a way to turn aside disaster and secure God's help — let my counsel please you, O king: buy back your sins with alms, and your wrongs with mercy toward the poor, and God will bear patiently with your sins. The king ignored the advice and endured the very disasters he had dreaded and foreseen; alms could have spared him from all of it. The angel Raphael says something identical, urging that alms be given freely and without stinting: prayer joined with fasting and almsgiving is good, because almsgiving rescues from death and scours away sin on its own. What this shows is that our prayers and fasts accomplish less without almsgiving behind them, and that requests alone carry little weight unless backed by deeds actually done. The angel is telling us, without ambiguity, that almsgiving is what makes our petitions effective, that it buys life back out of danger, and that it is almsgiving which frees souls from death.
None of this, beloved, do we assert without backing the angel Raphael's words with the proof of an actual event. The Acts of the Apostles records exactly such a case, proving through a deed done and completed that almsgiving rescues souls not merely from the second death but from the first as well. Tabitha had given herself wholeheartedly to righteous work and to almsgiving; when illness took her life, it was Peter who was called to her lifeless body. He arrived without delay, as apostolic kindness demanded, and found widows gathered around him in tears, pleading — not through their own words on the dead woman's behalf, but by displaying the cloaks and tunics she had once made for them, letting her own works speak for her. Peter recognized that such a plea could succeed, that Christ would not withhold his help from pleading widows, since Christ himself was clothed in them. He knelt and prayed, carrying to the Lord, as a worthy advocate, the prayers entrusted to him by widows and the poor; then he turned to the washed body laid out on its bier and said, Tabitha, rise up in the name of Jesus Christ. Peter did not fail to deliver at once the help pledged by the one whose gospel promise was that anything asked in his name would be granted. Death loosened its grip, breath returned, and while everyone stood amazed, her body was revived and brought back into the light of this world. That is the power mercy's rewards carry, that is the strength righteous deeds hold — she who had given widows their means of survival in hardship earned, through the widows' own plea, her recall to life.
The gospel shows the Lord — teacher of our life, guide to salvation without end — giving life to those who believe and, for those already given life, providing still further; and among all his heavenly commands nothing recurs more than this: keep giving alms, stop clinging to earthly holdings, and store up treasure in heaven instead. Sell what you own, he says, and give to the poor; and elsewhere: do not hoard treasure on earth, where moth and rot consume it and thieves break in to steal, but hoard treasure in heaven, safe from moth, from rot, from thieves who cannot break in there — for wherever your treasure sits, your heart will be found beside it. And wanting to show what completeness looks like once the law has already been kept, he told a man: if you want to be perfect, go, sell everything, give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven — then come, follow me. Elsewhere still he pictures a trader after heavenly profit, a buyer of salvation without end, who must spend his whole estate on one costly pearl — eternal life, made costly by Christ's own blood: the kingdom of heaven, he says, is like a merchant hunting fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl worth everything, went and sold all he owned to buy it.
Those he finds working to help and feed the poor, he names sons of Abraham. When Zacchaeus declared: I give half my goods to the needy, and repay fourfold whatever I have taken by fraud, Jesus replied: salvation has come to this house today, for he too is a son of Abraham. Just as Abraham's belief in God was counted to him as righteousness, so too the man who gives alms in obedience to God's command is believing God; and whoever holds genuine faith keeps the fear of God, and whoever keeps the fear of God has God in mind when he shows mercy to the poor. Such a man acts within God, because he believes — because he knows the promises spoken in God's word are true and that scripture cannot lie: barren trees, meaning fruitless men, are felled and thrown into the fire, while the merciful are summoned to the kingdom. Elsewhere he names the faithful as those who labor and bear fruit, but strips that title from the barren and unfruitful, saying: if you proved untrustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with what is genuine? And if you were untrustworthy with what belonged to another, who will give you what is your own?
You may worry that generous giving will eventually drain your estate and leave you in want. Set that fear aside; there is nothing to be uneasy about. Whatever is spent in Christ's service, whatever funds heavenly work, cannot run dry. This is not a promise I make on my own authority — I offer it on the strength of scripture and the guarantee of God's own word. Through Solomon the Holy Spirit says: the one who gives to the poor will never be needy, but the one who looks away will fall into deep want — proof that the merciful and the active never suffer lack, while it is the miserly and the barren who end up poor. The blessed apostle Paul, speaking under the Lord's own inspiration, adds the same lesson: the one who supplies seed to the sower will supply bread for food too, multiplying what you sow and building up the harvest of your righteousness, so that you come away enriched in every way. And elsewhere: carrying out this service will do more than meet the needs of the saints — it will overflow into abundant thanks offered to the Lord, since the poor's own prayer of gratitude to God for our giving and our labor brings back, through God's reward, greater wealth to the one who did the work. The Lord himself, in the gospel, already reading the hearts of such people and speaking ahead of time as a warning to those without faith, says plainly: do not worry, asking what we will eat, what we will drink, what we will wear — that is what the nations chase after, but your Father already knows you need all of it. Seek first the kingdom and God's righteousness, and everything else will be given to you besides. All these things, he says, are supplied to whoever seeks the kingdom and the righteousness of God; and it is these — those who have labored within his church — whom the Lord will welcome into the kingdom when judgment day arrives.
You worry your estate might run dry if you start giving from it freely — and, poor fool, you fail to see that while you fear your goods running short, it is your life and your salvation that are running short; while you watch closely lest your property shrink, you do not notice that you yourself are shrinking, obsessed with money rather than mindful of your own soul; and while you dread losing the estate on your own account, it is you who may perish on the estate's account. Rightly, then, does the apostle declare: nothing did we bring into this world, and nothing can we carry out of it — so, having food and covering, let that be enough for us. Those who set their hearts on getting rich fall instead into temptation, into a trap, into countless harmful desires that drag a person down into ruin and destruction. Greed is the root of every evil, and some, chasing after it, have wrecked their faith and driven themselves through with many griefs.
You fear that your estate may perhaps run out if you begin to work generously from it? But when has it ever happened that the righteous man lacked support? For scripture itself declares that a righteous soul will never be allowed by the Lord to perish of hunger. Elijah is fed by ravens ministering to him in the wilderness, and for Daniel, shut up in the lions' den by the king's order to be their prey, a meal is provided by divine power; and do you fear that food will fail one who works and who is pleasing the Lord, when the Lord himself in the gospel, to rebuke those of doubtful mind and little faith, affirms and says: consider the birds in the sky, which do not sow, do not harvest, and store no crops in barns, yet are fed by your Father who dwells in heaven. Are you not worth more than they? God feeds the birds, and daily food is provided even for sparrows, creatures with no sense of divine things, and neither drink nor food is lacking to them; and do you suppose that something will be lacking for a Christian, a servant of God, a man devoted to good works, dear to his own Lord?
Unless, that is, you imagine that feeding Christ leaves you unfed by Christ in turn, or that earthly things will be denied to those given heavenly and divine ones. Where does such a faithless notion come from — such an impious, sacrilegious thought? What business does a treacherous heart have inside the house of faith? And what of someone who does not believe in Christ at all, and yet goes by the name Christian? ‘Pharisee’ would suit you better. For when the Lord was discussing almsgiving in the gospel, warning us faithfully and to our benefit that prudent generosity now makes friends of worldly wealth who will one day welcome us into eternal dwellings, scripture adds what came next: the Pharisees, lovers of money that they were, heard all this and jeered. We see the same type in the church today — people whose ears are shut and hearts darkened, letting in no light from spiritual, saving counsel; no surprise that they sneer at a servant's preaching, when we see that even the Lord himself was sneered at by such men.
Why indulge yourself with such foolish, empty thinking, as though fear and worry over the future were what held you back from good works? Why hold up these shadowy illusions, these hollow excuses? Confess instead what is true — since you cannot fool one who already knows — and bring into the open what your mind is hiding. Barrenness has cast its darkness over your soul; with the light of truth withdrawn, a thick fog of greed has blinded a heart grown carnal. You are money's captive and slave now, shackled in the chains of greed, bound once more though Christ had already set you free. You hoard wealth that, hoarded, gives you no protection; you pile up an estate whose weight only crushes you; and you forget how God answered the rich man who gloated foolishly over his overflowing harvest: fool, he said, this very night your soul will be required of you — then who will have what you prepared? Why brood over your riches alone, why load yourself with an estate's weight to your own ruin, so that the richer you grow in this world, the poorer you stand before God? Split your income with your God; share your harvest with Christ; let Christ hold a share in your earthly goods, so that he in turn may make you co-heir of his heavenly kingdom.
You are mistaken and deceived, whoever you are, if you believe yourself rich in this world. Hear, in the Apocalypse of your Lord, a voice of this kind rebuking such men with just reproaches. You say, it says, I am rich, and I have grown wealthy, and I need nothing—unaware that in truth you are wretched, poor, blind, and naked. My counsel: buy from me gold that fire has refined, that you may be rich, and a white garment, that you may be clothed and the shame of your nakedness not be seen, and to anoint your eyes with salve, that you may see. You, then, who are wealthy and rich, buy from Christ gold refined by fire, so that once your filth has been smelted away as though by fire, you may be able to have gold that is pure, if you are cleansed by almsgiving and righteous work. Buy for yourself a white garment, so that you who had been naked after the pattern of Adam, and shuddered before, disfigured, may be clothed in the shining garment of Christ. And you, matron rich and wealthy, anoint your eyes not with the devil's antimony but with Christ's salve, so that you may be able to arrive at the sight of God, while you earn God's favor both by your conduct and by your works.
But you who are like this cannot do good works in the church: eyes that are overspread with blackness, covered in shadow and night, do not see the needy and the poor. Do you believe yourself, rich and wealthy, to be keeping the Lord's day, when you have no regard at all for the offering-box, when you come to the Lord's assembly without any sacrifice, when you take a share of the sacrifice that a poor person has offered? Look in the gospel at the widow mindful of the heavenly commandments, working in the very pinch and narrowness of her want, casting into the treasury the two small coins that were all she had. When the Lord took notice of her and observed her, weighing and considering her deed by spirit rather than by estate — gauging not the sum given but the portion it came from — he replied, saying: truly I tell you that this widow has put in more than all the rest among the gifts to God. For all these have given out of what was surplus to them, but she out of her want has given all the living she had. This woman, greatly blessed and glorious, earned praise from the judge's own voice while the day of judgment still lay ahead. May the wealthy blush at how barren and unfortunate they are. A widow, and a needy one, is found at work, and though everything given is meant for orphans and widows, she gives what she ought rather to receive — so that we may know what punishment awaits the barren rich, when even the poor, by this example, are bound to work. And that we may understand that these works are given to God, and that whoever does them earns God's favor, Christ calls it a gift to God, and shows that the widow put her two small coins among the gifts of God, so that it might be all the plainer that whoever has mercy on the poor lends to God.
But neither, dearest brothers, should this thing hold a Christian back and turn him from good and righteous works — that someone should think himself excused by the claim of his children — since in spiritual expenditures we ought to keep Christ in mind, who has professed himself the recipient, and we should set the Lord above our fellow-servants, even our own children, as he himself instructs and warns: whoever loves father or mother above me, he says, is unworthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter above me is unworthy of me. Likewise in Deuteronomy matching words are written to strengthen faith and love of God: those who say to father and mother, he says, I do not know you, and who do not acknowledge their own children — these have kept your commandments and observed your covenant. For if we love God with the whole heart, we ought to set neither parents nor children above God. This too John states in his letter, that the love of God is not present in those whom we see unwilling to act toward the poor: whoever has the goods of this world, he says, and sees his brother in need and shuts up his heart, how does the love of God abide in him? For if God is repaid through alms for the poor, and what is given to the very least is given to Christ, there is no reason for anyone to set earthly things above heavenly ones, or human concerns before divine ones.
A parallel case is the widow of the third book of Kings: caught in drought and famine after everything else ran out, she had baked from her last scrap of flour and oil a thin ashen cake, and once that was gone she expected to perish with her children — until Elijah appeared and asked to be fed first, with only what remained afterward going to her and her sons. She obeyed without hesitation; hunger and want did not lead this mother to put her own sons ahead of Elijah. What God approves and delights in was granted at once and freely: rather than sparing a portion from plenty, she surrendered everything from almost nothing, and though her own children hungered, the guest ate first — in famine and scarcity mercy came even before food, so that in this saving act the body's claims yielded in the flesh while the soul was kept safe in spirit. Elijah, standing here as a figure of Christ and showing that he repays mercy in kind, answered and said: thus says the Lord: the flour-jar shall not run empty, nor the oil-jug run dry, until the day the Lord sends rain on the earth. True to that divine promise, what she gave was multiplied and increased for the widow, and through her just deeds and merciful acts the vessels of flour and oil kept filling for her as she went on giving. The mother took nothing from her sons by giving to Elijah — she gave them more, through this kind and devout act. And this though she did not yet know Christ, had not heard his commands, was not yet redeemed by his cross and suffering, and repaid food and drink for no shed blood of his — which reveals just how gravely one sins within the church who places self and children ahead of Christ, hoards his own wealth, and refuses to share his abundant means with the poverty of those in need.
But, someone says, there are many children in the household, and the number of your sons holds you back from being generous in good works. Yet for this very reason you ought to do more, in that you are the father of many dependents. There are more for whom you should entreat the Lord; the sins of many must be redeemed, the consciences of many cleansed, the souls of many set free. In this present, worldly existence, a bigger household of dependents means bigger costs to sustain them; in the same way, within our spiritual and heavenly existence, more dependents should mean a greater outlay of good works. This is why Job offered so many sacrifices on his children's behalf — his victims to God matched, in number, the children under his roof. And because sin before God cannot help but occur every day, daily sacrifice was needed to wipe such sins away. Scripture confirms this: Job, upright and righteous, was father to seven sons and three daughters, and he purified them by offering God sacrifices in proportion to their number, plus a single calf for their sins. So if your love for your children is genuine, if you truly show them a father's full tenderness, you owe it all the more to act, and so commend them to God through righteous deeds.
Do not think of yourself as father to your children in the sense of one who is temporary and weak, but set before them the one who is the eternal and unshakable father of spiritual children. Assign to him the resources you are keeping for your heirs: let him be guardian to your children, let him be their protector, let him, by divine majesty, be their defender against all worldly wrongs. An estate entrusted to God is not seized by the state, not invaded by the treasury, not overturned by any legal chicanery. The inheritance is placed in safety when it is kept under God's guardianship. This is providing for beloved dependents into the future; this is looking after future heirs with a father's devotion, according to the faith of holy scripture, which says: I was younger, and then grew old, yet never did I see a righteous man abandoned, nor his children begging for bread; all day he lends generously in mercy, and his line will be blessed. And again: whoever conducts himself blamelessly in righteousness will leave blessed children behind. You are, then, a father who betrays and abandons, unless you look after your children faithfully, unless you provide for their keeping with true and devoted piety. Why do you care more for an earthly inheritance than a heavenly one? Would you rather hand your children over to the devil instead of Christ? You sin twice over and commit a double, twofold crime: both in that you do not prepare for your children the help of God the Father, and in that you teach your children to love their inheritance more than Christ.
Instead, become for your children the kind of father Tobit was. Pass down to your dependents useful, wholesome teaching, just as he did for his son; give your children instructions the way he gave his, saying: 'Now then, my son, I command you — serve the Lord faithfully and do what pleases him, and instruct your children to practice justice and give alms, to remember God, and to bless his name at every moment.' And again: 'Throughout your whole life, my son, hold God in your thoughts, and never stray from his commandments. Practice righteousness all the days of your life and do not walk the way of iniquity, for if you act out of truth there will be a regard for your deeds. Give alms out of your substance, and do not turn your face away from any poor person, so that God's face may not be turned away from you either. As you have, my son, so act: if your substance is abundant, give more alms out of it; if you have little, share even out of that little. And do not be afraid when you give alms: you lay up for yourself a good reward for the day of need, because almsgiving delivers from death and does not let one go into darkness. Almsgiving is a good gift for all who practice it before the Most High God.
What a gift this is, dearest brothers, whose staging is celebrated with God himself looking on! If in a pagan show it counts as splendid and impressive when proconsuls or even emperors turn out to watch, and sponsors spend and prepare all the more lavishly to win favor with their superiors, how much brighter and greater is the glory of a spectacle watched by God and Christ themselves; how much fuller the preparation, how much more generous the expense that should be offered here, where the powers of the heavens gather for the show, where all the angels gather, where the sponsor seeks not a chariot-team or a consulship, but is granted eternal life, and where he does not chase after the empty, fleeting favor of the crowd, but receives the everlasting reward of the heavenly kingdom.
And so that the idle and barren — those who, loving money, do nothing at all to reap salvation — feel a keener shame, and the blush of their own disgrace bites their sordid conscience all the harder, let each set before his own eyes the devil leaping forward into the midst together with his own seed-band — that is, with the people doomed to ruin and death — challenging the people of Christ, with Christ himself present and judging the contest, and saying: 'I have not taken blows for these people you see with me, nor endured the lash, nor borne the cross, nor shed blood, nor bought back my household at the price of suffering and bloodshed; nor do I promise them a heavenly kingdom, nor do I call them back again, restored to immortality, into paradise. Yet the gifts they procure for me — how costly, how grand, how won by excessive and prolonged labor, arranged in the most lavish displays, out of their own goods either mortgaged or sold to pay for the show! And unless a decent performance follows, they are driven out with jeers and hisses, and are sometimes all but stoned by the fury of the crowd. Show me such sponsors of yours, Christ — those rich men, those overflowing with abundant wealth — whether, with you presiding and watching in the church, they put on a show of that kind by pledging or selling off their goods, or rather by transferring their possessions, changed for the better, to heavenly treasuries. In these passing, earthly spectacles of mine, nobody eats, nobody wears clothing, nobody finds sustenance in the comfort of food or drink. Everything is squandered, amid the frenzy of the performer and the delusion of the spectator, in the vanity of wasteful and foolish pleasures that come to nothing. There, in your poor, you are clothed and fed; you promise eternal life to those who do these works — and your people, honored by you with divine wages and heavenly rewards, are scarcely a match for mine, who waste themselves for me.'
What can we answer to this, dearest brothers? By what reasoning do we excuse this sacrilegious barrenness, this covering of the rich in a night of darkness — how do we clear ourselves? We rank beneath the devil's own servants, since we fail to repay Christ even in small part for the cost of his suffering and blood. He gave us commandments; he taught us what his servants were bound to do; he promised reward to those who labor and threatened punishment to the barren, declaring his judgment and foretelling beforehand what he would decide. What excuse remains for one who does nothing, what defense for the barren, except this — that where the servant fails to act as instructed, the Lord will carry out what he warned? For he says this: when the Son of Man arrives in his splendor, with every angel accompanying him, he will take his seat upon his radiant throne, and every nation will be gathered before him; he will divide them from one another the way a shepherd parts sheep from goats, placing the sheep at his right and the goats at his left. Then the king will tell those at his right: come, you who are blessed by my Father — take possession of the kingdom made ready for you since the founding of the world. For when I hungered you fed me, when I thirsted you gave me drink, when I was a stranger you welcomed me, when naked you covered me, when ill you visited me, when imprisoned you came to me. Then the righteous will reply: Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill, or in prison, and come to you? And the king will answer them: truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did for me. Then he will tell those at his left: get away from me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire set aside for the devil and his angels. Because when I hungered you gave me nothing to eat, when I thirsted you gave me no drink, when I was a stranger you did not welcome me, when naked you left me uncovered, when ill and imprisoned you did not come to me. Then these too will answer: Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill, or imprisoned, and fail to serve you? And he will answer them: truly I tell you, whatever you failed to do for one of these least ones, you failed to do for me. And these will depart into everlasting fire, but the righteous into everlasting life. Could Christ have declared anything greater to us? Could he more powerfully summon us toward acts of justice and mercy than by teaching that whatever is granted to the needy and the poor is granted to him, and that he counts himself wronged whenever it is withheld from the needy and the poor — so that whoever feels no pull in the church out of regard for a brother might at least be moved by regard for Christ, and whoever gives no thought to a fellow-servant's toil and want might at least think of the Lord, who stands there in the very person he scorns?
And therefore, dearest brothers, we for whom fear of God has bent us low, and who, having already spurned and trodden down the world, have raised our minds to things above and divine, let us render obedient service to the Lord, with full faith, devoted mind, and unceasing action, so as to earn his favor. Let us give Christ earthly garments, to receive heavenly clothing in return. Let us give worldly food and drink, so as to come to the heavenly banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let us not reap little by sowing much. Let us look to our security and eternal salvation while there is time, just as the apostle Paul warns, saying: so then, as long as we have opportunity, let us work what is good toward everyone, and especially toward those who belong to the household of faith. And let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap.
Let us consider, most beloved brothers, what the believing people did in the days of the apostles, when in those very beginnings the mind was vigorous with greater virtues, when the believers' faith still burned with the fresh warmth of belief. They sold their houses and estates then and gladly and generously offered to the apostles the sum to be distributed to the poor, having sold and disposed of their earthly inheritance, transferring their funds to where they might reap the fruit of an eternal possession, purchasing there the homes where they would begin to dwell forever. Their works showed as much abundance as their love showed unity — a fact set down in the Acts of the Apostles, where the whole multitude of believers is described as having one soul and one mind, with no distinctions among them, and no one calling any of his goods his own, since everything was held in common. Becoming, through birth in the Spirit, a true child of God amounts to nothing less than this; following, under heaven's own law, the fairness of God the Father amounts to nothing less than this either. For whatever belongs to God is, in our common use, held in common, and no one is barred from his benefits and gifts, so that the whole human race may share equally in divine goodness and generosity. So equally the day gives light, the sun shines, the rain waters, the wind blows; sleep is one and the same for all who sleep, and the splendor of the stars and moon is shared by all. By this example of equality, whoever, being a possessor of goods on earth, shares his income and produce with the brotherhood, being fair and generous in free-handed giving, is an imitator of God the Father.
What glory will that be, dearest brothers, for those who do these works — how great and how supreme the joy — when the Lord begins to take account of his own people, and, bestowing on our merits and works the promised rewards, giving heavenly things for earthly, everlasting for temporal, great things for small, presents us back to the Father — the one who, through his own consecrating act, has restored us to him — and grants us eternity and deathlessness, restoring us to it by the quickening force of his blood, leading us home again to paradise, and unlocking heaven's kingdoms through the faithfulness and truth of his own pledge! May these truths take firm hold in our thoughts; may we grasp them with unwavering trust; may we cherish them with our whole heart; may we win them through works pursued without pause. This work of salvation, dearest brothers, is a splendid and divine thing. It is a mighty comfort for believers, a wholesome guard over our safety, a stronghold of hope, a shield of faith, a cure for sin — something within reach of anyone willing to do it, something at once weighty and simple, a peaceable crown untouched by persecution's danger, a genuine and supreme gift from God, indispensable to the weak and glorious for the strong — through which a Christian, so aided, gains spiritual grace, wins Christ as judge, and counts God his debtor. Let us press eagerly and swiftly toward this prize of saving deeds; let us all run the race of righteousness under the gaze of God and Christ, and let those among us who have already outgrown this age and its world not let any worldly craving slow our pace. If the day of our departure or of persecution finds us unencumbered, swift, running in this contest of work, the Lord will nowhere fail our merits in giving the reward: in peace he will give the white crown to the victors for their works; in persecution he will double it with the purple crown for their suffering.
In setting out to speak of patience, beloved brothers, and to proclaim its usefulness and its benefits, where could I better begin than by pointing out that even now, as you listen, patience is needed by you, so that you cannot so much as hear and learn what I am about to say without exercising it? For only then is wholesome speech and teaching truly absorbed, when what is spoken is heard with patience. And among all the other paths of heavenly discipline by which our profession of hope and faith is directed toward the rewards granted from above, I find nothing more useful for life or greater for glory than this: that we who lean upon the Lord's commands in reverent obedience and devotion should above all guard patience with our whole attention.
The philosophers too claim to pursue this virtue, but their patience is as false as their wisdom. For how could one who knows neither God's wisdom nor God's patience be either wise or patient? Concerning those who fancy themselves wise in this age, God himself gives warning: the cunning of the clever I will bring to ruin, and the insight of the shrewd I will cast aside. So too Paul, that blessed apostle, was sent — full of the Spirit of holiness — to summon and shape the nations, and he testifies and teaches thus: See that no one plunder you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ, for in him dwells the whole fullness of divinity. And elsewhere he says: Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you supposes himself clever, let him turn fool by this world's standard so that cleverness may follow — since what passes for cleverness here counts as sheer folly before God. For it is written: He catches the wise in their own cunning. And again: futility is all the Lord finds when he examines what the wise are thinking. Therefore, if true wisdom is not found among them, neither can true patience be found there. For if the patient man is the one who is humble and gentle, and we observe that philosophers are neither humble nor gentle but very pleased with themselves, and by that very self-satisfaction displeasing to God, it is clear that patience has no place where there is the insolent boldness of an affected liberty and the shameless boasting of a bared and half-naked breast.
We, however, beloved brothers, who are philosophers not in word but in deed, who display wisdom not in dress but in truth, who prize the awareness of virtue rather than the display of it, who do not merely speak of great things but put them into practice — as God's servants and worshippers, then, let us offer through spiritual obedience the patience taught to us by heavenly instruction. For this virtue is one we share in common with God. From him patience takes its beginning; from him its brightness and its dignity take their source. The origin and the greatness of patience proceed with God as its author. What is dear to God ought to be loved by man; the good that the divine majesty loves is thereby commended to us. If God is our Lord and our Father, let us follow the patience of the Lord and of the Father alike, since servants ought to be obedient and sons ought not to prove unworthy of their birth.
How great and how remarkable is God's patience, in that though profane temples, earthly idols, and sacrilegious rites are set up by men in insult to his majesty and honor, he endures them with utmost patience, and yet makes the day dawn and the sunlight rise equally upon the good and the wicked; and when he waters the earth with rains, no one is excluded from his benefits, so that he pours down his impartial showers equally on the just and the unjust. We see, by this same unbroken equality of patience, that the seasons obey God's will, the elements serve, the winds blow, the springs flow, the abundance of the harvest grows, the fruit of the vineyards ripens, the orchards overflow with produce, the groves grow green, and the meadows bloom, for the guilty and the innocent, for the devout and the impious, for the grateful and the ungrateful alike. And though God is provoked by frequent, indeed continual, offenses, he tempers his indignation and patiently awaits the day of retribution already appointed, and though he has vengeance in his power, he prefers to hold his patience long, bearing with mercy and delay, so that, if it can be, the wickedness so long indulged might at last be changed, and man, wallowing in the contagion of error and crime, might turn to God even late, as God himself warns: It is not the death of one who is dying that I desire, but rather his turning back to live. And again: Come back to me, declares the Lord. And once more: Turn back, all of you, to your God the Lord — for compassion, mercy, patience, and overflowing kindness are his nature, and he relents from the sentence he had pronounced against wrongdoing. Recalling this, and summoning the sinner back to repentance, the blessed apostle Paul writes: Or do you hold in contempt the abundance of his kindness, tolerance, and forbearance, unaware that it is God's forbearing kindness drawing you toward repentance? Instead, through your stubborn and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for that day of wrath, when God's just verdict will be disclosed and he repays each man according to what he has done. He calls the judgment of God just, because it is delayed, because it is put off long and often, so that by God's long patience man's life might still be provided for. Then, and only then, is punishment brought upon the wicked and the sinner, when repentance can no longer profit the sin.
And that we may understand more fully, beloved brothers, that patience is God's own possession, and that whoever is gentle, patient, and mild bears the likeness of God the Father — a truth the Lord established when, in his gospel, he set down precepts for salvation and, laying out divine teaching, shaped his disciples toward perfection: You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: hold even your enemies in love, and pray on behalf of those who persecute you, so that you may become sons of that Father of yours who dwells in heaven, who causes his sun to shine on both the good and the wicked and sends down rain on both the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing? Do not even the pagans do the same thing? Be, then, perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Thus he said that the children of God become perfect; thus he showed and taught that those reborn to a heavenly birth are brought to completion, if the patience of God the Father remains in us, if the divine likeness that Adam lost through sin is made visible and shines in our actions. What glory it is to become like God; what great and wonderful happiness it is to possess in one's virtues something that can be set beside the praises of the divine.
Nor did our Lord and God Jesus Christ, beloved brothers, teach this only in words; he fulfilled it also in deeds. He who had said he came down to do the will of the Father, among the other marvels of power by which he displayed the signs of divine majesty, also kept the Father's patience through the steadfastness of his own endurance. Indeed, every act of his, from the very moment of his coming, is marked by patience as its companion: first, in that he came down from that heavenly height into earthly life, and the Son of God thought it no shame to clothe himself in human flesh, bearing others' sins though he himself had committed none. Immortal though he was, he allowed himself to become subject to death, so that guilt might be paid for through the death of one who was innocent. A servant baptizes the Lord, and he who was to grant the remission of sins does not disdain to wash his body in the bath of regeneration. For forty days he fasts, he by whom others are fed; he hungers and felt hunger, so that those who had been famished for the word and for grace might be filled with heavenly bread. He engages the devil in that testing, and satisfied merely with having bested his foe, he attempts nothing beyond an exchange of words. He did not lord it over his disciples as a master by his own authority, but, kind and gentle, he cherished them with the affection of a brother, even stooping to wash the apostles' feet — showing by that example, toward his own servants, how one fellow-servant ought to treat another among his equals and companions. Nor is it surprising that he was so toward the obedient, he who could bear with Judas even to the very end with long patience, sharing food with his enemy, knowing the household foe and not exposing him openly, not refusing the betrayer's kiss. And toward the Jews, what great equanimity and what great patience, in seeking to win the unbelieving to faith by persuasion, in cherishing the ungrateful despite their obedience, in answering the contentious gently, in bearing the proud with mercy, in yielding humbly to those who persecuted him, willing even to gather in, up to the hour of his cross and passion, the killers of the prophets, ever rebellious against God.
But under the very passion and the cross, before he came to the cruelty of death and the shedding of his blood, what reproaches of insult were patiently heard, what mockeries of contempt were endured, so that he who a little before had formed the eyes of a blind man with his own spittle now received the spittle of those who mocked him; he in whose name the devil is now scourged along with his angels by his servants himself endured the scourges; he who crowns martyrs with unfading flowers was himself crowned with thorns; he who grants the true palm to those who conquer was struck in the face with the palm of a hand; he who clothes others with the garment of immortality was stripped of an earthly garment; he who gave the bread of heaven was fed with gall; he who offered a wholesome cup was given vinegar to drink. He, the innocent one, he, the just one — indeed innocence itself and justice itself — is numbered among criminals, and truth is crushed under false testimony; the one destined to judge is instead put on trial, and in silence God's own Word is brought to the cross. And though at the Lord's cross the stars are thrown into confusion, the elements are disturbed, the earth trembles, night shuts out day, the sun withdraws its rays and its gaze so as not to be forced to look upon the crime of the Jews, he himself does not speak, does not move, does not so much as declare his own majesty even in the midst of his passion: to the very end, all things are borne steadfastly and continuously, that in Christ patience might be brought to completion, full and perfect.
And even after all this, he still receives his own killers, if they turn and come to him, and, kind in his saving patience toward preserving them, he shuts his church to no one. Those adversaries, those blasphemers, those forever enemies of his name — if they do penance for their offense, if they acknowledge the crime they have committed — he grants them not merely release from the guilt of their crime but a share in heaven's own kingdom as reward. Could anything surpass this in patience, in kindness? Even he who shed the blood of Christ is given life by the blood of Christ. Such is the patience of Christ, so great is it; and had it not been so great and so complete, the church would not have the apostle Paul either.
But if we too, beloved brothers, are in Christ, if we have put him on, if he himself is the way of our salvation, let us who follow Christ along the path of salvation walk according to the example of Christ, just as the apostle John instructs, saying: Whoever says he abides in Christ ought himself to walk as he walked. Likewise Peter, upon whom the Lord's church was founded by his own appointment, sets down in his letter and says: Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his footsteps, who committed no sin, and in whose mouth no trace of deceit was ever discovered — reviled, he gave back no reviling; suffering, he made no threats, but delivered himself up to one who judged him unjustly.
We find, moreover, that the patriarchs and the prophets and all the just, who bore the image of Christ prefigured in themselves, guarded nothing more, in the praise of their virtues, than the patience they held with strong and unshaken steadfastness. Thus Abel, the first to begin and consecrate the origin of martyrdom and the suffering of the just, does not resist or struggle against his brother the murderer, but, humble and gentle, is patiently slain. Thus Abraham, believing in God and the first to lay the root and foundation of faith, when tested in the matter of his son does not doubt or hesitate, but obeys the commands of God with the whole devotion of patience. And Isaac, prefigured in the likeness of the Lord's sacrificial victim, when offered by his father to be immolated, is found patient. And Jacob, driven out by his brother, departs patiently from his own land, and later, with even greater patience, as a suppliant brings back to concord a brother still more hostile and persecuting, by peaceful gifts. Joseph, sold by his brothers and carried off into exile, not only patiently forgives, but generously and mercifully bestows grain upon those who come to him. Moses is frequently despised by an ungrateful and faithless people and nearly stoned, and yet, gentle and patient, he prays to the Lord on their behalf. And in David — the one from whose bodily line Christ's birth would come — what a great, remarkable, Christlike patience he displayed, having it often in his hand to kill Saul, who persecuted him and sought his death, and yet preferring to spare the one placed subject to him and delivered into his power, not repaying the enemy in kind, and even avenging him once he was slain by another. So many prophets, in the end, were killed; so many martyrs were honored by glorious deaths, all of them reaching their heavenly crowns because patience was what earned the praise. A crown for suffering and pain cannot be won unless patience has first accompanied that pain and suffering.
But that it may be more clearly and fully understood, beloved brothers, how useful and necessary patience is, let us consider the sentence God pronounced — the one Adam received at the very outset of the world, when the human race began, having forgotten the command and transgressed the law set before him. Then we shall know how patient we ought to be in this age, we who are born in such a way that we must labor here amid pressures and struggles. Because you have listened, God said, to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from that tree from which alone I had commanded you not to eat, the ground shall be cursed in all your works; in sorrow and groaning shall you eat from it all the days of your life. It shall bring forth for you thorns and thistles, and you shall eat the produce of the field. In the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken; for you are earth, and to earth you shall go. By the bond of this sentence we are all bound and constrained, until, death being blotted out, we depart from this age. We must of necessity live in sorrow and groaning all the days of our life; we must of necessity eat our bread with sweat and labor.
Hence, from the moment each of us is born and is received into the hospitality of this world, he takes his beginning from tears, and although as yet ignorant and unaware of all things, in that very first birth he knows nothing but to weep. By a natural foreknowledge, the infant soul, still raw, laments the anxieties and labors and storms of mortal life it is entering upon, bearing witness to them from the very outset in its own weeping and groaning. For as long as one lives here, one labors in sweat. And for those who sweat and labor, no comfort can come to their aid more than the comfort of patience — a virtue fitting and necessary for all in this world, but even more for us, who are shaken more by the devil's assaults, who, standing daily in the battle line, are worn down by the struggles of an experienced and seasoned foe, and for whom, besides the varied and constant battles of temptation, there also await, in the contest of persecution, the surrender of inheritance, imprisonment, the bearing of chains, the risking of life, the sword, wild beasts, fires, crosses — in short, every kind of torment and punishment, all to be endured by the faith and strength of patience, as the Lord himself instructs and says: I have spoken these things to you, that in me you may have peace; in the world you will have affliction, but take courage, for I have overcome the world. And if we ourselves — having already turned our backs on the devil and the world — nonetheless endure their assaults and hostility all the more often and fiercely, how much more must we hold fast to patience, so that with its help and companionship we may endure every hostile thing.
It is the saving precept of our Lord and Teacher: He who endures to the end shall be saved. And again: If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples; you will come to know the truth, and that truth will make you free. Beloved brothers, since simply being Christians is itself bound up with faith and hope, endurance and perseverance are owed from us: admitted first to a mere hope of truth and freedom, only through that endurance do we arrive at truth and freedom as realities in themselves. Yet for that faith and hope to ripen into fruit, patience is required. For the glory we chase is not one already present but one still to come, as the apostle Paul likewise teaches: Hope has brought us salvation. Yet a hope already visible is no longer hope at all — why would a man go on hoping for something he can already see? But when we hope for what remains unseen, we hold out for it through patient endurance. Such waiting, such patience, is essential, so that we may bring to completion what we have begun to be, and so that, when God fulfills it, we may lay hold of what we hope for and believe. Elsewhere, that same apostle teaches the righteous — those laboring to lay up heavenly treasure from the growth of a divine investment — that they, too, must be patient, saying: So then, as long as we have opportunity, let us do good toward everyone, especially toward those who belong to the household of faith. Let us not tire of doing good, for in its own season we will gather the harvest. He warns against anyone losing heart from impatience in the labor, against anyone turning aside, distracted or worn down by temptation, midway on the road to praise and glory, thereby forfeiting gains already made when what was begun is left unfinished — just as it is written: On the day he strays, the righteous man's own righteousness will not rescue him, and again: Hold on to what you have, so no one takes your crown. This word urges us to persevere patiently and bravely, so that the one who strains toward a crown already close at hand may, by enduring patience, be crowned.
But patience, beloved brothers, does not only guard what is good; it also repels what is adverse. Favoring the Holy Spirit and holding fast to heavenly and divine things, it takes its stand opposed to whatever the flesh and the body do that assails and ensnares the soul, driving them back with the fortification of its virtues. Let us look, then, at a few examples out of many, so that the rest may be understood from these few. Adultery, deceit, murder are deadly crimes. Let patience be strong and steadfast in the heart, and the body, sanctified and made a temple of God, is not defiled by adultery, nor is innocence, consecrated to justice, infected by the contagion of deceit, nor is the hand, once it has borne the eucharist, stained afterward by sword and blood.
Love binds brothers together, lays the foundation of peace, and gives unity its tenacity and strength — greater even than hope and faith, going ahead of both good works and martyrdom, and abiding with us forever in the kingdom of heaven. Strip patience away from it, and it languishes, unable to endure; take from it the power to bear and to hold out, and it survives on no root or strength whatsoever. Hence when the apostle spoke of love, he tied to it forbearance and patience. Love, he says, is magnanimous, love is kind; it does not envy, is not puffed up, is not provoked, harbors no evil thought; it loves everything, believes everything, hopes for everything, bears with everything. By this he shows that love can persevere so tenaciously precisely because it has mastered the art of bearing all things. Elsewhere he writes: supporting one another in love, laboring earnestly to preserve oneness of spirit through the tie that binds peace together. He thus proved that neither unity nor peace can endure unless brothers uphold each other through mutual forbearance and safeguard, with patience as intermediary, the tie that concord depends on.
What then of refraining from oaths and curses, of not demanding back what was taken from you, of turning the other cheek to the one who struck you, of forgiving a brother who wrongs you not just seventy times seven but every offense without limit, of loving your enemies and praying for those who oppose and persecute you — could any of this be endured without the strength that patience and forbearance supply? We see it accomplished in Stephen: as the Jews were killing him with violence and stones, he begged not vengeance for himself but pardon for his murderers, saying, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. Fittingly the first martyr of Christ, running ahead of those martyrs who would follow him to a glorious death, proclaimed not only the Lord's suffering in his preaching but also mirrored its gentle, long-suffering character in his own conduct. How, then, could rage, quarreling, or rivalry — none of which belong in a Christian — find any place here? Let patience occupy the heart, and such things can gain no foothold there; should they try to force entry, they are swiftly driven out and depart, leaving the heart a peaceful dwelling where the God of peace loves to reside. So too the apostle admonishes and instructs us: do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed until the day you are redeemed; put away from yourselves every trace of bitterness, wrath, indignation, clamor, and blasphemy. For once a Christian has escaped the fury and fleshly turmoil as though from the tossing of the sea, and has begun to grow calm and mild within the harbor of Christ, no room remains in his breast for either anger or strife, since it is not permitted him to return evil for evil, nor even to hate.
Patience is equally needed for the flesh's assorted troubles and for the body's frequent, punishing torments, under which humankind is worn down and shaken every day. When that command was first broken, bodily soundness departed together with immortality, and weakness arrived along with death; soundness cannot return until immortality itself is restored, so we are bound to wrestle continually against this frailty and weakness of the flesh — a contest sustainable only through the strength patience supplies. To test and prove us, assorted pains are inflicted and manifold trials imposed: loss of property, the heat of fevers, the agony of wounds, the death of loved ones. Nothing distinguishes the unjust from the just so clearly as this — in hardship the unjust grumbles and blasphemes out of impatience, while the just is proved through patience, just as it is written: in grief be patient, and in your humbling hold on to patience, for fire is what tests gold and silver.
So Job was tried and proved, lifted to the very pinnacle of praise for the virtue of patience. What great weapons the devil hurled at him, what torments he mounted against him! He was struck with the loss of his household goods, burdened with the death of his many children: a man rich in property and a father blessed with children, in an instant neither lord nor father any longer. Next came ravaging sores, and a gnawing plague of worms consumed his wasting, festering limbs. Determined to leave no torment Job had failed to undergo, the devil turned even his wife into a weapon, resorting to that ancient trick of his malice, as if a woman could once again be his means of deceiving and beguiling everyone, just as she had been at the beginning. Yet none of these grave and repeated onslaughts broke Job; instead, amid those hardships and pressures, God's blessing was proclaimed through his triumphant patience. Tobit likewise, after the splendid deeds of his righteousness and mercy, was tested through the loss of his sight; and the patience with which he bore his blindness earned him, in that same measure, great praise from God for his patience.
So that the good of patience may shine more brightly still, dearest brothers, let us weigh, by contrast, the harm impatience brings. Just as patience belongs to Christ as a good, so impatience, conversely, belongs to the devil as an evil; and just as someone in whom Christ lives and remains proves to be patient, so whoever's mind the devil's wickedness has seized always turns out impatient. Let us look back to the very first beginnings. The devil could not bear, with any patience, that humanity had been formed after God's own likeness; this is what first destroyed him, and through it he brought ruin on others too. Adam, unable to patiently keep the heavenly command concerning the deadly food, fell into death, failing to guard, under patience's watch, the grace he had received from God. To murder his brother, Cain grew impatient over the favor shown to Abel's sacrifice and offering; and because Esau descended from greater things to lesser, impatience over the delay cost him his birthright. As for the Jewish people, faithless and thankless toward God's kindnesses — was not the very crime that first drove them from God one of impatience? Unable to endure the wait while Moses conversed with God, they dared to demand pagan idols, so that a bull's head and an earthen image might be named as guides for their journey; nor did that same impatience ever leave them, since, forever intolerant of instruction and divine guidance, they went so far as to kill their own prophets and every righteous man, rushing at last even to the cross and the Lord's blood. Impatience produces heretics within the church too, and, mimicking the Jews, drives those rebels against Christ's peace and love into hostile, furious hatreds. Not to catalogue every instance, whatever patience builds toward glory through its works, impatience utterly tears down into ruin.
So then, dearest brothers, now that we have carefully weighed both patience's benefits and impatience's harms, let us cling in full observance to the patience by which we remain in Christ and are able to reach God together with Christ. It is abundant and manifold, confined to no narrow limit and bound by no short border. The virtue of patience reaches wide; its richness and generosity, though springing from a single fountainhead, pour out through countless overflowing channels toward glory, and nothing in our conduct can advance toward the perfection of praise unless patience lends it the firmness needed to complete it. Patience is what commends us to God and keeps us safe: it calms anger, curbs the tongue, steers the mind; it keeps watch over peace, directs discipline; it crushes the surge of lust, holds down the swelling of pride, quenches the blaze of jealousy; it restrains the power of the wealthy and gives comfort to the poverty of the needy; among virgins it protects their blessed purity, among widows their hard-won chastity, and among the joined and married their undivided devotion. It makes people humble when things go well, strong when things go badly, gentle in the face of insult and injury. It teaches quick forgiveness toward those who wrong us, and, when we ourselves are at fault, long and earnest pleas for pardon. It defeats temptation, withstands persecution, brings suffering and martyrdom to their completion. It is patience that gives our faith's foundation its unshakeable strength, patience that lifts the growth of hope to ever greater heights. It steers our conduct so that we can hold to Christ's path as we make our way through his forbearance, and it enables us to go on as God's children as we take the Father's patience for our model.
I know too, dearest brothers, that a great many, worn down by the weight of the wrongs assailing them or grieving over those who rage and attack them, long for swift vengeance; and this too must be said before I close: set as we are amid the upheavals of this restless world and the persecutions raised against us by Jews, pagans, and heretics alike, we should wait patiently for the day of retribution and not rush toward avenging our own grief in querulous haste, for it stands written: wait for me, says the Lord, until the day I rise as witness, for my sentence falls upon the gathered nations, that I may summon kings to account and pour my anger out upon them. The Lord commands us to wait, and to bear the day of coming retribution with strong patience. He speaks likewise in the Apocalypse: do not put a seal on the words of this book's prophecy, for the moment draws near — let the one who persists in wrongdoing go on wronging, let the defiled stay defiled, but let the righteous act still more righteously, and the holy grow still more holy. See, I am coming without delay, bringing my payment with me, to give back to each according to what he has done. Hence even the martyrs, crying out and hastening in the outburst of their grief toward their own vindication, are told to wait still longer and to lend patience until the appointed times run their course and the full company of martyrs is complete. And when, it says, he had broken open the fifth mark, I saw beneath God's altar the souls of those killed for God's message and their witness to it, and they called out in a great voice: how long, holy and true Master, before you judge and repay our blood upon those living on the earth? Each of them was given a white garment and told to rest a short while longer, until the full number of their companions and brothers was reached — those who would later be killed just as they had been.
When the righteous blood's divine retribution will arrive is declared through the prophet Malachi, the Holy Spirit saying: behold, the Lord's day comes ablaze like a furnace, and every outsider and every wrongdoer will become straw for it, and the coming day will set them alight, says the Lord. We find the same thing in the psalms, where the arrival of God as judge is foretold, one to be revered for the grandeur of his scrutiny: our God will appear openly, and he will not stay quiet. Fire will blaze ahead of him, and a violent storm will swirl around him on every side. He will call the sky above and the ground below to witness, so that he can set his people apart. Assemble to him those who are his righteous ones, those who bind themselves to his covenant through sacrifice. And the sky will proclaim his justice, since God himself is the judge. Isaiah foretells this same event, saying: behold, indeed, the Lord will arrive like fire, and his chariots like a whirlwind, to pay back wrath as vengeance. For they will be judged by the Lord's fire and wounded by his sword. And again: the Lord God of the heavenly armies will march out and smash war to pieces. He will stir up conflict and shout defiance at his enemies with power: I have stayed silent — will I stay silent forever?
But who is this, who says he has already kept quiet and will not stay quiet forever? It is surely he who, led like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, opened not his mouth. It is he who raised no outcry, whose voice went unheard in the public squares. It is he who neither defied nor talked back, offering his back to the whips and his cheeks to the blows, never turning his face aside from the disgrace of being spat upon. It is he who, standing accused before the priests and elders, said nothing at all, so that Pilate marveled at the deep silence he kept. This is the one who, having stayed silent through his suffering, will afterward refuse to stay silent when he takes revenge. This is our God — meaning not the god worshiped by everyone, but the God of those who believe and trust him — who, though he will not stay quiet when he appears openly at his second coming, was hidden in lowliness at his first. For having once come concealed in humility, he will now come manifest in power.
Let us wait for this one, dearest brothers — our judge and avenger, who together with his people, the church, will avenge the whole company of the righteous, all the way back to the world's first beginning. Whoever is far too eager and in too great a hurry to see his own case avenged should remember that the one who avenges has not yet had his own cause avenged either. [God the Father commanded that his Son be worshiped, and the apostle Paul, remembering that divine command, states it in these words: God raised him up and gave him a name above every other name, so that at Jesus's name every knee would bend — in heaven, on earth, and beneath it. And] in the Apocalypse the angel resists John, who wanted to worship him, saying: see that you do not do that, for I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers; worship the Lord Jesus instead. What a Lord Jesus is, and how vast his patience — worshiped as he is in the heavens, and still not yet avenged here on earth! Let us dwell on his patience, dearest brothers, amid our own persecutions and sufferings. Let us give his coming the full deference that waiting requires, and let us not, mere servants that we are, rush ahead of our Lord in irreverent, shameless haste to be vindicated. Instead let us press forward and labor, keeping watch with our whole heart, standing firm through every trial, and holding to the Lord's commands, so that when that day of wrath and retribution arrives, we will be honored alongside the righteous and those who fear God, rather than punished together with the wicked and sinful.
ON JEALOUSY AND ENVY. To be envious of the good you see in another and to grudge those who are better than you seems to some people a light and trifling fault, dearest brothers; and because it is reckoned light and trifling, it goes unfeared, and because it is unfeared it is despised, and because it is despised it is not easily guarded against, and so it becomes a blind, hidden ruin which, being scarcely perceived and therefore not watched for by the careful, strikes down unwary minds unseen. Yet the Lord has bidden us to be prudent and has commanded us to keep watch with careful vigilance, lest the adversary, who is himself ever watchful and ever laying snares, once he has crept into the breast, kindle great fires from small sparks, build up the greatest evils from the smallest beginnings, and, while he flatters the careless and unwary with a gentler breeze and a softer breath, whip up storms and gales that wreck faith outright and capsize both salvation and life together. We must therefore be on our guard, dearest brothers, and strive with all our strength, so that against the enemy raging and aiming his darts at every part of the body where we can be struck and wounded, we may fight back with careful and full watchfulness, as the apostle Peter forewarns and teaches in his letter, saying: be sober, be watchful, for your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour.
He goes about each one of us, and like an enemy besieging a fortified wall he searches and tests whether there is some part of our members less firm and less trustworthy, by whose entrance he might break through to the interior. He sets before our eyes alluring shapes and easy pleasures, that through sight he may destroy chastity. He tests the ears with melodious music, that through the hearing of a sweeter sound he may loosen and soften Christian firmness. He provokes the tongue to abuse, he goads the hand, roused by wrongs, toward the recklessness of bloodshed. To make a man a cheat he offers unjust gain; to seize the soul with money he heaps up ruinous profit; he promises earthly honors in order to take away the heavenly; he parades falsehoods so as to snatch away what is true; and once secret deception fails him, he turns to open, undisguised threats, brandishing the terror of a turbulent persecution — restless always and always hostile in his war against the servants of God, treacherous in peace, violent in persecution.
For this reason, dearest brothers, against all the devil's deceitful snares or open threats the mind must stand instructed and armed, as ready always to resist as the enemy is always ready to attack. And since his more frequent weapons are those that creep in unseen, and the more hidden and secret the shot, the less it is perceived, the more heavily and repeatedly it ravages our wounds, let us be watchful to understand and repel these as well. Among them is the evil of jealousy and envy. If anyone looks closely into it, he will find that nothing is more to be guarded against by a Christian, nothing more carefully to be foreseen, than that anyone be seized by envy and grudging, lest, entangled in the blind snares of the deceiving enemy, while brother turns against brother in jealous hatred, he unknowingly perish by his own sword. That we may grasp this more fully and see it more clearly, let us go back to its head and its origin. Let us see where jealousy came from, and when and how it began. For an evil so destructive will more easily be avoided by us if both its origin and its full extent are known.
From this the devil, at the very beginning of the world, was himself the first to perish and the first to destroy. He, propped up by angelic majesty, accepted and dear to God, once he beheld man fashioned after God's own image, erupted into jealousy through malicious envy — not casting down another by the prompting of jealousy until he himself had first been cast down by jealousy, captive before he captured, ruined before he ruined, since, goaded by envy, in snatching from man the grace of the immortality given him, he himself also lost what he had previously been. What an evil it is, dearest brothers, by which an angel fell, by which that lofty and glorious eminence could be tricked and overthrown, by which he who deceived was himself first deceived! From that time envy has stalked the earth, since he who is bound to perish through envy obeys the master of perdition, copying the devil's own jealousy, exactly as scripture states: death came into the world through the devil's envy. Those who belong to his party imitate him.
From this, then, came the first hatred within the new brotherhood, from this the unspeakable killing of kin began, when unjust Cain grew jealous of righteous Abel, when the wicked man pursued the good with envy and grudging. So powerful was the fury of rivalry in bringing the crime to completion that neither love for a brother nor the enormity of the wickedness nor fear of God nor the penalty for the deed was taken into account. He who had first displayed righteousness was unjustly crushed; he who had never known how to hate suffered hatred; he who did not resist was impiously slain even as he died. And that Esau became the enemy of his brother Jacob was jealousy: because the one had received his father's blessing, the other blazed up with the torches of hatred into persecution born of envy. And that Joseph's brothers sold him, the reason for the selling arose from rivalry: after he had simply told his brothers, as brother to brothers, what had been shown to him favorably in visions, their malicious minds burst out into envy. King Saul too — what else but the goad of jealousy drove him to hate David, to long, through persecutions often renewed, to kill one who was innocent, merciful, and patient in gentle forbearance? Because, after Goliath was slain and so great an enemy destroyed by God's help and favor, the admiring people burst forth in praise of David, Saul conceived from envy the fury of rivalry and persecution. And not to lengthen this by going through every case, let us consider the ruin of a whole people who once perished. Did not the Jews perish precisely because they chose to envy Christ rather than believe in him? Finding fault with the great works he performed, blind envy led them astray, and they could not open their hearts' eyes to perceive divine truths.
Considering these things now, dearest brothers, let us fortify our hearts, consecrated to God, watchfully and bravely against so great a destructive evil. Let the death of others serve toward our salvation; let the punishment of the imprudent bring health to those who take heed. Let no one imagine that this evil is confined to a single form, or shut up within short bounds and a narrow limit. The manifold and fertile ruin of jealousy reaches far and wide. Every evil springs from it as root, every disaster as fountain, every sin as seedbed, every fault as raw material. From it hatred rises, from it comes hostility. Jealousy inflames greed, when a man cannot be content with his own lot on seeing another richer. Jealousy stirs ambition, when a man sees another advanced in honors above him. With jealousy blinding our senses and reducing the secrets of the mind to its own dominion, reverence for God is cast aside, Christ's instruction is ignored, and no thought is given to the coming day of judgment. It puffs up with pride, embitters with cruelty, betrays with faithlessness, shakes with impatience, rages with discord, seethes with anger — and a man made subject to another's power can no longer restrain or govern himself. Because of it the Lord's peace-bond snaps apart, and because of it love between brothers is trampled, from this truth is corrupted, unity is torn apart, men rush headlong into heresies and schisms, while priests are disparaged and bishops envied, while one man complains that he was not himself ordained, or another disdains to bear a superior set over him. From this, puffed up with pride, perverted by rivalry, hostile through spite and envy not to a man but to his office, he kicks back, he rebels.
What corrosion of the soul, what wasting of the mind, what corroding rust upon the heart it is to envy another's virtue or his good luck — in other words, to despise in him either what he himself has earned or what God has granted him; to turn another's blessings into one's own misery; to be tormented by the prosperity of the distinguished; to make the glory of others one's own punishment; to set, as it were, executioners to work upon one's own heart, to summon torturers against one's own thoughts and feelings, who tear a man with inward torment, who beat the heart's secrets with the claws of malice. For such a man food brings no joy, drink can bring no gladness. He is forever sighing, groaning, grieving, and while the envious never lay down their spite, the besieged heart is torn without pause day and night. Other evils have their end, and whatever wrong is done comes to a close with the completion of the deed. In the adulterer the crime ceases once the seduction is accomplished; in the robber the wickedness rests once the murder is committed; possession of the plunder sets a limit to the plunderer's greed, and the accomplished deceit puts a stop to the liar's fraud. Jealousy has no limit, an evil that abides continually, a sin without end — and the more the man envied prospers with better success, the more the envious man is set ablaze with a greater fire of malice.
From this comes the threatening face, the grim look, pallor on the cheek, trembling on the lips, the grinding of teeth, raving words, unbridled abuse, the hand ready for the violence of murder, though it may hold no blade at this moment, it is nonetheless weaponized by the fury of a mind gone mad. And for this the Holy Spirit says in the Psalms: do not be jealous of one who walks well in his way. And again: the sinner will watch the righteous and grind his teeth at him. But God will laugh at him, for he sees that his day is coming. These the blessed apostle Paul points out and marks, saying: serpents' poison lies beneath their lips, and their mouths overflow with curses and rancor; their feet run swiftly toward bloodshed, wreckage and misery mark their paths, they have never recognized the road of peace, and no fear of God stands before their eyes.
A wound from a blade to the limbs is a far slighter and safer harm. Where the injury lies open to view, healing comes readily, and the healer's remedy quickly restores what can be seen. But the wounds of jealousy are hidden and concealed, and they do not admit the physician's healing remedy, since they have shut themselves up within the hiding place of conscience with their blind pain. Whoever you are, envious and malicious, see how treacherous, how ruinous, how hostile you are toward those you hate — you are the enemy of nothing so much as your own well-being. Whoever it is you pursue with jealousy will be able to escape and avoid you. You cannot escape yourself. Wherever you are, your adversary is with you, the enemy is always in your own breast, the ruin is shut up within, you are bound and fettered by the inescapable knot of chains, you are a captive under the rule of jealousy, and no comfort ever comes to your relief. To hound a man favored by God's grace is an evil with no letup; hating one who prospers is a misfortune that admits no cure.
And for this reason, dearest brothers, the Lord, taking thought for this danger, that no one might fall through jealousy of a brother into the snare of death, when his disciples asked him who among them was the greatest, said: whoever is least among you all, this one will be great. By his answer he cut off all rivalry, he rooted out and severed every cause and occasion for biting envy. It is not permitted to a disciple of Christ to be jealous, it is not permitted to envy. There is no room among us for rivalry over rank; greatness comes to us by way of lowliness, and we have grasped what makes us acceptable. So too the apostle Paul, teaching and exhorting that those of us lit up by Christ's brightness, having fled the gloom of our earlier conduct, ought to conduct ourselves in light-filled acts and deeds, writes: the night has passed, and the day has drawn near. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk becomingly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lustful desires and shamelessness, not in strife and jealousy. Once the dark has left your breast, once night is banished, once the haze is cleared away, once daylight's brightness fills your senses and you have become someone made of light, act as belongs to Christ — for Christ himself is both light and day.
Why do you plunge into jealousy's darkness, why wrap yourself in envy's cloud, why extinguish every light of peace and love through envy's blindness, why turn back to the devil you once renounced, why make yourself another Cain? For the apostle John declares in his letter that whoever is jealous of his brother and holds him in hatred is bound by the crime of murder, saying: whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. And again: whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness even now, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Whoever hates his brother, he says, walks in darkness and does not know where he is going. For he goes unknowing into hell, ignorant and blind he is cast headlong into punishment, turning his back on Christ's light, on him who cautions: I am the world's light; the one following me will never walk in darkness but will possess life's light. But he follows Christ who holds fast to his commands, who walks the path of his teaching, who traces his footsteps and his way, who imitates what Christ both taught and did, just as Peter also urges and admonishes, saying: Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his footsteps.
Let us keep in mind the designation Christ gives his own, the label he applies to his flock. Sheep is his term, so a Christian's innocence would mirror a sheep's innocence; lambs is another, so unaffected minds would model themselves on the lamb's artless nature. Why does a wolf lurk beneath the fleece of sheep, why does someone who falsely claims the Christian name dishonor Christ's flock? Bearing Christ's name while refusing Christ's path amounts to nothing less than treachery toward that sacred name, a desertion of salvation's road. For he himself teaches and says that the one who comes to life is the one who has kept his commandments, and that the one who has heard his words and done them is wise, and that the one who has taught and so acted is to be called the greatest teacher in the kingdom of heaven — then only will it profit the preacher that his teaching was good and useful, if what is spoken with the mouth is fulfilled by the deeds that follow. And indeed, what did the Lord more often impress upon his disciples, what among his saving counsels and heavenly precepts did he command to be kept and observed more than that we too should love one another with the same love with which he himself loved his disciples? But how can a man hold either the Lord's peace or his love, if, with jealousy intervening, he can be neither peaceable nor beloved?
For this reason too the apostle Paul, when he was setting forth the merits of peace and love, and when he affirmed and taught firmly that neither faith nor almsgiving nor even the suffering itself of the confessor and martyr would profit unless he had kept the bonds of love whole and inviolate, added and said: love is magnanimous, love is kind, love is not jealous — teaching and showing thereby that a man can hold fast to love only if he is magnanimous and kind and a stranger to jealousy and envy. Likewise in another place, when he was urging that a man now filled with the Holy Spirit and made, by heavenly birth, a son of God, should pursue nothing but spiritual and divine things, he states and says: and I, brothers, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal ones, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able — nor indeed are you able even now, for you are still carnal. For where there is jealousy and strife and dissension among you, are you not carnal, and walking after the manner of men?
Dearest brothers, the failings and sins of the flesh call for trampling, and the earthly body's hostile taint must be beaten down by spiritual strength, so that in slipping back toward our former ways we do not get caught in deadly traps — a warning the apostle gives us with foresight and wholesome intent. Brothers, he writes, our life should not follow the flesh. Living by the flesh brings the beginning of death; but putting the flesh's deeds to death through the Spirit brings life. Whoever is guided by God's Spirit counts among God's children. Given that we are God's children, that we have already come to be his dwelling-places, that having taken in the Holy Spirit we now live a holy, spirit-filled existence, that our gaze has risen from earth toward heaven, that our hearts, filled with God and Christ, now reach toward what is above and divine — let nothing occupy us except what suits God and Christ, exactly as the apostle stirs and exhorts us to do. Having been raised with Christ, he says, seek out what lies above, where Christ sits at God's right hand; fix your thoughts on what is above, not on earthly matters. You have died, after all, and your true existence lies concealed with Christ in God. Once Christ, who is your life, is revealed, you too will be revealed alongside him in glory. So then, we who through baptism have died to the flesh's sins belonging to the old man and been buried, and who have been raised alongside Christ by heavenly rebirth — let our thoughts and actions together match what belongs to Christ, exactly as this same apostle again teaches and warns, saying: the first man came from earth's dust, the second man comes from heaven. Those made of dust resemble the man of dust; those who are heavenly resemble the heavenly man. Just as we have carried the likeness of the earthly man, so let us carry too the likeness of the heavenly one. Yet we can carry that heavenly likeness only by displaying Christ's own resemblance in what we have now begun to become.
For this is to have changed what you were and to have begun to be what you were not — that in you the divine birth may shine, that toward God the Father the godlike discipline of your life may answer him, that in the honor and praise of a life well lived God may become manifest in man, since he himself urges and admonishes this, and promises a return in kind to those who make him manifest in themselves. Those, he says, who make me manifest, I will make manifest, and whoever despises me will be despised. Shaping and preparing us for this manifestation, the Lord and Son of God, presenting the Father's own likeness, declares in his Gospel: you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, hold your enemies in love and pray on behalf of those who persecute you, so you may resemble your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. If it is a joy and a glory to men to have children who resemble them, and if it delights them all the more to have begotten such, so that offspring reflect a father in matching features, how much greater is the joy in God the Father, when someone is so born spiritually that in his deeds and in what he is praised for, the divine origin proclaims itself. What a palm of righteousness, what a crown it is, to be such a one, of whom God will not say: I have begotten sons and raised them up, but they have spurned me! Let Christ instead commend you and summon you toward the reward with these words: come, you whom my Father has blessed, take possession of the kingdom made ready for you since the world's beginning.
By these meditations the soul must be strengthened, dearest brothers, and by exercises of this kind fortified against every dart of the devil. Let divine reading be in your hands, the Lord's own thought in your minds, let unbroken prayer never cease, let wholesome action continue. Let us always be occupied with spiritual deeds, so that whenever the enemy draws near, however often he tries to approach, he may find our breast shut against him and armed. For it is not the martyr's crown alone that belongs to the Christian, the one given in time of persecution. Peace too has its own crowns, by which, victorious over various and manifold conflicts, we are crowned once the adversary has been laid low and subdued. To have mastered lust is the palm of self-control. Patience earns its crown when a man resists rage and resists being wronged. To scorn money is a triumph over greed. It is the praise of faith to endure the world's adversities through confidence in what is to come. And whoever is not proud in prosperity wins glory from humility. And whoever is inclined to mercy in caring for the poor obtains the reward of a heavenly treasure. And whoever knows nothing of envy, and loves his brothers with a like mind and gentleness, is honored with the reward of love and peace. In this arena of virtues we run daily, and without pause of time we arrive at these palms and crowns of righteousness.
That you too, who were once possessed by envy and rancor, may be able to reach them, cast away all that malice by which you were formerly held, and reshape your steps toward the path of eternal life along the way of salvation. Pull out from your breast the thorns and briars, so that the seed the Lord sows may make you rich with fruitful yield, so that the divine and spiritual planting may overflow into an abundant harvest. Vomit out the poisons of bitterness, shut out the venom of discord, let the mind that serpentine envy had infected be cleansed, let all the bitterness that had settled within be soothed by the sweetness of Christ. From the mystery of the cross you take both food and drink; the wood which at Marah, in figure, brought sweetness to the taste, let it in truth bring to you the calming of a gentle heart, and you will not labor for the remedy of a flourishing health. Where you were wounded, there be healed. Love those you once hated; cherish those whom you envied with unjust slanders. Imitate the good, if you are able to follow them; if following is beyond you, then at minimum share their joy and offer congratulations to those who surpass you in virtue. Let a shared love make you their partner; let the fellowship of charity together with the bond of brotherhood make you their co-heir. Your debts will be forgiven you, when you yourself have forgiven; your sacrifices will be accepted, when you come to God in peace. Your thoughts and deeds will be guided by God, when you think what is divine and just, just as scripture states, may a man's heart ponder righteous things, so that God directs his footsteps.
But you have many things to think upon. Think of paradise, to which Cain, who slew his brother out of envy, does not return. Think of the heavenly kingdom, into which the Lord admits none but those of one accord and one mind. Consider that the title of sons of God belongs only to peacemakers, those who through birth and through divine law correspond, joined as one, to the image shared by God the Father and Christ. Consider that we stand under the gaze of God, running the whole course of our conduct and life while he himself watches and judges, and that we can only arrive, in the end, at seeing him face to face if our actions now please him as he watches us, if we prove ourselves worthy of his grace and mercy, and if, wanting always to please him in his kingdom, we please him here in this world first.
Discipline is the guardian of hope, the rein of faith, the guide on the road to salvation, the spark and nourishment of a good nature, the teacher of virtue; it makes a person abide always and continually in Christ and live for God, and arrive at the heavenly promises and divine rewards. To pursue it is wholesome, to turn from it and neglect it is deadly. In the Psalms the Holy Spirit speaks: cling to discipline, so the Lord does not grow angry, and you wander off the true path once his fury flares up swiftly toward you. And again: but to the sinner God says, why do you recite my statutes and take my covenant on your lips? You have hated discipline and cast my words behind you. And again we read: whoever casts off discipline is wretched. And from Solomon we have received the commands of wisdom's warning: my son, do not neglect the discipline of God, nor faint when corrected by him, for whom the Lord loves he corrects. But if God corrects the one he loves, and corrects in order to amend, then brothers too, and priests above all, correct in love rather than hatred those they discipline, meaning to amend them—just as God himself declared long before through Jeremiah, pointing ahead to our present age: shepherds suited to my own heart is what I shall grant you, and they shall pasture you, feeding you with discipline.
But if in the sacred writings discipline is urged frequently and everywhere, and the whole foundation of religion and faith proceeds from observance and fear, what should we more eagerly seek, what more should we wish to hold fast, than that, with our roots driven in more firmly and our dwellings set fast upon the rock with solid mass, we may stand unshaken against the storms and whirlwinds of the age, and come to God's gifts through his divine precepts, considering and knowing at once that our members are temples of God, cleansed from every stain of ancient contagion by the sanctification of the life-giving washing, and that it is not right for them to be violated or defiled, since whoever defiles them will himself be violated? We are the worshippers and priests of these temples: let us be slaves to him whose own we have already started becoming. Paul says in his letters, by which he has shaped us for the course of living through divine teaching: you are not your own, for you were bought at a great price. Glorify God and carry him in your body. Let us glorify and carry God with a pure and clean body and with better observance, and since we have been redeemed through the blood of Christ, let us obey the command of our redeemer in every service of that bondage, and make sure that our redeemer's temple is never given anything unclean or profane, so that he does not, feeling wronged, abandon the seat he inhabits. These are the words of the Lord who saves and teaches, who heals and warns at once: behold, he says, you have been made well; sin no more, lest something worse happen to you. He gives the fear proper to living, he gives the law of innocence, after he has bestowed health, nor does he allow one to wander afterward with loose and slackened reins, but rather threatens more gravely the very one he had healed, since sinning before was, of course, the lesser fault, back when the discipline of God was still unknown to you—once you have come to know God, sinning further finds no pardon at all. And indeed this both men and women, both boys and girls, every sex and every age, should observe and take care of, for the sake of the religion and faith they owe to God, lest what is received as holy and pure from the Lord's regard be held with too little anxious fear.
Now our word is to virgins, whose glory, the more exalted it is, the greater is our concern for it. She is the flower of the church's growth, the beauty and ornament of spiritual grace, a joyful nature, a whole and uncorrupted work of praise and honor, an image of God answering to the Lord's holiness, the brighter share of Christ's own flock. Through them and in them the glorious fruitfulness of mother church rejoices and abundantly flourishes, and the more that plentiful virginity adds to its number, the more the mother's joy increases. It is to these we speak, these we exhort, rather by affection than by authority, not that we, the least and lowest, quite conscious of our own lowliness, should claim any right of censure, but rather because, out of greater caution and concern, we fear more the assaults of the devil.
Nor is this caution empty, nor this fear vain, which takes counsel for the path of salvation, which keeps the Lord's own life-giving precepts, so that those who have dedicated themselves to Christ and, withdrawing from carnal desire, have vowed themselves to God both in flesh and in mind, may complete their work destined for a great reward, and be eager to be adorned and to please no one but their own Lord—the very one from whom the crown reserved for virginity is awaited, as he himself puts it: not everyone can take in this saying, only those granted it; he then names three classes of eunuchs�men born that way straight from the womb, men reduced to it by another's compulsion, and men who cut themselves off by their own will for heaven's kingdom. Again, too, through this voice of an angel the gift of continence is shown, virginity is proclaimed: these are the ones untouched by contact with women, remaining virgins still. These follow the Lamb, wherever his path leads. For the Lord does not promise the grace of continence to males alone and pass over women, but since woman is a portion of man and was taken and formed from him, in almost all the scriptures God speaks to the first-formed human as to both, since the two are one flesh, and in the male at once both male and female are signified.
But if continence follows Christ and the kingdom of God is where virginity is bound, what have these women to do with earthly finery and with jewelry, by wearing which, eager as they are to please men, they give offense to God instead, forgetting it was foretold: those who please men stand ashamed, because God has counted them as nothing; and Paul too declares, with grandeur and loftiness: were I still trying to please men, I would be no servant of Christ. Continence and chastity, in truth, rest not on soundness of flesh alone, but equally on the honor and modesty kept in dress and adornment, so that—following the apostle—the unmarried woman may be holy in both body and spirit. Paul teaches, saying: the unmarried person thinks of the Lord's affairs, of how to please God; but whoever has taken a spouse thinks of this world's affairs, of how to please a wife. In the same way the woman and the unmarried virgin thinks of the Lord's affairs, so that she may be holy in body and in spirit alike. A woman ought not merely to be a virgin, but must be recognized and trusted as one; let no one, upon seeing a virgin, wonder whether she really is one. Let her wholeness show itself the same in every respect, and let the fine reputation of her bearing go undisgraced. Why does she step out adorned, why arrayed, as if she had a husband or were hunting for one? Rather let her dread the thought of pleasing, if she truly is a virgin, and not court her own peril, keeping herself instead for things better and divine. Having no husband, whom would she be pretending to please? Let her hold fast, entire and pure, not merely in the body but in the spirit too. For it is not fitting that a virgin groom herself to display the shape of her beauty, or take pride in her flesh and its comeliness, since for such women no struggle is greater than the fight waged against the flesh, and the stubborn contest of subduing and mastering the body.
Paul cries out in a strong and lofty voice: far be it from me to glory, except in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world; and shall a virgin in the church glory in the beauty of the flesh and the comeliness of the body? Paul adds and says: those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its vices and desires. Yet the woman who claims to have given up the flesh's cravings and its faults is caught still holding what she claimed to have given up. You are caught, virgin, you are exposed: you boast of being one thing and you strive after another. You spatter yourself with the stains of carnal desire, when you should be a candidate for wholeness and modesty. Cry out, says God through Isaiah, all flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass has withered and the flower has fallen. But the word of the Lord endures forever. It befits no Christian, and least of all a virgin, to reckon on any glory or honor of the flesh, but to seek only the word of God, and to embrace the good things that will remain forever. Or if one must glory in the flesh, let it be plainly then, when in the confession of the Name she is tormented, when a woman is found stronger than her male torturers, when she endures fires or crosses or the sword or beasts in order to be crowned. Those are the precious jewels of the flesh, those the finer adornments of the body.
But there are some women wealthy and enriched by an abundance of means, who put their riches on display and insist they have every right to enjoy their own goods. Let them understand first that true riches belong to the woman rich in God, that true wealth belongs to the woman wealthy in Christ, that the only goods deserving the name are those spiritual, divine, heavenly ones that lead us toward God and remain with us as a lasting possession before him. Whatever, by contrast, is earthly, gained in this present age and bound to stay behind with this age, deserves the same contempt as the world itself, whose pomps and pleasures we already renounced the moment we crossed over, by a better road, to God. John rouses us and exhorts us, testifying with a spiritual and heavenly voice: he tells us plainly: set no love on the world, nor on whatever belongs to it. Whoever loves the world, the Father's love has no home in him: because everything the world contains is the flesh's desire and the eyes' desire and worldly ambition, none of which come from the Father but from the world's own craving. And the world will pass away, and its desire along with it, but whoever carries out God's will remains forever, just as God himself remains forever. What is eternal and divine, then, is what we must pursue, doing everything according to God's will, so that we might follow in the footsteps and teaching of our Lord, who gave this warning: I did not come down from heaven to carry out a will of my own, but the will of the one who sent me. And if no servant outranks his master, and a freed man owes his liberator obedience, then those of us wanting to be called Christian ought to copy what Christ himself said. It stands written, is read aloud, is heard, and is proclaimed by the church's own voice as our pattern: whoever claims to remain in Christ owes it to walk as Christ walked. We must tread in matching steps, straining to keep pace in rival advance. Only then will the pursuit of truth answer to the faith our name implies, and the reward comes to the believer only once belief has also become deed.
You call yourself wealthy and rich, yet your riches meet their match in Paul, who fixes by his own words a proper limit for your dress and finery. Let women, he says, array themselves with modesty and chastity, not with braided hair, nor gold, nor pearls, nor costly clothing, but as befits women who profess purity, through good conduct. Peter too agrees with these same precepts and says: let the adornment of a woman not be the outward one of ornament or gold or clothing, but the adornment of the heart. But if he warns even women—who might excuse their finery through a husband—to be held in check and shaped by the church's own religious discipline, how much more is a virgin bound to keep this rule, since for her there is no excuse at all for adornment, no way to shift the falsehood of the fault onto anyone else—the guilt rests on her alone.
You call yourself wealthy and rich. But not everything within one's power ought therefore to be done, nor should extravagant wishes, bred out of worldly ambition, be stretched past the honor and modesty that virginity demands, for scripture puts it thus: everything is permitted, yet not everything does good; everything is permitted, yet not everything builds up. Moreover, if you groom yourself too lavishly and go about the public streets in a way that draws attention, if you entice the eyes of the young toward yourself, draw the sighs of youths after you, nourish the lust of desire, kindle the fuel of hope, so that, even if you yourself do not perish, you destroy others, and offer yourself like a sword and a poison to those who see you, you cannot excuse yourself as though you were chaste and modest in mind. Your shameless dress and immodest adornment convict you, and you can no longer be counted among the girls and virgins of Christ, if you live in such a way that you can be desired.
You call yourself wealthy and rich. But boasting of her riches does not suit a virgin, since divine scripture asks: what has our pride gained us, or what has boasting of wealth brought us? All those things passed by like a shadow; and the apostle likewise warns and says: let those who buy be as though they possessed not, and those who use this world as though they did not use it, for the form of this world is passing away. Peter too, entrusted by the Lord to feed and guard his sheep, the one on whom he built and founded the church, denies owning gold or silver for himself, yet calls himself rich through Christ's own grace, wealthy through faith in him and through his power, by which he wrought many great wonders and miracles, by which he overflowed with the spiritual goods leading toward glory's reward. Such wealth, such riches cannot belong to a woman who would rather be rich toward the world than toward Christ.
You call yourself wealthy and rich, and think you are meant to use what God has willed you to own. Use it, but toward wholesome ends and worthy pursuits; use it for what God has commanded, for what the Lord has shown. Let the poor feel you to be rich, let the needy feel you to be wealthy; lend your patrimony to God, feed Christ with it; so that you may be permitted to bear the glory of virginity, so that you may come to reach the Lord's rewards, win it by the prayers of many. Store your treasures there, where no thief digs them up, where no lurking robber breaks in; acquire possessions for yourself, but rather heavenly ones, where your gains are continual and everlasting, immune from every touch of worldly harm, where no rust consumes, no hail beats down, no sun scorches, no rain spoils. In this very matter you sin against God, if you believe he handed you riches so that you would fail to put them to healthy use. God gave man a voice too, and yet love-songs and shameful ones are not to be sung; God willed that iron exist for the tilling of the earth, yet murders are not therefore to be committed; or because the Lord established incense and wine and fire, must sacrifice therefore be offered to idols; or because flocks of cattle abound on your land, must you offer up victims and sacrifices? Indeed a great patrimony is itself a temptation, unless one's wealth is put to good uses, so that each person, by means of their own patrimony, ought rather to buy back their sins than to increase them.
The marks and enticements of ornaments and garments, the seductions of beauty, suit none but shameless and prostituted women, and there is hardly any adornment more costly than that of women whose modesty is cheap. So too in the sacred scriptures, meant by the Lord to instruct and warn us, a harlot city gets described, decked out and made beautiful, doomed to perish together with—indeed on account of—those very ornaments. One of the seven angels holding the bowls came, it says, and approaching me said: come, I will point you to the sentence awaiting the great harlot enthroned above many waters, she with whom the earth's kings have played the harlot. He bore me off in spirit, and I beheld a woman seated on a beast; she was wrapped in a purple and scarlet garment, decked in gold and costly stones and pearls, gripping in her hand a golden cup brimming with abominations and the filth and fornication of the whole earth. Let chaste and modest virgins flee the adornment of the unchaste, the dress of the shameless, the marks of brothels, the ornaments of harlots.
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Isaiah too cries out and rebukes and reproaches the daughters of Zion, corrupted by gold and clothing, overflowing with ruinous wealth and falling away from God through the pleasures of the age. The daughters of Zion, he says, have been exalted, and have walked with outstretched neck and a glance of the eyes, and with a mincing gait of the feet, trailing their tunics and playing with their feet as they go. And God will bring low the chief daughters of Zion, and their finery the Lord will strip bare, stripping away too the splendor of their garments, their ornaments, their hair, their curls, their crescents, their headbands, their bracelets, their bangles, their armlets, their rings, their earrings, their silks woven through with gold and purple. And instead of a sweet perfume there will be dust, and instead of a girdle you will be girded with a rope, and instead of a golden ornament for the head you will have baldness. This God finds fault with, this he singles out; by this he declares that they have been corrupted, that by this they have fallen away from true and divine worship. Exalted, they have fallen; adorned, they have earned shame and disgrace. Clothed in silk and purple, they cannot clothe themselves with Christ; adorned with gold and pearls and jewels, they have lost the ornaments of heart and breast. Who would not curse and flee what has been another's ruin? Who would seek out and take up what has served, in place of the sword or the spear, for another's death? If a man drinking from a cup were to die from it, you would know that what he drank was poison; if one who ate a certain food perished after eating it, you would know that what could kill upon being taken was deadly, and you would neither eat nor drink of it, once you had seen others die from it. How great, then, is the ignorance of the truth, how great the madness of mind, to want the very thing that has always harmed and still harms, and to suppose that you yourself will not perish from that by which you know others have perished!
For God did not make scarlet or purple sheep, nor did he teach the dyeing and coloring of wool with the juices of plants and with shellfish, nor did he devise necklaces strung together with gold set with gems or pearls, arranged in numerous and elaborate links, with which to hide the neck he himself made, so that what God formed in a human being might be covered over, and what the devil invented might be displayed on top of it instead. Did God will that wounds be inflicted on ears, by which still-innocent infancy, ignorant of the world's evil, is made to suffer, so that afterward precious stones might hang from the scars and holes in the ears, heavy, if not in their own weight, then certainly in the sum of their price? All these things sinful and apostate angels revealed by their own arts, when, cast down to earthly corruption, they fell away from their heavenly vigor. They taught women to paint the eyes by circling them with black, to stain the cheeks with a false blush, to change the hair with counterfeit colors, and to assault every truth of face and head by the violence of their own corrupting art.
In this place, out of the fear which faith presses upon us and the love which brotherhood demands, I think it necessary to warn not virgins alone, or widows, but also married women, indeed every woman whatsoever, that the work of God and his making and his shaping must in no way be adulterated by the application of yellow dye or black powder or rouge, or by any cosmetic at all that corrupts the native lines. As it stands written, the Creator declared: let humankind be fashioned after our likeness, in our image — yet who dares to alter and overturn what God has made! They lay hands on God when they strive to reshape and transform what he has formed, not knowing that whatever is born is the work of God, and whatever is changed is the devil's work. If some skilled painter had rendered a man's face and features and bodily proportions in matching colors, and then, once the likeness was finished and complete, another came and laid hands on it, and, as though more skillful, reworked what was already shaped and already painted, it would seem a grave injury to the first artist and a just cause for indignation; and do you suppose you will bear unpunished so shameless and reckless an audacity, an offense against God the artist? So that you may not be shameless and unchaste toward men through the enticements of paint, corrupting and violating what belongs to God, you are held fast as an adulteress worse than any other. What you think adornment, what you think elegance, is an assault upon the divine work, a betrayal of the truth.
It is the voice of the apostle warning us: purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened; for indeed Christ our passover has been sacrificed. So let us celebrate the feast free of the old leaven — free too of the ferment born from malice and wickedness — relying instead on the unleavened loaf that is sincerity and truth. Does sincerity and truth endure when what is sincere is defiled by the adulteries of color, when by the deceits of cosmetics true things are turned into a lie? Your Lord says: you cannot make one hair white or black — and do you wish to be more powerful than your Lord's own voice, and by a bold and sacrilegious contempt dye your hair, foreboding for yourself, by an evil omen, hair already flame-colored for the future, and sin against that which is, so to speak, the better part of the body, the head! And although Scripture tells us that the Lord's head and hair were white as wool or snow, you curse gray hair, you detest whiteness — the very likeness of the Lord's own head!
Do you not dread, I wonder, given what you have become, that on the day the resurrection dawns, the one who fashioned you may fail to recognize you, and, as you come for your rewards and promises, turn you away and shut you out, and rebuking you with the force of a censor and a judge, say: this body is not mine, nor is this the image that is ours. A counterfeit dye has fouled your skin, an adulterous tint has transformed your hair, a lie has overthrown your face, your shape stands corrupted, your countenance is no longer your own. You will not be able to see God, since the eyes you have are not those God made but those the devil has infected. Him you followed; the serpent's reddened, painted eyes you copied, decked out by your own enemy, bound to burn alongside him. Are these things, I ask, not to be considered by the handmaids of God, not to be feared always, by day and by night? Let married women see for themselves what they flatter themselves in, for the sake of pleasing, from the comfort of a husband — while they offer this in their own defense, they draw others into partnership in the same guilty consent. As for virgins — and it is not to them that this discourse speaks — those who deck themselves out with such contrivances should not, in my judgment, be counted among virgins at all; rather, like a diseased sheep or a rotten head of cattle, they ought to be shut out from virginity's flock, pure and undefiled, lest their contagion spread while they dwell among the rest, lest corruption already at work destroy others too.
And since we seek the good of continence, let us avoid all things ruinous and hostile to it. Nor do I pass over those things which, through negligence coming into use, have taken for themselves a license against chaste and sober conduct. Some women are not ashamed to be present at weddings and, amid that freedom of wanton talk, to mingle in indecent conversation, to hear what is unfitting, to say what is unlawful, to be present and to look on amid shameful words and drunken feasts, by which the tinder of lust is kindled, the bride is emboldened to endure the loss of her chastity, the groom to boldness. What place is there in a wedding for one whose mind is not set on marriage, or how can things be pleasurable and joyful there, where aims and wishes differ? What is learned there, what is seen? How far the virgin falls short of her own purpose! How much less chaste she departs who came chaste! Though in body and mind she remains a virgin, in eyes, ears, and tongue she diminishes what she had.
But what of those who go to public baths together and prostitute bodies dedicated to modesty and chastity to eyes curious for lust? Those who, naked, both see men shamefully and are seen by men — do they not themselves supply an enticement to vice? Do they not, to their own corruption and injury, provoke and invite the desires of those present? You say, let each see with what mind he comes there; my only concern is refreshing and washing my poor body. That defense does not cleanse you, nor does it excuse the charge of wantonness and impudence. That washing soils, it does not cleanse; it does not purify the limbs but stains them. Shameless one, you look upon no one, but you yourself are shamelessly looked upon; you do not defile your own eyes with a base delight, but while you delight others, you yourself are defiled. You make a spectacle of the bathhouse; more shameful than the theater is the place where you gather. All modesty is stripped off there; together with the covering of clothing the honor and shame of the body is laid aside, and virginity, to be marked and handled, is laid bare. Consider now whether she who is modest when clothed is modest among men, once she has advanced to such boldness of nakedness.
Thus the church often mourns her virgins, thus she groans over their shameful and detestable stories: thus the flower of virgins is quenched, the honor and modesty of continence is cut down, all glory and dignity is profaned. Thus the enemy who overthrows insinuates himself by his arts; thus by hidden and deceiving snares the devil creeps in; while virgins crave finer adornment and looser wandering, virginity itself slips away from them, undone by a hidden shame — they become widows before ever being brides, adulteresses not of a husband but of Christ — as great as were the rewards for which they were destined as virgins, so great will be the punishments they will feel for lost virginity.
Hear, then, virgins, as you would a parent: hear, I beg you, one who fears for you and warns you alike: hear one who faithfully considers your advantages and interests. Remain as your maker, God, shaped you to be; stay as the Father's own hand formed you: let an unspoiled countenance, a pure neck, a sincere form remain in you. Let no wounds be inflicted on your ears, let no precious chain enclose your arms or neck with bracelets and necklaces; let your feet be free of golden fetters, your hair dyed with no color, your eyes worthy to look upon God. Let baths be attended together with women whose bathing in your presence is chaste. Let the shameless festivities of weddings and wanton feasts be shunned, whose contagion is dangerous. Conquer clothing, you who are a virgin; conquer gold, you who conquer flesh and the world. It is not the same thing to be unable to be conquered by greater things and to be found unequal to lesser ones. Narrow and strait is the way that leads to life, hard and steep the path that stretches toward glory. Along this narrow path the martyrs press on, the virgins go, and all the righteous walk. Shun the broad and spacious roads: there deadly enticements and death-bringing pleasures lie in wait; there the devil flatters in order to deceive, smiles in order to harm, entices in order to kill. The hundredfold fruit belongs to the martyrs first; the sixtyfold is yours. Just as martyrs give no thought to flesh or world, feeling no trivial, soft, or tender contest, so too in you — recipients of a second grace's reward — the strength suited to steadfastness should remain near at hand. Climbing toward greatness is never effortless: consider the sweat and toil spent merely scaling hills and mountain peaks. What then to climb to heaven? If you consider the reward of the promise, the labor is the lesser thing. Immortality is given to the one who perseveres, everlasting life is promised, the kingdom the Lord pledges.
Keep, virgins, keep what you have begun to be. Keep what you will be. You have earned something great: a rich prize for your virtue, chastity's highest reward. As for the power of self-restraint � shall I tell you the harm it escapes and the blessing it secures? I will multiply, God says to the woman, your sorrows and your groanings, and in sorrow you shall bring forth children, and your turning shall be toward your husband, and he shall rule over you. You are free from this sentence; you fear not the sorrows and groanings of women; no fear of childbirth concerns you: nor is a husband your lord — your Lord and head is Christ, in the place and likeness of the man; your lot and condition is a common one with the angels. This is the Lord's own teaching: those who belong to this age take husbands and wives and are given in marriage; but whoever is judged worthy of that coming age, worthy of rising from the dead, will neither take a spouse nor be given to one — death itself no longer having any claim on them. Such people match the angels of God, for they belong to the resurrection. That future state toward which we look, you have already stepped into. Even now, in this present age, you hold the glory that resurrection brings; you move through this age untouched by its taint: staying chaste, staying virgins, you stand level with God's angels. See only that your virginity stays intact and undamaged, and — having begun courageously — carries that same courage through to the end, seeking not the ornaments of jewelry or clothing but of character. Let it look to God and heaven, and not let eyes lifted high be brought down to the lust of flesh and world, cast down to earthly things.
The first pronouncement commanded to increase and multiply; the second urged continence as well. While the world was still young and empty, we were multiplied and increased by fruitfulness, propagating for the growth of the human race; but now that the earth is filled and the world entices, those who can receive continence are made eunuchs, living as such, for the kingdom's sake. The Lord does not command this, but urges it, nor does he force it upon anyone like some unavoidable burden, for free will's choice still stands untouched. But since he says that there are many dwellings in his Father's house, he points to the lodging of a better habitation. In seeking these superior dwellings and cutting away fleshly desire, you gain in heaven a grace far greater as your reward. Everyone who arrives at this divine, fatherly gift through baptism's sanctifying power sheds the former self there, thanks to the saving bath's grace, and — made new by the Holy Spirit — is washed clean of old corruption's stain through a second birth. Yet a deeper holiness, a fuller truth in that second birth, is yours alone, since for you the cravings of flesh and body now count for nothing. In you, only the things of virtue and of spirit remain, unto glory. These are the words of the apostle — the one the Lord named his chosen instrument, dispatched by God to carry his heavenly instructions. The first man, so he tells us, came from earth's dust; the second came from heaven. Those made of dust resemble the dusty man; those who are heavenly resemble the heavenly one. Just as we once carried the likeness of the dust-born man, so let us now carry the likeness of the one who comes from heaven. This image virginity bears, integrity bears it, holiness and truth bear it; those bear it who are mindful of God's discipline, who hold fast to righteousness with reverence, steadfast in faith, humble in fear, strong for every endurance, gentle in bearing injury, ready for showing mercy, of one mind and heart in brotherly peace.
Every one of these duties, virtuous virgins, calls for your attention, your devotion, your fulfillment — you who, given over to God and Christ, lead the way to the Lord to whom you are consecrated, holding the greater and finer share. You who are advanced in years, be teachers to the younger; you who are younger in age, offer to your equals an incitement. Rouse one another with mutual encouragements, provoke one another to glory by rival examples of virtue. Hold fast bravely, advance in spirit, arrive in happiness. Only remember us then, when virginity begins to be honored in you.
The gospel precepts, most beloved brothers, are nothing other than divine lessons: foundations on which hope is built, supports by which faith is strengthened, food by which the heart is nourished, rudders by which our course is steered, safeguards by which salvation is secured; and while they instruct the teachable minds of believers on earth, they lead them through to the kingdoms of heaven. Through the prophets—his own servants—God chose that much be declared and made known; yet the Son's own utterance far surpasses these, for he is God's Word, once voiced through the prophets, now bearing witness in his own voice—no longer commanding that a way be prepared for one who was coming, but himself coming and himself opening and showing us the way, so that we who once wandered blind and unwary in the darkness of death might now, illumined by the light of grace, hold to the path of life with the Lord as our guide and director.
Among his other saving counsels and divine precepts by which he provides for the salvation of his people, he himself also gave us a form for prayer; he himself instructed and taught us what to ask. The one who instructed our living instructed our praying as well, moved by the same generosity that led him to grant us every other gift, so that speaking to the Father in the words his Son gave us, we would be heard all the more readily. Already he had announced beforehand a coming time in which those who worship in spirit and truth would render the Father genuine worship, and what he had promised earlier he brought to fulfillment, so that we, having received spirit and truth from his sanctifying gift, might likewise offer him worship both true and spiritual, following what he passed down to us. For what prayer could be more spiritual than the one given to us by Christ, from whom the Holy Spirit was also sent to us? What petition could be truer before the Father than the one spoken by the Son, who is the Truth, from his own mouth? So that to pray in any other way than he taught is not merely ignorance but fault — since he himself declared: you reject the commandment of God in order to establish your own tradition.
Let us pray, then, most beloved brothers, as God our teacher has taught. It is a friendly and familiar prayer to ask God for what belongs to him, to let Christ's own prayer rise to his ears. May the Father, hearing us pray, recognize his own Son's speech in ours: may the one dwelling inside our breast also make himself heard through our lips — and because we hold him as our advocate with the Father on account of our sins, we sinners, pleading over our own wrongs, ought to utter nothing but our advocate's own utterance. He himself promises that anything asked of the Father under his name will be granted to us; how much more surely, then, do we secure our request when we invoke Christ's name by praying in the exact words he gave?
Let the speech and prayer of those who pray be marked by discipline, restraint, and modesty. Let us consider that we stand in the sight of God. We must please his divine eyes both in the bearing of our body and in the manner of our voice. For as it belongs to the shameless to make an uproar with shouting, so, on the contrary, it is fitting to pray with modest and measured petitions. Indeed, the Lord's own teaching directs that our prayers be offered secretly, tucked away in withdrawn, hidden places — within our own chambers — which suits our faith better, since we know that God is present everywhere, that he hears and sees all things, and that in the fullness of his majesty he penetrates even into what is hidden and concealed. Scripture attests this: I draw near as God, says the Lord, and am no distant deity. If a man hides himself in secret places, shall I not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth? And again: in every place the eyes of the Lord watch over the good and the evil. And when we assemble together with the brothers and join God's priest in celebrating the divine sacrifice, reverence and discipline must guide our conduct: we should not scatter prayers abroad in disordered shouting, nor hurl toward God, in noisy babble, a plea that deserves to be offered to him with quiet restraint — since God listens to the heart rather than the voice, and one whose thoughts are already seen has no need to be stirred by shouting, just as the Lord himself confirms: why do you think evil in your hearts? And elsewhere: every congregation will come to know that I am he who searches the innermost heart and mind.
Hannah observes exactly this, bearing as she does the church's own figure in the first book of Kings, when she besought God quietly and humbly, deep within the concealed recesses of her breast, rather than through any noisy demand. Her prayer stayed concealed even as her faith stood open; her heart, not her tongue, did the speaking, for she understood this to be how the Lord listens — and because she asked in faith, she gained exactly what she sought. Divine Scripture confirms it: her heart spoke, her lips stirred, yet no sound reached the ear, and still the Lord heard her. So too the Psalms tell us: converse within your own hearts, and let remorse pierce you upon your beds. Jeremiah conveys this same instruction from the Holy Spirit when he says: Lord, it is in the mind that you must be worshipped.
In worship, most beloved brothers, let none overlook how, within the temple, the tax collector prayed beside the Pharisee. Without raising his eyes toward heaven in shamelessness or lifting his hands in insolent display, he struck his own breast, acknowledging the wrongs locked inside him, and begged for divine mercy's aid; and though the Pharisee took pleasure in himself, sanctification instead fell to this humbler suppliant, since he grounded his hope of salvation not on confidence in his own blamelessness — for no one is without fault — but prayed with humility, admitting his sins; and the one who pardons the humble gave ear to his prayer. The Lord sets this down in the gospel thus: a pair of men climbed up to the temple to worship, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Standing there, the Pharisee prayed to himself in this way: God, I give you thanks that I am not like other people — thieves, wrongdoers, adulterers — nor even like this tax collector here. Twice a week I fast; of everything I possess I give a tenth. But the tax collector remained at a distance, unwilling even to raise his eyes toward heaven, striking his own chest instead as he said: God, show mercy toward me, a sinner. I tell you: it was this man, not the other, who returned home set right before God — for whoever raises himself up will be brought low, and whoever lowers himself will be raised up.
Having learned this, most beloved brothers, from the divine reading, and having come to know how we ought to approach prayer, let us also learn from the Lord's own teaching what we ought to pray. Pray thus, he says: Our Father, who art in the heavens, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done in heaven and on earth. Give us this day the bread we need for today, and cancel our debts for us, in the same way that we cancel them for our debtors; do not allow us to be brought into trial, but rescue us from evil.
Above all, the one who teaches peace and instructs in unity refused to let prayer be offered as a solitary, private act, as though a person praying should seek only for himself. None of us says my Father, who art in the heavens, nor give me today my bread; nor does anyone ask forgiveness for his debt alone, or pray solely for himself to avoid temptation and escape evil. Instead our petition belongs to everyone in common: praying, we do not intercede for a single soul but for an entire people, since all of us together form one body. It was God's will — he who teaches peace and concord, who instituted unity — that a single prayer should be lifted for everyone, just as he himself carried everyone within himself as one. Three youths, shut inside the blazing furnace, kept exactly this rule of prayer, their petitions in harmony and their spirits joined as one; faithful Scripture bears witness to this, and by showing how such men prayed, it offers us a pattern to follow in our own petitions, so that we might come to resemble them. Then, it says, all three, as though from a single mouth, raised a hymn and blessed God. Even before Christ had given them any teaching on prayer, their words rang out as one, as if from a single mouth. That is precisely why their prayer proved effective and secured its request — because a tranquil, unadorned, spiritual prayer wins the Lord's favor. In just this way we discover that the apostles, together with the other disciples, kept praying once the Lord had ascended. All of them, it says, continued steadfastly and with one mind in prayer, alongside the women, Mary who had been Jesus's mother, and his brothers. Their perseverance in prayer displayed at once both constancy and unity of spirit — since God, who settles people of one mind together in a household, admits into his own everlasting household only those whose prayer rises as one.
How great, most beloved brothers, are the mysteries held within the Lord's Prayer — how numerous, how vast, gathered briefly into speech yet spiritually overflowing in power, so that this compendium of heavenly teaching leaves out nothing at all that belongs in our prayers and petitions! So, he says, worship: Our Father, who art in the heavens. Reborn and remade in his God through grace, the new man names Father before anything else, since he has already begun his life as a son. To his own he came, it says, and his own did not welcome him; yet to all who did welcome him he granted the power to become children of God, to everyone trusting in his name. Anyone, then, who has trusted in his name and thereby become God's child ought to start from here: giving thanks and declaring himself a son of God — since by naming as his own the Father who dwells in the heavens, one of the earliest things he utters after this new birth must be a testimony that he has cast off his earthly, fleshly father and has come instead to know and hold only the Father in the heavens — as it is written: those who say to father and mother, I do not know you, and who did not acknowledge their own children — these have kept your commandments and observed your covenant. Likewise the Lord in his gospel commanded that we call no man on earth our father, since we have but one Father, who is in the heavens. And to the disciple who mentioned his dead father, he answered: let the dead bury their own dead — for he had called his father dead, though the Father of believers is living.
Nor ought we, most beloved brothers, to fix our attention solely on this — that we address as Father the one who is in the heavens — but we combine the words and declare Our Father: that is, father to everyone who believes, to those who, made holy through him and remade by a birth of spiritual grace, have begun their life as God's children. This very phrase also strikes and rebukes the Jews, since not only did they faithlessly spurn Christ — announced to them beforehand by the prophets and sent to them first — but they went so far as to kill him with cruelty; they can therefore no longer address the Lord as Father, for the Lord himself rebuts and confounds them, saying: your father is the devil, from whom you are born, and it is his desires you wish to carry out. From the very start he was a killer, never standing firm in truth, since truth finds no place in him. And through the prophet Isaiah, God cries out indignantly: sons I have raised and lifted high, yet they have scorned me. An ox recognizes its owner, a donkey its master's feeding trough, yet Israel has not recognized me, and my own people have failed to understand. Woe to this sinning nation, a people weighed down with sins, a corrupt brood, depraved children! You have abandoned the Lord and stirred to fury the Holy One of Israel. It is precisely to shame such people that we Christians, praying, address God as Our Father — since he has taken up residence as ours and abandoned his place among the Jews who deserted him. A people mired in sin cannot hold the title of son; but those granted forgiveness of their sins receive the name of sons inscribed to them, and to them eternity too stands promised, as the Lord himself states: everyone who sins is a slave. Yet a slave does not stay in the household forever, while a son remains there forever.
How immense is the Lord's generosity, how abundant his kindness and goodness toward us, in that he wished us to conduct our prayer before God in such a manner that we address the Lord as Father — and that, just as Christ holds the title Son of God, we too are named children of God: a title none of us would have dared claim in prayer had he not himself granted us leave to pray this way. We ought therefore, most beloved brothers, to bear in mind and understand that addressing God as our Father calls for conduct befitting God's children, so that just as we take satisfaction in ourselves before our Father, he too may take satisfaction in us. Let us live as though we were temples of God, so it is evident that the Lord makes his home within us. Our behavior should not fall beneath the Spirit's standard, so that we, already embarked on a spiritual and heavenly existence, might think and act on nothing except what belongs to heaven and the spirit — since the Lord God himself declared: those who glorify me, I will glorify, and those who scorn me will be scorned. The blessed apostle likewise set this down in his third letter: you do not belong to yourselves, for you were purchased at a great price; glorify God and bear him in your body.
After this we say: hallowed be your name — not that we wish God to be made holy by our prayers, but that we ask the Lord that his name be made holy in us. For by whom is God made holy, who himself makes all things holy? But because he himself said, be holy, for I too am holy, this is what we ask and request: that we who were made holy in baptism may continue steadfastly in the state we have already entered upon. This too we plead for every day. For we need a daily sanctification, so that we who sin daily may cleanse our faults through constant sanctification. What this sanctification is, which is granted to us by God's favor, the apostle proclaims, saying: no fornicator, no idol-worshipper, no adulterer, no man given to softness or to lying with men, no thief, no swindler, no drunkard, no slanderer, no grasping person will have any share in God's kingdom. Such, indeed, is what you once were — yet you have since been cleansed, set right, and consecrated, through the name belonging to the Lord Jesus Christ and through God's own Spirit. In the Lord Jesus's name and by our God's Spirit, he tells us, we have been made holy. It is our prayer that this holiness endure within us; and because the Lord, as our judge, having restored health and life to the man he rescued, cautions him against sinning again lest worse befall him, we turn this into an unceasing petition, asking day and night that the holiness and life granted to us through God's favor be kept safe under his own guard.
Next in the prayer comes: your kingdom come. Just as we ask that his name be made holy within us, so we ask that God's kingdom also be manifested among us. For at what point could God cease reigning, or when could something begin for one whose reign has always existed and will never end? What we request is the arrival of the kingdom already promised to us by God, purchased through Christ's blood and suffering — so that we, once bound in service within this present age, might afterward rule under Christ's dominion, exactly as he pledges: come, those my Father has blessed, take possession of the realm made ready for you since the world's beginning. It could also be, most beloved brothers, that Christ himself constitutes God's kingdom — the very one whose daily arrival we crave, whose presence among us we long to see fulfilled as soon as possible. Since he is himself the resurrection (because rising happens within him), the kingdom of God can likewise be understood as himself, since ruling too will happen within him. And we are right to seek God's kingdom, meaning specifically the heavenly one, since an earthly kingdom exists as well. Yet whoever has already turned away from this present age stands above both its honors and its dominion; thus anyone devoted to God and to Christ longs not for earthly rule but for the kingdoms of heaven. Continual prayer and petition remain necessary, lest we slip away from that heavenly kingdom just as the Jews did — those to whom it was first pledged and who nonetheless fell from it, as the Lord himself demonstrates and declares. Many, he says, will arrive from east and west and will take their place at table alongside Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob within the kingdom of the heavens; yet the kingdom's own sons will be thrown out into the darkness beyond — there will be weeping there, and grinding of teeth. He thereby shows that the Jews had once been sons of the kingdom, for as long as they also remained sons of God; once the title of Father no longer applied to them, the kingdom departed as well. And so we Christians, having already begun in prayer to name God our Father, likewise pray that his kingdom may come to us.
We continue further, saying: your will be done in heaven and on earth — meaning not that God needs to carry out what he wills, but that we ourselves might be capable of carrying out what God wills. For who could stand against God so as to prevent him from doing as he wills? Rather, because the devil sets himself against us, keeping our thinking and our conduct from submitting fully to God in every respect, our prayer and petition is that God's will take effect within us; and for that to happen within us, God's own will must supply the help and shelter needed, since strength drawn from one's own powers avails nothing, while safety comes from God's mercy and forbearance. The Lord himself, in fact, revealing the frailty of the human nature he carried, said: Father, if this is possible, take this cup away from me; and then, setting an example for his disciples — that their own preference should yield to God's — he added: yet let it be not as I wish but as you wish. And elsewhere he says: I did not descend from heaven to carry out my own preference, but the preference of the one who sent me. Now if the Son submitted in order to carry out the Father's preference, how much more should a servant submit in order to carry out his master's! John, too, in his letter, presses and teaches this same obedience to God's preference, saying: do not set your love on the world or on what belongs to the world. Whoever loves the world lacks the Father's love within him, since everything the world contains — fleshly craving, the craving of the eyes, and the arrogance bred by life — springs not from the Father but from the world's own craving. And the world, together with its craving, is passing away; but whoever carries out God's preference endures forever, exactly as God himself endures forever. Those of us who wish to endure forever must carry out the will of the eternal God.
God's will is embodied in everything Christ himself performed and taught. It shows itself as humble conduct, firm faith, restrained speech, righteous deeds, merciful works, and disciplined character. It means never learning how to injure another while being able to endure an injury received; keeping peace among the brethren; loving the Lord wholeheartedly, cherishing him as Father and fearing him as God. It means placing nothing whatsoever ahead of Christ, just as he placed nothing ahead of us; holding fast to his love without ever letting go; standing beside his cross with courage and trust whenever the struggle touches his name and glory; displaying, in speech, the steadiness of our confession, in questioning, the boldness with which we engage, and in death, the endurance that earns our crown. Wanting to share Christ's inheritance, obeying God's own precept, carrying out the Father's will — these three amount to one and the same thing.
We ask that God's will come to pass both in heaven and on earth — a plea that touches the very completion of our deliverance and our salvation. Since our body comes from the earth while our spirit comes from heaven, we ourselves constitute both earth and heaven, and it is regarding both — body together with spirit — that we pray for God's will to be accomplished. A contest goes on daily between flesh and spirit, each warring against the other, so that we fail to do what we actually want, because the spirit longs after heavenly and divine realities while the flesh hungers for what belongs to earth and this present age. So we ask that harmony between these two be brought about through God's help and support, so that as his will is worked out in spirit and in flesh alike, the soul reborn through him may be kept safe. Paul makes this plain without disguise, in his own words: flesh, he says, wars against spirit, and spirit resists flesh in return — locked together in mutual opposition, they leave you powerless to accomplish what you wish. The deeds produced by the flesh are plain to see: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idol-worship, sorcery, hatred, quarreling, jealousy, anger, rivalry, dissension, factionalism, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and similar things — people who practice such things will never inherit God's kingdom. By contrast, what the spirit produces is love, joy, peace, magnanimity, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-mastery, purity. This is why, in prayers offered daily — indeed unceasingly — we beg that his will be accomplished toward us in heaven and on earth alike: because God wills precisely this, that earthly concerns should yield to heavenly ones, and that what is spiritual and divine should hold sway.
This can also be taken another way, dearest brothers: because the Lord bids and urges us to love even our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, let us also intercede for those who remain of the earth and have not yet started becoming heavenly, asking that God's will be accomplished in them as well — the very will Christ carried out by rescuing and remaking humankind. For the disciples are no longer termed earth by him but rather earth's salt, and the apostle names the first man as formed from earth's clay while the second came from heaven; so it suits us, who should resemble God the Father, who causes his sun to rise on good and wicked alike and sends rain on just and unjust, to pray and ask, following Christ's own teaching, that we plead on behalf of everyone's deliverance — so that, just as in heaven (that is, within ourselves) his will has already been done through our faith, that we might belong to heaven, so too on earth (that is, among those still refusing belief) his will may likewise be done, that those still earthly by their first birth may start becoming heavenly, born from water and spirit.
As the prayer continues, we petition, saying: grant us this day our daily portion of bread. This admits of both a spiritual and a plain reading, since either interpretation, through God's own gift, serves toward salvation. This bread belongs not to everyone, but only to us, for Christ himself is life's own bread. Just as we call him 'our Father' because he fathers those who comprehend and trust him, so likewise we speak of 'our bread,' since Christ becomes bread for those among us who partake of his body. We ask that this bread be granted to us day by day, so that those of us united to Christ, receiving his eucharist daily as saving nourishment, might not be held back by some more serious fault intervening — barred from communion and thereby cut off from the bread of heaven, separated from Christ's own body — for he himself declares: I am the bread of life who descended from heaven; whoever eats of my bread will live forever; and the bread I will give is my own flesh, given for the life of the world. Since he says that eternal life belongs to whoever eats his bread, it is evident that life belongs to those who partake of his body and rightly share in the eucharist through communion; conversely, then, we must dread and pray against the possibility that someone, held back and cut off from Christ's body, might fall short of salvation — elsewhere he issues this same warning: fail to eat the Son of Man's flesh and drink his blood, and no life at all will be found within you. For this reason we ask that our bread — Christ himself — be given us daily, so that, abiding and living within Christ, we might never break away from his sanctifying presence and his body.
This can also be taken another way: we who have turned away from the world, and, through the faith of spiritual grace, cast off its wealth and display, ask for ourselves nothing but food and the means of living, since the Lord teaches and says: whoever does not give up everything he owns cannot be my disciple. Now whoever has taken up discipleship under Christ, renouncing everything as his teacher's voice demands, should request enough food for that single day rather than stretching his petitions toward some distant future, since the Lord himself lays it down again, saying: do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself; each day's trouble is sufficient for itself. Rightly, then, does Christ's disciple ask for his sustenance one day at a time, forbidden as he is from dwelling on tomorrow — since it would be self-defeating and contradictory to seek a long life in this world while praying for God's kingdom to arrive swiftly. In the same way the blessed apostle exhorts us, building up and confirming how solid our hope and trust ought to be: nothing, he says, did we carry into this world, and certainly we can carry nothing out of it; so, having food and clothing, let these be enough for us. But those wanting to grow rich fall into temptation, into snares, into many harmful and hurtful desires that drown a person in ruin and destruction. Greed is the root from which every evil springs, and some, grasping eagerly after it, have wrecked themselves away from the faith and impaled themselves on many sorrows.
He teaches that riches are not only to be despised but are dangerous, that there lies the root of evils which flatter, the blindness of the human mind deceived by a hidden trickery. That is why God rebukes the rich fool who was thinking of his worldly stores and boasting of the abundance of his overflowing crops, saying: fool, this very night your soul is demanded of you; the things you have prepared, then, whose will they be? The fool was rejoicing over his crops, though he was to die that night, and while his life was already failing he was thinking about an abundance of provisions. The Lord, on the other hand, teaches that a man becomes perfect and complete who, after selling all he has and distributing it for the use of the poor, lays up for himself a treasure in heaven. He says that the one who can follow him and imitate the glory of his passion is he who, unencumbered and girded, is entangled by no snares of household wealth, but, freed and unbound, himself follows after his goods which he has already sent ahead to the Lord. So that every one of us might be capable of readying ourselves for this, he here teaches us to pray and to grasp what prayer's rule should be.
The righteous person can never lack daily food, for Scripture says: the Lord will not allow a just soul to perish from hunger; and elsewhere: I was once young, now I have grown old, yet never have I witnessed the just abandoned, nor his offspring begging for bread. Likewise the Lord makes this promise: do not worry, asking yourselves what you will eat, what you will drink, or what you will wear — such concerns belong to the pagans. Your Father already knows that you need all of this. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and everything else will be granted to you besides. He assures those who pursue God's kingdom and righteousness that every other thing will be supplied. Since everything belongs to God, whoever possesses God will lack nothing — so long as he himself does not abandon God. This is how Daniel, confined to the lions' den at the king's command, received his meal through divine provision, fed by God's care even while surrounded by beasts that hungered yet held back from harming him. In just the same way Elijah was sustained during his flight into the wilderness, with ravens serving him and birds delivering his food, kept alive even amid persecution. And — what a shameful cruelty found only in human wickedness! — wild animals restrain themselves and birds provide nourishment, while men ambush and savage one another!
Concerning our sins we next offer this petition: forgive us our debts, even as we ourselves forgive those who owe us. Once food has been requested, forgiveness for wrongdoing is sought next, so that whoever is nourished by God may go on living within God, provided for not merely in this present, temporary life but in the eternal one — reachable only if the sins that the Lord terms debts are pardoned, exactly as he states in his own gospel: I released you from that whole debt because you begged me to. How essential, how wisely arranged, and how beneficial it is that we are reminded of our sinfulness, driven as we are to plead on our sins' behalf, so that in seeking pardon from God, a person's mind might turn back to examine its own conscience. So that no one might flatter himself as innocent and, by puffing himself up, ruin himself further, he is shown and taught that sinning happens to him every day, since he is commanded to pray daily concerning his sins. John likewise cautions in his letter: should we claim to be without sin, we only fool ourselves, and truth has no place in us; yet if we acknowledge our sins, the Lord, faithful and righteous, will pardon them. Within that same letter he brings together both points — that we must plead for our sins, and that pleading secures pardon. Thus he named the Lord faithful, since he honors the assurance of his own pledge to forgive — for the one who instructed us to pray about our debts and offenses has guaranteed the Father's compassion and the forgiveness that comes after.
He plainly went further, attaching a rule that binds us under a definite condition and pledge — that we ask for our own debts to be released in the very way we release those indebted to us, aware that what we request concerning our sins will never be granted unless we do the same for those who offend against us. Elsewhere, accordingly, he states: by whatever measure you measure out, it will be measured back to you — and the servant who, once his master had forgiven his entire debt, refused in turn to forgive his fellow servant, was thrown into prison, because in denying mercy to a fellow servant he forfeited what the Lord had granted him. Christ presses this point with even greater force and weightier judgment: when you stand to pray, he says, forgive whatever grievance you hold against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive your sins; but should you fail to forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your sins. On the day of judgment no excuse will remain for you, since the verdict you pronounce becomes the verdict passed on you, and you will undergo precisely what you yourself inflicted. For God has ordered that those within his household be peaceable, unanimous, and of a single mind, wishing those he has remade through the second birth to persist as they were reborn, so that we, being sons of God, might dwell in God's peace, and so that those sharing one spirit might share one mind and one feeling. Thus God will not even receive the sacrifice of someone at odds with another, and he directs the one who leaves the altar to first make peace with his brother, so that God himself may be won over by peaceable prayer. A sacrifice greater to God than any other is our peace and fraternal unity, and a people gathered into one, arising from the oneness shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When Abel and Cain each brought their first offerings, God did not regard their gifts but examined their hearts, so that whoever was pleasing at heart would also be pleasing in what he presented. Abel, being peaceable and just, offered his sacrifice to God in innocence, and by this taught others that whenever they bring gifts to the altar, they should approach in reverence toward God, with an uncomplicated heart, following the standard of righteousness, and in harmonious peace. Because he showed himself this way in his offering to God, it was fitting that he himself later became an offering to God — the very first to demonstrate martyrdom, inaugurating through the glory of his own bloodshed the Lord's own passion, since he had possessed the Lord's own righteousness together with his peace. People of this kind receive their crown from the Lord; people of this kind will be vindicated alongside the Lord on judgment day. But whoever is quarrelsome, at odds with others, and fails to keep peace with the brethren cannot escape the charge of splitting the family of faith, even if put to death for the Name — as holy Scripture and the blessed apostle both attest, since it is written that whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and no murderer reaches the kingdom of heaven or lives together with God. Whoever chooses to imitate Judas rather than Christ cannot remain with Christ. What a grave fault this is, one that not even the baptism of blood can wash away; what a crime that not even martyrdom itself can atone for!
The Lord likewise warns us, out of necessity, to say in prayer: and do not let us be brought into temptation. This part reveals that the adversary holds no power over us unless God grants leave for it beforehand, so every bit of our fear, devotion, and vigilance ought to be directed toward God, since during trials the evil one can do nothing beyond what authority is handed him from that source. Scripture confirms this, stating: Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, marched against Jerusalem and laid siege to it, for the Lord had delivered it into his hand. Authority is granted to the evil one against us in proportion to our own sins, as Scripture says: who handed Jacob over to plunder, and Israel to those who stripped him bare? Was it not God, against whom they had sinned, refusing to walk in his ways or heed his law, so that he poured his burning anger down upon them? And again, when Solomon sinned and strayed from the Lord's commands and paths, it is recorded: and the Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon himself.
Power is granted against us in two ways: as punishment when we transgress, or for glory when we are tested — as we observe in the case of Job, when God himself declares: look, I place everything he owns into your hands, but be careful not to touch the man himself. And the Lord speaks in the gospel at the moment of his passion: you would hold no power over me at all had it not been granted you from above. So when we pray not to be brought into temptation, our own weakness and frailty are being called to mind through that very prayer, lest anyone exalt himself with arrogance, lest anyone claim credit for himself with pride and presumption, lest anyone credit himself with the glory of his own confession or suffering — since the Lord, giving a lesson in humility himself, declared: stay alert and pray, so you do not fall into temptation; the spirit is eager enough, yet the flesh remains feeble. So it is that when submission and humility open the confession, and the whole of oneself is handed over to God, his own kindness grants whatever is asked in that submissive spirit, with fear and honor shown toward him.
After all this comes, at the close of the prayer, a final clause that gathers up all our petitions and prayers in a compact brevity. For at the very end we place: but deliver us from evil, comprehending all the adversities that the enemy works against us in this world — against which there can be a firm and trustworthy defense if God delivers us, if he grants his help to us as we beg and implore. Now when we say deliver us from evil, nothing further remains that need be asked for, since once we have sought God's protection against evil, when that has been obtained we stand secure and safe against all that the devil and the world contrive. For what fear is there from the world for one for whom God is the guardian even within the world?
Is it any wonder, dearest brothers, that God himself taught a prayer which, through his own instruction, compressed our entire petition into a discourse of salvation? This had been announced long beforehand by the prophet Isaiah, who, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke of God's grandeur and mercy: bringing the word to completion and cutting it short in righteousness, he says, for the Lord will produce an abbreviated word across the whole earth. Our Lord Jesus Christ, himself God's Word, arrived for all people; gathering both learned and unlearned, every sex, every age, he set forth the precepts of salvation and drew his teaching together into one great summary — sparing learners' memory the strain of heavenly instruction while letting them grasp quickly what plain faith demanded. So, in teaching what eternal life consists of, he wrapped up life's mystery in a brief yet immense and divine statement, saying: this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one true God, and the one you sent, Jesus Christ. Likewise, drawing the first and weightiest precepts out of the Law and the Prophets, he says: hear, Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one; and: you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength — this comes first, and a second resembles it: you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. The entire Law and the Prophets rest upon these two commandments. And again: whatever you wish others would do for you, do that very thing for them, since this sums up the Law and the Prophets.
God taught us to pray through deeds as much as through words, praying frequently himself and interceding, demonstrating by his own example what we should do, as it is written: he would withdraw into deserted places and pray; and again: he went up the mountain to pray and remained there praying all night long. Yet if he who had no sin at all still prayed, how much greater is the obligation on sinners to pray; and if he, keeping vigil the entire night, prayed with unrelenting petitions, how much more should we stay awake through the night in devoted, frequent prayer!
Now the Lord prayed and made petition not for himself — for what would an innocent man need to pray for on his own behalf? — but for our offenses, as he himself declares when he says to Peter: behold, Satan has demanded to sift you all like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail. And afterward he makes entreaty to the Father on behalf of all, saying: I do not ask for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us. Great is God's kindness and, equally, his love toward our salvation, that not content merely to redeem us with his blood, he went further still and made petition for us besides. See, then, what the desire of the one who prays for us amounted to: that just as the Father and the Son are one, so we too might remain in that same unity — so that from this it might also be understood how greatly one sins who tears apart unity and peace, since the Lord made this very request wishing, plainly, that his people should live, knowing that discord does not arrive at the kingdom of God.
But when we stand at prayer, dearly beloved brothers, we ought to keep watch and bend ourselves to our petitions with the whole heart. Let every worldly and fleshly thought withdraw, and let the mind think of nothing except what it is praying. For this reason the priest, too, before the prayer, prepares the minds of the brothers by a preface said beforehand, saying: lift up your hearts, so that when the people answer, we have them lifted to the Lord, they are put in mind that nothing besides the Lord should occupy their thought. Let the breast be shut against the adversary and lie open to God alone, and let it not permit the enemy of God to draw near it in the time of prayer. For he creeps in often and slips inside, and by subtle deceit calls our prayers away from God, so that we have one thing in the heart and another on the lips, when, with an intention that is truly sincere, prayer to the Lord belongs properly to mind and understanding, not merely to vocal sound. What a carelessness, then, to let yourself be dragged off and held captive by foolish, worldly notions while entreating the Lord — as if some other matter deserved more of your attention than this: a conversation with God is taking place! Expecting God's ear while deaf to your own words makes little sense. Would you have God keep you in mind as you pray, when you yourself give no thought to what you are doing? Guarding against the enemy demands more than that; offering God prayer while careless of his majesty is itself an offense against him; keeping the eyes open while the heart drowses amounts to this same failure — whereas the Christian, even with eyes closed in sleep, should keep an alert heart, this is exactly what stands written, spoken in the voice of the church, in the Song of Songs, where the heart keeps watch even while the body sleeps. It is for this reason that the apostle gives his careful, watchful warning: continue in prayer, watching in it — thereby teaching and showing plainly that those God finds alert at their prayers are the ones who receive what they ask.
Let those who pray come to God not with prayers that are barren or bare. A petition is ineffectual, a prayer is unfruitful, when it makes its request to God with nothing to show. For since every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire, so too speech that bears no fruit cannot win favor with God, since it is made fertile by no work. And so it is that divine scripture teaches this very thing: a prayer joined to fasting and to almsgiving is a good one. For he who on the day of judgment is to render reward for deeds and almsgiving is even today a kindly listener to one who comes to prayer accompanied by works. So it was, in the end, that the centurion Cornelius, when he prayed, deserved to be heard. He was a man who did many acts of charity among the people and prayed to God continually. To him, as he prayed about the ninth hour, an angel appeared, bearing witness to his work and saying: Cornelius, your prayers and your acts of charity have gone up in remembrance before God.
Prayers rise swiftly to God when our own works send them up to him. So too the angel Raphael stood by Tobit, who prayed unceasingly and worked unceasingly, saying: making known and acknowledging what God has done is itself a mark of honor. When you and Sarah were praying, it was I who carried the memory of your prayer up into the presence of God's splendor; and when, without hesitation, you buried the dead, and did not delay in rising from your meal to go lay out that corpse, I was sent to put you to the test; and again God dispatched me to restore you and Sarah, your daughter-in-law, to health. I am none other than Raphael, one among the seven holy angels stationed in attendance before the splendor of God. Through Isaiah, too, the Lord admonishes and teaches similar things, bearing witness: loose, he says, every knot of injustice, undo the bonds of oppressive dealings; send away the broken into rest and scatter every unjust bond; break your bread for the hungry, and bring the needy who have no roof into your house; if you see one naked, clothe him, and do not despise those of your own household. Then your light shall break forth early, and your garments shall rise swiftly, and righteousness shall go before you, and the splendor of God shall surround you. Then you shall cry out, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking, he says, behold, I am here. He promises to be present and to hear and protect those who, loosing the knots of injustice from their heart and doing works of charity toward the household of God according to his commands, while they hear what God commands to be done, earn in turn God's own hearing of them. The apostle Paul, blessed as he was and once helped by the brothers amid the pressure of his need, described what had been done for him as sacrifices offered to God. Having received, he says, what was sent through Epaphroditus, I am now full — a fragrance of sweetness, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God. So it is: whoever shows mercy to the poor makes a loan to God, and whoever gives to the very least gives to God himself, offering him, in a spiritual sense, a sacrifice of sweet fragrance.
Looking at how prayers were celebrated, we find Daniel together with the three young men — strong in faith, victorious even while captives — keeping to the third, sixth, and ninth hours, a plain sign of the Trinity destined to be revealed in the final age. For the first hour, arriving at the third, shows the completed number of the Trinity, and likewise the fourth, advancing to the sixth, declares a second Trinity, and when the count is completed from the seventh to the ninth, the perfect Trinity is numbered through triple sets of hours. Those who worshiped God, already marking out these intervals of hours in a spiritual sense long before, kept to fixed and lawful times for prayer. And it was afterward made plain that these had once been mysteries, in that the righteous of old prayed in this manner. For the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples at the third hour, fulfilling the grace of the Lord's promise. Likewise Peter, going up to the rooftop at the sixth hour, was instructed both by a sign and by the voice of God admonishing him, that he should admit all to the grace of salvation, though before he had hesitated over the cleansing of the Gentiles. And the Lord, crucified at the sixth hour, washed away our sins with his blood by the ninth, and thus, so that he might redeem us and bring us to life, he then accomplished the victory through his passion.
Yet for us, dearly beloved brothers, beyond the hours our forebears kept for prayer, the occasions and the deeper meanings of prayer have since multiplied. Morning prayer, too, is required of us, precisely because morning is the fitting time to honor the Lord's rising from the dead. This is what the Holy Spirit once pointed to in the psalms: My king and my God, it is to you I will pray, Lord, in the morning, and you will listen to my voice; come morning I take my stand before you, watching for you. Again, the prophet gives voice to the Lord's own words: at first light they will keep watch for me, saying, come, let us turn back to the Lord our God. In the same way, once the sun withdraws and the day draws to a close, prayer is again required of us. Christ himself is truly the sun, truly the day, so when the sun and day of this world recede and we pray asking for light to return upon us, our petition is really for Christ's own coming, which will bestow the favor of light without end. The Holy Spirit's psalms also call Christ Day: the stone, it says, that the builders threw aside has now become the cornerstone. This the Lord has brought about, and it astonishes us to behold. This is the day the Lord has fashioned; let it be for us a day of joy and feasting. So too the prophet Malachi testifies that Christ bears the name Sun, saying: but for you who hold the name of the Lord in awe, the sun of righteousness will rise, bringing healing on its wings. If, then, holy scripture presents Christ as sun in truth and as day in truth, no single hour excuses Christians from worship offered constantly and often, given that those of us united to Christ — dwelling, that is, within the true sun and day — ought to keep pressing forward in prayer across the entire span of daylight; and later, once night has rolled back around in its turn under the world's revolving law, no darkness threatens harm to those still at prayer, for children of the light experience daylight even at night. Can anyone carrying light within his own heart truly lack light? Is there ever an absence of sun or day for someone to whom Christ himself is sun and day?
As for us, belonging to Christ and thus dwelling permanently in light, prayer ought not lapse even through the nighttime hours. Consider the widow Anna: praying ceaselessly, ever watchful, she kept steadily winning God's favor, just as the gospel records of her — she never left the temple, giving herself over to fasting and prayer both night and day. Whatever the pagans do, still unillumined as they are, or the Jews, cut off from the light and left dwelling in shadow, is their own affair; but as for us, dearly beloved brothers, who live continually in the Lord's light, holding on to and remembering the new identity grace gave us at the start, let us treat night as though it were day. Let us hold the conviction that we walk always in light; let none of the darkness we have left behind hold us back; let no hour of night rob our prayer, no petition of ours go slack through idle neglect. Made new in spirit and reborn by God's mercy, we should live now as a rehearsal of what awaits us — since the kingdom holds only day for us, with night never intervening, so even now, in the dark hours, let us keep watch as if surrounded by light, ready always to offer prayer and thanks to God; here too, our prayer and thanksgiving must never fall silent.
You, Demetrianus, have often barked at me and railed against the one true God through a mouth given to sacrilege and words steeped in impiety, and out of a certain modesty I chose to look past you, judging it wiser to meet an ignorant man's error with silence than to stir a madman's fury by answering him. And this silence was not without warrant from divine teaching itself, for it is written that one ought to keep silent before a witless man's ears, since if he hears it he will only mock sensible speech; and it is written too that a fool's folly deserves no reply, for the one who answers risks becoming just like him. In the same way we are ordered to guard what is sacred deep in our own hearts rather than fling it before swine and dogs, since the Lord himself declared: give not what is holy to the dogs, and throw not your pearls in front of pigs, or they will grind them underfoot. For since you kept coming to me driven more by a taste for contradiction than any wish to learn, and, bawling loudly, chose to hurl out your own words shamelessly rather than hear mine out patiently, it seemed useless to argue with you at all, for it would have been simpler and less strenuous to quiet the churning waves of a raging sea with mere shouting than to rein in your fury through debate. Certainly it is wasted labor and no use at all to offer light to the blind, speech to the deaf, wisdom to the brute, since the brute cannot perceive, the blind cannot admit light, nor the deaf hear.
Considering these things I have often kept silent, and by patience overcome impatience, since I could neither teach one unteachable, nor restrain an impious man by religion, nor curb a raging one by gentleness. But since you say that a great many complain, and that the blame for the frequent rising of wars, for plague, for the ravages of famine, and for the long droughts that withhold rain and showers, is laid upon us, it is no longer right to stay silent, lest our silence come to be seen not as modesty but as a lack of confidence, and lest, by disdaining to refute false accusations, we seem to admit the charge. I answer, then, both you, Demetrianus, and equally those others whom you have perhaps stirred up, having by sowing hatred against us with your slanderous words made yourself many companions who sprang from the same root and origin as you; though I believe they will admit the reasonableness of what I say. For one who was moved toward evil by a deceiving lie will be moved far more readily toward good by the truth.
You have said that all these things by which the world is now shaken and driven are brought about through us, and that they ought to be charged to us, because our gods are not worshipped by us. On this point, since you are ignorant of the knowledge of God and a stranger to the truth, you ought first to know this: that the age has already grown old, and does not stand with the strength it once had, nor keep the vigor and force by which it formerly prevailed. Even were we silent, and brought forward no proofs from the sacred scriptures and divine pronouncements, the world itself now speaks and, by the visible failing of things, testifies to its own decline. There is not so great an abundance of rain in winter to nourish the seed, nor the accustomed blaze of summer heat to ripen the crops; the springtime is not so joyful in its mildness, nor the autumn so fruitful in its yield of trees. Less marble is quarried from mountains dug out and exhausted; the mines, already spent, yield less silver and gold, and the poor veins grow shorter day by day. Everywhere there is falling off and failure: the farmer in his fields, the sailor upon the sea, the soldier in the camp, honesty in the marketplace, justice in the courts, harmony among friends, skill in craft, discipline in behavior -- all decline together. Do you think that so great a substance of a thing grown old can still be as strong as it once was able to be, when still new and vigorous in its youth? Whatever now, with its end already near, sinks toward its setting and its last stage, must necessarily diminish. So the sun at its setting casts its rays with less bright and fiery splendor; so the moon, its course now declining, grows thin with worn horns; and the tree that was once green and fruitful, its branches withering, afterward becomes barren, disfigured by old age; and the spring that once flowed abundantly from overflowing veins, failing with age, scarcely trickles out a meager drop. Such is the verdict pronounced over the world; such is God's law -- whatever has arisen must fall, whatever has grown must age, whatever is strong must weaken, whatever is great must shrink, and once weakened and diminished, all things come at last to an end. Yet you charge it to the Christians that individual things diminish while the world grows old.
What if old men, too, were to charge it to the Christians that they have less strength in old age, that they no longer thrive as before in keenness of hearing, swiftness of foot, sharpness of eye, bodily vigor, richness of the inner organs, fullness of limb; and that, though a human lifespan once ran on past eight or nine centuries, it is now hardly able to touch even a hundred years. We see gray hairs on children; hair falls out before it has finished growing; and a lifetime does not end in old age but begins from old age. So even at its very rising, birth already hastens toward its end; whatever is now born decays because the world itself has grown so old, and for this reason no one should be surprised that particular things within it have started to fail, given that the world as a whole already stands in decline, near its close.
Now as for wars growing ever more frequent, barrenness and famine piling up dread, health collapsing under savage sickness, and the human race being ravaged by plague and death -- understand that this too was foreseen: in the final age troubles would grow numerous and calamities would take on new forms, and as judgment day drew closer the anger of an offended God would blaze up ever hotter against the blows dealt to mankind. These things do not come about, whatever your baseless grievance and your ignorance of the truth may loudly claim, on account of our neglect of your gods -- rather, they happen because you fail to worship God. For he is the master and governor of the world; everything moves at his command and by his will, and nothing whatsoever occurs unless he brings it about or allows it to occur. So, plainly, when events unfold that reveal the fury of an angered God, this is not on account of us, who worship him, but is imposed for the guilt and wrongdoing of you people -- you who neither look for God nor fear him, nor, casting off empty superstitions, acknowledge the one true worship, by which the single God common to all should be honored and petitioned by everyone alike.
Hear him himself speaking, hear him instructing and warning us with his divine voice: you shall worship the Lord your God, he says, and him alone shall you serve; and again: you shall have no other gods besides me; and again: do not go after foreign gods to be their servants, and give them no reverence, lest you stir me to anger by the work of your own hands, bringing about your ruin. A prophet as well, full of the Holy Spirit, testifies and proclaims God's wrath, saying: so speaks the Lord of hosts -- because my house stands empty while each of you hurries to your own house, the sky above will hold back its dew and the ground will withhold its yield, and I will send a sword against the land, against the grain, the wine and the oil, against people and livestock, and against every labor of human hands. Likewise another prophet repeats and says: I will send rain upon one city and not send rain upon another; one part will be rained upon, and the part upon which I do not send rain will dry up; and two and three cities will gather into one city to drink water, and even so they will not be satisfied; yet you have not turned back to me, says the Lord.
See, the Lord is indignant and angry, and he threatens because you do not turn back to him; and do you marvel or complain, in the midst of this obstinacy and contempt of yours, if rain falls but rarely from above, if the ground lies squalid with dust, if the barren soil scarcely brings forth thin and pale grass, if hail beats down and weakens the vine, if a storm uproots and strips the olive, if drought dries up the spring, if a pestilential breath corrupts the air, if a diseased condition consumes a man -- since all these things come as provoked by sin, and God is provoked all the more when even such great punishments do no good. That these things happen either for the discipline of the stubborn or the punishment of the wicked, that same God declares in the sacred scriptures, saying: in vain I struck your children, they received no discipline. And a prophet devoted and consecrated to God answers to this very thing and says: you struck them and they did not grieve; you scourged them and they would not accept discipline. See, blows are inflicted by divine power and there is no fear of God; see, from above there is no lack of lashes and scourges, and no trembling, no dread at all. Suppose this reckoning played no part whatsoever in the affairs of men -- would not the boldness for crime grow far greater still among people who felt safe from punishment?
You complain that now the springs are less abundant for you, and the breezes less wholesome, and the rain less frequent, and the earth less fertile in its service, that the elements no longer serve your comforts and pleasures as they should. But it is you who are the slave of God, through whom all things serve you; you are the servant of him at whose nod all things serve you. You yourself exact servitude from your own slave, and force one man to obey and submit to another, though you share the same lot of birth, the same condition of dying, a like material of body, a common reason of soul, and by equal right and the same law you both come into this world and later depart from it; and yet unless service is rendered to you at your own pleasure, unless obedience is given to your will, you, an overbearing and excessive demander of servitude, scourge, beat, and often afflict and torment with hunger, thirst, nakedness, the sword, and prison. And do you not recognize the Lord your God, when you yourself exercise such lordship?
Rightly, then, God's scourges and blows are not lacking amid the plagues that assail you. And since these accomplish nothing here, and do not, for all the terror of such disasters, turn men one by one back to God, there remains afterward an eternal prison and unceasing flame and unending punishment, and there the groan of those who beg for mercy will not be heard, because here too the terror of an indignant God went unheard, though he cries out through the prophet and says: listen to the word of the Lord, sons of Israel, for the Lord brings a case against those who dwell in the land, since neither mercy, nor truth, nor the knowledge of God exists anywhere on earth; cursing, deceit, killing, theft, and adultery have overrun the land, and blood is mingled with blood upon blood. For this the land will grieve, together with everyone living in it, with the wild animals of the countryside, the creeping things of the earth, the birds overhead, and even the fish of the sea will be swept away, so that no one is left to render judgment or to prove another wrong. God says he is indignant that the knowledge of God is not on the earth, and that God is neither known nor feared. God condemns and calls to account the wrongs of falsehood, of lust, of deceit, of cruelty, of impiety, of frenzy, and no one turns to innocence. See, the very things foretold beforehand in the words of God are coming to pass, yet trust in what is happening now moves no one to plan ahead for what comes next. Even amid these very adversities, by which the soul, hardly able to breathe, is hemmed in and confined, men still find leisure to be wicked, and in such great dangers judge not themselves but rather each other. You are indignant that God is indignant, as though by living wickedly you deserved any good thing, as though all these things that happen were not still less and lighter than your sins.
You who judge others, be for once a judge of yourself as well; look into the hidden places of your own conscience -- or rather, since there is now no shame at all in wrongdoing, and men sin as though sinning itself pleased more, you who appear plain and exposed to everyone's view, look at yourself too. You may be swollen with pride, greedy and grasping, fierce with rage, undone by dice, drunk on wine, consumed by jealousy, corrupted by lust, brutal in cruelty -- yet you still wonder why God's anger against the punishment of mankind keeps growing, when what deserves punishment increases with every passing day? You complain that an enemy rises up, as though, even were there no foreign enemy, there could be peace among citizens wearing the same toga; as though, even if arms and dangers from foreign barbarians were held in check, the weapons of domestic assault would not rage more fiercely and grievously within, through the slanders and injuries of powerful citizens. You complain of barrenness and famine, as though drought made a greater famine than greed does, as though the burning heat of want did not grow fiercer from the hoarding of grain supplies and the piling up of prices. You complain that the sky is shut against rain, while granaries here on earth are so cheated. You complain that fewer children are born, as though what has been born were made available to the needy. You accuse plague and pestilence, when by that very plague and pestilence the crimes of individuals are either exposed or increased, since even the sick are shown no mercy, and greed and plunder gape after the dead. The same men who are timid toward the duty of piety are reckless for impious gain, shunning the burials of the dying while grasping after what the dead leave behind, so it appears the poor sufferers are perhaps left to their illness precisely for this reason -- that while being tended they might not be able to escape; for he who seizes a dying man's property has wished for that man's death.
So great a terror of disasters cannot teach innocence, and amid a people dying in constant slaughter no one considers that he too is mortal. Men run about everywhere, snatching, seizing -- no concealment of plunder, no hesitation, as if it were lawful, as if it were owed, as if the one who does not rob would feel the loss and expense himself -- so does each man hasten to snatch. Even among robbers there is some shame at their crimes, after a fashion; they love trackless throats of land and deserted wastes, and even there, though wrong is done, still the criminal's deed is veiled by darkness and night. Greed rages openly, and, safe in its own boldness, displays the weapons of headlong desire in the very light of the forum. From it come forgers, from it poisoners, from it assassins in the middle of the city, as quick to sin as they are unpunished in sinning. It is the guilty who commit the crime, yet no one innocent steps forward to punish it. There is no fear of accuser or judge; the wicked win impunity, while the modest keep silent, the guilty are afraid, and those who should sit in judgment are bought. And so through the prophet, by divine spirit and inspiration, the truth of the matter is set forth, and a sure and manifest reasoning is shown: that the Lord could prevent adversities, but that the deserts of sinners keep him from bringing help. Is the hand of the Lord not strong enough, he says, to save, or will he make his ear heavy so as not to hear? But your sins separate you from God, and because of your offenses he turns his face from you, so as not to show mercy. Let sins and offenses, then, be reckoned, let the wounds of conscience be considered, and let every man cease his grievances against God or against us, once he recognizes that his suffering is nothing more than what he has earned.
And now see this very thing, which is above all the subject of our discourse: that you make war on the guiltless, that out of scorn for God you strike at and crush those who serve him. Is it not enough that your life is stained by the manifold variety of raging vices, by the wickedness of savage crimes, by the profit of bloody plunder, that false superstitions have toppled true religion, that God goes altogether unsought and unfeared -- must you further demand, with unjust persecutions, the blood of God's servants, those consecrated to his majesty and divine power? That you refuse to worship God yourself is not sufficient for you; beyond this you must also chase down, with sacrilegious violence, those who do worship him. You neither worship God nor allow him to be worshipped at all, and while all others please you who venerate not only these silly idols and images made by human hand, but even certain monstrosities and prodigies, only the worshipper of God displeases you. Everywhere in your temples smoke the pyres of sacrificed victims and the burnt offerings of cattle, while God's altars are either nonexistent or hidden. Crocodiles and dog-headed gods and stones and serpents are worshipped, and God alone on earth is either not worshipped, or it is not safe to worship him. You strip the innocent, the just, dear to God, of house, you plunder them of inheritance, you weigh them down with chains, you shut them in prison, you punish them with beasts, with sword, with fire. Nor are you even content with a swift end to our sufferings and the brief simplicity of quick punishments; you apply long torments to bodies to be torn apart, you multiply repeated torments for entrails to be mangled, and your ferocity and savagery cannot even be satisfied with the usual torments -- your ingenious cruelty devises new punishments.
What is this insatiable madness for butchery, this unquenchable lust for cruelty? Pick, instead, between two possibilities: being a Christian is a crime, or it isn't. If it is a crime, why don't you put to death the man who admits it? If it is not, why hunt down someone innocent? Had I denied it, torture would have been warranted for me. Had I, fearful of your punishment, hidden behind a lie what I once was and pretended that your gods still had my worship, then torture would rightly have been mine, then I should have been forced by pain toward confessing the charge -- exactly as, in every other trial, defendants are tortured once they deny the crime laid against them, so that the truth of what was done, unobtainable from an accuser's testimony, is wrung out through bodily suffering. But as things stand, when I confess freely and proclaim it aloud, declaring again and again in my own words that I am a Christian, and when I tear down your gods not in some hidden corner but openly, in public, right in the forum with magistrates and governors listening -- why inflict torments on someone who already confesses? So that, if your earlier charge against me was too slight, it may now swell into something deserving still greater hatred and punishment. Why, when I announce that I am a Christian before a crowd with people gathered round, and refute you and your gods with a plain, public statement, why do you turn instead to the body's weakness, why do you wrestle with frail earthly flesh? Come at me with strength of spirit instead, shatter the courage of my mind, tear down my faith, beat me in debate if you are able, beat me with reason.
Or, if your gods truly possess any divine power and might, let them stand up for themselves and rise to their own defense through their own greatness. Yet what can they possibly give their worshippers, if they cannot even take vengeance on their own behalf against those who refuse to worship them? For whoever avenges is greater than whoever is avenged -- which makes you greater than your own gods. And if you surpass those you worship, then worship should flow from them toward you, not from you toward them. Just as captives owe their survival to a guard's watch, so too your gods, once wronged, owe their protection entirely to your vengeance. Reflect on what that means: you shield them, so worshipping them should embarrass you; they depend on your protection, so hoping for safety from them should embarrass you all the more.
If you wish to hear them and see them, when they are put under oath by us, they are tortured with spiritual scourges and by the torment of our words are driven out of the possessed bodies, when, wailing and groaning, they confess with a human voice but under a divine power, feeling the lashes and the blows, that the coming judgment is real. Come and learn that what we say is true. And because you say you worship the gods in this way, at least believe the very beings you worship. Or if you would rather believe yourself, he who now besieges your breast, who now has blinded your mind with the night of ignorance, will speak about you in your own hearing. You will see us being begged by those you beg, feared by those you adore. Those same beings that you gaze upon with reverence and honor as masters -- you will see them standing bound under our hand and trembling like captives. Surely even in this way you can be confounded in these errors of yours, when you have seen and heard your gods, at our questioning, betray at once what they are, and, unable to conceal their tricks and deceptions, do so in your very presence.
What sluggishness of mind is this, or rather what blind and foolish madness of fools, not to come out of the darkness into the light, and, bound in the snares of eternal death, to refuse to take up the hope of immortality -- not to fear God when he warns and says: whoever sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, unless to the Lord alone. And again: they worshiped the things their own fingers made, and man was bowed down and made low, and shall I not overlook it for them? Why do you bow and bend yourself before false gods, why do you stoop your captive body before foolish images and earthly figments? God made you upright, and while the other animals are bent forward and pressed down toward the earth by their posture, to you an upright stance has been given, and a face lifted toward heaven and toward the Lord above. Look there, direct your eyes there, seek God in the heights. That you may be free of the underworld, lift your heart, held up toward the high and heavenly things. Why do you cast yourself down to death alongside the serpent that receives your worship? Why, through him and with him, do you collapse into the devil's own ruin? Keep the loftiness with which you were born. Persist as the one God made you to be. Set your soul in accord with the posture of your face and body. That you may know God, first know yourself. Leave behind the idols that human error invented. Turn to God: if you call upon him, he comes to help. Believe in Christ, whom the Father sent to give us life and to restore us. Cease to harm the servants of God and Christ with your persecutions -- those whom, when harmed, divine vengeance defends.
For this is why none of us, when seized, resists, nor does our people -- however great and numerous -- take vengeance against your unjust violence. The certainty of vengeance to come makes us patient. The innocent yield to the guilty; the blameless submit to punishments and torments, sure and confident that whatever we suffer will not go unavenged, and that the greater the wrong of the persecution, the more just and heavy the retribution for it becomes. Never does impious wickedness rise against our name unpunished; divine retribution follows at once, every time. Even setting aside the ancient records, and passing over without any proclaiming voice the vengeances so often repeated on behalf of the worshipers of God, the proof of a recent event is enough -- how swiftly, and in such swiftness how greatly, retribution has just followed, in the ruin of affairs, the loss of resources, the wasting of soldiers, the diminishing of the camps. And let no one think this happened by chance, or suppose it was accidental, for divine Scripture recorded this long ago: the Lord declares, vengeance belongs to me, I myself will render it back. And the Holy Spirit warns again in these words: do not say you will take revenge on your own enemy -- instead, look to the Lord, so that his help may come to you. From this it is clear and evident that all these things which come down from the indignation of God happen not by us but on our behalf.
Nor should anyone think, on this account, that Christians go unavenged for the things that happen, because they too seem to be grazed by the onset of these events. Anyone whose entire delight and honor rests in this world will feel the sting of the world's misfortunes. He mourns and weeps if things go badly for him in this age, since things cannot go well for him after this age -- he whose whole fruit of living is gathered here, whose whole comfort ends here, whose short and perishable life reckons some sweetness and pleasure here, because once he has departed from this life only punishment remains for his grief. But for those who have confidence in the good things to come, there is no grief at all in the onset of present evils. In short, we are neither dismayed by adversity nor broken nor grieved, nor do we murmur at any disaster of circumstance or ill health of body. Living more by the spirit than the flesh, we overcome the weakness of the body with the firmness of the soul. We know and trust that by the very things which torment and wear you down, we are being tested and made strong.
Do you imagine that adversity weighs on us the same way it weighs on you? Look closer: the very same troubles fall on each side quite differently. Among you, impatience is loud and forever complaining; among us, patience stands firm and devoted, quiet at all times and grateful toward God always -- claiming nothing here as its own joy or gain, but mild, gentle, unshaken amid every gust of this unstable world, awaiting the hour that God has promised. So long as this body of ours continues, shared as it is with everyone else, its bodily state too must likewise be shared, and the human race cannot be split apart in that respect until one departs hence from this world. Meanwhile, good and bad alike are contained within one house. Whatever comes into the house we suffer by an equal lot, until, when the end of temporal time is completed, we are divided into the lodgings of either eternal death or immortality. We are not, then, your equals and peers because, while still established in this world and in this flesh, we run into the same troubles of the world and the flesh along with you. For since all that punishes lies in the sensation of pain, it is clear that he is not a partaker of your punishment whom you see not grieving along with you.
In us, hope stands sturdy and faith holds firm; even amid the crumbling ruin of this passing age, the mind stays upright, courage does not waver, patience is never joyless, and the soul rests forever secure in its God -- just as the prophet was moved by the Holy Spirit's own voice, urging us on and confirming, with heavenly speech, the steadiness of our hope and trust. The fig tree, so the prophet says, will yield no fruit, nothing will sprout in the vineyards, the olive's labor will come to nothing, the fields will offer no food, the flocks will run short of pasture, and no cattle will remain in the stalls -- yet I myself will take joy in the Lord, I will delight in God my deliverer. He denies that the man of God, the worshiper of God, propped up by the truth of hope and grounded in the steadfastness of faith, is shaken by the assaults of this world and this age. Though the vine fail and the olive deceive, and the burning field, its plants dying of drought, wither away, what is this to Christians, what is it to the servants of God, whom paradise invites, whom all the grace and abundance of the heavenly kingdom awaits? Forever they find their delight in the Lord, taking pleasure and happiness in their God, bearing the world's evils and hardships with courage as they watch for the good things still to come. For we who, our earthly birth set aside, have been renewed and reborn in spirit, and no longer live for the world but for God, will receive the gifts and promises of God only when we have come to God. And yet, to keep off enemies, and to obtain rain, or to remove or moderate adversities, we always pray and pour out our petitions, and for the peace and welfare of you yourselves, propitiating and appeasing God, we pray continually and earnestly by day and by night.
Let no one, then, flatter himself because for the present, by the shared condition of flesh and body, the lot of worldly troubles is common to us and to the profane, to worshipers of God and to those who set themselves against God, and suppose from this that not all these things that happen to us are inflicted for our sake — since it was foretold beforehand, by God's own proclamation and the testimony of the prophets, that the wrath of God would come upon the unjust, that persecutions which would harm us in human terms would not be lacking, but also that vengeances which would defend the injured, by God's own power, would follow.
And how great are the things that even now happen for our sake in the meantime. Something is given as an example, so that the wrath of the avenging God may be known. Yet still ahead lies the day of judgment, which holy Scripture announces, saying: wail, for the day of the Lord is near, and destruction from God is at hand. For behold, the day of the Lord comes, of incurable indignation and wrath, to make the world a desert and to destroy sinners out of it. And once more: look -- the Lord's day arrives, blazing like a furnace, and all foreigners and all the wicked will be stubble, and the coming day will set them ablaze, says the Lord. The Lord foretells that foreigners will be set ablaze and burned -- that is, those alien to the divine race, and profane, not reborn in spirit nor made sons of God. That only those who have been reborn and marked with the sign of Christ can escape, God says in another place, when, sending his angels for the devastation of the world and the destruction of the human race, he threatens more heavily still, at the last, saying: go and strike, and do not spare your eyes. Do not have pity on the old or the young, and slay virgins and women and little children, that they be utterly destroyed. But do not touch anyone on whom the sign has been marked. God explains elsewhere both the nature of this sign and where on the body it is set, saying: pass through the middle of Jerusalem and mark a sign on the foreheads of the men who groan and grieve over the iniquities being done in their midst. That this mark is tied to Christ's suffering and blood -- and that anyone found carrying it remains safe and untouched -- God's own testimony confirms as well, saying: and the blood shall be a sign for you upon the houses in which you are, and I will see the blood and protect you, and there shall be no plague of destruction upon you, when I strike the land of Egypt. What was fulfilled then, in figure, by the slaying of the lamb beforehand, is fulfilled in Christ, the truth following afterward. Just as there, when Egypt was struck, the people of Judea could escape only by the blood and sign of the lamb, so too, when the world begins to be laid waste and struck down, whoever is found in the blood and sign of Christ alone escapes.
Look, then, while there is time, to true and eternal salvation, and, since the end of the world is now near, let fear of God redirect your thoughts toward him. And do not let this powerless and empty dominion delight you in this age, set as it is among the just and the gentle, just as in a field darnel and wild oats hold sway among the cultivated and fruitful crops; and do not say that misfortunes happen because your gods are not worshiped by us -- recognize instead that this is God's wrath at work, God's own judgment, so that he who is not understood through his kindnesses may at least be understood through his blows. Seek God, even if late, since long ago, through the prophet, God gave this warning and exhortation: seek God, and your soul shall live. Come to know God, even if late, since Christ himself, in coming among us, taught and urged the same lesson, declaring: eternal life consists in this, that they may know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ. Believe him who never at all deceives. Believe him who foretold all these things to come. Believe him who will give the reward of eternal life to those who believe. Believe him who will inflict eternal punishments in the fires of hell upon the unbelieving.
What glory of faith will there be then, what penalty of faithlessness, when the day of judgment comes; what joy for believers, what sorrow for the faithless, that they did not wish to believe here beforehand, and now cannot return to believe. The ever-burning hell will scorch those condemned to it, and a devouring punishment of living flames, and there will be no way for them to have either relief from their torments or ever an end. Souls will be kept, together with their bodies, for unending torments unto grief. He who once watched us for a time will then be watched by us forever, and the brief pleasure taken by cruel eyes in carrying out persecutions will be weighed against an everlasting sight, trusting the word of holy Scripture, where it is written -- their worm does not perish, their flame is never put out, and all flesh will behold them as a spectacle. And again: the just will then stand with great boldness before those who once oppressed them and stripped away the fruit of their labor. Seeing this, their oppressors will be shaken by dreadful fear, astonished at a rescue they never expected, and will say among themselves, groaning in remorse and anguish of soul: here are the very people we once mocked and made a byword of scorn. Fools that we were, we judged their way of life madness and their death dishonorable. Yet how is it they are now counted among God's own children, their place set among the saints? So we ourselves wandered off the path of truth; no light of righteousness ever shone for us, no sun ever rose on us. We wore ourselves out on the road of wrongdoing and ruin, tramping through harsh, empty country, never knowing the Lord's own way. What did our pride get us? What did boasting of riches ever bring us? All of it vanished like a passing shadow. Then the grief of punishment will be without the fruit of repentance, its weeping useless and its pleading ineffective. Too late they believe in eternal punishment, who refused to believe in eternal life.
Provide, then, for your safety and your life while it is allowed. We offer you the saving gift of our mind and counsel. And since we are not permitted to hate, and thereby please God the more, in that we render no requital for injury, we urge you, while the opportunity remains, while something of this age still remains to you, to make your peace with God, and to rise up out of the depths of dark superstition and into religion's own true, shining light. Your advantages are not something we envy, and we do not conceal God's gifts from you. We return goodwill for your hatreds, and for the torments and punishments inflicted on us we point out the paths to salvation. Believe and live, and you who now for a time persecute us, rejoice with us forever. Once someone has left this life behind, no room remains for repentance, no way left to make amends. Here life is either lost or kept; here provision is made for eternal salvation by the worship of God and the fruit of faith. Let no one be held back, either by sins or by years, from coming to obtain salvation. While a person still remains in this world, it is never too late to repent. The way to God's indulgence lies open, and for those who seek and understand the truth the access is easy. Even at the very point of death, at the setting of this temporal life, you may ask for your offenses, and by confession and faith in acknowledging him who alone is true God, implore him -- pardon is given to the one who confesses, and saving indulgence is granted by divine mercy to the one who believes, and even in death itself one passes over into immortality.
This is the favor Christ bestows, the gift that flows from his own mercy: death beaten down beneath the cross's trophy, a ransom of his own blood paid to win back every believer, mankind brought home into God the Father's peace, and mortal creatures quickened through a birth descending from heaven. Let every one of us follow him, if it can be managed; let his mark and mystery be our reckoning. Through him a path opens toward life; through him paradise is restored to us; through him we are led into heaven's own kingdoms. With him we will live forever, made sons of God through him; with him we will exult forever, restored by his own blood. As Christians we will be glorious together with Christ, blessed through God the Father, rejoicing always in everlasting delight in the sight of God and always giving thanks to God. For he who, though once liable to death, has been made secure in immortality, can only ever be joyful and thankful.
Letter I. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons and the people residing at Furni, greeting. We were deeply troubled, both I and the colleagues who were present with me and the fellow presbyters who sat with us, dearest brothers, when we learned that our brother Geminius Victor, departing this life, had named the presbyter Geminius Faustinus as guardian in his will, even though it had already been decreed some time ago in a council of bishops that no cleric or minister of God should be appointed guardian or curator in anyone's will, since those who are honored with the divine priesthood and established in clerical ministry ought to devote themselves to nothing but the altar and the sacrifices, and to spend their time in prayer and supplication. As scripture states: no soldier of God entangles himself in worldly affairs, so that he may please the one to whom he has proved himself. And if this is said of all believers, how much more should those not be bound by worldly cares and snares who, being occupied with divine and spiritual matters, cannot withdraw from the church to attend to earthly and secular business. The pattern of this ordinance and religious observance the Levites held earlier under the law, so that when the land was divided and the possessions apportioned among the eleven tribes, the Levitical tribe, which was devoted to the temple and the altar and the divine ministries, received no share in that division, but while the others tilled the land, that tribe alone served God, and received tithes from the produce that grew, from the eleven tribes, for its food and sustenance. Divine authority and providence ordained the whole of this arrangement, so that nothing might distract those engaged in divine works, and they would not be forced to occupy their thoughts with secular affairs or undertake them. That very rationale and pattern is upheld today among the clergy: those raised within the Lord's church through priestly ordination are to be pulled from divine service by nothing whatsoever, so that worldly concerns and affairs cannot entangle them; instead, taking what amount to tithes from the brothers' offerings given in their honor, they must remain constant at the altar and the sacrifices, devoting themselves night and day to heavenly and spiritual matters. Our predecessor bishops, weighing this matter with due reverence and providing wisely for our welfare, decreed that no brother departing this life should name a cleric as his guardian or curator; should anyone act otherwise, they ruled that no offering ought to be made in his name, and the sacrifice for his repose should not be celebrated. For one who wished to draw priests and ministers away from the altar does not deserve to be named at God's altar in the priests' prayer. And therefore, since Victor dared to appoint the presbyter Geminius Faustinus as guardian, contrary to the pattern recently established by the priests in council, no offering should be made for his repose among you, nor should any prayer be made frequently in his name in the church, so we might uphold this ruling the priests made out of conscientious necessity, while simultaneously setting a model for the other brothers: that God's priests and ministers, given over to his altar and church, must never be summoned away into worldly affairs by anyone. For it will be possible to guard against this happening any further with regard to the person of clerics, if what has now been done is duly enforced. I wish you, dearest brothers, always good health.
Letter II. Cyprian to his brother Eucratius, greeting. Out of your affection and mutual regard, dearest brother, you thought I should be consulted as to what I think about a certain actor who, established among you, still persists in the disgrace of his own profession, and, being a master and teacher not of instructing but of ruining boys, also instills in others what he himself has wrongly learned - whether such a man ought to have communion with us. To my mind this squares with neither the majesty of God nor the gospel's discipline -- that so shameful and disgraceful a contagion should stain the church's modesty and honor. For since men are forbidden by the law to put on women's clothing, and those who do are judged accursed, how much greater a crime is it not merely to put on women's garments, but also, through the teaching of a shameless art, to display shameful, soft, and womanish gestures? Nor can anyone excuse himself on the ground that he himself has ceased to appear on the stage, when nonetheless he teaches this to others. A man who has installed others to stand in for him cannot truly be said to have stopped -- one who, rather than continuing alone, supplies many successors, teaching and training them, against God's own ordinance, in how a man may be reshaped into a woman, and how sex may be changed by artifice, and how the devil, defiler of the divine handiwork, might take pleasure in the failings of a body ruined and weakened by such acts. Yet should this same man plead poverty and dire need, his necessity too can be relieved among the others who are sustained by the church's provisions, provided that he is content with more frugal and innocent food, and does not think that he must be paid a salary in order to cease from sin - since by ceasing he benefits not us but himself. As for the rest, let him seek as much as he wishes from that occupation - but consider what kind of gain it is, that snatches men away from the table of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and, having wickedly and ruinously fattened them in this world, leads them to the everlasting torments of hunger and thirst. And so, as far as you are able, call him back from this depravity and disgrace to the path of innocence and to the hope of his own life, so that he may be content with the church's more modest, but wholesome, provision. Should the church in that place lack the means to sustain someone in want, he is free to come over to us instead, where he can obtain what he needs for food and clothing -- no longer instructing others in deadly error outside the church, but rather learning what is wholesome within it. I wish you, dearest son, always good health.
Letter III. Cyprian to his brother Rogatianus, greeting. We were deeply and sorrowfully troubled, both I and the colleagues who were present, dearest brother, upon reading your letter, in which you complained about your deacon, that forgetful of your priestly office and unmindful of his own duty and ministry, he provoked you with his insults and injuries. And indeed you acted honorably toward us and in keeping with your usual humility, in preferring to complain to us about him, when, by the strength of your episcopate and the authority of your chair, you had the power to have him punished at once, being certain that all your colleagues would approve whatever you did against that insolent deacon by your priestly authority - having, with regard to such men, divine precepts, since the Lord God says in Deuteronomy: whoever behaves so arrogantly as to refuse to heed the priest or the judge presiding in those days, that person must be put to death, so that the whole people, on hearing of it, will be afraid and stop acting wickedly. And that we may know that this word of God proceeded with his true and supreme majesty for the honoring and vindicating of his priests: when three men from among the ministers, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, dared to rise up in pride against the priest Aaron and lift up their necks and make themselves equal to the priest set over them, they at once paid the penalty of their sacrilegious audacity, swallowed and devoured by a gaping chasm in the earth. And not they alone, but the other two hundred fifty as well, who had joined them in that audacity, were consumed by fire bursting forth from the Lord, proving that God's priests find their vindication in the very one who makes them priests. In the book of Kingdoms too, when the priest Samuel was despised by the people of the Jews on account of his old age, just as you now have been, the Lord was angered and cried out and said: it is not you they have despised, but me they have despised. And to avenge this, he raised up King Saul for them, who afflicted them with grievous injuries and trampled and oppressed the proud people with every kind of insult and punishment, so that the priest who had been despised might be vindicated by divine retribution against the proud people. Solomon as well, filled with the Holy Spirit, both testifies to and teaches the authority and power belonging to the priesthood, in these words: fear God with your whole soul, and sanctify his priests. And again: honor God with your whole soul, and hold his priests in honor. Recalling these precepts, the blessed apostle -- as the Acts of the Apostles record -- when confronted with the charge, do you dare curse and insult God's priest this way, replied: brothers, I was unaware that he held the high priesthood. Scripture says: do not curse a ruler of your people. Christ our Lord, who is at once our king, our judge, and our God, showed honor to the high priests and priests all the way to the day he suffered, even though they had shown neither fear of God nor recognition of Christ. For when he had cleansed a leper, he said to him: go and show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift - out of that humility by which he also taught us to be humble, he still called him priest, whom he knew to be sacrilegious. So too, in the very hour of his passion, after being struck and asked, is that how you answer the high priest, he uttered no insult toward the high priest's person, defending his own innocence instead: if I have said something wrong, testify to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why strike me? In all this he acted with humility and patience, leaving us a pattern to imitate in both. He taught that true priests should be honored lawfully and fully, precisely by showing himself so even toward false priests. Deacons, moreover, ought to remember that the Lord chose the apostles - that is, the bishops and those set over the church - but that the apostles, after the Lord's ascension into heaven, appointed for themselves deacons as ministers of their episcopate and of the church. And if we, who make bishops, can dare anything against God, then deacons too, who are made by us, can dare something against us. And so it is fitting that the deacon about whom you write should repent of his audacity, that he may acknowledge the honor due the priest, and give satisfaction, in full humility, to the bishop set over him. For these are the beginnings of heretics, and the origin and first attempts of schismatics with evil designs, who please themselves and, in the swelling of pride, despise the one set over them. In this way a man separates from the church; in this way an unholy altar gets erected outside it; in this way revolt rises against Christ's peace and against God's ordinance and unity. But if he provokes and further exasperates you with his insults, you shall exercise against him the power of your office, whether to depose him or to exclude him from communion. For if Paul the apostle told Timothy in writing, let no one look down on your youth, then all the more should your colleagues say to you: let no one look down on your age. And since you have written that a certain man joined himself with that same deacon and became a partner in his pride and audacity, this man too, and any others who prove to be of the same kind and who act against a priest of God, you shall have the power either to restrain or to exclude from communion - except that we instead urge and admonish them to own that they have done wrong, offer amends, and let our resolve stand undisturbed. For we desire and wish rather to overcome the insults and injuries of individuals by merciful patience than to avenge them by priestly authority. I wish you, dearest brother, always good health.
Letter IV. Cyprian, Caecilius, Victor, Sedatus, Tertullus, together with the presbyters who were present, to their brother Pomponius, greeting. Your letter has reached us, dearest brother -- the one carried by our brother Paconius -- and in it you ask, wanting our reply, what view we hold about those virgins who, having once resolved to keep their state continently and firmly, were afterward discovered to have remained lying together in the same bed with men - one of whom, you say, is a deacon - while these same women, who confessed to having slept with men, plainly assert that they are still intact. Since you have wanted our counsel in this matter, be assured that we hold firmly to the gospel and the apostles' traditions, so that our brothers and sisters may receive steadfast and resolute guidance, and that ecclesiastical discipline may be observed in every way conducive to usefulness and salvation - for the Lord himself declares: shepherds after my own heart I will give you, and they will tend you, feeding you with discipline. And again it is written: whoever casts off discipline is unhappy. And in the psalms too the Holy Spirit instructs, saying: cling to discipline, so the Lord does not grow angry and you stray from the correct path once his fury flares swiftly upon you. First of all, then, dearest brother, both those set over the people and the people themselves must labor at nothing else than this: that we who fear God should hold to the divine precepts with every observance of discipline, and not allow our brothers to go astray and live according to their own whim and appetite, but should faithfully take counsel for the life of each one - not allowing virgins to share a roof with men -- let alone share a bed, which goes without saying -- not even ordinary cohabitation, since both the weaker sex and an age still unsteady ought in every respect to be restrained and governed by us, lest occasion be given to the devil, who lies in wait and is eager to rage and do harm - since the apostle also says: give no place to the devil. A ship in danger must be freed watchfully from perilous places, lest it be broken among reefs and rocks. A burden must be quickly stripped off in a fire, before the flames overtake and consume it. No one is safe for long who is close to danger. Nor can a servant of God escape the devil, who has entangled himself in the devil's snares. Such persons must be intervened with quickly, so that they may be separated while the innocent can still be separated, because afterward they cannot be parted by our intervention once they have become bound together by a most grievous conscience. In short, we see with the greatest sorrow of mind how many serious ruins arise from this, and how many virgins are corrupted through unlawful and dangerous unions of this kind. But if they have dedicated themselves to Christ in faith, let them persevere chaste and modest, without any scandalous talk, so that, being strong and steadfast in this way, they may look forward to virginity's reward. Where they lack the will or the strength to persist, marriage serves them better than falling, through their own faults, into the fire. Certainly let them give no scandal to the brothers or sisters, since it is written: if food scandalizes my brother, I will not eat meat in this world, lest I scandalize my brother. Nor should any of them think she can defend herself with the excuse that it can be examined and proved whether she is a virgin, since both the hand and the eye of midwives are often deceived, so that even if she is found uncorrupted in that part of the body by which a woman can be a virgin, she could still have sinned in another part of the body, which can be corrupted and yet cannot be examined. Certainly the very lying together, the very embracing, the very conversation and kissing, and the shameful and foul sleeping of two people lying together - how much disgrace and how much guilt does this confess? If a husband returning home should see his betrothed lying with another man, would he not be indignant and furious, and perhaps, in the anguish of jealousy, even take up a sword in his hands? How much more, then, does Christ our Lord and judge burn with fury and outrage on seeing his own virgin -- consecrated and reserved for his holiness -- sleeping beside another man, and what penalties does he threaten for such incestuous unions - whose spiritual sword and coming day of judgment each one of our brothers ought to take every counsel and effort to escape? And since all, without exception, ought to hold to discipline, it is much more fitting that those set over the church and the deacons should take care of this, since they are to provide to the rest an example and a model in their conduct and character. For how can they preside over integrity and continence, if corruptions and the teaching of vices should begin from themselves? And therefore you acted wisely and with due firmness, dearest brother, in excluding from communion the deacon who repeatedly stayed with the virgin, and likewise the others who had made a habit of sleeping with virgins. But if they do penance for this unlawful cohabitation of theirs and withdraw from one another, let the virgins meanwhile be carefully examined by midwives, and if they are found to be virgins, let them, once they have received communion, be admitted to the church - but with this warning, that if they should afterward return to the same men, or should dwell together with them in the same house and under the same roof, they should be expelled with a more severe censure, and should not thereafter be readily received back into the church. But if any of them should be found to have been corrupted, let her do full penance, since she who has committed this crime is an adulteress not of a husband but of Christ, and therefore, after a just period of time has been reckoned, and confession made, let her afterward return to the church. But if they persist obstinately and do not separate from one another, they should understand that such brazen stubbornness will forever bar them from admission to the church at our hands, lest their own failings become a model leading others to ruin. Nor let them think that the reckoning of their life or salvation is secure if they are unwilling to obey their bishops and priests, since the Lord God says in Deuteronomy: anyone who acts with such arrogance that he will not listen to whichever priest or judge is presiding at that time -- such a man must die, so that the whole people, hearing of it, will be afraid and act wickedly no more. God commanded that those disobedient to his priests be put to death; he set a time for his judgment upon the disobedient. And indeed at that time they were slain by the sword, when carnal circumcision still remained; but now, since spiritual circumcision has begun to belong to the faithful servants of God, the proud and rebellious are struck down by a spiritual blade whenever they are expelled from the church, for outside it they have no life: God's house is singular, and salvation exists nowhere but within the church. Moreover, that the undisciplined perish, since they do not hear or obey wholesome precepts, the divine scripture testifies, which says: the undisciplined man does not love the one who corrects him. But those who hate correction shall be consumed shamefully. Therefore, that the undisciplined may not be consumed and perish, take pains, dearest brother, to govern the brotherhood with wholesome counsels as far as you are able, and to take thought for the salvation of each. Narrow and confined is the way by which we enter into life, but great and abundant is the fruit when we arrive at glory. Those who have, for the kingdom of heaven's sake, made themselves eunuchs ought in every respect to be pleasing to God, and should not offer scandal to the priests of God or to the church, nor to their brothers, through their own conduct. And for the present, if they seem to be saddened by us, let us nonetheless admonish them with wholesome persuasion, knowing that the apostle too said: have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth? But if they obey, it is most welcome to us; by the value of our word we have confirmed them, standing, unto salvation. But if some of the perverse are unwilling to obey, then, according to the same apostle who says: if I were pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ - if we cannot persuade some to make themselves pleasing to Christ, we at least, for our part, keeping his commandments, will please Christ our Lord and God. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brother, always good health in the Lord.
Letter V. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, his dearest brothers, greeting. I greet you in good health by the grace of God, dearest brothers, and I am glad to have learned that everything concerning your own well-being likewise stands sound. Since the circumstances of my situation do not now permit me to be present among you, I ask that, out of your faith and devotion, you carry out there both your own responsibilities and mine, so that nothing be lacking either in discipline or in diligence. As for supplying what is needed - whether for those who have confessed the Lord with glorious voice and are now held in prison, or for those poor and needy ones who labor yet persevere in the Lord - I ask that nothing be wanting, since the whole sum that has been gathered there has been placed in the hands of the clergy precisely for such occasions, so that more of them might have the means to work toward relieving the necessities and hardships of each individual. I ask also that your careful attention not fail in seeing to the maintenance of order. For even though the brothers, out of their affection, are eager to gather and visit the good confessors whom divine favor has already made illustrious by their glorious beginnings, I nevertheless think this ought to be done cautiously, not in crowds nor through a great multitude joined together at once, lest this very thing stir up ill will, and access be denied, and while we want too greedily to have everything, we lose it all. Take counsel, then, and see to it that this can be done more safely with some restraint, so that the presbyters too, who make the offering there in the presence of the confessors, take turns one at a time along with a single deacon each, since both the change of persons and the rotation of those who come reduces resentment. In everything, indeed, we ought - as befits servants of God - to be gentle and humble, deferring to the circumstances, providing for quiet, and looking out for the people. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, always to fare well in the Lord and to remember me. Greet the whole brotherhood. The deacon sends greetings, and my companions here alongside me send theirs as well. Farewell.
Letter VI. Cyprian to Sergius, Rogatianus, and the rest of the confessors, everlasting greeting in God. Dearest brothers, I greet you, longing myself to look upon you, had the circumstances of my situation allowed me to reach you. For what would delight me and gladden me more than being at your side this very hour, so that I might be embraced by those hands which, pure and innocent, holding fast to the Lord's faith, refused sacrilegious compliance? What could be sweeter or loftier than kissing now those mouths which confessed the Lord with a voice full of glory, and beholding you present before my own eyes, you who scorned the world and were found worthy to gaze upon God? But since no means is given me to take part in that joy, I send instead this letter, standing in for my presence, to reach your ears and your eyes - through it I congratulate you, while at the same time urging you to stay strong and unwavering in confessing the glory of heaven, and, having set out on the road of the Lord's favor, to push forward with spiritual courage toward winning the crown, keeping as your protector and guide the Lord, who declared: 'And look, I am with you every single day, right to the world's very end.' Blessed is the prison your presence has lit up! Blessed is the prison that sends men of God up to heaven! O darkness more brilliant than the sun, shining brighter than this world's own light - where your bodies have just now been fashioned into God's temples and made holy through divine confession! Let nothing now fill your hearts and minds except the divine precepts and heaven's commands, by which the Holy Spirit has forever stirred us to bear up under suffering. Let death be far from anyone's thoughts - think instead of immortality; not of fleeting punishment, but glory without end - for as scripture attests: 'Precious in God's sight is the death of those who belong to him in righteousness.' And again: 'A broken spirit is God's own sacrifice; a heart crushed and humbled, God will not despise.' And once more, where divine scripture tells of the torments that consecrate God's martyrs and, through the very trial of their suffering, make them holy: 'Even though before human eyes they were made to suffer torment, their hope brims with immortality. Tested briefly, they will be greatly rewarded, since God tried them and judged them worthy of himself; like gold he proved them in the furnace, and welcomed them as though a whole burnt offering. A time will come when they are regarded with favor: they will pass judgment on nations and hold sway over peoples, and their Lord will reign without end.' Considering, then, that you are destined to judge and to reign alongside Christ the Lord, joy is the only fitting response, and you must tread present agonies underfoot for the sake of the gladness still to come - it has been decreed from the world's very beginning that justice must struggle through worldly conflict - already at the outset Abel, a just man, was struck down, and after him one just man after another, prophets and apostles alike, went to their deaths, and in his own person the Lord set the pattern for them all, showing that his kingdom belongs only to those who followed the path he trod, when he said: 'Whoever cherishes his life in this age will lose it, and whoever despises his life in this age will keep it safe for life everlasting.' Elsewhere he taught the same lesson differently: those who merely kill the body but cannot touch the soul are nothing to fear; dread instead falls due to the one who has power to ruin soul and body together in hell. Paul, too, urges those of us eager to reach the Lord's promises that we owe the Lord our imitation in every respect. 'We,' he says, 'are children of God - and if children, heirs also: heirs of God, sharing the inheritance with Christ, provided we suffer alongside him so that we may also share in his splendor.' He went on to set the present age against the glory to come, saying: 'What we suffer now carries no weight against the glory yet to be revealed in us.' Weighing the splendor of that glory, it falls to us to bear every hardship and persecution, since, however many the trials of the righteous, all who trust in God are rescued out of every one of them. Blessed, too, are the women at your side, set in that same glory of confession - women who, holding to the Lord's faith and outdoing their own sex in strength, stand not only near the crown themselves but have given the rest of womankind a model in their own constancy. And so that your company's glory might lack nothing, so that every age and every sex among you might have its honor, divine favor has joined boys to you as well in glorious confession, showing us again something like what those illustrious boys Ananias, Azarias, and Misael once did: shut inside the furnace, the flames retreated before them and turned to refreshment, with the Lord standing beside them as witness that hell's burning has no power over his confessors and martyrs, but that those who trust in God remain forever whole and safe in every circumstance. And I ask, for the sake of your own devotion, that you weigh carefully what kind of faith those boys had, able to win God's approval so completely. Prepared for anything, as we all should be, they told the king: 'Nebuchadnezzar, O king, we owe you no answer on this score. There is a God we serve, able to pull us from the blazing furnace, and he will rescue us out of your hands, O king. But should that not happen, know this: we will not serve your gods, nor will we bow to the golden image you have raised.' Though they both believed, and knew from their faith, that they might even be freed from the punishment right before them, they refused to boast of it or claim it as their due, adding 'but should that not happen' - so that the strength of their confession would not be diminished for lack of the witness that suffering gives. They affirmed that God can do anything, yet did not rest their trust on being rescued then and there, but fixed their minds instead on that everlasting glory of freedom and security. Holding to this same faith, and turning it over day and night, let us, wholly given over to God with our whole heart and despising what is present, fix our thoughts only on what lies ahead - the reward of the eternal kingdom, the Lord's embrace and kiss, the vision of God - so that in everything you may follow the example of Rogatianus the presbyter, that glorious elder who, through his devout courage and by divine favor, clears the road ahead of you toward the glory belonging to our age; who, alongside our brother Felicissimus, ever composed and steady, was first to meet the onslaught of the raging crowd and made ready lodging for you in prison, and who even now still goes before you in a sense, as your guide. That this work may reach completion in you, we beseech the Lord with unceasing prayer, that he who caused you to confess him at the outset may, as your beginnings press on toward their summit, grant you also to be crowned. I wish you, dearest and most blessed brothers, to fare well always in the Lord and to reach the glory of the heavenly crown.
Letter VII. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, his dearest brothers, greeting. I greet you, dearest brothers, in good health by the grace of God, hoping to come to you soon, so that the longing both of myself and of you and of all the brothers may be satisfied. Yet we must have regard for the common peace, and sometimes, however much it grieves my own spirit, keep away from you, lest my presence provoke the resentment and violence of the pagans, and we become the cause of breaking the peace - we who ought rather to look out for everyone's quiet. So once you have written to tell me that matters have calmed and that my coming is called for - or once the Lord, should he so choose, has shown this to me beforehand - I shall set out to join you. For no place could hold more good or more joy for me than the very spot where God first willed both my faith and my growth. I ask that you take diligent care of the widows and the sick and all the poor. And if there are any travelers in need, supply their expenses from that sum of my own which I left with our fellow presbyter Rogatianus. And in case that whole amount should already have been spent, I have sent him, through the acolyte Naricus, a further portion, so that help toward those in distress may be carried out more generously and promptly. I wish you, dearest brothers, always to fare well [and to remember me. Greet our brotherhood in my name, and urge them to keep us in mind.]
Letter VIII. We have learned that the blessed Pope Cyprian has withdrawn on account of Crementius the subdeacon, who came to us from you for a definite reason - and no doubt he acted rightly in this, since he is a person of note, and given the contest now pressing upon us, which God has permitted in this world so that the adversary might wrestle together with his own servants, wishing also to make this struggle known to angels and to men, so that whoever conquers may be crowned, while whoever is conquered will bring upon himself the sentence that has been made known to us. And since it falls upon us, who seem to hold the office of leaders and to keep watch over the flock in place of shepherds, that if we are found negligent, it will be said of us what was also said of our predecessors, who were such negligent leaders - that we did not seek out the lost, did not correct the erring, did not bind up the lame, yet ate their milk and clothed ourselves with their wool. Indeed the Lord himself, carrying out what the Law and the Prophets had set down, teaches as follows, saying: 'I am the good shepherd, who lays down my life for my sheep. But the hired hand, whose own the sheep are not, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons them and flees, and the wolf scatters them.' And to Simon he likewise says: 'Do you love me?' He answered, 'I love you.' He said to him, 'Feed my sheep.' We recognize this saying borne out by the very act of his own departure from life, and the other disciples followed his course as well. We do not wish, then, dearest brothers, to be found hired hands, but good shepherds - since you know that no small danger presses upon us if we do not exhort our brothers to stand unshaken in the faith, lest, rushing headlong into idolatry, the brotherhood be uprooted altogether. Nor is it in words alone that we press this on you; rather, you can learn it from the numerous people traveling to you from our side, since, with God's help, we have carried out and go on carrying out every one of these things with the utmost diligence, even at worldly risk, holding the fear of God and everlasting punishment before our eyes more than any fear of men or passing harm - never forsaking the brotherhood, and pressing them to hold their ground in faith, staying prepared to walk wherever the Lord leads. And even those who were on their way to comply we have called back. The church stands firm in the faith, although some, driven by sheer terror - whether because they were persons of prominence, or because they were seized by fear of men - have fallen; and though we have set them apart, we have not abandoned them, but have urged and continue to urge them to do penance, so that they might somehow receive pardon from him who alone can grant it, lest, if left by us, they should become worse. You see, then, brothers, that you too must do this - that even those who have fallen, their minds set right by your encouragement, may confess again if seized a second time, so as to be able to correct their former error. There are also other matters that fall to you, which we have likewise set down: that if those who have fallen into this trial begin to be seized by weakness, and do penance for what they have done and desire communion, they should certainly be helped - whether widows, or the afflicted who cannot support themselves, or those in prison, or those shut out of their own homes - they ought certainly to have someone to minister to them. Even catechumens, if overcome and led astray by weakness, ought not to be left without help. And what matters most - if the bodies of the martyrs or of others go unburied, great danger threatens those upon whom this task falls. Whichever of you, then, on whatever occasion, brings this work to completion, we are confident will be judged a good servant - as one faithful in the least being set over ten cities. May God, who grants all things to those who hope in him, grant that all of us be found engaged in these works. The brothers who are in chains greet you, and the presbyters, and the whole church, which itself keeps watch with the utmost care over all who call upon the name of the Lord. And we for our part ask that you, in turn, keep us in mind. Know also that Bassianus has reached us; and we ask that you, who have zeal for God, pass a copy of this letter, whenever suitable opportunities allow, to as many as you can - either by your own hand or by sending a messenger - so that they may stand strong and unshaken in the faith. We wish you, dearest brothers, always to fare well.
Letter IX. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons and brothers residing at Rome, greeting. Since a report of the passing of my good colleague was uncertain among us, dearest brothers, and rumor wavered in doubt, I received a letter sent to me by you through Crementius the subdeacon, by which I was fully informed of his glorious departure, and I rejoiced greatly that, in keeping with the integrity of his administration, his end too proved an honorable one. In this too I congratulate you very much, that you have pursued his memory with such a widely known and distinguished testimony, so that through you it might become known to us what would be, for us as well, a glorious remembrance of a leader, and would also offer us an example of faith and virtue. For just as it is a ruinous thing, harmful to the fall of those who follow, when a leader collapses, so, by contrast, it proves helpful and wholesome when a bishop's steadfast faith holds him out to the brothers as a pattern worth following. I have also read the letter, in which neither who wrote it nor to whom
Letter X. Cyprian to the martyrs and confessors of Jesus Christ our Lord, in God the Father, everlasting greeting. I rejoice with gladness and congratulate you, bravest and most blessed brothers, now that your faith and courage are known — the very qualities in which mother church glories, and lately gloried again when, amid a steadfast confession, a punishment was undergone that made confessors of Christ exiles. Yet a confession endured in the present life, the stronger it is in suffering, the more brilliant and greater it is in honor. The struggle grew, and the glory of those who struggled grew with it. Nor were you held back from the battle-line by fear of torment; rather the very torments spurred you on the more to the fight, and with ready devotion you went forth strong and steadfast to the contest of the greatest struggle. Of these I have already learned that some are crowned, some are near to the crown of victory, and all — whom the prison enclosed in a glorious company — are fired with an equal and like warmth of courage to wage the contest, just as soldiers of Christ ought to be within the divine encampment — their faith's untainted steadiness not undone by flattery, not shaken by threats, not overwhelmed by cruelty and torment, because greater is he who is in us than he who is in this world, and earthly punishment has no more power to cast down than divine protection has to raise up. The matter was proved in the glorious contest of the brothers, who, in overcoming their torments, became leaders for the rest, offering an example of courage and faith, engaging in the battle-line until the line of their enemies gave way, defeated. With what praises, then, should I proclaim you, bravest brothers? With what herald's voice should I adorn the strength of your hearts and the perseverance of your faith? You endured, even to the completion of glory, the harshest interrogation, and you did not yield to the torments — rather the torments yielded to you. The crown gave an end to sufferings that the torments themselves did not give. That harsher butchery persisted so long, not that it might cast down a standing faith, but that it might send God's men to the Lord all the more swiftly. The admiring crowd of onlookers saw a heavenly and spiritual contest of God, a battle of Christ — his servants standing with free voice, unblemished mind, and divine strength, stripped indeed of worldly weapons but armed as believers with the weapons of faith. Those who were tortured stood stronger than their torturers, and the limbs that were struck and torn overcame those who struck and tore them. The repeated blow, however long it raged, could not overcome an unconquerable faith, though in God's servants, with the frame of their bodies broken, it was no longer limbs but wounds that were being tortured. The blood flowed that would quench the fire of persecution, that would put out with its glorious shedding the flames and fires of hell. Oh, what a spectacle that was for the Lord — how lofty, how great, how acceptable in God's eyes, given the devotion and consecration of his soldier, just as it is written in the Psalms, the Holy Spirit speaking to us and admonishing us alike: precious in the sight of God is the death of his righteous ones. Precious is this death, which purchases immortality at the price of its own blood, which receives God's crown at the completion of its courage. How glad Christ was there, how willing in such servants of his both to fight and to conquer — the protector of the faith, giving to believers as much as the one who receives believes himself capable of holding. Present in that very contest of his, he lifted up, gave strength to, and inspired those who fought and bore witness in his name; and the one who defeated death for our sake now conquers without end within us. When they hand you over, he says, do not think about what you are to say; for it will be given you in that hour what you should say. For the words are not your own; it is your Father's Spirit speaking within you. The present battle furnished proof of this. Bursting forth from that martyr was a voice charged with the Holy Spirit, uttered as the most blessed Mappalicus, in the midst of his torments, told the proconsul: you will see tomorrow's contest. What Mappalicus had spoken, attesting his courage and conviction, the Lord himself brought to fulfillment: a contest from heaven stood displayed, and within the very struggle that contest promised, God's servant won his crown. This is the contest that the prophet Isaiah foretold long ago, saying: it is no small contest for you with men, since God grants the contest. And to show what this contest would be, he added, saying: behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. This is the contest of our faith by which we engage, by which we conquer, by which we are crowned. This is the contest that the blessed apostle Paul also showed us, in which we must run and attain to the glory of the crown. Do you not know, he says, that those who run in the stadium all run, yet only one receives the prize? Run so as to win it. They run to win a crown that perishes; ours does not. Again, showing his own contest and promising that he would soon become an offering to the Lord, he says: Already I am being poured out as a libation, and my hour of departure draws near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith. Now only the crown of righteousness remains for me — a reward the righteous judge, the Lord, will bestow on me on that day, and not on me alone but on all who have cherished his coming. This contest, then, foretold beforehand through the prophets, entrusted through the Lord, carried out through the apostles, Mappalicus made that pledge to the proconsul, speaking both for himself and for his fellow martyrs. Nor did that faithful voice fail in its promise. He displayed the fight he had pledged and received the palm he had earned. This most blessed martyr, and the others who shared in the same struggle, his companions steadfast in faith, patient in suffering, victorious under interrogation, I both wish and urge that the rest of you follow, so that those whom the bond of confession and the shared shelter of the prison have joined together, the completion of their courage and the heavenly crown may join as well — that you may wipe away with your own joy the tears of mother church, who mourns the ruin and the deaths of so many, and that you may strengthen the firmness of the others still standing by the incitement of your example. If the battle-line calls you, if the day of your contest comes, fight bravely, struggle steadfastly, knowing that you struggle under the eyes of the Lord who is present, and that by the confession of his name you attain to his own glory — he who does not merely watch his servants from afar, but himself wrestles in us, himself engages, himself both crowns and is crowned in the struggle of our contest. The glorious blood of the martyrs makes her illustrious. Once she was white through the deeds of the brothers; now the martyrs' blood has dyed her purple. Neither lilies nor roses are absent from her blossoms. Let each now strive for the fullest dignity of either honor. Let them receive crowns — white ones earned by their deeds, purple ones earned by their suffering. Within that heavenly encampment, both peace and battle yield their own blossoms, the flowers by which Christ's soldier is crowned unto glory. I wish you, bravest and most blessed brothers, to be always well in the Lord and to remember us. Farewell.
Letter XI. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, brothers, greeting. Although I know, dearest brothers, that out of the reverence each of us owes to God you too are there pressing on urgently with constant prayers and earnest petitions, still I myself also remind your devoted concern that, to appease and entreat God, we must groan not with voice alone but with fasting and tears and every kind of supplication. For it must be understood and confessed that this turbulent devastation of our present distress, which has laid waste the greater part of our flock and still continues to lay it waste, has come upon us according to our sins, since we do not keep to the Lord's way nor observe the heavenly commands given us for salvation. The Father's will, our Lord carried out; God's will, we fail to carry out — chasing after inheritance and profit, courting pride, absorbed in rivalry and discord, indifferent to simplicity and faith, forsaking the world only in speech and never in deed, each of us content with himself and irksome to everyone else. We are beaten, then, as we deserve, since it is written: but that servant who knows his master's will and does not comply with his will shall be beaten with many blows. And what blows, what lashes do we not deserve, when even the confessors, who by their example ought to have been a model of good conduct for the rest, do not keep discipline? And so, while the swollen and shameless boasting of some confessors' pride puffs them up beyond measure, torments have come — torments without end from the torturer, without escape by condemnation, without the comfort of death; torments that do not easily release to the crown but torture as long as it takes to bring men down, unless someone, withdrawn by divine favor, makes progress in the very midst of the cruelty and attains glory not by the limit of the punishment but by the speed of dying. We suffer these things through our own fault and our own desert, just as the divine warning foretold, saying: should they abandon my law and refuse to walk by my judgments, should they defile my statutes and disregard my commands, I will punish their wrongdoing with the rod and their offenses with the scourge. We feel, then, rods and scourges, we who please God neither by good deeds nor make amends for our sins. Let us entreat God's mercy with our whole heart and the whole of our mind, since he himself has also added, saying: but my mercy I will not take away from them. Let us make our request and we will obtain it; and should the answer be slow in coming or delayed, because our offense has been grave, let us knock, for the door opens to whoever knocks — so long as it is our prayers, our groans, and our tears that knock upon it — prayers on which we must persist and dwell, and provided the prayer is united in heart. Now you should know what above all persuaded and impelled me to send you this letter, — as the Lord deigns to show and reveal — namely that a vision declared: seek and you will be granted it; and then the people standing by were bidden to ask for certain named persons, but in their asking there were discordant voices and differing wishes, and this greatly displeased him who had said: ask, and you shall obtain, because the inequality of the people jarred and there was no single, simple agreement among the brothers joined in harmony — for it stands written that God settles the like-minded together in a household, and in the Acts of the Apostles we find that the whole company of believers were of a single soul and mind, and the Lord himself decreed in his own voice: my commandment is this, that you love one another, and again: I say to you, if two among you on earth are of one accord about whatever you ask, it will be given you by my Father in heaven. Yet if agreement between a mere two accomplishes this much, what would the harmony of all together achieve? And if, in keeping with the peace the Lord has given us, all the brothers were in agreement, we would have secured long since, from God's mercy, the very thing we now request, and we would not still be tossed about in this danger to our salvation and our faith — indeed these evils would not even have come upon the brothers, if the brotherhood had been of one mind together. For this too was shown: that a father of the household sat, with a young man sitting at his right, who, anxious and somewhat downcast with a certain indignation, sat holding his jaw in his hand with a sorrowful face. Another, however, standing on the left side, carried a net which he threatened to cast so as to seize the surrounding people. And when the one who saw this wondered what it meant, he was told that the young man sitting so at the right was grieved and sorrowful because his commands were not being kept, while the one on the left rejoiced that an opportunity was being given him to seize from the father of the household the power to rage. This was shown well before the storm of this present devastation arose. And we see fulfilled what was shown — that while we scorn the Lord's commands, while we do not keep the saving precepts of the given law, the enemy has received the power to do harm, covering with the cast of his net those less armed and less wary against resistance. Let us pray urgently and groan with constant prayers. For you should know, dearest brothers, that we were reproached not long ago through a vision for this very thing — that we drowse in our prayers and do not pray watchfully. And God, indeed, who loves the one he corrects, when he corrects, corrects to this end, that he may amend; he amends to this end, that he may preserve. Let us shake off, then, and break the bonds of sleep, and pray urgently and watchfully, just as Paul the apostle directs, saying: continue steadfastly in prayer, keeping watch in it — for the apostles likewise never gave up praying both day and night, and the Lord himself also, the teacher of discipline and the way of our example, prayed often and watchfully, and, as the Gospel tells us, he withdrew to the mountainside to pray and passed the night there in prayer to God. And surely what he prayed, he prayed for us, since he himself was not a sinner but bore our sins. Indeed, so greatly did he plead on our behalf that elsewhere we find this recorded: to Peter the Lord declared, Satan has sought leave to sift you as one sifts wheat; yet I have prayed on your behalf, that your faith not give way. But if he labors and watches and prays for us and for our offenses, how much more ought we to press on in prayer, and pray, and first ask the Lord himself, and only afterward, by means of him, render satisfaction to God the Father? We have as advocate and intercessor for our sins Jesus Christ our Lord and God, provided only we repent of our past sins, and confessing and understanding the offenses by which we now offend the Lord, pledge for the rest to walk in his ways and fear his commandments. The Father both corrects and protects us, so long as we stand firm in faith and, though under pressures and hardships, cling steadfastly to his Christ, as it stands written — what shall part us from Christ's love? tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or want of clothing, or peril, or the sword? None of these things can separate believers, none can tear away those who cling to his body and blood. This persecution is a testing, and God has wished by this testing to shake out and prove our sin, just as he has always proved his own; yet help to believers has never at any time been lacking in his testings. Finally, to his least servant — one set, though most unworthy of his regard, amid very many faults — he has, out of his own goodness toward us, deigned to give a command. Tell him, he said, let him be untroubled, for peace is coming; but the reason for the present delay is that there still remain some who must be proved. But we are also warned by divine admonitions about sparing food and sober drink — namely, lest a heart already raised on high by heavenly vigor be weakened by worldly allurement, or lest a mind weighed down by over-generous feasting be less alert for the vigil of prayer. I ought not to conceal these particulars, nor keep them hidden in my own conscience alone, since by them each of us can be instructed and guided; nor should you yourselves keep this letter hidden among us, but you should have it read to the brothers. For to intercept what the Lord deigns to use to admonish and instruct us belongs to one who does not wish his brother to be admonished and instructed. Let them know that we are being proved by our Lord, and let none, in the struggle of the present distress, fall away from the faith by which we once believed in him — rather let each acknowledge his own sins, or at least now set aside the manner of life of the old man. For no one who looks back and puts his hand to the plow while looking behind is fit for the kingdom of God. Finally, Lot's wife, who, though freed, looked back against the command, lost what she had escaped. Let us attend not to what lies behind, to which the devil calls us back, but to what lies ahead, to which Christ calls us. Let us lift our eyes to heaven, lest the earth deceive us with its delights and allurements. Let each one pray to God, not for himself alone but for all the brothers, as the Lord taught us to pray, where he does not command each a private prayer, but bids us pray for all in a common prayer, with united and harmonious petition. Should the Lord find us humble and calm, joined to one another, in awe of his anger, set right and improved by this present ordeal, he will hold us safe against the enemy's onslaughts. Discipline has gone before; pardon will follow. Let us only, asking without ceasing and receiving with faith, in simplicity and unity of mind, entreat the Lord, entreating with groaning and weeping together, as it befits those to entreat who are set among the ruins of the mourning and the fears of those who remain, among the great multitude of the fallen and the small band of the steadfast still standing. Let us pray that peace be restored the sooner, that swift help come to our hiding places and our dangers, that what the Lord deigns to show his servants be fulfilled — the restoration of his church, the security of our salvation, calm after the rains, light after the darkness, gentle stillness after storms and whirlwinds, the loving help of the Father's affection, the accustomed great works of the divine majesty, by which the blasphemy of our persecutors may be beaten back, the penitence of the lapsed be restored, and the brothers who persevere, strong and steadfast, may glory. I wish you, dearest brothers, to be always well and to remember us. Give my greeting to the brotherhood on my behalf, and urge them to keep us in memory. Farewell.
Letter XII. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, his brothers, greeting. Although I know that you, dearest brothers, have often been reminded by my letters that every care should be shown to those who confess the Lord with a glorious voice and are held in prison, still I press this upon you again and again, so that nothing may be lacking to their comfort who lack nothing for their glory. And would that the condition of my place and rank allowed me to be present myself now: I would gladly and readily fulfill, in the customary ministry, every office of our love toward these bravest of brothers. But let your diligence stand in for my office and do all that ought to be done for those whom the divine favor has made illustrious by such merits of faith and courage. And to the bodies also of all who, even though they were not tortured, nevertheless depart from prison by a glorious death, let a more watchful care and concern be shown. For their virtue and honor are no less, so that they too should be counted among the blessed martyrs. What lay in their power they endured, whatever they were ready and eager to endure. He who offered himself to torments and death before the eyes of God suffered whatever he was willing to suffer; it was not that he lacked the torments, but the torments lacked him. "Whoever will have confessed me before men, I too will confess him before my Father," says the Lord — they have confessed. "He who endures to the end will be saved," says the Lord — they endured, and all the way to the end they bore onward the merits of their virtues, untainted and whole. And again it is written: "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life" — faithful unto death they have arrived, steadfast and unconquerable. When to our will and confession in prison and in chains the end of dying is added, the glory of martyrdom is made complete. Finally, note also the days on which they depart, so that we may be able to celebrate their commemorations among the memorials of the martyrs — though Tertullus, our most faithful and devoted brother, among the other cares and concerns which he shows the brothers in every service of his labor, and who is not lacking even there in caring for the bodies, has written and will write and inform me of the days on which our blessed brothers pass in prison, through the outcome of a glorious death, into immortality, so that here among us offerings and sacrifices may be celebrated for their remembrance; these, God protecting us, we shall celebrate before long in your company. Let your care and diligence also not fail the poor, as I have already often written, those, that is, who stand firm in the faith and, fighting bravely alongside us, have not abandoned the camp of Christ: to these indeed greater love and care ought now to be shown by us, since, driven neither by poverty nor cast down by the storm of persecution, as they serve the Lord faithfully, they have set before the rest of the poor a pattern of faith to follow. Dearest brothers, whom I long for so much, may you always be well, and keep me in your thoughts; convey my greeting to the brotherhood. [Farewell.]
Letter XIII. Cyprian to Rogatianus the presbyter and to the rest of the confessor-brothers, greeting. Some while back, dearest and bravest brothers, I had already sent a letter rejoicing over your faith and courage in exultant terms; and even now my chief concern is simply this: with a glad heart, again and again, to proclaim the glory of your name. For what greater or better wish could I hold than to see Christ's flock lit up by the honor of your confession? Since every brother is bound to rejoice at this, within that shared joy the bishop's portion runs deeper still; for a church's glory is nothing other than its leader's glory. Just as we grieve over those the hostile storm brought down, so equally we take joy in you, whom the devil failed to overpower. Still, by the faith we hold in common, and by the genuine, unaffected love our hearts bear you, we urge you, who defeated the adversary in this opening clash, to hold onto your glory through courage that does not waver. We remain in the world still, still drawn up in battle-line, contending daily for our very life. Effort is needed, so that beyond these beginnings you press on toward growth, and what you launched with such fortunate first steps reaches completion in you. To have managed to gain something is a small thing; the greater thing is being able to hold on to what you gained — just as faith itself, and the saving birth, give life not merely by being received, but by being guarded afterward. It is not the initial gain but the eventual completion that keeps a person safe for God. The Lord taught exactly this through his own instruction, saying, "Look, you have been healed — sin no more, so that nothing worse befalls you." Picture him saying the same thing to his confessor: "Look, you have become a confessor — sin no more, so that nothing worse befalls you." Consider Solomon, and Saul, and many others besides: for as long as they strayed from the Lord's paths, they could not hold on to the grace given them — once the Lord's discipline left them, grace departed along with it. We must keep to the narrow, cramped path that leads to praise and glory; and since calm, humility, and the settled peace of good conduct suit every Christian — for God's own word looks to no one except the person who is humble, quiet, and trembles at his sayings — confessors above all are bound to keep and practice this, since you have become the pattern for the other brothers, the model by which everyone's conduct and behavior ought to be measured. For just as the Jews became estranged from God — and because of them his name is cursed among the nations — so, on the other hand, those are precious to God through whose good order the Lord's name gets proclaimed with praise, exactly as it stands written, the Lord giving this warning beforehand: "Your light must shine in front of everyone, so that they can look at your good deeds and give glory to your Father in the heavens." And the apostle Paul says: "Shine as lamps within the world." Peter gives a similar exhortation: "As foreigners and travelers," he says, "hold yourselves back from fleshly cravings, which wage war against the soul; keep your manner of life upright among the pagans, so that even while they speak ill of you as wrongdoers, they will look at your good deeds and end up glorifying God." Most of you, I am glad to say, take this seriously; made better by the honor your confession brought, you protect and preserve your glory through a peaceable, upright manner of life. Yet word reaches me that a few are tainting your ranks and wrecking the praise attached to your distinguished name through their own corrupt behavior — men whom you yourselves, being the ones who love and guard that praise, ought to scold, restrain, and set right. Think how much shame is heaped on your name when one man lingers about, drunk and indecent, or another slips back to the very homeland he was banished from, only to be caught and die not as a Christian but as a criminal. I hear too that some are growing puffed up and swollen with conceit, though it is written: "Do not think too highly of yourself, but be afraid — for if God spared not even the natural branches, he may well not spare you either." Our Lord was brought like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, he did not open his mouth: "I am not," he says, "defiant, nor do I argue back. I offered my back to the lash and my cheeks to the blows; I did not turn my face away from the disgrace of spitting." And yet does anyone, living now through him and within him, still dare to swell with pride, forgetting both the deeds he performed and the commands he handed down, whether directly or through his apostles? Given that no servant outranks his master, those who follow the Lord ought to trace his footsteps in humility, calm, and silence — for whoever ranks lowest becomes the greatest, as the Lord states: "Whoever is least among you, that one shall be great." Then again — and this ought to strike you as detestable — we have learned, with the deepest groaning and grief of spirit, that there is no shortage of men who defile God's temples, sanctified and made splendid by confession, staining their own bodies through shameful, disreputable union, sharing beds indiscriminately with women. Even granting that no actual sexual sin weighs on their conscience, it remains a serious offense in itself that their scandal breeds examples leading others to ruin. Nor should there be quarrels or rivalries among us, given that the Lord bequeathed us his peace and it stands written: "You are to love your neighbor as yourself." But if you go on biting and blaming one another, watch that you are not devoured by one another. I beg you also to steer clear of insults and cursing, since those who curse will not inherit God's kingdom, and a tongue that once confessed Christ must be kept whole and clean, along with its own dignity. For whoever speaks what is peaceable, good, and just, in keeping with Christ's command, confesses Christ anew each day. We had already renounced the world at our baptism; yet only now do we truly renounce it, since, tested and approved by God, having left behind everything of our own, we follow the Lord, living and standing firm in fear of him and faith. Let us build one another up through mutual encouragement and advance ever further in the Lord, so that once he, in his mercy, brings about the peace he has promised, we may come back to the church as new men, almost transformed — met by our brothers and by the pagans alike as people corrected in every respect and reshaped for the better, so that those who once admired the glory of our courage under trial may now admire instead the discipline of our conduct. Dearest brother, I wish you lasting good health.
Letter XIV. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, his brothers, greeting. I had truly hoped, dearest brothers, to send my letter in greeting to our entire clergy, whole and untouched by harm. But since the raging storm that struck down most of our people has, on this front too, piled fresh grief upon us by cutting into a portion of the clergy as well, we pray the Lord that going forward, through his divine mercy, we may greet as safe those of you whom we recognize as standing firm in both faith and courage. And though the situation urged me to hurry to you in person — first from sheer longing for you, which sits at the top of my wishes, and then so we might jointly weigh what the common good demands for steering the church, refining it through the counsel of many — it still seemed wiser, for now, to stay hidden and quiet, out of concern for other advantages bearing on the peace and safety of all of us. Tertullus, our dearest brother, will give you the reasons for this; besides the rest of the diligent effort he pours into the works of God, he was also the one who urged this course, that I remain careful and restrained and not rashly show my face in public, above all in that place where I had so often been sought out and demanded. Trusting, then, in your love and devotion, which I know well, I both urge and instruct you through this letter: since your presence there draws far less resentment and danger than mine would, act in my place in carrying out what the church's administration requires. Meanwhile let care for the poor be maintained as far as circumstances allow — for those, that is, who have stood by unshaken faith and never left Christ's flock — so that through your diligence they receive the means to bear their hardship, lest need succeed, against them once they are struggling, where the storm failed against them while they stood confident. Show a still greater measure of care to the glorious confessors as well. Although I know that most of these have already been taken in hand by the brothers' devotion and goodwill, still, if any lack clothing or supplies — as I had written to you before, back when they were still confined in prison — let whatever they need be provided; only see that they learn from you, and are taught and come to understand what church discipline, following the teaching of Scripture, requires of them: that they must be humble, modest, and quiet, so as to protect the honor attached to their name, so that those glorious in voice may prove glorious in conduct too, and thereby show themselves worthy — so that, earning the Lord's favor in everything, they may reach the heavenly crown once their praise is brought to completion. For more still lies ahead of them than what already appears behind them, since it is written: "Do not praise anyone before his death," and again, "Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life," and the Lord likewise says, "The one who holds out to the very end will be saved." The Lord himself should be their pattern: at the very hour of his suffering, humility grew in him rather than pride, and it was in that hour that he knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples, telling them, "Since I, your master and lord, have knelt to wash your feet, the duty falls to you likewise, that you wash the feet of one another; what I have done for you stands as a model, so that you would treat others exactly as I have treated you." Let them likewise follow the teaching of Paul the apostle, who, after repeated imprisonment, after floggings, after wild beasts, stayed gentle and humble through it all, and even after being caught up to the third heaven and paradise claimed nothing for himself out of arrogance, saying: "We did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but toiled night and day in labor and exhaustion, so as not to weigh any of you down." I beg you, drive each of these points home to our brothers. And since whoever humbles himself will be lifted up, now more than ever they must fear the adversary lurking in ambush, who presses hardest against the strongest, and, sharpened by the very defeat he has suffered, tries to overcome the one who overcame him. The Lord will grant that I too may see them and, through a wholesome exhortation, steady their minds toward guarding their glory. For it grieves me to hear that some are behaving shamelessly and recklessly, wasting themselves on foolishness and quarrels, fouling through illicit unions bodies that belong to Christ and have already confessed him, refusing to be governed by deacons or presbyters — acting so that the corrupt, wicked conduct of a few taints the honest glory belonging to the many good confessors. Those men ought instead to be respected, for fear that, once condemned by their own testimony and judgment, they be cut off from fellowship with them. For only that confessor is truly illustrious and genuine of whom the church later feels no shame, but rather takes pride in. As for the matter our fellow presbyters Donatus, Fortunatus, Novatus, and Gordius wrote to me about, I could not answer any of it on my own, since from the very start of my time as bishop I decided never to act on my private judgment alone, apart from your counsel and the people's consent. But once I come to you, by God's grace, we shall then deal together with what has already been done or still needs doing, as the respect we owe each other requires. Dearest brothers, whom I long for above all, may you always fare well and keep me in mind. Give my warm greeting to whatever brotherhood remains with you, and remind them to remember us. Farewell.
Letter XV. Cyprian, to the martyrs and confessors, dearest brothers, greeting. The care of my office and the fear of God compel me, bravest and most blessed martyrs, to urge you by this letter that the same men who guard the faith of the Lord so devotedly and bravely should equally preserve the Lord's law and discipline. Since all soldiers of Christ are bound to keep the commands of their commander, it is all the more fitting that you obey his precepts, you who have become an example to the rest in courage and in the fear of God. My assumption, in fact, had been that the presbyters and deacons stationed there were fully warning and instructing you in the gospel's law, a practice consistently followed under those who governed before me, with deacons traveling to and from the prison to steer the martyrs' wishes through their own counsel and the precepts of scripture. But now, to my very great grief of mind, I learn that not only are the divine precepts not being brought before you there, but that they are actually being hindered, so that what you yourselves do cautiously toward God and honorably toward the priest of God is being undone by certain presbyters, men who, thinking neither of the fear of God nor of the honor due the bishop, dare — after you sent me letters asking that your wishes be examined and peace granted to some of the lapsed, once the persecution should end and we begin to gather again with the clergy — to offer on behalf of these lapsed and hand over to them the sacrament, thereby defiling the Lord's holy body, in defiance of the gospel's law and of your own honorable request, before penance has been performed, before confession of so grave and extreme a sin has been made, before the hand has been laid upon them in penance by the bishop and clergy. For Scripture says: he who eats that bread or drinks that cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will bear the guilt of the Lord's body and blood. To the lapsed, indeed, pardon can be granted in this matter. Who that is dead would not hasten to be brought to life? Who would not hurry toward his own salvation? But it belongs to those set over the church to hold to the rule and to instruct even those who are hasty or ignorant, lest men meant to shepherd the flock turn instead into its butchers. For to grant what turns to ruin is to deceive; the fallen is not thereby raised up, but is rather driven further toward ruin through offense against God. Let them learn from you, then, when they ought instead to have been teaching. Let them reserve their petitions and desires for the bishop, and await a mature and settled time for the peace they ask to be granted. First the mother must herself receive peace from the Lord; only then, according to your wishes, can the peace of her children be dealt with. And since I hear, bravest and dearest brothers, that you are being pressed by the shamelessness of certain men, and that your own modesty is suffering violence, I beg you, with all the entreaty I can, mindful of the gospel and considering how carefully and in what manner your predecessors the martyrs granted such things in the past, that you too weigh with care and caution the wishes of those who petition you, so that, as friends of the Lord who will one day judge along with him, you may examine the conduct, the deeds, and the merits of each, and consider also the kinds and degrees of their offenses, lest, if anything is promised rashly and unworthily by you, or done so by us, our church itself begin to blush even before the pagans. For we are visited and chastened often, and warned so that the Lord's commands may remain uncorrupted and inviolate. This, I know, does not cease even there among you, in that the divine censure instructs many of you as well toward the discipline of the church. All of this can come about if you temper what is asked of you with religious reflection, understanding and restraining those who, showing favor to persons, either curry favor through your kindnesses or seek out a market for illicit trafficking. Regarding this I have sent separate letters to both the clergy and the congregation, with instructions that each be read aloud to you. But you must also see to this and correct it with diligence: that you name specifically those to whom you wish peace to be granted. For I hear that some petitions are drawn up in such a way that it is said, 'let him and his household communicate' — a thing never done by the martyrs at all — so that a vague and blind petition may afterward heap up ill will against us. For it opens wide when it is said 'he and his household,' and twenty or thirty or more can be brought forward to us, claimed to be the relatives, connections, freedmen, and household of the one who received the petition. And so I ask that you name specifically, in the petition, those whom you yourselves see, whom you know, whose penance you observe to be nearly complete in satisfaction, and so send us letters befitting our faith and discipline. I wish that we, bravest and most beloved brothers, may always fare well in the Lord and that you remember us. Farewell.
Letter XVI. Cyprian, to the presbyters and deacons, brothers, greeting. For a long time I kept my patience, dearest brothers, as though our respectful silence might serve toward quiet. But since the unrestrained and headlong presumption of certain men, through their own rashness, attempts to disturb both the honor of the martyrs, the modesty of the confessors, and the peace of the whole people, it is no longer right to keep silent, lest excessive silence lead to danger both for the people and for us alike. For what danger of offending the Lord ought we not to fear, when some of the presbyters, mindful neither of the gospel nor of their own place, thinking neither of the future judgment of the Lord nor of the bishop now set over them — a thing never done at all under my predecessors — claim everything for themselves with insult and contempt toward the one set over them? And would that they were not claiming everything for themselves at the cost of overturning the salvation of our brothers! I could overlook and bear the insults to my episcopate, as I have always overlooked and borne them. But there is no room now for overlooking it, when our brotherhood is being deceived by certain of you: for while, without reason, they wish to seem agreeable in restoring men to salvation, they do more harm to the lapsed. For even those who committed the offense that the persecution forced upon them know that it is the gravest of sins, since the Lord and our judge has said: everyone who acknowledges me in front of others, I too will acknowledge in front of my Father in heaven; but the one who disowns me, I will likewise disown — and again he has said: all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and blasphemies; but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit has no forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. Likewise the blessed apostle has said: it is impossible to drink from the Lord's cup while also drinking from the cup of demons, or to share in the Lord's table while sharing also in the table of demons. Whoever withholds this from our brothers deceives the wretched, so that those who could, by true penance, satisfy God who is a merciful Father, through their prayers and their works, are instead led astray, so that they perish the more, and those who could raise themselves up fall the further. For even when, in lesser sins, sinners do penance for the proper time, and come to confession in due order of discipline, and receive the right of communion through the laying on of hands by the bishop and clergy, now, in this raw time, while the persecution still continues, while the peace of the church itself has not yet been restored, they are admitted to communion, and the offering is made in their name, and although penance has not yet been performed, confession not yet made, the hand not yet laid upon them by the bishop and clergy, the eucharist is given to them — though Scripture warns: anyone who partakes of that bread or that cup of the Lord unworthily stands guilty of the Lord's own body and blood. But now those who did not know the law of scripture so well are not the guilty ones; guilty rather will be those set over them who do not bring these things before the brothers, so that, instructed by their leaders, they may do everything in the fear of God and according to the observance he has given and prescribed. They expose the blessed martyrs to ill will, and set the glorious servants of God against the priest of God, so that, while the martyrs, mindful of my office, sent me letters and asked that their wishes then be examined and peace granted only once our mother herself had first received peace through the Lord's mercy and divine protection had brought us back to our church, these men, setting aside the honor which the blessed martyrs together with the confessors reserve for us, despising the law of the Lord and the observance which those same martyrs and confessors bid be kept, before the fear of persecution is even extinguished, before our return, before the very passing of the martyrs themselves, communicate with the lapsed and make the offering and hand over the eucharist — when even if the martyrs, through the heat of their glory and paying less attention to scripture, should wish for something against the law of the Lord, they ought to be warned of it by the presbyters and deacons bringing it to their notice, as has always been done in the past. So the divine censure does not cease to chasten us, neither by night nor by day. Besides nightly visions, by day too the innocent age of children is filled among us with the Holy Spirit, who in ecstasy see with their eyes and hear and speak the things which the Lord deigns to use to warn and instruct us. And you will hear all of it when the Lord, who bade me withdraw, brings me back to you. In the meantime, let those among you who are rash, careless, and puffed up, men giving no heed to any human authority, stand in dread of God instead, aware that persisting further down this path will bring the very warning the Lord instructs me to employ, barring them for the time from making the offering, and they will have to answer for their conduct in front of us, in front of the confessors, and in front of the entire congregation once, God permitting, we are gathered back together into the church's embrace. Concerning this I have sent word in writing to the martyrs, to the confessors, and separately to the congregation, and both letters I have directed to be read out to you. I wish that you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, may always fare well in the Lord and that you remember us. Farewell.
Letter XVII. Cyprian, to the brothers established among the people, greeting. That I groan and grieve over the ruin of our brothers I know myself, dearest brothers, for I too, along with you, groan and grieve equally for each one, and I suffer and feel what the blessed apostle says: who is weak, he says, and I am not weak? who is made to stumble, and I do not burn? And again he set it down in his letter, saying: if one member suffers, the rest of the members suffer with it; and if one member rejoices, the rest of the members rejoice with it. I suffer with our brothers, I grieve with them, who, fallen and struck down by the assault of persecution, dragging with them a part of our very flesh, have brought upon us, through their own wounds, an equal grief — men to whom the divine mercy has the power to give healing. Yet I do not think we should hurry, nor should anything be done carelessly and hastily, lest, while peace is seized upon rashly, the offense of divine indignation be provoked all the more gravely. The blessed martyrs have written to us concerning certain of the lapsed, asking that their wishes be examined. Once peace has first been given to all of us by the Lord and we begin to return to the church, each case will be examined with you present and judging. Yet I hear that certain presbyters, giving no heed to the gospel and paying no mind to what the martyrs put in writing to us, and withholding from the bishop the honor owed his priestly office, are found to be admitting the lapsed to communion already, making the offering on their behalf and handing them the eucharist, even though such steps are only proper once the due order has been followed. For when, even in lesser offenses which are not committed against God, penance is performed for the proper time, and confession is made only after the life of the one performing penance has been examined, nor can anyone come to communion unless the hand has first been laid upon him by the bishop and clergy — how much more, in these gravest and most extreme offenses, ought everything to be observed cautiously and with restraint, according to the discipline of the Lord? Our own presbyters and deacons, in fact, should have pressed this point, urging the flock entrusted to them and teaching them, through divine instruction, the path of seeking salvation through prayer. I know both the quiet and the fear of our people: they would be watchful in making satisfaction to God and in prayer, had not certain of the presbyters, currying favor, deceived them. Do you, then, govern each one individually, and, guided by the precepts of God, steady the minds of the lapsed through counsel and restraint. No one should pick fruit still bitter before its season. No one should return a ship, battered and breached by the waves, to open water until it has been thoroughly mended. No one should rush to put on a torn garment before watching a skilled hand mend it and a fuller return it cleaned. Let them hear our counsel patiently, I ask, and await our return, so that when, through God's mercy, we come to you, we may, having summoned our fellow bishops, together with the presence of the confessors and your own judgment as well, examine the letters and wishes of the blessed martyrs according to the discipline of the Lord. Regarding this I have addressed separate letters to the clergy on one hand and to the martyrs and confessors on the other, and have directed that both be read aloud to you. I wish that you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, may always fare well in the Lord and that you remember us. Farewell.
Letter XVIII. Cyprian, to the presbyters and deacons, brothers, greeting. I am amazed, dearest brothers, that to the many letters I have frequently sent you, you have written back nothing, since the welfare and the very necessity of our brotherhood can only be rightly guided if, instructed by you, we can refine our plan of action. Since, however, I see that the opportunity of coming to you does not yet exist, and that summer has already begun — a season that brings with it constant and severe illnesses — I think we must meet the needs of our brothers, so that those who have received petitions from the martyrs, and who can be aided before God by their intercession, if they should be overtaken by some illness and the danger of death, need not wait for our presence, but may make confession of their sin before whatever presbyter is at hand, or, if no presbyter can be found and the end begins to press, before a deacon as well, so that, once hands have been laid upon them in penance, they may go to meet the Lord bearing the peace the martyrs asked, in their letters to us, to see granted. As for the rest of the people who have fallen, tend them with your presence, and revive them with your comfort, so that they do not fall away from faith and from the Lord's mercy. For those who remain meek and humble and truly performing penance, persevering in good conduct, will not be abandoned by the Lord's help and aid, but will be tended to all the more by his divine remedy. And to those who listen, if any should be overtaken by danger and placed at the point of death, let your watchfulness not be lacking; let the Lord's mercy not be denied to those who implore his divine grace. I wish that we, dearest brothers, may always fare well and remember one another. Give my greeting to the whole brotherhood on my behalf, and remind them to keep us in mind. Farewell.
Letter XIX. Cyprian, to the presbyters and deacons, brothers, greeting. I have read your letter, dearest brothers, in which you wrote that your sound counsel is not lacking to our brothers, urging them to set aside rash haste and offer God a devout patience, so that once his mercy has brought us together, we may take up each case in keeping with the church's own discipline, a point underscored by the scriptural word: call to mind the place from which you have fallen, and turn to penance. And he truly does penance who, mindful of the divine precept, meek and patient and obedient to the priests of God, wins the Lord's favor through his own obedience and just works. Yet since you have pointed out that some are unrestrained and press hastily for admission to communion, and you have asked that I give you a rule in this matter, I believe I have written fully enough on this in the letter I sent you most recently: that those to whom the martyrs have issued a certificate, and who can be aided by their help before the Lord in their offenses, if they should begin to be pressed by some illness and danger, should, after confession is made and your hands are laid upon them in penance, be sent on to the Lord carrying the peace the martyrs pledged to them. But the rest, who without any petition received from the martyrs stir up resentment — since this matter concerns not a few, nor one church, nor one province, but the whole world — let them wait first, under the Lord's guard, for the church's own general peace to be restored, a fitting course for the modesty, the discipline, and indeed the whole conduct of life we all share, so that those who lead the church, assembling alongside the clergy and also in the sight of the people who remained steadfast, to whom, too, for their faith and their fear of the Lord, honor is due, may be able to arrange everything through counsel shared by all, in due reverence. But how irreligious it is, and how ruinous even to those who are themselves in such haste, that, while still exiles, driven from their homeland and stripped of all their goods, not yet returned to the church, certain of the lapsed should hasten to get ahead of the confessors themselves and enter the church before them! If they are too eager, they hold in their own power what they ask for, since the very passage of time will grant them more than what they ask. The battle is still being fought, and the contest is celebrated daily. Should those who sinned repent both sincerely and steadfastly, with the fervor of their faith holding strong, then one not yet crowned has no cause to despair over the waiting. I wish that you, dearest brothers, may always fare well and remember us. Convey my greetings to the entire brotherhood, and encourage them to remember us. Farewell.
Letter XX. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons of Rome, greeting the brethren dwelling there. Since I have learned, dearest brothers, that what has been and is being done here by me is being reported to you with less than complete honesty and fidelity, I have judged it necessary to write you this letter, so that you might understand the reasoning behind how I have acted, governed myself, and applied diligence in this matter. When the disturbance first broke out with sudden force, and the crowd had repeatedly and violently clamored for me, I withdrew for a time, thinking not so much of my own safety as of the public peace of the brethren, lest the sedition that had begun be provoked further by my unseemly presence. Yet though absent in body, I was never absent in spirit, in action, or in counsel from doing what my humble office could do for our brethren according to the Lord's precepts. What I have done is told by the thirteen letters sent to you across that time — none of them omitted counsel where the clergy needed it, encouragement for the confessors, a rebuke for those who had fallen away when one was called for, or my appeal urging the whole brotherhood to beg for God's mercy — so far as my humble powers, under the guidance of the Lord, could strive according to the rule of faith and the fear of God. After the tortures began, whether for brothers already tortured or still shut up awaiting torture, my word reached them to strengthen and comfort them. Likewise, when I learned that those who had defiled their hands and mouths by sacrilegious contact, or had polluted their conscience no less by wicked certificates, were going about everywhere to court the martyrs, and were even corrupting the confessors by importunate and self-serving pleading, with thousands of certificates handed out each day with no distinction made or case examined, contrary to what the gospel required — so I composed letters aimed, so far as my own judgment allowed, at bringing the martyrs and confessors back into line with what the Lord commands. Likewise the presbyters and deacons did not lack priestly firmness in restraining, with our intervention, certain men who, careless of discipline and driven by reckless haste, were on the verge of restoring communion to those who had lapsed. For the people themselves too, we did what we could to steady their minds and instructed them that church discipline should be kept. Afterward, when certain lapsed persons, acting on their own initiative with no one else urging them, took to bold demands and tried to force through, by sheer pressure, the peace the martyrs and confessors had pledged them, I sent word to the clergy twice on this point, with instructions that it be read aloud: that as a stopgap measure for the time being, anyone holding a martyr's certificate who found himself near death should, once he had confessed and had hands laid upon him in penance, be allowed to depart to the Lord bearing the peace the martyrs had granted. In this I laid down no law, nor rashly set myself up as its author. But since honor was owed to the martyrs, and the impulse of those who wished to throw everything into confusion had to be checked, and since besides I had read the letter you had recently sent to our clergy through Crementius the subdeacon, urging that help be given to those who, seized by weakness after their fall, were repentant and desired communion, I thought I should stand by that, in agreement with your judgment, lest our conduct, which ought to be united and of one mind in everything, differ in some point. As for the rest, I have directed that their cases, even where a certificate has been received from the martyrs, be deferred and reserved for my presence, so that when peace has been granted us by the Lord and a greater number of bishops can meet together, we may take counsel with you as well and decide or amend each case. I wish you, dearest brothers, continued good health.
Letter XXI. Celerinus to Lucianus. As I write this to you, brother and lord, I was both glad and sorrowful — glad because I heard that before this world's magistrates you confessed our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by name, or at the very least spoke out in his name; sorrowful, because from the moment I parted from you I was never able to receive any letter from you. And now a double sorrow has fallen on me, because you knew that Montanus, our brother shared with you, was coming to me from the prison, and yet you gave me no word of your welfare or of what is happening with you. But this is apt to befall the servants of God, above all those standing firm in confessing Christ, since I am aware that none of you now gives thought to worldly matters, hoping instead for the crown of heaven. I said to myself, perhaps you had simply forgotten to write to me. For, to speak of myself too, lowly as I am — if I, Celerinus, may be thought worthy to be heard by you as a brother — even when I too was engaged in so glorious a confession, I remembered my oldest brothers, and in my letters I recalled that their former affection for me and mine still stood. Yet, dearest one, I ask the Lord this: that should you still face it, you be washed clean in that sacred blood for Christ our Lord's sake, before my letter finds you in this world; and should it arrive first instead, send word back to me on the matter. May he, then, crown you for the name you confessed — I hold this faith, that though we may never meet again in this present world, we will one day embrace each other in Christ's presence in the world to come. Ask that I too may be found worthy to be crowned along with your company. Know, however, that I am set in great tribulation, and though you are not present with me, I remember our former affection day and night as though you were. God alone knows it. And so I ask that you grant my wish and grieve with me over the death of my sister, who fell in this devastation to Christ's enemy. For she sacrificed and provoked our Lord, as seems plain to us. On her account I have spent, weeping day and night, in sackcloth and ashes, even on the day of Easter joy, the days from then until now, and I continue to spend them so, until the help and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, coming through you or through those lords of mine who shall be crowned, from whom you are to ask it, comes to the aid of so wretched a shipwreck. For I have recalled your former love, in that, while you grieve for our sister, along with the others you well know — namely Numeria and Candida — over whose sin we owe a duty of concern, since they regard us as brothers. It is my conviction that Christ, weighing their repentance and the services they have performed among our fellow exiles who came from among you (of whose deeds you yourself will hear from them), will, at the request of you their martyrs, grant them pardon. I have heard, too, that you have received a more glorious ministry. O happy man, receive now the fulfillment of the desire you always cherished, even in your sleep upon the earth. You wished to be cast into prison for his name, and now it has befallen you, just as it is written: may the Lord grant you according to your heart. And now, set as bishop over these very ones, he has acknowledged you as the same minister still. My lord, here is my plea, made through our Lord Jesus Christ himself: carry word to the rest of your fellow confessors, brothers and lords to me as they are, and put this request to them on my behalf. Whichever of you is crowned first should be the one to grant our sisters Numeria and Candida release from that sin. For as to this same Etecusa, I have always called her that — God is our witness — because she paid out money on her own behalf so as not to sacrifice; she is only thought to have gone up as far as the Three Fates and come back down again. That she did not sacrifice, then, I know for certain. Their case has already been heard, and the leaders have ordered that they remain in this state for now, until a bishop is appointed. But I ask that, relying as we do on your sacred prayers and pleas before God, since you stand as both friends of Christ and his witnesses, you extend pardon to them all. I ask, then, dearest lord Lucianus, that you remember me and grant my request. May Christ grant you, then, that sacred crown — a gift bestowed on you both through confession and through a life lived in holiness, the path you have steadily followed, standing as a model for the saints and a testimony to Christ throughout — and that you report this matter to all my lords, your fellow confessors, so that they may grant help from us in this. For you should know, brother and lord, that I make this request not for myself alone; Statius, Severianus, and every confessor who arrived here from your side join in asking the same — those to whose ship the women went down to the harbor, and whom they brought up into the city, and to whom sixty-five of them ministered and have cared for down to this very day; for they are all in their charge. I ought not to burden your holy heart any further, since I know you act with a ready will. Macarius greets you, along with his sisters Cornelia and Emerita, who rejoices over your glorious confession, as do all the brothers; and Saturninus, who himself wrestled with the devil and bravely confessed the name of Christ, and who bravely confessed even under the torment of the claws, and who here too begs and asks earnestly. Your brothers Calpurnius and Maria and all the holy brothers greet you. You should also know that I have written to my lords, your brothers, and I ask that you see fit to read this letter to them.
Letter XXII. Lucianus, if I am worthy to be called a colleague in Christ, to Celerinus his lord, greeting. I received your letter, dearest brother and lord, in which you burdened me so much that, because of your grief, my joy nearly vanished — the joy of at last reading, after so long, the letter I too had longed for, in which you thought me worthy of remembrance; by the kindness of your great humility I rejoiced to read it, you who wrote to me as though I might be worthy to be called your brother — I, who among the lowlier have confessed the name of God with fear. For you, by God's will, not only confessed but by your words and God-inspired speech struck fear into that great serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, and by them you conquered — words such as, I know, only lovers of the faith and zealots for the discipline of Christ could speak, in which vigor of spirit I know you to live, and I rejoice in it. And now, dearest one, already to be counted among the martyrs, you have chosen to burden us with your letter about our sisters — a matter regarding which I wish we could make remembrance without so grave a crime having been committed; surely we would not now be bowed down under such tears as these. You should know what took place regarding us: while the blessed martyr Paulus still lived, he summoned me and spoke these words: Lucianus, before Christ I tell you, that if anyone asks you for peace after my departure, grant it in my name. And all of us whom the Lord has deigned to call in this great tribulation, by common agreement, have all together granted peace to all. See, then, brother, that this rests partly on what Paulus charged me, and partly on what we all together decided — we who, even prior to this present trial, when the emperor's command condemned us to perish of starvation and thirst, were confined within two cells, yet endured such conditions that neither hunger nor thirst achieved its end; but the heat, from the pressure of our confinement, was so unbearable that no one could endure it. But now we are set in the very glory itself. And so, dearest brother, greet Numeria and Candida, whom, according to the charge of Paulus and the other martyrs — whose names I set down below: Bassus in the stone-quarry, Mappalicus under torture, Fortunio in prison; Paulus from the torture, Fortunata, Victorinus, Victor, Herennius, Credula, Hereda, Donatus, Firmus, Venustus, Fructus, Iulia, Martialis and Ariston, who by God's will died of hunger in prison; and we too, you will hear within days, will join their company. For already, since we were shut up again, it is the eighth day from the day I write this letter to you; and eight days before that, for five days running, we received only a little bread and water by measure. And so, brother, I ask that, just as here, when the Lord grants peace to his church, according to the charge of Paulus and our own decision, after their case has been laid before the bishop and confession made, they may have peace — not only these two, but also those others whom you know concern us. All my colleagues greet you. Greet on our behalf the Lord's confessors present with you — those whose names you gave us, Saturninus and his companions among them, and also my colleague and Maris, Collecta and Emerita, Calpurnius and Maria, Sabina, Spesina, and the sisters Ianuaria, Dativa, Donata. We greet, along with their households, Saturus, Bassianus, and the whole clergy, Uranius, Alexius, Quintianus, Colonica, and everyone else whose name I have left out here, since weariness overtook me — may they pardon that oversight. I wish good health always to Alexius and Getulicus and the money-dealers and the sisters. My sisters Ianuaria and Sophia send you their greeting, and I commend them to your care.
Letter XXIII. All the confessors to Cyprian, their father, greeting. Know that all of us, once we had heard the account of what each had done after his fall, have granted them peace, and we want you to pass this ruling along so that the other bishops likewise come to know of it. We pray that you may have peace along with the holy martyrs. Written in the presence of a member of the clergy, an exorcist and a reader; Lucianus wrote it.
Letter XXIV. Caldonius to Cyprian and his fellow presbyters residing at Carthage, greeting. The pressure of the times makes it so that we do not grant peace rashly. But since it seemed right to write to you, seeing that those who, after having sacrificed, were tested again and driven into exile — these seem to me to have already washed away their offense, in that they give up their possessions and homes and, doing penance, follow Christ. Thus Felix, who served as presbyter under Decimus, my fellow prisoner (I have come to know this same Felix more fully), and his wife Victoria, and Lucius, faithful believers, were driven into exile and left behind possessions which the treasury now holds. And also during the persecution, a woman called Bona, whom her husband dragged forward to make sacrifice, though she kept her conscience unstained since others forced her hands to perform it — she herself began to cry out against it, saying, 'I did not do it, you did it' — she too was driven into exile just the same. So when all of them came before me to request peace, declaring, 'We have regained the faith we once lost; through penance we have openly confessed Christ' — my own view holds that peace should be granted them, yet I have still referred the matter to your shared judgment, lest I appear to presume anything rashly on my own. If, then, anything is decided by common counsel, write to me. Greet our people; yours greet you. I wish you the best of health.
Letter XXV. Cyprian to his brother Caldonius, greeting. We have received your letter, dearest brother, quite sober and full of integrity and faith; nor are we surprised that, being practiced and skilled in the Lord's scriptures, you act in everything with caution and deliberation. You have judged rightly concerning the granting of peace to our brothers, a peace they themselves regained through genuine repentance and the honor of confessing the Lord, vindicated by the very words that had once condemned them. Since, then, they have washed away every offense and blotted out their first stain by a later act of courage, with the Lord standing by them, they should no longer remain fallen beneath the devil's dominion as if prostrate — they who, having been driven into exile and stripped of all their goods, have risen up and begun to stand with Christ. And would that the rest, too, who repent after their fall, might in the same way be restored to their former condition. As for those who now press us and try rashly and importunately to extort peace, so that you might know how we have arranged matters, I have sent you a booklet along with five letters, which I wrote to the clergy, to the people, and also to the martyrs and confessors. These letters, when sent to a good many of our fellow bishops as well, met with their approval, and they have written back that they too stand with us in the same resolve, according to the catholic faith. This same booklet you should likewise forward to whichever of our fellow bishops you are able to reach, so that all of us together might hold to a single practice and a shared accord, in keeping with what the Lord has commanded. I wish you, dearest brother, continued good health.
Letter XXVI. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, greeting the brethren. The Lord declares: on whom will I look, if not the person who is humble, quiet, and stands in awe of my words? Though we all ought to be such, all the more ought those to be so who must labor, after a grave fall, to win back the Lord's favor by true repentance and complete humility. I have read, moreover, the letter of all the confessors, which they wished to be made known through me to all our colleagues, and to have it reach those to whom, in cases already settled before us, the peace they themselves have granted might apply. Because this touches on what all of us together must weigh and decide, I do not presume to settle it in advance or treat something so shared as mine alone to determine. And so let us hold for now to the letters I recently sent you, a copy of which I have already sent to many of our colleagues as well; they have written back that they approve of what we have decided, and that you need not depart from it, until, peace having been restored to us by the Lord, we can come together and examine each case individually. But so you can also see the letter my colleague Caldonius sent me and my reply to him, I have enclosed copies of both alongside this one. All of this I ask be read to our brothers, so that they may compose themselves more and more to patience, and not add a further offense to the one already committed, since, while they refuse to let us serve either the gospel or examine their cases according to the letter of all the confessors... I wish you, dearest brothers, good health, and to remember us. Greet the whole body of the brethren.
Letter XXVII. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons of Rome, greeting the brethren. Having already written to you, dearest brothers, a letter in which I set out our proceedings and gave some small account of the discipline and diligence we have observed, another matter has arisen which ought not to be hidden from you either. For our brother Lucianus, himself one of the confessors, warm indeed in faith and sturdy in courage, yet lacking a firm grounding in what the Lord's word teaches, attempted several things without proper skill, having some time back set himself up as an authority, so that slips written in his own hand were being handed out wholesale to many under the name of Paul—though Mappalicus, a cautious and modest martyr mindful of the law and of discipline, wrote no such letters running counter to the gospel, but only, moved by family affection, asked that peace be granted to his mother and sister who had lapsed; and Saturninus too, even after his tortures, while still held in prison, issued no letters of that kind. But Lucianus, not content with handing out, while Paul was still in prison, slips written in his own hand under Paul's name, went on doing the same thing under his name even after his death, saying that this had been entrusted to him by Paul—not realizing that obedience is owed to the Lord rather than to a fellow-servant. Many slips were also given out in the name of the young man Aurelius, who had endured torture, written in the same hand of Lucianus, because Aurelius himself did not know his letters. To offer some resistance to this state of affairs I wrote to them the letter which I sent to you enclosed in my previous one, in which I did not cease to ask and urge that the rule of the Lord's law and of the gospel be kept. After that letter, as though something more measured and restrained were now being done, Lucianus wrote, in the name of every confessor, a letter which very nearly dissolved the whole bond of faith, along with the fear of God, the Lord's command, and the holiness and firmness of the gospel. His claim, made in everyone's name, was that each of them had granted peace, and that he wanted this formula made known through me to the other bishops—a copy of which letter I have enclosed for you. To it was plainly appended the clause 'to those whose case shall be established by inquiry into what they did after their fall.' This has stirred up greater ill-will against us, since when we begin to hear and examine each individual's case we seem to many to be refusing what they now all boast of having received from the martyrs and confessors. In short, the origin of this disturbance has already begun. For in our province, in a number of towns, the crowd has risen up against those set over them, and they have forced the immediate grant to themselves of the peace which they clamor was given once for all to everyone by the martyrs and confessors, terrifying and overpowering their leaders, who lacked sufficient strength of spirit and firmness of faith to resist. Even among us certain troublemakers, who in time past were scarcely kept in check by us and were being put off until they could appear before me, have been kindled as though by torches through this letter and have begun to blaze up all the more and to wring from us the peace they claim was given them. I have sent along a copy of what I wrote to the clergy concerning them. Also enclosed for your reading are two things: what my colleague Caldonius, in his integrity and good faith, wrote to me, and my reply to him. I have likewise sent copies of the letter which Celerinus, a good and steadfast confessor, wrote to that same confessor Lucianus, along with Lucianus's reply, so that you may know how diligently we are laboring over all these matters, and may learn from the truth itself how measured and cautious the confessor Celerinus is, and how modest in the humility and fear proper to our faith, while Lucianus, as I have said, understands the Lord's word poorly and, through his own easy-going nature, is careless about the ill-will he leaves behind for our modesty. The Lord's own command was this: converts among the nations are to be baptized calling upon Father, Son, and Spirit as one, and that same washing blots out sins committed beforehand. Lucianus knows neither this precept nor the law behind it, yet he commands that peace be granted and sins remitted in Paul's name instead, insisting Paul himself had charged him with the task—a claim you can verify for yourselves in this same man's letter to Celerinus. He gives far too little weight to a simple truth: martyrs do not make the gospel; rather, the gospel makes martyrs. For the apostle Paul himself, the man the Lord called a vessel of his own choosing, wrote in his own letter: 'I marvel that you are turning away so quickly from the one who called you by grace, toward a different gospel—not that there is another, except that some are troubling you and wish to twist the gospel of Christ around. Yet even if we ourselves, or an angel out of heaven, should announce to you something other than what we announced, let that one be cursed; as we have said before, so now I say again: whoever announces to you anything other than what you received, let him be cursed.' Your letter, however, which I received, addressed to the clergy, arrived opportunely, as did the one sent by the blessed confessors Moyses, Maximus, and Nicostratus, together with the rest, addressed to Saturninus, Aurelius, and their companions, containing the full strength of the gospel and the firm discipline of the Lord's law. As we labor here and strain with all the strength of our faith against the assault of this ill-will, your letter has helped us greatly, so that by God's providence there might be some relief, and that, before the letter I lately sent you had reached you, your own judgment might already declare to us that, according to the gospel's rule, it stands firmly and with one mind alongside our own. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, always to fare well.
Letter XXVIII. Cyprian to Moyses and Maximus, presbyters, and to the rest of the beloved confessors, brethren, greeting. I had already learned by report, most valiant and blessed brothers, of the glory of your faith and courage, and rejoiced greatly and gave heartfelt thanks that a special favor has prepared you, by the confession of his name, for the crown of our Lord. For you, made the first leaders and captains for the battle of our times, have raised the standards of the heavenly army. You have imbued with your own courage the spiritual contest which God has willed to be waged in this age. You broke the first onset of the rising war with unshaken strength and unshaken steadiness. From you the happy beginnings of the fight arose. From you came the first omens of victory. It has fallen to some to complete their martyrdom through torture; but he who went before in the struggle and became an example of courage to the brothers shares in honor with the martyrs. You have handed down from your own hand the woven crowns to this place, and have offered your brothers a drink from the cup of salvation. To the glorious beginnings of your confession and to the auspicious opening of a victorious campaign there has been added that steadiness of discipline which we have seen from the force of your letter, which you recently sent, with careful admonition, to your colleagues joined with you in confession of the Lord, urging that the holy precepts of the gospel and the life-giving commands once handed down to us be kept with strong and steady observance. Here is another lofty step in your glory; here again, doubled together with your confession, a title to merit before God: to stand firm of foot in this battle-line where an attempt is made to break in upon the gospel, and to drive back with the strength of faith those impious hands raised to undermine the Lord's commands—having already given, at the outset, examples of courage, now to give also lessons in conduct. After rising from the dead, the Lord sent the apostles out with this charge: all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to me now. Go, therefore, to every nation, baptize them by invoking Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one, and teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And the apostle John, mindful of this command, later sets down in his letter: by this, he says, we recognize that we have come to know him, if we hold fast to his precepts. Whoever claims to know him yet fails to keep his commands is a liar, and truth has no place in him. These are the precepts you urge to be kept; these are the divine and heavenly commands you observe. This, and nothing less, is what makes one a confessor of the Lord; this is what makes one a martyr of Christ—holding his word's firmness whole and unbroken in every respect, and not attempting, in the Lord's name, to become a martyr while working to destroy the Lord's own commands, thereby turning, against him, the very distinction he has granted you, armed with weapons received from him, into a kind of rebellion against him. That would be to wish to confess Christ while denying the gospel of Christ. I rejoice, then, over you, most valiant and most faithful brothers, and just as I give thanks for the martyrs honored there for the glory of their courage, in the same measure I give you thanks too, for the crown that belongs to the Lord's own discipline. The Lord has poured out his favor in manifold generosity, distributing the praises and spiritual glories of his good soldiers with rich variety. We too share in your honors; we count your glory as our own glory—we whose times such great blessedness has made illustrious, that it has fallen to our own age to see the tried servants of God and the soldiers of Christ crowned. I wish you, most valiant and most blessed brothers, always to fare well and to remember me.
Letter XXIX. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons, brethren, greeting. So that nothing might escape your notice, dearest brothers, of what was written to me and of what I wrote back, I have sent you a copy of both letters, and I trust that what I wrote back does not displease you. But this too I owed it to you to convey by letter—that pressing need has led me to send letters to the clergy residing in the city. And since it was necessary for me to write through members of the clergy, and since I know that most of ours are away, while the few who are there are barely sufficient for the daily service of the work, it was necessary to appoint some new men to be sent. I would have you know that I have appointed the reader Saturus and the subdeacon Optatus, a confessor, whom we had already, by common counsel, placed close to the clergy some time ago—when we gave Saturus the reading once and again on the day of Easter, or when, lately, in carefully testing readers together with the teaching presbyters, we placed Optatus among the readers of the teachers' pupils, examining whether all the qualities that ought to be present in those being prepared for the clergy were indeed found in them. During your absence, then, I introduced nothing new; rather, something set in motion long before by all of us in common counsel has now, under the pressure of necessity, simply been pushed further along. I wish you, dearest brothers, always to fare well and to remember me. Greet the brotherhood. Farewell.
Letter XXX. To Cyprian, from the presbyters and deacons resident at Rome, greeting. A mind conscious of its own uprightness, sustained by the vigor of gospel discipline, and rendered by heaven's decrees a truthful witness before itself, is wont to rest content with God alone as its judge, seeking no praise from another and fearing no accusation from another; yet doubly worthy of praise are those who, knowing that their conscience owes account to God alone as judge, still desire that their own deeds be approved by their own brethren as well. That you act so, brother Cyprian, is no wonder, since out of your modesty and inborn diligence you wished us to be found sharers of your plans rather than mere assessors of them, so that in your undertakings, as we gave our approval, we might find praise alongside you, and might be joint heirs of your good counsels because we could also stand as their confirmers. For we shall all be believed to have worked as one, since we are all discovered bound together by one and the same agreement of censure and discipline. What indeed suits peace so well, or is so needful amid the warfare of persecution, as holding fast the strictness owed to divine vigor? Whoever slackens it must forever drift on an unsteady course, tossed here and there by the shifting, uncertain storms of affairs, and, as if the rudder of counsel had been wrenched from his grip, will run the ship of the Church's welfare aground upon the rocks; so it becomes plain that the Church's welfare can be secured in no way other than by beating back, as though they were hostile waves, those who act against her, and by keeping ever safe, like a saving rudder amid the tempest, the settled reasoning of discipline itself. Nor is this a policy newly devised by us now, nor have these defenses against wrongdoers arrived among us all at once as fresh remedies; rather, this severity of ours is old, our faith is old, and, we read, our discipline is old as well � for the apostle would never have spoken such lofty praise of us, declaring that your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world, had this very vigor not already, from that time forward, drawn the roots of its faith out of those earlier days. To have fallen short of praise and glory of that kind would be the heaviest of charges. It is a lesser disgrace never to have won the herald's praise at all than to have tumbled down from praise's summit. It is a smaller fault to have gone unhonored by good testimony than to have thrown away the honor of good testimonies once held. It is a lighter matter to have lain obscure and unpraised, with one's virtues intact, than, disinherited from the faith, to have squandered one's own praises. For whatever is put forward to someone's glory, unless guarded by anxious and careful labor, swells instead into reproach for the gravest crime. That we speak the truth here, our earlier letter has already shown, in which we laid before you, in a clear statement, our judgment against those who had betrayed themselves as faithless through the unlawful profession of wicked certificates, as though by this act they seemed to have slipped free of the devil's entangling snares � when in fact they were held fast by that very deed, no less than if they had actually gone up to the impious altars, since by doing this they had themselves borne witness to it; and likewise against those who accepted such certificates as valid even though they had not been present at the making of them, since by having them written up through an agent in this way, they had, in effect, made themselves present. For the one who procured that a thing be done bears no immunity from the crime, nor is he a stranger to the offense whose consent, though the crime was not committed by his own hand, is nonetheless publicly read out; and since the whole sacrament of the faith is understood to rest wholly on confessing the name of Christ, whoever looks for deceitful tricks as his excuse has thereby denied it, and whoever wishes to appear to have satisfied the edicts or laws set up against the gospel has, by that very wish to seem obedient, already obeyed. Nor have we shown you any less clearly our conviction and agreement concerning those who had defiled their hands and mouths with unlawful sacrifices, their minds having been defiled beforehand, which is precisely how their hands and mouths too came to be defiled. Never let it happen that the Roman Church should surrender her vigor through such irreverent ease, or, overturning the majesty of the faith, unstring the sinews of her strictness, so that, while the ruin of the fallen brethren not only still lies prostrate but continues to spread, remedies granted too hastily for their reconciliation would of course do no good, and new wounds would be pressed by a false mercy upon the old wounds of their transgression � with the result that these wretched men would be robbed of even repentance itself, to their own deeper ruin. For how can the medicine of pardon make any progress if the physician himself, cutting repentance short, grants relief to the danger, merely covering the wound instead of allowing the necessary passage of time to draw a scar over it? That is not healing � to speak plainly, it is killing. You also have letters from the confessors themselves � those whom the honor of their confession still keeps shut up here in prison, and whose faith has already crowned them gloriously once in the gospel's contest � letters agreeing with ours, in which they too have laid out the strictness of gospel discipline and have called back unlawful petitions from the Church's sense of shame, lest, by granting these too readily, they should fail to easily mend the ruins of gospel discipline � especially since it would suit no one more than those who had handed themselves over to be racked and torn apart for the gospel by raging men, to keep unstained the dignity belonging to the full measure of gospel vigor, lest they should rightly forfeit the honor of martyrdom by choosing, at the very moment of martyrdom, to betray the gospel. For whoever fails to keep watch, in the very matter through which he possesses something, over what he holds � violating the source from which he holds it � loses what he once possessed. On this score we owe you, and gladly render, the greatest thanks: that you lit up the darkness of their prison with your letters, that you came to them however you were able to gain entry, that you refreshed spirits already made strong by their own faith and confession with your words of encouragement and your letters, that by praising their happy state as it deserved you kindled in them a still hotter longing for heaven's glory, that you drove forward those already inclined, and that, as we believe and hope, you armed them with the strength of your words to come off as victors � so that, although all this seems to spring from the faith of those confessing and from God's own generosity, they may nonetheless appear, in some measure, indebted to you even within their martyrdom. But to come back to the point from which our discourse seemed to have wandered: enclosed you will find the letters we likewise sent to Sicily. Yet a greater necessity presses us to delay action in this matter, since, after the passing of that man of most noble memory, Fabian, no bishop has yet been appointed among us, owing to the hardship of the times and circumstances, to moderate all these questions and to be able, with authority and counsel, to render an account concerning those who have lapsed. And in so vast a matter, it seems best to us, just as you yourself have likewise proposed, that the peace of the Church be upheld first, and only afterward, through a joint deliberation of bishops, presbyters, deacons, confessors, and likewise the laity who have stood firm, should the case of the lapsed be taken up. For it strikes us as both invidious and burdensome not to examine, through the judgment of many, what appears to have been committed by many, and instead to hand down a single verdict, when so great a crime is noted to have spread abroad through so many � since no decree can stand firm unless it is seen to carry the agreement of the majority. Look at nearly the whole world laid waste, with the remnants and wreckage of the fallen strewn everywhere; and for that very reason so weighty a deliberation is required, in proportion to how widely the offense appears to have spread. The remedy must not fall short of the wound, nor the cures fall short of the deaths, so that just as those who fell, fell because in blind rashness they were far too careless, so those striving now to set this matter right should exercise every restraint of counsel, lest anything done otherwise than it ought be judged null and void by all. With one single counsel, then, with the same prayers and the same tears, let both we who up to now seem to have escaped the ruin of this present time, and those who seem to have fallen into these calamities of the age, beseech the divine majesty and beg peace for the name of the Church. Let us cherish one another, guard one another, and arm one another with mutual vows. Let us pray that the lapsed be raised up again; let us pray that those standing firm not be tempted all the way to ruin; let us pray that those reported to have fallen, recognizing the magnitude of their offense, come to understand that they ought not to demand a remedy that is instant and premature. Let us pray that the effect of pardon may follow upon the lapsed only after their repentance, and that, having acknowledged their crime, they be willing meanwhile to grant us patience, and not further disturb the Church's still unsettled state, lest they should appear to have themselves kindled an inward persecution against us, adding to the heap of their offenses the further charge of restlessness � for modesty suits best those whose immodest mind stands condemned in their own offenses. Let them knock at the doors, certainly, but let them by no means break them down. Let them draw near to the threshold of the Church, but let them by no means vault over it. Let them stand guard at the gates of the heavenly encampment, but armed with the modesty by which they may understand that they had once deserted. Let them take up again the trumpet of their prayers, but not one sounding the call to battle. Let them equip themselves with the weapons of modesty, and take up again the shield of faith which, in denying Christ, they had cast away out of fear of death � yet let them believe that they now stand armed against the enemy, the devil, and not against the Church, who mourns their fall. A modest petition, a humble plea, a necessary humility, and a patience that is not idle, will profit them greatly. Let them dispatch tears as envoys of their sorrow; let groans drawn up from the depths of the heart serve as their advocate, giving proof of grief and shame for the crime committed. Indeed, if they truly shudder at the enormity of the disgrace committed, if with a truly healing hand they probe the deadly wound of their heart, their conscience, and the winding depths of that injury, let them even feel shame in asking � since it carries even greater peril and disgrace not to have sought the help of peace at all. But let all of this proceed under solemn obligation, with the very terms of the petition tempered to the demands of the time, with a humble request and a submissive prayer: for the one who is petitioned ought to be softened, not provoked, and just as divine mercy must be kept in view, so divine judgment must be kept in view as well; Scripture itself joins the two: on one page, because you asked me, I forgave you the whole of your debt, and on another, anyone who disowns me in front of other people will in turn be disowned by me in front of my Father and his angels. God gives freely, yet that same generosity makes him no less exacting and watchful over what he has commanded; and just as he calls men to the banquet, so too he casts out, bound hand and foot, beyond the gathering of the saints, the one who has no wedding garment. Heaven he has made ready, but hell too he has made ready. He has made ready refreshments, but eternal punishments too he has made ready. He has made ready light beyond reach, but he has likewise made ready the vast, unending darkness of endless night. Seeking to hold to the measure of this tempering, both for those nearby and for those whom the heat of this persecution had cast down from other, distant provinces, we judged that nothing should be altered before a bishop is appointed, but we believed that care for the lapsed should meanwhile be handled with moderation, so that, while we wait for the bishop God will grant us, the case of those able to bear delay should remain in suspense; but for those whose approaching end allows their life no further delay, if, having performed penance and having often declared their detestation of their own deeds, they have shown through tears, through groans, through weeping, the marks of a grieving and truly repentant soul, since no hope of living, humanly speaking, remains to them � only then should help be extended, carefully and cautiously, leaving to God alone the choice of what becomes of such people and the true reckoning of his own verdict; while we, for our part, take anxious pains that wicked men should not praise us for an excessive readiness, nor truly repentant men accuse us of a harshness that seems cruel. We pray, most blessed and most glorious pope, that you may always fare well in the Lord and remember us.
Letter XXXI. To Pope Cyprian, from Moses and Maximus, presbyters, and Nicostratus and Rufinus and the rest of the confessors who are with them, greeting. Amid the many and varied griefs that beset us on account of the present ruin of so many people across almost the whole world, this chief comfort has come upon us: that on receiving your letter we were lifted up, and took in it a balm for the sorrows of our grieving spirit. We can now grasp, perhaps, why divine providence's grace chose to keep us bound so long behind prison walls: only so that your letter could teach and steel our spirits, letting us approach the crown set aside for us with a still keener longing. For your letter shone upon us like calm after a storm, like the longed-for stillness in a raging sea, like rest amid labors, like health amid dangers and pains, like a bright and gleaming light in the thickest darkness. We drank it in with a thirsting spirit and received it with a hungering desire, so that we rejoice to go into combat with the enemy well fed and nourished by it. May the Lord repay you for this charity of yours, and render the fruit owed for so good a work. The one who urges others on earns a crown's reward every bit as much as the one who actually endures the suffering; praise belongs to the teacher just as fully as to the one taught. And the one who gave the warning deserves honor equal to the one who heeded that warning and obeyed — though at times the greater share of glory settles instead on the instructor rather than on the pupil who merely proved teachable. For this latter, perhaps, would not have had what he practiced, had the former not taught it. We have received, then — we say it again, brother Cyprian — great joys, great comforts, great encouragements, above all because you have followed the glorious martyrs — I will not say deaths, but immortalities — with praises as glorious and as fitting as they deserve. For such passings deserved to be proclaimed in such words, that what was reported should be told exactly as it happened. Your letter let us picture the martyrs' magnificent victories, and it was almost as if our own eyes tracked them on their way toward heaven, and we beheld them as though set among the angels and the powers and the heavenly dominions. And we felt, as it were, with our own ears, the Lord bearing witness of them before his Father, as had been promised them. This it is, then, that lifts up our spirit day by day and sets it aflame to attain the steps of so great a dignity. For what could happen to any man, by divine favor, more glorious or more blessed than to confess the Lord God undaunted in the very midst of the executioners; than, surrounded by a cruel earthly power's assorted and elaborate tortures, with the body itself twisted, broken, and torn open, still to proclaim Christ as God's Son, the spirit slipping away yet unbound; than, having left the world, to have sought heaven; than, having abandoned mankind, to stand among the angels; than, once every worldly barrier has given way, to stand at last unbound before God's own gaze; than to take possession of heaven's kingdom with no waiting required; than to have become a partner in Christ's own passion in the name of Christ; than to have become, by the divine favor of one's own judge, a judge oneself; than to walk away with a conscience untainted, earned by confessing that name; than to have refused compliance with the faith's profane, man-made statutes; than to have borne public witness to the truth with one's own voice; than, through one's own death, to have mastered the very thing every man dreads; than to have won immortality through that very death; than, torn and wrenched by every instrument of savagery, to have overcome the torments by the very torments; than, amid all the pains of a lacerated body, to have held firm by strength of spirit; than not to have shuddered at one's own flowing blood; than to have come to love one's own sufferings once the faith was won; than to have counted the loss of one's life as truly having lived? To this very combat the Lord rouses us, as it were with a trumpet-call from his own gospel, saying: whoever cherishes father or mother above me does not deserve me, and whoever cherishes his own soul above me does not deserve me, and whoever fails to take up his cross and come after me does not deserve me. And again: how fortunate are those who suffer persecution on account of justice, since the kingdom of heaven belongs to them! How fortunate you are, when men persecute and hate you — be joyful and rejoice, for it was in just this way they persecuted the prophets who came before you. And: for you shall stand before kings and governors, and brother will deliver up brother to death, and father his child, and whoever holds out to the very end will be kept safe. And: to the one who overcomes I will grant a seat upon my throne, just as I too overcame and took my seat upon my Father's throne. The apostle, too, asks: what could ever cut us off from Christ's love? Hardship, anguish, persecution, hunger, want of clothing, danger, the blade? Just as it stands written: for your sake we face death the whole day through, reckoned no better than sheep bound for slaughter — yet through all of it we come out victorious, on account of the one who loved us. When we read through these and like sayings gathered from the gospel, and feel them set beneath us by the Lord's own voice like so many torches to kindle our faith, our fear of truth's enemies has given way to something bolder — we now challenge them outright; and by this very fact, that we have not yielded, we have already conquered the enemies of God and overthrown the wicked laws set against the truth. And if we have not yet shed our blood, yet we are ready to shed it; let no one judge this delay of ours a mercy, as though it works against us, gets in the way of our glory, puts off heaven, and keeps us from beholding God in all his splendor. For in a combat of this kind, in a battle in which faith itself contends, it is true mercy for the martyrs not to have put off the delay. Ask, then, dearest Cyprian, that the Lord by his grace may, day by day, more and more richly and readily both arm and enlighten us, and strengthen and fortify us with the powers of his might, so that, as the best of commanders does with his soldiers, having trained and tested us thus far in the camp of the prison, he may now lead us out to the field of the appointed contest. Let him hand us the weapons that are divine — unconquerable darts, a breastplate of righteousness immune to breaking, a shield of faith no blow can pierce, a helmet of salvation that no force can shatter, a sword of the spirit that can never be wounded. For to whom ought we rather to entrust this petition on our behalf than to so glorious a bishop, that we, destined for the sacrifice, might ask for aid from a priest? Here is another joy of ours: that in the office of your episcopate, although for the present you have been drawn apart from the brethren by the condition of the times, you have not been wanting; that you have repeatedly strengthened the confessors by letter; that you have supplied the necessary expenses out of your own honest labors; that in every way you have shown yourself, as it were, always present; that in no part of your office have you limped like some deserter. But we cannot keep silence about what has moved us to still greater and firmer joy, but must follow it with the full witness of our voice. For we have noticed that you rebuked, with fitting censure and as they deserved, those who, forgetful of their own offenses, had wrested peace from the presbyters through hasty and headlong desire during your absence, and those who, without regard for the gospel, had given what is holy of the Lord and pearls away with reckless ease — since so great an offense, one that has raged with unbelievable devastation across almost the whole world, ought not, as you yourself write, to be handled except cautiously and with moderation, with every bishop, presbyter, deacon, confessor — and even the steadfast laity — brought into the consultation, as you yourself testify in your letter, lest, while we wish to relieve ruins out of place, we should seem to be preparing other and greater ruins. For where will fear of God be left, if pardon is granted so readily to those who sin? Their spirits are indeed to be cherished and nurtured toward the proper time of ripeness, and instructed from the scriptures that they have committed a sin greater than all others. Nor should they take heart because they are many; rather, they should be restrained the more because they are not few. A shameless number has never had power to lessen an offense — but shame has, and modesty, and repentance, and discipline, and humility and submission, and the expectation of another's judgment upon oneself, and the endurance of another's sentence upon one's own act. This is what proves repentance. This is what brings a scar over a fresh wound. This is what raises up and lifts the fallen ruin of a cast-down mind, what quenches and puts an end to the burning fever of raging sins. For a physician does not give to the sick what belongs to the healthy, lest untimely food, instead of checking the raging storm of illness, only feed it — lest what could have been cured more quickly by a lessening fast be prolonged instead, through impatience, by a surfeit fed too freely. Hands defiled by impious sacrifice must therefore be washed clean by good works, and mouths wretchedly polluted by unlawful food must be purified by the words of true repentance, and the faithful spirit must be renewed and replanted in the secret places of the heart. Let the frequent groans of the penitent be heard, and let the tears of the faithful again pour from their eyes, that those very eyes which wrongly gazed upon the idols may, by tears that make satisfaction to God, wipe away what they had unlawfully done. Patience is necessary in sickness of every kind. Those who are ill struggle with their pain, and only then hope for health if by endurance they overcome the pain. For a scar that a hasty physician brings on too quickly is unreliable, and the cure breaks open again at any mishap, if the remedies are not applied faithfully, however slow that may be. A flame is quickly called back into a blaze, unless the whole fuel of the fire is put out down to the very last spark — so that men of this sort may rightly know that it is precisely this delay that serves them best, and that the more faithful remedies come from necessary postponements. Besides, what good is it for Christ's confessors to endure the prison's filth, if those denying him face no danger to their own faith? What good is it that chains encircle them for God's name, if refusing to confess God carries no loss of communion? What good is it that captives surrender their glorious souls, if deserters from the faith sense nothing of how grave their dangers and their sins truly are? But if they display excessive impatience and demand an intolerable haste for restoration to communion, in vain do they hurl these complaining and envious words, which have no power against the truth, with insolent and unbridled mouths — since it would have been in their own right to keep what they are now compelled, by a necessity sought of their own will, to beg for. For the faith that was able to confess Christ was also able to be kept by Christ in communion. We wish you well, brother, and ask that you remember us.
Letter XXXII. Greeting from Cyprian; his letter goes out to the presbyters and deacons, the brethren. So that you may know, dearest brethren, what sort of letter I sent to the clergy acting at Rome, and what they wrote back to me, and likewise the reply that Moses and Maximus the presbyters, Nicostratus and Rufinus the deacons, and the other confessors detained alongside them sent back to my letter, I have sent you copies to read. See to it, as far as you are able and with all diligence, that both our letter and their reply become known to our brethren. And if any bishops of my colleagues from abroad, or presbyters or deacons, are present or should arrive, let them hear all this from you. And if they wish to copy the letters and carry them to their own people, let them be given leave to make copies — although I have also instructed our brother Satyrus, the reader, to give to each who wants it the opportunity of transcribing, so that, while the state of the churches is in some way being set in order for the time being, a single, faithful agreement may be kept by all. As for the other matters that must be dealt with, as I have written also to most of my fellow bishops, we shall treat them more fully by common counsel, when, the Lord permitting, we begin to come together as one. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brethren, always to be well. Greet the brotherhood. Farewell.
Letter XXXIII. Our Lord — and his commands are ones we must revere and hold to — sets out, in establishing the bishop's dignity and the framework of his church, these words to Peter in the gospel: you are Peter, I tell you, and it is on this very rock that I shall raise my church, a church that hell's gates will never overpower; to you I will hand the keys of heaven's kingdom, and every binding you make on earth will hold bound in heaven too, and every loosing you make on earth will likewise be loosed in heaven. Out of this, across the successive turns of history, comes the appointment of bishops and the church's whole framework, such that bishops form the church's foundation and every action of the church runs through those same leaders. Since this has been so founded by divine law, I find it astonishing that some people would presume, with such reckless nerve, to send me a letter composed in the church's own name — when it is the bishop, the clergy, and all who have remained steadfast that make up the church. Never — may the Lord's mercy and his unbeaten might never permit — could the church be called the ranks of the lapsed, given what stands written: the God we serve is a God of the living, not of the dead. We indeed wish that all be brought back to life, and by our prayers and groans we ask that they be restored to their former state. Yet suppose some of the lapsed insist on naming themselves the church, and claim the church resides among and within them — what follows, then, except that they ought to be the ones petitioning us for admission into it? It behooves those who, mindful of their own offense, ought to make satisfaction to God, to be modest, quiet, and submissive, refraining from composing any letter as though speaking for the church — knowing instead that it is to the church they are writing. As it happens, some among the lapsed — humble, mild-mannered, awestruck and God-fearing, people who had always labored splendidly and abundantly within the churches without ever crediting the Lord's account with their own efforts — have written to me, aware of his saying: once you have carried out everything commanded, declare yourselves servants of no particular worth, since you have merely done your required duty. Thinking on this, and though they had received a certificate from the martyrs, still, that the satisfaction itself might be admitted before the Lord, they wrote to me, praying, that they acknowledge their offense and are performing true repentance, and are not rushing rashly or importunately toward peace, but are waiting for our presence, saying that peace itself, if they receive it when we are present, will be the sweeter to them. The Lord is my witness how greatly I rejoiced over them, he who has deigned to show what servants of this kind, and such as these, deserve from his goodness. Having received this letter of theirs and then finding that you had sent something different, I request that you sort out clearly what each of you wants; whichever of you sent this present letter, attach your individual names to a petition and forward that petition to me bearing every name. For it is necessary to know first to whom I am to reply. Then I will write back on each point you have raised, according to the limited measure of my position and function. I wish you, brethren, to be well, and to conduct yourselves quietly and peaceably according to the Lord's discipline. Farewell.
Letter XXXIIII. Cyprian sends this greeting to the brethren who serve as presbyters and deacons. You have acted rightly and with discipline, dearest brethren, in that, on the advice of those of my colleagues who were present, you decided that Gaius of Dida, presbyter, and his deacon, should not be admitted to communion — men who, having communicated with the lapsed and offered their oblations, were repeatedly caught in their perverse errors, and who, though warned once and again by my colleagues, as you have written to me, not to do this, persisted stubbornly in their presumption and boldness, deceiving certain brethren of our own people. For these we desire in every way what is useful, and we look to their salvation not with a flattery that corrupts, but with sincere faith, that they might appeal to God with genuine repentance, groaning and grief in full measure, seeing that it is written: call to mind the place from which you fell, and turn to penance; and, further, the sacred text declares: the Lord speaks thus — once you turn back and groan, then rescue comes, and you will recognize where you had been. But how can they groan and do penance, when certain of the presbyters intercede over their groans and tears such that they assume communion ought to be handed out to them without due caution, unaware of what stands written: those who declare you fortunate are leading you astray and disturbing the course of your steps. Rightly, then, our wholesome and true counsels achieve nothing, so long as saving truth is hindered by ruinous flattery and coaxing, and the wounded and sick mind of the lapsed suffers what the bodily sick and infirm also often suffer — that while they reject wholesome foods and useful drinks as though bitter and repugnant, and crave instead those things that seem pleasant and sweet for the present, they bring on their own ruin and death through disobedience and lack of self-control, and do not benefit from the true remedy of the physician's skill, while the sweet enticement of a flatterer deceives them. So, following my letter with faithful and sound judgment as you have, do not now abandon the wiser course you have taken. And read this same letter also to my colleagues, if any are present or should arrive, so that, united in purpose and agreement, we may keep to a sound approach for tending and mending what the lapsed have suffered, planning to address every matter in full once, through the Lord's mercy, we assemble together. In the meantime, should any of our presbyters, deacons, or visiting clergy be so bold and reckless as to grant communion to the lapsed ahead of our ruling, he is to be cut off from our fellowship, and must answer to all of us for such rash behavior once we gather together, the Lord willing. You have also wished that I write back what seems best to me concerning Philumenus and Fortunatus, subdeacons, and Favorinus, acolyte, who withdrew for a time and have now returned. I do not believe it is mine alone to render judgment here, given that a good number of the clergy remain absent still and have not seen fit even now, belatedly, to claim their place back, and this inquiry into each case must be handled and weighed more fully, not only with my colleagues but with the whole body of the people themselves. For the matter must be weighed with careful moderation and pronounced upon, since it will set a precedent for the future concerning the ministers of the church. Meanwhile, let them refrain only from the distribution of the offerings, not as though seen to be deprived of ecclesiastical ministry, but so that everything may be deferred, whole and entire, until our presence among you. I wish you, dearest brethren, always to be well. Greet the whole brotherhood. Farewell.
Letter 35. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons residing at Rome, his brothers, greeting. Both our shared affection and plain reason demand, dearest brothers, that I withhold nothing from your knowledge of what is happening among us, so that we may share a common counsel regarding the good order of the church's administration. For after I sent you a letter by way of our brothers Saturus the reader and Optatus the subdeacon, a conspiracy of reckless daring arose among certain of the lapsed, who refuse to do penance and make satisfaction to God; they sent me a letter demanding not that peace be granted them but claiming it as though already granted, on the ground that, as they claim, Paul granted everyone peace — a claim you will find set out in their letter, a copy of which I have sent you. At the same time I have sent you what I briefly wrote back to them for the moment, and also the letter I subsequently sent to the clergy, so that you might know its contents; a copy of this too I have sent you. But if their recklessness is not checked by either my letters or yours, nor yields to wholesome counsel, we shall do what the Lord has commanded us to do according to the gospel. I wish you, dearest brothers, ever good health. Farewell.
Letter 36. The presbyters and deacons residing at Rome to Cyprian, their father, greeting. When we had read through your letter, brother, which you sent by Fortunatus the subdeacon, we were struck by a double grief and overwhelmed by a twofold sorrow: that no rest at all was granted you amid such pressing trials of persecution, and that the unrestrained insolence of the lapsed brothers was to be noted, carried as far as a dangerous recklessness of words. Yet although these things we have mentioned weighed heavily upon us and our spirit, still your vigor and the severity you have applied, in keeping with the gospel's discipline, tempers so grave a burden of our grief, since you both justly restrain the shamelessness of some and, by exhorting them to penance, show the way of lawful salvation. We were greatly astonished, indeed, that they wished to leap so far forward that, at so pressing and untimely and bitter a moment, amid so vast and immense a crime and offense, they did not so much seek peace for themselves as claim it — nay, even declared that they already possessed it in heaven. But if they have it, what are they asking for that they already hold? And if it is proved, by this very asking, that they do not have it, why do they not submit to the judgment of those from whom they thought peace — which plainly they do not have — must be sought? But should they suppose that they possess, from some other quarter, a special privilege of communion, they ought to weigh it against the gospel, so that only if it does not clash with the gospel's law will it stand secure. Yet how can what seems to stand against the gospel's decree offer a communion in keeping with the gospel? For since every privilege looks toward the grant of indulgence only insofar as it does not disagree with the one to which it seeks to be joined, it is necessary that, because it disagrees with the one to which it seeks to be joined, it lose the indulgence and privilege of that fellowship. Let them weigh, then, what it is they are undertaking here. Should they claim the gospel laid down one rule and the martyrs another, the martyrs themselves, by clashing with the gospel, would stand endangered on two fronts. For the gospel's majesty would seem already shattered and collapsed, were some newly invented decree able to override it; and the martyrs' heads would be stripped of confession's glorious crown, were it discovered that they had not won it through observing the gospel, the very source from which martyrs come — so that, rightly, no one has less standing to rule against the gospel than someone striving to earn the martyr's title by means of that same gospel. We should also like to have this made clear: supposing martyrs are made martyrs solely because, by declining to sacrifice, they held fast to the church's peace at the cost of their own blood being poured out, for fear that, worn down by the pain of torment, they would forfeit salvation along with that peace — on what basis, then, do they imagine that the salvation they themselves believed they would have forfeited by sacrificing should now be handed over to men reported to have sacrificed, when in others' cases they owe the very rule they had earlier appeared to set for themselves? In this matter we observe that the very thing they thought they were doing in their own favor they have in fact turned against themselves. For if the martyrs thought peace ought to be given to these people, why did they not give it themselves? Why did they judge that they should be referred back to the bishop, as they themselves say? For the one who orders a thing done is certainly able to do the very thing he orders done. But, as we understand it — indeed, as the matter itself speaks and cries out — the most holy martyrs judged that a measure of both modesty and truth should be applied on both sides. For since they were being pressed hard by many, in referring them to the bishop they thought they should have regard for their own sense of shame, so as not to be troubled any further; and by not themselves granting communion to these people, they judged that the untouched integrity of the gospel's law should be preserved. You, however, brother, for your own charity's sake, should never cease to temper the minds of the lapsed and to offer the healing of truth to those who err, even though a sick mind is apt to spurn the diligence of those who tend it. This wound of the lapsed is still fresh, and the injury is still rising into swelling. And therefore we are confident that, as time draws on and this violent impulse grows old, they will come to love this very medicine as trustworthy, once it has been applied to them — provided only that there are none to arm them for their own peril, and who, instructing them wrongly, demand for them, in place of the healthful remedies of delay, the deadly poisons of a hastened communion. For we do not believe that all of them would have dared to claim peace for themselves so insolently without some instigation from certain persons. We know the faith of the church of Carthage, we know its training, we know its humility. Hence we were also surprised that we had to note certain things inserted rather harshly among you in a letter, when we have often learned, by many examples of reciprocal affection, of your mutual love and charity for one another. It is time, then, for them to do penance for their offense, to prove the sorrow of their fall, to show shame, to display humility, to exhibit modesty, so that submission on their part might summon God's clemency, and honor rendered to his priest might draw divine mercy down upon them. Their plea, indeed, would have carried far greater weight had the humility of those still standing firm reinforced the prayers made for them, for a petition succeeds all the more readily when the one on whose behalf it is offered truly merits its success. As for the matter concerning Privatus of Lambaesis, you have acted after your custom, wishing to report to us a matter that gave you concern; for it is fitting that all of us keep watch over the whole body of the church, whose members are spread through the several provinces. But even before your letter, the deceit of that cunning man could not remain hidden from us. For when a certain agent of his wickedness, Futurus, his standard-bearer, had come here before and tried fraudulently to draw a letter out of us, he did not go unrecognized, nor did he obtain the letter he wanted. We wish you ever good health.
Letter 37. Cyprian to Moyses and Maximus, presbyters, and the rest of the confessors, brothers, greeting. Celerinus, on his arrival, presented all of you together and each of you singly to our affections, dearest brothers — companion of your faith and courage, and glorious soldier of God in your struggles. We beheld all of you present in him as he came, and as he spoke to us warmly, again and again, about your affection toward me, hearing his words was hearing you yourselves. I rejoice greatly and abundantly whenever such news is brought to me by such men. We too are with you there in prison in a certain sense; we believe we share in the ornaments of divine favor along with you, we who cling so closely to your hearts. Your undivided love binds us to your honor; the Spirit does not allow affection to be separated. Confession encloses you there, affection encloses me here. And indeed we are mindful of you day and night, and whenever we offer prayer in the sacrifices along with many others, and when in private we pray in seclusion, we ask for you the Lord's full favor along with crowns and praises. But to return you the like, our own mediocrity falls short. You give more when you remember us in prayer — you who, hoping now only for heavenly things and meditating only on the divine, ascend by the very delay of your suffering to loftier heights, and by the long passage of time do not diminish your glories but increase them. A first and single confession makes one blessed; yet each time you are invited to quit the prison and instead choose it anew through faith and courage, you confess all over again. Your praises are as many as your days; as many circuits of the months, so many increases of merit. Whoever suffers a single blow wins victory only once; but the one who stays continually amid his torments, grappling with pain yet never overcome, earns a fresh crown each day. Let the magistrates now, and the consuls or proconsuls, glory in the emblems of their yearly rank and their twelve fasces: behold, a heavenly rank has been marked in you with the splendor of an annual honor, and, through the enduring span of a victory's glory, it has now outlasted the cycle of a full year come round again. Sun rising and moon coursing once lit the world; yet within your prison, he who fashioned sun and moon alike shone on you as a brighter light, and in your hearts and minds the brightness of Christ, shining out, poured its eternal and radiant light upon the darkness of that place of punishment, dreadful and deadly to others. Winter passed through the changing months; but you, shut in, weighed the season of winter against the winter of persecution. After winter came the mild air of spring, glad with roses and crowned with flowers; but for you roses and flowers came from the delights of paradise, and heavenly garlands crowned your heads. Behold, summer is now fruitful with the abundance of harvest, and the threshing floor is full of grain; but you, who sowed glory, reap the fruit of glory, and, set upon the Lord's threshing floor, you watch the chaff being burned with unquenchable fire, while you yourselves, already tested and stored like cleansed grains of wheat and precious kernels, count the shelter of your prison as a granary. Nor does autumn lack, for you, the grace of a spiritual season for performing its offices. Outside, the vintage is being pressed and the grape trodden in the winepresses for wine that will fill future cups; you, rich clusters from the Lord's vineyard, grapes already ripe with fruit, trodden by the assault of this world's oppression, feel our winepress in the twisting of your prison, and instead of wine you pour out blood — strong for the endurance of suffering, you gladly drain the cup of martyrdom. So the year unfolds among the servants of God; so the turning of the seasons is kept with spiritual merits and heavenly rewards. Blessed enough are those among you who, passing through these traces of glory, have already departed from this world, and, having finished their course of courage and faith, have come to the embrace and kiss of the Lord, the Lord himself rejoicing. But your glory too is no less — you who, still standing in the contest and destined to follow the glories of your companions, wage the battle a long while, and, unshaken and unmoved in steady faith, offer to God each day a spectacle through your virtues. The longer your fight, the loftier your crown; it is one contest, but built up out of a manifold number of battles. You conquer hunger and despise thirst, and by the strength of your vigor you tread down the squalor of the prison and the horror of that place of punishment. There, pain is subdued, torment is crushed, and death is not feared but desired, for the prize of immortality naturally overpowers it, granting the victor the honor of everlasting life. What a spirit is now in you, how lofty, how capacious a breast, where such and so great things are turned over, where nothing is thought of but the commands of God and the rewards of Christ! There the will is only God's, and though you are still placed in the flesh, the life now being lived is no longer that of the present age but of the age to come. Now, most blessed brothers, be mindful of me, so that among your great and divine thoughts you turn us too over in mind and spirit, and let me be present in your prayers and petitions, when that voice, illustrious through the purity of confession and praiseworthy through the steady course of its own honor, reaches the ears of God, and, with heaven opened to it from these subjugated parts of the world, and, sent upward to the realms above, secures from the Lord's goodness whatever it requests. Indeed, is there anything you might seek from the Lord's kindness that you would fail to merit — you who have so kept the Lord's commands, who have held to the gospel's discipline with the sincere vigor of faith, who, standing firm with the Lord's precepts and his apostles in the uncorrupted honor of courage, have, through the genuineness of your martyrdom, steadied many an unsteady believer? True witnesses to the gospel, and true martyrs of Christ, rooted in its foundations, built upon the rock with solid mass, you have joined discipline with courage, you have summoned others toward reverence for God, turning your own martyrdoms into models for them. I wish you, most courageous and most blessed brothers, ever good health, and that you remember us.
Letter 38. Greeting from Cyprian, addressed jointly to the presbyters, the deacons, and the whole assembled people. When ordaining clergy, dearest brothers, we are accustomed to let divine testimonies go before you first. Our brother Aurelius, an illustrious young man — one the Lord has already approved and God holds dear — is still young in years but advanced in the praise of courage and faith — lesser in the endowment of his age but greater in honor — has fought a double contest: he has confessed twice, and twice been made glorious by the victory of his confession. When he conquered in the first course, he was driven into exile; and when he fought again in a still fiercer contest, he emerged both triumphant and victorious from that struggle of suffering. Every time the adversary chose to test God's servants, this most eager and most courageous soldier met the challenge and won. Merely having contended earlier, when only a few looked on, at the time of his being sent into exile, was not enough for him; he earned the right to contend also in the public forum with more distinguished courage, so that after the magistrate and proconsul he might conquer, and after exile overcome torments too. Nor can I decide which deserves greater praise in him: the splendor of his wounds, or the humility of his bearing; whether he is more notable for the honor of his courage or more praiseworthy for the admiration his shame deserves — so exalted is he in dignity and so humble in modesty, that he seems to have been kept back by providence as a model for the rest, teaching the church's discipline — how God's servants win by courage in confession, then distinguish themselves afterward by how they conduct their lives. He has read the words of Christ, source of all martyrs, and now mounts the reader's platform after having stood in the arena of torture; there he was a spectacle before a crowd of pagans, here he is seen by his own brothers; there his voice drew the astonishment of onlooking strangers, here it draws the delight of the brotherhood. Be assured, then, dearest brothers, that I have ordained him along with the colleagues present with me — news I know you will welcome gladly, wishing that our church might ordain as many men of this sort as it can. And because gladness is always eager and joy cannot tolerate waiting, he has already read for us on the Lord's day — that is, he has inaugurated peace, in dedicating the reading. Keep steadfastly at your prayers, and support our petitions with your own, so that the Lord's mercy, favoring us, may soon restore both a priest safe and sound to his people, and, along with the priest, a reader who is a martyr. I wish you, dearest brothers, ever good health, in God the Father and Christ Jesus.
Letter 39. Cyprian to the presbyters, deacons, and the whole people, brothers, greeting. Beloved brothers, we ought to recognize and embrace the divine favors with which the Lord has deigned to make his church illustrious and honored in our own times, granting relief to his good confessors and glorious martyrs, so that those who confessed Christ so nobly might afterward adorn the clergy with the ministries of the church. Rejoice, then, and be glad with us on reading this letter, in which I and my colleagues who were present report to you that our brother Celerinus, glorious both in virtue and in character, has been joined to our clergy not by human vote but by divine appointment. When he hesitated to consent, the church itself, urging and admonishing him through a nighttime vision, drove him to stop refusing. I too urged him — though the vision had the greater right, and it compelled him — because it was neither right nor fitting that a man whom the Lord had honored with the dignity of heavenly glory should be without ecclesiastical honor. This is the man who was first into the battle of our own time, first among the standard-bearers of Christ's soldiers, who in the earliest and hottest days of the persecution grappled with the very author and prince of the assault; and while he overcame his adversary with an unconquerable steadfastness in the contest, he opened the way of victory for the rest — a victor not by a brief tally of wounds, but a triumphant conqueror through the miracle of a long struggle, under torments that clung to him and lasted. For nineteen days he was shut up under guard in prison, bound in fetters and iron. Yet though chains confined his body, his spirit stayed unbound and free. Through long days without food or drink his flesh withered, yet God nourished the soul within him — a soul kept alive by faith and courage — with food of the spirit. He lay among his torments, stronger than his torments; shut in, greater than those who shut him in; lying down, loftier than those who stood; bound, firmer than those who bound him; condemned, more exalted than his judges. And though his feet were fastened in the stocks, the helmeted serpent was crushed and defeated. On his glorious body the bright marks of his wounds still shine; across the sinews and limbs that long decay had worn down, the marks remain visible for anyone to see. Great and wonderful are the things the brotherhood may hear of his courage and his praises. And if there is anyone like Thomas who trusts his ears too little, the evidence of his eyes is not lacking, so that he may see with his own eyes what he hears with his ears. In this servant of God, glory came from the victory of his wounds, and the memory of his scars preserves that glory. Nor is this title of glory new or unfamiliar to our dearest Celerinus. He walks in the footsteps of his own kin; he is matched by his parents and relatives in an equal honor of divine appointment. His grandmother Celerina was crowned with martyrdom long ago. Likewise his uncles Laurentinus and Egnatius, who had once soldiered in the world's camps yet served, in truth, as God's own soldiers of the spirit, while overthrowing the devil by their confession of Christ, earned the Lord's palms and crowns through a glorious death. As you remember, we always offer sacrifices for them, as often as we celebrate the anniversaries and commemorations of the martyrs' sufferings. He could not, then, be unworthy or lesser, when the dignity of his family and its noble generosity called him on by such examples of courage and faith within his own household. For if it is a matter of praise and renown in a worldly family to be of patrician rank, how much greater is the praise and honor of becoming noble in the proclamation of heaven. I cannot say which I should call more blessed — those for so illustrious a posterity, or this man for so glorious an origin. So evenly does divine favor pass and return among them, that the rank of their offspring illuminates their crown, and the loftiness of his lineage lights up his glory. Beloved brothers, when this man came to us with so great a mark of the Lord's favor, made illustrious by the testimony and the very miracle of the one who had persecuted him, what else was fitting than to set him upon the platform, that is, upon the tribunal of the church, so that, raised up by the height of that loftier place and visible to the whole people because of the brightness of his honor, he might read the precepts and the gospel of the Lord which he follows so bravely and so faithfully? Let the voice that confessed the Lord be heard daily in the very words the Lord himself spoke. Whether some further rank still awaits him within the church's order remains to be seen. Nothing gives a confessor greater power to help his brothers than this: while the gospel reading is heard from his mouth, each hearer may imitate the faith of the one reading it. He was to be joined in this reading office to Aurelius, with whom he is already united in the fellowship of divine honor, with whom he is bound together by every mark of virtue and praise. Both are equals, and each resembles the other: as lofty as they are in glory, so humble in modesty; as much advanced by divine favor, so much subdued in their own quiet and calm, each offering the others examples of virtue and character alike, fit both for combat and for peace — praiseworthy there for strength, here for modesty. In such servants the Lord rejoices, in such confessors he takes glory, whose way of life and conduct so advance the proclamation of his glory that they offer a lesson in discipline to others. For this purpose Christ has long wished them to remain here in the church; for this purpose, snatched back from the midst of death, kept safe as though by a kind of resurrection worked upon them, he has preserved them, so that, since nothing loftier is seen among the brothers in honor, nothing more humble in modesty, the brotherhood that follows them may accompany these same men. Know, however, that they have for now been appointed as readers, because it was fitting that a lamp be set upon a lampstand, whence it may shine on all, and that glorious faces be placed in a higher position, where, seen by all who stand around, they may offer an incentive of glory to those who behold them. For the rest, know that we have already marked out for them the honor of the presbyterate, so that they may be honored with the same allowances as the presbyters and share in the monthly distributions in equal amounts, destined to sit with us once their years have advanced and been strengthened, although a man who has completed the full measure of his years by the dignity of glory can in no way seem lesser in the ripeness of his age. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, always to fare well.
Letter 40. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons and the whole people, dearest and most longed-for brothers, greeting. It was necessary to announce to you, dearest brothers, a matter that concerns both our common joy and the greatest glory of our church. For know that we have been admonished and instructed by divine appointment that the presbyter Numidicus be enrolled among the number of the presbyters of Carthage and take his seat with us in the clergy, bright with the clearest light of confession, illustrious and exalted in the honor of both courage and faith — he who, by his own exhortation, sent ahead of him a glorious company of martyrs killed by stoning and by fire, and who, when his wife was burned alive at his side by that same fire along with the rest — though I would rather say preserved than destroyed — looked on her with joy. He himself, half-burned and buried under stones, was left for dead; but afterward, when his daughter, with the anxious devotion of filial love, went searching for her father's body, he was found still half-alive, drawn out, and revived by companions whom he himself had sent ahead — remaining behind against his own will. But we see the reason he remained: it was so that the Lord might join him to our clergy and, with the falling away of some of our presbyters, might replenish the depleted ranks with glorious priests. And he will indeed be advanced, when God permits, to a fuller place of his priestly office, once we have come, under the Lord's protection, into his presence. Meanwhile let what is now shown be done, so that we may take up this gift from God gratefully, trusting the Lord's mercy will grant still more such honors, so that, with the strength of his church restored, he may make men so gentle and humble flourish in the honor of our assembly. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brothers, always to fare well.
Letter 41. Cyprian to his colleagues Caldonius and Herculanus, and likewise to his fellow presbyters Rogatianus and Numidicus, greeting. I was deeply grieved, dearest brothers, on receiving your letter, since it has always been my purpose and desire to keep our whole brotherhood safe and whole and to preserve the flock undamaged, as charity demands; and now you report to me that Felicissimus has been scheming much, wickedly and treacherously, so that, beyond his frauds and thefts, of which I had already learned much long ago, he has now also attempted, together with a portion of the people, to strike against the bishop — that is, to cut the sheep off from their shepherd, to pull children from their parent, and to break apart the members of Christ. And when I sent you in my place as deputies, so that you might settle the needs of our brothers with those funds, and, for any who also wished to practice their trades, assist their wants with such supplement as was sufficient, while also taking into account their ages, their circumstances, and their merits — so that even now I, on whom this care rests, might wish to know all of them and to advance to the offices of church administration those who are worthy, humble, and gentle — that man has interfered, so that no one who deserved relief could be relieved, nor could the matters I had wished be sorted out by your careful examination; he has even threatened our brothers who were first to come forward to be relieved, with wicked power and violent intimidation, that they would have no share with him in death if they chose to obey us. And after all this, neither moved by the honor of my office nor daunted by your authority and presence, acting on nothing but his own impulse and unsettling the brothers' peace, he has torn himself away with a great many followers, proclaiming himself, in reckless madness, the leader of a faction and the chief of a schism — in which, indeed, I rejoice that a great many brothers have withdrawn from his rashness and preferred to side with you, choosing instead to stay under the church as their mother and take their support from what the bishop distributed; and I know for certain that the rest, too, will do the same in peace and will soon abandon their rash error. Meanwhile, since Felicissimus has threatened that those who obeyed us — that is, who remained in communion — would have no share with him in death, let him receive the sentence he himself pronounced first: let him know that he is cut off from us, since to the frauds and thefts we have clearly established against him is now added the charge of adultery, which our brothers, men of weight, have reported that they detected and have affirmed they will prove. All this we shall investigate fully when, by the Lord's permission, we have met together with many colleagues. But Augendus too, who, giving no thought to the bishop or the church, joined himself in the same conspiracy with that man — if he persists further with him — let him receive the sentence which that factious and reckless man invites upon himself. But let anyone who joins his conspiracy and faction know that he will have no communion with us in the church, since he has chosen of his own will to separate himself from the church. Have these words of mine read out to our brothers, then forward them to the clergy at Carthage, adding the names of all those who have joined themselves to Felicissimus. I wish you, dearest brothers, always to fare well.
Letter 42. Caldonius, together with his colleagues Herculanus and Victor, and likewise with the presbyters Rogatianus and Numidicus. We have withheld communion from Felicissimus and Augendus, and likewise from Repostus, one of the exiles, and from Irene of the Rutili and Paula the seamstress, as you ought to know from my notation. We have likewise withheld it from Sophronius, himself also one of the exiles, and from Soliassus the baker.
Letter XLIII. Cyprian, to all the people, greeting. Dearest brothers, Vitius — a presbyter of complete faith and integrity — together with Rogatianus and Numidicus, confessor-presbyters shining with the glory that God's favor confers, and also the deacons, good men entirely given over to serving the church, along with the rest of the ministers, are giving you the full measure of their presence, tirelessly building each of you up through constant exhortation and shaping and correcting the minds of the lapsed with sound counsel; even so, I too admonish you as far as I am able, and visit you by letter in whatever way I can — by letter, I say, dearest brothers. For the spite and treachery of certain presbyters is why I was kept from reaching you before Easter: remembering their old conspiracy, and still harboring that ancient venom against my episcopate — no, truly against your own vote and God's own verdict — they are starting up again their long-standing assault on us, along with their sacrilegious plots, using their usual treachery. Yet by God's providence, even though we neither wanted nor sought this, and indeed pardoned and stayed silent, they have paid the penalties they had earned: rather than being thrown out by us, they threw themselves out; they passed judgment on themselves by their own conscience; conspirators and wrongdoers, they drove themselves from the church of their own will, in line with your own sacred votes. It has now become plain where the Felicissimus faction sprang from, on what foundation and by what force it held together. Long ago these same men were feeding certain confessors encouragement and provocation not to make peace with their bishop nor to keep church discipline, in faith and calm, according to the Lord's own commands — so that they would fail to preserve the honor of their confession through a blameless and undefiled manner of life. And as if corrupting the minds of some confessors and arming a fragment of a shattered brotherhood against God's priesthood had not been enough, they have now turned their poisoned trickery toward destroying the lapsed as well — aiming to lure the sick and wounded, those least able and least firm, given the disaster of their own collapse, to adopt a sounder plan — away from the cure for their wound; and, setting aside the prayers and pleas by which the Lord is to be reconciled through lasting and repeated satisfaction, to draw them by the false promise of a deceitful peace into disastrous recklessness. But I implore you, brothers: stay alert against the devil's traps, and, anxious for your own salvation, keep an even closer watch against this lethal deception. Here is another persecution, here is another trial, and these five presbyters are nothing but the same five ringleaders who not long ago were bound by an edict handed to the magistrates, aiming to undercut our faith and turn the fragile hearts of the brothers toward deadly traps by betraying the truth. This same scheme, this same overthrow, is now being carried out through the five presbyters allied with Felicissimus, to destroy salvation — so that God goes unpetitioned, so that the very man who denied Christ does not entreat that same Christ he denied, so that after the guilt of the crime there is no penance sought, so that satisfaction is not rendered to the Lord through the Lord's own bishops and priests; instead, with the Lord's priests set aside, a fresh scheme of sacrilegious innovation rises up against gospel discipline. And though we ourselves, along with the confessors and city clergy, and likewise every bishop established in our province or overseas, had already agreed that nothing be altered in the matter of the lapsed unless we all assemble together and, taking counsel jointly, settle on a decision balanced between discipline and mercy — against this resolution of ours they rebel, and all priestly authority and power is being torn down by their conspiring factions. What penalties I am now suffering, dearest brothers, since I cannot come to you in person at present, cannot go to each of you myself, cannot myself urge you as the Lord and his gospel teach! It was not enough that two years of exile have already passed, with the sorrowful parting from your faces and your eyes, the endless grief and groaning that tortures me alone, apart from you, in unbroken lament, the tears that flow day and night, because it has not yet fallen to me to greet you — you whom such love and passion made your bishop — nor yet to be held in your arms. Added to this wasting of my spirit has come a still greater sorrow: that amid so great an anxiety and need I cannot run to you myself, since, because of the threats and traps of the treacherous, we are careful that our arrival not stir up a greater uproar there, and — since a bishop in every matter ought to provide for peace and quiet — that I myself should not appear to have given an opening for unrest and to have stirred the persecution up afresh. Even so, dearest brothers, even so, I both warn you and urge you: do not rashly trust ruinous voices, do not readily give in to deceitful words, do not mistake night for day, darkness for light, hunger for nourishment, thirst for drink, poison for medicine, or death for salvation. Do not let the age or standing of these men mislead you — men who, matching the ancient wickedness of those two elders, just as those elders tried to corrupt and defile the chaste Susanna, likewise try, through their adulterous teaching, to defile the church's purity and violate the gospel's truth. God cries out and declares: do not heed the words of false prophets, for the visions in their own hearts deceive them; what they speak does not come from the Lord's mouth; to those who cast off the Lord's word they say, peace will be yours. Peace is now being offered by men who themselves have none, nor do they let the church bring the lapsed back and recall them — men who have themselves broken away from the church. There is one God, one Christ, one church, and one chair, founded by the Lord's own voice upon Peter; no other altar can be raised, no new priesthood established, beyond that single altar and that single priesthood. Whoever gathers anywhere else, scatters. Whatever human fury sets up in defiance of the divine ordinance is adulterous, impious, sacrilegious. Keep well away from any dealings with such men, and avoid their talk as you would flee a spreading cancer or a plague, since the Lord warned us beforehand, saying: they are blind guides leading the blind, and when a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit. Our prayers, which day and night we pour out to God together with you, plead on your behalf, so that you may satisfy him with fitting amends; our tears plead too, tears by which the guilt of the sin you committed is washed away; and the peace you seek from the Lord's mercy, sincerely and in true faith, likewise pleads for you. Do they not know it is written: and the prophet who dreams a dream, the one who spoke to lead you astray from the Lord your God? Brothers, let no one lead you astray from the Lord's paths; let no one steal you away as Christians from Christ's gospel; let no one drag the church's children off from the church. Let only those perish who chose ruin for themselves; let only those remain outside the church who tore themselves away from the church; let only those go without bishops who rose up against their bishops; let only those bear the penalty of their plot who, once by your votes and now by God's own verdicts, have earned the sentence their conspiracy and malice deserved. The Lord cautions us in his gospel, saying: you set aside God's commandment in order to establish your own tradition. Let those who set aside God's commandment and try to establish a tradition of their own be met by you with firm and unwavering rejection. Let a single fall suffice for the one who has lapsed; let no one, through his own scheming, cast down further those who wish to rise again; let no one press down and crush further those already lying prostrate, whom we pray may be raised up by God's own hand and arm; let no one strip of every hope of salvation those who, half-alive, beg to regain their former health; let no one, through the darkness of his own collapse, extinguish for the wavering the last light along the path of salvation. The apostle instructs us, saying: if anyone teaches otherwise and will not agree with the healthy teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, being puffed up with pride, withdraw from that person. And elsewhere he says: let no one deceive you with hollow words, for it is on account of these very things that God's wrath falls upon the sons of disobedience; do not, then, share in their fate. There is no cause for you to be taken in by the hollow words of their perversity and begin sharing their fate. I beg you, withdraw from such men, and stand with us in our counsel — we who day after day pour out unbroken prayers to the Lord on your behalf, who long to see you called back to the church through the Lord's mercy, who ask God for the fullest peace: peace for the mother first, and then for her children. Add your own prayers and pleas to ours; add your tears to our weeping. Flee the wolves who cut sheep off from their shepherd; flee the poisonous tongue of that devil who, ever a liar and a deceiver from the world's very beginning, tricks by deceiving, wounds by flattering, does harm by promising good, and destroys by pledging life. Even now his words gleam and his poison is obvious: he offers peace precisely so that peace is never attained; he offers salvation precisely so that the sinner never reaches salvation; he offers the church, since his one goal in all of it is that whoever trusts him should be lost from the church entirely. Now, dearest brothers, is the moment for those among you who stand firm to keep persevering, holding on with unbroken constancy to the glorious steadfastness you showed through the persecution — and for those who fell under the enemy's scheming in this second trial to think faithfully of their hope and their peace, and, so that the Lord may pardon them, not to turn away from the Lord's priests, since it is written: and whoever acts arrogantly, refusing to obey the priest or the judge holding office in those days, that man shall die. This is the last and closing trial of this persecution, and, with the Lord's protection, it too will soon be over, so that after Easter I may come before you in person along with my colleagues; and there, together, according to your own judgment as well and the shared counsel of us all — as had already been agreed — we shall be able to settle and refine what must be done. But if anyone, unwilling to do penance and make satisfaction to God, goes over to Felicissimus and his party and attaches himself to the heretical faction, let that person know that he can never afterward return to the church and share communion with Christ's bishops and people. I wish you, dearest brothers, always good health, and that you persist with us in unceasing prayer to beg the Lord's mercy.
Letter XLIV. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. Dearest brother, some men sent by Novatian came to us: Maximus a presbyter, Augendus a deacon, along with a certain Machaeus and Longinus. But once we had learned, both from the letters they were carrying and from their own talk and insistence, that Novatian had been set up as bishop, we were troubled by the wrongness of an ordination carried out unlawfully and against the Catholic church, and decided they must be shut out from communion with us at once. Having for a time pushed back and answered what they were stubbornly and obstinately trying to argue, I and the many colleagues gathered around me nonetheless held off until Caldonius and Fortunatus, our colleagues, should arrive — men we had recently sent to you and to our fellow bishops present at your ordination, as our representatives — so that, once they came back and told the true story of what had happened, the wrongdoing of the other side could be shattered with greater weight, through their unmistakable proof. Later our colleagues Pompeius and Stephen also came, and they too, to brief us further on this end, brought forward clear signs and testimony matching their own seriousness and honesty, so there was no longer even a need to hear out further those sent by Novatian. When these men, at the gathering, burst in amid spiteful jeers and unruly shouting, demanding that the charges they claimed to have and to prove be examined publicly before us and the congregation, we judged it beneath our dignity to let colleagues who had already been chosen, ordained, and given the commendable approval of so many, be tossed about any further, their honor left open to rivals' slanderous voices. And because setting down in writing every point on which they were refuted and beaten, and shown by their unlawful attempts to have manufactured a heresy, would take too long, you will hear it all in full detail from Primitivus, our fellow presbyter, when he reaches you. Let them go running about looking for partners in their stubbornness and their broken, erring cause. We have given them our answer once already, and we keep insisting that, once they set aside this ruinous quarrel and strife, they ought to recognize that abandoning the mother is impiety, and to understand plainly that once a man has been made bishop — confirmed by his fellow bishops' and the people's own testimony and verdict — no one else can in any way be installed in his place. So if they genuinely wish to look after their own interests peacefully and in good faith, if they claim to stand for the gospel and for Christ, let them come back to the church first. I wish you, dearest brother, lasting good health.
Letter XLV. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. Dearest brother, what suited the servants of God, and above all priests devoted to justice and peace, we had lately sent our colleagues Caldonius and Fortunatus to do: namely, that not merely through the persuasion carried in our letters, but through their own presence and the joint counsel of all of you, they might strive and work as hard as they could to bring the scattered members of a divided body back together, restoring them to the Catholic church's oneness, and to knit fast the tie of Christian love. But since the opposing side's stubborn, unbending obstinacy refused not only the embrace and bosom of the root and the mother, but, as the quarrel grew worse and festered further, set up its own bishop for itself, and, against the divine order once handed down as a sacred trust and against Catholic unity, made for itself outside the church a rival and adulterous head — once we had received letters from both you and our colleagues, and once our dear friends and colleagues Pompeius and Stephen, good men, had also arrived, through whom all this was affirmed and proved to us firmly and with shared joy, we have, following what the holiness and truth of divine tradition and church order required, sent our letter on to you. We have likewise arranged for this same news to reach each of our colleagues throughout our province, and have instructed that the brothers there also be supplied with letters on the matter. Yet our own mind and intention had already been made known at that time to the brothers and to the whole people there, when, upon receiving letters recently from both sides, we read your letter and made your episcopal ordination known to every ear. Mindful too of our shared honor, and holding fast to the respect owed to priestly gravity and holiness, we rejected with scorn the bitter, accusatory material gathered from the other side into a written pamphlet, weighing and considering together that in so large and devout a gathering of brothers, with God's priests seated together and the altar set before them, such things ought to be both read and heard. For matters are not to be put forward carelessly, nor published rashly and without thought, if, composed in a spirit of discord, they would scandalize those who hear them and would unsettle with uncertain rumor the brothers stationed far off across the sea. Let those answer for it who, serving either their own rage or their own appetite, forgetting divine law and holiness, are eager for the moment to boast of things they cannot prove, and, unable to tear down and overcome our innocence, are satisfied to smear it with lying report and false rumor. Surely it falls to those set over us, the priests, to make sure that such writings, whenever composed by certain persons, are rejected by us. For otherwise, where would we find what we are taught and what we teach is written: keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit? And elsewhere: your mouth has overflowed with malice, and your tongue has woven snares; sitting, you slandered your brother, and against your mother's son you set a stumbling block; and likewise what the apostle says: let no evil word proceed from your mouth, but only what is good for building up the faith, that it may give grace to those who hear. We have shown, moreover, that this is the right course — that whenever such things are composed through the reckless slander of certain people, we permit them to be read in our presence. And so, dearest brother, when writings of that kind against you and against the fellow presbyter seated with you reached me, I had only what conveyed a devout plainness read aloud to clergy and people, nothing that echoed with the barking of curses or abuse. As for our wish to have the written testimony of our colleagues who had been present at your ordination — it was not that we had forgotten old custom and were chasing something new, since it would have been enough for you simply to announce by letter that you had been made bishop, had there not been a faction on the other side at odds with us, one whose slanderous, accusing fabrications were troubling the minds of our fellow colleagues and of very many brothers alike, and confusing their hearts. To lay that matter to rest, we thought it necessary that you too be given the firm, solid backing of colleagues writing on your behalf; and they, declaring in their letters testimonies worthy of your character, your life, and your discipline, cleared away, even among your rivals — men who delight in novelty or wrongdoing — every trace of doubt and disagreement. And having weighed it by a sound method in keeping with our own advice, amid this unrest among troubled brothers, they gave sincere and firm approval to your priesthood. For this, brother, above all else, we labor and must labor: to guard, as far as we are able, the unity handed down to us as heirs by the Lord and through the apostles, and, insofar as it depends on us, to gather back into the church the sheep who wander and stray, whom the stubborn faction and heretical enticement of certain men have severed from their mother — leaving outside only those who, through their own stubbornness or rage, have persisted and refused to return to us, and who will themselves answer to the Lord for the division and separation they have caused, and for the church they have abandoned. As for how far this touches the matter of the presbytery involved and of Felicissimus — so that you can learn what took place here, our colleagues have sent you a letter signed in their own hand; from it you will find out what they decided and declared, once they had heard the case. But you would do well, brother, also to have read there to the brothers copies of the letter that, out of our shared affection, I recently sent by our colleagues Caldonius and Fortunatus for you to read — the letter I had written there about that same Felicissimus and those same presbyters, addressed to the clergy though not to the people — copies laying out both the ordination and the account of what happened, so that our whole fraternity, here and there alike, may be fully informed through us. I have now likewise sent the same copies by way of Mettius the subdeacon and Nicephorus the acolyte, whom I have sent on. I wish you, dearest brother, lasting good health.
Letter XLVI. Cyprian to Maximus, Nicostratus, and the other confessors, greeting. Since you have often learned from my letters, dearest brothers, with what regard for your confession and what devotion to our conjoined brotherhood I have kept my speech, I beg you now to trust and rest upon this letter of mine, in which I write to you about your conduct and your praises both simply and faithfully, offering you counsel. For it weighs on me and grieves me, and an unbearable sadness of a heart struck down and almost prostrated presses upon me, when I learned that there, contrary to God's ordinance, contrary to the law of the gospel, contrary to the unity of catholic instruction, you have agreed to the making of another bishop — that is, that which is neither right nor lawful, the setting up of a second church, the tearing apart of the members of Christ, the rending, by a divided rivalry, of the one heart and body of the Lord's flock. I beg that among us at least this unlawful rift of our brotherhood not continue, but that, mindful of your confession and of the divine tradition, you return to the mother from whom you came forth, from whom, amid that same mother's rejoicing, you came to the glory of confession. And do not think that you are thereby upholding the gospel of Christ, while you cut yourselves off from Christ's flock and from his peace and concord, when it befits glorious and good soldiers far more to stand fast within their own camp, and, being stationed within, to handle and provide for those matters which must be dealt with in common. For since our unanimity and concord ought never to be torn apart at all — because, the church not having been abandoned by us, we cannot go outside and come to you — we ask and beg, with whatever exhortations we can, that you rather return to the mother church and to your own brotherhood. I wish you, dearest brothers, always to fare well.
Letter XLVII. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. I judged it both a religious duty and a necessary one, dearest brother, to write a brief letter to the confessors who are there and who, led astray by the obstinacy and perversity of Novatian and Novatus, have withdrawn from the church, so that, out of the affection we share, I might urge upon them a coming-back to the mother from whom they sprang, namely the catholic church itself. I first had this letter read to you by Mettius the subdeacon, so that no one might pretend that I had written something other than what is contained in my letter. I have nonetheless instructed this same Mettius, sent by me to you, to act according to your judgment; and if you think the confessors ought to be trusted with this same letter, let him then deliver it to them. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter XLVIII. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. Your letter reached me, dearest brother, carried by Primitivus our fellow presbyter, and in it I found you troubled because, after a letter had been directed to you from the colony of Hadrumetum in the name of Polycarp, and after Liberalis and I had come to that same place, letters had then begun to be directed there to the presbyters and deacons. I want you to know, and to believe for certain, that this was done with no disloyalty or intent of insult. Rather, when several of us colleagues, gathered together in one place, had determined that, delegates having been sent to us from our fellow bishops Caldonius and Fortunatus, everything should meanwhile be held in suspense until those same colleagues of ours returned to us, matters there having either been brought back to peace or ascertained according to the truth — the presbyters and deacons residing at Hadrumetum, our fellow bishop Polycarp being absent, did not know what we had jointly decided. But when we ourselves arrived in person, and our decision became known, they too began to observe what the rest were observing, so that the agreement among the churches established there might not differ in any respect. Yet certain persons sometimes trouble minds and spirits with their talk, reporting things otherwise than the truth actually stands. For as we gave an account to individual travelers by sea, so that they might not sail amid any scandal, we know that we urged them to acknowledge and hold fast to the source and root of the catholic church. But since our province is spread rather widely, and has Numidia and Mauretania attached to it as well, lest a schism arising in the city should confound the minds of those absent with uncertain rumor, it was resolved that, the truth of the matter being upheld by us through the bishops, and a greater authority being established to confirm your ordination, then at last, every scruple having been shaken from each person's heart, letters should be written — as indeed they are being written — to absolutely everyone stationed there, so that all our colleagues might alike approve and hold firmly both your fellowship, that is, the unity of the catholic church, and their affection for you. We rejoice that this has come about by divine will and that our plan has proceeded providentially. For thus now both the truth and the dignity of your episcopate stand founded in the clearest light, by the most manifest and most firm confirmation. And so, through the written replies our colleagues sent us from there, and through what our fellow bishops Pompeius, Stephanus, Caldonius, and Fortunatus reported and attested, all might come to know both the necessary origin and the just reason for your ordination, together with its glorious freedom from any stain. That we may administer this steadfastly and firmly together with our other colleagues as well, and hold to it in the harmonious unanimity of the catholic church, divine protection will bring to completion — so that the Lord, who deigns to choose and appoint priests for himself in his church, may also, by his own will and help, watch over those he has chosen and appointed, guiding, inspiring, and supplying both the firmness needed to restrain the defiance of the wicked and the gentleness needed to foster the repentance of the lapsed. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter XLVIIII. Cornelius to his brother Cyprian, greeting. As great as the anxiety and worry we bore over those confessors who had been ensnared and almost deceived by the deceit and malice of a crafty and cunning man, and estranged from the church, so great is the joy that has now come upon us; and we give thanks to God almighty and to Christ our Lord, since, their error recognized and the venomous cunning of that malicious man understood — like a serpent's — of their own plain will they returned to the very church they had abandoned, exactly as they themselves confess in their own words. And at first indeed our brothers of proven faith, loving peace and desiring unity, reported their swelling pride softening into gentleness — yet the report was not reliable enough for us to be easily persuaded that they had suddenly changed. But afterward the confessors Urbanus and Sidonius came to our fellow presbyters, affirming that Maximus, confessor and presbyter, ... together with them likewise desired to return to the church. But since much had gone before, contrived by them, which you too have learned from our fellow bishops and from my letters, so that they should not rashly be trusted, it was decided that these things which they had sent by delegation should be heard from their own mouth and confession. When they had come and were questioned by the presbyters about what they had done, at last, as for the letters, crammed with slander and abuse, which had gone out under their names to every church and had stirred nearly all of them into turmoil, they claimed to have been tricked and to have had no idea what those letters held, saying they had merely put their signatures to them after that man's cunning led them astray; they also owned that they had set schism and heresy in motion, in that they allowed a hand to be laid on him as though for ordination to the episcopate. When these and other things were laid to their charge, they begged that they be blotted out and removed from memory. When the whole matter had been reported to me, it was decided to convene the presbytery. Five bishops were also present, who were there that day, so that, with the plan firmly settled, it might be decided by common consent what should be observed concerning their persons. And so that you might know the impulse and the counsel of each, it was decided that our own opinions too should be brought to your notice, which we have appended below. This having been done, Maximus, Urbanus, Sidonius, and a good many brothers who had joined themselves to them came into the presbytery, begging with the utmost entreaty that what had previously been done should fall into oblivion, with no mention made of it, as though nothing at all had been done or said, and that, all things being mutually forgiven, they might now show God a heart made clean and pure, in keeping with the gospel's saying that those pure of heart are blessed, for they shall look upon God. As followed from this, the whole matter had to be made known to the people, so that they too might see, established in the church, those whom they had for so long seen wandering and straying, and had grieved over. Their will being known, a great gathering of the brotherhood took place; there was one voice of all giving thanks to God, expressing the joy of their hearts in tears, embracing them as though on that day they had been freed from the punishment of prison. And to set down their own words: 'Cornelius', they said, 'is known to us as bishop of the most holy catholic church, God almighty and Christ our Lord having chosen him. Our error we own. Trickery was worked upon us. Treacherous and wheedling talk caught us in its snare. Even though we may have looked as if joined in some association with a schismatic, heretical man, our heart all the while never left the church. We know well enough that God is one, that the Christ we have confessed as Lord is one, that the Holy Spirit is one, and that within the catholic body a single bishop is what must be.' Who would not be moved by such a profession from them, so that what they had confessed before worldly power they should now confirm, established in the church? Wherefore we ordered Maximus the presbyter to resume his place. As for the rest, with the enormous approval of the people, we forgave to God almighty all that had been done before, in whose power all things are kept in reserve.
Letter L. Cornelius to his brother Cyprian, greeting. So that nothing might be lacking to the future punishment of this wicked man, cast down by the powers of God, when Maximus and Longinus and Machaeus had been expelled from that place, he rose up again; and, as my previous letter told you (the one carried by Augendus the confessor), Nicostratus, Novatus, Evaristus, Primus, and Dionysius have by now, I suppose, reached that place. Let watch therefore be kept, so that it may become known to all our fellow bishops and brothers: that Nicostratus is guilty of many crimes, and not only committed fraud and plunder in the accounts he managed for his fleshly patroness, but also — a thing reserved for his everlasting punishment — carried off no small deposits belonging to the church; that Evaristus stood among those who stirred up the schism, and that in his place, over the people he had once led, Zetus now holds the office of bishop as his successor; and that Novatus has marked out here such deeds, by his malice and insatiable greed, as he always practiced there among us — so that you may know what sort of leaders and protectors this schismatic and heretic always keeps joined to his side. Fare well, dearest brother.
Letter LI. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. We profess, dearest brother, that we have given and continue to give the greatest thanks, without ceasing, to God the Father almighty and to Christ his Lord and our saving God, because his church is so protected by divine power that its unity and holiness are not perpetually or wholly corrupted by the obstinacy of treachery and heretical depravity. For we have read your letter, and received with exultant joy the fullest measure of our shared prayer, that Maximus the presbyter, and the confessors Urbanus, together with Sidonius and Macarius, have returned to the catholic church — that is, having laid aside their error and abandoned their schismatic, indeed heretical, madness, they have sought again, with faithful soundness, the dwelling of unity and truth, so that from whence they had gone forth to glory they might return there gloriously, lest those who had confessed Christ should afterward desert Christ's camp, and lest those who had not been conquered by force and violence should be tempted away from the faith of love and unity. Behold the unblemished and untarnished wholeness of their praise; behold the uncorrupted and solid worth of the confessors — to have withdrawn from deserters and fugitives, to have abandoned betrayers of the faith and assailants of the catholic church. Deservedly, as you write, both clergy and people and the whole brotherhood received them on their return with the greatest joy, since, when confessors preserve their glory and return to unity, there is no one who does not count himself their companion and sharer in their glory. We can gauge the gladness of that day from our own feelings; for if, here, upon your letter reporting their confession, the whole number of the brothers rejoiced and received the news with the greatest eagerness of common congratulation, how much more there, where the very event and its present joy were unfolding before everyone's eyes? For since the Lord says in his gospel that there is the greatest joy in heaven over one sinner doing penance, how much greater is the joy, alike on earth and in heaven, over confessors returning to the church of God with their glory and their praise, and making, by the trust and proof of their own example, a path of return for others? For here error had led certain of our brothers to think they were following the fellowship of the confessors. Their error now removed, light has been poured into the hearts of all, and it has been shown that the catholic church is one, and cannot be torn apart or divided. Nor will anyone now easily be able to be deceived by the wordy speeches of a raging schismatic, now that it stands proven: soldiers of Christ, good and glorious as they are, cannot be kept for any length of time outside the church through someone else's treachery and deceit. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter LII. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. Both diligence and love marked what you did, dearest brother, when you hurried Niceforus the acolyte off to us, to announce to us the glorious joy concerning the returned confessors, and to instruct us fully about the new and destructive machinations of Novatian and Novatus aimed at assailing the church of Christ. For the day before, the guilty faction of heretical depravity had come here — already ruined itself, and destined to ruin others who agreed with it — and on the following day Niceforus arrived with your letter, from which we learned, and have begun to teach and instruct others in turn, that Evaristus, from being a bishop, has remained not even a layman, but is banished from his see and his people, an exile from the church of Christ wandering through distant provinces, and that he, himself a shipwreck of truth and faith, is stirring up like shipwrecks among certain others resembling him; that Nicostratus too, having lost the deacon's office of holy administration, having sacrilegiously and fraudulently withdrawn church funds and denied the deposits of widows and orphans, did not so much wish to come to Africa as flee there from the city because of his awareness of his plunder and abominable crimes; and that now, a deserter and fugitive from the church, as though changing one's region were the same as changing one's character, he boasts of himself further as a confessor and proclaims it, though one who has denied the church of Christ can no longer be called, nor be, a confessor of Christ. For the apostle Paul writes: 'On account of this a man will leave his father and mother, and the pair will become a single flesh — a mystery of great weight'; yet, he adds, my meaning points to Christ and the church. Given, then, that the blessed apostle states this and, in his own sacred words, bears witness that Christ and the church are joined by ties nothing can undo, how could anyone stand with Christ while standing apart from Christ's own bride, outside her church? Or how could someone claim the task of directing or shepherding the church, when it is that very church of Christ he has plundered and cheated? As for Novatus, nothing needed to be reported to us from there, since it should rather be through us that Novatus is shown to you: a man always greedy for revolution, raging with the insatiable rapacity of avarice, puffed up with arrogance and the stupor of swollen pride, the bishops there never held him in anything but contempt, every priest without exception has denounced him aloud as both heretic and traitor, he is ever on the watch to betray, ever fawning in order to trick, never loyal enough to love — a torch and a fire for kindling the flames of sedition, a whirlwind and a storm for making shipwreck of the faith, an enemy of quiet, an adversary of tranquility, a foe of peace. In short, once Novatus withdrew from you there — that is, once the storm and whirlwind withdrew — quiet was in part restored there, and the glorious and good confessors who, at his instigation, had departed from the church, returned to the church after he had left the city. This is the same Novatus who among us first sowed the fire of discord, who separated certain of the brothers there from their bishop, who during the very persecution was, for overturning the minds of the brothers, a kind of second persecution to us in his own right. He is the one who made Felicissimus, his own henchman, a deacon, without my permission or knowledge, by his own faction and ambition, and who, sailing with his own storm to Rome as well, to overturn the church there, attempted similar and equal things — tearing a portion of the people away from the clergy, rending apart the concord of a brotherhood that had held well together and loved one another. Clearly, since Rome, in keeping with its greatness, ought to take precedence over Carthage, he committed there greater and graver deeds — he who here had made a deacon against the church, there made a bishop. Nor should anyone marvel at this in such men: the wicked, maddened by their own fury, are always driven on, and once they have done their crimes, they are goaded by the very awareness of their guilty mind. Nor can those remain in the church of God who have kept neither the discipline of God and of the church in the conduct of their own life, nor the peace of good character. The orphans he despoiled, the widows he defrauded, the church funds he withheld, demand from him these punishments which we now see in his madness. His own father, too, died of hunger in the village, and afterward was not even buried by him in death; his wife's womb was struck by a kick, and by a hastened miscarriage the child was forced out in an act of infanticide. And now he dares to condemn the hands of those who sacrificed, though he himself is more guilty than their feet — his own feet, by which the son who was being born was killed. He had long feared this awareness of his crimes; for this reason he knew for certain that he would not merely be removed from the presbytery, but also barred from communion, and, the brothers pressing the matter, the day of inquiry was drawing near on which his case would be tried among us — had not persecution intervened first, which he seized upon with a kind of wish to escape and profit from condemnation, and so contrived and stirred up all these things, so that he who was bound to be cast out and excluded from the church might, by a voluntary withdrawal, forestall the priests' judgment — as though to have anticipated the sentence were the same as to have escaped the punishment. As for the rest of the brothers, we labor over those whom we grieve to see ensnared by him, that they may flee the pernicious side of this deceiver, that they may escape the deadly snares of this tempter, that they may seek again the church from which he by divine judgment deserved to be driven out; and we trust that, with the Lord's help, through his mercy, they can return. For none can perish except one it is certain will perish, since the Lord says in his gospel: 'Every planting which my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up.' Whoever was never rooted through the Father's own commands and cautions is the only sort capable of forsaking the church, the only sort who, turning from the bishops, stays raging alongside schismatics and heretics. All the others, though, the Father's mercy, our Lord Christ's forbearance, and our own patient endurance will bring back into our fold. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter 53. Maximus, Urbanus, Sidonius, and Macaeius, priests, greet their brother Cyprian. Dearest brother, we feel sure you rejoice with us just as eagerly, since we, taking counsel together and putting the church's welfare and peace first, set aside every other consideration, kept God's judgment intact, and made peace with our bishop Cornelius and the whole clergy alike. Know for certain from this letter that the entire church shared in the gladness of what took place, and that everyone's affection toward it was wholehearted. We pray, dearest brother, for your good health across many years.
Letter 54. Cyprian to Maximus the presbyter, and likewise to his brothers Urbanus, Sidonius, and Macaeius, greeting. Having read your letter, dearest brothers, which you sent me concerning your return and the peace of the church and the restoration of brotherhood, I confess I was made glad to the same degree that I had already rejoiced before, when I learned the glory of your confession and joyfully received the heavenly and spiritual praise of your struggle. This too is proof of your faith and your honor: acknowledging that there is only a single church, refusing to share in someone else's error, or rather his depravity, and instead going back to the very camp you had left — the camp from which, with the strongest resolve, you once set out to fight and overcome the enemy. For it was there, to the place from which arms had been taken up for the battle-line, that the trophies won in that battle-line had to be brought back, lest those whom Christ had prepared for glory should not be held glorious by Christ's church. But now that you have held fast, in the Lord's peace, to a course matching your faith and to the law of undivided love and harmony, and have shown others by your own journey an example of love and peace, our teaching about the church's reality and about the oneness of gospel and sacrament — which we already held — is confirmed as well by your consent and your pledge, so that Christ's confessors, who had stood out as praiseworthy champions of virtue and honor, should not turn into guides toward error. Let others see how much they congratulate you, or how much each glories within himself; as for me, I confess that I both congratulate you enough and glory more than the rest in this peaceable return and love of yours. For you ought to hear plainly what has been in my heart. I grieved deeply and was gravely troubled that I could not share communion with those whom I had once begun to love. Once you had left prison, a schismatic and heretical error seized you, so it seemed as if your glory had stayed shut inside those walls. Your reputation's honor appeared, in fact, to have lodged itself there, since Christ's soldiers failed to come back from prison into the very church they had once entered amid its praise and celebration. For even though there seem to be weeds within the church, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered by this, so that because we perceive there are weeds in the church we should ourselves withdraw from the church. We need only labor to be wheat ourselves, so that when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord's granaries, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle writes in his epistle that within a large household the vessels are not merely gold and silver, but wood and earthenware too — some kept for honorable use, others for the opposite. Let us take pains and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold or silver. But to break the vessels of clay has been granted to the Lord alone, to whom also the iron rod has been given. A servant cannot be greater than his master, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father has granted to the Son alone, so as to suppose he can already openly carry the winnowing-fan to the threshing floor to cleanse it, or separate all the weeds from the wheat by human judgment. Such is the arrogant defiance and irreverent overreach that a twisted madness claims for itself. And while some are forever claiming for themselves more than gentle justice demands, they perish out of the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling pride they lose the light of truth. Because of this we, holding to moderation and looking to the Lord's balance, and considering the Father's devotion and mercy, weighed out, after long and much deliberation among ourselves, what should be done with just moderation. All of this you can examine thoroughly by reading the little book which I had lately read here and which I sent for you also to read, out of our common affection, in which for the lapsed there is neither lacking a censure to rebuke nor a remedy to heal. There our limited effort set forth, to whatever degree it managed, what oneness within the catholic church means; and I am confident this booklet wins your favor increasingly now, for you read it in a spirit of approval and affection, fulfilling in your actions what we had only put into words, as you come back to the church within a bond of love and peace. I wish you, dearest brothers, always good health.
Cyprian to his brother Antonianus, greeting. Dearest brother, I received your earlier letter, one firmly grounded in harmony with our priestly body and firmly attached to the catholic church; in it you declared that you did not share communion with Novatian, but rather followed the counsel of myself and our colleague Cornelius. I sent a copy of that letter on to our colleague Cornelius, so he could set aside every worry, knowing you stood in communion with him — with the catholic church, in other words.
But then a second letter of yours came, carried by our fellow presbyter Quintus, and in it I could tell that your resolve had started to waver, unsettled by Novatian's correspondence. Even though you had earlier settled your judgment and agreement firmly, this letter asked me to explain in writing which heresy Novatian had started, and on what basis Cornelius stays in communion with Trofimus and with those who burned incense to idols. If you raise this question carefully out of genuine concern for the faith, seeking the truth of an uncertain matter in earnest worry, then such hesitant anxiety, in a soul aflame with reverence toward God, deserves no reproach.
Yet since I see that after the first part of your letter you were afterward disturbed by Novatian's letters, I set this down first, dearest brother: that serious men, once founded solidly upon the rock, are not shaken, I will not say by a light breeze, but not even by wind or storm, lest a wavering and uncertain mind be repeatedly tossed by various opinions as if by the gusts of assailing winds, and be turned aside from its purpose with the reproach of a certain fickleness. So that Novatian's letters may not do this to you, brother, or to anyone else, as you have wished, I will briefly set out the reasoning of the matter for you. And indeed, first, since you seem to have been disturbed also concerning my own conduct, I must clear both my person and my cause before you, lest anyone suppose that I have lightly departed from my purpose, and that, having defended the gospel's rigor at first and in the beginning, I later seem to have turned my mind away from that earlier discipline and censure, as though I had thought peace should be granted freely to those who stained their conscience with certificates or who committed the abominable sacrifices. Both of these things I did only after long and carefully weighed deliberation.
While the battle-line still held and the glorious struggle raged on amid the persecution, the soldiers' courage — and above all the resolve of the lapsed — needed rousing with our full exhortation's force and energy, stirred as if by a trumpet-blast of our voice, so that they would pursue repentance not through prayer and mourning alone; rather, once a chance arose to resume the contest and win back salvation, our stern words would drive them toward eagerness for confession and the glory of martyrdom. In the end, when certain presbyters and deacons wrote to me that some were being unrestrained and pressing hastily for admission to communion, I wrote back to them in a letter of mine which still survives, adding also this: if they are in too great a hurry, they have it in their own power to obtain, in the very time itself, more than what they ask, granted to them generously. The battle is still being fought, and the contest is celebrated daily. If a man truly and firmly repents of what he has done, and the warmth of faith prevails, what cannot be deferred can be crowned. But as to what should be decided regarding the case of the lapsed, I put that off, so that when quiet and calm had been given, and divine indulgence allowed the bishops to gather together, we might then, after common deliberation and weighing the counsel drawn from everyone's contribution, decide what ought to be done; but if anyone, before our council and before the decision determined by the counsel of all, wished rashly to grant communion to the lapsed, he himself should be kept from communion.
I set out this very same view at full length to the Roman clergy — who at that time still lacked a bishop — and to the confessor Maximus the presbyter together with the others then in custody, now reunited with Cornelius within the church; their own reply lets you confirm that this is what I wrote. Their letter states it this way: although in so weighty a matter it seems best to us — as you too have urged — that the church's peace be secured first, and only afterward, once bishops, presbyters, deacons, confessors, and laypeople of good standing had deliberated jointly, should the question of the lapsed be handled. It further noted that Novatian, writing at the time and reading out loud what he had composed, along with the presbyter Moses — then still a confessor, now a martyr — signed his name, agreeing that peace be granted to lapsed persons who were weak and near death. That letter traveled across the entire world, reaching every church and all the brethren.
Nevertheless, following what had been determined earlier, once the persecution had quieted down, when the opportunity was given to gather together, a large body of bishops — kept sound and unharmed by their own faith and the Lord's guarding hand — assembled as one, and once passages of Scripture had been cited at length from each side, we struck a balanced middle course through sound moderation: the lapsed were not to lose every prospect of rejoining communion and receiving peace outright, or else, despairing further, they might find the church shut against them and turn to live as pagans following the world; yet neither should the gospel's strictness be loosened so they might dash headlong into communion; but rather that repentance should be drawn out at length, and fatherly mercy be sought with sorrow, and the cases, the intentions, and the necessities of each be examined, according to what is contained in the little book which I trust has reached you, where the several points of our decisions are set down. And in case the number of bishops in Africa seemed insufficient, we also wrote to Rome about this matter to our colleague Cornelius, who himself, after holding a council with very many fellow bishops, agreed with us on the same judgment, with equal gravity and wholesome moderation.
It was necessary now for me to write you about this, so that you might know I have done nothing lightly, but, in accordance with what I had already committed myself to in my letters, referred everything to the common counsel of our council, and had granted communion to none of the lapsed beforehand, while there was still opportunity for the lapsed to receive not merely indulgence but even a crown; yet afterward, as the harmony of the college and the good of gathering the brotherhood together and healing the wound required, I judged it right to yield to the necessity of the times and to provide for the salvation of many, and now not to depart from what was once agreed in our council after common deliberation, however much many things are stirred up by the voices of many, and lies brought forth from the devil's mouth against the priests of God are scattered everywhere to break the harmony of catholic unity. Yet you, being a decent brother and a like-minded fellow bishop in the priesthood, ought not to take at face value whatever the malicious and the apostate claim, but rather weigh, through careful inquiry into our life and conduct, what your modest and serious brother-bishops actually do.
Now, dearest brother, I turn to our colleague Cornelius himself, so you can know the real Cornelius as we do — not through the falsehoods of spiteful detractors, but through the verdict of God, who made him bishop, and through the witness of our fellow bishops, whose entire number across the world has reached agreement in unanimous harmony. As for what recommends our dear Cornelius to God, to Christ, to Christ's church, and equally to every fellow priest, by praiseworthy report: he did not arrive at the episcopate all at once; instead, having risen through every ecclesiastical office and repeatedly earned the Lord's approval in sacred service, he ascended to the priesthood's highest summit by passing through each degree of religious duty in turn. Nor, further, did he seek or desire the episcopate for himself, nor did he grab at it the way others do whom their own swollen arrogance and pride puff up; rather, being calm and unassuming in other respects — as those chosen for this office by God's will tend to be — out of the modesty of his lifelong chastity and the humility of a reserve bred and guarded within him, he was not one who forced his way to becoming bishop, as some do, but instead endured force himself, compelled into accepting the office. He was made bishop through a great many of our fellow bishops who happened to be present in the city of Rome at the time, who sent us honorable, commendable letters, rendered illustrious by their own testimony, about his ordination. Cornelius became bishop through the verdict of God and his Christ, through the witness of nearly the whole clergy, through the vote of the people present on that occasion, through the gathering of the priesthood's elders and good men, at a moment when no one else had been made bishop before him — while Fabian's seat, that is, Peter's seat and the rank of the priestly chair, still stood empty. Once that seat is filled, established by God's will and confirmed by all our agreement, anyone who then wishes to become bishop must become one outside the church, and holds no valid ordination, since he does not hold to the church's unity. Whoever that man may be, however much he boasts of himself and claims for himself, he remains profane, a stranger, an outsider. And because a second cannot exist after the first, whoever is set up following the one who alone should exist is not really a second at all, but nothing whatsoever.
Now consider, after an episcopate neither pursued through ambition nor extorted by force but accepted at the will of God, who appoints priests, just how much virtue appeared in him once he had taken up that office, how much strength of soul, what firmness of faith — a thing we ought, with plain and honest hearts, to recognize fully and commend — in that he sat fearless upon the priestly chair at Rome during the very period when a tyrant hostile to God's priests threatened things utterable and unutterable, and heard news of a rival emperor rising against himself with far greater patience and endurance than news of a priest of God being installed at Rome. Should this man not be hailed, dearest brother, as possessing virtue and faith of the highest order? Should he not be numbered among the illustrious confessors and martyrs, given how long he sat awaiting his own executioners and the agents of a raging tyrant's vengeance, ready to run him through with a sword, crucify him, burn him alive, or tear his flesh and limbs apart by some unprecedented torment, while he stood unmoved against savage decrees, trampling threats, agonies, and torture beneath the strength of his faith? Granted that the Lord's greatness and kindness, having watched over the priest he willed into being, kept him safe once made — still, so far as his own devotion and reverence go, Cornelius endured all that could be endured, and through his priesthood alone he had already defeated the tyrant before that tyrant was later defeated by war and weapons.
As to the fact that certain dishonorable and grave things are being bandied about concerning him, do not be surprised, since you know this has always been the devil's work: to savage God's servants through falsehood and to smear an honorable reputation with fabricated gossip, so that men who shine bright by their own clear conscience end up tarnished by other people's talk. But know that our colleagues have looked into the matter and discovered most truly that he was stained by no defilement of a certificate, as some falsely claim, nor did he mingle sacrilegious communion with the bishops who had sacrificed, but rather he joined to us only those whose cases had been heard and whose innocence had been established.
As for Trofimus, about whom you wished me to write to you, the matter is not as rumor and the lies of the malicious have reported to you. For, just as our predecessors have often done, our dearest brother yielded to necessity for the sake of gathering our brothers together. And since the greater part of the people had gone off with Trofimus, now that Trofimus is returning to the church, making satisfaction and confessing his former error with the repentance of a supplicant, and calling back with full humility and satisfaction the brotherhood he had lately drawn away, his prayers were heard, and there was admitted into the Lord's church not so much Trofimus himself as the very great number of brothers who had been with Trofimus — none of whom would have been willing to return to the church unless they had come along with Trofimus. So, once the matter had been weighed together with a great many colleagues, Trofimus was taken back in, and amends for him came through the brothers' return and the recovered salvation of many. Yet Trofimus was admitted in such a way that he communicates as a layman, not, as the letters of the malicious reported to you, as though he were usurping the office of the priesthood.
As for the report brought to you that Cornelius indiscriminately communicates with those who sacrificed, this too arises from the fabricated rumors of the apostates. Those who defect are hardly in a position to speak well of us, and we should not hope to satisfy people who, unhappy with us and in open revolt against the church, keep forcing their way toward luring the brothers away from it. Wherefore, whatever is said against Cornelius and against us, do not readily listen to it or believe it, dearest brother.
If any are overtaken by illness, they are helped in their danger, as has been our decision. But once help has been given and peace granted to those in peril, they cannot then be choked or crushed by us, or driven by our own hand and force toward the end of death, as though, because peace is given to the dying, those who have received peace must necessarily die — when it appears rather as a sign of divine mercy and fatherly gentleness, that those who receive the pledge of life in the peace given are also kept alive here, having once received that peace. And therefore, if once peace is given, a further span of life is granted by God, no one ought to make this a charge against the priests, since it was once agreed that the brethren should be helped in their danger. Nor should you suppose, dearest brother, as some think, that those who obtained certificates ought to be treated as equal to those who actually sacrificed, since even among those who sacrificed the circumstance and the case are often quite different. For they cannot be treated as equals: the man who rushed at once and willingly to the abominable sacrifice, and the man who resisted and struggled long before he came, under necessity, to that deadly deed; the man who betrayed both himself and all his own household, and the man who, going himself into danger on behalf of everyone, protected his wife and children and whole household by a bargain struck at his own risk; the man who forced his tenants or friends into the crime, and the man who spared his tenants and farmers, and even took in under his own roof and hospitality very many brothers who were being driven out as exiles and fugitives, offering and presenting to the Lord many living and unharmed souls to intercede for the one that was wounded.
Great differences existed among those who truly offered sacrifice, so subjecting certificate-holders to that same harsh judgment would be cruel injustice — for the man who obtained a certificate can plead his own case: 'Through my bishop's instruction I had already come to know that idolatry was forbidden and that no one devoted to God should bow before an image. To keep from breaking that rule, I seized on the certificate option only once it was offered — I would never have sought it out myself — and either appeared before the magistrate personally or had someone else declare on my behalf that I was a Christian, that sacrifice was barred to me, that I would not approach the altars of the devil, and that my payment was purely to escape committing what was forbidden.' Even so, this certificate-bearer, once our rebuke taught him that even this conduct had been wrong, carries a stained conscience despite hands untouched by forbidden food and lips free of its contagion. Hearing our words, he weeps, mourns, is now made aware of his failing, and — led astray more by mistake than by wrongdoing — declares himself finally schooled and ready for whatever follows.
If we turn away the repentance of such people — who still hold some confidence in a conscience not wholly ruined — they will immediately be swept, along with wife and the children they managed to keep safe, into heresy or schism through the devil's enticements; and on judgment day it will stand against us that we failed to care for a wounded sheep, and that for one wounded animal we lost a great many sound ones. Yet the Lord left the ninety-nine that were whole to search out the one gone astray and worn down, and once he found it, he bore it home upon his own shoulders. Shall we, then, fail even to search for the weary, and worse, drive off those who come seeking us? And while false prophets go on tearing and scattering Christ's flock even now, shall we hand the wolves and dogs their chance — destroying by our own cruelty and lack of feeling those whom the fiercest persecution failed to destroy? Where, dearest brother, would that leave the apostle's teaching — that in every matter he tries to satisfy everyone, looking not to what serves himself but what serves the many, so that they might be saved; that we should follow his example just as he follows Christ's? Or again, that he made himself weak for the weak, so as to win them over; or that when a single part of the body suffers, every part suffers alongside it, and when one part is glad, all the rest share the gladness.
There exists a different line of thought, dearest brother, belonging to the philosophers and the Stoics, who hold that every sin carries equal weight and that a serious-minded man should not be swayed easily. Yet a vast gulf separates Christians from philosophers. Since the apostle warns us to watch lest anyone plunder us through philosophy and empty deceit, we must steer clear of anything that springs not from God's mercy but flows from the arrogance of a harsher philosophical creed. Of Moses, though, scripture tells us he was a man of surpassing gentleness. And in his gospel the Lord instructs: show mercy, just as your Father has shown mercy toward you. Elsewhere: it is not the well who require a doctor, but those in poor health. What sort of healing can a man offer who declares, 'I treat only the well, who need no physician at all'? Rather, our task is to bring aid and healing to the wounded. Nor should we count as dead those we see struck down by a savage persecution — count them instead as merely half alive, for had they been utterly dead, they could never later have risen among us as confessors and martyrs.
Yet because something remains in them that repentance, if it follows, can restore to fresh strength in faith and courage — for repentance itself supplies the armor — nothing at all can be armed in one who instead surrenders to despair: who, cut off harshly and cruelly from the church, turns aside to pagan customs and worldly business, or, cast out, goes over to heretics and schismatics. There, even should he later be killed on account of the Name, having been placed outside the church and severed from both unity and love, he cannot win the martyr's crown. For this reason, dearest brother, we have decided that, once each case has been weighed individually, the certificate-holders should be received for now, and that the sacrificers should be helped as death draws near — since confession has no place among the dead, and no one can be forced by us into repentance once its fruit has been taken away. Should the trial come first, he will be discovered by us, fortified and equipped for that trial; but if instead frailty overtakes him before the trial arrives, he departs bearing the comfort of peace and fellowship.
Nor do we mean to anticipate the judgment of the Lord, who alone will judge — so that should he find the sinner's repentance complete and genuine, he may confirm what we have here decided. But should anyone deceive us with a false show of repentance, God, whom no one mocks and who sees into the human heart, will pass judgment on what we could only view imperfectly, and the Lord will set right whatever his servants judged wrongly; still, brother, we must keep in mind the words written: a brother who helps his brother will be lifted up, and the apostle's own statement that, watching over yourselves so that you too are not tempted, you should carry one another's loads, and in that way fulfill Christ's law. Likewise, checking pride and crushing arrogance, he writes in his letter: let the one who imagines himself standing take care not to fall; and elsewhere he asks: who are you, to sit in judgment over someone else's servant? Before his own master he stands or falls — and stand he will, for God has power to keep him upright. John, too, shows that we hold Christ our Lord as our advocate and intercessor before God for our sins, writing: my little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin; yet should anyone sin, we have one who pleads for us with the Father, Christ the righteous, who himself atones for our sins. And Paul the apostle likewise wrote in his letter: if, while we were still sinners, Christ died on our behalf, how much more, now made righteous by his blood, will we be rescued through him from wrath.
Bearing his kindness and mercy in mind, we ought not to treat our brothers with harshness, hardness, or a lack of feeling, but should instead share the grief of the grieving and weep alongside those who weep, lifting them up as best we can through the support and consolation of our affection — neither so unbending and rigid that we crush their attempts at repentance, nor so loose and permissive that we grant communion carelessly. Picture it: a brother lies struck down and wounded on the battlefield by the foe. From one side the devil labors to finish off the one he has already wounded; from the other, Christ presses that the man he ransomed should not be lost entirely. Standing between these two, on which side do we place ourselves? Do we favor the devil's destruction of him, walking past the half-dead brother the way the priest and Levite did in the gospel story? Or, acting as priests of God and Christ, following what Christ both taught and did himself, do we instead pull the wounded man free from the enemy's grip, and, once he is healed, hand him over to God, the true judge?
Do not suppose, dearest brother, that granting the lapsed a path of repentance, or offering the penitent hope of peace, weakens the courage of the faithful or reduces the number of martyrdoms. The resolve of those genuinely steadfast stays unmoved, and among people who hold God in reverence and love with their whole heart, an unshaken and sturdy integrity continues. Even adulterers, after all, receive from us a season for repentance and are granted peace — yet virginity within the church does not therefore diminish, nor does the noble commitment to continence weaken on account of others' sins. The church thrives, adorned by so many virgins, and chastity along with modesty keeps intact the full measure of its honor; the strength of continence is not undone merely because pardon and mercy are extended to the adulterer. To stand in a position of pardon is one thing; to reach glory is another. Being confined in prison until the last coin owed is paid is one thing; receiving straightaway the reward due to faith and courage is another. Being purified through prolonged suffering for one's sins, refined slowly by fire, is one thing; having already washed away every sin through suffering endured is another. Hanging suspended until judgment day awaiting the Lord's verdict is one thing; being crowned by the Lord at once is another entirely.
Indeed, some bishops before our time, here in our own province, took the view that adulterers should not be granted peace, and shut the door on repentance altogether where adultery was concerned. All the same, they did not break away from their fellow bishops' company, nor did their unyielding rigor or strict judgment tear apart the unity of the catholic church — so that, though peace was extended to adulterers elsewhere, a bishop who withheld it was not thereby cut off from the church. So long as the tie of harmony holds and the undivided bond of the catholic church continues on, every bishop manages his own course of action and directs his own policy, ultimately answerable to the Lord for it.
I am astonished, though, that certain people are so fixed in their view that they deny repentance ought to be granted to the lapsed, or think pardon should be withheld from the penitent — given that it is written: recall the place from which you fell, and repent, and return to your earlier deeds. This, of course, addresses someone already recognized as fallen, whom the Lord urges to rise once more through good works, since scripture states that almsgiving rescues from death — not, naturally, from that death Christ's blood extinguished once for all, or from which we were freed by the water of saving baptism and our redeemer's grace, but from the death that afterward creeps in through sin. Elsewhere too a season for repentance is granted, and the Lord issues a warning to the one who fails to repent: I hold much against you, he says, because you let your wife Jezebel, who claims to be a prophetess, teach and mislead my servants into fornication and eating what has been sacrificed; and I gave her a season to repent, yet she refuses to repent of her fornication. See, I am throwing her onto a bed, and those who committed fornication with her into deep affliction, unless they turn from their deeds in repentance. Surely the Lord would not press repentance at all were he not promising mercy to those who repent. And in the gospel he states: I tell you, there will be greater joy in heaven over a single repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. For since scripture tells us that God did not create death, nor takes delight in the ruin of the living, it follows that he who wishes no one to perish wants sinners to repent and, through repentance, come back to life once more. This is why, through the prophet Joel, he calls out and says: even now, declares the Lord your God, turn back to me with your whole heart, together with fasting and weeping and mourning, and tear open your hearts rather than your garments, and come back once more to your God the Lord, since he is compassionate and kind, slow to anger and abounding in tenderness, one who turns aside from the punishment he had threatened for wrongdoing. In the psalms as well we find both God's severity and his mercy side by side, threatening even as he spares, punishing to bring correction, and once correction is made, holding back further harm: I will punish, he says, their wrongdoing with the rod and their sins with blows, yet I will not withdraw my mercy from them.
The Lord, too, in the gospel, reveals the loving-kindness of God the Father when he asks: which of you, if his son asks him for bread, would hand him a stone instead; or if he asks for a fish, would hand him a snake? If you, then, wicked as you are, know how to give worthwhile gifts to your own children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Here the Lord sets an earthly father alongside the boundless and generous kindness of God the Father. For if that flawed father here on earth, though deeply wounded by a son who sinned and did wrong, nevertheless rejoices and is overjoyed — should he later see that same son changed, having set aside the wrongs of his former life and, through the pain of repentance, corrected toward a sober, upright way of living and the discipline of blamelessness — and welcomes back with a father's delighted embrace the one he had once cast away, how much more will that one true Father, good and merciful and kind, who is himself goodness, mercy, and kindness, take joy in his children's repentance, holding out no threat of wrath or punishment to those who repent, or grieve, or mourn, but instead offering mercy and forgiveness? For this reason the Lord in the gospel pronounces those who mourn blessed, since mourning draws mercy toward itself; whoever remains stubborn and proud only piles up wrath and the penalty of the coming judgment upon himself. And so, dearest brother, we have ruled that those who fail to repent, and who do not, with their whole heart and through an open display of grief, bear witness to sorrow over their offenses, should be kept entirely apart from any expectation of fellowship and peace — should they only start pleading for it once weakness and danger have set in; for what drives them to ask is not repentance for their offense but the urgent reminder of approaching death, and someone who never once considered that he might die does not deserve comfort at death's threshold.
Turning now to the matter of Novatian, dearest brother, on whom you asked to have written what heresy he introduced — understand first that we ought not even trouble ourselves over what he teaches, since he teaches from outside the fold. Whoever and whatever he may be, no one who stands apart from Christ's church can be called a Christian. Let him boast all he wants and trumpet his supposed philosophy or eloquence with proud speech: having preserved neither brotherly love nor the church's unity, he has forfeited even what he once possessed — unless perhaps you consider him a bishop, when, with a bishop already duly installed in the church by sixteen fellow bishops, he strains through sheer ambition, set up as an outsider and adulterous bishop by deserters, to seize the office for himself. And though there is, from Christ, a single church spread across the whole world and divided into many members, and likewise a single episcopate spread across a harmonious multitude of bishops, this man, after God's own tradition, after the linked and universally joined unity of the catholic church, tries to fashion a merely human church, dispatching his own new apostles through countless cities to lay certain fresh foundations for his invented institution. And though bishops have long since been appointed throughout every province and every city — men seasoned with age, sound in the faith, proven under strain, outlawed in persecution — he dares to set rival pseudo-bishops over them, as though his fresh and stubborn venture could somehow cover the whole world, or the fabric holding the church's body together could be torn apart by the seeds of his discord. He fails to see that schismatic movements always burn brightest at their beginning but cannot go on growing, and whatever they launched unlawfully cannot increase, but instead collapses at once from its own twisted rivalry. He could not, in any case, retain a bishop's office even had he first been validly made a bishop and only later broken away from his fellow bishops' body and the church's unity, since the apostle instructs us to bear with one another so we do not drift from the unity God has founded, saying: bearing with one another in love, striving to preserve the unity granted by the Spirit through the bond of peace. Whoever, then, keeps neither the unity given by the Spirit nor the bond of peace, cutting himself off from the church's bond and the fellowship of its priests, can hold neither the authority nor the honor of a bishop, since he refused to preserve either the unity or the peace belonging to the episcopate.
Consider, then, just how excessive his arrogance runs, how thoroughly he has forgotten humility and gentleness, how greatly he flaunts his own presumption — that anyone would dare, or trust himself able, to accomplish what the Lord did not even entrust to the apostles: imagining he can tell weeds apart from wheat, or, as if granted sole authority to wield the winnowing-fork and clear the threshing floor, attempting to sift chaff from grain. And though the apostle states that in a large house the vessels are not made only of gold and silver, but of wood and clay as well, he appears to pick out only the golden and silver vessels, scorning, rejecting, and condemning those made of wood and clay — even though it is only on the day of the Lord that the wooden vessels will be consumed by the fire of his burning judgment, and the clay ones shattered by the one who wields the iron rod.
Or if he has appointed himself examiner and judge of the heart and the innermost being, let him judge equally in every case; and since he knows it is written, 'Behold, you have been made whole; sin no more, lest something worse befall you,' let him separate cheats and adulterers too from his own side and company, seeing that the case of the adulterer is far graver and worse than that of the certificate-holder, since the one sinned out of necessity, the other by choice; the one thought it enough for himself, deceived by error, that he had not actually sacrificed; the other, an assailant of another man's marriage, or one who entered a brothel, has defiled with a detestable pollution the sanctified body and temple of God in the sewer and filthy pit of the common crowd — just as the apostle says, 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but the one who commits fornication sins against his own body.' Yet even to these repentance is granted, and hope of lamenting and making amends is left them, according to that same apostle who says: 'I fear that when I come to you I may mourn for many of those who sinned before and did not repent of the uncleanness which they committed, and of the fornication and lust.'
Nor should the new heretics congratulate themselves for claiming they hold no communion with idolaters, when in their own ranks are adulterers and defrauders bound by the guilt of idolatry, as the Apostle declares: "Know and understand this: every fornicator, or unclean person, or defrauder — which is idolatry — has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God." And again: "Put to death, then, whatever in you belongs to the earth" — meaning fornication, uncleanness, evil desire, and greed, which amount to serving idols and bring down God's wrath. Since our bodies belong to Christ as his members, and each of us is a dwelling-place of God, a man who defiles God's temple through adultery defiles God himself, and one who sins thereby carries out the devil's wishes and becomes a servant to demons and idols. Wicked acts spring not from the Holy Spirit; rather, desires kindled by the enemy's suggestion and by an unclean spirit drive a man to act against God and take up service to the devil. Thus it follows: if these heretics claim that one man can be stained by another's sin, and argue on their own authority that the offender's idolatry transfers to someone who did not offend, their very argument cannot clear them of the charge of idolatry, since apostolic proof establishes that the adulterers and defrauders they commune with are themselves idol-worshippers. We, however, hold — in keeping with our faith and the pattern handed down through divine teaching — that truth demands each person answer for his own sin alone, and that no one can be made guilty in place of another, for the Lord gives this warning: "The righteousness of the righteous will rest on him, and the wickedness of the wicked will rest on him." And again: "No father will perish on account of his sons, nor will any son perish on account of his father; rather, each person will perish for his own wrongdoing." Taking this teaching to heart, we surely believe no one ought to be shut out from satisfaction's reward and the expectation of peace, trusting as we do in the divine Scriptures, whose author and encourager is God himself, that sinners are led back to penance and that those who repent are not refused pardon and mercy.
And oh, what a cheat played upon the brotherhood, what a fraud worked on grieving mourners — this hollow, useless pretense of heretical teaching, urging repentance toward satisfaction while stripping satisfaction of its remedy: telling our brothers, "Weep, pour out your tears, groan by day and night, labor long and often to wash and cleanse your fault away — yet after all this you will die outside the church; you will do everything peace requires, yet receive none of the peace you sought." Who could keep from dying on the spot at such words? Who could avoid collapsing under that very despair? Who would not turn his heart away from the very purpose of mourning? Do you imagine a farmer would keep working if you told him, "Till your field with every skill a farmer has, tend it with diligence, but you will harvest no grain, press no wine, gather no olives, pick no fruit from your trees"? Or suppose you urged someone toward owning and sailing ships, saying: "Buy timber from the finest woods, brother; join the keel with the strongest, choicest oak; labor to build and equip the vessel with nails, ropes, and sails — but once you have done all this, you will see no profit from its voyages or its trade."
This amounts to blocking off and severing the path of grief, the road of repentance, so that — while in the Scriptures the Lord God shows tenderness to those who turn back and repent — our own harshness and cruelty, by cutting away the fruit of repentance, destroys repentance itself. But if we find that no one should be kept from performing penance, and that peace can be granted, through the Lord's priests, to those who beg and implore his mercy, since he is merciful and kind, then the groaning of mourners must be received, and the fruit of repentance must not be withheld from those who grieve. And since no confession, no exomologesis, can take place among the dead, those who have repented with a whole heart and made their plea ought meanwhile to be taken into the church and kept there for the Lord, who, coming to his church, will judge exactly those he finds inside it. But as for apostates, deserters, adversaries, enemies tearing apart Christ's church — these, even should they be slain for his Name while still outside, cannot, by the Apostle's own teaching, be received into the church's peace, since they held to neither its Spirit nor its unity.
These few points, dearest brother, out of many, I have run through as briefly as I could meanwhile, both to satisfy your wish and to bind you ever more closely into the fellowship of our college and body. But if opportunity and means should bring you to us, we shall be able to discuss more together and to treat more fully and richly what may serve a wholesome concord. I wish you, dearest brother, ever good health.
Letter 56. Cyprian to the brothers Fortunatus, Ahymnus, Optatus, Privatianus, Donatulus, and Felix, greeting. You wrote to me, dearest brothers, telling how, while attending a bishop's ordination in Capsa, our colleague Superius brought you word about our brothers Ninus, Clementianus, and Florus — men seized earlier in the persecution who had confessed the Lord's name and overcome both the magistrate's violence and the raging mob's assault, but who afterward, tortured under heavy punishment before the proconsul, were beaten down by the force of the torments and, after prolonged agony, fell short of the glory toward which the full strength of their faith had carried them; and that nonetheless, since that grave fall — brought about not by will but by necessity — they had spent these three years without ever ceasing to do penance. On this you thought it right to seek my counsel, asking whether it might now be permitted to admit them to communion. As for my own judgment: I believe the Lord's indulgence will not fail men who, it is agreed, stood their ground in the battle line, confessed the Lord's name, and with unshaken firmness of faith overcame the violence of magistrates and the onslaught of a furious populace; who endured imprisonment and, for a long time, amid the proconsul's threats and the roar of the surrounding crowd, resisted torments that tore their bodies and prolonged, repeated agonies — so that what seems, in the end, to have given way through the flesh's weakness may be offset by the defense of their earlier merit, and it should suffice for such men to have lost their glory, without our also shutting the door of pardon against them and stripping them of a father's love and our fellowship. We judge it enough, to win the Lord's mercy, that for three unbroken years, sorrowfully as you write, they have mourned with the utmost penitential lament. I certainly do not think peace is being handed out carelessly or rashly to men whom we can see neither lacked courage in their service nor shrank from the fight beforehand, and who, should the battle line form again, could well win back their glory. Since it was resolved in council that those doing penance should be helped if illness threatened them with death and given peace, surely priority in the granting of peace belongs to those we see failed not through weakness of will, but who, having joined the fight and been wounded there, could not, because the flesh is frail, carry through to the crown of confession — all the more since, eager as they were to die, no one allowed them to be killed, but they were torn by torments and worn down over so long a time that it was not their unconquered faith that gave way, but their weak flesh that was exhausted. Since, however, you asked that I take up this matter most fully with the assembled colleges — and so weighty a question demands a graver judgment drawn from many counselors — and since nearly everyone is now staying home with their people through the first days of Easter's celebrations, once they have satisfied their congregations and begun coming to me, I will discuss the matter more fully with each of them, so that a firm decision on your question, weighed by the counsel of many bishops, can be settled among us and written back to you. I wish you, dearest brothers, ever good health.
Letter 57. Cyprian, and Liberalis, and Caldonius, and Nicomedes, and Caecilius, and Junius, and Marrutius, and Felix, and Successus, and Faustinus, and Fortunatus, and Victor, and Saturninus, and another Saturninus, and Rogatianus, and Tertullus, and Lucianus, and Sattius, and Secundinus, and another Saturninus, and Eutyches, and Ampius, and another Saturninus, and Aurelius, and Priscus, and Herculaneus, and Victoricus, and Quintus, and Bonoratus, and Manthaneus, and Hortensianus, and Verianus, and Iambus, and Donatus, and Pomponius, and Polycarpus, and Demetrius, and another Donatus, and Privatianus, and Fortunatus, and Rogatus, and Monnulus, to brother Cornelius, greeting. Some time ago, dearest brother, after taking counsel with one another, we had already decided this: that those who, in the onslaught of persecution, had been tripped by the enemy and had fallen, defiling themselves with forbidden sacrifices, must undergo penance at full length, and, should the danger of fatal illness press upon them, should be given peace at the point of death. For neither justice nor a father's tenderness nor God's own mercy would allow the church to be shut against those knocking at her door, or the comfort of saving hope withheld from those who grieved and pleaded, so that souls departing this world would be handed over to the Lord stripped of communion and peace — since he himself had granted and laid down the rule that what is bound on earth is bound in heaven, and that only what had first been loosed here, within the church, could be loosed there. But now, seeing the day of a fresh onslaught beginning again to draw close, and warned repeatedly by sign after sign to stand armed and ready for the contest our foe proclaims against us, let us likewise, through our own exhortation, make ready the people entrusted to us by God's favor; above all, let us assemble within the Lord's camp soldiers of Christ eager for arms and demanding the fight. Under the pressure of necessity we have judged that peace ought to be granted to those who have never left the Lord's church, and who from the very day of their fall have gone on doing penance, mourning, and pleading with the Lord — and that these should be armed and made ready for the battle now close at hand. We must heed such signs and their just warnings, so that shepherds do not abandon their sheep to danger, but the whole flock is drawn together as one and the Lord's host is armed for the struggle of heavenly warfare. Rightly enough, in the past, the penance of mourners was stretched over a longer season, so that the weak might be aided at their last hour, so long as peace and stillness lasted — a season in which the tears of mourners could be delayed at length and help could still reach the dying late in their weakness. But now peace is needed not by the weak but by the strong, and it is not the dying but the living to whom we must give communion, so that those we rouse and urge to the fight are not left bare and unarmed by us, but fortified with the protection of Christ's blood and body; and since the very purpose of the Eucharist is to serve as a safeguard for those who receive it, let us arm with the shield of the Lord's abundance those whom we want kept safe from the enemy. For how can we teach them, or press them, to pour out their own blood in confessing his Name, if we refuse them the blood of Christ when they are about to fight in his cause? Or how can we prepare them for the martyr's cup, unless we first let them drink the Lord's cup within the church, by right of communion? A distinction must be kept, dearest brother, between those who apostatized, returning to the pagan world they had renounced to live once more as gentiles, or who deserted to the heretics and daily take up arms against the church like men murdering their own kin, and, on the other hand, those who never withdrew from the church's threshold and who, continually and sorrowfully begging for divine and fatherly comfort, now declare themselves ready to fight, prepared to stand firm and battle for their Lord's name and their own salvation. At this moment, the peace we grant is given not to those asleep but to those keeping watch; not for indulgence but for weapons; not for rest but for the front line. If, as we hear, hope, and trust, they hold their ground and, alongside us, strike the enemy down in the encounter, we will not regret having given peace to men so brave — in truth, since as priests we offer God's sacrifices every day, preparing victims and gifts for him, granting peace to martyrs is itself among the greatest honors and glories our episcopate can claim. But should any of the lapsed — God forbid it among our people — deceive us, seeking peace by a trick so as to gain communion at the very hour battle is coming without meaning to fight, that man deceives and cheats only himself, keeping one thing hidden in his heart while his lips proclaim another. As far as it is given us to see and to judge, we can view each man's face; we cannot search his heart or read his mind. Such things belong to the judgment of the one who searches and knows what is hidden, who comes soon and will judge the heart's secret, concealed places. Yet the wicked ought not to harm the good; rather the good should lend the wicked their help. Nor should peace be refused to those on the verge of martyrdom merely because some among them will end up denying the faith, for peace must be given, precisely for this reason, to all who are about to fight, lest through our own ignorance the very man destined to be crowned in the contest should be passed over. Let no one say: "The man about to suffer martyrdom is baptized already in his own blood, and needs no peace from the bishop, since his own glory will bring him peace regardless, and a still greater reward awaits him through the Lord's favor." Such a man cannot, in the first place, be fit for martyrdom if the church has not armed him for the fight, and his spirit — which receiving the Eucharist lifts up and kindles — will fail him. For the Lord says in his Gospel: "When they hand you over, do not worry about what you will say, for it will be given to you in that hour what to say; it is not you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking within you." But if it is the Spirit of the Father who, by his own word, speaks in those handed over and set to confess the Name, how can anyone be found ready or fit to confess who has not first received peace and, through it, the Spirit of the Father — who strengthens his servants and himself speaks and confesses within us? Suppose, then, that such a man abandons all he owns and flees, and, hiding out in remote wilderness, either falls in with bandits or dies of fever and sickness — will it not be charged against us that so fine a soldier, one who left behind everything, scorning house and parents and children to follow his Lord instead, died without peace, without communion? Will it not be counted against us on judgment day — whether as lazy neglect or cruel severity — that we, as shepherds, were unwilling either to care for the flock entrusted and committed to us in peace, or to equip them for the fight? Will the Lord not bring this charge against us, he who cries out through his prophet: "Behold, you drink the milk and clothe yourselves in the wool, you slaughter what is fat, yet you do not feed my sheep; the weak you failed to strengthen, the sick you failed to support, the broken you failed to bind up, the strayed you failed to bring back, the lost you failed to seek, and the strong you wore down with labor; and my flock was scattered for want of shepherds, and became prey for every wild beast, with no one to search for them or bring them home. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I set myself against the shepherds: their hands will be made to give my sheep back, and I will drive them off, so shepherding my flock is no longer theirs to do; feeding my sheep will no longer be theirs either, for I will pull my sheep out of their mouths and, ruling with justice, feed them myself." So that our own mouths — by which we refuse peace, by which we set up human cruelty's hardness instead of divine, fatherly love — should not bring the Lord's demand for the flock entrusted to us back upon our own heads, it has seemed right to us, prompted by the Holy Spirit and warned by the Lord through many clear visions — since the enemy's approach has been foretold and made plain to us — to gather Christ's soldiers within the camp and, once each case has been examined, to grant peace to the lapsed, or rather to hand weapons to those about to fight. We trust this decision will win your approval as well, out of regard for fatherly mercy. But if any of our fellow bishops should hold, even as the contest presses in, that peace ought not be granted to the brothers and sisters, he will answer to the Lord on judgment day for either his untimely strictness or his inhuman severity. What we have set down accords with faith, love, and care, and reflects what lay on our conscience: that the day of the contest is near, that a fierce enemy will soon rise against us, and that the coming battle will be not like the one before but far heavier and more savage — this has been revealed to us again and again by divine means, and of it we have often been warned by the Lord's providence and mercy. Trusting in his aid and favor, we who place our confidence in him may stand secure, for he who tells his soldiers of the coming battle while they are still at peace will also grant victory in the encounter to those who fight for him. We wish you, dearest brother, ever good health.
Letter 58. Cyprian, to the people settled at Thibaris, greeting. Dearest brothers, I had truly considered, and kept it in my thoughts, that if the state of affairs and the pressure of the season allowed it, I would come to you myself, as you have so often wished, and there in person lend the brotherhood whatever slight strength my exhortation could give. But because the press of business holds me fast, leaving me no chance to travel so far from home or to stay long away from the flock over which divine mercy has set me, I have sent you instead, for the time being, this letter to act in my place. For since the Lord in his instructing kindness stirs and warns us again and again, it falls to us to carry that same warning and concern through to your conscience as well. You ought to know, and to hold as certain, believing it firmly, that the day of affliction has already begun looming over us, and that the world's end together with antichrist's season has drawn close, so that we should all stand prepared for the fight, fixing our minds on nothing but the glory of life without end and the crown that comes from confessing the Lord — and we should not imagine that what is coming will resemble what has already gone by. A fiercer, harsher battle now presses upon us, and for it Christ's soldiers must ready themselves with unshaken faith and sturdy courage, mindful that the daily draught they take from the cup of Christ's blood is meant to enable them, in turn, to pour out their own blood for his sake. To wish to be found alongside Christ is nothing other than this: imitating what Christ himself taught and carried out, following the apostle John's word — that whoever claims to remain in Christ is bound to walk exactly as Christ walked. In the same vein the apostle Paul urges and instructs: we are God's children; and if children, then also God's heirs, fellow heirs with Christ, provided we share his suffering so that we may likewise share his glory. All of this deserves our reflection now, so that none of us should crave anything more from a world already dying, but should instead follow Christ, who lives forever and gives life to those servants grounded in faith in his name. The season has arrived, dearest brothers, of which our Lord gave notice long before, teaching that it would come, in these words: an hour will come when whoever kills you will imagine he is rendering God a service. And they will act this way because they never knew the Father, nor me. I have said these things to you so that, once their hour arrives, you will recall that I told you beforehand. Let none of us be surprised that relentless persecutions wear us down and that crushing pressures assault us again and again, since the Lord foretold long ago that these very things would come in the last days, and armed our struggle with the teaching and encouragement of his own words; his apostle Peter likewise taught that persecutions arise so that we may be proven, and so that, following the pattern set by the righteous who came before us, we too may be bound to God's love through death and suffering. He wrote as much in his letter: beloved, do not be astonished at the fiery ordeal that falls upon you to test you, and do not fall away as though something unheard-of were happening to you; rather, whenever you take part in Christ's sufferings, rejoice in every way, so that when his glory is disclosed you may rejoice and exult as well. If you are reviled for Christ's name, you are blessed, since the name that carries the Lord's majesty and power comes to rest upon you — a name that unbelievers curse, yet we hold in honor. The apostles taught us these very things, which they themselves had learned from the Lord's commands and heavenly instructions, the Lord himself giving us strength and saying: no one abandons house, field, parents, brothers, wife, or children for God's kingdom's sake without receiving seven times as much back in the present age, and in the age to come, life everlasting. And there is a further saying of his: blessedness comes to you when hatred, exclusion, banishment, and slander fall upon you and your name is treated as something foul, and all on account of the Son of Man. When such a day arrives, leap for joy and rejoice, since a great reward is waiting for you in the heavens. It was the Lord's wish that we should be glad and exult amid persecutions, because it is precisely when persecutions strike that crowns of faith are awarded, God's soldiers are tested, and heaven stands open to martyrs. We did not enlist under this name only to dream of peace and to dodge and shrink from the fight, since it was the Lord himself — master of humility, endurance, and suffering — who marched first into this very struggle, so that he might be the first to do what he commanded be done, and so that the one who urges us to suffer might himself suffer first on our account. Keep this before your eyes, dearest brothers: he to whom the Father alone has handed every judgment, the one destined to come as judge, has already declared the verdict of that coming judgment and knowledge, announcing and affirming beforehand that he will acknowledge before his Father those who acknowledge him, and disown those who disown him. Were escape from death possible, our fear of dying would be justified. But since a mortal being cannot avoid death, let us seize the opportunity offered by the divine promise and favor, and let us pass through death's gate carrying the reward of immortality with us; nor should we dread being killed, since it is certain that the moment of our killing is also the moment of our crowning. Let none of you, dearest brothers, grow troubled at seeing our people scattered and driven to flight by fear of persecution, simply because he does not see the brotherhood gathered as one body, or hear the bishops delivering their teaching. They cannot all remain together at such a time, for they are forbidden to kill and are instead destined to be killed. Wherever, during those days, any brother finds himself cut off from the flock in body though not in spirit, owing to necessity and the pressure of the moment, let him not be shaken by dread of that flight, nor take fright at retreating into hiding in some lonely, deserted place. No one is alone whose companion in flight is Christ. No one who guards himself as a temple of God is ever alone, wherever he may be, for he is never apart from God. And should a robber corner him as he flees through wilderness and mountains, or a wild beast set upon him, or hunger, thirst, or cold wear him down, or should a storm and gale swallow him as he hurries across the sea on a headlong voyage — Christ watches over his soldier no matter where he fights, and to the one who dies, on account of persecution, for the honor of his name, he pays out the reward he promised to grant at the resurrection. Perishing quietly rather than publicly before a crowd takes nothing away from martyrdom's glory, since what makes death worthwhile is dying for Christ's sake. For the testimony of one's martyrdom it is enough that there is a witness who approves and crowns the martyrs. Let us imitate, dearest brothers, righteous Abel, who opened the way to martyrdom by being the first person killed for righteousness' sake. Let us imitate Abraham, God's friend, who did not hesitate to lay his own son on the altar with his own hands, submitting to God through the devotion of his faith. Let us imitate the three young men — Ananias, Azarias, and Misael — who, neither shaken by their youth nor crushed by captivity, though Judea had been conquered and Jerusalem taken, defeated the king within his own realm through the strength of their faith; ordered to bow before the statue King Nebuchadnezzar had erected, they proved themselves tougher than his threats and his flames, declaring and testifying to their faith in these words: King Nebuchadnezzar, we need not answer you on this matter. There exists a God we serve who has power to rescue us out of the blazing furnace, and he will free us from your hands; but even if he does not, know this — we will not serve your gods, nor bow to the golden statue you have raised. They trusted that their faith could win them escape, yet they added the words even if not, so the king would understand that they were equally ready to die for the God they worshiped. This, indeed, is the strength virtue and faith supply: to believe and know that God can rescue someone from death staring them in the face, and still not fear death or give way, so that faith might be shown all the stronger for it. Through their mouths burst the untainted, unconquerable force of the Holy Spirit, proving true what the Lord had proclaimed in his gospel: when they seize you, give no thought beforehand to what you will say. In that hour, what you should say will be given to you. For it is not you speaking, but your Father's Spirit, who speaks through you. He meant that the words and answers we would need would be granted and supplied to us by divine gift in that very hour, and that it would not be us speaking then, but the Spirit of God the Father — who, never abandoning or dividing himself from those who confess him, both speaks within us and is crowned in us. Daniel offers the same pattern: pressed to kneel before Bel, an idol the ruler and people of his day held sacred, he instead defended his God's honor with unshaken faith and boldness of speech, crying out that heaven and earth's maker, the Lord his God, was the sole object of his worship. Consider, too, the harsh torments the blessed martyrs endured in the books of the Maccabees — should a Christian, mere servant that he is, refuse to suffer when the Lord suffered before him? Should we, for sins that are our own, decline the suffering he endured on our account despite bearing no sin of his own? The Son of God suffered so that he might make us God's sons, so should a son of man refuse suffering if he means to go on being God's son? If the world's hatred weighs on us, Christ bore that same hatred first; if we endure insults, exile, or torment in this world, the world's own maker and lord underwent far worse, and he warns us of it, saying: if the world hates you, remember it hated me before you. Had you belonged to the world, the world would have loved what was its own; but because you do not belong to the world, since I have drawn you out of it, the world hates you for that reason. Remember the word I spoke to you: no servant outranks his master. If they hunted me down, they will hunt you as well. Everything he commanded, our Lord and God likewise did in his own person, so that no follower could plead learning without practice as an excuse. And let none of us, dearest brothers, grow so frightened at the prospect of coming persecution or antichrist's looming arrival that we fail to be found fully equipped, in every way, with the gospel's exhortations and its precepts and heavenly warnings. Antichrist arrives, but Christ comes after him and stands over him. The enemy storms and rages, but the Lord follows close behind to avenge what we have suffered and the wounds we bear. The adversary seethes and makes threats, yet there exists one who can rescue us from his grip. Fear belongs to a different power altogether � the one from whose wrath there is no escaping, exactly as he cautioned us beforehand: those who can destroy only the body, and not the soul, are not to be feared; dread rather the one able to hurl both soul and body together into the ruin of hell. And again: whoever clings to his own life will lose it, and whoever gives up his life in this world will keep it for life eternal. And the Apocalypse teaches and forewarns: if anyone bows to the beast and its image and takes its mark on forehead or hand, that one too will drink from the wine of God's fury, mixed into the cup of his wrath, and will be tormented with fire and brimstone in full view of the holy angels and in full view of the Lamb, and the smoke rising from their torment will ascend forever, and they will find no rest by day or by night, all who bow to the beast and its image. Men train and condition themselves for a worldly contest, counting it a mark of great personal honor if it should fall to them to be crowned with the crowd looking on and the emperor present. Consider, then, how much loftier and greater this contest is, made glorious by the prize of a heavenly crown, where God himself watches us compete, fixing his gaze on those he has deigned to make his children, and delights in the spectacle of our struggle. As we fight and grapple in the contest of faith, God watches, his angels watch, and Christ himself watches. How great is the honor of that glory, how great the happiness, to contend with God presiding and to be crowned with Christ as judge! Let us arm ourselves, dearest brothers, with our whole strength, and make ready for the contest, with mind unspotted, faith intact, and courage given wholly over. Let God's camp advance to the battle line to which we are called. Let those still standing whole be armed, so that the whole man does not lose what he only recently gained; let the fallen too be armed, so that even the one who has stumbled may recover what he lost — let honor call the whole to the fight, and let grief call the fallen. The blessed apostle teaches us to arm and prepare ourselves, saying: what we wrestle against is not flesh and blood, but rather this world's powers and its rulers, this darkness, the wicked spirits dwelling in the heavens. Because of this, put on the whole armor, so that you may stand firm on the evil day, and, having done everything, remain standing, your waist bound with truth, wearing righteousness as a breastplate, your feet fitted with readiness to carry the gospel of peace, taking up faith as a shield with which you can douse every burning arrow the wicked one shoots, and salvation as a helmet, and the Spirit's sword, which is God's word. Let us take up these weapons; let us fortify ourselves with these spiritual, heavenly defenses, so that on the evil day we may stand firm against the devil's threats and fight back. Let us wear righteousness as a breastplate, so that our chest is shielded and made secure against the enemy's arrows. Let our feet be shod and armed with the gospel's teaching, so that once we begin to tread on and crush the serpent, it cannot bite and trip us up. Let us carry faith bravely as our shield, under whose protection whatever the enemy hurls can be extinguished. Let us also take up, to cover our heads, the spiritual helmet, so that our ears are guarded against hearing savage edicts, our eyes guarded against seeing loathsome idols, our forehead guarded so that God's mark stays unblemished, our mouth guarded so that a victorious tongue may confess the Lord Christ. Let us also arm our right hand with the spiritual sword, so that it firmly rejects deadly sacrifices, and, keeping the eucharist in mind, which receives the Lord's body, embraces it instead — destined afterward to receive from the Lord the crowning reward of heaven. What a day that will be, dearest brothers, how momentous, when it arrives — when the Lord begins to review his people and, through the scrutiny of divine knowledge, to recognize each one's merits; to cast the guilty into hell and condemn our persecutors to the endless burning of a punishing flame, while paying out to us the reward owed to faith and devotion. What glory, and how vast a joy, to be granted the sight of God, to be honored with sharing, alongside Christ the Lord your God, in the joy of salvation and everlasting light; to greet Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the patriarchs, along with the apostles, the prophets, and the martyrs; to rejoice with the righteous and God's friends amid the delight of the immortality granted in heaven's kingdom; to receive there what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has conceived. For the apostle declares that we will receive far more than whatever we here do or endure, saying: the sufferings of this present time do not measure up to the glory that will be revealed in us. When that revelation comes, when God's brightness shines down upon us, we will be as blessed and joyful, honored by the Lord's favor, as those left behind will be guilty and wretched — those who, as deserters of God or rebels against him, carried out the devil's will, and so must inevitably be tormented together with him in unquenchable fire. Let these things, dearest brothers, take hold of your hearts. Let this be how we prepare our armor, our meditation by day and by night: to keep before our eyes, and turn over constantly in thought and feeling, the punishments awaiting the wicked and the rewards and merits due the righteous — what the Lord threatens as punishment for those who deny him, and what he promises as glory for those who confess him. If the day of persecution should overtake us while we are pondering and dwelling on these things, the soldier of Christ, schooled by his precepts and warnings, will not flinch at the battle, but will stand ready for the crown. I wish you, dearest brothers, lasting good health.
Cyprian, to his brother Cornelius, greeting. I have read your letter, dearest brother, the one sent through our brother Saturus the acolyte — a letter full, indeed, of brotherly affection, of church discipline, and of a bishop's sternness. In it you informed me that Felicissimus, Christ's enemy, had been barred by you not for the first time but long since, on account of his many and very grave offenses, and that he had been condemned and turned away there, not merely by my judgment but by that of a great many fellow bishops as well; and that when he arrived, backed by a mob and a gang of reckless men, he was thrust out of the church with the full vigor that bishops are bound to exercise — out of the same church from which, together with those of his own kind, both God's majesty and the sternness of Christ, our Lord and our Judge, had already driven him out long before, so that, as one who fathered schism and division, embezzled money placed in his trust, violated virgins, and ruined and corrupted many marriages, he would not go on to defile the bride of Christ — incorrupt, holy, and chaste — with the disgrace of his presence and with impure, incestuous contamination.
But when I had read the other letter, brother, which you appended to your first, I was greatly astonished to find that you had been somewhat shaken by the menace and dread of those newcomers — since, as you wrote, they came at you in a fit of desperation, threatening that, should you refuse the letter they carried, they would proclaim it publicly and spill out much that was shameful and base, fitting only their own mouths. But if things truly stand this way, dearest brother — that we must fear the audacity of the most worthless men, and that wickedness may achieve through rashness and despair what it could never gain by right and fairness — then the strength of the episcopate and the Church's lofty, God-given power to govern have both come to nothing, and Christians we can no longer remain nor even continue to exist, once we have reached a point where the schemes and threats of ruined men make us tremble. Pagans issue their threats, so do Jews; heretics too, and all those whose hearts and minds the devil has claimed, spew their venomous fury daily with raving voices. Even so, threats alone give us no cause to yield, nor does the enemy and adversary outrank Christ merely because he arrogates and grabs so much for himself in this age. What must endure among us, dearest brother, is faith's unbending strength and a firmness so steady and unshaken that, set against every charge and surge of the howling waves, it stands the way a rock lodged in their path stands, by its own bulk and solidity. It makes no difference to a bishop from what direction terror or peril approaches him — one who lives constantly exposed to dangers and terrors, and is in fact made glorious precisely through those dangers and terrors. Nor should we reckon and weigh only the menace coming from pagans or from Jews, seeing that the Lord himself was seized by his own brothers, betrayed by a man he himself had numbered among his apostles; that righteous Abel, at the very dawn of the world, fell at no hand but his brother's; that Jacob, fleeing, was hunted by a brother turned hostile; that the boy Joseph was sold off by the very brothers who sold him; and we find it written too in the gospel that enemies were foretold to arise from within one's own household, and that men once joined by a single bond of accord would turn traitor to one another. Whoever does the betraying, whatever rage drives it, none of that matters once God allows the betrayal to happen and grants the crown for enduring it. Suffering at a brother's hand what Christ himself suffered brings us no shame; nor does doing what Judas did bring glory to those who do it. Yet what emptiness is this, what swollen, puffed-up, hollow bluster from men who threaten — hurling their menace at someone far off, when right here they hold me, present and within their reach! We take no fright at the abuse of men who daily rend themselves and their own lives apart with such talk; the clubs, stones, and swords they brandish in their murderous language do not frighten us. So far as lies within their power, such men stand before God already as murderers. And yet kill us they cannot, unless the Lord allows them to kill. We, though we must die but once, watch them destroy themselves daily — through their hatred, their words, and their own transgressions.
But it is not on this account, dearest brother, that we should abandon ecclesiastical discipline or loosen priestly authority — merely because insults assail us or threats make us tremble — for divine Scripture meets us here and gives its warning: the man who grows presumptuous and defiant, who boasts of himself, shall accomplish nothing whatever, this man who has stretched his soul wide as the grave. And again: fear not the speech of a sinful man, for his splendor shall become dung and worms. Today he is raised on high; tomorrow he is nowhere found, for he has gone back to his own dust, and his very thoughts shall come to nothing. And once more: I beheld the wicked man raised up, towering above the cedars of Lebanon; I passed by, and behold, he was gone; I searched for him, and no trace of his place remained. Such swelling, such pride and arrogant, haughty display, springs not from the teaching of Christ, whose lesson is humility, but instead from the spirit that belongs to antichrist — the very spirit the Lord condemns through his prophet, saying: yet you said within your own heart, I shall climb to heaven, I shall place my throne higher than the stars of God, I shall sit atop the towering mountain, above the high peaks toward the north, I shall rise above the clouds, I shall be equal to the Most High. And he goes on: but you shall be brought down instead to the underworld, to the depths of the earth, and those who look upon you shall be struck with wonder. That is why, elsewhere too, divine Scripture holds out a like penalty against such men, declaring: for the day belonging to the Lord of Hosts falls upon every man who deals unjustly and is proud, upon everyone raised high and puffed up. In this way each man betrays himself at once, by his own mouth and his own speech, and whether antichrist or Christ occupies his heart becomes plain simply from how he talks — just as the Lord himself teaches in his gospel: brood of vipers, how could evil men like you ever speak what is good? For the mouth gives voice to whatever fills the heart in abundance. A good man draws good things from his good storehouse, while a wicked man draws wicked things from his wicked one. This too explains why that rich sinner, watching Lazarus find rest and refreshment in Abraham's embrace, begs for relief even as flames scorch and torment him — paying his penalty above all through his mouth and tongue, of all the parts of his body, precisely because it was with tongue and mouth that he had sinned the most.
Since it stands written that the abusive shall not inherit God's kingdom, and since the Lord likewise says in his gospel that whoever calls his brother a fool, or calls him raca, shall answer for it in the fire of hell — how then can men avoid the Lord's avenging judgment when they hurl such abuse not merely at fellow believers but at priests themselves, men granted so great an honor by God's own favor that anyone in earlier days who defied his priest or judge was put to death without delay? For thus speaks the Lord God in Deuteronomy: whatever man acts arrogantly, refusing to obey the priest or the judge, whoever that man may be in those days — he shall die, and the whole people, upon hearing of it, shall be afraid and shall no longer act wickedly. In the same way, when Samuel was rejected by the Jews, God tells him: it is not you they have rejected, but me. So too the Lord in the gospel: whoever listens to you listens to me and to him who sent me, and whoever spurns you spurns me and him who sent me. And after cleansing the leper, he told him: go, show yourself to the priest. Later still, during his passion, struck by a blow from the high priest's servant and asked whether that was any way to answer the chief priest, the Lord flung back no insult at him, took nothing away from the honor owed the priesthood, but rather, defending and revealing his own innocence, replied: if I have spoken amiss, testify to the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me? A further episode comes later, in Acts: there the blessed apostle Paul was rebuked with the words: do you assault God's priest with such abuse? By that time, those men, having already crucified the Lord, had turned sacrilegious, godless, and bloodstained, and no longer held any genuine claim to priestly honor or authority. Yet Paul, mindful even of that empty title and mere shadow of the priesthood, answered: brothers, I was not aware that this man was the chief priest — since scripture says: a ruler of your people you shall not revile.
Given how many such weighty examples precede us, examples through which priestly authority and power stand confirmed by God's own favor, what should we make of men who count as enemies of priests, rebels against the catholic Church, unmoved either by the Lord's own warning or by dread of the judgment still to come? Heresies have sprung up, schisms have been born, from no other source than this: that God's priest goes unheeded, and men forget that the Church has, for a season, a single priest and a single judge standing in Christ's place. Had the whole body of believers obeyed him according to the divine teaching, nobody would ever have raised a hand against the priestly college as a whole; nobody, after the divine verdict, after the people's vote, after fellow bishops had reached agreement, would set himself up as judge — not merely over other bishops now, but over God himself; nobody would tear apart the unity of Christ's Church through schism; nobody, swollen with self-satisfaction, would go off on his own to found some fresh heresy — unless a man's rashness is so sacrilegious, his mind so ruined, that he imagines a bishop can come into being apart from God's judgment, even though the Lord says in his gospel: are two sparrows not sold for a single coin, yet not one falls to earth without the Father's will? If, as he says, not even the least thing occurs apart from God's will, can anyone imagine that the greatest and highest matters take place within God's Church either unknown to him or without his consent — that priests, who are his stewards, are appointed apart from his own decree? To think this is to have no faith at all, the very faith that gives us life; it is to deny honor to God, by whose will and judgment, as we know and believe, everything is ruled and directed. Bishops plainly are not made by God's will when they are made outside the Church, made in defiance of the gospel's own order and tradition — just as the Lord himself declares among the twelve prophets: they have appointed a king for themselves, but not through me. And again: their offerings are like the bread of mourners; all who eat them shall be defiled. And through Isaiah the Holy Spirit likewise cries out: woe to you, rebellious children! So says the Lord: you have taken counsel, but not from me; you have struck an agreement, but not by my spirit — piling sin upon sin.
For the rest — I say it provoked, I say it grieving, I say it compelled — when a bishop is put in the place of one who has died, when he is chosen by the vote of the whole people in peace, when he is protected by God's help in persecution, faithfully joined to all his fellow bishops, already for four years proved to his people in the episcopate, serving discipline in quiet, proscribed in the storm, his very name bound up and joined with his office of bishop, so often demanded for the lion, honored in the circus and the amphitheater by the testimony of the Lord's own favor, and even in these very days in which I wrote this letter to you, sought again for the lion in the circus by the shouting of the crowd on account of the sacrifices which the people were ordered by published edict to celebrate — when such a man, dearest brother, is seen to be attacked by certain desperate and ruined men set outside the Church, it is plain who is doing the attacking: not Christ, surely, who either appoints or protects priests, but he who, as adversary of Christ and enemy of his Church, pursues with his own hostility the man set over the Church for this very purpose — that once the pilot has been removed, he may rage more savagely and violently amid the Church's shipwrecks.
None of this ought to trouble any believer, dearest brother, who keeps the gospel in mind and holds to the apostle's own warning: that in the last days certain proud, defiant men, enemies of God's priests, would either desert the Church or turn against it — for both the Lord and his apostles announced long before that such men would come. Nor should it surprise anyone that a servant finds himself abandoned by some, when even the Lord himself, while performing his greatest wonders and confirming the deeds of God the Father through the witness of his own works, was left by his own disciples. And yet he neither rebuked those who left nor threatened them harshly, but instead turned to the apostles who remained and asked: do you also wish to leave? — thereby honoring the law by which every man, left free and given his own choice, reaches for either death or salvation on his own account. Peter, though — the very rock on which the Lord had built his Church — spoke for everyone as one voice, answering in the voice of the Church itself: Lord, where else should we go? you hold the words of everlasting life, and we have come to believe and to know: you are God's living Son, the Christ — showing thereby that those who abandon Christ perish through their own fault, yet the Church, which believes in Christ and clings once for all to what it has come to know, never truly departs from him at all, and that the Church consists of those who remain within God's house; while whatever planting God the Father did not himself plant shows itself among those we see, not made solid and firm like grain but scattered like chaff before the spirit of the enemy who winnows it — of whom John likewise writes in his letter: they departed from among us, yet they never truly belonged with us, for had they belonged with us, they would have stayed. In the same way Paul warns that we ought not be troubled when the wicked fall away from the Church, nor should the desertion of the unfaithful weaken our own faith. For, he asks, if some among them have lost their faith, does their faithlessness cancel God's faithfulness? Never — for God remains true, though every man may lie.
As far as it concerns us, brother, our own conscience requires us to take care that no one is lost from the Church through any fault of ours; but should anyone perish by his own choice and through his own wrongdoing, refusing to repent and come back to the Church, we shall stand blameless before the judgment, having offered him the remedy — while only those who refused the healing our counsel provided shall remain among the punished. Nor should the abuse hurled by ruined men push us from the straight road and the settled rule, since the apostle himself teaches: if I still sought to please men, I would not be Christ's servant. It makes all the difference whether one seeks to win over men or God. Please men, and you offend the Lord; but strive instead to please God, and both human insult and human curses become things we ought to disregard.
As for why I did not write to you at once, dearest brother, about this Fortunatus — set up as a pseudo-bishop by a handful of long-standing heretics — the matter did not seem urgent enough to rush before you as though it were something of great weight or alarm, especially since Fortunatus's name was already quite familiar to you: one of the five presbyters long ago fled from the Church, only recently removed by the ruling of our numerous and most weighty fellow bishops, who had already written to you about this the year before. Likewise you would recognize Felicissimus, the ringleader of the sedition, who appears in that very same letter our fellow bishops sent you earlier — a man removed here by them, and then only recently driven out from the Church there by you yourself. Since I trusted you already knew all this, and felt sure it remained firmly fixed in your memory and in your own governance, I saw no need to rush word to you urgently about the foolishness of these heretics. Nothing the heretics and schismatics scheme up among themselves ought to touch the majesty and standing of the catholic Church. As it happens, word has reached us that the Novatianist faction has now set up its own pseudo-bishop, one Maximus, a presbyter recently sent to us as Novatian's envoy and turned away from our fellowship. Yet even of this I had not written to you, since we hold all such matters in contempt, and I had lately sent you the names of the bishops established there — sound and whole men, presiding over the brethren within the catholic Church. This much I judged right to put in writing to you, by the counsel of all of us, so that there might be a quick means of clearing up error and telling truth from falsehood, and so that both you and our fellow bishops might know with whom correspondence should properly be exchanged: should anyone outside those named in our letter presume to write to us, you would recognize him at once as either stained by sacrifice or by a certificate, or else simply one of the heretics — a corrupt and godless man, in short. When the chance arose, through Felicianus the acolyte — a man closely trusted, a cleric you had sent along with our colleague Perseus — I included, among the other things that needed to reach you from here, word about this Fortunatus as well. But our brother Felicianus, delayed there either by the winds or held back to gather further letters from us, was overtaken along the way by Felicissimus rushing to reach you first. Crime always moves this way — hoping that speed alone will let it outrun innocence.
Through Felicianus as well, brother, I let you know that Privatus had arrived in Carthage — that old heretic from the colony of Lambaesis, condemned some ninety years past by the judgment of ninety bishops for many grave offenses, and, as your own knowledge surely recalls, most severely censured in the letters of our predecessors Fabian and Donatus. When he sought to argue his case before us at the assembly we convened on the Ides of May just past, and was refused admission, he made this same Fortunatus his pseudo-bishop, a fellow well suited to his company. Along with him had also come a certain Felix, whom Privatus himself had long before set up outside the Church as a pseudo-bishop in heresy. Present too, standing beside the heretic Privatus, were his companions Jovinus and Maximus — men condemned by the verdict of nine of our fellow bishops for unspeakable sacrifices and other proven crimes, and removed again the previous year by the judgment of a great many of us gathered in assembly. Joined to these four was Repostus of Saltus, a man who both collapsed himself during the persecution and, through his sacrilegious urging, dragged down the greater part of his own people as well. These five, together with a handful of men either fallen to sacrifice or burdened by guilty consciences, chose Fortunatus as their pseudo-bishop — and since their crimes matched each other so well, such indeed was the ruler as those he ruled.
From this, dearest brother, you can already tell the rest of the lies that those desperate and ruined men have been scattering there — for even though the whole company of sacrificers and heretics produced only five bogus bishops willing to make the crossing to Carthage and take Fortunatus as their partner in madness, those same men, sons of the devil and steeped in falsehood, have still dared to boast, as you write, that twenty-five bishops were present. This very lie they had already been circulating here among our brothers beforehand, claiming that twenty-five bishops were coming from Numidia to install a bishop of their own. Once that lie was exposed and they were left confounded — since only five shipwrecked men actually showed up, and we kept even those at a distance — off they sailed to Rome bearing the freight of their falsehoods, as if the truth were too slow a vessel to overtake them and expose their lying tongues with proof drawn from plain fact. And here, brother, lies the true madness: failing to grasp that falsehood cannot deceive for long, that night endures only until daybreak, and that once the day brightens and the sun climbs, the dark and the gloom yield to light, and whatever thieving went on under cover of night comes to a stop. Indeed, ask them for names and they would have none, even false ones, to give. Wickedness is so scarce among them that not twenty-five altogether can be scraped up from both the sacrificers and the heretics. Yet to fool the ears of simple folk and those at a distance, they inflate the count with lies, as though — even if the number were genuine — the Church could be defeated by heretics, or justice by the unjust.
It does not suit me, dearest brother, to descend to their own level now and rehearse in my own words everything they have done and go on doing, since what priests of God ought to say and set down in writing needs careful thought, and shame, more than anger, should guide what we speak, lest I appear, under provocation, to be piling up insults instead of laying out crimes and sins. So the frauds worked against the Church I pass over in silence; their plots, their adulteries, their offenses of every stripe I leave untouched. But there is one matter — and here the concern is not mine, nor any man's, but God's own — that I do not think should go unmentioned about their crime: even from the very first day the persecution began, when the wrongdoers crimes were still fresh and burning, and when it was not only shrines of the devil that reeked from those forbidden offerings but the lapsed themselves whose hands and mouths still gave off smoke, these men refused to stop admitting the lapsed to communion and obstructing the penance that ought to have been carried out — this even though God cries out, whoever sacrifices to other gods shall be uprooted, except to the Lord alone; and the Lord declares in the gospel, whoever denies me, him will I deny; and elsewhere the divine wrath and indignation speaks out plainly: to them you poured drink offerings, to them you brought sacrifices — shall this not stir my indignation? says the Lord. Yet these men work to keep God, who himself swears he is provoked to anger, from being petitioned at all; they work to keep Christ, who proclaims he will deny whoever denies him, from being won over by prayer and amends.
As for us, right during the persecution itself we sent letters on this exact question and were ignored. After holding council on several occasions, we set it down as a decree — backed not merely by our agreement but by the threat of censure — that the brothers must do penance, and that peace was not to be handed out carelessly to any who refused to do it. But these men, sacrilegious toward God, reckless in impious fury against God's priests, have broken from the Church and raised murderous weapons against her, laboring to see the devil's malice carried through to completion — so that divine mercy might find no wounded soul left to tend within its own Church; they poison, with the deceit of their falsehoods, whatever penitence the wretched might feel, so that God's anger goes unappeased, so that none will seek out Christ the Lord — whom he once shrank from confessing as a Christian and afterward feared to renounce — so that whoever had left the Church stays gone. Effort goes into making sure offenses cannot be paid for by rightful amends and mourning, that tears cannot wash the wounds clean. A lying counterfeit peace strips away the genuine one; the healing lap of the mother is barred shut, with a stepmother stepping in between, so that the weeping and sighing of the lapsed goes unheard from lip and breast. Beyond that, the lapsed are pressed to turn the same tongues and mouths that once sinned on the Capitol into weapons of abuse against the priests; confessors, virgins, and all those made glorious within the Church by the renown of their faith, these men chase down with insult and slander. Through this it is not so much our people's modesty, humility, and sense of shame that takes the blow as it is the offenders' own hope and life that get torn to shreds. For the one who is wretched is not the one who endures abuse but the one who deals it; and under the law, the sinner is not the man struck by his brother but the man who strikes him; when guilty men wrong the innocent, it is in fact the guilty, imagining themselves the doers, who suffer the wrong. This, in the end, is why their minds have gone numb and their perception dull and foreign to them: it is God's anger at work, withholding from them any grasp of their offenses, so that no penitence can follow — just as scripture has it: God gave them a spirit of stupor, meaning that they would not turn back, be healed, and after their sins be cured through entreaty and rightful amends. And the apostle Paul writes in his letter: they refused to love the truth in a way that would bring them salvation, and on that account God will send upon them a delusion at work, so that they believe a falsehood, so that judgment falls on all who refused to believe the truth and instead took delight in wrongdoing. The first rung of blessedness is never sinning; the second is owning up to one's sins. In the first, innocence runs its course whole and untouched, guarding itself; in the second, a cure steps in to heal what is broken. Both of these these men have thrown away by offending God, so that the grace won through the sanctifying of baptism has slipped from them, and beneath there remains no penitence to cure the guilt. Or do you suppose, brother, that these count as trivial wrongs against God, minor and modest failings — that because of these men the majesty of an angry God goes unpetitioned, that his wrath, his fire, his coming day go unfeared, that with antichrist already at the door the faith of God's soldiers is stripped of its weapons, while the vigor and dread owed to Christ are cast aside? Let laymen answer for how they will handle this. On priests falls the heavier duty of upholding and guarding God's majesty, so that we not appear to be careless in any part of it, since the Lord gives this warning: and now, priests, this charge is laid upon you — if you refuse to listen, and refuse to take it to heart to render honor to my name, says the Lord, I will loose a curse against you, and I will turn even your blessing into a curse. Honor, then, is paid to God precisely when his majesty and judgment are held in such contempt that, even as he himself declares his anger and indignation at those who sacrifice, and threatens eternal punishment and unending torment, sacrilegious men come forward proclaiming that God's wrath need not be weighed, that the Lord's judgment need not be dreaded, that no one need knock at Christ's Church — but instead, with penance done away and no confession of the crime ever made, bishops scorned and trodden down, presbyters should announce peace in words full of deceit, and — so that the lapsed never rise and the excommunicated never return to the Church — communion should be handed to those holding none.
Nor did it satisfy them merely to have broken from the gospel, stripping from the lapsed any hope of amends or penitence, and to have stripped men caught up in fraud, or fouled by adultery, or contaminated by the deadly touch of sacrifice, of every sense and fruit of penitence, so that they would neither seek God nor own up to their wrongs before the Church — beyond even this, they built for themselves, outside the Church and in opposition to it, a meeting-place for a ruined faction, a spot where a crowd of the guilty-conscienced, unwilling to seek God's pardon or make amends, could pour together. And after all that, on top of everything, once they had propped up a false bishop of their own manufacture through heretics, they now have the nerve to set sail, carrying letters as schismatics and profane men, toward Peter's seat and toward the principal church, the very source from which priestly unity first sprang — giving no thought at all to the fact that these are Romans, a people whose faith the apostle's own preaching once praised, a people faithlessness cannot reach. So what reason could there be for them to come, announcing a false bishop raised up against the true ones? Either they stand by what was done and mean to keep at their crime, or, if it displeases them and they are backing away, they already know where they belong. For we have all agreed together, and it is only fair and right, that each man's case be tried in the place where the offense occurred, and since every shepherd has been given his own share of the flock to rule and tend, answerable to the Lord for how he manages it, surely those under our charge ought not to go roaming about, nor to smash, through treacherous and reckless behavior, the unity binding the bishops together, but rather to argue their case in the place where their accusers and the witnesses to their crime can be found — unless, perhaps, to a handful of desperate, ruined men the authority carried by the bishops of Africa now looks trivial, those very bishops who have already judged them and, weighing the many snares of guilt binding their conscience, condemned them lately by their own verdict. Their case has already been heard, sentence has already fallen, and it does not befit the dignity of priests for that to be dragged open again by the shifting whims of an unsteady, changeable mind, since the Lord's own teaching runs: let your speech be yes, yes; no, no.
If the number of those who passed judgment on them last year were reckoned together with the presbyters and deacons, more were present then at the judgment and inquiry than are these same men who now appear joined with Fortunatus. For you should know, dearest brother, that ever since he was made a false bishop by heretics he has been all but abandoned by nearly everyone. For those to whom deceptions were held out in the past and to whom false words were given, on the assurance that they would shortly rejoin the Church together, once they saw a false bishop actually installed there, discovered they had been fooled and led on, and now day after day they keep returning and knocking at the Church's door — while we, who must answer to the Lord, weigh each case with anxious care, scrutinizing closely who deserves to be taken back in and welcomed to the Church. For with some, either their own wrongdoing works against them, or the brothers object so stubbornly and firmly that letting them in at all would risk scandal and danger to many. Rotten scraps should never be gathered up in a way that wounds what is whole and sound alongside it, nor is any shepherd wise or fit for his task who blends diseased, infected sheep into the flock so freely that the whole flock catches the spreading sickness. [Pay their numbers no mind; a single man who stands in awe of God outweighs a thousand godless sons, just as the Lord spoke through the prophet: son, take no delight in godless sons, however many they multiply to you, since the fear of God has no place in them.] If only, dearest brother, you could stand here beside us when these twisted, perverse men come back from their schism! You would see the sheer effort it takes me to talk our brothers into patience, so that, setting aside their grief, they might agree to take back and heal the guilty. Just as they celebrate and rejoice when the milder offenders with lighter guilt return, so, conversely, they balk and push back whenever men beyond correction and beyond shame — fouled by adultery or by sacrifice, and on top of it all still arrogant — come crawling back to the Church in a way that spoils the good character already inside it. I can scarcely persuade the people — indeed I must all but wrest their consent — to let such men be admitted at all. And the grief of the brotherhood has been proved all the more just from this, that one or another, received through my own too-ready leniency against the resistance and protest of the people, turned out worse than they had been before and could not keep faith with their penitence, because they had not come with true penitence in the first place.
And these other men, who have now sailed off to join you together with Felicissimus, guilty of every crime, dispatched as envoys by the false bishop Fortunatus — what am I even to say about them? They bring you letters as false as the man himself whose words they carry, men whose sins weigh as heavy on the conscience, whose lives are as vile, whose reputation as disgraceful, that they should have been thrown out of the Church even had they still belonged to it. Indeed, knowing full well what their own conscience holds against them, they dare not come near, dare not so much as approach the Church's threshold, but roam the province instead, hunting for brothers to trap and plunder, and now, already notorious everywhere and driven out on every side for their crimes, off they sail to you as well. For they can have no face to approach us or to take their stand among us, since there are the bitterest and gravest charges brought against them by the brothers. If they wish to put our judgment to the test, let them come. In short, if they can offer any excuse or defense, let us see what sense of satisfaction they have, what fruit of penitence they bring. Here the Church is closed to no one, nor is a bishop refused to anyone. Our patience, our leniency, our humanity stand ready for those who come. I wish for all to return to the Church; I wish all our fellow soldiers to be gathered together within the camp of Christ and the household of God the Father. I forgive everything, I overlook much, out of zeal and desire to gather the brotherhood together. Even offenses committed against God I do not examine with the full rigor of religious judgment. In pardoning offenses more than is proper, I very nearly sin myself. I embrace, with ready and full affection, those who return with penitence, confessing their sin with humble and simple satisfaction.
But if there are any who think they can return to the Church not by prayers but by threats, or who imagine they can make an entrance for themselves not by lamentations and satisfactions but by intimidation, let them be sure of this: that against such men the Church of the Lord stands shut, and that the camp of Christ, unconquered and strong and fortified under the Lord's protection, does not yield to threats. A priest of God, holding fast the gospel, keeping the commandments of Christ, can be killed, but cannot be conquered. Zechariah, God's high priest, furnishes and supplies us an example of courage and faith: neither threats nor stoning could break him, and he was slain within God's own temple while crying aloud, repeating the very words that we ourselves now hurl at the heretics: thus speaks the Lord: you have abandoned my paths, and I in turn abandon you. It does not follow that, merely because a handful of reckless and wicked men have turned their backs on the Lord's heavenly, life-giving paths and, holy in nothing they do, find themselves left behind by the Holy Spirit, we ourselves should then grow careless of what tradition hands down from God, weighing the crimes of frenzied men as heavier than the rulings of priests, or imagining that human aggression carries more force than divine protection carries to shield us.
Is this, then, dearest brother, the point we have come to — that the catholic Church's own dignity, the loyal and unblemished grandeur of the people gathered within her, and the very authority and power of the priesthood, must all be set aside, so that men who have positioned themselves outside the Church can claim the right to sit in judgment over the one placed over her: wounded men judging the sound, the damaged judging the whole, the fallen judging the one still standing, the guilty judging the judge, the sacrilegious judging the priest? What is left, then, except for the Church to yield ground to the Capitol, for the priests to step back and the Lord's altar to be cleared away, and for images and idols, altars and all, to be marched into the holy and honored gathering of our own clergy — handing Novatian richer, fuller ammunition to declaim against us — should those who sacrificed and openly denied Christ not merely be pleaded with and let back in absent any act of penance, but on top of it begin lording over us through sheer intimidation? Let them lay down their weapons if peace is what they want; if they mean to make amends, why the threats? And if threats are what they bring, let them understand that God's priests hold no fear of them. Even antichrist himself, when his coming begins, will not force his way into the Church simply by threatening, nor will anyone bow to his violence just because he vows to destroy whoever resists him. Heretics only arm us further while imagining their threats terrify us; rather than beat us down, they lift us up and set us ablaze, even as they turn what should be peace into something worse for the brothers than persecution itself. Still, we hope the fury in their words never hardens into deed, that men who sin already through faithless, cruel speech will not go on to sin in action too. We ask and implore of God — a God they never tire of provoking and angering — that their hearts might soften, that laying down their rage their minds might come back to health, that their hearts, shrouded now in the darkness of their offenses, might glimpse the light of penitence, and that they would rather want the bishop's prayers offered up on their behalf than spill a priest's blood themselves. But should they persist in their rage and carry on cruelly with these plots and their murderous threats, there exists no priest of God so feeble, so crushed and downcast, so undone by the weakness common to men, that divine strength cannot raise him up against these enemies who assail God, nor whose frailty and humility cannot draw courage from the vigor of the Lord who shields him. Whose hand ends us, or when, means nothing to us, since death and bloodshed will bring us our reward from the Lord himself. It is instead their own fate that calls for tears and mourning, so thoroughly has the devil blinded them that, sparing no thought for hell's unending torments, they try to play the part of an antichrist already close at hand.
And although I know, dearest brother, that out of the mutual love which we owe and show to one another, you always read our letters to the most flourishing clergy who preside with you there and to the most holy and honored people, yet now I both press and request that this thing you normally do unprompted, as an act of honor, you do this time because I have asked it — namely, that once this letter of mine has been read, if any contagion of poisoned speech and pestilent sowing has crept in among you there, it may all be stripped away from the ears and hearts of the brothers, and that the whole and sincere love of good men may be purged clean, on the part of all, from every stain of heretical detraction.
For the rest, dearest brothers, let them turn away resolutely and shun the words and conversations of those whose talk creeps like a cancer, just as the apostle says: evil conversations corrupt good character. And again: after a first warning, avoid a man who is a heretic, knowing that such a person is perverse and sins, being condemned by his own judgment. And through Solomon the Holy Spirit speaks: the perverse man, it says, carries destruction in his own mouth and stores up fire in his lips. Likewise he warns again, saying: hedge your ears about with thorns and do not listen to a wicked tongue. And again: a bad man gives ear to unjust tongues, but the righteous man does not attend to lying lips. And though I know that our brotherhood there is, by your foresight, well guarded, and is besides sufficiently wary through its own watchfulness, so that it cannot be caught by the poisons of heretics nor deceived, and that the divine teachings and precepts hold sway among them exactly to the degree that they fear God — still, our concern for you together with our abundant love has led us to set down this counsel for your sake: let no dealings at all be struck up with people of that sort, let no meals or talk be shared with the wicked, and let us keep ourselves as far apart from them as they themselves have run off from the church — for it stands written, if he will not listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Nor does the blessed apostle stop at merely advising this; he goes further and orders that such men be shunned outright, and his command runs thus: invoking the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ's own name, you are to withdraw from any brother whose conduct is disorderly and who spurns the tradition passed down from us. Faith can share no partnership with faithlessness. Anyone who does not stand with Christ, anyone hostile to Christ, anyone opposed to his peace and unity, has no place standing beside us. Should they approach bearing prayers and making amends, grant them a hearing; should they instead hurl abuse and menace, turn them away. I wish you, dearest brother, unfailing good health.
Letter LX. Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting. Word has reached us, dearest brother, of the glowing proof your faith and courage gave, and the honor of your confession filled us with such joy that we now number ourselves among the sharers in your merit and your praise. For since we share one church, one united mind, and an undivided harmony, what priest would not rejoice in the praises of his fellow priest as though they were his own, or what brotherhood would not delight everywhere in the joy of its brothers? It cannot be expressed how great was the rejoicing here, how great the gladness, when we learned of your good and courageous doings — that you had stood there as leader of the brothers in confession, but also that the leader's confession had grown through the brothers' agreement with him, so that while you went ahead toward glory you made many companions of that glory and persuaded a whole people to become confessors: given that you stood ready before anyone else to make confession for the sake of everyone, we cannot decide which we ought first to proclaim in you — your ready and steadfast faith, or the inseparable love of the brothers. There the courage of the bishop who led was publicly proven, and the union of the brotherhood that followed was displayed. There, with a single mind and a single voice shared among you, the entire church of Rome gave its confession. It has become clear, dearest brother, the faith which the blessed apostle proclaimed concerning us. This praise of courage and this firmness of strength he already foresaw then in the spirit, and by testifying beforehand to your merits in that proclamation of things to come, he was, in praising the parents, calling the children forward. While you are thus of one mind, while you are brave, you have given the rest of the brothers great examples of unity and courage. You have taught them mightily to fear God, to cling firmly to Christ, for the people to stand by their priests in danger, for brothers not to be separated from brothers in persecution, that a harmony bound together cannot be conquered at all, and that God of peace grants to the peaceable whatever they ask of him together. The adversary had leapt forward with violent terror to throw Christ's camp into confusion. But he was driven back by the very force with which he had come, and as much terror and dread as he brought, so much courage and strength he found in return. He had believed he could once more trip up God's servants, and, as if they were raw recruits and untried, less prepared and less experienced, shake them as was his usual custom. He first attacked one alone, as a wolf tries to cut a sheep from the flock, as a hawk tries to separate a dove from the flying company — for whoever lacks sufficient strength against all seeks instead to surround the isolation of individuals. But repulsed by the faith and vigor alike of a united army, he understood that Christ's soldiers were now watching, sober and armed, standing ready for battle, unable to be conquered, able only to die, and unconquered precisely in this, that they do not fear to die, nor do they fight back against their attackers — since the innocent are not permitted to kill even a guilty man — but readily hand over both life and blood, so that, while such malice and savagery rage in the world, one may withdraw all the more swiftly from the wicked and the savage. What a glorious spectacle that was before the eyes of God, what joy in the sight of Christ for his own church, that against the battle the enemy had tried to bring, not individual soldiers but the whole camp together came forward. For it is agreed that all would have come if they had been able to hear the call, since whoever heard it ran there in haste and came. How many who had lapsed were restored there through glorious confession; they stood firm, and made braver for battle by the very pain of their repentance — so that it appears they had merely been taken by surprise and had trembled from the fear of a strange and unaccustomed trial, but afterward came back to themselves, and strengthened their true faith and their powers, gathered from the fear of God, steadily and firmly for every endurance — no longer standing for pardon of a crime, but for the crown of suffering. What does Novatian say to this, dearest brother? Does he now lay down his error? Or rather — as is the way of madmen — has he been driven all the more to fury by these very blessings and successes of ours, so that the more our love and faith flourish gloriously on this side, the more his madness of division and envy flares up afresh on that one? The wretched man does not tend to his own wound, but wounds himself and his followers still more gravely, clattering his tongue to the ruin of the brothers and hurling the poisoned darts of his eloquence — more hardened by the corruption of secular philosophy than softened by the peaceable wisdom belonging to the Lord — a man who has deserted the church, turned foe to mercy, slain repentance, taught pride, corrupted truth, and destroyed love. Does he even recognize now who is a priest of God, what the church and house of Christ is, who are the servants of God whom the devil harasses, who are the Christians whom antichrist assails? For he does not seek out those he has already subdued, nor does he trouble to overthrow those he has already made his own. As the church's enemy and foe, he looks past and scorns the very people he drove out of the church into captivity and defeat; instead he presses his attack against those in whom he sees Christ dwelling. And yet, even if any of these men should be arrested, he has no cause to flatter himself as though in a confession of the Name, since it is agreed that if such people are killed outside the church, it is not the crown of faith but rather the penalty of faithlessness, and that those we watch tearing themselves away in discord's fury from that peaceful, God-given family will find no place in God's house among people of a single mind. We urge you plainly, dearest brother, as far as we are able, through the mutual love binding us together, that — seeing how the Lord's own warning providence is teaching us, and the merciful counsels of heaven, wholesome as they are, are alerting us that the day of our struggle and contest draws near — we ought not to stop persisting, together with the whole people, in fasting, keeping watch, and prayer. Let us apply ourselves to constant groaning and frequent supplication. For these are our heavenly weapons, which make us stand and persevere with courage; these are the spiritual defenses and divine darts that protect us. Let us be mindful of one another, of one heart and one mind together, let us always pray for one another on both sides, let us relieve pressures and hardships through mutual love; and if any of us here should go ahead, by the swiftness of divine favor, may our love persevere with the Lord, and may our prayer not cease before the mercy of the Father on behalf of our brothers and sisters. I wish you, dearest brother, continual good health.
Letter LXI. Cyprian, together with his colleagues, to his brother Lucius, greeting. Not long ago, dearest brother, we rejoiced with you when divine favor established you, with a double honor, as both confessor and priest in the governance of his church. But now we rejoice no less over you, your companions, and the whole brotherhood, seeing that the Lord's kindly and generous protection has restored you once more to your own people, with all the glory and praise you carried before — restored as a shepherd to his flock, a helmsman to his ship, a ruler to those he governs — so that your exile might appear ordained by God's hand, not to strip the church of a bishop banished and cast out, but to send him back to the church greater still. For the dignity of martyrdom was no less in the three young men because their deaths were foiled and they came out of the furnace unharmed, nor did Daniel's merit fall short, for though thrown to the lions as their prey, the Lord shielded him and he lived on into glory. In Christ's confessors, delayed martyrdoms do not lessen their merit as confessors, but rather display the mighty works of divine protection. We see fulfilled again in you what those brave and illustrious young men proclaimed before the king — that they themselves were indeed ready to burn in the flames rather than serve his gods or worship the image he had made, yet that the God whom they worshiped, whom we too worship, was powerful enough to snatch them from the furnace and free them from the king's hands and from the punishments then at hand. We see this same pattern play out again now, through the faith your confession showed and the protection the Lord kept over us: though you stood ready and prepared to endure every punishment, the Lord instead drew you back from that penalty and held you in reserve for his church. Your homecoming did nothing to lessen the bishop's dignity as confessor; rather, his priestly authority grew all the greater, so that he who stands at God's altar as bishop might urge the people toward the weapons of confession and the accomplishing of martyrdom not merely by words but by deeds, and, with antichrist pressing near, might ready the soldiers for battle not only through the encouragement of speech and voice but through the example of faith and courage. We understand, dearest brother, and see clearly, with every ray of light our heart holds, the saving and holy counsels of the divine majesty — why a sudden persecution should have broken out there recently, why worldly power should have burst out so suddenly against the church of Christ, against Bishop Cornelius, that blessed martyr, and against all of you — so that, to confound the heretics and beat them back, the Lord might show what the church is, who its one bishop is, chosen by divine ordination, who the presbyters are who are joined to the bishop in priestly honor, who are the united and true people of Christ, joined together by their love for the flock that belongs to the Lord, who are those the enemy assails, and against whom he strikes precisely so as to spare those he calls his own — since Christ's foe pursues and attacks nothing except the camp and soldiers of Christ; heretics, once thrown down and claimed as his, he disdains and passes over. He seeks instead to cast down those he sees standing firm. And would that the opportunity were given now, dearest brother, for us who love you with mutual affection to be present there for your return, so that we ourselves might share, together with the rest, in the most joyful fruit of your arrival. What rejoicing of all the brothers there must be, what a running together and embracing of everyone who comes to meet you! No embrace, however tightly people cling and kiss you, could ever feel like enough; nor could the crowd's own eyes and faces ever grow satisfied simply watching the joy your return brings. There the brotherhood has begun to learn what sort and how great will be the joy to follow when Christ comes; and because his coming has drawn near so swiftly, a kind of image of it has already gone before among us, so that just as John, his forerunner and herald, proclaimed by his coming that Christ had come, so now, with the Lord's confessor and priest returning, it may appear that the Lord himself is now returning. As for us, I and my colleagues and the whole brotherhood send you this letter in our stead, dearest brother, and, representing our joy to you by letter, we express the faithful service of our love; here too, never pausing in our sacrifices and prayers, we offer thanks to the Father who is God and to his Son Christ, our Lord, and alike we pray and ask that he who is perfect and who perfects may guard and perfect in us the glorious crown of your confession — he who perhaps called you back to this very purpose, that your glory might not remain hidden, as it would have if your consummate martyrdom of confession had taken place away from us. For a sacrifice that offers the brotherhood an example of both courage and faith ought to be offered up in the presence of the brothers. We wish you, dearest brother, continual good health.
Letter LXII. Cyprian to his brothers Januarius, Maximus, Proculus, Victor, Modianus, Nemesianus, Nampulus, as well as Honoratus, greeting. With the deepest groaning of our spirit, and not without tears, we read your letter, dearest brothers, which you sent us out of concern for your love, about our brothers and sisters taken captive. Who indeed would fail to grieve over troubles of this sort, or who would not treat a brother's suffering as though it were his own, when the apostle Paul speaks and says: if one member suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and if one member rejoices, all the other members rejoice with it? And in another place he asks: is anyone weak, without my sharing in that weakness? Therefore now the captivity of our brothers must be reckoned our own captivity, and the suffering of those in danger must be counted as our own suffering, since our union is indeed one body, and it is not love alone but our very religion that ought to spur and strengthen us to ransom the members of our brothers. For since the apostle Paul says again: do you not know that you are God's temple and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? — even if love alone were not enough to drive us to bring aid to our brothers, it must still be considered in this matter that what has been taken captive are temples of God, and that we ought not allow, through long delay and neglected grief, God's temples to remain captive for long, but should labor with what strength we can and act swiftly, so that we may earn Christ our judge and the Lord our God through our service. For since Paul the apostle teaches that all who have received baptism into Christ have clothed themselves in Christ, it is Christ himself who must be recognized in our captive brothers and must be ransomed from the danger of captivity — he who ransomed us from the danger of death — so that he who stripped us from the jaws of the devil may now himself, who remains and dwells within us, be freed from the hands of barbarians and be ransomed with a sum of money, he who ransomed us with his cross and blood; and he allows this to happen for a time he permits this so our faith may be tested — whether every one of us would act for a fellow believer as we ourselves would wish someone to act on our behalf, were we ourselves held captive among the barbarians. For who, mindful of common humanity and moved by mutual love, would not, if he is a father, reckon that his own children are held there now; or, if he is a husband, consider that his own wife is held captive there, with grief equal to the love of the marriage bond? And how great is the shared mourning and anguish among all of us over the danger to the virgins who are held there, for whom not only the loss of freedom but the loss of chastity must be lamented — and it is not so much the chains of the barbarians as the violations of pimps and brothels that must be wept over, lest limbs consecrated to Christ, devoted in chaste virtue to the eternal honor of continence, be defiled by the contagion of others' lust? Weighing all this in the light of your letter and examining it with sorrow, our brotherhood here promptly, willingly, and generously contributed monetary help for the brothers — always indeed inclined, according to the firmness of their faith, toward the work of God, but now roused all the more to works of salvation by contemplation of so great a grief. For if the Lord says in his Gospel, I was sick and you visited me, think how much fuller a reward our labor will earn when instead he says, I was held captive and you ransomed me. And if he says elsewhere, I was in prison and you visited me, imagine the greater measure once he comes to say: I lay shut up and bound in the prison of captivity, held among the barbarians, and you set me free from that enslaving prison — for on the day of judgment they shall receive their reward from the Lord. In short, we give you the greatest thanks for wishing us to share in your concern and in so good and necessary a work, in that you have offered us rich fields in which to sow the seed of our hope, expecting to reap a harvest from the abundant fruits that come from this heavenly and saving work. We have sent a hundred thousand sesterces, raised here from the offerings of the clergy and people living alongside us, in this church that we preside over through the Lord's own indulgence — funds you will dispense there according to your own diligence. And indeed we hope nothing like this happens again, and that the Lord's majesty will shield our brothers, keeping them safe from dangers of this kind. Yet if, to test the love of our heart and examine the faith of our breast, something of this kind should occur, do not hesitate to inform us of it by your letter, being certain and assured that our church and the whole brotherhood here pray that such things not happen again, and, if they do happen, are ready to offer help willingly and generously. And so that you may keep in your prayers, and always keep, our brothers and sisters who promptly and willingly worked at this so necessary task, and repay them in kind for their good work through your sacrifices and prayers, I have added the names of each — and likewise of our colleagues and priests, who, being themselves present, also contributed something from their own resources on behalf of their own people; I have added their names too, and noted and sent along, besides our own contribution, the small sums that were theirs as well — all of whom, according to what faith and love demand, you ought to remember in your prayers and supplications. We wish you, dearest brothers, continual good health in the Lord, and ask that you remember us.
CYPRIAN TO HIS BROTHER CAECILIUS, GREETING. Although I know well, dearest brother, that throughout the whole world a great many bishops set by God's favor over the Lord's churches hold fast to gospel truth and to the tradition the Lord handed down, never departing through some new human device from what Christ our teacher both taught and did, still, because some — whether out of ignorance or plain simplicity — fall short, in sanctifying the Lord's cup and serving the people, of the very practice that our Lord and God Jesus Christ, the author and teacher of this sacrifice, himself established, I judged it both a duty of religion and a plain necessity to write to you on the matter, so that whoever remains caught in that error might, once the light of truth is seen, come back to the wellspring from which the Lord's own tradition rises. And do not think, dearest brother, that we set down here anything of our own devising or human contrivance, or that we take this upon ourselves boldly by our own will, since we always keep our poor self within a humble and modest restraint. But when something is enjoined by God's inspiration and command, a faithful servant must obey his Lord, and stands excused before all for presuming nothing of himself, since he is compelled to fear offending his Lord unless he does what he is bidden.
Know, then, that we have been admonished to preserve the Lord's tradition in offering the cup, and to do nothing other than what the Lord did first on our behalf: that the cup which is offered in his memory should not be offered without wine. For since Christ says, "I am the true vine," the blood of Christ is certainly not water but wine. And his blood, by which we have been redeemed and given life, cannot be seen to be present in the cup when the cup lacks the wine by which the blood of Christ is shown forth — that blood which is proclaimed by the mystery and testimony of all the Scriptures.
For we find in Genesis, in connection with the sacrament of Noah, that this same thing was foreshadowed beforehand, and that a figure of the Lord's passion existed there: that he drank wine, that he was made drunk, that he was uncovered in his own house, that he lay stretched out with his thighs bared and exposed, that his nakedness was pointed out by the middle son and reported abroad, but was covered over by the other two, the elder and the younger, and the rest of the details which there is no need to pursue — since it is enough to grasp this alone, that Noah, showing a type of the truth to come, drank not water but wine, and so expressed an image of the Lord's passion.
So too, the mystery of the Lord's sacrifice stands prefigured through the priest Melchizedek, just as divine Scripture testifies when it says: "Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine; he was a priest of God Most High, and gave Abraham his blessing." That Melchizedek carried a type of Christ is shown by the Holy Spirit in the psalms, where the Father addresses the Son directly: "Before the daystar I begot you; you are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek." This priestly order plainly traces back to, and flows out of, that earlier sacrifice — the facts that Melchizedek served as a priest of God Most High, that bread and wine were what he offered, and that Abraham received his blessing. For none is more truly a priest of God Most High than our own Lord Jesus Christ: it was he who made an offering to God the Father, presenting this very same thing Melchizedek had once presented — namely bread and wine, standing for his own body and blood. And that earlier blessing bestowed on Abraham belonged, in fact, to our own people. For if Abraham put faith in God and this was counted to him as righteousness, then surely anyone who believes God and lives by faith likewise stands justified, already blessed and made righteous long before in Abraham, that man of faith — as the blessed apostle Paul confirms, saying: "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness. Know then that those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham." And Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations through faith, told Abraham beforehand that in him all nations would find blessing. So then, those who live by faith share the blessing given to faithful Abraham. Hence we find in the gospel that children are raised up out of stones, meaning gathered from among the nations, to become sons of Abraham. And when the Lord praised Zacchaeus, he replied, "Salvation has come to this house today, since he too is a son of Abraham." So then, in order that the blessing concerning Abraham recorded in Genesis might be duly performed through the priest Melchizedek, an image of sacrifice went before it, set in place through bread and wine; and it was the Lord who, bringing that image to its completion, offered bread and a cup mixed with wine, he who is fullness itself fulfilling the truth toward which the earlier image had pointed.
But through Solomon too the Holy Spirit foretells a figure of what the Lord would sacrifice, touching on the slain victim, the bread and wine, and likewise the altar and the apostles. "Wisdom," it says, "built her house and set up seven pillars. She slew her victims, she mixed her wine in the bowl, and she prepared her table. And she sent out her servants, calling with a lofty proclamation to the bowl, saying: 'Whoever is foolish, let him turn aside to me.' And to those lacking understanding she said: 'Come and eat of my bread, and drink the wine which I have mixed for you.'" It speaks of wine mixed — that is, by a prophetic voice it announces beforehand the cup of the Lord mixed of water and wine, so that it might appear that in the Lord's passion that very thing was done which had been foretold before.
The blessing of Judah signals this very truth as well, and there too Christ's figure appears: that his own brothers would praise and worship him, that the hands with which he carried the cross and defeated death would press down the backs of fleeing, yielding enemies, and that he is none other than Judah's lion, lying down asleep in his passion before rising again, himself the hope of every nation. To these things divine Scripture adds and says: "He will wash his robe in wine and his garment in the blood of the grape." And when the blood of the grape is spoken of, what else is shown but that the wine of the Lord's cup is his blood? So too in Isaiah the Holy Spirit bears witness to this very point about what the Lord suffered, saying: "Why are your garments red, and your clothing as though from treading a winepress full and thoroughly trodden?" Could plain water redden garments, or is water what gets trampled underfoot in a winepress or squeezed out by its press? Surely mention is made of wine for this reason, so that the Lord's blood might be understood by wine, and that what was afterward made manifest in the Lord's cup might be proclaimed by the prophets foretelling it.
The treading and pressing of the winepress is likewise reckoned in this: for just as one cannot come to drink wine unless the grape is first trodden and pressed, in the same way, Christ's blood could not have been ours to drink had he not first undergone the treading and pressing himself, and been first to drink from that cup before offering it to those who believe.
Whenever the holy Scriptures name water by itself, baptism is what is meant, as we can see is signified in Isaiah. "Do not," it says, "call to mind earlier things, and do not dwell on what is old. See, I am making new things, which shall soon come into being, and you shall come to know them; I will open a way through the desert, and rivers in a dry place, so as to water my chosen race, my people whom I have claimed as my own, that they might declare my mighty works." There, through his prophet, God announced ahead of time that among the nations, in places once dry, rivers would later overflow and water God's chosen race — meaning those made sons of God through the begetting that baptism is. So too it was foretold long beforehand that the Jews, should they come to thirst and seek out Christ, would find drink among us — that is, would come into baptism's grace. "Should they thirst in the desert," it says, "he will guide water to them; from the rock he will draw it out for their sake — the rock will be split open, and, as the water pours out, my people will drink." This finds its fulfillment in the gospel: Christ, the rock, is pierced by the spear-thrust in his passion, and, pointing to what the prophet had earlier foretold, he cries out: "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink, whoever believes in me — as Scripture says, rivers of living water will flow out from within him." And to make it plainer that here the Lord means baptism rather than the cup, Scripture continues: "But this he said about the Spirit, which those believing in him were about to receive." The Holy Spirit is received precisely through baptism, and so it is those baptized and having received the Spirit who go on to drink the Lord's cup. No one need be puzzled that, while it is baptism divine Scripture is describing, it still speaks of our thirsting and drinking, since the Lord likewise says in the gospel: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness" — for what is taken up with an eager, thirsting desire is absorbed all the more fully and richly. In just the same way, the Lord tells the Samaritan woman elsewhere: "Whoever drinks from this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks from the water I shall give will never thirst again." This very fact signals the saving water of baptism too, in that it is received a single time and never repeated. But the Lord's cup within the church is something forever both longed for and drunk.
There is no call, dear brother, for a great pile of arguments to establish that "water" always stands for baptism, and that this is how we should read it — since the Lord himself, at his coming, revealed clearly the truth of both baptism and the cup. He decreed that faithful water, the water of eternal life, be given to believers at their baptism, yet through his own example he showed that the cup ought to be mixed from wine joined with water. For, on the day of his passion he took the cup, blessed it, and handed it to his disciples with the words: "All of you, drink from this; this is the blood of the covenant, poured out for many, for the forgiveness of sins. Truly I tell you, this fruit of the vine shall not touch my lips again before that day I share it new with you, in my Father's kingdom." From this it is clear the cup the Lord offered contained a mixture, and that the wine was what he named his blood. So it follows that Christ's blood goes unoffered wherever the cup contains no wine, and that the Lord's sacrifice cannot be celebrated with proper sanctity unless what we offer corresponds to his passion. How, then, could we hope to drink new wine from the vine together with Christ in the Father's kingdom, if we fail to offer wine in the sacrifice belonging to God the Father and to Christ, and fail to mix the Lord's cup as the Lord's own tradition requires?
The blessed apostle Paul as well, called and dispatched by the Lord and made a herald of the gospel's truth, records these same words in his letter, saying: "The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and declared: 'This, given for you, is my body — do this in remembrance of me.' In like fashion, after the meal, he took the cup too, saying: 'This cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood; whenever you drink it, do this in memory of me.' For whenever you eat this bread and drink from this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." If, then, the Lord commands this, and his apostle likewise confirms and transmits it — that whenever we drink, we should perform this act in memory of the Lord, just as the Lord himself performed it — we discover that this command goes unfulfilled among us unless we too carry out exactly what the Lord did, mixing the cup in the same fashion, keeping faithful to his divinely given instruction. And that we must in no way depart from the gospel precepts, and that disciples too ought to observe and do steadfastly and firmly the very things the teacher taught and did, the blessed apostle teaches elsewhere still more forcefully, saying: "I am astonished that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by grace, to a different gospel — which is not another gospel, except that there are some who trouble you and wish to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel to you other than what we have preached, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: if anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what you received, let him be accursed."
Given, then, that no one — not the apostle himself, not even an angel sent down from heaven — has authority to proclaim or teach anything beyond what Christ once taught and his apostles once announced, I find it altogether astounding that, against gospel and apostolic practice, water by itself gets offered in the Lord's cup in some places, water that on its own cannot stand for Christ's blood. On this mystery the Holy Spirit does not keep quiet, even in the psalms, where the Lord's cup is mentioned: "Your cup which brings drunkenness is exceedingly good." Now a cup capable of intoxicating must be mixed with wine, since water alone can make no one drunk. And the Lord's cup intoxicates just as the wine Noah drank in Genesis made him drunk. Yet because the intoxication brought by the Lord's cup and blood differs from that of common wine, when the Holy Spirit spoke in the psalm of "your cup which brings drunkenness," he added "exceedingly good" — signifying that the Lord's cup intoxicates in a way that produces sobriety, drawing the mind toward spiritual understanding, so that each person, moving past worldly taste, comes to his senses in the knowledge of God. And just as ordinary wine loosens the mind, relaxes the soul, and dissolves every sorrow, so too, after the Lord's blood and saving cup have passed one's lips, what fades away is remembrance of one's former self, forgetting the old worldly way of living; and the heart, once weighed down and grieving under the burden of sin, finds relief in the gladness of God's mercy — a gladness that can genuinely delight one drinking within the Lord's church, provided that what is drunk preserves the Lord's own truth.
What a backward, contradictory thing it would be if, after the Lord turned water into wine at that wedding, we went and turned wine back into water — when the very mystery of what happened there should instruct and warn us to offer wine, not water, in the Lord's sacrifices instead. Because spiritual grace had run dry among the Jews, wine ran dry too, since the house of Israel is described as the vineyard belonging to the Lord of Hosts. Christ, however, by turning water into wine, was demonstrating that the gentile peoples would step into that place, and that we ourselves would later, through the merit of faith, arrive where the Jews had forfeited their standing — in other words, he was showing that once the Jews had dropped away, it would be the gentile peoples flocking together to the wedding feast of Christ and the church. That waters stand for peoples is something divine Scripture states plainly in Revelation: "The waters you saw, on which that harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues" of the heathen. And this too, we clearly recognize, is bound up within the mystery of the cup.
For since Christ, who bore our sins, bore us all, we see that in the water the people are understood, while in the wine the blood of Christ is shown. But when water is mixed with wine in the cup, the people are united to Christ, and the believing multitude is joined and knit to him in whom it has believed. And this joining and union of water and wine is so mingled together in the cup of the Lord that the mixture cannot any longer be separated one from the other. As a result, nothing has power to sever the church — meaning those who, faithfully and steadfastly established within it, persevere in what they have believed — from Christ, so that it goes on clinging to him and abiding always in undivided love. But just as water alone cannot be offered in sanctifying the Lord's cup, so neither can wine alone. For if one should offer wine alone, the blood of Christ begins to be without us; but if it should be water alone, the people begin to be without Christ. But when both are mixed and joined together by a blended union with one another, then a spiritual and heavenly mystery is accomplished. In the same way, the Lord's cup consists neither in water by itself nor wine by itself, unless the two are mixed together — much as the Lord's body cannot exist as flour by itself or water by itself, unless both are combined, joined, and pressed together into the solid mass of a single loaf. By this same mystery our people too are shown to be made one: for just as many grains, gathered together and ground and mixed, make one loaf, so in Christ, who is the bread of heaven, let us know that there is one body, to which our multitude is joined and made one.
So there is no ground at all, dear brother, for anyone to imagine some people's custom deserves following, just because certain individuals once believed water by itself ought to be offered in the Lord's cup. We must ask instead whom those individuals themselves were following, for in the sacrifice Christ offered, only Christ is to be followed — meaning we are bound to obey and carry out precisely what Christ did and ordered to be done, since he says in the gospel: "If you keep what I command you, I call you servants no longer, but friends." And the Father himself, speaking from heaven, testifies that Christ alone deserves to be heard: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him." So if Christ alone must be heard, our attention should fall not on what somebody before us supposed ought to be done, but on what Christ — who precedes everyone — did first. What we ought to follow is not human custom but God's own truth, since God, through the prophet Isaiah, says: "They worship me in vain, teaching human commandments and doctrines" — and the Lord echoes this very point again in the gospel: "You set aside God's commandment in order to establish your tradition." And in yet another place he states: "Whoever breaks even one of these smallest commandments, and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven." If it is forbidden to break the smallest of the Lord's commandments, how much graver a wrong to tamper with matters so weighty, so momentous, so tightly bound to the mystery of the Lord's passion and our redemption — or to alter through human custom what has been divinely established into something else entirely? For since Christ Jesus, our Lord and God, is himself high priest before God the Father, offered himself up as a sacrifice to the Father, and commanded this be repeated in remembrance of him, then the priest who truly fills Christ's office is the one who imitates Christ's own act — offering, in the church, a genuine and complete sacrifice to God the Father, provided he begins his offering in the very manner he sees Christ himself to have offered.
Otherwise the whole discipline of religion and of truth is overturned unless what is spiritually commanded is faithfully kept, unless someone is careful about this very point at the morning sacrifices — that through the taste of wine he not give off the smell of the blood of Christ. Thus, then, the brotherhood begins to be held back from the passion of Christ in times of persecution, once in the offerings it grows accustomed to being embarrassed by his blood and his gore. Yet the Lord himself says in the gospel: whoever has been ashamed of me, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed. And the apostle likewise says: if I were pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ. How, then, could we ever spill our own blood in Christ's name, when swallowing his own blood makes us feel shame?
Or does someone comfort himself with the thought that, though only water appears to be offered in the morning, we present the mixed cup once evening dinner arrives? Yet at dinner we have no way of gathering the entire congregation to our table, in order that the whole brotherhood together might witness the sacrament performed as it truly should be. It is nonetheless true that the Lord gave the mixed cup after supper, not in the morning. Must we, then, hold the Lord's Supper after our evening meal, offering the mixed cup that way at our regular Sunday gatherings? Christ's offering was fittingly timed near evening, so that the hour of sacrifice itself would signal the world's decline toward its close, just as Exodus records: the whole gathered assembly of Israel's sons shall slaughter it near evening. And the Psalms likewise say: my upraised hands stand as an evening offering. We, however, mark the Lord's resurrection in the morning.
Since his passion is invoked in every sacrifice we offer — for what we present is nothing less than the Lord's own passion — our task is simply to reenact what he himself did, no more and no less. Scripture tells us that whenever we lift the cup to recall the Lord and his suffering, we are to repeat that same act which he is known to have performed. Let it be considered, dearest brother, whether any predecessor of ours, through ignorance or plain simplicity, neglected to keep and follow what the Lord's own example and teaching directed; such simple failure might perhaps find pardon through the Lord's own mercy. But no excuse remains open to us, now that the Lord himself has warned and taught us to mix wine into his cup exactly as he once did, and to write to our fellow bishops on this very point, so that the law of the gospel and the tradition handed down by the Lord might be preserved everywhere, with nothing of what Christ taught or practiced left abandoned.
To go on scorning these things and to remain fixed in old error is nothing else than to fall headlong into the Lord's own rebuke, as he charges [in the Psalm]: why do you recite my statutes and take my covenant upon your lips? But you have hated discipline and cast my words behind you. If you saw a thief, you ran with him, and you cast your lot among adulterers. To recite the Lord's statutes and covenant, yet fail to act as the Lord himself acted — what is this except throwing away his words and scorning the discipline that comes from him, committing theft and adultery, not of earthly goods but of spiritual ones? — for someone robs the gospel truth of our Lord's own words and deeds whenever he corrupts and falsifies the divine commands. As Jeremiah has it: what, he asks, does straw have in common with wheat? Therefore, behold, I stand against the prophets, says the Lord, who steal my words each one from his neighbor, misleading my people through their lies and their errors. And elsewhere in the same prophet: she committed adultery, he says, with wood and stone, and through all of this she has not turned back to me. This same theft and adultery — lest it fall upon us as well — we must resist with vigilance, with reverent fear, and with careful watchfulness. For if we serve as priests of God and of Christ, I can find no one more deserving of our imitation than God and Christ themselves, since he plainly declares in the gospel that he himself is the light of the world. The one who has followed me will never walk in the dark, but will possess the light of life. So that we might avoid walking in darkness, then, we must follow Christ and keep his commandments, since elsewhere, sending forth the apostles, he himself said: all authority in heaven and on earth has been granted to me. So go out and make disciples of every nation, plunging them into the name shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while instructing them to observe every command I have given you. For this reason, if it is Christ's light we mean to walk by, we must not turn away from his commands and counsel, giving thanks that even as he teaches us what to do from now on, he forgives whatever we did wrong in simple ignorance before. And because his second coming draws nearer to us with each day, his generous and gracious favor floods our hearts ever more with the light of truth.
It is fitting, therefore, dearest brother, both to our religion and to our fear of God, and to the very office and duty of our priesthood, in mixing and offering the Lord's cup, to safeguard what the Lord's own tradition truly hands down, correcting, on the Lord's own admonition, what has previously seemed to be done wrongly by certain persons, so that when he begins to come in his own brightness and heavenly majesty, he may find us holding what he warned, observing what he taught, doing what he did. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter 64. From Cyprian, together with his sixty-six fellow colleagues gathered in council, to their brother Fidus, greeting. Your letter has reached us, dearest brother, and from it we learned that our colleague Therapius rashly extended peace, acting too soon and in undue haste, to a former presbyter named Victor, before Victor had completed his full penance or made his peace with the Lord God whom he had offended. This news disturbed us a good deal, since it meant straying from what our decree required — namely that no one receive peace before the lawful and complete period of satisfaction has passed, and without the people's own request and awareness, unless some illness or pressing need forced the matter. Yet once we had weighed the matter carefully among ourselves over time, we thought it sufficient to reprimand our colleague Therapius for acting so rashly, warning him against repeating such conduct; still, we did not believe that peace, however it had been granted by one of God's priests, should afterward be revoked, and so we permitted Victor to retain the fellowship that had already been extended to him. Concerning the question about infants — you had said that a child should not be baptized within its second or third day of life, that the ancient law of circumcision deserved consideration, and that therefore a newborn ought not to receive baptism and sanctification before the eighth day — our council reached quite a different conclusion. Not a single member agreed with your proposed course; instead we all judged together that no one, once born, should be refused God's mercy and grace. Since the Lord states in his gospel that the Son of Man came not to destroy human souls but to rescue them, so, as much as depends on us, no soul ought to be lost if this can possibly be avoided. What, after all, is missing in someone already shaped by God's own hands within the womb? To our eyes, measuring by the ordinary passage of earthly days, newborns appear to grow gradually; yet anything God has made is already brought to completeness through the majesty and craft of its maker. Further, sacred Scripture assures us that God's gift is bestowed with one same equality upon everyone, whether infant or elder, for we read how Elisha, calling on God over the widow's dead son, laid himself across the boy so that head touched head, face touched face, and his own limbs, stretched over the child, matched each of the little one's limbs, foot against foot. Judged merely by our own manner of birth and bodily proportions, an infant could never be matched to a full-grown man, nor could such small limbs stretch to cover larger ones. But here a spiritual, God-given parity is being shown — that all human beings stand equal and alike, having been made once by God, and that while our bodies may differ in growth measured by worldly years, no such difference exists before God, unless the grace granted at baptism itself varies in measure according to the recipient's age, though the Holy Spirit is in fact given to everyone equally, not by measure but through the Father's own tenderness and generosity. God pays no more attention to a person's age than he does to a person's rank, offering himself to all alike, in perfect balance, for reaching heavenly grace. You also mentioned that the trace of birth still on an infant in its first days is unclean, such that each of us hesitates even to kiss it — but we do not consider this any barrier to bestowing heavenly grace. Scripture tells us that to the clean, everything is clean. None of us should recoil from what God himself chose to fashion. Though the child is only newly come from the womb, that is no reason for anyone to shrink from kissing him while granting grace and making peace, for in kissing an infant each of us, according to his own devotion, ought to picture God's hands still fresh upon that child — hands which we in a sense touch with our lips whenever we embrace someone just formed and just born, since it is God's own handiwork we are embracing. As for the Jews' fleshly circumcision, performed on the eighth day, that practice was itself a foreshadowing mystery — a shadow and figure dispatched ahead of time — which reached its fulfillment only once Christ had come. Since it was on the eighth day — the first day following the sabbath — that the Lord was destined to rise, restore us to life, and grant us a circumcision of the spirit, that eighth day, the first after the sabbath and now the Lord's own day, had already come beforehand as a figure; and once the reality arrived and spiritual circumcision was granted to us, that figure came to an end. For this reason we do not believe anyone ought to be kept from grace under a law now firmly established, nor spiritual circumcision blocked by the carnal kind, but rather that everyone, with no exception, ought to be welcomed into Christ's grace, just as Peter states in the Acts of the Apostles: God has shown me that no person is to be called profane or unclean. And if anything at all were capable of blocking someone from grace, it would surely be the graver sins more likely found among grown and seasoned adults. Yet if even the worst offenders — those who had sinned greatly against God for a long time — receive forgiveness once they come to belief, with none excluded from baptism or grace, how much less should a newborn be excluded, since the only sin such a child carries is the contagion of ancient death inherited at his first birth through descent from Adam's flesh, having done no wrong himself — indeed such a child comes to receive forgiveness even more readily, since what is forgiven him is not his own sin but someone else's. For this reason, then, dearest brother, our council reached this judgment: that we ought never to bar anyone from baptism and from the grace of a God who shows mercy, kindness, and generosity toward all; and though this principle applies to every person, we believe it applies with still greater force to infants and the newly born, who deserve our assistance and divine compassion all the more precisely because, from the very first moment of life, their weeping and crying amount to nothing but a plea for help. We wish you, dearest brother, to fare well always.
Letter 65. From Cyprian, to his brother Epictetus and to the people living at Assuras, greeting. I was struck with deep grief and distress, dearest brothers, upon hearing that Fortunatianus — once your bishop — having suffered a serious collapse, now intends to behave as if unharmed and whole, and has set about claiming the bishopric for himself. This news troubled me for several reasons: first because of the man himself, poor wretch, whether utterly darkened by the devil's shadow or led astray by someone's sacrilegious deception — for while he should instead be making amends and besieging the Lord day and night with weeping, prayer, and pleading, he still ventures to reclaim the very priesthood he betrayed, as if approaching God's altar were permissible after bowing at the devil's, or as if he were not thereby stirring up still fiercer wrath and judgment from the Lord on the last day. Unable to serve as a model of faith and courage for the brothers, he has instead become an instructor in faithlessness, arrogance, and recklessness; and having failed to teach the brothers to hold their ground in the fight, he now teaches those already defeated and fallen not even to ask for mercy — even though the Lord himself declares: to them you poured drink offerings and to them you presented sacrifices; over such things shall I not show my anger? says the Lord; and elsewhere: whoever sacrifices to other gods, apart from the Lord alone, shall be uprooted; and again the Lord speaks, saying: they bowed down to what their own fingers had fashioned, and so man was brought low and humbled, and I will grant them no pardon; and in the Apocalypse too we find the Lord's anger foretold: if anyone worships the beast and its image, and takes its mark upon forehead or hand, that one will likewise drink the wine of God's fury, poured undiluted into the cup of his wrath, and will be tormented with fire and brimstone in full view of the holy angels and of the Lamb; the smoke of their torment rises age after age without end, and neither day nor night will those who worship the beast and its image find any rest. Given, then, that the Lord threatens exactly these punishments and torments on judgment day against all who submit to the devil and offer sacrifice to idols, how could anyone imagine himself fit to serve as God's priest after submitting to and serving the devil's own priests? How could he suppose his hand fit to be raised for God's sacrifice, or his prayer fit for the Lord, once both hand and prayer have become prisoners to sacrilege and crime — especially since divine Scripture bars even priests guilty of lesser faults from approaching the sacrifice, stating in Leviticus: no man bearing a defect or blemish shall come near to present offerings to God; and likewise in Exodus: let the priests who draw near the Lord God make themselves holy, lest the Lord perhaps abandon them; and again: those who come near to serve at the holy altar must not bring guilt upon themselves, lest they die. Those, then, who have burdened themselves with grave wrongs — namely, those whose idol-sacrifices amount to sacrilege — have no claim to God's priesthood, nor can they offer any prayer for the brothers in his presence, given what the gospel states: God pays no heed to a sinner, but listens to the one who reveres him and carries out his will. Granted, the thick gloom of advancing shadows has so darkened certain men's hearts that they let in no ray of light from these healthy teachings, but, having once strayed from the straight course of the true path, are carried off suddenly and steeply into the darkness and delusion born of their own crimes. Small wonder, then, that men who have already denied the Lord likewise spurn our counsel and the Lord's commandments. What they crave are the contributions, offerings, and profits on which they once fed insatiably, and they still lust after feasts and banquets, whose lingering drunkenness they used to belch up daily in their excess — now demonstrating beyond doubt that, before any religion, it was really their stomachs and their shameless appetite for gain that they served. From this we recognize and believe that this scrutiny itself has arisen from God's own testing, so that such men might no longer keep standing at the altar and touching it — men bringing to it the disgrace of the unchaste, the loyalty of traitors, the piety of the impious, treating divine matters as merely earthly, holy things through sacrilegious hands. Accordingly, to prevent such men returning to defile the altar again or make contact with the brothers, we must stand guard with every ounce of strength and press forward with all our energy, driving back so far as possible the shameless boldness behind their crime, so they no longer attempt to act as priests — men who, thrust down to the very edge of death, have collapsed under a heavier ruin than even the lapsed laity. But should this madness prove incurable and persist among these deranged men, with the Holy Spirit withdrawn and the darkness that took hold remaining locked in its own night, then our plan will be this: to pull individual brothers free of their deceit, and to cut them off from any contact, so that no one stumbles into the snares of their error — for no offering can be made holy where the Holy Spirit is absent, nor can the Lord grant benefit to anyone through the prayers of a man who has himself trampled upon the Lord. So if Fortunatianus, either forgetting his own crime through the devil's blinding, or having turned into the devil's own agent and servant for deceiving the brotherhood, continues in this madness, then you, to the extent you can, must labor, and amid this darkness of a raging devil, draw the brothers' minds back from error, so they do not readily fall in with another's madness, nor become partners in the wrongdoing of desperate men, but instead hold firm to the unbroken path of their own salvation and the lasting strength of an integrity they themselves preserve and guard. As for the lapsed, once they recognize the size of their offense, they should not stop pleading with the Lord, nor forsake the one catholic Church that the Lord alone established; rather, remaining steadfast in acts of penance and begging for the Lord's mercy, they should keep knocking at the Church's door, so that they might be taken back into the place they once held, and return to the Christ they had abandoned. Nor should they give ear to those who deceive themselves through a false and fatal enticement, for it is written: let no one lead you astray with empty talk, since it is on account of these very things that God's wrath falls upon the disobedient; do not, then, share company with them. Let no one, therefore, keep company with those who remain stubborn, unafraid of God, and wholly withdrawn from the Church. But should anyone grow impatient with pleading before the offended Lord, and refuse to heed us, choosing instead to follow the desperate and the lost, he alone will bear the blame once judgment day arrives; for how could such a man plead with the Lord on that day, having already denied Christ once and now denying Christ's Church as well, and, refusing obedience to bishops who are sound, whole, and living, having made himself the companion and comrade of the dying? I wish you, dearest brothers, to fare well always.
Letter 66. From Cyprian, also called Thascius, to his brother Florentius, known too as Pupianus, greeting. Brother, I had supposed that you had finally come round to repentance, and that whatever unspeakable, shameful things — things loathsome even to pagans — you had once rashly heard or believed of us belonged now to the past. Yet your letter shows me otherwise: you remain exactly the man you were, holding the same opinions of us and clinging stubbornly to what you have chosen to believe; and, worried that our fellowship might somehow tarnish the glory of your reputation and your martyrdom, you go probing into our behavior, and, setting aside God the judge who appoints priests, you would rather — not, I dare say, pass sentence on me, for who am I? — overturn the very verdict rendered by God and by Christ. That is disbelief in God himself; that is open revolt against Christ and his gospel, for he has said: are two sparrows not sold for a mere penny, yet not a single one drops to earth apart from the Father's consent — and by this his majesty and truth show that nothing, however trivial, occurs without God's own awareness and permission. Yet you imagine priests are ordained in the church behind his back. To believe the men ordained are unworthy and corrupt is simply to claim that God plays no part, directly or otherwise, in establishing his own priests within the church. Or do you rate my personal testimony above God's own, when the Lord himself instructs us that no one's witness about himself can be trusted, since every man naturally favors his own cause and will not volunteer evidence against himself — whereas genuine truth demands, when we make our proclamations, a witness separate from the one proclaiming? "If I testify concerning myself," he says, "my testimony is not true; there is another who testifies of me." And if the Lord — who will one day judge everything — refused to have his own self-testimony simply taken on faith, choosing instead to be vindicated through the Father's own judgment and witness, how much more ought his servants hold to that principle, servants who are not only vindicated by God's judgment and witness but who take pride in it. Yet a fabrication spun by hostile, malicious men has overpowered you, set against the divine verdict and against the confidence we place in our own faith — as though, among the lapsed, the defiled, and those thrust outside the church, hearts the Holy Spirit has abandoned could hold anything but a corrupted mind, a lying tongue, poisoned grudges, and blasphemous falsehoods; and whoever puts faith in such people is bound to be counted among them once the day of reckoning arrives. Now, regarding your claim that priests should be humble because the Lord and his apostles were humble: my own humility is well known to, and cherished by, all our brothers and even by pagans; you too once recognized it and valued it, back when you were still within the church and still in fellowship with me. But ask which of us truly stands far from humility — I, who wait on the brothers day after day and receive each newcomer to the church kindly, willingly and with joy, or you, who have made yourself a bishop over your bishop and a judge over the judge whom God appointed for his own season — recall that the Lord God says in Deuteronomy: whoever acts with such arrogance that he will not obey the priest or the judge holding office in those days — that person shall be put to death, and the whole nation, hearing of it, will be afraid and will no longer act wickedly; and again he tells Samuel: it is not you they have spurned, it is me. And once more, when someone said to the Lord in the gospel, "Do you answer the high priest so?" — he, careful to uphold and teach that the priesthood's honor must be respected, said nothing against the high priest himself, but merely defended his own innocence, replying: "If I have spoken wrongly, point out the wrong; but if rightly, why strike me?" So too the blessed apostle, on being told, "Do you dare abuse the high priest this way?", uttered no insult against the priest — even though he might rightly have spoken out boldly against men who had crucified God and had already thrown away the Lord, the Christ, the temple, and the priesthood; yet, though that priesthood was counterfeit and stripped of honor, he still respected the mere hollow shadow of its title, and said: "Brothers, I did not realize he was the high priest, for scripture says, you shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people." Unless, that is, I was only a priest to you before the persecution, while you still shared communion with me, and stopped being a priest once the persecution came — since that same persecution lifted you to the very peak of a martyr's glory while it bore down on me with the weight of proscription, when this was read out publicly: "Whoever holds or keeps any property belonging to Caecilius Cyprianus, bishop of the Christians..." — so that people who would not believe God when he set up a bishop might at least believe the devil when he outlawed one. I do not boast of this; I mention it with sorrow, since you have made yourself judge over God and over Christ, who tells the apostles — and, through them, everyone set over the church who succeeds them by delegated ordination — "Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever listens to me listens to the one who sent me; and whoever rejects you rejects me, and the one who sent me." For where, after all, have schisms and heresies come from, and where do they keep arising, if not from this: the bishop, who alone presides over the church, gets treated with contempt through the arrogant presumption of certain men, while a man God himself has honored is judged unworthy in men's eyes? What is this swelling of pride, this haughtiness of spirit, this puffed-up mind, that summons those set over you — your priests — before your own private tribunal, as though, unless we've been cleared in your court and acquitted by your verdict, then, behold, for six years now the brotherhood has had no bishop, the people no leader, the flock no shepherd, the church no governor, Christ no chief priest, God no priest at all! Let Pupianus step forward and render his verdict; let him claim credit for the judgment belonging to God and to Christ, so that this vast number of the faithful gathered under our charge won't appear to have died without hope of salvation or peace; so that this new body of believers won't be judged to have gained through us no grace of baptism or of the Holy Spirit; so that the peace granted to so many of the lapsed and repentant, and the communion conceded after our own examination, won't be nullified by the weight of your judgment. Give your consent at last; condescend to render a verdict about us and to confirm our episcopate by the strength of your own judgment, so that God and his Christ can thank you for having, through your agency, restored to their altar and to their people a chief priest and a governor. Bees have their king, cattle their leader, and both remain loyal; even bandits submit to their chief with complete and humble obedience. How much simpler, how much better, are dumb beasts and speechless animals — even brigands, savage and bloodstained among their swords and weapons — than you! Among them their leader is acknowledged and feared, though he was chosen not by divine appointment but merely agreed upon by a band of lost, guilty criminals. You said, too, that you needed to shake off a scruple lodged in your mind. You fell into it, yes, but through your own irreverent credulity; you fell into it through your own sacrilegious will and thinking — since you eagerly listen to, and happily credit, unchaste, impious, unspeakable charges brought against a brother, against a priest, and defend other people's lies as if they were your own possession, forgetting the scripture: "Fence your ears about with thorns, and refuse to listen to a wicked tongue," and again: "A wicked man gives heed to an unjust tongue, but a righteous man pays no attention to lying lips." Why did such a scruple never trouble the martyrs, brimming with the Holy Spirit and, through their suffering, already standing near the presence of God and his Christ — men who sent letters from prison to Cyprian the bishop, recognizing him as God's priest and testifying on his behalf? Why did this scruple never trouble so many of my fellow bishops and colleagues, who either were themselves proscribed as they left our ranks, or were arrested and kept in prison and chains, or were driven into exile and made their way to the Lord along a glorious road, or, executed in various places, received their heavenly crowns straight from the Lord's own glory? Why did this scruple never trouble, among our own people who stand with us, entrusted to us by God's favor, so many confessors tested under torture, celebrated for the memory of their notable scars and wounds, so many virgins preserved intact, so many admirable widows, and, in the end, every church throughout the entire world bound to us in the tie of unity? Unless, as you have written, all of these — being in communion with me — have been contaminated by my defiled mouth and have thereby lost, through contact with my fellowship, all hope of everlasting life. Pupianus alone remains sound, untouched, holy and pure, having refused association with us, and to him alone will belong a dwelling in paradise, within heaven's kingdom. You have also written that the church, on my account, now keeps a portion of itself scattered abroad — when in truth the entire body of the church stands gathered, united, bound together in undivided harmony, and only those men remain outside who, even were they inside, would deserve expulsion; nor does the Lord, guardian and protector of his people, permit the wheat to be torn from his threshing floor — only chaff can be winnowed away from the church — for the apostle himself says: "What, then, if some among them have broken faith? Does their faithlessness cancel God's faithfulness? Certainly not; let God be true, though every man be a liar." And the Lord too, in the gospel, when the disciples were deserting him as he spoke, turned to the Twelve and asked, "Do you also want to leave?" Peter answered him: "Lord, to whom would we go? You hold the words of everlasting life, and we have come to believe and know that you are the Son of the living God." It is Peter who speaks there — the very man on whom the church was built — teaching and demonstrating, on the church's behalf, that although a stubborn, arrogant crowd of the disobedient may break away, the church itself never breaks away from Christ; and the church consists of those who are the people united to their priest, the flock clinging fast to its shepherd. From this you should grasp a single truth: the bishop resides within the church, just as the church resides within its bishop, so anyone standing apart from the bishop stands outside the church too; and it is pointless for those to flatter themselves who, lacking peace with God's priests, slip in and imagine they hold some secret communion here or there with certain individuals — for the church, one and catholic, is never split or torn apart, but everywhere stands joined together, bound fast by the mutual bond of its priests. So then, brother: if you will weigh the majesty of God, who ordains Christ's priests; if you will at some point turn your gaze to Christ, who by his will, his command, and his presence governs both those set over the church and the church alongside them; if you will trust in the innocence of priests on the strength of divine judgment rather than human malice; if you will finally begin, even now, however late, to regret your rashness, your pride, your insolence; if you will offer full satisfaction to the Lord and to his Christ — the one I serve, offering him, with lips kept undefiled, unending sacrifice through both persecution and peace alike — then we shall be able to weigh the question of restoring you to communion, though still holding fast to our reverence and fear of the divine censure; and I will first put the matter before my Lord, to see whether he will, by his own sign and warning, permit peace to be granted you and allow you to be received into the communion of his church.
Letter LXVII. From Cyprian, together with Caecilius, Primus, and Polycarp; Nicomedes, Lucilianus, and Successus; Sedatus, Fortunatus, and Januarius; Secundinus, Pomponius, and Honoratus; Victor, Aurelius, and Sattius; a Petrus, a second Januarius, and a Saturninus; a second Aurelius, Venantius, and Quietus; Rogatianus, Tenax, and Felix; Faustus, Quintus, and a second Satveninus; Lucius, Vincentius, and Libosus; Geminius, Marcellus, and Iambus; Adelphius and Victoricus, along with Paulus — writing to Felix the presbyter, to the congregations settled at Legio and at Asturica, and no less to Aelius the deacon and the congregation settled at Emerita: brothers, greeting in the Lord. Once we had assembled together, dearest brothers, we read the letter you had sent us through our fellow bishops Felix and Sabinus; in it, out of your concern to keep your faith whole and your reverence for God, you told us that Basilides and Martial, both marked by certificates of idol-worship and burdened with the knowledge of unspeakable crimes, had no right to hold a bishop's office or to carry out God's priesthood. You asked us to answer you on the matter and to see your just and pressing worry relieved, whether by our encouragement, our aid, or our formal judgment. Yet what meets this wish of yours is not so much our own advice as a command from God, since long before now a heavenly voice ordered, and God's own law set down, exactly who — and of what sort — ought to serve at his altar and carry out the sacred offerings. Thus in Exodus, God addresses Moses directly with this warning: those priests who draw near the Lord God must be made holy, so the Lord does not, perhaps, cast them off. And further: when they draw near to serve at the sacred altar, they must not bring guilt upon themselves, or they will die. So too in Leviticus, the Lord instructs: no man marked by any flaw or blemish shall come forward to present offerings to God. Now that these truths have been set before us and made clear, our submission owes itself entirely to what heaven commands; no one's standing may sway the outcome in matters such as these, nor can any human leniency hand out favors where a decree from God steps in and settles the law. Nor should we lose sight of what the Lord, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, said to the Jews when he rebuked and condemned them for scorning his commands in favor of merely human teaching: this nation, he declares, honors me only with its lips, while its heart stays distant from me; their reverence for me is empty, since what they teach are simply human rules dressed up as doctrine. The Lord makes the same charge again in the gospel: you set aside God's command so that you can uphold your own custom instead. Bearing all this in mind, and weighing it with careful, reverent attention, we are bound, when ordaining priests, to select only bishops of blameless and unblemished character — men whose holy and worthy offerings to God will win a hearing for the prayers they raise on behalf of the people's welfare, since scripture says: God does not listen to the sinner, but hears the one who reveres him and carries out his will. This is why, with the utmost care and honest examination, only those whom God is known to hear ought to be selected for his priesthood. Let no one among the people console themselves with the notion that fellowship with a corrupt priest, or consent given to an unjust and improper appointment of one placed over them, leaves them untouched by the taint of wrongdoing — for the prophet Hosea records this divine warning: their offerings will become like the bread of mourners; everyone who eats of it will be made unclean — showing plainly that guilt spreads to everyone without exception who has had contact with the offering of an impure and unrighteous priest. We find the same lesson set out in Numbers, when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram claimed for themselves, in defiance of Aaron the priest, the privilege of offering sacrifice. There too the Lord, through Moses, ordered the people to keep apart from them, so that by association with the guilty they would not themselves share in the guilt: withdraw, he says, from the tents of these harsh and wicked men, and do not touch anything belonging to them, or you will perish along with them in their sin. This is why a people obedient to the Lord's commands, and reverent toward him, is bound to keep clear of a leader mired in sin, and not join in the offerings of a priest who defiles the altar — for it is precisely the people who hold the authority either to choose priests worthy of the office or to turn away those unfit for it. And we see that this same principle flows directly from divine authority: that a priest is to be selected with the people looking on, in full view of everyone, and confirmed as worthy and suitable through the judgment and witness of the public — exactly as the Lord directs Moses in Numbers: take your brother Aaron, and his son Eleazar, and bring them up the mountain in view of the whole assembly; strip Aaron of his vestments and clothe Eleazar his son with them, and let Aaron then be gathered to his people and die there. God orders that the priest be installed before the entire assembly — meaning he teaches and demonstrates that priestly ordinations must happen only where the gathered people are watching and aware, so that with the community present, either the wrongdoing of the unworthy comes to light or the merit of the worthy is made known, and the appointment stands as fair and lawful only once it has passed through everyone's scrutiny and vote. The Acts of the Apostles preserve the very same custom, carried forward as heaven itself had taught it: a successor needed to be chosen for Judas's vacated place, and it was before the assembled body that Peter rose to speak. He stood up, so the text runs, in the midst of the disciples gathered there, and the whole company was of one accord. We also notice that the apostles held to this practice not only when ordaining bishops and priests but likewise for deacons — as is recorded, again, in the Acts: the twelve, it says, summoned the entire body of disciples together and spoke to them. This was carried out with such deliberate care, summoning the whole community, precisely to keep anyone unworthy from slipping unnoticed into service at the altar or into priestly rank. For sometimes the unworthy are indeed ordained — not by God's will, but through mere human overreach — and God himself makes plain, through the prophet Hosea, his displeasure at appointments that arise apart from a lawful and rightful process, saying: they set up kings for themselves, and not through me. For this reason it must be kept and observed with care, in keeping with divine tradition and apostolic custom — as is likewise upheld among us, and indeed across virtually every province — that for ordinations to be properly carried out, the bishops from the neighboring sees of the same province should gather together with the congregation for whom a leader is being installed, and the bishop should be selected while the people stand present, since they know each candidate's whole manner of life and have observed each one's conduct firsthand. And we see that this is exactly what took place among you when our colleague Sabinus was ordained, with the result that the office was granted to him through the vote of the entire brotherhood together with the judgment of the bishops who were present and who had already written to you about him, and hands were laid on him to fill the place Basilides had vacated. Nor can an ordination rightly carried out be undone simply because Basilides, once his crimes had come to light and even been admitted by his own conscience, traveled to Rome and misled our distant colleague Stephen — who knew nothing of what had truly happened — hoping to maneuver his way back into an office from which he had justly been removed. The upshot is that Basilides's guilt has not been wiped away but rather compounded, since the crime of trickery and deceit has now been heaped on top of his earlier sins. For the one caught off guard through carelessness deserves far less blame than the one condemned for deliberately practicing deception. Yet even granting that Basilides managed to deceive men, God he cannot deceive, since scripture says: God is not to be mocked. Nor has deception done Martial any good either, so as to free him — entangled as he too is in serious wrongdoing — from exclusion out of the episcopate, since the apostle likewise warns: a bishop must be above reproach, as one entrusted with God's household. Therefore, given what you yourselves report, dearest brothers, what our colleagues Felix and Sabinus confirm, and what another Felix, from Caesaraugusta, a man devoted to the faith and a champion of the truth, states in his own letter — namely, that Basilides and Martial bear the stain of a wicked idolatrous certificate; and given, further, that Basilides, beyond the mark of that certificate, while confined by illness spoke blasphemy against God, admitted to having done so, and, laying down his office of his own will because his conscience was wounded, turned instead toward penance, pleading with God and counting himself fortunate merely to be granted lay communion; and given that Martial, apart from the shameful and sordid pagan feasts long kept up within the burial guild, and apart from having buried his sons pagan-style in unconsecrated graves alongside foreigners, has also been shown, through records taken openly before the procurator ducenarius, to have submitted to idol-worship and renounced Christ — and given that many other grave charges besides entangle Basilides and Martial — it is pointless for men such as these to try to lay claim to a bishop's office, since it is beyond doubt that men of this kind can neither govern Christ's church nor are fit to offer sacrifice to God; all the more so since, well before this, together with us and indeed with every single bishop established throughout the whole world, our colleague Cornelius as well — a peaceable and upright priest, whom the Lord further honored with martyrdom — had already ruled that such men may be allowed to undertake penance, yet must be kept from ordination to clerical rank and from priestly standing. Do not let it unsettle you, dearest brothers, if in these final days some grow unsteady in faith, some let their reverence for God slacken irreligiously, or some fail to hold on to peaceful harmony. All this was foretold as bound to happen as the age draws to its close; it was declared beforehand, by the Lord's own voice and by the apostles' witness together, that as the world grows old and the antichrist approaches, whatever is good will dwindle while whatever is wicked and hostile will spread. Even so, despite these final days, neither has the church of God lost the vigor of the gospel, nor has the strength of Christian virtue and faith grown weak, such that a portion of the clergy still remains that will in no way give way to this collapse of circumstance and this shipwreck of belief, but instead stands firm and unshaken, guarding the honor of God's majesty and the dignity of the priesthood with unwavering, reverent care. We recall and hold on to this: that even while others gave way and yielded, Mattathias upheld the law of God with courage; that Elijah, as the Jews fell away and turned from true religion, held his ground and struggled valiantly; that Daniel, undeterred either by exile in a foreign land or by the constant assault of persecution, again and again bore glorious witness through martyrdom; and that the three youths likewise, unbent by either years or threats, stood firm against the fires of Babylon and triumphed over the conquering king even in the midst of their own captivity. Whatever number of turncoats or traitors may now be rising up inside the church against the church itself, working to tear down both faith and truth together, most people still keep a sincere heart and unbroken devotion, a soul given over to none but the Lord their God; the treachery of others does not pull the Christian faith down into ruin, but instead rouses and lifts it up toward glory, in keeping with what the blessed apostle urges when he asks: what then, if some among them fell away from faith? Has their faithlessness canceled out God's faithfulness? Certainly not — God remains true, even if every man proves false. And if every man is indeed false, and God alone is true, what else ought we, his servants, and above all his priests, to do except cast aside human error and falsehood and hold fast to his commands, so that we remain within God's truth? So then, even if some among our fellow bishops, dearest brothers, have judged it acceptable to set aside godly discipline and to fellowship carelessly with Basilides and Martial, this ought not to shake our own faith, since the Holy Spirit issues this warning against such men in the psalms: but you hated discipline and cast my words behind you; if you saw a thief, you ran alongside him, and you threw in your lot with adulterers. This shows that whoever attaches himself to wrongdoers becomes a partner and sharer in the sins of others. And the apostle Paul writes to the very same effect: gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent men, arrogant men, boasters, inventors of wickedness — who, though they knew God's justice, failed to grasp that those responsible for such conduct deserve death; and not only do they commit these wrongs themselves, but they also approve of others who do. For, as he says, those responsible for such conduct deserve death. He makes it plain and demonstrates that it is not only the wrongdoers who deserve death and face punishment, but also those who approve of the wrongdoers — people who, by mixing themselves into forbidden fellowship with the wicked, with sinners, and with those unwilling to repent, become stained through contact with the guilty, and, having joined in the offense, are likewise not spared from the penalty. For this reason, dearest brothers, we both praise and endorse the devoted care you show for your integrity and your faith, and, as far as we are able, we urge you through this letter of ours not to entangle yourselves through unholy fellowship with priests who are corrupt and stained, but rather to keep the complete and unblemished steadiness of your faith intact through reverent watchfulness. I wish you, dearest brothers, lasting good health.
Letter 68. Cyprian to his brother Stephen, greeting. Our colleague Faustinus, residing at Lyon, dearest brother, has written to me once and again, informing me of things which I know have certainly also reached you, both from him and from our other fellow bishops established in that same province: that Marcianus, residing at Arles, has joined himself to Novatian and has broken away from the truth of the Catholic Church and from the concord of our body and priesthood, holding to the hardest depravity of heretical presumption, so that for those repenting and grieving and knocking at the church with tears and groaning and sorrow, the comforts and supports of divine devotion and fatherly gentleness are shut, and the wounded are not admitted to have their wounds tended, but are left without hope of peace and communion, to be thrown to the plundering of wolves and to the devil's prey. It falls to us to take counsel here and to bring aid, dearest brother — we who keep the divine mercy before our eyes and hold the balance by which the church is governed, dealing out to sinners the rigor of firm discipline, yet in such measure that goodness and divine mercy are never withheld as medicine for the fallen who need raising up, nor for the wounded who need healing. Therefore you ought to write a most complete letter to our fellow bishops established in Gaul, so that they no longer allow Marcianus — obstinate, proud, an enemy alike of divine devotion and of the brethren's salvation — to go on insulting our college, seeing that he has not yet, it appears, been separated from us; for he has for some time now been boasting and proclaiming that, in his devotion to Novatian and pursuit of his obstinacy, it was he himself who cut off communion with us. Yet Novatian, the very man he follows, was long ago put outside and judged an enemy of the church: when he sent envoys to us in Africa hoping to be readmitted to our communion, the council of very many bishops present there answered him that he had already placed himself outside and could not be received back into fellowship by any of us — this because he had tried to raise a profane altar, install an adulterous throne, and offer sacrilegious sacrifice against the true priest, after bishop Cornelius had already been set in the Catholic Church by God's own judgment together with the votes of clergy and people. Accordingly, should Novatian wish to regain his senses and turn back to a sound mind, his path was penance, coming to the church humbled and pleading. How empty it is, then, dearest brother, that Novatian, though rebuffed, refuted, and disowned by priests of God across the whole world, should still find flatterers among us willing to mock at us and sit in judgment on the majesty and dignity of the church! Send letters through the province, to the people gathered at Arles, so that with Marcianus set apart, someone else may be put in his place, and Christ's flock — scattered and injured by him to this very day, and treated with contempt — may be brought back together. Let it suffice that so many of our brethren there have already died these past years without peace; let those who remain, at least, be given help — they who groan through day and night and beg, imploring the divine and fatherly mercy, for the comfort of our support. This, dearest brother, is exactly why the body of bishops is so large: cemented by the glue of shared concord and bound fast by the cord of unity, so that should any one of our college attempt to breed heresy and tear apart and ravage Christ's flock, the others may step in to help, gathering the sheep of the Lord into the fold as shepherds ought — useful and merciful ones. Consider: if some harbor at sea, its breakwaters broken, turned hostile and dangerous to shipping, would sailors not steer instead for other, closer harbors offering safe passage, a sound approach, and secure anchorage? Or if some roadside inn came under siege and control of bandits, so that anyone entering would fall victim to those lying in ambush there, would travelers who learned of it not seek out safer lodging further along the road, where hospitality and shelter could be trusted? Just such a duty rests on us, dearest brother: to welcome with open and generous humanity those of our brothers who, steering clear of Marcianus's reefs, come looking for the safe harbor of the church, and to offer travelers an inn like the one in the gospel, where men wounded and battered by robbers may be taken in, cared for, and kept safe by the innkeeper. What greater or finer duty could there be for those set over the church than watching carefully, with wholesome remedy, over the tending and safekeeping of the flock — for the Lord himself speaks and declares: those grown feeble you left unstrengthened, those fallen sick you left unhealed, those broken you offered no comfort, those who wandered off you never turned back, and those who were perishing you never searched for; and so my flock scattered, for lack of any shepherd, and became a meal for every wild beast in the field, with no one to search them out or bring them home. For this the Lord speaks thus: watch — I stand against these shepherds; I will demand my flock back from their hands, and I will strip from them the charge of feeding my sheep; they shall feed them no longer, and I will pull my sheep free of their mouths, and I myself will feed them with justice. Since, then, this is how the Lord threatens shepherds through whose fault the flock he owns is left uncared for and dies away, what else is left for us to do, dearest brother, but pour full effort into bringing Christ's sheep back together and nursing them, and apply the medicine of a father's devotion to heal the wounds of the fallen — since the Lord likewise warns in the gospel, saying that it is not the well who need a physician, but the sick. For however many of us shepherd, it is one flock we feed together, and every sheep that Christ won by his own blood and suffering is ours to gather in and tend, never allowing our grieving, pleading brothers to be crushed by cruelty and trodden under the arrogant conceit of certain men — for it stands written: the stubborn man, vaunting himself, gains nothing at all, he who has stretched his soul as wide as the grave; and all such men the Lord in the gospel rebukes and condemns, saying: you are those who make yourselves out righteous before other men, yet God sees straight into your hearts, since whatever stands high among men is loathsome before God. Those who please only themselves, who swell with arrogant pride and claim things for themselves that are not theirs, he calls loathsome and detestable. Since Marcianus has taken his place among such men, allying himself with Novatian and setting himself up as an enemy of mercy and devotion, it is not his place to pass sentence but to receive it; nor should he act as if he had himself judged the college of bishops, when in truth it is he who has been judged by every bishop. Cornelius and Lucius, blessed martyrs who went before us, left a glory that must never go unguarded; we ourselves hold their memory dear, but the duty falls on you with still greater weight, dearest brother — you who now stand in their place as vicar and successor — to uphold that honor with all the gravity and authority your office carries. Full of the Lord's own Spirit and already established in the glory of martyrdom, they judged that peace should be extended to the fallen, and set down in their own letters that once penance had been performed, the fruit of communion and peace was not to be withheld — a judgment every one of us everywhere has echoed without exception. There could hardly have been a divided mind among men who shared a single Spirit; and it is thus plain that whoever we now see holding a differing view does not share, along with the rest, the truth of the Holy Spirit. Tell us plainly who has taken Marcianus's place at Arles, so that we may know where to send our brothers and to whom we owe our correspondence. I wish you, dearest brother, always good health.
Cyprian to his son Magnus, greeting. Out of your religious diligence you have put a question to our modest judgment, dearest son: whether, alongside the rest of the heretics, those who come over from Novatian, after his unholy washing, ought also to receive baptism and consecration in the Catholic Church — the church's own lawful, true, and singular baptism. On this point, so far as our grasp of the faith and the truth and holiness of the divine Scriptures can guide us, our answer is that heretics and schismatics of every kind hold no power or right whatsoever. For that very reason no exception can or should be made for Novatian, allowing him alone, though standing outside the church and working against Christ's peace and love, to escape being numbered among its adversaries and antichrists. Nor did our Lord Jesus Christ, when he declared in his gospel that his enemies were those not aligned with him, single out any one variety of heresy; rather he showed that anyone at all who stood apart from him, failing to gather with him and thereby scattering his flock, counted as an adversary — as he says: whoever is not with me stands against me, and whoever does not gather alongside me scatters. In the same way the blessed apostle John drew no line between one heresy or schism and another, nor picked out particular groups by name, but branded as antichrists all who had broken away from the church and worked against it, saying: you have heard that an antichrist is coming, and even now many antichrists have already appeared; by this we recognize that the last hour has come. They went out from among us, yet they never truly belonged to us — had they belonged to us, they would have stayed at our side. From this it is clear that the Lord's adversaries and antichrists include everyone known to have broken away from the love and unity of the Catholic Church. Further still, the Lord lays down in his gospel: and should he refuse to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a pagan and a toll collector. If, then, those who scorn the church are counted no better than pagans and toll collectors, how much more must rebels and enemies — who fabricate false altars, illegitimate priesthoods, sacrilegious offerings, and counterfeit titles — be reckoned among pagans and toll collectors, when even those guilty of the lesser fault of mere contempt for the church earn that verdict from the Lord's own mouth.
That the church is a single thing, the Holy Spirit makes plain in the Song of Songs, speaking as Christ: my dove is one, my flawless one is one; she alone belongs to her mother, singled out by the one who bore her. And of her he says again: an enclosed garden is my sister, my bride — a sealed spring, a well of living water. Now if Christ's bride, the church, is a garden shut up, then what is closed cannot stand open to outsiders and the unclean. And if it is a spring under seal, then no one stationed outside, cut off from access, can either drink from it or be sealed by it. So too, if the well of living water is a single well, that same water within cannot bring life or sanctity to someone standing outside it, for drinking and use of it are reserved solely for those inside — a point Peter also makes clear, showing that the church is one and that baptism belongs only to those within it, when he writes: in Noah's ark a few — eight souls in all — were kept safe through water, and this baptism now saves you in the same way, proving in this that Noah's single ark stood as a figure for the one church. And if, back then, a man who had never entered Noah's ark could nonetheless be saved through water once the world had been purged and cleansed by that flood, then equally now someone outside the church — to which alone baptism belongs — can be given life through baptism just the same. Paul, too, sets this out with even greater openness and clarity in his letter to the Ephesians: Christ loved the church and gave himself up on her behalf, so that he might make her holy, cleansing her through the washing of water. And if this church, loved by Christ and made clean solely by his washing, is one, then how could someone outside it be either loved by Christ or cleansed and washed by that same washing?
For this reason — since the water of life and the power to baptize and wash a person belong to the church alone — whoever claims a follower of Novatian can be baptized and made holy must first demonstrate that Novatian either belongs to the church or stands at its head. For there is one church, and being one, it cannot be at once inside and outside. If it stands with Novatian, it did not stand with Cornelius; but if it stood with Cornelius, who took Fabian's place through lawful ordination and whom the Lord crowned not merely with the priesthood's honor but with martyrdom besides, then Novatian has no place within the church, nor can he count as a bishop, since — spurning both gospel and apostolic tradition, succeeding no one — he sprang from himself alone. No one, in fact, can possess or hold the church who was never ordained inside it.
Divine Scripture's own witness makes plain that the church has no existence outside itself, cannot be torn apart or split against itself, but keeps the oneness of a house that neither separates nor divides — as it is written of the mystery of the Passover and the lamb, that lamb which stood for Christ: it shall be eaten within a single house; carry none of its flesh out beyond the door. We find the same thing shown through Rahab, who herself likewise carried a figure of the church, when she was commanded: gather your father and mother, your brothers and your father's whole household, in to yourself, into your own house; and whoever passes out through your door will bear the guilt himself. This mystery declares that all who wish to live and to escape the world's destruction must be gathered into that one single house — the church — and that whoever leaves those thus gathered (that is, if someone who has received grace within the church later withdraws and departs from it) will bear his own guilt, meaning he alone will be to blame for his own ruin. The apostle Paul makes this very point, teaching that a heretic must be shunned as a man who is perverse, sinful, and condemned by his own hand. He it is who answers for himself — not driven out by any bishop, but a runaway from the church by his own choosing, condemned by his own heretical presumption.
And so the Lord, revealing to us the unity that flows from divine authority, states plainly: I and the Father are one. And drawing his church back into that same oneness, he adds further: and there will be one flock, one shepherd. But if there is only one flock, how can someone not counted among its number still be reckoned part of it, or take the man who calls himself shepherd while the true shepherd still stands, presiding over God's church by unbroken succession: since he succeeds no one and springs from himself alone, that title cannot hold; such a man turns foreign and unclean, hostile to the peace Christ gives and to the oneness God intends, and God's house, his church, offers him no dwelling, for only those joined in one harmony and single mind live there — as the Holy Spirit says through the Psalms: God, who settles the like-minded together within a house? Finally, the Lord's own sacrifice itself points to this Christian oneness of mind, held fast by a love that will not break or separate. For when the Lord names his body bread — bread gathered from the joining of many grains — he shows that our people, whom that bread represents, are joined as one; and when he names his blood wine, pressed from many clusters and grapes and drawn together into one, he likewise signifies that our flock is bound together by the blending of a united multitude. Suppose Novatian truly shares this loaf that belongs to the Lord, and suppose he has likewise drunk from Christ's own cup: even so, the grace of the church's one baptism could be granted him only on one condition — proof that he holds fast to the church's unity.
Just how unbreakable the mystery of unity is, and how hopeless the ruin — how great a disaster drawn down by God's own anger — awaiting those who break away and, forsaking their bishop, raise up some rival false bishop elsewhere, divine Scripture shows in the books of Kings, where the ten tribes tore away from Judah and Benjamin and, forsaking their own king, set up another for themselves: and the Lord, it says, grew angry against the whole line of Israel and thrust them out and handed them over to be plundered, until he cast them from his presence, because Israel had torn itself from the house of David and made Jeroboam son of Nebat king over themselves. Scripture tells us that the Lord's anger delivered them to ruin precisely because they had broken away from unity and raised up a rival king. And the Lord's fury against those who caused this schism ran so deep that when a man of God was dispatched to Jeroboam to charge him with his sins and warn of coming punishment, he was forbidden even to eat bread or drink water while there; and when he disobeyed and dined against God's command, he was struck down at once by the weight of divine judgment, so that on his way home a lion attacked and killed him on the road. Ordinary food and drink, mere earthly fare, were forbidden even to that prophet among schismatics — so how could anyone still insist that heaven's grace and the water that saves us through baptism belong to schismatics too? The Lord in his own gospel goes further still, casting an even brighter light on the matter: those very people who had once broken away from Judah and Benjamin, abandoning Jerusalem to settle in Samaria, came to be counted among pagans and foreigners. For when he first sent his disciples out on their mission of salvation, he instructed them: do not take the road that leads to the nations, and do not enter any town of the Samaritans. By directing them first to the Jews, he tells them to pass over the nations for the time being; but by adding that even the towns of Samaria — where the schismatics lived — must likewise be avoided, he shows that schismatics rank alongside the nations.
Suppose someone objects that Novatian keeps the same rule of faith the Catholic Church keeps, baptizing with our own creed — naming, as we do, one God as Father, one Christ as Son, one Spirit as Holy — and therefore claims a right to the power of baptizing, on the grounds that his baptismal questioning appears no different from ours. Whoever thinks to raise such an objection should know, first, that we and the schismatics do not share one and the same rule for the creed, nor the same questioning. For when they ask, do you believe in the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life through the holy church, their very question is a lie, since they possess no church. And by their own words they then admit as much: that forgiveness of sins comes only through the holy church — which, lacking it themselves, proves that no sins can be forgiven among them at all.
As for their claim to know the same God the Father, the same Christ the Son, and the same Holy Spirit that we know, this cannot help such people either. For Korah and Dathan and Abiram, along with the priest Aaron and Moses, knew the same God, living under the same law and religion, and called upon the one true God who was to be worshipped and invoked; yet because they overstepped the ministry proper to their station and claimed for themselves, against Aaron the priest who had received the lawful priesthood by God's own appointment and the Lord's ordination, a license to offer sacrifice, they were struck down by God and at once paid the penalty for their unlawful attempt, nor could sacrifices offered irreligiously and unlawfully against the right of the divine ordinance stand valid or avail. The very censers, too, in which incense had been unlawfully offered, were by the Lord's command melted down and purified by fire, drawn out into thin plates and fastened to the altar — not that priests might use them again, but rather that they might stand before those who came after as a memorial of divine indignation and vengeance, and serve to correct posterity, just as sacred Scripture says. 'Let it be,' it says, 'a memorial to the sons of Israel, that no outsider who is not of the seed of Aaron may draw near to offer incense before the Lord, lest he become like Korah.' And yet those men had not created a schism, nor had they gone outside and shamelessly and belligerently rebelled against God's priests — which is exactly what these men now do, tearing the church apart and rising up against the peace and oneness that Christ established, as they try to set up a see of their own, seize the primacy, and claim for themselves license both to baptize and to offer sacrifice. How can such men bring anything to completion, or obtain anything at all from God, through undertakings that have no lawful standing, when what they are attempting stands against God himself and is granted them by no right? This is why it is pointless for the patrons of Novatian and like-minded schismatics to insist that saving baptism can sanctify anyone there, in a place where the one performing the baptism plainly has no right to baptize at all.
And that the severity of the divine judgment against such presumption might be still better understood, we find that in a crime of this kind it is not only the leaders and instigators but also those who merely take part who are marked out for punishment, unless they separate themselves from fellowship with the wicked — as the Lord commanded through Moses, saying: 'Separate yourselves from the tents of these hard-hearted men, and touch nothing that belongs to them, lest you perish together in their sin.' And what the Lord had threatened through Moses, he fulfilled: whoever failed to separate himself from Korah and Dathan and Abiram at once paid the penalty for that impious fellowship. By this example it is shown and proved that all who mingle themselves, with irreligious recklessness, with schismatics against their bishops and priests will be liable both to the guilt and to the punishment — just as the Holy Spirit also testifies through the prophet Hosea, saying: 'Their sacrifices are like the bread of mourning; all who eat of them shall be defiled' — teaching and showing plainly that all who have been defiled by the sin of the instigators are joined together with them in the same punishment, without exception.
What merit, then, can there be before God among people upon whom punishments are inflicted by divine judgment? Or how can such men justify and sanctify those they baptize, when they themselves, as enemies of the priesthood, attempt to usurp what belongs to another, what is unlawful, and what has been granted to them by no right at all? We are not surprised, all the same, that such people, out of their own perversity, contend for their cause; each of them must of necessity defend what he does, and being defeated they are unwilling to yield easily, even though they are well aware that what they are doing has no permission behind it. What is astonishing — indeed, what ought rather to provoke indignation and grief — is that Christians should stand alongside antichrists, and that betrayers of the faith and traitors to the church should stand within the church itself against the church. Yet since these men, stubborn and unteachable in other respects, nevertheless confess this much — that none at all, whether heretics or schismatics, possess the Holy Spirit, and that for this reason they can indeed baptize, but cannot give the Holy Spirit — we hold them to this very point, that we may show that those who do not have the Holy Spirit cannot baptize at all either.
For since baptism forgives each person's sins, the Lord himself proves and declares in his Gospel that only those who possess the Holy Spirit have the power to remit sins. Once he had risen, he dispatched his disciples with these words: 'Just as the Father sent me, I in turn send you.' Then, having spoken, he blew his breath upon them, saying: 'Take the Holy Spirit. Whoever's sins you forgive will stand forgiven; whoever's sins you hold back will remain held.' Here he makes plain that baptizing and granting the forgiveness of sins belong only to one who holds the Holy Spirit. Indeed John, destined to baptize Christ our Lord, had already received the Holy Spirit while still enclosed in his mother's womb — proof beyond doubt that no one can baptize who lacks the Holy Spirit. Let those, then, who back heretics or schismatics tell us plainly: do they possess the Holy Spirit, or not? If they do, why is it that when their converts come over to us, we still lay hands on them so they may receive the Spirit — when, had it truly been received there, it could have been conferred there as well? But since every heretic and schismatic outside gives no Holy Spirit at all, and hands are therefore laid on among us so that a person may here receive what does not exist and cannot be granted there, it stands to reason that forgiveness of sins likewise cannot be granted through people who plainly lack the Holy Spirit. And so, that men may in accordance with the divine order and the gospel's truth obtain forgiveness of sins, be made holy, and become temples of God, everyone whatsoever who comes over from the church's foes and its antichrists to the church of Christ must be baptized in the church's own baptism.
You also asked, dearest son, what I think about those who obtain the grace of God while sick and in weakness — whether they are to be counted lawful Christians, since they were not washed with the water of salvation but merely had it poured over them. On this point our modesty and reserve prejudge no one's own view, so that each may hold what he judges right and act on what he has judged. For my own part, so far as my modest capacity can grasp, I judge that the divine benefits can in no way be diminished or weakened, and that nothing lesser can occur there, where what is drawn from the divine gifts is received with the full and complete faith both of the giver and of the recipient. For it is not the same in the sacrament of salvation, where the contagion of sins is washed away, as in a bodily and worldly bath, where the filth of skin and body is cleansed, so that soap and other such aids, and a tub and a pool, are required, by which the little body may be washed and made clean. The believer's heart is washed in one way; the mind of man is cleansed by the merits of faith in another. When necessity presses and God grants his own indulgence, the resources of salvation's sacraments bestow their full benefit on those who believe. No one should be troubled, either, that the sick seem merely sprinkled or to have had water poured over them when they obtain the Lord's grace, since holy Scripture, through the prophet Ezekiel, declares: 'I shall pour clean water over you, cleansing you from every uncleanness and every idol of yours; I will make you clean, give you a new heart, and place a new spirit inside you.' So too in Numbers: 'Whoever remains unclean until evening is to be purified on the third day and again on the seventh, and only then will he be clean; but if he is not purified on those two days, he stays unclean, and that person is to be cut off from Israel, for the water of sprinkling was never sprinkled over him.' And again: 'The Lord said to Moses: Take the Levites out from among the sons of Israel and purify them; carry out their purification in this way — sprinkle over them the water of purification.' And once more: 'The water of sprinkling serves as their purification.' From all this it is clear that sprinkling water carries the same force as the full saving bath, and that whenever this happens within the church, where both giver and recipient hold an undivided faith, everything can stand firm and reach its completion and perfection through the Lord's majesty and the truth that faith holds.
As for the fact that some call those who have obtained the grace of Christ through saving water and lawful faith not Christians but 'clinics,' I cannot find whence they take this name — unless perhaps those who have read more widely and in more obscure sources have found this term 'clinics' in Hippocrates or Soranus. For my part, the only 'clinic' I know is the one from the Gospel, and I know that his sickness did nothing to prevent that paralyzed and feeble man, who had lain in his bed through long years, from reaching the fullness of heavenly health; nor was he merely roused from his pallet by the Lord's indulgence, but with his strength restored and renewed he carried the pallet away himself. And therefore, so far as it is given us to grasp and judge by faith, my own opinion is this: that whoever has obtained the divine grace in the church, by the law and right of faith, should be judged a lawful Christian. But if anyone thinks that such people have obtained nothing, because they were merely sprinkled with the water of salvation rather than washed in it, then, if they are indeed empty and void of grace, let them not be deceived — so that, should they recover from the discomfort of their illness and regain their strength, they should be baptized. But if those who have already been sanctified by the baptism of the church cannot be baptized again, why should they be scandalized in their faith and in the Lord's indulgence? Or perhaps they did obtain the Lord's grace, only in a smaller and reduced portion of God's own gift and the Holy Spirit — Christians in name, then, but not equal in standing to the rest?
Quite the opposite: the Holy Spirit comes with no measured limit at all, but is poured out in its entirety upon the one who believes. For if the day is born equally for all, and if the sun's light falls evenly and alike across everyone, how much more must Christ — the true sun, the true day — grant the light of everlasting life in his church with that same even hand? We see the sacrament of this equality celebrated in Exodus, when manna flowed down from heaven and, by prefiguring things to come, showed the food of heavenly bread and the sustenance of Christ who was to come. There, without distinction of sex or age, a gomer was gathered equally for each. From this it was apparent that Christ's indulgence and heavenly grace, which was afterward to follow, would be divided equally to all, without regard to sex, without distinction of years, without respect of persons, and that the gift of spiritual grace would be poured out upon the whole people of God. Yet plainly this same spiritual grace, which is received equally by believers in baptism, is afterward either diminished or increased in our manner of life and conduct — much as in the Gospel the seed the Lord sows falls equally for everyone, yet the soil it lands on differs — some of it is lost, while elsewhere it piles up abundantly, yielding thirty, sixty, or a hundred times over. And yet again, since all alike are called to the same denarius, how is it right that what is distributed equally by God should be diminished by human interpretation?
Should it trouble anyone that some who are baptized in sickness were, up to that point, still being harassed by unclean spirits, he should understand this: the devil's obstinate malice retains its power only as far as the water of salvation, and loses every trace of its poison once baptism takes place. We see this pattern in King Pharaoh, who resisted at length, lingered in his faithlessness, and managed to stand firm and gain ground for that whole time, right up to his arrival at the water — but once he reached it, he was overcome and destroyed. The blessed apostle Paul declares that the sea prefigured the sacrament of baptism, saying: 'Brothers, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers stood beneath the cloud, all of them crossed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses by way of that cloud and that sea.' He then adds: 'All of this took place as a foreshadowing meant for us.' This is even carried out today, when through the exorcists, by human voice and divine power, the devil is scourged and burned and tormented, and though he often says he will go out and release the men of God, he lies in what he says, and practices with the same lie of obstinacy and fraud what was formerly done through Pharaoh. Yet once someone arrives at the water of salvation and is made holy through baptism, we should recognize and trust that the devil is there overpowered, and the person now consecrated to God is freed by divine mercy. For if scorpions and serpents, which prevail on dry ground, can, when plunged into water, still prevail or retain their venom, then the evil spirits too — which are called scorpions and serpents and which are nonetheless trampled underfoot by us through the power given by the Lord — could still linger inside someone who, having been baptized and made holy, now has the Holy Spirit beginning to dwell within.
This, in fact, we find confirmed by experience itself: that under the pressure of necessity, those baptized in sickness and who have obtained grace are freed from the unclean spirit that formerly troubled them, and live praiseworthy and approved lives in the church, and day by day make more progress through the growth of their faith into an increase of heavenly grace; while, conversely, no small number among those baptized in good health, should they afterward fall into sin, find the unclean spirit coming back to trouble them once more — which makes it obvious that baptism shuts the devil out through the believer's faith, and lets him back in should that faith later collapse. Unless, that is, some think it only fair that people polluted by unholy water outside the church, among its adversaries and antichrists, should count as baptized, while those baptized within the church are made to seem as though they received less of God's indulgence and grace — and that such honor is given to heretics that those coming from them are not even asked whether they were washed or merely had water poured over them, whether they were 'clinics' or able to walk about — while among us the integrity of the truth of the faith is diminished, and the majesty and holiness of the church's baptism are disparaged.
I have written back, dearest son, to your letter as far as our modest ability allowed, and have shown what we ourselves think, so far as it is in us to think — prescribing to no one, so that each bishop may decide as he judges right, since each bishop must one day answer to the Lord for his own conduct, just as the blessed apostle Paul states, writing to the Romans: 'Each of us will render account for himself.' Let us not, then, judge one another. I wish you, dearest son, always to fare well.
Letter 70. Cyprian and Liberalis and Caldonius and Junius and Primus and Caecilius and Polycarpus and Nicomedes and Felix and Marrutius and Successus and Lucianus and Honoratus and Fortunatus and Victor and Donatus and Lucius and Herculanus and Pomponius and Demetrius and Quintus and Saturninus and Marcus and another Saturninus and Altus and Donatus and Rogatianus and Sedatus and Tertullus and Hortensianus and likewise another Saturninus and Sattius and Januarius and Saturninus and Maximus and Victor and another Victor and Cassius and Proculus and Modianus and Cittinus and Gargilius and Eutychianus and another Gargilius and another Saturninus and Nemesianus and Nampulo and Antonianus and Rogatianus and Honoratus, to the brothers, greeting. When we were gathered together in council, dearest brothers, we read the letter you sent concerning those who appear to have been baptized among heretics and schismatics, asking whether they ought to be baptized on coming to the catholic Church, which is one. On this matter, although you yourselves there hold the truth and the firmness of the catholic rule, yet since out of common regard you judged it right to consult us, we set forth our opinion — not a new one, but one long since established by our predecessors and kept by us — and join it to yours in equal agreement. We hold it certain and settled that no one can receive baptism apart from the Church, outside its bounds, given that there exists but a single baptism, instituted within the holy Church; and scripture records the Lord's own words: they abandoned me, the spring of living water, and carved out for themselves cracked cisterns unable to hold any water; and elsewhere divine scripture gives this warning: hold yourself back from water that is not your own, and do not drink from another man's spring. Before anything else, though, the priest must cleanse and consecrate the water itself, so that through the baptism performed with it, the sins of the person being baptized can be washed away, for the Lord speaks through Ezekiel in these terms: I will pour clean water over you, and you will be washed clean of every defilement and every idol of yours; I will make you clean, and grant you a renewed heart, and place within you a fresh spirit. Yet how could someone cleanse and consecrate the water who is himself unclean, a man in whom the Holy Spirit does not dwell — since the Lord declares in Numbers that everything an unclean person lays hands on becomes unclean by that very touch? Or how could someone administering baptism grant another the remission of sins, when, being outside the Church, he cannot even set down his own? The baptismal interrogation itself bears witness to this: the candidate is asked whether he believes in eternal life and in sins forgiven through the holy Church, and by that question we intend something specific — outside the Church no sin is ever released, whereas among heretics, lacking any Church at all, forgiveness simply does not happen. So those who speak up for the heretics must either alter that question or else defend the truth of it — unless, that is, they are prepared to grant these people a Church too, given that they insist the people possess baptism. The one baptized must also be anointed, so that, having received the chrism — that is, the anointing — he may become one anointed of God and hold within himself the grace of Christ. And the oil used for this anointing, consecrated upon the altar, comes from the eucharist itself; but a man lacking both altar and Church could never consecrate that created oil. Hence no spiritual anointing can be found among heretics at all, since among them, as is agreed, oil cannot be consecrated nor can the eucharist ever be performed. We should also bear in mind the written warning: may the oil of a sinner never touch my head — words with which the Holy Spirit had already cautioned us beforehand in the psalms, so that no one straying and wandering from the path of truth would be anointed among heretics, the adversaries of Christ. Furthermore, what prayer can a sacrilegious and sinful priest even offer on a baptized person's behalf, given the written word: God pays no heed to a sinner, but listens instead to the one who reveres him and does his will? For who can give what he himself lacks, and how can a man carry out spiritual works once he has lost the Holy Spirit himself? For this reason, whoever comes untaught to the Church must be baptized and remade, so that within it, through those made holy, he too may be made holy, since it stands written: since I myself am holy, you must be holy too, says the Lord — so that one who had been led astray and dipped outside the Church might, through true and ecclesiastical baptism, set aside this very failing: that a man approaching God, while looking for a priest, instead fell by deceit into a sacrilegious fraud. As for the rest, approving heretical and schismatic baptism amounts to endorsing everything else those same people have baptized into. A portion of a thing cannot be empty while another portion holds force. If such baptism truly worked, it would likewise be able to confer the Holy Spirit; but since it cannot confer the Holy Spirit — being set outside, it has none to give — neither can it baptize the one who comes to it, given that there is only a single baptism, only a single Holy Spirit, and only a single Church, founded by Christ our Lord upon Peter as the source and principle of unity. So it follows that, everything among them being void and false, we ought to approve none of what they have carried out. What, after all, could stand ratified and firm before the Lord when it is performed by those the Lord himself, in his own gospel, names his enemies and adversaries, saying: whoever stands apart from me stands against me, and whoever fails to gather alongside me scatters instead. And the blessed apostle John too, holding fast to the Lord's commandments and precepts, wrote in his own letter: you have heard that an antichrist is coming; well, many antichrists have now appeared, and from this we recognize that the last hour has come. They departed from our company, though they never truly belonged to it — had they belonged to us, they would have remained at our side. From this too we ought to draw the conclusion and ask ourselves whether people who stand against the Lord and bear the name of antichrists are capable of granting the grace of Christ. Hence, we who stand with the Lord and keep his unity, administering by his favor his priesthood within the Church, must refuse and cast aside everything that his adversaries and antichrists carry out, treating it as unholy, while granting, to those who leave error and depravity behind to embrace the one Church's genuine faith, the complete sacraments of divine grace — unity and truth of faith in full measure. We wish you, dearest brothers, ever good health.
Letter 71. Cyprian to his brother Quintus, greeting. Our fellow presbyter Lucianus told me, dearest brother, that you wanted to know what we think about those who appear to have been baptized among heretics and schismatics. So that you might learn what most of our fellow bishops, together with the presbyters present, recently decided on this matter in council, a copy of that same letter accompanies this one. I cannot say what presumption leads some of our colleagues to imagine that those tinged among heretics ought not to be baptized once they reach us, on the ground that, as they claim, baptism is one — meaning one within the catholic Church specifically, since the Church is single and no baptism can exist outside it. Yet two baptisms cannot both be genuine, so if the heretics truly baptize, then the baptism belongs to them. And whoever, by his own authority, extends this cover to them yields to them and grants that an enemy and adversary of Christ might hold the power to wash, cleanse, and consecrate a person. We, however, say that those coming from that quarter are not rebaptized among us but baptized for the first time. For they receive nothing in that place, since nothing is to be had there; rather, they come to us so as to receive here what is found here alone — grace together with the whole of truth, since grace and truth form a single thing. Still, some of our colleagues would rather honor heretics than agree with us, and by insisting there is but a single baptism, they refuse to baptize newcomers — thereby either creating two baptisms themselves, since they concede baptism to the heretics as well, or, worse still, arguing that the heretics' filthy, profane dipping deserves to be set above and preferred over the genuine, singular, lawful baptism of the catholic Church. In doing so they overlook the written word: what benefit does washing bring to one baptized by a dead man? Clearly those outside the Church of Christ must be counted among the dead, and a person who is not himself alive cannot impart life to another, given that there is only one Church — the Church that has attained the grace of eternal life and therefore lives forever, granting life in turn to God's people. And they claim to be following old custom here, since back when heresies and schisms were only beginning, there were people who left the Church after having already been baptized within it; when such people returned afterward and did penance, there was then no need to baptize them again. We too keep this same practice today: those known to have been baptized in our fold and to have crossed over to the heretics, if afterward, recognizing their sin and setting their error aside, they come back to the truth and the mother Church, need only have hands laid on them in penance — since, having already been a sheep, the shepherd may take this stray, wandering sheep back into his fold. But if someone coming from the heretics was never baptized in the Church beforehand, and instead arrives entirely a stranger and unconsecrated, that person must be baptized in order to become a sheep at all, since it is the single water within the holy Church that makes sheep of us. And because falsehood and truth, darkness and light, death and immortality, antichrist and Christ can share nothing whatsoever in common, we must in every way preserve the unity of the catholic Church and give no ground on faith or truth to its enemies. Custom, however, is not the thing to appeal to; reason is what must carry the argument. For not even Peter — whom the Lord chose first and on whom he raised his Church — claimed anything for himself with arrogance or presumption when Paul later took issue with him over circumcision, as though to say he held first rank and that newer, later arrivals owed him obedience; nor did he scorn Paul for having once persecuted the Church, but instead accepted the counsel of truth and readily yielded to the sound reasoning Paul was pressing — giving us thereby a model of both harmony and patience, so that we might not cling stubbornly to what is merely our own, but rather treat as our own whatever our brothers and colleagues usefully and soundly propose, provided it is true and lawful. With this very concern in mind, and with faithful regard for harmony and peace, Paul likewise wrote in his letter: let two or three prophets speak, and let the rest weigh what is said; and if something is revealed to another person seated there, let the first fall silent. In this passage he taught and demonstrated that individuals are often shown better things, and that no one ought to fight stubbornly for a position simply because he had once taken it up and held to it, but should instead gladly welcome whatever turns out to be better and more useful. Encountering something better is no defeat for us; rather it teaches us — above all concerning the Church's unity and the truth underlying our hope and faith. As priests set by God's own favor over him and his Church, we ought to recognize this: sins are released only inside the Church, and Christ's enemies can lay claim to nothing at all where his grace is concerned. Agrippinus too, a man of blessed memory, established this very thing together with the other bishops who at that period governed the Lord's Church across the provinces of Africa and Numidia, and confirmed it after the weighed deliberation of shared counsel. We ourselves have likewise followed their verdict, one both devout and lawful, sound and consistent with the faith and with the catholic Church. And so that you might know the letter we composed on this matter, a copy has been forwarded, out of shared regard, for your notice as well as that of our fellow bishops there. I wish you, dearest brother, ever good health.
Letter 72. Cyprian and the others to their brother Stephen, greeting. It became necessary for us, dearest brother, to bring a number of priests together and hold a council, so as to settle certain matters and work them out through shared deliberation; a great many issues were raised and examined there. But one matter above all had to be put before you in writing and weighed together with your own gravity and wisdom, since it touches especially on priestly authority and on the unity and dignity of the catholic Church alike, flowing as it does from the plan of divine ordering: namely, that people dipped outside, apart from the Church, and stained among heretics and schismatics by the defilement of profane water, ought to be baptized once they arrive at our side and at the Church, which is one — since laying a hand on them to receive the Holy Spirit is not enough unless they also receive the Church's own baptism. Only then, in fact, can they be fully consecrated and become children of God, if they are born through both sacraments together, for it stands written: unless someone is born of water and of spirit, he cannot enter God's kingdom. Moreover, this practice is recorded as one the apostles themselves upheld in the Acts of the Apostles, kept as the true expression of saving faith: for when the Holy Spirit came down in the household of the centurion Cornelius upon the gentiles gathered there, who were ablaze with the warmth of faith and trusted in the Lord with their entire heart — so that, filled by that Spirit, they praised God in unfamiliar tongues — even so the blessed apostle Peter, keeping in mind the divine command and the gospel, still directed that these very people, already full of the Holy Spirit, be baptized, so that nothing would appear to have been left out, and the apostolic teaching would preserve in every respect the law set down by the divine command and the gospel. That there is no true baptism in what heretics practice, and that nothing among those hostile to Christ can gain anything through the grace of Christ, was carefully laid out recently in the letter sent on this very subject to our colleague Quintus, settled in Mauretania, and likewise in the letters our colleagues had earlier sent to the bishops presiding over Numidia — copies of both letters are enclosed. We add plainly to this, dearest brother, and join to it by shared consent and authority, that even presbyters or deacons first ordained within the catholic Church, who afterward turned faithless and rebellious against it, or who were advanced among the heretics by pseudo-bishops and antichrists through an ordination that is itself profane and contrary to Christ's design, and who attempted, in opposition to the one true altar, to offer false and sacrilegious sacrifices elsewhere — such men, too, should be received back only on this condition, that when they return they take communion as laymen, and be content simply with admission to peace, they who had themselves been enemies of peace; nor should those returning retain among us the same marks of rank and honor with which they took up arms against us. Wholeness and freedom from blemish are required of priests and ministers serving at the altar and in the sacrifices, as the Lord God states in Leviticus: no man carrying a blemish or defect may draw near to present offerings to God; and Exodus enjoins the same, saying: let the priests who draw near to the Lord God be made holy, lest the Lord abandon them; and again: when they draw near to serve at the holy altar, they must bring no guilt upon themselves, lest they die. And what greater guilt, what more disfiguring blemish, could there be than to have taken a stand against Christ, to have torn asunder the very Church he purchased and established with his own blood, to have forgotten the peace and love of the gospel and, driven by hostile fury and discord, made war on God's united and harmonious people? Even should such men later return to the Church, they still cannot bring back with them those they misled, who died outside the Church, cut off before their time, lacking both communion and peace — whose souls will be demanded on the day of judgment from the very hands of the men who led them into ruin and were its authors. It is therefore enough for pardon to be granted such returning men; faithlessness, however, ought not to be advanced within the household of faith. For what, then, would we be keeping back for the good and blameless, for those who never abandoned the Church, if we honor the very people who left us and turned against the Church? These matters we lay before your conscience, dearest brother, both for the sake of shared honor and out of plain affection, trusting that, given your devotion to religion and the sincerity of your faith, whatever is at once devout and true will please you as well. For the rest, we know that some, once they have taken a stance, are reluctant to abandon it or readily alter their course, yet, while keeping intact the bond of peace and harmony among their fellow bishops, hold on to certain practices they have adopted for themselves alone. In this matter we neither compel anyone nor impose a rule, since every bishop set over the governing of a church retains free judgment of his own will, and must one day render to the Lord an account of how he has acted. We wish you, dearest brother, ever good health.
Cyprian to his brother Jubaianus, greeting. Wishing to be told our thinking and the drift of our reflection on the baptism practiced by heretics, you wrote to me, dearest brother — heretics who, standing outside and set apart from the Church, claim for themselves something that belongs to neither their right nor their authority; a claim we can regard as neither valid nor lawful, since it is agreed that even among themselves the thing is forbidden. And since I had already set out in earlier letters what we think about this matter, to spare you the trouble I have enclosed a copy of those very letters, showing what we resolved in council, with several of us present, and also what I later wrote back to our colleague Quintus when he raised the same question. And now once more, having assembled together, seventy-one bishops from the provinces of both Africa and Numidia, we have confirmed this same conclusion afresh by our own judgment, establishing that there is a single baptism, the one founded within the catholic Church, and that on this basis, whoever comes to us from adulterous and unholy water is not rebaptized but is baptized by us for the first time, to be washed and made holy in the truth of saving water.
Dearest brother, what you mentioned in your letter does not trouble us at all — that the Novatianists rebaptize those they lure away from us — since whatever the church's enemies choose to do is simply none of our concern, so long as we ourselves keep the honor due our own authority and stand firm in reason and truth. Novatian, like the apes that mimic human behavior without being human themselves, wants to claim the catholic church's authority and truth as his own possession, even though he is not himself within the church — worse, he has set himself up, and remains, as a rebel and foe opposing it. He is well aware that baptism is one single thing, and it is this single claim he seizes for himself, so he can announce that the church stands with him and brand the rest of us heretics. We, however, who possess the root and head of that one church, are certain and confident that he has no rightful standing outside the church whatsoever, and that the one baptism belongs with us — the very place where he himself was baptized earlier, back when he still kept hold of reason and truth regarding divine unity. Yet if Novatian supposes that people baptized inside the church must be rebaptized once outside it, as though by some foreign heretical rite, then he should have started the practice on his own person, submitting first to a rebaptism performed by an outsider and heretic — he who imagines that baptism belongs outside the church, after it, indeed opposed to it. What kind of logic is it that, simply because Novatian ventures to act this way, we ought to conclude we should not act likewise? What follows, then? Because Novatian also seizes for himself the honor belonging to the priestly seat, are we therefore obliged to give up that seat? And because Novatian, against all propriety, tries to set up his own altar and offer his own sacrifices, must we abandon our altar and sacrifices, for fear of appearing to hold rites equal and identical to his? It would be utterly pointless and foolish for the church to abandon truth itself merely because Novatian, standing outside it, lays claim to truth's mere image.
For us, meanwhile, judging that those coming to the church from the heretics must be baptized is nothing new or sudden — a great many years and a long stretch of time have passed since, in an assembly under Agrippinus of blessed memory, numerous bishops gathered together and settled this matter; and from that time to this day so many thousands of heretics turning to the church across our provinces have neither refused it nor hesitated over it, but have taken it up gladly and with good reason, so as to gain the grace of that saving, life-giving washing. Nor, indeed, is it hard for a teacher to plant true and lawful things in someone who arrives wanting to learn, having condemned heretical wrongdoing and discovered the church's truth, and who learns precisely so that he might live. Let us not hand heretics the shock of finding us complicit and agreeable — instead, they will submit to the truth freely and eagerly.
Clearly, I found it written in the letter whose copy you forwarded to me that who did the baptizing is not the question, so long as the person baptized was able to receive the forgiveness of sins in keeping with what he believed — and I did not think this point ought to be skipped over, all the more because in that same letter I also noticed Marcion mentioned, in such a way that even those coming from him need not, it says, be baptized again, since they already appear to have received baptism in Jesus Christ's name. We ought, then, to weigh the faith of those who believe outside the church, and ask whether that same faith could win them any grace. For if the heretics share one faith with us, then one grace could belong to both alike. And if the Patripassians, Anthropians, Valentinians, Appelletians, Ophites, Marcionites, and the rest of these plagues, swords, and poisons bent on subverting truth confess, along with us, one Father, one Son, one Holy Spirit, and one church, then baptism there too could be a single thing — provided the faith really is a single thing.
So as not to drag things out running through every heresy and cataloguing each one's follies or lunacies — since describing things one finds either horrifying or shameful to know brings no pleasure — let us for now examine only the case of Marcion, whom your letter to us happened to mention, and ask whether his baptism's logic can hold together. After rising from the dead, the Lord, sending his disciples out, teaches and instructs them in how baptism ought to be performed, saying: all authority in heaven and on earth has been granted to me. Go therefore, teach every nation, and plunge them beneath the water calling on Father, Son, and Spirit-all-Holy as one name. A threefold mystery is signaled there — the very rite by which the nations were washed. Does Marcion keep to that three-in-one at all? Is the God he names as Father and Creator the same one we worship? Does his Christ match ours — born of the virgin Mary, the Word turned flesh, bearer of our sins, conqueror of death through dying it, the man whose own rising set the flesh's resurrection moving for the first time, its proof laid bare before the followers who watched him stand again wearing the very body he had worn in dying? Marcion's faith stands far apart from ours, and so does every other heretic's. In fact there is nothing among them except treachery, blasphemy, and a quarrel picked with soundness and truth alike. How, then, can someone baptized among them be thought to have gained forgiveness of sins and the grace of divine mercy through his faith, when he lacks the truth that faith itself requires? For if, as some imagine, a person could receive something outside the church simply by his own faith, then certainly he received exactly what he believed. But believing something false, he could not come away with something true — instead he received something corrupt and unholy, matching what he believed.
This very point about profane and adulterous baptism the prophet Jeremiah subtly touches on when he says: why do those who grieve me prevail? my wound is stubborn; how shall I be healed? while it happens, it has become to me like deceitful water, having no faithfulness. The Holy Spirit, through the prophet, makes mention of deceitful water that has no faithfulness. What is this lying and faithless water? Surely it is that which counterfeits the image of baptism and, by its feigned pretense, cheats one of the grace of faith. But if someone could be baptized outside according to a false faith and obtain remission of sins, he could also, according to that same faith, obtain the Holy Spirit, and there would be no need for the laying on of hands upon him when he comes, so that he might receive the Holy Spirit and be sealed. For either he could obtain both by his own faith outside, or he who was outside received neither of them.
It is clear, though, where and through whom the forgiveness of sins can be granted — that same forgiveness given, of course, in baptism. The Lord gave this power first to Peter, the one on whom he built the church and from whom he set up and displayed the source of its unity, so that whatever Peter loosed would count as loosed. After rising, too, he addresses the apostles: just as the Father sent me, so I send you. A breath followed those words, cast upon them along with the command: receive the Holy Spirit. Whoever's sins you release, that person's sins are released; whoever's you hold fast, those are held fast. From this we grasp that only those set over the church, grounded in gospel law and the Lord's own ordinance, are permitted to baptize and grant forgiveness of sins — while outside, nothing whatsoever can be bound or released, since there is no one there capable of binding or releasing.
Nor, dearest brother, do we propose this without the authority of divine scripture, that we say all things have been divinely arranged by a fixed law and a proper ordination, and that no one may usurp for himself, against the bishops and priests, anything that does not belong to his own right and power. For Korah and Dathan and Abiram too tried to usurp for themselves against Moses and Aaron the priest the license to sacrifice, yet they did not do with impunity what they dared unlawfully. And the sons of Aaron, who placed foreign fire upon the altar, were immediately struck dead in the sight of the indignant Lord. This same punishment awaits those who falsely bring foreign water into baptism, so that divine judgment may avenge and vindicate the fact that heretics do against the church what belongs to the church alone to do.
As for the claim some make — that once the apostles Peter and John arrived among those already baptized in Samaria, hands were merely laid on them so they might receive the Holy Spirit, without any rebaptism taking place — we see, dearest brother, that this instance bears no relevance whatsoever to the question now before us. Those who had come to belief in Samaria had done so with genuine faith, and they had already been baptized inside the one church — the sole place permitted to bestow baptism's grace and release sins — by Philip the deacon, sent there by those very apostles. Since they had thus already received a valid, churchly baptism, there was no need to baptize them a second time; what Peter and John supplied was simply what was still missing, so that through prayer offered on their behalf and hands laid upon them, the Holy Spirit might be called down and poured out over them. The same thing still happens among us today: those baptized within the church are brought before its leaders, and through our prayer together with the laying on of hands, they receive the Holy Spirit and are sealed with the Lord's mark.
There is no reason, then, dearest brother, why we should suppose we must give way to heretics, or imagine that the baptism entrusted to the one church alone should be handed over. A good soldier defends his commander's camp against rebels and foes; a glorious general keeps safe the standards placed in his charge. Scripture says: the Lord your God is a jealous God. Having received God's Spirit, we ought to carry a zeal for divine faith — the very zeal that pleased Phinehas and, by earning God's favor, calmed his rightful anger while the people were dying off. Why would we credit to their side something corrupt, foreign, and opposed to divine unity, when we recognize only a single Christ and a single church belonging to him? The church, mirroring paradise's pattern, has shut fruit-bearing trees within its own walls, and whichever of them fails to produce good fruit gets chopped down and thrown into the fire. Four rivers water these trees — namely the four gospels — through which it pours out baptism's grace in a saving, heavenly flood. Could someone standing outside the church possibly draw water from the church's own springs? Could a man perverse, condemned by his own doing, exiled from paradise's fountains, and dried out by an unending thirst, possibly hand anyone paradise's wholesome, health-giving drink?
The Lord calls out for whoever thirsts to come and drink from rivers of living water flowing out of his own body. Where, then, will the thirsty person go — to the heretics, among whom there is no spring or stream of life-giving water at all, or rather to the church, the single church built, by the Lord's own word, upon the one man who also received its keys? This is the single church holding and possessing her bridegroom and lord's entire authority. Here we preside; for her honor and her oneness we contend; her grace together with her glory we guard through loyal devotion. By God's own permission we give drink to his thirsting people, and we keep watch over the borders of those life-giving springs. If we retain the right belonging to what is ours, if we recognize the mystery of unity, why then should anyone reckon us traitors to truth, betrayers of unity? The church's water — faithful, life-giving, holy — cannot be tainted or defiled, just as the church herself remains uncorrupted, chaste, and pure. Should heretics be devoted to and situated within the church, they could then make use of her baptism and her other saving gifts as well. But since they are not within the church — worse, they act against it — how could they possibly baptize using the church's own baptism?
It is no trivial or minor thing that gets granted to heretics when we credit their baptism as valid, since from that point flows the whole origin of faith, the entryway into hope of saving eternal life, and God's gracious stooping down to purify and give life to his servants. For if a person really could be baptized among heretics, then surely he could likewise obtain forgiveness of sins. And if he obtained forgiveness of sins, he was made holy; and if made holy, he became a temple of God — but if he became a temple of God, whose God, I ask, was it? Not the Creator's, since he never believed in him. Nor Christ's, since someone denying that Christ is God cannot become a temple belonging to Christ. Nor the Holy Spirit's — for since the three are one, how could the Holy Spirit be reconciled with someone hostile to either the Son or the Father?
So it is pointless for people beaten by reason to throw custom in our face, as though custom outranked truth, or as though in spiritual matters one shouldn't follow whatever the Holy Spirit has revealed as the better course. Someone who errs out of simple ignorance can indeed be pardoned — Paul, that blessed apostle, says as much of himself: I was once, he writes, a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man, yet I found mercy because I acted without knowing better. But once inspiration and revelation have come, a person who knowingly and deliberately clings to his former error sins with no excuse of ignorance to shield him, since he now leans on a kind of stubborn presumption even while reason overwhelms him. And let no one claim, we simply follow what we received from the apostles, since the apostles handed down only a single church and a single baptism, established nowhere but within that very church — and we can find no case of the apostles ever admitting someone baptized among heretics into fellowship on the strength of that baptism, as though the apostles had endorsed heretical baptism.
As for what some people claim — treating it as though it somehow supported the heretics' cause — that the apostle Paul said: nevertheless, in whatever way, whether from pretext or from sincerity, Christ gets proclaimed, we find that this too accomplishes nothing for those who back and applaud heretics. Paul was not, in fact, discussing heretics or their baptism in that letter at all, so nothing he wrote there could be shown to bear on this question. He was talking about fellow believers — some walking disorderly, against the church's discipline, others upholding gospel truth out of fear of God. He noted that some among them proclaimed the Lord's word steadily and boldly, while others were caught up in jealousy and quarreling; some maintained goodwill and affection toward him, while others harbored ill will and division — yet he himself endured everything patiently, as long as, whether sincerely or as pretext, the name of Christ that Paul was preaching reached the notice of as many as possible, and that still-fresh, still-untrained sowing of the message might spread through the preaching of those proclaiming it. Now, there's a real difference between people inside the church speaking Christ's name and people outside it, acting against the church, baptizing in Christ's name. So whoever champions the heretics' cause should not cite what Paul said about the brothers, but instead demonstrate whether Paul thought anything ought to be conceded to a heretic, or approved their faith and baptism, or established that faithless, blasphemous people could receive forgiveness of sins outside the church.
But if we consider what the apostles themselves thought of heretics, we discover them, throughout all their letters, cursing and denouncing the heretics' sacrilegious corruption. When they describe such people's talk as spreading like a cancer, how could speech spreading that way into listeners' ears possibly grant forgiveness of sins? And when they insist there's no partnership between righteousness and wrongdoing, no fellowship between light and darkness, how could darkness possibly shed light, or wrongdoing make anyone righteous? And when they say such people do not belong to God but instead carry the spirit of antichrist, how can they be doing anything spiritual or divine — being enemies of God whose very hearts the spirit of antichrist has seized? So then, if we set aside the errors born of human quarreling and turn back, with sincere and devout faith, to the gospel's authority and the apostles' handed-down tradition, we understand that nothing of the church's saving grace is open to those who, scattering seeds against and attacking Christ's church, are called adversaries by Christ himself and antichrists by his apostles.
There is, moreover, no basis for anyone to invoke Christ's name in order to sidestep Christian truth, claiming that whoever is baptized in Jesus Christ's name, in whatever manner and wherever it happens, has thereby gained baptism's grace — since Christ himself says: not everyone who calls me Lord, Lord, will enter heaven's kingdom, and he likewise warns and cautions beforehand that no one should be too readily taken in by false prophets and false christs acting in his own name. Many, he says, will come using my name, claiming, I am the Christ, and they will deceive a great many; and he then adds: but you — be on your guard. See, I have foretold everything to you. From this it becomes clear that what gets boasted of in Christ's name should not be embraced right away, but rather what is actually carried out in Christ's truth.
As for why Jesus Christ's name is introduced in the gospels and the apostles' letters in connection with forgiveness of sins, this isn't because the Son alone, apart from or against the Father, could benefit anyone — rather, it was meant to show the Jews, who kept boasting that they had the Father, that the Father would do them no good at all unless they trusted in the Son he had sent (since those who already knew God the Creator as Father ought also to have recognized the Son as Christ), and that they shouldn't flatter themselves over possessing the Father alone while refusing to acknowledge his Son, who also said: no one reaches the Father except through me. That salvation requires knowing both together, he himself makes clear, saying: this is eternal life — that they know you, the one true God, and the one you sent, Jesus Christ. Since, then, by Christ's own preaching and testimony, the Father who sent must be recognized first, and only afterward Christ who was sent, and there can be no hope of salvation unless both are recognized at once, how could those among the heretics who are said to be baptized under Christ's name be judged to have gained forgiveness of sins, when God the Father goes unrecognized — indeed gets blasphemed? The situation of the Jews under the apostles differed from the circumstance of the Gentiles. Since the Jews had already received the ancient baptism belonging to the law and Moses, they still needed baptizing under the name of Jesus Christ as well, following what Peter tells them in Acts: repent, and let every one of you be immersed under the Lord Jesus Christ's name, so your sins may be forgiven, and you shall receive the Holy Spirit as a gift. For the promise belongs to you, to your children, and to everyone still to come whom the Lord our God shall call. Peter brings up Jesus Christ's name not to leave the Father out, but so the Son might be joined together with the Father.
Once he had risen from death, the Lord sent his apostles out among the nations, and their commission was this: baptize the gentiles, calling upon Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together as one. How, then, can certain people claim that a gentile baptized outside the church—indeed against the church—in the name of Jesus Christ alone, no matter who performs it or how, can still obtain the forgiveness of sins, given that Christ himself ordered gentiles baptized within the whole and undivided Trinity? Unless, perhaps, one who repudiates Christ finds himself unrejected by Christ; one who repudiates the Father whom Christ confessed goes unrejected as well; and one who blasphemes against him whom Christ named as his own Lord and God nonetheless earns from Christ pardon for sin and baptismal consecration. Yet by what authority might a man secure forgiveness through baptism while denying that God is the creator of Christ, seeing that Christ drew from that very Father the power by which we ourselves are washed and made holy—the Father he named greater than himself, from whom he sought glorification, whose wishes he carried out all the way to drinking the cup obediently and enduring death? What, then, is this but an attempt to shield and champion blaspheming heretics, maintaining that someone who sins gravely and speaks evil against the Father, Lord, and God of Christ might still gain forgiveness through Christ's name? And how strange this further claim is—that a man who rejects the Son thereby has no Father, while one who rejects the Father is somehow imagined to keep the Son—when the Son himself testifies, saying: no one comes to me unless the Father has granted it to him? This shows clearly that no forgiveness in baptism can come from the Son in a case where it is certain the Father withheld it, especially since the Son elsewhere states: every plant my heavenly Father did not plant will be torn out by the roots.
But suppose Christ's own disciples are unwilling to learn from Christ himself how greatly a father's name deserves reverence and esteem—let them take instruction instead from ordinary, worldly examples, recognizing that Christ laid this down with unmistakable reproach: this age's children show more shrewdness than the children of light. Consider: if in this world someone hurls abuse at another man's father, if a shameless, insolent mouth mars his honor and dignity with slander, that man's son grows angry and indignant, striving with all the strength available to him to avenge the wrong done to his father. Do you really think Christ hands out impunity to the impious, the sacrilegious, and those who blaspheme his own Father, forgiving in baptism the sins of people who, once baptized, keep piling the same insults on the Father's person, offending through the relentless malice of a slandering tongue? Could any Christian, any servant of God, so much as imagine such a thing in his mind, hold it as a matter of faith, or speak it aloud? Where, then, would the divine commandments of the law stand—the ones declaring: honor your father and mother? Unless the title 'father,' which we are ordered to honor in a human being, may be freely profaned when applied to God. Christ lays down a matching command in the gospel—whoever curses father or mother must die—so where, then, would that leave the law? Unless the very one who orders death as punishment for those who curse their earthly parents grants life instead to those who curse their heavenly, spiritual Father and stand as enemies of the church, their mother. Some go so far as to assert a thing utterly execrable and detestable—that the same Christ who warns that anyone blaspheming the Holy Spirit will be guilty of everlasting sin should be said to sanctify through saving baptism those who blaspheme the Father in that same way. And those today who suppose that such people, on coming to the church, deserve admission to communion without baptism fail to realize that they are thereby making themselves partners in sins that are not their own—indeed in everlasting sins—by letting in, without baptism, those who can lay down the guilt of their blasphemies only through baptism.
How senseless and twisted it is, then, that once the heretics themselves have thrown off and forsaken whatever error or crime once held them, and have come to acknowledge the church's truth, we ourselves should go on to hack away at the rights and sacred rites belonging to that very truth—telling those arriving and repenting that they already possess forgiveness of sins, even while they themselves admit having sinned and coming for this very reason to seek the church's mercy? For this reason, dearest brother, our duty is twofold: to hold fast to the catholic church's faith and truth and to instruct others in it, and to make plain, through every precept found in the gospels and the apostles, the logic behind the divine order and its unity.
Could the power of baptism ever outweigh or surpass confession—outweigh suffering itself—so that a man testifies to Christ before witnesses and is washed in his own blood? Yet even this kind of baptism does nothing for a heretic, even one killed outside the church while professing Christ—unless, that is, the defenders and champions of heretics choose to hail as martyrs heretics slain over a false profession of Christ, and, contrary to the apostle's own witness (who insists that being burned or killed gains such people nothing), award them the crown and glory belonging to suffering. But if, for a heretic, neither the baptism of open confession nor that of blood can bring salvation—since outside the church there is no salvation at all—how much less good will it do him if, hidden in some den of thieves and marked by the taint of adulterated water, he has not merely failed to wash away his old sins but has instead piled on fresh and worse ones? For this reason baptism among us cannot be shared with heretics, seeing that God the Father, Christ the Son, the Holy Spirit, the faith itself, and the church are none of them shared with them. That is why those coming over from heresy to the church must be baptized, so that people being readied through divine rebirth for God's kingdom, by means of the church's lawful, genuine, and sole baptism, may be brought to life through both sacraments together—since scripture says: unless one is born from water and spirit, he cannot go into God's kingdom.
At this point certain people, imagining they can dismantle the truth of the gospel's proclamation through mere human argument, bring up against us the case of catechumens: suppose one of them, before being baptized within the church, is arrested and put to death while professing the Name—does he thereby forfeit the hope of salvation and the reward owed to his confession, simply because he had not yet been reborn of water? Such people, then—supporters and champions of heretics—should recognize that catechumens of this kind already hold the whole of the faith and the church's truth, and march out to battle the devil from God's own camp bearing full and genuine knowledge of the Father, of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit; and further, that they are not left without the sacrament of baptism at all, since they are washed in that most glorious and greatest baptism—the baptism of blood—the very baptism the Lord spoke of when he said he had another baptism still to undergo. That those baptized in their own blood and made holy through their suffering reach completion and secure the grace promised by God, the same Lord shows in the gospel, when, in the very moment of his own passion, he addresses the thief who believes and confesses beside him, promising that the man will be with him in paradise. Because of this, those of us set over the faith and its truth must not deceive or lead astray the people who come to that faith and truth and, in doing penance, beg forgiveness for their sins—rather, once we have corrected and reshaped them, we owe them instruction fit for heaven's kingdom, according to heaven's own discipline.
Someone may object: 'What, then, becomes of those who in earlier times came from heresy into the church and were received without baptism?' The Lord, in his mercy, has the power to grant forgiveness, and need not cut off from his church's blessings those who, having been received in all simplicity, died within her fold. Still, an error made on one occasion does not license repeating it forever, since it suits those who are wiser and who fear God far better to submit gladly and without delay to a truth once revealed and clearly recognized, rather than to fight on stubbornly and obstinately against brothers and bishops for the sake of heretics.
Let no one suppose that heretics are kept from approaching the church because baptism stands in their way, as though the label 'second baptism' offended them into staying back. Quite the opposite: this very fact pushes them still harder toward the need to come, once a truth has been demonstrated and proven to them. For if they observe that our own judgment and decree treat the baptism they underwent there as legitimate and valid, they will conclude that they likewise hold the church and its other benefits rightly and lawfully—leaving them no reason to join us, since, believing they already have baptism, they will suppose they already have everything else too. Yet once they learn instead that no baptism exists outside, and that forgiveness of sins cannot be granted beyond the church, they rush toward us all the more eagerly and quickly, pleading for the gifts and favors of the church, their mother—certain that they can never reach the genuine promise of divine grace except by first arriving at the church's truth. Nor will heretics balk at being baptized among us with the church's lawful and genuine baptism, once they discover from us that even people already baptized with John's baptism were baptized once more by Paul, exactly as we find recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.
Even now, some among our own maintain that heretical baptism should count as valid, treating it—out of a certain resentment—as monstrous to baptize afterward, as if one were rebaptizing enemies of God, though we find that even those John baptized were baptized a second time: that same John ranked highest among the prophets, filled already with divine grace while still inside his mother's womb, sustained by Elijah's spirit and strength, a man who was no foe of the Lord but rather his forerunner and herald, who announced the Lord not merely in speech but pointed him out with his own eyes, and who baptized Christ himself, through whom everyone else receives baptism. But if a heretic could gain a claim to baptism simply because he baptized first, then baptism would belong not to whoever rightfully holds it but to whoever grabbed it first; and since baptism and church can never be pulled apart or divided from each other, whoever managed to seize baptism first seized the church right along with it—so you, arriving later and thus overtaken, you who by conceding and shaking hands surrendered the right you had once received, now start to look like the heretic in his eyes. Scripture makes plain how perilous it is in matters of God for anyone to give up his own right and standing, since in Genesis Esau forfeited his birthright this way and afterward could never reclaim what he had once relinquished.
I have set these things down for you briefly, dearest brother, in keeping with our modest capacity, prescribing nothing to anyone and passing judgment on no one, so that each bishop remains at liberty to act as he sees fit, exercising his own free judgment. As far as it rests with us, we do not dispute with our colleagues and fellow bishops over heretics; with them we preserve godly harmony and the Lord's peace, all the more since the apostle himself says: should anyone suppose there is room for quarreling, that is not a custom we hold, nor one the church of God holds. We maintain, patiently and gently, love among ourselves, respect for our fellowship, the bond of faith, and harmony in the priesthood; and it is for this reason too that I have now composed, so far as our modest capacity allowed, with the Lord's permission and inspiration, a short work on the value of patience, which out of mutual affection I have sent along to you. I wish you, dearest brother, lasting good health.
Letter 74. Cyprian sends greeting to his brother Pompeius. We have already covered fully, in the letters whose copies I forwarded to you, dearest brother, all that must be said about baptizing heretics; yet since you wished to learn what our brother Stephen wrote back to us in answer to our own letter, I am forwarding you a copy of that answer. Reading it will make his error stand out to you ever more sharply -- a man striving to argue the heretics' side against Christians and against God's Church. Among the various things he set down, some proud, some beside the point, some at odds with each other, all penned without much care, he even went so far as to add this: 'If, then, anyone comes to you out of any heresy at all, let no change be made beyond what tradition hands down -- that hands be laid on such people as a mark of penance, since the heretics themselves, properly speaking, do not baptize one another when they cross over, but merely admit each other to communion.' In forbidding baptism within the Church for a convert from any heresy, he has thereby ruled every heretical baptism valid and legitimate. Yet given that each heresy carries its own particular baptism and its own separate sins, this man, by accepting all of them at once, has piled the guilt of every heresy into his own lap. He has directed that nothing be altered beyond what has been handed down -- as though the innovator were the one who holds fast to unity and claims a single baptism for the single Church, rather than the one who, forgetting that unity, clings to the falsehoods and stains of an unholy washing! 'Let nothing be altered,' he insists, 'beyond what has been handed down.' But where does such a tradition originate -- does it flow down from the Lord's own authority and the Gospel, or does it arise instead from what the apostles commanded and wrote? God himself testifies and warns beforehand that whatever is written must be carried out, saying to Joshua son of Nun: 'Let this book of the law never leave your mouth; ponder it day and night, so as to keep and perform everything written within it.' In the same way the Lord, dispatching his own apostles, orders that the nations be baptized and instructed to keep everything he had commanded. So then, if either the Gospel lays down, or the letters or acts of the apostles contain, a rule that converts from any heresy are not to be baptized but only to have hands laid on them for penance, then let this sacred and God-given tradition stand. But if heretics everywhere are called nothing except opponents and antichrists, and pronounced to be avoided, twisted, and self-condemned, how can we imagine we ought not condemn people the apostles' own testimony already shows to stand condemned by their own doing? Let no one, then, cast slander on the apostles, as though they had approved heretical baptisms or shared communion with heretics apart from the Church's own baptism, given that whatever the apostles wrote about heretics came before the fiercer plagues of heresy had even broken out -- before Marcion of Pontus had even risen out of Pontus, whose own teacher Cerdo arrived in Rome while Hyginus, ninth bishop of that city, held office; Marcion, following Cerdo's lead, piled fresh crimes onto the old, blaspheming against God the Father and Creator more brazenly and rashly than any before him, and arming heretical madness still more wickedly and gravely with sacrilegious weapons in revolt against the Church. But suppose it is granted that still more, and still worse, heresies arose afterward, and that no rule or writing ever, at any earlier time, prescribed that a heretic need only have hands laid on him in penance before being received into communion -- and suppose there is only a single baptism, existing among us, within our bounds, granted by divine favor to the Church alone -- then what obstinacy, what arrogance, is this, to rank a human tradition above the divine arrangement, failing to notice that God grows indignant and angered whenever a human tradition breaks apart and overrides the divine commands, exactly as he cries out through the prophet Isaiah: 'This people honors me only with their lips, while their heart stays far removed from me. Their worship of me is empty, for they teach human commandments and doctrines.' In the same vein the Lord in the Gospel rebukes and reproaches, saying: 'You set aside the commandment of God in order to establish your own tradition.' Remembering this precept, the blessed apostle Paul himself likewise cautions and teaches: 'If anyone teaches otherwise and will not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and with his teaching, that man is puffed up, understanding nothing; withdraw from one such as this.' A splendid, lawful tradition indeed is being offered to us through our brother Stephen's teaching, one supposedly lending us fitting authority! For in that very passage of his letter he went on to add: 'since the heretics themselves, properly speaking, do not baptize one another when they cross over, but merely admit each other into communion.' To such depths of wrongdoing has God's Church, the bride of Christ, now sunk, that she should copy the heretics' example, borrowing from darkness the discipline she uses to celebrate heaven's own sacraments, letting Christians act exactly as antichrists do! What blindness of mind, what depravity is this, refusing to acknowledge the unity of faith that flows down from the tradition of God the Father and of our Lord and God Jesus Christ? For if the Church is absent among heretics precisely because she is one and cannot be split apart, and if for that same reason the Holy Spirit is not present there, since he too is one and cannot dwell among the profane and the outsiders -- then surely baptism, resting on that identical unity, cannot exist among heretics either, since neither the Church nor the Holy Spirit can be severed from it. Or, if they credit the majesty of the name for baptism's effect, so that whoever is baptized anywhere, in any fashion, in the name of Jesus Christ, is deemed renewed and made holy -- why, then, does that same name's majesty not equally apply when hands are laid on the baptized person there to receive the Holy Spirit? Why should that identical majesty of that identical name fail to prevail in the laying on of hands, when they insist it has already prevailed in making baptism holy? For if someone born outside the Church can still become a temple of God, why could the Holy Spirit not likewise be poured out over that temple? Whoever has had his sins removed in baptism and been made holy, refashioned spiritually into a new man, is thereby rendered fit to receive the Holy Spirit -- since the apostle states: 'All of you baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.' A person baptized among heretics who is capable of that -- of putting on Christ -- is by the same token capable of something greater still: taking in the very Spirit Christ sent forth. Suppose instead one insisted a man baptized outside the Church had truly clothed himself in Christ yet somehow failed to obtain that Spirit; such a claim would make the one sent greater than the sender himself, as if Christ could be donned with the Spirit absent, or the Spirit torn loose from Christ. It is equally senseless, given that the second birth is a spiritual one, through which we are brought forth in Christ by the washing of rebirth, to claim that a person might be born spiritually among heretics, where they deny the Spirit even exists at all. Water by itself cannot wash away sin and make a man holy unless the Holy Spirit accompanies it. So then, either they must concede the Spirit is likewise present wherever they claim baptism exists, or else no baptism exists where the Spirit is absent, since baptism cannot occur apart from the Spirit. And what does it even mean to claim and insist that there could be children of God who were not born within the Church? For the blessed apostle plainly shows and proves that baptism is the place where the old man perishes and the new man comes to life, saying: 'He rescued us through the washing of rebirth.' But if rebirth belongs to that washing -- that is, to baptism -- how could a heresy that is not Christ's bride bring forth children for God through Christ? Only the Church, joined and made one with Christ, brings forth children in a spiritual sense, as the same apostle says elsewhere: 'Christ loved the Church and gave himself up on her behalf, so as to make her holy, cleansing her through the washing of water.' If, then, this cherished one, this bride, is the only one made holy by Christ and the only one cleansed by his washing, then it is obvious that a heresy -- not being Christ's bride, and unable to be cleansed or made holy by his washing -- cannot bring forth children for God. Furthermore, a person is not born through the laying on of hands, since that is not when he receives the Holy Spirit, but rather in baptism, so that, once already born, he may then receive the Spirit -- exactly as happened with Adam, the first man. God first shaped him, and only afterward breathed the breath of life into his face. The Spirit cannot be received, after all, unless someone already exists to receive it. Since, then, Christians are born in baptism, and since the power to beget and to sanctify through baptism rests with Christ's bride alone -- she alone able to bear and beget children for God in a spiritual sense -- where, from whom, and to whom is a person born who does not belong to the Church as a child? For a man to have God as father, let him first take the Church as mother. Since, then, no heresy whatsoever -- nor indeed any schism -- can possess outside the Church the power to sanctify through saving baptism, our brother Stephen's stubbornness has gone so far that he even insists children are born to God through the baptism performed by Marcion, and likewise by Valentinus and Apelles and the rest who blaspheme against God the Father, claiming that forgiveness of sins is granted there, in Jesus Christ's name, in the very place where the Father, Lord, and God Christ himself is blasphemed. Here, dearest brother, loyalty to our faith and to the sacred office we occupy compels us to ask a hard question: could a priest of God stand and render account on judgment day, having affirmed, endorsed, and claimed as his own the baptisms performed by blasphemers? The Lord himself issues this warning: 'And now, O priests, this command is given to you: if you will not listen, and will not take it to heart to render honor to my name, says the Lord almighty, I will send a curse down upon you, and I will turn your blessing into a curse.' Does a man honor God by sharing communion with Marcion's baptism? Is God honored by one who rules that blasphemers against him receive forgiveness of sins nonetheless? Does he honor God by claiming that God's children are born, outside the Church, from an adulteress and a prostitute? Does he honor God by upholding heresies against the Church, having abandoned the unity and truth that flow from divine law? Does he honor God, being a friend to heretics and an enemy to Christians, by judging that God's priests -- who defend Christ's truth and the Church's unity -- deserve to be shunned? If this is what honoring God amounts to, if this is how fear of God and discipline are kept by his own worshipers and priests, then let us cast down our weapons, hand ourselves over into captivity, surrender to the devil the Gospel's ordinance, Christ's design, and God's own majesty; let the divine army's sacraments be undone, the banners of the heavenly camp be given up; let the Church retreat and yield ground to the heretics -- light to darkness, faith to faithlessness, hope to despair, sound reasoning to error, immortal life to death, love to hatred, truth to lies, Christ to antichrist. Small wonder, then, that schisms and heresies keep rising day by day, spreading thicker and more abundantly, spewing out, like snakes multiplying from serpent hair, the venom of their poison with ever-greater force against God's Church -- so long as certain people lend them patronage, authority, and firm backing, so long as their baptism finds defenders, so long as faith and truth are betrayed, so long as what is waged against the Church from outside gets vindicated from within the Church itself. But if the fear of God still lives among us, dearest brother, if the thread of faith still holds firm, if we keep Christ's commandments, if we guard his bride's holiness whole and untouched, if the Lord's own words cling to our hearts and minds where he asks, 'Yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?' -- then let us, God's faithful soldiers serving him in genuine faith and devotion, hold with loyal courage the camp entrusted to us by heaven. Nor should a custom that has crept in among some be allowed to block truth from prevailing and winning through. For custom apart from truth is nothing but error grown old. Because of this, let us set error aside and follow truth, recognizing that even among the people of Ezra truth won out, as it stands written: 'Truth endures and grows strong forever; it lives and holds power throughout every age. With her there is no favoritism and no distinctions; she carries out what is just, and nothing unjust is found in her judgment; strength, kingship, majesty, and power belong to every age. Blessed is the God of truth.' This is the truth Christ himself reveals to us in his Gospel, saying: 'I am the truth.' Because of this, if we are in Christ and hold Christ within us, and if we remain within the truth and truth remains within us, let us hold on to what is true. Yet through eagerness born of presumption and stubbornness, it happens that a man will defend his own crooked, false position more readily than yield to what is right and true in someone else. Foreseeing this, the blessed apostle Paul writes to Timothy, warning that a bishop should not be quarrelsome or combative, but gentle and open to instruction. And the one who is open to instruction is patient and mild when it comes to learning. Bishops, after all, ought not merely teach but also learn, since the one who teaches better is the one who keeps growing and advancing daily by learning better things. This same apostle Paul likewise teaches and warns that if someone still speaking hears a better revelation given to another, the first speaker should fall silent. For devout, unpretentious minds, setting error aside and then finding and digging out the truth is, in short, a simple matter. If we go back to the head and starting point of the divine tradition, human error comes to an end, and once the logic of the heavenly mysteries has been examined closely, whatever lay hidden and dim beneath a fog and cloud of darkness is thrown open into truth's light -- just as, when a channel carrying water that once flowed richly and freely suddenly runs dry, one naturally heads straight to the spring to discover there the cause of the failure: whether the veins at the source itself have dried up, or whether the water, running full and unbroken from there, simply stopped somewhere along its path; so that, if the fault turns out to lie in a cracked or leaky channel keeping the water from flowing steadily and continuously for use, then, once that channel is mended and reinforced, water may again reach the city for drinking and use with the same fullness and abundance it had when it first left the spring. This is exactly what God's priests ought to do now, holding to the divine precepts: if truth has wavered or faltered on some point, let us go back to the Lord's own starting point and to the tradition handed down by the Gospel and the apostles, and let the reasoning behind our conduct rise again from the very source where its order and origin first arose. For we have received the tradition that there is one God, one Christ, one hope, one faith, one Church, and one baptism, established only within that one Church -- and whoever has broken away from that unity is necessarily found standing among the heretics, and by taking a stand against the Church, attacks the very sacrament of the divine tradition. We see this sacrament of unity expressed too in the Song of Songs, in words spoken as though by Christ: 'A garden enclosed is my sister, my bride -- a sealed fountain, a well of living water, a paradise bearing the fruit of orchards.' But if his Church is a closed garden and a sealed fountain, how could anyone outside the Church enter that same garden or drink from that fountain? Peter too, likewise demonstrating and defending this unity, taught and warned that we can be saved only through the one Church's single baptism: 'In Noah's ark,' he says, 'a few -- eight people, that is -- were kept safe through water, and baptism will save you in that same way.' Through this brief, spiritual summary the sacrament of unity is laid bare. For just as, in that flood which cleansed the world of ancient wickedness, anyone not inside Noah's ark could not be kept safe through the water, so too now no one can be seen as saved through baptism unless baptized within the Church, which stands founded -- after the pattern of that single ark -- upon the Lord's own unity. And so, dearest brother, having examined and clearly seen the truth, this is what we hold and observe: that everyone crossing over to the Church from any heresy at all be baptized with the Church's one lawful baptism -- except for those already baptized within the Church beforehand who afterward went over to the heretics. Such people, when they return, having performed penance, need only receive the laying on of hands and be restored by the shepherd to the fold from which they had wandered. May you keep good health always, dearest brother.
Firmilian, greeting his brother Cyprian in the Lord. Through Rogatianus, our beloved deacon whom you dispatched, we received the letter you addressed to us, most beloved brother, and for this we rendered God our fullest thanks: that although separated bodily from one another, we have been so joined together in spirit that we seem not merely to occupy one region but to share a single dwelling under one roof. And this is fitting to affirm, since God's spiritual house is itself singular. For, as it is written, in the last days the Lord's mountain will stand revealed, with God's own dwelling set above the mountain peaks, where those who assemble come together in joy -- matching what the Psalm likewise asks of the Lord, that one might dwell within God's house across every day of life. Elsewhere too it has been shown that among the saints there exists a deep shared longing to gather as one: 'Behold,' it says, 'how good and how delightful a thing it is when brothers dwell together as one.'
For union, peace, and concord furnish the greatest delight not only to faithful men who know the truth, but even to the angels of heaven themselves — for the divine word tells them that when one sinner turns back in penitence and comes home to the bond that unites us, joy follows. Such a thing surely could not be said of angels dwelling in heaven unless they too were joined to us, rejoicing at our unity just as, on the other hand, they grieve when they see the divided minds and split wills of certain people, as though such people were not calling upon one and the same God together, but, separated and divided from one another, could no longer hold conversation or common speech. Except that in this matter we can render thanks to Stephen, because through his inhumanity it has now come about that we might receive proof of your faith and wisdom. But it does not follow that, because we have received this benefit of grace on Stephen's account, Stephen himself has thereby earned a benefit and grace worthy of him. For neither can Judas, on account of his treachery and the betrayal he wickedly worked against the Savior, be thought worthy, as though he himself had furnished the cause of such great goods, in that through him the world and the peoples of the nations were freed by the Lord's passion.
For now let these deeds of Stephen's be set aside, so that dwelling on his brazenness and arrogance does not weigh us down further with grief over his misdeeds. But learning from your side that this present question has been resolved by you in keeping with the standard of truth and Christ's own wisdom, we rejoiced greatly and offered thanks to God for showing us, in brothers placed at so vast a distance, such a strong shared bond of faith and truth. God's grace, after all, has the power to bind and join, through the tie of love and oneness, even things that appear parted by wide stretches of land — much as, in ages past, divine power once bound Ezekiel and Daniel, born later, to Job and Noah, who came earlier, uniting them across an interval of time in one bond of accord; separated though they were by long stretches of years, they were nonetheless of a single mind through the same divine breath. We now notice the same thing in you: though the farthest regions lie between us, you have proven yourselves bound to us in heart and spirit. All of this happens because of divine oneness. Since the same one Lord dwells within us, he everywhere gathers and unites his people by the tie of unity. Hence, as scripture says, their voice has gone out through every land — those sent by the Lord who run swiftly in a spirit of oneness. Conversely, it does no good at all for people to live near one another and be joined bodily if their hearts and minds are at odds, since souls once torn from God's unity can never truly be one. For it is written: those who go far from you will perish. Such people, though, will face the Lord's judgment as their conduct deserves, having turned away from the words of the one who begged the Father for oneness, saying: Father, grant that just as you and I are one, so these too may be one within us.
As for what you have written, we have taken it up as our own, and have not read it in passing, but have committed it to memory, having gone over it repeatedly; nor does it harm the usefulness of a saving matter either to go over the same points again to confirm the truth, or to add certain things to build up the proof. Whatever we have appended on our part is no sign that your account fell short in any way; rather, divine speech exceeds what human nature can hold, and no soul can take in its whole and perfect measure — which is exactly why prophets are so numerous, so that God's many-sided wisdom could be shared out among a multitude of them. Hence it is also commanded that the first prophet, while speaking, keep silence if a revelation has been made to a second. For this reason it necessarily happens among us that each year the elders and those set over the churches come together as one, to settle matters entrusted to our care, so that, if there are more serious matters, they may be directed by common counsel, and that a cure through penance might also be sought for fallen brothers wounded by the devil after their saving bath—not because we grant them release from sin ourselves, but so that, through us, they come to understand their wrongdoing and are driven to make a more complete amends before the Lord.
Since your envoy was eager to hurry back to you, and winter weather was closing in, we wrote back to your letter as fully as we could manage. Regarding Stephen's claim — that the apostles forbade baptizing those coming from heresy and passed this rule down to their successors — you responded thoroughly, noting that hardly anyone would be foolish enough to think the apostles handed down any such thing, given that it is well established that the heresies themselves, loathsome and detestable as they are, only sprang up afterward. Marcion, Cerdo's pupil, is known to have brought in his blasphemous teaching against God well after the apostles, long past their era; Apelles too, siding with that blasphemy, piled on further novel and even worse doctrines hostile to faith and truth. The dates of Valentinus and Basilides are likewise well documented — they too took up arms against God's church with their wicked falsehoods after the apostles, following a considerable stretch of time. It is equally plain that the remaining heretics brought forward their own twisted sects and corrupt inventions later still, each led astray by whatever error he fell into; and it is obvious that every one of them stands self-condemned, having pronounced against themselves, before the day of judgment, a verdict allowing no excuse. Whoever upholds their baptism does nothing less than join in their condemnation, making himself, by becoming their partner in such matters, guilty alongside them.
Now, that those who are at Rome do not observe in all things what has been handed down from the beginning, and vainly claim the authority of the apostles, can be known even from this: that in regard to the celebration of the days of Easter, and in regard to many other sacraments of divine matters, one may see that there are certain differences among them, and that not all of it matches what is kept at Jerusalem — much as, across a great many other provinces too, numerous practices differ according to local and regional custom; yet none of this variation has ever caused any rupture in the unity and peace of the Catholic Church. Stephen, however, has now ventured to do just that: shattering the peace he owed you, a peace his predecessors had consistently preserved toward you with mutual affection and respect, and even now defaming the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, as though they themselves had handed down this practice—they who in their letters cursed heretics and warned us to avoid them. Hence it is clear that this is a human tradition which asserts that heretics have baptism, and defends them as possessing what belongs to the Church alone.
You gave a good reply also to the point Stephen raised in his letter — that heretics themselves reach agreement with one another over baptism, so that when they come from one sect to another they do not rebaptize but merely admit each other into fellowship, as though we too were bound to act this way. Here, though you have already made clear enough how absurd it is for anyone to follow those in error, we add, for good measure, that this behavior of theirs is hardly surprising: for however much they diverge on lesser points, on the one point that matters most they share a single, common stance — namely, blasphemy against the Creator, inventing for themselves assorted dreams and delusions about some unknown god. From this it naturally follows that they agree about the emptiness of their baptism in exactly the way they agree in rejecting the true nature of the Godhead. Since answering each of their wicked or empty assertions one by one would take too long, it is enough to state briefly, as a summary, that whoever fails to hold the true Lord and Father cannot possess the truth of either the Son or the Holy Spirit — just as those called Cataphrygians, who claim new revelations for themselves, can possess neither Father nor Son, since they lack the Holy Spirit. Ask them whom they proclaim as Christ, and they will answer that they proclaim the one who sent the spirit speaking through Montanus and Prisca. Noticing in these people a spirit not of truth but of deception, we conclude that whoever upholds this false prophecy in opposition to Christ's own faith cannot possess Christ. The same holds for every other heretic: having severed themselves from God's church, they can hold no power or grace whatsoever, because every power and every grace reside in the church alone, where the elders preside, holding the authority to baptize, to lay on hands, and to ordain. Just as a heretic has no right to ordain or lay on hands, neither does he have the right to baptize or perform any holy, spiritual act, since he remains a stranger to holiness that is spiritual and God-given. We settled all of this long ago at Iconium, a town of Phrygia, gathering together those who had come from Galatia, Cilicia, and neighboring districts nearby, resolving that the point must be firmly upheld and defended against heretics, since some had raised doubts about the matter.
Now, since Stephen and his supporters insist that forgiveness of sins and rebirth can occur through baptism administered by heretics — people who by their own admission lack the Holy Spirit — let them stop and grasp that no spiritual birth is possible apart from the Spirit. Consider how the blessed apostle Paul gave a spiritual baptism anew to those who had received only John's baptism prior to the Lord's sending of the Holy Spirit, and only afterward laid hands on them so the Spirit might come upon them. What sense would it make, then, if we, seeing Paul rebaptize his own disciples who had undergone John's baptism, should nonetheless hesitate to baptize those coming to the church from heresy, once their unlawful, profane dipping is behind them? Unless, that is, today's bishops — lesser figures than Paul — are somehow granted the power to confer the Holy Spirit on converted heretics through the laying on of hands alone, while Paul himself lacked the standing to confer the Spirit that way on those baptized by John, and had to baptize them anew with the church's own baptism before he could.
This too is absurd, that they think it need not be asked who it was that baptized, on the ground that the one baptized can obtain grace once the trinity of the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been invoked. Then this would be the wisdom which Paul writes exists in those who are perfect, that whoever counts as perfect and wise within the church would maintain or accept the notion that this bare recitation of names by itself suffices to remit sins and consecrate the baptism — when in truth these effects follow only when the one performing the baptism himself possesses the Holy Spirit, and the rite itself is never valid without the Spirit's presence. But they say that whoever is baptized outside, in whatever manner, can obtain the grace of baptism by his own mind and faith. This too is plainly absurd, as if a corrupt mind had the power to draw down from heaven the sanctity meant for the righteous, or a counterfeit faith could summon the truth meant for believers. The Lord himself makes clear that not all who invoke the name of Christ are heard, or can obtain any grace by their invocation, saying: Many will come in my name, saying, I am the Christ, and they will deceive many. In the final analysis, a false prophet and a heretic are no different from one another: just as the former deceives by invoking the name of God or Christ, the latter deceives through the rite of baptism. Both rely on a lie to deceive the wills of men.
I wish also to relate to you a matter of history that has occurred among us, bearing on this very point. Nearly twenty-two years back, during the period following Emperor Alexander's reign, many disturbances and afflictions befell here, both common to all men and particular to Christians: there were also many frequent earthquakes, so that they overthrew much throughout Cappadocia and Pontus, and certain cities were even swallowed up, taken down into the deep by a gaping fissure in the collapsed ground; from this a grave persecution also arose against our name, which, after a long peace before it, springing up suddenly from an unexpected and unaccustomed evil, became all the more terrifying in throwing our people into confusion. Serenianus was at that time governor in our province, a harsh and fierce persecutor. In this disturbance, while the faithful were set in fear and fleeing this way and that from dread of persecution, leaving their homelands and passing into other parts of the region (for there was still opportunity to move, since that persecution was not throughout the whole world but local), there suddenly appeared here a certain woman who, falling into ecstasy, set herself up as a prophetess, and acted as though full of the Holy Spirit. She was moved by the onslaught of the chief demons in such a way that for a long time she troubled and deceived the brotherhood, performing certain marvelous and portentous things and promising to make the earth move—not that the demon had such power as to be able by his own force to move the earth or shake the elements, but that the wicked spirit, sometimes foreknowing and understanding a coming earthquake, would pretend that he himself was going to do what he saw was going to happen. Through such falsehoods and boasts, he managed to overpower the judgment of individual people to the point that they obeyed her and followed wherever she commanded and led, and he even made that woman walk barefoot through rough snows in the raw of winter, without being troubled or harmed in any way by that wandering; he even had her say she was hastening to Judea and Jerusalem, pretending she had come from there. This same spirit also led astray one of the presbyters, Rusticus, and likewise a certain deacon, to the point that both engaged in intercourse with her — a fact uncovered a short while afterward. For suddenly there appeared to her one of the exorcists, a tested man always well conducted in matters of religious discipline, who, roused also by the exhortation of many brothers who themselves were strong and praiseworthy in the faith, set himself against that wicked spirit to overcome it—a spirit which, by a subtle deceit, had itself foretold a little before that a certain hostile and unbelieving tempter would come. Nevertheless that exorcist, inspired by the grace of God, resisted bravely and showed that it was a most wicked spirit which before had been thought holy. And this woman, who earlier, through the tricks and delusions of many demons, had plotted to mislead the faithful — among the many devices by which she had led great numbers astray, she even dared this often: that by an invocation not to be despised she pretended to sanctify bread and to make the Eucharist, and offered a sacrifice to the Lord without the sacrament of the customary proclamation, and she also baptized many, using the usual and lawful words of questioning, so that nothing seemed to differ from ecclesiastical rule.
What, then, are we to say of a baptism where a supremely wicked demon performed the rite by means of a woman? Surely Stephen and his adherents do not endorse this as well, especially seeing that it lacked neither the Trinitarian formula nor the proper and ecclesiastical questioning? Can anyone believe that sin was truly remitted, or that the regeneration of the saving washing was rightly accomplished, when everything, though carried out in the likeness of the truth, was nonetheless carried out through a demon? Or do the defenders of heretical baptism go so far as to argue that a demon, calling upon that same threefold name — Father and Son and Spirit — thereby handed down baptismal grace? If so, the identical error grips them all, and demonic deceit is precisely what is at work there, given that the Spirit is entirely wanting among them.
This too, what sort of thing is it, that Stephen wishes there to be present, among those baptized by heretics, the presence and holiness of Christ? For if the apostle speaks truly in saying, All of you who have been immersed into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ, then surely whoever has been baptized there into Christ has clothed himself with Christ as well. But if he has clothed himself with Christ, he might also have received the Holy Spirit sent by Christ, making it pointless for a hand to be laid upon him when he comes to receive the Spirit — unless they intend to split the Spirit apart from Christ, so that among heretics Christ is indeed present, yet the Holy Spirit is not.
Let us run briefly through the rest of what has been said by you copiously and most fully, especially since our dearest deacon Rogatian is hastening to you. It follows, then, that we must put this question to those who defend heretics: is their baptism a matter of flesh, or of spirit? If it belongs to the flesh, it is no different from Jewish washing, employed by them merely as an ordinary rite by which bodily grime alone gets removed. If, on the other hand, it belongs to the spirit, how could a spiritual baptism exist among people lacking the Holy Spirit entirely? For this reason, the water in which they are immersed amounts, for them, to nothing more than a fleshly cleansing, not the true sacrament of baptism.
Now if baptism performed by heretics were truly capable of a second-birth regeneration, then those baptized in their ranks would have to be reckoned not heretics at all, but children of God — since it is exactly this second birth occurring in baptism that produces God's children. Yet if Christ has a single bride — namely the Catholic Church — then she alone is the one who bears children for God. Christ does not have multiple brides, for the apostle states: I have pledged you, a chaste virgin, to be presented to a single husband, Christ; and elsewhere: Listen, daughter, look and bend your ear; forget your own people, since the king has longed for your loveliness; and again: Come from Lebanon, bride, cross over and pass through, starting from the origin of faith; and once more: I have entered my garden, my sister, my bride. Everywhere we see a single figure put forward, precisely because there is likewise a single bride. The assembly of heretics, however, does not share unity with us, since she is no bride at all but an adulteress given over to fornication, and therefore cannot produce offspring for God. Unless, as Stephen apparently supposes, heresy does the birthing and abandons the infant, while the church merely picks up the castoffs and raises as her own those she never bore — though a mother cannot claim motherhood over children not her own. This is precisely why Christ our Lord, revealing that his bride is singular and proclaiming the mystery of her unity, states: Whoever stands apart from me stands against me, and whoever fails to gather alongside me scatters instead. For if Christ stands with us while heretics do not, then heretics plainly stand opposed to Christ; and if we gather together with Christ while heretics fail to gather with us, they are, beyond doubt, scattering.
Nor should we pass over something we are bound to state here: following the Song of Songs, the church may be described as an enclosed garden, a sealed spring, a paradise bearing orchard fruit. As for those who have never crossed into this garden, nor looked upon the paradise God the creator planted — how could such people ever supply anyone with the living water of saving washing from a spring shut up inside and marked with the divine seal? And since Noah's ark was nothing other than a symbol of the church of Christ, which then, while all outside were perishing, preserved only those who were within the ark, we are plainly taught to recognize the unity of the church, just as Peter also stated, saying: so too baptism now saves us in like manner — showing that just as those who were not with Noah in the ark were not merely left unwashed and unsaved by the water but perished at once in that flood, so now likewise whoever is outside the church, not with Christ, will perish — unless they turn by repentance to the one and saving washing of the church.
Consider the depth of error and blindness in anyone who claims that sin can be forgiven within heretical assemblies while refusing to remain on the one church's foundation, laid once for all upon the rock by Christ himself — a truth made plain by the fact that Christ addressed Peter alone: whatever you bind upon earth will be bound in heaven too, and whatever you loose upon earth will be loosed in heaven too. Likewise in the Gospel, Christ breathed only upon the apostles, saying: receive the Holy Spirit; if you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven them, and if you retain anyone's, they are retained. This authority over the forgiveness of sins passed to the apostles, then to the churches founded by those Christ had commissioned, and finally to the bishops who took their place through an unbroken line of ordination. Yet those hostile to the single catholic church where we stand, our rivals who — though we are the ones descended from the apostles — seize priesthoods forbidden to them and erect unholy altars against us, are nothing but a new Korah, Dathan, and Abiram: sacrilegious men sharing their crime, bound to suffer the very punishments those men suffered, together with everyone who sides with them, exactly as the companions and backers of Korah's band died the same death alongside him.
And in this matter I am justly indignant at such open and manifest folly on Stephen's part, that he, who takes such pride in the rank of his own bishopric and claims to hold Peter's succession — Peter, the one upon whom the church's foundations rest — yet goes on to introduce many other rocks and raise up new church buildings everywhere, defending baptism there purely by his own authority. For those who are baptized undoubtedly fill up the number of the church; and one who approves their baptism thereby confirms that a church, made up of the baptized, exists there too. He does not perceive that by so doing and by deserting unity he darkens, and in a manner abolishes, the truth of the Christian rock. Yet the apostle declares that the Jews, though blinded by ignorance and bound by the gravest crime, have a zeal for God. Stephen, who proclaims that he holds the chair of Peter by succession, is roused by no zeal at all against heretics, granting them not a small but the greatest power of grace, so as to say and assert that through the sacrament of baptism they wash away the old man's filth, blot out the ancient sins of death, turn men into God's sons through a heavenly rebirth, and restore them to life everlasting by the divine washing's consecration. But if he grants and bestows such great and heavenly gifts of the church on heretics, what else is he doing but sharing communion with those to whom he defends such abundance of grace? And it is idle for him now to hesitate to agree with them in everything else too and to share in their fellowship, so as to gather together with them, mingle prayers equally with them, and set up a common altar and sacrifice.
But, he says, the name of Christ avails greatly for faith and for the sanctification of baptism, so that whoever, and wherever, is baptized in the name of Christ at once obtains the grace of Christ. To this point one may briefly reply, and say: if outside the church baptism in the name of Christ was effective to cleanse a man, then in that same name of Christ the laying on of hands could also there have been effective to bestow the Holy Spirit. From there, everything else that heretics practice will start looking legitimate and permissible too, given that it is carried out under Christ's name — quite contrary to what you yourselves argued in your own letter, that the name of Christ can be effective only within the church, to which alone Christ has granted the power of heavenly grace.
As for their appeal to custom, set up against the truth — what kind of fool would rank habit above truth, or, having seen the light plainly, still cling to darkness? Perhaps ancient custom did help the Jews somewhat even as Christ — that is, the truth — arrived, in the sense that they clung to their old ways and forsook the new path of truth. This very point you Africans can turn against Stephen: once truth became known to us, we let go of custom's error. For our part, we bring truth and custom together, and against Roman custom we oppose the custom grounded in truth, keeping from the outset what Christ and the apostles handed down. Nor do we remember this practice starting up among us at some point, for the rule has stood here from the first that we recognize only a single church of God, and regard nothing as valid baptism apart from that of the holy church. Indeed, because some questioned the validity of baptism among people who, though accepting the new prophets, still appear to acknowledge the same Father and Son that we do, a large gathering of us met at Iconium, weighed the matter with the greatest care, and affirmed that any baptism whatsoever conferred outside the church is to be rejected.
As for what they put forward on behalf of the heretics, saying that the apostle said whether by occasion or in truth Christ is proclaimed — to answer this is pointless, since it is plain that the apostle, in the letter in which he said this, made no mention at all of heretics or of their baptism, but was speaking only of brethren, whether those speaking with him in bad faith or those persevering in sincere faith; nor is there need for a lengthy discussion to sift this out — it is enough simply to read the letter itself and to recognize what the apostle said, and of whom.
What, then, they ask, becomes of people who came over from the heretics and were received without the church's baptism? If they have already left this life, they fall among those who, though catechized among us, died before baptism came — still no slight gain in truth and faith, the very thing they had reached by forsaking error, even though death overtook them before they reached grace's completion. But those who are still living ought to receive the church's baptism, so that sins may be remitted to them, lest, through someone else's rash assumption, they persist in their old error and die short of grace's completion. Yet how great a wrong it is, on the part of either those admitted or those admitting them, that — with neither the filth cleansed through the church's washing nor the sins laid open — they dare, in reckless communion, to lay hands on the Lord's body and blood, since scripture says: whoever eats that bread or drinks that cup unworthily incurs guilt for the Lord's body and blood.
We too have judged that anyone baptized by men who once held bishoprics in the catholic church, but who later took upon themselves the authority to ordain clergy, must be treated as not baptized at all. And this is observed among us, that whoever comes to us having been dipped by them, as strangers who have gained nothing from that act, is baptized among us with the one true baptism of the catholic church, so that they may obtain the regeneration of the life-giving washing. Still, great is the distance between someone who gave way only because the strain of persecution left him no choice, and someone who, moved by a sacrilegious will, boldly takes up arms against the church, or turns an impious tongue against the Father, against the God of Christ, against the very maker of all things. Yet here is Stephen, without a trace of shame, claiming that sins can be forgiven through the hands of men steeped in every crime themselves — as if a house of death could somehow yield up a bath of salvation.
Where, then, does that leave what scripture commands: keep away from water not your own, and do not drink from another's spring — if you forsake the church's own sealed spring, seize foreign water as though it were yours, and defile the church with unclean springs? For in sharing the baptism of heretics, are you not simply drinking from their filth and slime, and, though the church's holiness has made you clean, letting yourself be soiled by contact with someone else's dirt? Do you feel no fear of God's judgment, testifying on behalf of heretics against the church, when scripture says a lying witness shall not escape punishment? No — you are worse than any heretic. For when a good number of them, recognizing their mistake, turn to you to reach the church's genuine light, you lend support to the very errors of those approaching, and, having dimmed the light of the church's truth, you pile up the gloom of heretical night. And when these very people admit they are living in sin and possess no grace, and say that is exactly why they seek the church, you deny them the forgiveness of sins granted in baptism, claiming they were already baptized and gained the church's grace while standing outside it. You fail to grasp that on judgment day their souls will be demanded from your hand — you, who refused a drink to those thirsting for the church and brought about the death of those who wanted to live, and on top of it all you take offense.
Notice the ignorance behind your daring to find fault with people contending for truth against lies. Really, who has the better claim to indignation toward the other side — someone who champions the cause of God's enemies, or someone who instead opposes those enemies in defense of the church's truth? Except, of course, ignorant men are notoriously quick to quarrel and lose their temper, since a lack of judgment and of measured speech pushes them readily into rage — so much so that scripture's words apply to no one better than to you: a hot-headed man kindles disputes, and a quick-tempered man multiplies wrongdoing. Just think how many quarrels and splits you have set loose across the churches of the entire world. And think how much wrongdoing you have piled onto yourself by tearing yourself away from so many flocks. You did the tearing, make no mistake about that — for the real schismatic is the man who has turned himself into a deserter from the shared unity of the church. While you imagine that everyone else can be shut out from you, in truth you alone have shut yourself out from everyone. Not even the apostle's teaching could shape you toward the standard of truth and peace, where he urges and states: I, then, a prisoner for the Lord's sake, appeal to you to conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the calling you received, with complete lowliness and mildness of spirit, enduring one another patiently out of love, making every effort to guard the Spirit's oneness through the tie of peace — a single body and a single Spirit, just as you were summoned to a single hope belonging to your calling; a single Lord, a single trust, a single washing, a single God and Father of everyone, who reigns over all, works through all, and dwells within all of us.
How carefully did Stephen live out these beneficial commands and warnings from the apostle, beginning with lowliness of mind and mildness! What could be more lowly or mild than breaking with so many bishops across the entire world, shattering peace with one group after another through discord of every kind — at one point with the Eastern bishops, a fact we assume is already known to you, at another point with you southern brothers, whose delegated bishops he received with such patience and mildness that he would not even grant them a moment of ordinary conversation, and, ever mindful above all of love and charity, directed the entire brotherhood that not a single person was to take them into his house, so that those who arrived would be denied not only peace and communion but even a roof over their heads and lodging. This is what he calls preserving the Spirit's oneness through peace's bond: severing himself from love's unity, turning himself into an outsider to the brethren in every respect, and rebelling in a storm of discord against the very sacrament and tie of peace. Can one body and one spirit exist in such a man, whose own solitary soul is, perhaps, nothing but slippery, shifting, and unsteady? As for him, though, let it rest there. Let us turn instead to the point on which the whole question truly hangs. Those who insist that people baptized by heretics should be accepted as having received the grace of a lawful washing claim that our baptism and theirs is one identical thing, with no difference at all. Yet what does the apostle Paul actually say? A single Lord, a single faith, a single washing, a single God. If the heretics' baptism is truly identical to ours, then their faith must, without question, be identical too. And if the faith is a single thing, then the Lord must likewise be a single thing. If the Lord is single, it follows that the church, too, is single. But if this oneness — which admits no splitting or dividing whatsoever — belongs to the heretics as well, what further point is there in disputing? Why, then, do we even call them heretics rather than Christians? Moreover, since God is not a single thing shared between us and the heretics, nor the Lord, nor the church, nor the faith — not even the spirit or the body is single between us — it follows plainly that baptism, too, cannot be something we hold in common with them, given that nothing whatsoever is common between us. Even so, Stephen feels no shame in lending his backing to such claims against the church, and, to defend the heretics, in splitting the brotherhood apart — and, worse still, in branding Cyprian a false Christ, a false apostle, and a deceitful laborer: a man who, knowing full well that every one of these charges fits himself, rushes to pin on someone else, falsely, exactly what he himself deserves — and rightly — to be called. We wish good health to all of you, together with every bishop across Africa, all the clergy, and the whole brotherhood, so that we may remain forever of a single mind and single accord with you, joined to us even across the distance.
Letter 76. From Cyprian to Nemesianus, Felix, Lucius, a second Felix, Litteus, Polianus, Victor, Iader, and Dativus, his fellow bishops, together with the presbyters, deacons, and remaining brothers held at the mine — martyrs consecrated to God the almighty Father, to Jesus Christ our Lord, and to God our preserver — everlasting greeting. Your own glory, most blessed and most beloved brothers, called for me to come in person, to see you and hold you in my arms, had I myself not been confined — banished for confessing the Name — within the limits of a fixed place of exile. Yet as best I can, I make myself present to you: though I am not permitted to reach you on foot and in the flesh, I come nonetheless through affection and through the spirit, putting into a letter the joy with which your virtues and your honors fill me, and counting myself joined to you — not through bodily suffering, but through the bond of love. How could I stay silent, how could I force my own voice into stillness, when I hear such glorious things of those dearest to me, whom divine favor has so honored — some of you already past the finish line of martyrdom, soon to take from the Lord the crown earned by your merits; others of you still waiting behind prison bars or amid the chains of the mine, turning the very length of your torment into a stronger lesson for arming and strengthening the brothers, and gaining, through the slowness of your suffering, an ever larger claim on merit — bound to receive as many heavenly rewards as the days you now count in pain? None of this surprises me, bravest and most blessed brothers, as the fitting reward of your devotion and faith: the Lord has lifted you to the towering peak of glory through the honor of his own radiance — you who have always thrived within his church by keeping unbroken the thread of faith, holding to the Lord's commands without wavering: purity in your simplicity, unity in your love, humility in your restraint, care in your stewardship, alertness in aiding those who toil, compassion in tending the poor, steadfastness in upholding truth, and rigor in the discipline you observe. And so that your example of right conduct should lack nothing, now, through the confession of your own voices and the suffering of your own flesh, you call the brothers' hearts onward toward holy martyrdom, proving yourselves leaders by your courage — for as a flock follows its shepherds and copies what it watches done by those placed above it, so it may earn from the Lord a crown matching its obedience. As for your having begun the holy first steps of your confession by being severely beaten with rods and battered under such punishments, this is nothing we should recoil from. A Christian's body has no dread of clubs, for its whole hope is fixed upon a tree. Christ's servant has understood the mystery of his own deliverance — bought back through wood into life without end, and carried by that same wood toward his crown. What wonder, then, that you — vessels made of gold and silver — were sent to the mine, the very birthplace of gold and silver, save that the mines' function has now been turned around, and ground that once yielded up gold and silver has begun instead to take it in? They have also clamped fetters onto your feet and wrapped disgraceful chains around limbs made blessed as temples of God — as if binding the body could bind the spirit too, or as if contact with iron could stain your gold. For men given over to God, whose devout courage bears witness to their faith, these are adornments and not fetters; the feet of Christians so joined are not led toward shame but lifted toward radiance and a crown. O blessed feet in bonds, to be freed not by any blacksmith but by the Lord himself! O blessed feet in bonds, guided along the road of salvation straight toward paradise! O feet chained for now within this world, so as to stand forever free before God! O feet held back a little while by shackles and crossbars, yet destined soon to race their glorious course toward Christ! However long jealous cruelty or malice wishes to hold you fast in its knots and bonds, you will soon pass from this earth and these torments into the kingdoms of heaven. In the mines no bed or cushion comforts the body — it is Christ's own refreshment and comfort that sustains it. Bodies worn down by toil lie on bare ground, yet lying there with Christ is no punishment at all. Unwashed limbs grow filthy and marred with grime, but whatever grows dirty outwardly in the flesh is cleansed within, in the spirit. Bread there is meager, yet a person lives not on bread by itself, but on God's own word. Clothing fails those who shiver, yet whoever has clothed himself in Christ is richly dressed and adorned already. Hair on a half-shaved head stands rough, but since Christ himself is the head of every man, any head marked for the Lord's name must surely be a fitting one. With what brightness will all this ugliness — loathsome and repulsive as it looks to pagans — be repaid! This brief, worldly punishment will be exchanged for a reward of shining, unending honor, when — as the blessed apostle says — the Lord reshapes the body of our humble state into the likeness of his own glorified body. Nor, dearest brothers, should anyone feel that faith or religion suffers any loss because God's priests have no means there now to offer and perform the sacred sacrifices. In fact you yourselves perform and offer to God a sacrifice at once precious, glorious, and of great value toward your reward in heaven, for scripture itself says it plainly: what God wants offered to him is a contrite spirit, and a heart ground down and humbled he will never turn away. Such is the offering you make him; such, unceasing through every day and night, is the sacrifice you perform, standing as living victims and presenting yourselves as unblemished, consecrated gifts — just as the apostle urges: I beg you, then, brothers, through God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a sacrifice, living and holy, pleasing to God; do not take the shape of this present age, but be remade by a renewed mind, so you can discern what God wants — the good, the pleasing, the perfect. This above all is what pleases God; this is what carries our works forward to greater merit in winning his favor; this alone is what repays the Lord — for his great, saving gifts — with the devotion and faithful service we owe him, as the Holy Spirit announces and affirms in the psalms: What return shall I make to the Lord for everything he has given me? I shall lift up the cup of deliverance and cry out the Lord's name. Costly, in the eyes of the Lord, is the death of those who are righteous. Who would refuse to lift the cup of deliverance eagerly and at once? Who would not long, joyful and glad, for a chance to give something back to his own Lord? Who would not face, bravely and without wavering, a death so costly in God's eyes, hoping to please the one who watches from above as we struggle in the contest for his name — approving our willingness, aiding our fight, crowning our victory, repaying in us through fatherly kindness whatever he himself supplied, and honoring the very work he himself brought about? That our victory, and our reaching the palm of this great contest by overcoming our adversary, belongs to him — this the Lord himself teaches and declares in his gospel: When they hand you over, do not worry over how or what you will say, for in that very hour what you must say will be given to you; it is not you speaking, but your Father's Spirit speaking through you. And elsewhere: resolve in your hearts not to plan your defense beforehand, for I myself will give you speech and wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand. Here lies both the believer's great confidence and the disbeliever's gravest fault: failing to trust the one who pledges his aid to those who confess him, and likewise failing to fear the one who warns of everlasting punishment for those who deny him. All of this, bravest and most faithful soldiers of Christ, you have impressed on our brothers, fulfilling through deeds what you had already taught in words — set to be counted among the greatest in the heavenly kingdom, according to the Lord's own promise: whoever both does and teaches these things will be named greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And indeed, a great many of the people, following your lead, made confession alongside you and were crowned alongside you too, bound to you by an unbreakable tie of love, never parted from their leaders by either prison or mine. Among them are virgins too, whose sixtyfold harvest has gained a hundredfold besides, lifted toward the heavenly crown by a twin measure of glory. Even in children, a valor beyond their years has outstripped their age through the honor of confession, so that your blessed company of martyrs is graced by every age and both sexes alike. What strength of a conquering conscience is now yours, dearest brothers — what greatness of soul, what inner rejoicing, what triumph filling your breast — knowing that each of you stands firm awaiting God's promised reward, unafraid of the day of judgment, moving through the mine with a body held captive yet a heart that reigns, aware that Christ himself walks beside you, delighting in the endurance of his servants as they tread his own footsteps and paths toward the everlasting kingdom! Day after day you look forward, glad, to the saving day of your own departure, and, ready at any instant to leave this world behind, you press on toward the martyrs' reward and God's own dwelling places — soon to behold, once this world's darkness ends, a brilliant light, and to gain a splendor beyond all your afflictions and struggles, as the apostle testifies: What we suffer now cannot be weighed against the glory still to come, the glory that will be shown in us. Clearly, since your words now carry more weight in prayer, and requests made amid suffering are more readily granted, plead all the harder and ask that divine favor bring every one of our confessions to completion, so that God may free us too, together with you, whole and glorious, out of this world's darkness and its snares — so that we, joined here by the tie of love and peace against the wrongs of heretics and the pressure of pagans, may rejoice together in the same way within the kingdoms of heaven. I wish you well always in the Lord, most blessed and bravest brothers, and ask that you keep me in mind everywhere and always. Farewell.
Letter 77. From Nemesianus, Dativus, Felix, and Victor to Cyprian their brother — everlasting greeting in the Lord. In your letters, dearest Cyprian, you have always spoken with deep insight suited to the moment; reading them again and again sets the crooked straight and gives strength to those of sound faith. For as you keep uncovering hidden mysteries in your writings, you cause our faith to grow and draw people out of the world into belief. Indeed, whatever good things you have put into your many books, you have unknowingly painted a portrait of yourself for us. You surpass all men in exposition, outdo them in eloquence, exceed them in wise counsel, in unaffected wisdom, in generosity of deed, in holy self-denial, in humble service, and in blameless conduct. You yourself know, dearest one, our fondest wish: to see you, our teacher and the one we love, arrive at the crown of a great confession. Like a good and genuine teacher, you spoke first, before the proconsul's record, the very words we your students would later need before the governor; sounding the trumpet, you called God's soldiers, armed with heavenly weapons, into the battle; standing in the front rank, you cut down the devil with the sword of the spirit; and with your words you arranged the brothers' ranks on every side, so that traps closed in on the enemy from all directions and the corpse of that common foe, its sinews severed, was trodden underfoot. Trust us, dearest one: your blameless soul deserves no less than the hundredfold reward, for it did not flinch before the world's first assaults, did not balk at exile, did not hesitate to abandon its own city, did not shrink from staying in a desolate place — and since it gave so many an example of confession, it led the way to martyrdom before them. How many, indeed, has your example spurred toward their own martyrdoms! And you have joined yourself not merely to the martyrs already gone from this world, but formed a heavenly bond with those still to come. So the condemned here join us in giving you the greatest thanks before God, dearest Cyprian, because through your letters you have revived our worn-out hearts, tended limbs wounded by rods, freed feet shackled in irons, evened the ragged hair on half-shaved heads, brightened the prison's darkness, flattened the mine's mountains into level ground, laid sweet-smelling flowers beneath our noses, and driven off the foul reek of smoke. Your service, together with that of our beloved Quirinus, has already accomplished this: through Herennianus the subdeacon and the acolytes Lucanus, Maximus, and Amantius, you sent supplies for distribution, meeting whatever our bodies had lacked. Let us, then, support each other through prayer, and let us ask, just as you instructed us, that God, Christ, and the angels stand behind everything we do. We hope, brother and lord, that you always fare well and keep us in your memory. Greet everyone at your side. All of us here send you our love and greetings, and long to see you.
Letter 78. From Lucius, together with all the brothers at his side, to Cyprian, brother and fellow bishop — greeting in God. While we were rejoicing and glad in God for arming us for the struggle and, by his own favor, making us victors in the fight, your letter reached us, dearest brother, the one you sent through Herennianus the subdeacon and the acolytes Lucanus, Maximus, and Amantius. Reading it, we found ease within our chains, comfort amid distress, and support in our need; we were stirred and made bolder, ready for whatever further suffering awaits. For even before our own suffering began, you had already called us toward glory, you who first led the way for us in confessing the name of Christ. And we, walking in the footprints of your confession, hope to receive equal grace alongside you. For whoever runs ahead in the race also reaches the prize first, and you, having taken the lead, shared with us out of what you gained — proof of that undivided love with which you have always regarded us — so that those of one spirit might, through the grace of your prayers, be bound together in peace and share a single crown of confession. And added to your crown of confession, dearest brother, comes the reward for your labors — a generous measure you will receive from the Lord on the day of repayment, you who made yourself present to us through your letter, showing the pure and blessed heart we have always known, and speaking praises to God with us according to its full measure — not merely what we deserve to hear, but all that you are able to express. Your words have adorned and reinforced whatever was still weak in us, sustaining us through the same sufferings we now bear, secure in the heavenly reward, the martyr's crown, and the kingdom of God, according to the pledge you made us in your letter, filled as you were with the Holy Spirit. This entire promise rests on a single condition, dearest friend: keep us in your prayers — something I have no doubt you already do, just as we, on our side, never fail to do for you. We have received, then, most longed-for brother, the gift that you and Quirinus sent — an offering drawn from every clean deed. Just as when Noah made his offering to God and God took delight, favoring his sacrifice as a pleasing scent, so too God favors yours and delights in repaying you for so worthy a deed. I ask, further, that you arrange for the letter we wrote to Quirinus to be passed along. I wish you, dearest and most longed-for brother, lasting well-being and that you remember us. Greet everyone with you. Farewell.
Letter 79. To Cyprian, dearest and most beloved: Felix, Iader, and Polianus, along with the presbyters and all those staying with us at the mine of Sigus — everlasting greeting in God. We return your greeting, dearest brother, through our brothers Herennianus the subdeacon, Lucanus, and Maximus, who by your prayers' help remain strong and unharmed; through them we received the sum you sent as an offering, along with your letter, in which you were kind enough to console us like children with heavenly words. We have given, and continue to give, thanks to God the almighty Father through his Christ, for the comfort and strength your words have brought us, and we ask, from the purity of your heart, that you keep us continually in mind in your prayers, so that the Lord may complete both your confession and ours, which he has graciously granted within us. Greet all who share your dwelling. We hope, dearest brother, that you fare well in the Lord. Written by Felix, signed by Iader, read by Polianus. Greetings to my lord Eutychianus.
Letter 80. Cyprian to Successus his brother, greeting. The reason I did not write to you right away, dearest brother, was that the entire clergy, standing under the very blow of the contest, simply could not leave this place, every one of them ready, out of devotion of soul, for glory both divine and heavenly. Know, though, that the men I had sent to the city for this very purpose have returned, bringing back to us the confirmed truth of whatever rescript had been issued about us. For all sorts of conflicting, uncertain reports are circulating in people's opinions. But here is what actually stands true: Valerian has sent the senate a rescript ordering that bishops, presbyters, and deacons be executed without delay; that senators, distinguished men, and Roman knights be stripped of rank and then of property, and, should they persist as Christians even after losing their estates, be put to death as well; that noblewomen have their property seized and be sent into exile; and that any member of the imperial household, whether already confessed earlier or confessing now, have his goods confiscated and be shipped in chains to labor on the emperor's own estates. The emperor Valerian also attached to his address a copy of the letter he sent to the provincial governors concerning us; we look for that letter to arrive any day, standing firm in the strength of our faith to bear whatever suffering comes, and awaiting, through the Lord's help and mercy, the crown of everlasting life. Know that Xystus was executed in the cemetery on the eighth day before the Ides of August, along with four of his deacons. And the city prefects press this persecution daily, so that anyone brought before them is executed and his goods claimed for the imperial treasury. I ask that you pass all this along to our other fellow bishops as well, so that their encouragement may everywhere strengthen the brotherhood and prepare it for the spiritual contest, so that each of our people may dwell less on death than on immortality, and, given over to the Lord in full faith and complete courage, may find more joy than fear in this confession — knowing that the soldiers of God and of Christ are, in it, not destroyed but crowned. I wish you, dearest brother, lasting well-being in the Lord always.
Letter 81. Cyprian, to the presbyters, deacons, and the whole people, greeting. When it was reported to us, dearest brothers, that warrants had been sent out to bring me to Utica, and our dearest friends persuaded me by their counsel to withdraw for a time from our gardens, I agreed, since a just reason intervened for it, on the ground that it is fitting for a bishop to confess the Lord in that very city over whose church he presides, and to bring glory upon the whole people by the confession of their own bishop present among them. For whatever a confessing bishop declares at the very moment of confession, he declares by the inspiration of God, speaking in the mouths of all. But the honor of our so glorious church would be diminished if I, a bishop set over this church, having received sentence at Utica on the charge of confession, were to go from there to the Lord as a martyr in a place not my own, seeing that I long for and desire and owe it, by unceasing prayers and every vow, to confess both for myself and for you among you, and to suffer there, and to go forth from there to the Lord. So here we remain, withdrawn into this hidden retreat, waiting for the proconsul's return to Carthage; once he is back, his own word will tell us what the emperors have decreed touching Christian laypeople and bishops, and only then shall we utter whatever the Lord wills spoken at that hour. You yourselves, dearest brothers, having been schooled by me all along in obedience to what the Lord has commanded, and having so often absorbed this teaching from my own instruction, must hold to peace and stillness — none of you should stir up trouble among the brothers, nor hand himself over to the pagans unbidden. For the one who is seized and handed over ought to speak, since God, set within us, speaks in that hour, he who has willed us rather to confess than to volunteer. As for anything further we ought to do before the proconsul, in judging me, passes sentence touching my confession of God's name, we will settle it under the Lord's guidance when the moment draws near. May the Lord Jesus keep you safe, dearest brothers, and grant that you remain steadfast in his church, and be pleased to preserve you.
Men of great and outstanding intellect, having given themselves wholly to learning, devoted whatever labor they could to the pursuit of truth, scorning every private and public occupation, since they judged it far more splendid to search out and grasp the reasoning of things human and divine than to cling to the piling up of wealth or the heaping up of honors—matters which, being frail and earthly and pertaining only to the care of the body, make no one better or more just. Those men were indeed most worthy of attaining knowledge of the truth, since they desired to know it with such passion, and set it before all other things—for it is well known that some cast aside their family estates and renounced every pleasure, so that, stripped and unencumbered, they might follow virtue alone and naked; and the very name and authority of virtue carried such weight among them that they judged the reward of the highest good to consist in virtue itself. Yet they neither obtained what they sought, nor did their effort and diligence come to anything, because truth—that is, the hidden mystery of the highest God who made all things—cannot be grasped by human wit and by the senses proper to man. Were it otherwise, God and man would stand undivided, supposing a human mind capable of grasping the counsels and ordering of that eternal majesty. Since, then, it was impossible for divine reason to become known to man by his own resources, God did not allow man, seeking the light of wisdom, to wander longer in error, or to roam through impenetrable darkness with no fruit for his labor. He opened man's eyes at last, and made the knowledge of truth his own gift, so as to show that human wisdom is nothing, and to point out to the wandering and lost the way to attain immortality. Yet this heavenly gift and benefit finds few takers, for truth stays concealed under a veil of obscurity: scholars scorn it as lacking capable defenders, while the unlettered despise it for the harshness bound up in it, a harshness that human nature, prone as it is to vice, cannot endure—for since bitterness is mixed with the virtues, while vices are seasoned with pleasure, men, put off by the one and charmed by the other, are carried headlong, and, deceived by an appearance of good, embrace evils in place of goods—I judged it needful to remedy these errors, guiding the educated toward true wisdom and those without learning toward true religion. This calling ought to be reckoned far better, more useful, and more glorious than that of oratory, in which we were long occupied, training young men not toward virtue but plainly toward clever malice; and now we shall speak with far greater rightness of heavenly teachings, teachings by which men's minds can be shaped toward reverence for the true majesty. Nor does anyone deserve better of human affairs who brings the skill of speaking well than one who teaches men to live devoutly and blamelessly. For this reason philosophers among the Greeks were held in greater glory than orators. The former were judged instructors in living rightly—far more excellent a title—since eloquence concerns only a few, whereas living well concerns everyone. Yet that training in contrived disputes has been of great use to us, so that now, with greater abundance and skill in speaking, we may plead the cause of truth. Though truth can be defended without eloquence, as it has often been defended by many, still it ought to be made bright and, in a manner, asserted with the clarity and polish of style, so that it may pour into men's minds with greater power, girded by its own strength and graced by the brilliance of eloquence. Our discourse, then, is set upon religion and matters divine. For if certain very great orators, veterans by now of their profession, once they had worked through their pleadings' labors, finally devoted themselves to philosophy and deemed it the most fitting repose from their toils, and if they twisted their minds in the search for things that could not be found, so that they seem to have sought not leisure for themselves but a new labor, and one indeed far more troublesome than what they had practiced before—how much more rightly may I betake myself to that holy, true, divine wisdom, as to some most secure harbor, in which all things are easy to state, sweet to hear, simple to understand, honorable to undertake? And if certain wise arbiters of fairness set down compilations of civil law to settle citizens' quarrels and disputes, then with how much greater justice and skill ought we to compose divine institutes in writing—works speaking not of drainage, water rights, or property claims, but treating hope, life, salvation, immortality, and God himself, so as to quiet death-dealing superstitions and the ugliest errors? Setting aside, then, the champions of this earthly philosophy, who bring nothing certain, let us take the straight road. If indeed I thought them sufficiently fit guides to right living, I myself would follow them and urge others to follow; but since they are at odds with one another in great strife, and often disagree even with themselves, it is plain that their path is by no means straight, since each has stamped out his own way as he pleased, and left great confusion to those seeking truth. But we, who have received the sacred trust of true religion, since truth has been revealed to us by God, since we follow God as the teacher of wisdom and the leader of virtue, summon all people without any distinction of sex or age to the heavenly food; for no food is sweeter to the mind than the knowledge of truth. To assert and set forth this knowledge we have devoted seven books, although the matter is nearly an endless and immense task, such that if anyone wished to expand and pursue it fully, so great an abundance of material would flow out to him that his discourse would find neither limit to its books nor an end. But we shall gather everything briefly, because the matters we intend to present are so plainly clear and luminous that it seems rather astonishing that truth should appear so obscure to men, and especially to those commonly considered wise—or rather because our sole task will be to instruct men — that is, to lead them out of the confusion binding them and onto a truer path. If we succeed in this, as I hope, we shall send them on to the most abundant and full fountain of learning itself, by whose draught and drinking they may quench the thirst conceived in their inmost being and put out its burning; and all things will be easy, plain, and clear to them, provided only they are not too weary to lend the patience of reading or listening to grasp the discipline of wisdom. For many, clinging stubbornly to empty superstitions, harden themselves against manifest truth, having done well not so much by the religions they wrongly assert as ill by themselves. Though they have a straight road before them, they follow crooked, winding paths, abandoning the level way so as to slip over a precipice, forsaking the light so as to lie helpless and blind in darkness. These must be counseled not to fight against themselves, and to be willing at last to be freed from their inveterate errors—which indeed they will do, if they ever come to perceive plainly the purpose of their birth. Depravity springs from just this: not knowing oneself. Whoever has shaken this off, once the truth is known, will know what he should be directed toward and how his life ought to be led. I sum up briefly the whole of this knowledge: that no religion is to be undertaken without wisdom, and no wisdom is to be approved without religion.
Now that I had taken up the task of setting forth the truth, I judged it unnecessary to begin from that question which seems to come first by nature—whether there is a providence that watches over all things, or whether all things happen and are carried on by chance. Democritus is the author of this view, Epicurus its confirmer. But before them Protagoras, who called the gods into doubt, and afterward Diagoras, who denied them, and certain others who did not think gods existed, accomplished nothing else than to make people think there was no providence. Yet the other philosophers, and above all the Stoics, refuted them most sharply, teaching that the world could neither have come to be without divine reason, nor stand firm unless governed by the highest reason. And Marcus Tullius, though a defender of the Academic school, discoursed both often and at length on the providence that governs all things, confirming the arguments of the Stoics and bringing forward many new ones of his own—which he does throughout all the books of his philosophy, but most of all in those on the nature of the gods. Nor indeed was it hard to expose as false the claims of a handful of misguided thinkers, given the testimony of peoples and nations, which do not disagree on this one point. For there is no one so uncultivated, so savage in manners, that, lifting his eyes to the sky, even though he does not know by whose providence this whole visible order is governed, does not nonetheless understand that there is some providence, from the very greatness, motion, arrangement, constancy, usefulness, beauty, and balance of things, and that what stands together by such wondrous design cannot but have been set in order by some greater counsel. And it would certainly be quite easy for us to pursue this topic as fully as one likes; but because the matter has been much debated among philosophers, and those who deny providence seem to have been answered sufficiently by sharp and eloquent men, and because it is necessary for us to speak, scattered throughout this whole work we have undertaken, of the skillful working of divine providence, let us for the present set aside this question, which hangs together with the rest in such a way that nothing, it seems, can be discussed by us without at the same time discussing providence.
Let, then, the starting point of our work be that question which follows and comes second: whether one god's power governs the world, or many gods share that rule. No one who has any sense and reasons things through with himself fails to understand that there is one, who both made all things and governs them by the same power with which he made them. What call is there for a multitude to uphold the world's governance? Unless perhaps we shall suppose that, if there were several, each would have less strength and power—which indeed is the position of those who want there to be many gods, since it is necessary that they be weak, seeing that individually, without the help of the rest, they could not sustain the steering of so great a mass. But God, who is eternal mind, is in every respect of perfect and complete power; and if this is true, it is necessary that he be one. For power, or virtue, that is absolute retains its own proper firmness. A thing counts as whole when nothing can be subtracted from it, and as perfect when nothing further could be added. Who would doubt that the most powerful king is the one commanding the entire globe? Not unreasonably so, for everything everywhere is his, and every resource flows toward him from every direction. But if several were to divide up the world, each would certainly have less wealth, less strength, since each would confine himself within his allotted portion. In the same way, gods too, if there were several, would each be weaker, since others would possess just as much in themselves. But the perfect nature of power can exist in that in which the whole resides, rather than in that in which only a small part of the whole is found. If God is perfect, as he must be, he can be nothing other than singular, with everything held within him. It is necessary, then, that the powers and capacities of many gods be weaker, since each one will lack exactly what is present in the others; and thus the more numerous they are, the smaller each will be. What of the fact that that supreme power over things, that divine force, cannot be divided even once? For whatever admits division must also admit destruction. But since destruction has no place in God, who is incorruptible and eternal, divine power, as a consequence, admits no division. God, then, is one, if nothing else can possess so much power; and yet those who suppose there are many gods say that duties are divided among them. We shall discuss all this in its proper place. For now I hold to what pertains to the present point: supposing they split responsibilities between them, we arrive at an identical result: no single one of them suffices alone for everything. He, then, will not be perfect who cannot govern everything when the others are idle. Thus it comes about that the perfect power of one is needed to rule the world, rather than the weakness of many. Whoever thinks that so great a vastness cannot be ruled by one is mistaken, and fails to grasp the true scale of divine majesty's strength and power, supposing as he does that the single god who was able to make the world is not able to govern the very thing he made. But should he picture in thought the sheer immensity of this divine work, and consider that, though nothing existed beforehand, it was still called into being from nothing by God's power and design—a work which could not have been begun and completed except by one—he will then understand that it is far easier for what was established by one to be ruled by one. One might object that a work as vast as the world's fashioning could never have been accomplished by a single maker. However many he supposes, however great, whatever greatness, power, virtue, and majesty he assigns to the many, I gather all of that together into one and say that it exists in the one, so that as much of these things exists in him as cannot even be conceived or expressed. And in this matter, since we fall short both in perception and in words—because the human breast cannot contain so great a light of understanding, nor mortal tongue the explanation of such great things—this very fact we ought to understand and declare. I see again what might be said on the other side, that the many are such as we suppose the one to be. But this can by no means be so, because the power of each would be unable to advance further, meeting the powers of the others in its way. For it is necessary that each keep within his own limits and be unable to overstep them, or, if he oversteps them, drive out another from his own bounds. Believers in many gods fail to notice that these gods might well desire opposing things, a divergence from which quarrels and conflict would spring up between them—just as Homer imagined the gods warring among themselves, some wishing Troy to be taken, others resisting. It is necessary, then, that the world be ruled by the decision of one. For unless the power over each several part is referred back to a single providence, the sum total itself cannot hold together, with each one caring for nothing more than what belongs to him properly—just as military affairs, too, cannot function unless there is one commander and director. For if in a single army there were as many commanders as there are legions, as many as there are cohorts, as many as there are companies, as many as there are wings of cavalry, first the battle line could not even be drawn up, with each one refusing to risk himself, nor could it easily be governed or kept in order, since all would follow their own private plans, and by their disagreement would do more harm than good; likewise in this governance of the natural order, unless a single figure bears responsibility for the total sum, all will unravel and fall apart. To say that the world is ruled by the decision of many is like someone claiming that in one body there are many minds, since the services of the limbs are many and varied, so that separate minds are believed to govern each of the body's senses; likewise there are many feelings by which we are commonly stirred, whether to anger or desire or joy or fear or pity, so that in all of these as many minds are thought to be at work. If anyone should indeed say this, he would seem not even to grant that there is the one mind that there is. But if in one body a single mind holds the governance of so many things and attends to all of them at once, why should anyone suppose that the world cannot be ruled by one, but can be ruled by many? Because those who champion many gods understand this, they say that the gods preside over individual things and parts in such a way that there is nonetheless one outstanding ruler. So then the rest will not be gods, but attendants and servants, whom that one greatest and most powerful being has set over these duties, so that they serve his command and his nod. If they are not all equal, then not all of them are gods; for the same thing cannot be both what serves and what rules. For if ‘god’ names the highest power of all, such a being must be incorruptible, perfect, immune to suffering, subject to no one. Those, then, whom necessity compels to obey one greatest god are not gods. But since those who think this way are not wrong without reason, we shall reveal the cause of this error a little later. For now, let us confirm the oneness of the divine power by testimonies.
The prophets, who were quite numerous, proclaim one god, speak of one god, since, being full of the spirit of the one god, they foretold with equal and harmonious voice what was to come. But those without a share of truth think they should not be trusted, saying that their utterances were not divine but human—namely, that their proclaiming a single god must mean they were mad or lying. And yet we see that most of their prophecies have been fulfilled day after day, and a divination agreeing upon one consistent view shows that they were not raving. For who out of his senses could not only foretell the future but also speak in a coherent and connected way? Were they, then, deceivers who said such things? What is farther from them than a design to deceive, seeing that they restrained others from every kind of fraud? For this reason they were sent by God, that they might be both heralds of his majesty and correctors of human depravity. Moreover, the desire to invent and to lie belongs to those who seek wealth, who crave gain—a motive quite alien to those consecrated men. For they carried out the office entrusted to them in such a way that, having abandoned everything necessary for the upkeep of life, they took thought neither for the future nor even for the next day, content with whatever food was supplied to them at the moment. And these men not only had no gain, but suffered torment and death as well. For the precepts of justice are bitter to the wicked and to those who live badly. And so those whose sins were both exposed and forbidden put them to death, torturing them most cruelly. Those, then, who had no eagerness for gain also had no desire and no reason to deceive. What of the fact that some of them were leaders, or even kings, upon whom suspicion of greed or fraud cannot fall, yet by that same mode of divination they too bore witness to the one god?
But let us by all means set aside the testimonies of the prophets, lest the proof seem less adequate when it concerns those to whom no credence is given at all. Let us come instead to the authors and summon as witnesses to the truth those very writers whom our opponents are accustomed to use against us — I mean the poets and the philosophers. We must derive proof of the one God from these, not because they grasped the truth themselves, but because truth's own force presses so hard upon the eyes that only blindness could fail to notice its shining. The poets, then, although they adorned the gods in their songs and magnified their deeds with the highest praises, nevertheless time and again admit that a single spirit or mind holds everything together and governs it. Orpheus — older than any other poet, indeed a contemporary of the gods themselves, since he is said to have sailed among the Argonauts with the sons of Tyndareus and Hercules — calls the true and great God Protogonos, because nothing was born before him, but all things were generated by him. He also names him Phanes, because when as yet nothing existed, he was the first to appear and come forth out of the infinite. Since he could not grasp where this being came from or what it was by nature, he said he was born of the boundless air: 'Protogonos Phaethon, son of the far-stretching air.' For he had nothing further to say. He declares this being to be the father of all the gods; he built the heavens for their sake and gave his offspring a shared dwelling and home: 'he built for the immortals an undecaying house.' By nature and the guidance of reason, then, he grasped that a most excellent power exists, the maker of sky and earth. Jupiter, however, could not be named as the first principle of things, since Jupiter was begotten of Saturn; nor could Saturn himself, who was said to be born of Heaven; and he did not dare to establish Heaven as the first god, since he saw it to be an element of the universe, one which itself needed a maker. This reasoning led him to that firstborn god to whom he assigns and attributes supremacy. Homer offered us nothing useful bearing on the truth, since human affairs rather than divine ones filled his pages. Hesiod could have done better, since he compressed the generation of the gods into the work of a single book; yet he gave nothing that took its beginning from a founding god, but rather from Chaos, which is the confused heap of raw and unordered matter — though he ought first to have explained whence, when, and how Chaos itself began or came to be. Surely, just as all things that are arranged, ordered, and made are the work of some craftsman, so it is necessary that matter itself was fashioned by someone. Who, then, could have made it, if not the God under whose power all things lie? Yet he shrank from this, recoiling in dread from a truth he did not recognize. For that song of his was not poured out on Helicon by the inspiration of the Muses, as he wished it to seem, but came already meditated and prepared. Among our own poets, Virgil came not far from the truth, whose words about the supreme God, whom he named mind and spirit, are these: 'In the beginning, spirit nourishes from within the sky and the earth and the watery plains, the shining orb of the moon and the Titanic stars, and mind, poured through the limbs, stirs the whole mass and mingles itself with its vast body.' And lest anyone should fail to recognize what spirit this was that held such power, he made it plain elsewhere, saying: 'For God moves through all lands and tracts of sea and the deep sky; from him flocks, herds, men, every kind of beast, each draws at birth its thin thread of life.' Ovid too, at the beginning of his celebrated work, without any concealment of the name, confesses that the world was built by God, whom he calls the maker of the world, the artisan of things. Had Orpheus, or these poets of ours, held firmly to the insight nature's guidance gave them, they would, once truth was in hand, have reached the very same teaching we now follow. That covers the poets; we turn now to the philosophers, greater in authority and surer in judgment, since they are believed not to have been given to invented tales but devoted to the pursuit of truth. Thales of Miletus — counted among the seven sages, and credited as the very earliest to search out the causes of nature — said that water was that from which all things were born, but that God was the mind that formed all things out of water. Thus he placed the matter of things in moisture, but set the principle and cause of generation in God. Pythagoras defined God thus: a spirit that travels and spreads across every region of the cosmos and every part of nature, the source from which each living, born creature draws life. Anaxagoras says that God is an infinite mind that moves by itself. Antisthenes says that there are indeed many gods of the peoples, but one natural god, the maker of the whole. Cleanthes and Anaximenes say that the highest god is the aether, an opinion our own poet endorsed: 'then the almighty father Aether descends with fertile rains into the lap of his joyful spouse, and, mingled with her vast body, nourishes all her great offspring.' Chrysippus at times calls a natural force endowed with divine reason, at times divine necessity, by the name of God; likewise Zeno calls it natural and divine law. Uncertain as all these opinions are, they nevertheless point to the same thing: that they agree there is one providence. For whether you call it nature, or aether, or reason, or mind, or fated necessity, or divine law, or whatever else, it is the same thing that we call God. Nor does the diversity of names stand in the way, since by their very meaning they all revolve back to one. Aristotle, though he is at odds with himself and both says and thinks contradictory things, nevertheless testifies in the end that one mind presides over the world as its highest. Plato — held to be wisest of them all — defends monarchy plainly and openly, and names God neither aether, nor reason, nor nature, but simply as he is: God — by whom this perfect and wonderful universe was fashioned. Cicero, following and imitating him, frequently and in many places confesses God and calls him supreme, in the books he wrote on the Laws; and he argues that the world is governed by him, disputing the gods' own nature along these lines: 'Nothing is more excellent than God. It is necessary, then, that the world be ruled by him. God, therefore, obeys and is subject to no nature. He himself, then, rules all nature.' And as to what God is, he defines it in the Consolation: 'Nor indeed, as we conceive him, can God himself be understood except as a mind — released and free, set apart from all mortal admixture, perceiving and moving all things.' Annaeus Seneca too, who was the keenest of the Stoics among the Romans, how often does he follow up the supreme God with well-deserved praise! For when discoursing on untimely death, he says: 'Do you fail to grasp how supreme in authority and majesty is the judge over you — ruler of the earth and of heaven and of all the gods, the god from whom those divine powers that we individually adore and worship depend?' Likewise in the Exhortations: 'As he set down the earliest foundation stones of this most beautiful structure, and beginning that work than which nature knows nothing greater or better, so that all things might proceed under their own guides — although he himself had stretched throughout the whole body — nevertheless God brought forth attendants for his realm.' And what a great many other sayings of his echo ours! These I now set aside, since they are more fitting for other places. For now it suffices to show that minds of the greatest genius brushed against the truth and all but seized it, had habit, tainted with depraved opinions, not dragged them back — the same habit by which they supposed there were other gods, and believed that the things God made for man's use ought to be regarded and worshipped as gods, as though endowed with sense.
Let us now pass on to divine testimonies. But first I shall bring forward one that is like a divine testimony, both because of its exceeding antiquity and because the one I shall name was, from among men, raised up into the gods. In Cicero, the pontiff Gaius Cotta, arguing against the Stoics about religions and the variety of opinions that commonly exist concerning the gods, in order to render everything uncertain in the manner of the Academics, says that there were five Mercurys, and having enumerated four in order, identifies the fifth as the one who killed Argus, and says that for this reason he fled to Egypt and handed down to the Egyptians laws and letters. The Egyptians call him Thoth; September, the opening month of their calendar, took its name from him. He also founded a city, which even now is called in Greek the City of Mercury, and the people of Pheneus worship him religiously. Although he was a man, he was nevertheless of the greatest antiquity and so thoroughly instructed in every kind of learning that his knowledge of many matters and arts earned him the surname Trismegistus. He wrote books, and many of them, bearing on the knowledge of divine things, in which he asserts the majesty of the supreme and singular God and calls him by the same names by which we call him Lord and Father. And lest anyone should ask his name, he said he was nameless, because he has no need of the particularity of a name, on account of his very unity. His own words are these: 'God is one, and he who is one has no need of a name; for he who exists is nameless.' God, then, has no name, because he alone exists, and there is no need of a proper term except when a multitude demands distinction, so that you may mark out each single person by its own token and designation. But for God, since he is always one, his proper name is God. It remains to bring forward, concerning oracles and sacred verses, testimonies that are far more certain. For perhaps those against whom we argue think that neither the poets, as inventors of empty fictions, nor the philosophers, since they too were men and could err, deserve to be believed. Marcus Varro, than whom no one ever lived more learned, not even among the Greeks, in the books on divine matters that he wrote for Gaius Caesar, Pontifex Maximus, speaking of the Board of Fifteen, says that the Sibylline Books did not belong to one Sibyl, but are called Sibylline under a single name because the ancients gave the name Sibyl to all women who prophesied, either from the name of one particular Delphic woman or from their announcing the counsels of the gods. For they used to say 'theos' for gods, not 'theous,' and for counsel not 'boulen' but 'boullan,' in the Aeolic manner of speech. And so a Sibyl was said to be, as it were, 'theoboule' — one who tells the counsel of god. There were, moreover, ten Sibyls in number, and he enumerated them all, along with the authorities who had written about each. The first was from Persia, mentioned by Nicanor, who wrote the deeds of Alexander the Macedonian; the second was the Libyan, whom Euripides mentions in the prologue to the Lamia; the third the Delphic, of whom Chrysippus speaks in the book he composed on divination; the fourth the Cimmerian, in Italy, cited by Naevius in his volumes on the war with Carthage and by Piso in his Annals; the fifth the Erythraean, whom Apollodorus of Erythrae affirms to have been his own fellow citizen, and to have foretold to the Greeks bound for Ilium that Troy would fall and that Homer's verses would contain lies; the sixth was the Samian, of whom Eratosthenes writes that he found it recorded in the old annals of the Samians; the seventh the Cumaean, named Amalthea, called by others Herophile or Demophile, who brought nine books to King Tarquinius Priscus and demanded three hundred gold pieces for them, and when the king scorned so great a price and mocked the woman's madness, she burned three of the books before the king's eyes yet asked the identical sum for what remained; Tarquin judged her madness only greater still; but after she burned three more and would not lower her price, the king relented and purchased what was left for three hundred gold pieces. Their number was later increased, after the Capitol was rebuilt, since verses were gathered from every city, both Italian and Greek, especially from Erythrae, and brought to Rome under whatever Sibyl's name they bore. The eighth was the Hellespontine, born in the territory of Troy, in the village of Marmessus near the town of Gergithium, whom Heraclides Ponticus records as active in the era of Solon and Cyrus; the ninth was the Phrygian, who gave oracles at Ancyra; the tenth the Tiburtine, called Albunea, honored at Tibur as a goddess along the banks of the river Anio, in whose whirling waters her image is said to have been found holding a book in her hand. The songs of all these Sibyls are current and preserved, except those of the Cumaean, whose books are kept hidden by the Romans, and no one is permitted to inspect them save the Board of Fifteen. And each Sibyl has her own separate book; but because they are all inscribed under the single name 'Sibyl,' people take them all for the product of a single author, and they lie jumbled together, nor can it be discerned or assigned which belongs to which, except in the case of the Erythraean, who inserted her own true name into her song and stated beforehand that she would be called the Erythraean, though she had been born at Babylon. But we too shall speak of them confusedly as 'the Sibyl,' wherever it is necessary to make use of their testimonies. All these Sibyls, taken together, announce a single God, but the Erythraean especially, who is held to be the most celebrated and noble among the rest, since Fenestella, a most careful writer, speaking of the Board of Fifteen, says that after the Capitol was restored, the consul Gaius Curio proposed to the Senate that envoys be sent to Erythrae to gather and bring back to Rome the songs of the Sibyl; and so the envoys chosen for the errand were Publius Gabinius, Marcus Otacilius, and Lucius Valerius, bringing back to Rome about a thousand verses transcribed from private individuals. We have shown above that Varro said the same. In these verses, then, which the envoys brought to Rome, there are these testimonies concerning the one God: 'One God, who alone rules, immensely great, unbegotten.' That he alone is the supreme God, who made the heavens and adorned them with lights: 'but God alone, highest above all, who has made the sky, the sun and the stars, and the moon, the fruit-bearing earth and the swelling waves of the sea.' And since he alone constructed the world and fashioned everything — both the substance it is made of and what it contains — she affirms that worship belongs to him alone: 'worship him alone, the sole ruler of the universe, who alone has come to be from age to age and unto age.' Likewise another Sibyl, whoever she may be, when declaring that she was bringing to men the voice of God, speaks thus: 'For I am the only god; no other god exists.' I could proceed through the remaining testimonies too, but these already suffice, and I hold the rest back for better occasions. Yet given that our task is to uphold truth's case in front of people who wander from truth to serve counterfeit religions, what better proof could we offer against them than turning their own gods' testimonies against them?
For Apollo — whom beyond all others they consider divine and especially prophetic — while residing at Colophon, whither, I suppose, he had migrated from Delphi drawn by the pleasantness of Asia, when someone asked him who or what God actually is, answered with a set of twenty-one lines that opens thus: 'Self-generated, untaught, without mother, immovable, a name no speech can hold, abiding within fire — this is god, and as for us angels, we are god's small share.' Could anyone imagine this description fits Jupiter, given that he had a mother, and a name besides? What of the fact that the great Mercury Trismegistus, whom I mentioned above, calls God not only motherless, as Apollo does, but also fatherless, since he has no origin from anywhere else? For he who himself begot all things cannot have been begotten by anyone. Enough, I think, have I taught by arguments and confirmed by witnesses what is in any case sufficiently clear by itself: that there is one king of the world, one father, one lord. But perhaps someone will ask of us the question Hortensius raises in Cicero's dialogue: if God is one, what blessed solitude can that be? As though, because we say he is one, we therefore say he is deserted and alone. He keeps envoys, the ones we term messengers. And it holds true, as I noted earlier, quoting Seneca's Exhortations — that God brought forth attendants for his realm. Yet none of these count as gods, nor do they seek the title of god or any worship, since whatever they do follows God's own command and desire alone. Nor are they, on the other hand, identical to the beings commonly worshipped, whose count is limited and set. Yet should worshippers of the gods imagine that these ministers — those we term the supreme God's attendants — are exactly the ones they honor, they have no grounds to resent us for affirming a single God while rejecting a plurality. If a multitude pleases them, we do not say there are twelve, or three hundred sixty-five as Orpheus says, but that they are innumerable. We turn their mistake around in the other direction, since they reckon the number too small. Still, let them recognize what these beings should properly be titled, so they do not wrong the true God — whose name they scatter across many — by misapplying it. Let them trust their own Apollo instead — in that identical oracle, just as he stripped Jupiter of primacy, he likewise stripped the other gods of their name. Its third line, after all, makes clear these attendants of God should bear the name angels, not gods. As for himself, indeed, he lied, for although he belongs to the number of demons, he joined himself to the angels of God; but elsewhere, in other oracles, he admitted openly to being a demon. When asked in what manner he wanted his prayers addressed, this was his reply: 'All-wise, all-taught, much-turning one, hear, O demon.' Likewise again, when asked to utter a prayer to Apollo Smintheus, he began with this verse: 'Harmony of the world, light-bringer, all-wise demon.' What is left, then, except that his own admission puts him beneath the true God's whip and everlasting punishment? Indeed, in yet another oracle he said: 'The demons who roam about the earth and about the sea are subdued beneath the unwearying scourge of God.' We shall discuss both kinds of beings in the second book. For now, meanwhile, it is enough for us that, while wishing to honor himself and to be set in heaven, he confessed — as the matter indeed stands — how those who always stand beside God ought to be called. Let men, therefore, draw themselves back from their errors, and, casting aside their depraved religions, come to know their parent and lord, whose power cannot be measured, whose greatness cannot be perceived, whose beginning cannot be grasped. When the reach, the keenness, and the memory of the human mind arrive at him, as though all paths were withdrawn and exhausted, it stops, clings, and fails, nor is there anything further to which it can advance. But since it cannot be that what exists should not at some point have begun to exist, it follows that, since nothing existed before him, he himself was brought forth out of himself before all things; and for this reason he is called by Apollo self-born, and by the Sibyl self-begotten and unbegotten and unmade. This Seneca, a keen man, perceived in his Exhortations. 'We,' he says, 'depend upon something else. And so we look to someone else, to whom we owe whatever is best in us. Another brought us forth, another equipped us: God made himself.'
Such numerous and weighty witnesses together establish this: one God's power and forethought hold the world in order, and Plato, in the Timaeus, calls his might and majesty too vast for any mind to grasp or any speech to render, given how immense and unfathomable that power is. Yet let anyone try to doubt that something might be difficult or unattainable for a deity who fashioned such vast and astonishing works through foresight, gave them stability through his own excellence, carried them through to completion by reasoning, and continues, even now, to uphold them with his breath while steering them with his strength — a deity impossible to picture, impossible to describe fully, and truly known only to himself. Hence, as I have often pondered this great majesty, those who worship the gods have seemed to me at times so blind, so thoughtless, so devoid of understanding, so little different from mute beasts, in that they believe that beings born from the union of a male and a female could possess any measure of majesty or divine power — when the Erythraean Sibyl says: it is not possible for one shaped from a man's loins and a womb to be a god. And if this is true, as indeed it is, it is clear that Hercules, Apollo, Liber, Mercury, and Jupiter himself, along with the rest, were men, since they were born of two sexes. For what is further removed from God than that act which he himself granted to mortals for the propagation of offspring, and which cannot exist apart from bodily substance? If the gods, then, are immortal and eternal, what need have they of a second sex — surely only in order to beget? And what need have they of offspring at all, since those who are always to exist have no need of succession? For indeed, among men and other living creatures, the difference of sex, and coupling, and begetting, have no other purpose than that all the kinds of living things, since by the condition of their mortality they are doomed to perish, may be preserved by mutual succession; but for God, who is everlasting, neither a second sex nor succession is necessary. Someone will say, 'so that he might have servants, or beings over whom he himself could rule.' What need, then, is there of a female sex, when God — who is called almighty — could beget sons without the use and labor of a woman? For if he has granted this to certain tiny creatures, that their offspring gather themselves from leaves and sweet herbs with their own mouths, why should anyone suppose that God himself could not beget except by the mingling of the opposite sex? As for those, then, whom the ignorant and unwise call and worship as gods, there is no one so thoughtless as not to understand that they were mortal. 'How, then,' someone will ask, 'did they come to be believed gods?' Doubtless because they had been kings of surpassing greatness and power, and thanks to their outstanding qualities — whether the good they did for others or the skills they invented — the very people under their former rule cherished them and set them apart in lasting remembrance. And if anyone doubts this, let him consider their deeds and their acts, all of which poets and ancient historians alike have handed down.
Hercules, who because of his valor is most renowned, and is held to be, as it were, the Africanus among the gods, did he not defile the whole earth, which he is said to have traversed and purged, with fornications, adulteries, and lusts? Nor is it any wonder, since he himself was begotten of an adulterous union with Alcmena. What, after all, could there have been of the divine in one who, himself enslaved to his own vices, brought infamy, disgrace, and shame upon males and females alike, against every law? But not even those great and marvelous deeds of his ought to be judged such that they should be attributed to divine virtues. What greatness, really, lies in beating down a lion and a boar, shooting birds out of the sky, mucking out a king's stable, stripping the belt from a warrior-woman he defeated, or killing savage horses together with their owner? Such feats belong to a man of courage — a man nonetheless. Everything he subdued was, after all, weak and destined to perish. As the orator observes, no strength exists that iron and muscle together cannot eventually break down; true bravery, instead, lies in mastering one's own spirit and holding anger in check — something Hercules never managed, nor was he ever capable of it. Whoever does this, I do not merely compare him with the greatest of men — I judge him most like a god. I could wish he had added something concerning lust, luxury, greed, and arrogance, so as to complete the portrait of the virtue of the one he judged to be like a god. For the man who overcomes a lion is not to be reckoned braver than the man who overcomes the violent beast enclosed within himself, namely anger; nor is the one who brought down the most rapacious birds braver than the one who restrains his most greedy desires; nor the one who defeated the warrior Amazon braver than the one who conquers lust, that destroyer of modesty and reputation; nor the one who removed dung from a stable braver than the one who drives vices out of his own heart — vices which are the more pernicious because they are one's own domestic evils, whereas those other things could be avoided and guarded against. The conclusion follows: only a man marked by self-control, moderation, and justice deserves to count as brave. And anyone who truly weighed what belongs to the works of God would immediately see as absurd all the things over which the most foolish men marvel. Such men measure these exploits not against divine excellence, of which they know nothing, but instead against the puniness of their own bodily power. For indeed no one has denied that Hercules served not only King Eurystheus — which might in some measure seem honorable — but also a shameless woman, Omphale, who made him sit at her feet, clothed in her own garments, spinning wool. A detestable disgrace! But so great was the pleasure that it was worth it to him. 'Well then,' someone may object, 'do you actually trust what the poets say?' And why wouldn't I trust them? These are not the words of Lucilius, nor of Lucian, that mocker who spared no god and no man alike, but rather of those very poets whose whole business was singing the gods' praises above everyone else's. So if we refuse to trust the ones who praised them, whose word are we left to rely on? Let whoever thinks these poets lie produce other authorities whom we may trust, who can teach us who these gods are, how and whence they arose, what their power is, what their number, what their authority, what in them is worthy of wonder, what deserving of worship, and finally what surer and truer mystery there is. He will produce none. Let us believe, then, these poets, who spoke not to find fault but to proclaim praise. So then, he sailed with the Argonauts, and stormed Troy in anger against Laomedon over a reward denied him for saving Laomedon's daughter — from which it is clear at what period he lived. This same man, driven by fury and madness, killed his own wife along with their children. And people take this creature for a god! Philoctetes, though, his heir, held no such belief — the very man who lit the pyre beneath him as he prepared to burn, who stood by watching his limbs and sinews dissolve into ash, who gathered his charred remains for burial on Mount Oeta — and got the hero's arrows as payment for performing that service.
Aesculapius, himself born not without disgrace to Apollo, what else did he do worthy of divine honors, except that he healed Hippolytus? He certainly had a rather more famous death, in that he deserved to be struck by a thunderbolt from a god. Tarquitius, discussing illustrious men, says he was born of uncertain parents, exposed, found by hunters, nursed on the milk of a dog, handed over to Chiron, and taught medicine by him; that he was a Messenian, but lived at Epidaurus. Tullius, moreover, says he was buried at Cynosurae. As for Apollo, the father — a love that overpowered him drove him, did it not, to the disgraceful task of tending someone else's flock, and then to raise walls for Laomedon as hired labor, only to be cheated of that pay without consequence to the king? And it was from this that the faithless king first learned to renege on whatever agreements he had made with the gods. This same Apollo, while loving a beautiful boy, violated him, and while playing with him, killed him. Mars killed a man and was let off that charge by the Athenians out of favor; yet to avoid looking purely savage and monstrous, he went on to sleep with Venus, an adulterer as well as a killer. Castor and Pollux stopped being twins the moment they seized brides already promised to other men — Idas, stung by grief over the wrong done to him, ran one of the pair through with a blade. The poets claim the two now take turns living and dying, which makes them, out of every god or mortal, the most pitiable of all, since not even a single, final death is granted to them. Yet Homer alone testifies plainly that both were dead, not in the manner poets usually employ; for when he makes Helen, sitting on the walls beside Priam, recognize all the leading men of Greece, but ask only after her own two brothers, he adds to her speech a verse of this kind: so she spoke, but the earth already held them, buried. Mercury, a thief and a scoundrel, what has he left behind for his own fame except the memory of his own frauds? Worthy of heaven, no doubt, because he taught wrestling and was the first to invent the lyre! Father Liber must, of necessity, hold the place of highest authority and the leading vote in the senate of the gods, since he alone, apart from Jupiter, of all of them celebrated a triumph, led an army, and conquered the Indians. But that unconquered general, that conqueror of India, was most shamefully conquered by love and lust. For, carried to Crete with his half-manly retinue, he found a shameless woman on the shore, and, relying on the confidence of his Indian victory, he chose to play the man, lest he seem too soft — and he claimed for his own marriage that woman who had betrayed her father, murdered her brother, and been abandoned and repudiated by another man; he made her Libera, and together with her ascended into heaven. And what of the father of all these, Jupiter, who in the solemn prayer is called Best and Greatest? Is he not shown, from his very boyhood, to have been impious and all but a parricide, since he drove his father from his kingdom and put him to flight, unwilling even to wait for the death of the old man from decrepit age, in his eagerness to rule? And when he had seized his father's throne by force and by arms, he was assailed in war by the Titans — a war which was the beginning of evils for the human race; and once he had beaten them and locked in a lasting peace, everything that remained of his life he passed amid illicit affairs and acts of adultery. I pass over the virgins whom he violated, for that is generally judged tolerable. I cannot pass over Amphitryon and Tyndareus, whose households he filled with disgrace and infamy. But this indeed was the height of impiety and crime, that he carried off a royal boy for the purpose of violation. For it seemed too little for him, if in assaulting the chastity of women he was already stained and shameful, unless he also did wrong to his own sex — this is true adultery, as being against nature. Whoever does such things, we may see whether he is Greatest, but he is certainly not Best; for that name is absent from corrupters, from adulterers, from the incestuous — unless perhaps we are mistaken, we who call men who do such things wicked and depraved, and judge them most deserving of every punishment. Foolish, then, was Marcus Tullius, who charged Gaius Verres with adulteries — for the very same things Jupiter, whom he himself worshiped, committed; and who charged Publius Clodius with incest with his sister — yet that Best and Greatest one had one and the same woman as both sister and wife.
Who, then, is so utterly senseless as to believe this fellow reigns in heaven, when by rights he should never even have reigned on earth? Not without some cleverness did a certain poet compose a triumph for Cupid, a work in which he portrays Cupid as not just the mightiest of the gods but as their conqueror too. Having listed the love affairs of each god, through which they fell under Cupid's sway and dominion, he stages a procession where Jupiter, bound in chains alongside the other deities, is marched before the triumphal chariot of the victor. This was a clever poetic invention, yet it is not so far removed from reality. Anyone lacking virtue, anyone overpowered by lust and wicked cravings, belongs not to Cupid, as the poet pictured it, but to death everlasting. Yet let us leave aside discussion of morals and turn instead to the substance of the matter, so that people may grasp the errors that entangle them so pitifully. The masses take it for granted that Jupiter rules in heaven; both the learned and the ignorant alike hold this conviction, a point proven by religion itself, by prayers, hymns, temples, and statues alike. Yet these same people also admit that this very Jupiter was born from Saturn and Rhea. How, then, can he be regarded as divine—or, in the poet's words, as the author of men and of things—when countless thousands of men had already existed before his birth? These, of course, are the men who lived under Saturn's reign and enjoyed daylight before Jupiter ever did. Evidently, then, one god held kingship in the earliest era, and a different one afterward. It follows that yet another could hold the throne in times to come. If the crown changed hands once before, why should we doubt it could change again later? Perhaps Saturn had the power to father a mightier son, yet Jupiter lacks it? But surely divine authority is either eternally fixed, or, granting that it could shift—which is impossible—then it must always remain subject to shifting. Could Jupiter, then, forfeit his throne just as his own father did? Quite obviously so. Though this same Jupiter spared no woman, married or unmarried, he nonetheless refrained from touching Thetis alone, since a prophecy warned that whatever child she bore would surpass his father in greatness. And note, first, that this reveals not divine foreknowledge on his part—for had Themis not warned him of what lay ahead, he would have remained ignorant himself; yet if he lacks divinity, he cannot properly be called a god either, given that the very word 'divinity' derives its name from 'god,' just as 'humanity' derives from 'man.' Second, it betrays an awareness of his own vulnerability in one who plainly dreaded something mightier than himself. Whoever acts this way surely recognizes that he does not hold the highest rank, since something greater than himself could exist. This same Jupiter swears his most binding oaths by the marsh of the Styx—a superstitious rite observed even by the gods above. What kind of superstition is this, and who first imposed it? Does some power exist, then, greater still, one that punishes gods guilty of false oaths? And why this immense terror of the underworld swamp, if the gods themselves cannot die? Why should they fear a thing they will never encounter, except those bound to perish? Why, then, do mortals raise their eyes toward heaven? Why swear oaths by gods above, when these very gods above are cast down again to the world beneath, finding there something they in turn revere and worship? And what of this — that there are fates which every god, Jupiter included, obeys? If the Fates hold power great enough to surpass all the gods of heaven combined, and even their own lord and ruler, why should these not rather be called the true rulers, given that necessity forces every god to submit to their laws and decrees? Can anyone doubt that whoever yields to something else is thereby not the greatest power? Were he truly supreme, he would shape fate rather than receive it. Let me return now to the point I had set aside. It was toward this one woman alone that he showed restraint in his desire—not from any virtue, but from dread of a rival heir. Such fear, plainly, belongs to a being who is mortal, feeble, and insignificant—since he himself might have perished at birth, just as his elder brother did before him; and had that brother survived, he would never have surrendered rule to his junior. Jupiter, rescued through cunning and raised in hiding, took the name Zeus or Zen—not, as some imagine, from the fire of heaven, nor because he grants life and breathes soul into living creatures (for that power is god's alone, and how could one who received his own soul elsewhere breathe soul into another?)—but rather because he was the first male child of Saturn to survive. Men, then, might have had a wholly different ruler among the gods, had Saturn not been tricked by his own wife. But someone will object that the poets fabricated all of it. Whoever thinks so is mistaken. The poets were in fact describing men, yet to honor the memory of those they praised, they called them gods. Thus it is precisely those elements presented as though about gods that count as fiction, not the elements presented as though about men—a distinction that will become obvious from the following example. Intending to violate Danaë, Jupiter poured an abundance of gold coins into her lap; this was simply the price paid for her ruin. But the poets, casting it as a divine act so as not to undercut the majesty they attributed to him, invented the tale of a golden shower descending from him—using the same kind of figure by which they describe iron raining down, when picturing a mass of spears and arrows. He is said to have abducted Ganymede disguised as an eagle: this too is poetic embellishment. Either he captured the boy through a legion whose standard bore an eagle, or the vessel carrying him displayed an eagle emblem for protection—just as it was under the guise of a bull that he seized and transported Europa. Likewise, the story goes that Io, daughter of Inachus, was transformed into a heifer—she who, fleeing Juno's fury, had already grown bristles and already resembled a cow—and is said to have swum the sea and reached Egypt, where, recovering her original shape, she became the goddess now known as Isis. What proof, then, could establish that Europa never actually rode upon a bull, or that Io was never turned into a cow? The fact that calendars mark a fixed date for Isis's sailing-festival shows she did not swim across at all, but made the crossing by ship. Thus those who fancy themselves clever, reasoning that a living earthly body cannot exist in the sky, dismiss the entire Ganymede tale as fiction, failing to notice that the event happened on earth precisely because the deed and the lust behind it were themselves earthly. So the poets did not invent the deeds outright—had they done so, they would be nothing but frivolous—but rather dressed up real events with embellishment. Their purpose was not to slander but to glorify. This is precisely how people are misled: believing all such tales to be mere poetic invention, they end up worshipping what they fail to understand. They do not grasp where poetic license properly ends, how far invention may legitimately stretch, since a poet's task is to take things that genuinely occurred and, through indirect figures, reshape and present them in altered forms, adorned to some degree. But to fabricate an entire account from nothing—that is folly, marking one a liar rather than a poet. Yet someone may say that the poets invented the openly fabulous tales, but did they also invent the tales of goddesses and of divine marriages? Why, then, are such scenes depicted and worshipped in this manner? Unless, perhaps, not only poets but painters and sculptors also deceive us. For if this Jupiter, as you name him, is truly a god—if he is not the one born of Saturn and Ops—then no statue of him should have been erected in any temple but his own alone. What, then, do statues of women signify? What does the weaker sex represent here? For if this same Jupiter desired that sex, the very stone statues betray that he was a man. People claim the poets lied, and yet they believe them regardless; indeed, through their own conduct they demonstrate that the poets told the truth. For they craft images of the gods such that the very distinction of sex portrayed confirms what the poets recount. What else explains the statue of Ganymede alongside the eagle figure, placed at Jupiter's feet in the temples and honored equally with him, except to keep alive forever the memory of that shameful crime and violation? Nothing here, then, was purely fabricated by poets; rather, something has been shifted and veiled through indirect figuration, so that truth might be wrapped and hidden—just as in the tale of the kingdoms divided by lot. For it is said heaven fell to Jupiter by lot, the sea to Neptune, and the underworld to Pluto. Why did the earth not become a third share instead? Because, in truth, the event took place on the earth itself. The truth embedded here, then, is that they parceled out and assigned dominion over the world such that the East fell under Jove's rule, while the western share went to Pluto, who carried the surname Agesilaus—because the eastern region, source of light for mortals, seemed the superior share, while the West seemed the lesser. Thus they cloaked the truth in fiction, so the truth itself would not diminish popular belief. As for Neptune's portion, the matter is straightforward: we hold that his authority resembled the vast command once given to Marcus Antonius, to whom the senate granted power over the entire seacoast so he might hunt down pirates and bring peace to the whole sea. In this fashion, every coastal region, together with the islands, came under Neptune's authority. And how can this be demonstrated? Ancient records, naturally, teach us so. Euhemerus, an ancient writer from the city of Messene, compiled the deeds of Jupiter and the others believed to be gods, weaving together a history drawn from titles and sacred inscriptions preserved in the oldest temples, above all in the shrine of Jupiter Triphylius, where an inscription stated that Jupiter himself had erected a golden pillar, upon which he inscribed his own deeds, so that a record of his achievements might endure for those who came after. Ennius both translated and followed this history; here are his words: where Jupiter grants Neptune dominion over the sea, all its islands, and every place bordering the sea, that he might govern them entirely. What the poets say, then, is true, though veiled beneath some pretext or appearance. It may also be that Mount Olympus supplied the poets their figure of speech in claiming Jupiter drew heaven as his lot, since 'Olympus' is itself an ambiguous term, denoting both a mountain and the sky. That Jupiter made his home on Olympus, this same history confirms, stating: at that time Jupiter passed the greater portion of his life atop Mount Olympus, and men would travel there to seek his judgment whenever a dispute arose; likewise, whenever anyone discovered something new and useful for human existence, they would bring it there to show Jupiter. In this manner the poets transpose many details, not to lie about the gods they worship, but so that, through richly varied figures, they might lend their verses charm and grace. But those who fail to grasp how or why each thing is figured end up hounding the poets as liars and blasphemers. Misled by this very same error, even philosophers—finding what was told of Jupiter unfitting for a god—invented two Jupiters, one natural, one mythical. They glimpsed part of the truth, namely that the Jupiter the poets speak of was a man—but regarding this so-called natural Jupiter, swayed by common religious custom, they erred, transferring a man's name onto a god who, as noted above, being unique, requires no name at all. That the Jupiter born of Ops and Saturn is a man cannot be denied. Hollow, then, is the conviction of those who apply Jupiter's name to the supreme god. Some are known to shield their errors with this excuse: caught out regarding the one true god, unable to deny him, they insist it is this very god they worship, only preferring to call him Jupiter. Could anything be more absurd? For Jupiter is rarely worshipped apart from the company of his wife and daughter. From this alone it is clear who he really is, and it is improper to transfer his name to any place lacking both Minerva and Juno entirely. And consider further—the very meaning of this name conveys neither divine power nor even proper human power. Cicero explains that Jupiter and Juno derive their names from 'aiding' (iuuare), so that Jupiter is, so to speak, the 'aiding father.' Yet this title suits a god poorly, since aiding is the act of one who grants some assistance to another, a stranger, and only a modest benefit at that. No one prays to a god merely to be aided, but rather to be saved, to be granted life and safety—something far greater and far more significant than mere aid. And on the subject of a father: no father is described as merely 'aiding' his sons when he begets or raises them; the word is too feeble to capture the magnitude of a father's benefit. How much less fitting, then, is it applied to god, the true father, through whom we exist, to whom we belong entirely, by whom we are shaped, brought to life, and given light, who breathes life into us, grants us safety, and furnishes our varied sustenance. Whoever imagines himself merely 'aided' by god fails to grasp the divine benefits at all. Therefore, whoever belittles the power of the supreme majesty through Jupiter's name is not simply mistaken but sacrilegious. And so, having established both from his recorded deeds and from his character that Jupiter was a man who ruled upon the earth, it remains for us to examine his death as well. Ennius, in his Sacred History, having recounted everything Jupiter accomplished in life, concludes: then Jupiter, having circled the earth five times and distributed rule among all his friends and kin, having bequeathed to men laws, customs, and grain, and having done much else of value, endowed with undying glory and everlasting memory, left behind lasting monuments to himself. When at last his years ran their course, it was on Crete that he passed from mortal life into the company of the gods; there his sons, the Curetes, tended his remains and paid him honor, and there, in the city of Cnossus—said to have been founded by Vesta—his tomb can still be found, bearing an inscription in archaic Greek letters, ZAN KRONOU, which in Latin renders as Jupiter, son of Saturn. This account, certainly, comes not from poets but from writers of ancient history. And these matters hold true to such a degree that the Sibylline verses confirm them, which read thus: lifeless spirits, likenesses of dead men worn down by labor, whose vaunted tomb ill-omened Crete shall keep. Discussing divine nature in his own philosophical work, Cicero notes that the theologians reckoned three separate Jupiters existed, and that the third of these, a son of Saturn, was the Cretan Jupiter—the one whose tomb visitors are still shown on that island. How, then, can a god be living in one location and dead in another, possess a temple here and a tomb there? Let the Romans, then, understand that their Capitol—the very pinnacle of their state religion—amounts to nothing more than a hollow tomb marker. Let us turn now to his own father, the one who held the throne earlier and who perhaps has a stronger claim to divinity, given that he is said to have sprung from the union of such mighty elements. Let us examine what quality he possessed that would befit a god. First, there is the tradition that he presided over a golden age, that justice governed the earth under his rule. I concede there is something here absent from his son's reign. For what suits a god better than just governance and a righteous era? Yet when I reflect that he too was born through the same process, I cannot regard him as the supreme god, seeing there exists something older than he is—namely, sky and earth. But I am searching for a god beyond whom nothing whatsoever exists, one who serves as the wellspring and origin of all things: this must be the one who established the sky itself and founded the earth. Yet if Saturn was born of these, as is claimed, how could he be the first and highest god, when he owes his very origin to others—or who governed the world before Saturn's birth? But this, as I noted a little earlier, is poetic invention. It could hardly be that senseless elements, separated by such vast distance, joined together to produce a son; nor that the offspring would fail to resemble his parents above all, instead bearing a form his own begetters lacked. Let us ask, then, what truth hides beneath this figure. Minucius Felix, in his work titled the Octavius, argued as follows: that Saturn, driven out by his son and arriving in Italy, was called son of Caelus (Sky), since we customarily say of those whose virtue we admire, or of those who arrive unexpectedly, that they 'fell from the sky'; and that he was called son of Terra (Earth), since we call people of unknown origin 'sons of the earth.' These claims bear some resemblance to truth, yet are untrue, since it is agreed he was already regarded this way even while he still reigned. One might argue instead that Saturn, a most powerful king, bestowed his own parents' names upon sky and earth to preserve their memory, whereas these had previously borne different names entirely—just as we know mountains and rivers have been named after people. When poets refer to those descended from Atlas, or from the river-god Inachus, they surely do not mean that men could be born of senseless things, but rather that they mean those born from men who, alive or dead, lent their names to mountains or rivers. This was common practice among the ancients, the Greeks especially. Thus certain seas, we are told, took their names from those who drowned in them—the Aegean, the Icarian, the Hellespont—and in Latium, Aventinus lent his name to the hill where he was buried, and Tiberinus, or Thybris, to the river where he drowned. It is no surprise, then, that these men's names were bestowed upon sky and earth, since they had fathered exceptionally powerful kings. It follows, then, that Jupiter's father was not born from the sky—an impossibility—but from a man named Uranus. Trismegistus attests to this truth: he stated that very few men ever possessed complete wisdom, and among them he named his own kinsmen Uranus, Saturn, and Mercury. Because our critic knew nothing of this, he carried the story off in a different direction. I have shown how his account could be explained. Now let me relate how, where, and by whom this naming actually occurred—for it was Jupiter, not Saturn, who did this. In the Sacred History, Ennius tells it this way: then Pan brought him up onto the mountain called the Pillar of Heaven. Having climbed it, he gazed out broadly over the lands, and there upon the mountain he raised an altar to Caelus (Heaven), and Jupiter was the very first to offer sacrifice on it. There he looked upward at what we now term the sky, and to what lay above the world—called the aether—he gave the name 'sky,' honoring his grandfather's name; and Jupiter, in propitiating what is termed the aether, was first to name it 'sky,' burning the whole of the victim he sacrificed there. Nor is this the only occasion on which Jupiter is recorded as having sacrificed. There is a further episode Caesar preserves in his commentary on Aratus, drawn from Aglaosthenes: while Jupiter was performing rites on the shore before leaving Naxos to fight the Titans, an eagle swept down toward him; reading this as a favorable sign, he later claimed the bird as his own protective emblem once victory was won. The Sacred History further attests that even earlier an eagle had perched upon his head, foretelling his future rule. Since Euhemerus records that Caelus, Jupiter's grandfather, ended his days in Oceania and lies buried at the town of Aulacia, no one else could have been the object of that sacrifice.
Since we have unveiled the mysteries of the poets and discovered the parentage of Saturn, we turn back now to weigh his virtues and his deeds. He was, they say, just in his kingdom. But in the first place, by the very fact that he existed, he is already no god; and second, he was not even just, but wicked — not only toward his sons, whom he killed, but toward his own father, whose genitals he is said to have cut off, which perhaps really did happen in some sense. But people, out of regard for the element called "sky," reject the whole story as a most foolishly invented fable, though the Stoics, as they habitually do, try to bring it over into physical theory. Cicero, discussing their view in his book On the Nature of the Gods, records it thus: they held that the heavenly, highest, and ethereal nature — that is, the fiery one, which begets all things by itself — had no need of that part of the body which requires union with another for procreation. This reasoning could apply to Vesta, if she were said to be male. And this is precisely why they consider Vesta a virgin: fire, being an inviolable element, allows nothing to spring into being out of it, for whatever it seizes it consumes. Ovid says in the Fasti: understand Vesta as nothing other than the living flame, and you see that no bodies are born of flame. Rightly, then, she is a virgin, who neither releases nor receives any seed, and loves the companions of virginity. The same reasoning could have been applied to Vulcan, who is likewise reckoned a form of fire, though the poets left him uncastrated. It could have applied to the Sun as well, in whom lies the nature and cause of begetting; the Sun's own fiery warmth, after all, is what makes anything capable of birth or growth at all, so that no other element has less need of genitals than heat does, by whose warmth all things are conceived, born, and sustained. Finally, even granting their view, which are we more inclined to believe: that Heaven was mutilated, or that he was simply born without genitals in the first place? For if he begets by his own power alone, he surely had no need of genitals when he fathered Saturn himself; but if he did have them and they were cut off by his son, then the origin and whole nature of things would have perished. And what of the fact that they strip Saturn himself not only of divine sense but even of human sense, when they assert that he is the Saturn who governs the course and revolution of periods and times, taking his Greek title straight from that idea? Kronos is his name, a word identical to chronos — a stretch of time, that is — while in Latin he is called Saturn because he is "sated" (saturetur) with years. These are Cicero's own words, setting forth the Stoic opinion — how empty it is, anyone can grasp with the least effort. For if Saturn is the son of Heaven, how could time be born from Heaven, or Heaven be castrated by time, or time afterward be stripped of its rule by its own offspring Jupiter? By what path did Jupiter come to be born out of time itself? Or in what years could eternity, which has no end, be "sated"?
If, then, these arguments of the philosophers are empty, what remains except to believe that what truly happened is exactly what it appears to be — namely, that a man was castrated by a man? Unless someone supposes he was a god who feared a co-heir — though if he had possessed any divinity, he ought to have cut off his own genitals rather than his father's, to prevent Jupiter's birth, the son who later stripped him of his kingdom. This same Saturn, having taken his sister Rhea — whom we in Latin call Ops — as his wife, is said to have been forbidden by an oracle from raising male children, since it was foretold that he would one day be driven out by a son. Fearing this, he did not, as the story goes, devour the sons born to him, but killed them — although it is written in the Sacred History that Saturn and Ops, along with the rest of the people of that era, habitually ate human flesh, and that it was Jupiter who first, in laying down laws and customs for mankind, forbade by edict the eating of that food. But if this is true, what justice can be found in him at all? Still, let us grant, for argument's sake, that Saturn's devouring of his sons is pure fiction — but even granting some rational basis for it, is it not simply that ordinary folk describe a man as having devoured his own children once he has carried them out for burial and laid them to rest? Ops, however, when she had borne Jupiter, hid the infant away and secretly sent him to be raised in Crete. Here again I must fault his lack of foresight. Why did he need to receive the oracle from someone else in the first place? Why, seated in the heavens, could he not see what was happening on earth? Why were the Corybantes able to deceive him with their cymbals? And finally, why did some greater power arise capable of overcoming his? Clearly, an old man was easily beaten and stripped of power by a younger one. He fled, then, driven out, and came by ship to Italy after long wandering, as Ovid recounts in the books of the Fasti: the reason for the raft remains — the scythe-bearing god came by raft to the Tuscan river, having roamed the whole world before. Destitute and adrift, he was taken in by Janus; evidence of which survives in ancient coins, on which Janus appears with a double face, while on the flip side stands a ship — an image the same poet then adds to: but a grateful posterity shaped the ship in bronze, bearing witness to the arrival of the guest-god. All, then — not only the poets, but also the writers of histories and antiquities who recorded his deeds in Italy — agree that he was a man: the Greeks Diodorus and Thallus, the Latins Nepos, Cassius, and Varro. For when Italy was living in a rude, rustic way, he gathered together an unruly people scattered across the high mountains, gave them laws, and chose to have the land called Latium, because he had lain hidden (latuisset) there in safety. Does anyone imagine that a god is one who was driven out, who fled, who hid? No one is so foolish. For whoever flees or hides must necessarily fear violence and death. Orpheus, who lived not long after his time, plainly recalls that Saturn reigned on earth among men: "first of all Kronos ruled as king over earthly men, and from Kronos was born the great, wide-seeing king Zeus himself." Likewise our own Virgil: "golden Saturn led this life on earth," and elsewhere: "golden were the ages they say existed under that king; so peacefully did he rule the peoples in tranquil peace." Nowhere does he say Saturn spent his life in heaven, nor that the gods above ruled in peace below; from which it is clear that he was an earthly king — a point Virgil makes still more plainly elsewhere: "he shall found again the golden ages once ruled over the fields of Latium by Saturn." Ennius, indeed, in his Euhemerus, says it was not Saturn who reigned first, but his father Uranus. "At the very start," runs his account, "Caelus was the very first to hold supreme rule on earth; this kingdom he built and secured for himself with the help of his brothers." There is no great disagreement here, since even the greatest authors are uncertain whether it was the son or the father. Yet both things may well be true — that Uranus first began to stand out among the rest in power and hold primacy, though not kingship, and that Saturn afterward gathered greater resources for himself and assumed the royal title.
Now, since the Sacred History differs somewhat from what I have reported, let us set forth what is contained in the true writings, lest we seem to follow and endorse the poets' foolishness in our indictment of these religions. These are the words of Ennius: then Saturn took Ops as his wife. Titan, who was the elder, demanded that he himself should reign. There Vesta, their mother, and their sisters Ceres and Ops, urged Saturn not to yield the kingdom to his brother. Titan, who was uglier in appearance than Saturn, and who moreover saw that his mother and sisters were working to secure the kingship for Saturn, therefore agreed that Saturn should reign. So he made a pact with Saturn: any male offspring that came to Saturn would go unraised — this he arranged so that the kingdom would eventually pass back to his own sons. A first son then arrived for Saturn, and this child they killed. Afterward twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then they showed Juno to Saturn but secretly hid Jupiter away, giving him to Vesta to be raised, concealing him from Saturn. Likewise Ops bore Neptune secretly from Saturn and hid him away in the same manner. In the same fashion, at a third birth, Ops bore the twins Pluto and Glauca — Pluto being in Latin Dis Pater, whom others call Orcus. There they showed the daughter Glauca to Saturn, but concealed and hid away the son Pluto. Afterward the infant Glauca died. This, as it is written, is the lineage and kinship of Jupiter and his brothers — so it has been handed down to us from the Sacred Writing. A little further on he adds this: then, after Titan learned that sons had been born to Saturn and raised in secret from him, he drew aside his own sons, who are called the Titans, seized his brother Saturn and Ops, walled them in, and set a guard over them. How true this history is, the Erythraean Sibyl shows, saying nearly the same things, differing only in a few details that do not touch the main point. Jupiter, then, is cleared of the gravest charge — that of having bound his own father in chains — for it was his uncle Titan who did this, because Saturn had broken the pact and his sworn oath by raising male children. The rest of the history unfolds thus: Jupiter, grown to manhood, on hearing that his father and mother were hemmed in under guard and cast into chains, came with a great multitude of Cretans, defeated Titan and his sons in battle, freed his parents from their chains, restored the kingdom to his father, and so returned to Crete. After this, an oracle was given to Saturn, warning him to beware lest a son drive him from his kingdom; to lighten the force of the oracle and escape the danger, he plotted against Jupiter, meaning to kill him; but Jupiter, learning of the plot, claimed the kingdom for himself once more and drove Saturn into flight. Saturn, hounded across every land by soldiers whom Jupiter had dispatched to seize or slay him, at last barely found in Italy a place where he could hide.
Since it is established from these facts that these were men, it is not hard to see how the practice of calling them gods began. Given that no kings existed before Saturn or Uranus — mankind then being too sparse, its people living a rough country existence under no ruler at all — it can hardly be doubted that men of that era began to lavish the highest praise and extraordinary honors on the king himself and his whole lineage, going so far as to call them gods: whether from wonder at their prowess (a belief the still-unrefined and simple genuinely held), or, as often happens, out of flattery toward whoever currently held power, or in gratitude for the advantages through which they had been raised to civilized life. Then, when the kings themselves, having been beloved by those whose lives they had ordered, died, they left behind great longing for themselves. So people fashioned images of them, to have some consolation in gazing upon their likenesses; and going further, out of affection they began to honor the memory of the dead, both to seem to show gratitude to their benefactors and to entice their successors toward a desire to govern well. Cicero teaches this in his work On the Nature of the Gods, saying: human life and common custom took it upon themselves to raise men of outstanding merit to heaven through fame and goodwill. Hence Hercules, hence Castor, hence Pollux, hence Aesculapius, hence Liber. And elsewhere: in most states it can be understood that, for the sake of sharpening virtue, or so that the best men might more willingly face danger for the republic's sake, the memory of brave men has been consecrated with the honor due immortal gods. It was by this reasoning, of course, that the Romans deified their Caesars and the Moors their kings. Thus religions gradually arose, as those who first knew these men instructed their own children and grandchildren in this rite, and these in turn instructed all their descendants; and eventually these greatest kings, owing to the fame of their name, came to be worshipped throughout every province. As for private devotion, individual peoples reserved their deepest reverence for whoever had founded their own nation, tribe, or city — men famed for courage or women renowned for their chastity — so Egypt revered Isis; Juba was the god of the Moors, Cabirus of the Macedonians, Urania of the Carthaginians, Faunus of the Latins, Sancus of the Sabines, and Quirinus of the Romans; likewise Athens honored Minerva, and in the same way Juno belonged to Samos, Venus to Paphos, Vulcan to Lemnos, Liber to Naxos, and Apollo to Delos. Thus varied cults were taken up among different peoples and regions, as men, wishing to show gratitude toward their own leaders, could find no other honors to bestow on those now lacking life. Moreover, the devotion shown by those who came after did much to spread this error: wanting to seem sprung from divine stock, they bestowed divine honors on their forebears and decreed that such honors continue to be paid. Can anyone doubt how the cults of the gods came to be established, given that in Virgil one reads Aeneas's own words as he directs his companions: "Now pour libations to Jupiter, and call upon my father Anchises with prayers"? — to whom he attributes not only immortality, but even power over the winds: "let us beg for winds, and may he wish these rites brought yearly to him in temples dedicated to him, once the city is founded." The same, naturally, was later done for Jove by Liber, Pan, Mercury, and Apollo, and afterward for these very figures by their own successors in turn. The poets, too, added their part, and by composing verses meant to please, raised them to heaven, just as those who flatter even wicked kings with lying panegyrics do today. This evil arose from the Greeks, whose fickleness, equipped with skill and fluency in speaking, stirred up an unbelievable fog of falsehoods. And so, admiring them, other peoples were the first to take up their rites and hand them on to all nations. For this vanity the Sibyl rebukes them thus: "Greece, why do you place your trust in men who are your leaders? Why do you offer vain gifts to the dead? Do you sacrifice to idols? Who put this delusion in your minds, to perform these rites, abandoning the face of the great God?" Marcus Tullius Cicero — a man who was not merely a polished speaker but a philosopher too, indeed the one true disciple of Plato — in the book where he sought comfort over his daughter's death, stated without hesitation that the gods honored by the state had once been men. That testimony carries all the more weight given that he himself held the augural priesthood and admits himself to worshipping and revering those same gods. In just a few lines, then, he has handed us two truths at once: professing that he will consecrate his daughter's image by the very method the ancients used to consecrate those gods, he thereby reveals both that they were mortal and where this empty superstition began. "Since," he says, "we observe not a few men and women numbered among the gods, and revere their most sacred shrines across our cities and countryside, let us defer to the wisdom of those whose genius and discoveries have given our whole life the shape of laws and settled institutions. But if any living being ever merited being made divine, she was surely the one. Whether the fame of Cadmus's line, or of Amphitryon's, or of Tyndareus's, earned them a place in heaven, that same honor is certainly owed to her. And so I will do it — with the immortal gods' own approval, I will set her, finest and most learned of all women, into their assembly, and consecrate her before the judgment of every mortal." Perhaps someone will say that Cicero, from excessive grief, had lost his senses. And yet that entire speech, perfect in learning, in examples, and in style itself, was the work not of a sick mind, but of a steady and judicious one, and this very opinion carries no mark of grief at all. For I do not think he could have written with such variety, such fullness, such polish, unless reason itself, and the consolation of friends, and the passage of time, had already softened his grief. What of the fact that he says the same thing in his books On the Republic, and the same in On Glory? For in his Laws, a work in which, following Plato, he wished to set down the laws by which he thought a just and wise state ought to be governed, he decreed thus concerning religion: "let them worship the gods and those who have always been held to be heavenly, and those whom their merits have placed in heaven: Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, Pollux, Quirinus." Likewise in the Tusculan Disputations, when he said that almost the whole of heaven was filled with the human race: "but if," he says, "I should try to search out ancient matters and draw out from them what the writers of Greece have recorded, those very gods of the greater nations, who are held to be such, will be found to have set out from here to heaven. Since, then, tombs are shown in Greece, remember — since you have been initiated — what is handed down in the mysteries; then at last you will understand how widely this truth extends." Here he is plainly appealing to what his friend Atticus already knows: that the mysteries themselves reveal that everyone who receives worship was once a man; and regarding Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, and Pollux he spoke without hesitation, but concerning their fathers Apollo and Jupiter — and no less concerning Neptune, Vulcan, Mars, and Mercury, all four of which he called gods of the greater nations — he shrank from stating the matter plainly. And so he says this truth "extends widely," so that we may understand the same of Jupiter and the other, older gods — whose memory, if the ancients consecrated it by the same reasoning by which he says he will consecrate the image and name of his daughter, then those who mourned them may be forgiven, but those who believe in them cannot be. Madness alone could make anyone think heaven opens to the dead simply because a horde of fools has agreed to say so, or that a person could hand someone else a power he does not hold himself. Consider Rome: it made Julius a god only because the criminal Antony wished it, and Quirinus a god only because shepherds fancied it — this despite the one having slain his twin brother, the other his fatherland. And had Antony not been consul, Gaius Caesar, whatever his services to the republic, would have been denied even the honor due a dead man — a fate arranged by his father-in-law Piso and his kinsman Lucius Caesar, who forbade a funeral for him, and by the consul Dolabella, who tore down the memorial column standing in the forum — his tomb, in other words — and cleansed the forum of it. As for Romulus, Ennius shows how deeply the people missed him, giving the grieving crowd, mourning their vanished king, these very words: "O Romulus, Romulus divine, what a guardian of the fatherland the gods raised up in you! You led us forth into the borders of light. O father, O begetter, O blood sprung from the gods." That same longing made the crowd all too ready to swallow a lie: Julius Proculus, coached by the senators, announced to the plebs that the king had appeared to him looking grander than any living man, ordering that a shrine be raised for him and that he now be worshipped as the god Quirinus. By this act he persuaded the people themselves that Romulus had gone to join the gods, and freed the senate of suspicion of having murdered their king.
I could have been content with what I have already set out, but much still remains needed for the work I have undertaken. For although, by demolishing the very head of the religions, I have overthrown them all at once, still I wish to pursue the rest and refute more fully this inveterate persuasion, so that men will finally feel shame and remorse over their own mistakes. Here is a weighty labor, one fit for a man: to go on loosening religion's knots from the minds it binds, as Lucretius puts it—though he himself never managed to do this, since nothing true supported his effort. This is our task, since we both assert the true God and refute the false ones. Those, then, who suppose that the gods came from mere fictions the poets dreamed up, and yet believe that goddesses exist as women and worship them, are unwittingly rolled back to the very thing they had denied: that these beings mate and give birth. For it cannot be otherwise, since two sexes were established for the purpose of generation. But once they accept a difference of sexes, they fail to see the consequence: that they must conceive—which cannot happen in the case of God. Yet this is exactly what they think, since they claim some are offspring of Jupiter and the rest of the divine company. New gods, then, are born, indeed every day; for they are not outdone by men in fecundity. So everything is full of innumerable gods, since of course none of them dies. For men are countless already, beyond any reckoning of their multitude, and yet, being born, must also die in turn — so what count should we imagine for gods who, generation upon generation across the centuries, never once lost their immortality? Why, then, are so few of them worshipped? Unless perhaps we are to think that the two sexes of the gods exist not for the sake of generation but only for the taking of pleasure, and that they do the very things which shame little human beings to do or to suffer. But if some are said to have been born of others, it follows that they are always being born, since they were indeed born at some time; or if they have ceased to be born, we ought to know why or when they ceased. Not without wit does Seneca, in his books of moral philosophy, ask: 'What is the reason, then, that among the poets the most lustful Jupiter has stopped fathering children? Has he turned sixty, and has the Papian law fastened a clasp on him? Or has he obtained the right of three children? Or has it finally occurred to him that one should expect from another what one has done to another, and does he now dread that somebody could someday treat him the way he once treated Saturn?' Now let those who insist gods exist explain how they answer the case I am about to lay before them: grant the gods two sexes, and coupling must follow; and once they come together, houses become a necessity for them too — for surely they possess enough virtue and modesty not to act promiscuously or out in the open, the way we watch dumb beasts behave. Grant them houses, and cities must follow just as surely — and here Naso himself is our authority, saying: 'the common folk dwell scattered in various places; in front, the mighty gods of heaven, the illustrious ones, have set their own homes.' Grant them cities, and fields cannot be far behind. What comes next is plain to anyone: tilling and plowing the ground, which exists purely to provide food — and that alone proves they are mortal. Run the same chain in reverse and it holds just as firmly: strip away the fields and the cities go too; strip away the cities and no houses remain; without houses there is no coupling; and without coupling, no female sex among them at all. Yet females plainly exist among the gods — so gods they cannot be. Let whoever is able unravel this chain of reasoning. Each link pulls the next so tightly that the final conclusion cannot be refused. Nor will anyone unravel this either: between the two sexes one is stronger and one weaker, since males are the sturdier and females the frailer. Weakness, though, has no place in God — so the female sex has none either. Add to this the conclusion already reached above: they cannot be gods, precisely because females are found among them.
For these reasons the Stoics interpret the gods in another direction, and since they do not clearly see what the truth is, they try to connect them with the reasoning of natural phenomena. Cicero, following them, delivered this opinion about the gods and their religions: 'Do you not see, then, how reasoning drawn from natural phenomena well and usefully discovered has been dragged over to invented and fictitious gods? Out of that came false beliefs, unruly errors, and superstitions fit almost for old women. We even know the gods' shapes, their ages, their clothing and finery, and beyond that their families, marriages, and kinships—all of it recast in the image of human frailty.' What could be said more plainly, what more truly? Rome's foremost philosopher, a man crowned with the highest priesthood, charges the gods with being invented and fictitious, declares that the worship paid them is a superstition fit almost for old women, and laments how thoroughly false beliefs and unruly errors ensnare mankind. Indeed his whole third volume treating the nature of the gods overturns and utterly destroys every religion. What more, then, is expected of us? Can we surpass Cicero in eloquence? Certainly not; but confidence failed him, since the truth eluded him, as he himself candidly confesses in that same work. For he says he can more easily say what a thing is not than what it is—that is, he understands falsehoods but does not know the truth. It is clear, then, that those who are thought to be gods were men, and after their deaths that reputation was simply enshrined as worship. That is why their ages differ and each has a fixed likeness: because their images were shaped in that appearance and at that age at which death overtook each one. Let us consider, if you please, the miseries of these unfortunate gods. A son was lost to Isis, a daughter to Ceres; and Latona, driven out and flung across the whole earth, barely managed to find some tiny island in which to give birth. The Mother of the Gods fell in love with a handsome youth, and upon discovering him with a rival she cut off his manhood, leaving him half a man—hence her rites are performed to this day by the Galli, her gelded priests. Juno pursued her rivals most fiercely, since she herself could bear no child by her own brother. Varro writes that Samos was once called Parthenia, since it was there that Juno grew to womanhood and there too that she wed Jupiter. Hence her most ancient and revered temple stands on Samos, her statue is carved wearing bridal attire, and every year her rites are performed like a wedding celebration. If, then, she grew up, if she was a girl before she became a wife, then whoever fails to grasp that she was simply human is confessing himself an animal. Why should I speak of the shamelessness of Venus, prostituted to the lusts not only of gods but of men as well? Her notorious affair with Mars gave her Harmonia, Mercury gave her the androgynous Hermaphroditus, Jupiter gave her Cupid, Anchises gave her Aeneas, and Butes gave her Eryx; from Adonis, though, she could bear nothing, since a boar's tusk killed him while he was still a boy. She, as is recorded in the Sacred History, was the first to establish the trade of the courtesan, and it was she who instructed Cyprian women to profit from selling their bodies openly—commanding this precisely so that she alone would not stand out among women as shameless and man-hungry. Does even this being have anything of divinity, whose adulteries are counted as more numerous than her offspring? Yet not even her supposed virgins managed to preserve an unstained chastity. Take the birth of Erichthonius, for instance—where do we suppose that came from? Sprung from the soil, the way poets would have us imagine? The facts themselves shout otherwise. Once Vulcan had forged weapons for the gods, and Jupiter, granting him first pick of whatever reward he wanted, had sworn by the infernal marsh, as was customary, to refuse nothing, the lame craftsman asked to marry Minerva. Bound by so solemn a vow, Jupiter, best and greatest, could not refuse—yet he cautioned Minerva to fight him off and guard her honor. It was during that very tussle, so the story goes, that Vulcan's seed spilled onto the ground, giving rise to Erichthonius, whose name derives from the Greek words for strife and earth—that is, drawn straight from the struggle and the soil itself. Why, then, did the virgin goddess seal that boy away with a serpent and hand him, sealed shut, to Cecrops's three daughters? A plain case of incest, to my mind, one that admits no explaining away. Then there is the goddess who, on the verge of losing the lover torn apart by his own bolting horses, called in the finest physician, Asclepius, to restore the young man; and once he was healed she tucked him away in hidden quarters, entrusting him to the nymph Egeria and her sacred grove, so that, alone, deep in the forests of Italy, he could live out an unnoticed life under a new name, Virbius. What is the meaning of such careful, such anxious nursing? What do the hidden quarters mean? What does the banishment mean—so distant, or to a woman, or into solitude? What, further, does changing his name mean? And finally, what does his unrelenting dread of horses mean? What do all these details point to, if not a guilty conscience over an affair, and a passion far from chaste? She had every reason to labor so hard on behalf of so devoted a young man, one who had spurned the advances of a stepmother infatuated with him.
At this point we must also refute those who not only admit that the gods were made out of men, but even boast of it in praising them—whether for virtue, as with Hercules, or for gifts, as with Ceres and Liber, or for arts discovered, as with Aesculapius and Minerva. Taking up each matter in turn, I mean to show just how absurd it all is and how far beneath the cost men pay for it—defiling themselves with an inexpiable crime and becoming enemies of the true God—when, having spurned Him, they take up the rites of the dead. They say that virtue is what raises a man to heaven—not that virtue of which the philosophers speak, which lies in the goods of the soul, but this bodily kind called strength; and since this was especially prominent in Hercules, he is believed to have earned immortality. Who is so foolishly stupid as to judge bodily strength something divine, or even something excellent for a man, when even beasts of burden possess it in greater measure, and it is often broken by a single illness or diminished and collapses with old age itself? And so this same Hercules, when he saw his own muscles disfigured by sores, wished neither to be healed nor to grow old, lest he should ever seem lesser or uglier than himself. Men supposed that he ascended to heaven from the pyre on which he had burned himself alive, and, most foolishly admiring these very things, they set them up wrought and consecrated in statues and images, so that monuments to their vanity might stand forever—men who believed that killing wild beasts could make one a god. But perhaps this is the fault of the Greeks, who always regarded the flimsiest things as the greatest. What of our own people? Are they any wiser? They despise athletic prowess, because it does no harm, but royal power, because it commonly does great harm far and wide, they so admire that they suppose brave and warlike commanders are placed in the company of the gods; nor do they think there is any other road to immortality than to lead armies, lay waste to others' lands, destroy cities, raze towns, and either slaughter free peoples or reduce them to slavery. Clearly, the more men they have crushed, plundered, and killed, the nobler and more illustrious they consider themselves, and, captivated by the appearance of empty glory, they attach the name of virtue to their crimes. I would rather, at this point, that their gods had sprung from killing wild animals than that men should endorse so bloody a road to immortality. If someone slays a single man, he is held polluted and wicked, and they think it unlawful for him to be admitted even to this earthly dwelling-place of the gods. But the man who has slaughtered countless thousands of men, flooded the fields with blood, and stained the rivers, is admitted not merely into the temple but into heaven itself. In Ennius, Africanus speaks thus: 'If it is permitted for anyone to ascend into the regions of the heaven-dwellers, to me alone the greatest gate of heaven stands open'—clearly because he destroyed and wiped out a great part of the human race. O in how great a darkness you moved, Africanus—or rather, O poet, who supposed that the ascent to heaven for men lies open through slaughter and blood! To this vanity even Cicero gave his assent. 'It is indeed so, Africanus,' he says, 'for that same gate stood open to Hercules too'—as though he himself had plainly been the doorkeeper of heaven when it happened. For my part I cannot decide whether I ought rather to grieve or to laugh, when I see grave and learned men, men who in their own eyes seem wise, tossed about in such a pitiable flood of errors. If this is the virtue that makes us immortal, I would rather die than bring destruction upon as many as possible. If immortality cannot be obtained in any other way except through blood, what will happen if all men agree in concord? And this could certainly happen, if, having cast off their ruinous and impious frenzy, they were willing to be innocent and just. Will no one, then, be worthy of heaven? Will virtue perish, because men will not be permitted to rage against other men? But these men, who reckon the overthrow of cities and peoples as the highest glory, will not tolerate public peace; they will plunder and rage, and by inflicting injuries with insolence they will break the covenant of human society, so as to have an enemy whom they may destroy no more wickedly than they provoked him. Now let us go on to the rest. The gift of certain benefits gave Ceres and Liber the name of gods. I could show from the divine writings that wine and grain were in use among men even before the offspring of Caelus and Saturn; but let us grant, for argument's sake, that these were truly discovered by them. Can it seem a greater or more important thing to have gathered grain and taught men, once it was ground, to make bread from it, or to have pressed grapes gathered from vines and made wine, than to have brought forth the grain itself, or the vines themselves, out of the earth? Suppose God did leave these things to be discovered by human ingenuity; still it cannot be otherwise than that all things belong to Him, who gave man the very wisdom by which to discover, and also the things capable of being discovered in the first place. The arts too are said to have won immortality for their inventors, as medicine did for Aesculapius, and metalworking for Vulcan. Let us, then, also worship those who taught fulling or shoemaking. Why is no honor paid to the inventor of pottery? Is it because the wealthy despise Samian ware? There are also other arts whose inventors have been of the greatest benefit to human life: why have temples not been assigned to them as well? But no doubt it is Minerva who discovered them all, and that is why craftsmen pray to her. So Minerva rises to heaven out of these humble trades. Is there really any reason for anyone to abandon Him who created the earth with its living creatures, the heavens with their stars and lights, in order to venerate her who taught the weaving of cloth? And what of the figure credited with teaching how bodily wounds get healed? Could he outrank the one who shaped bodies in the first place, granted the very capacity to feel and to live, and both devised and produced the herbs and everything else on which the healing art depends?
But someone will object that reverence is due not only to the maker of all things but also to those who did some partial good. Yet it has never once happened, and cannot happen, that a worshipper of these lesser beings has also worshipped God; grant others equal honor, and He goes entirely unworshipped, since His religion rests on nothing less than believing Him singular and alone. The greatest of the poets proclaims that all who improved life through their discovered arts now dwell among the dead, and that even the inventor of medicine, master of that very craft, was hurled by a thunderbolt into the Stygian waters—so we might grasp just how powerful the almighty Father is, capable of striking down even gods with his bolts. Clever men perhaps reasoned among themselves along these lines: a god cannot be struck by lightning, so plainly this never occurred. But the truth runs the other way—precisely because it did occur, the man in question was clearly no god. The poets' falsehood lies not in the event but in the label attached to it: fearing trouble, they shrank from admitting the plain truth against popular opinion. Yet if it is agreed among the pagans themselves that these gods started out as men, why do they refuse to trust the poets' account of their flights, wounds, deaths, wars, and affairs? From these very details one can grasp that becoming gods was never possible for them at all, given that they were not even decent men, and their conduct in life earned nothing but everlasting death.
I come now to the cults that belong distinctly to the Romans, having already discussed the ones held in common with others. Divine honors were paid to the She-Wolf who nursed Romulus, and I could tolerate this if it were truly the animal whose shape she bears. But Livy tells us that the statue represents Larentina, and represents not her body at all, but rather her mind and her character. For she had been the wife of Faustulus, and because her much-frequented body came cheap, the shepherds nicknamed her "wolf" — meaning harlot, which is also why a brothel bears the name lupanar. In shaping this figure the Romans were obviously copying the Athenians, among whom a harlot called Leaena, after killing a tyrant, was barred by custom from having a harlot's statue raised inside a temple, so an image of the animal sharing her name was set up instead. Thus one people built a monument from a name, the other from an occupation. A festival was likewise dedicated under this name, giving rise to the Larentinalia. The Romans do not confine their reverence for harlots to her alone — Faula too is worshiped, whom Verrius records as having been Hercules's mistress. What sort of immortality, then, should we imagine this to be, when even prostitutes lay hold of it? Flora, who had piled up great riches through the business of prostitution, named the populace her heir and bequeathed a set sum of money whose yearly interest would fund games marking her birthday — games known as the Floralia. Because the Senate found this shameful, it decided instead to draw a story from her very name, so as to lend some dignity to a disreputable affair. They invented a goddess in charge of flowers, one who needed appeasing so that crops, trees, and vines alike might bloom richly and well. Working the same angle, a poet in his Fasti spun the tale that she had once been a nymph of noble lineage named Chloris, who wed Zephyr and, as a dowry from her husband, received dominion over every flower. All this sounds respectable in the telling, yet the belief behind it is disgraceful and shameful, and when we are after the truth such coverings must not fool us. Accordingly those games are staged with every sort of indecency, fittingly enough given the memory of a harlot they honor. Beyond the free rein given to obscene language, harlots are stripped bare at the crowd's insistence, take on the role of mimes, and are made to perform lewd gestures before the public eye until even shameless onlookers have had their fill. As for the statue of Cloacina discovered in the Great Sewer, Tatius consecrated it, and since he had no idea whose likeness it depicted, he simply named it after the place it was found. Tullus Hostilius, for his part, fashioned images of Fear and Pallor and paid them worship. What can be said of this, except that he wanted his gods constantly nearby, the way people usually wish for such things? From this same impulse, Marcus Marcellus's dedication of Honor and Virtue differs only in the respectability of its titles, while agreeing in substance. With equal folly the Senate also enrolled Mind among the gods — though had Mind truly been present, it would never have consented to rites of this kind. According to Cicero, Greece took on a grand and daring project when it set up shrines to Cupids and Loves within its gymnasia — plainly he was flattering Atticus while poking fun at his own good friend. That should be called neither grand nor a project of any kind, but rather the ruinous and hopeless depravity of shameless men who handed their own sons — children they ought to have raised toward virtue — over to the lust of young men; men, moreover, who planted the gods of their vice precisely where naked bodies are exposed to corrupt eyes, wanting them venerated at just the age when innocence and inexperience leave one open to entrapment before any defense is possible. Small wonder, then, that every shameful vice has poured out from this single nation, a people among whom vice itself is treated as sacred, not merely tolerated but actively worshiped. And as though outdoing the Greeks in good sense, he tacked on the maxim that virtues, and not vices, deserve consecration. But accept that, Marcus Tullius, and do you not see that vice is bound to burst in right alongside virtue, since evil clings to good and holds greater sway over the human mind? Forbid the consecration of vices, and that very Greece will reply that some gods are worshiped for the sake of gain, others simply to avoid harm. This is always the excuse given by those who treat their own evils as divine, the way the Romans do with Rust and Fever. If vices, then, should not be consecrated — and here I side with you — neither should virtues. They possess no wisdom or awareness of their own, nor should they be housed within walls or little shrines molded from clay; instead they must be lodged in the breast and grasped from within, or they turn false the instant they are placed outside a person. So I find myself laughing at that famous law of yours, phrased in these words: "But for those things by which mankind is granted ascent to heaven — Mind, Virtue, Piety, Faith — let shrines be built in their honor." Yet none of these can exist apart from a person. If they are to be worshiped at all, they must reside within the individual himself; and if instead they stand outside him, what good is worshiping what one does not actually have? Virtue itself deserves worship, not some image standing in for it, and that worship comes not through sacrifice, incense, or formal prayer, but purely through will and intention. For what is worshiping virtue, if not seizing it in the mind and holding onto it? Anyone who resolves to want it obtains it the moment he wills it. That alone counts as the true worship of virtue — religious devotion belongs to no one but the single God. So why, wisest of men, occupy land with useless structures when it could serve practical human purposes instead? Why appoint priests to tend things empty and without any feeling? Why slaughter victims? Why pour out such expense on the crafting or the upkeep of images? A sturdier, less corruptible temple already exists — the human breast. Let that be adorned instead; let that be filled with the true powers of the divine. Given false consecrations of this sort, a certain outcome inevitably follows. Those who worship virtues in such a manner — chasing after mere shadows and images of virtue — cannot themselves hold on to what is genuinely real. As a result virtue exists nowhere, vice ruling on every side; loyalty is absent, each person grabbing what he can for himself; devotion is gone, greed and desire sparing neither kindred nor parents as they rush toward poison and blade; there is no peace and no harmony, war raging openly and, in private, hatred boiling over into bloodshed; chastity, too, is gone, unchecked lust staining every sex and every part of the body. Even so they never stop worshiping the very things they flee from and despise. They honor with incense and fingertip gestures what, in their deepest feelings, ought to fill them with horror — an error that traces entirely back to ignorance of that first and highest good. After the city fell to the Gauls, with the Romans under siege on the Capitoline, they built engines of war from women's hair and then dedicated a shrine to Venus the Bald. They fail to grasp, then, how empty their religion is, evident from the very fact that they mock it with such absurdities. Perhaps they picked up from the Spartans the habit of inventing gods out of whatever happened to occur. For when the Spartans were laying siege to the Messenians, and the besieged, having tricked their besiegers, slipped out and rushed off to plunder Sparta, it was the Spartan women who drove them back in flight. Once the Spartans learned of the enemy's trick, they gave chase, and their armed wives went out a long way to meet them. When the women spotted their own husbands readying for battle and mistook them for Messenians, they stripped off their clothing. But the men, recognizing their wives at the sight and stirred by desire, mingled with them just as they stood, weapons and all — indiscriminately, naturally, since there was no leisure to be selective — much as the young men sent out earlier had mingled with the maidens, the union that produced the Partheniae. To commemorate this event they raised a shrine and statue to Venus Armed, and although it sprang from a disgraceful episode, consecrating an armed Venus still comes off as more respectable than a bald one. Around the same time an altar went up for Jupiter the Baker, because in their sleep he had told them to bake bread from whatever grain remained and hurl it into the enemy camp; that act lifted the siege, since the Gauls gave up hope of starving the Romans into submission. What a mockery of religion this is. Were I defending it, my gravest complaint would be that the majesty of the gods has sunk into such contempt that it's turned into a joke under the most humiliating names. Who wouldn't laugh at grown, learned men busying themselves over the goddess Oven, celebrating her Fornacalia? And who, hearing of the goddess Muta, could keep from laughing? The Lares, supposedly, sprang from her, and Lara or Larunda serves as her other name. What could she, unable to speak, possibly give her worshiper? Also worshiped is Iaca, who tipped off Hercules about the theft of his cattle and won divine status by betraying her own brother; and Cunina, guardian of infants in their cradles who wards off the evil eye; and Stercutus, credited with first introducing manure to the fields; and Tutinus, in whose shameful lap brides are seated so that the god may seem to sample their chastity ahead of their husbands — along with a thousand other monstrosities, enough that we might now call those who took up worshiping such things vainer than even the Egyptians, who at least revere monstrous and absurd images that resemble something. But what of those who worship a shapeless, rough-hewn stone named Terminus? This is said to be the very stone Saturn devoured in place of Jupiter, and the honor paid him is not undeserved. For when Tarquin wanted to build the Capitol, and many gods' shrines already stood on that ground, augury was taken to see whether each god was prepared to make room for Jupiter; every one of them complied except Terminus, who alone would not budge. Hence the poet calls him the immovable rock of the Capitol. From this very fact we can gauge how great a god Jupiter must be, since not even a stone would yield to him — perhaps out of confidence, since Jupiter had rescued him from his father's jaws. So once the Capitol was finished, an opening was deliberately left in the roof directly over Terminus, so that, having refused to yield, he might still enjoy open sky — though not even those who imagined the stone enjoyed it were themselves enjoying anything. Public supplication, then, is offered to him as guardian god of boundaries, one who is not only a stone but at times even a mere stake. So what are we to say of those who worship such things, except that they themselves are, above all else, stones and stakes?
We have spoken about the gods themselves who are worshipped; now a few things must be said about their rites and mysteries. Among the Cypriots, it was Teucer who first offered a man's life to Jupiter as a sacrificial victim, a rite he passed on to his own descendants; only under the emperor Hadrian, in fairly recent times, was it finally abolished. Among the Taurians, a savage and inhuman people, there was a law that guests be sacrificed to Diana, and that sacrifice was celebrated for many ages. The Gauls appeased Esus and Teutates with human blood. Not even the Latins were free of this monstrous practice, since Jupiter Latiaris is even now worshipped with human blood. What good do people beg from gods to whom they sacrifice in this way? Or what can such gods provide to men, when they are placated by men's sufferings? But one need not marvel so much at barbarians, whose religion matches their manners; yet what of our own people, forever boasting that gentleness and civilized manners are glories belonging to them alone — in these sacrilegious rites are they not shown to be more savage even than barbarians? For those who, though polished by liberal studies, fall away from humanity are to be reckoned more guilty than the rough and untaught who slip into wicked deeds through ignorance of what is good. It appears, however, that this rite of sacrificing men is ancient, given that Saturn received an identical form of sacrifice within Latium — though no man was truly slain upon an altar there; rather, he was cast down into the Tiber from the Mulvian Bridge. Varro is the authority that this was done in consequence of a certain oracle, the last line of which runs thus: 'and send heads to Hades, and to the father a man' — that is, a human being. Because this seemed ambiguous, it was customary to throw in both a torch and a man. But this kind of sacrifice is said to have been abolished by Hercules on his return from Spain, though the rite continued, with images of rushes thrown in place of real men, as Ovid teaches in the Fasti: until the Tirynthian came into these fields, sad rites were performed every year in the manner of Leucas; the Romans used to throw straw men into the water, false bodies cast after Hercules' example. The Vestal Virgins perform these rites, as the same poet says: then too the maiden is accustomed to cast rush images of ancient men from the oaken bridge. But as for the infants who were sacrificed to that same Saturn out of hatred for Jupiter, I do not know what to say. So savage and barbarous were these men that a sacrifice was the name they gave to their own child-slaughter — a crime foul and accursed against the human race — when, with no regard for natural affection, they extinguished tender and innocent lives, the age dearest of all to parents, and surpassed in cruelty even the fiercest of beasts, which nonetheless love their own offspring! What madness beyond all cure! Even at their most furious, could those gods do worse than what they do while favorable — soaking their own worshippers in the blood of murdered children, robbing them of their offspring, tearing every human feeling out of them? What could be holy to men such as these? And in unholy places, what would they not dare, these men who carry out the gravest of crimes right at the altars of their own gods? Pescennius Festus, in his books of histories written as satire, reports that the Carthaginians used to sacrifice human victims to Saturn, and that when they were defeated by Agathocles, king of the Sicilians, they supposed the god was angry with them; and so, in order to atone more scrupulously, they sacrificed two hundred sons of the nobility. So much evil could religion persuade men to commit — evil that has often given birth to wicked and impious deeds. To whom, then, were these most senseless men appealing by that sacrifice, when they slaughtered so great a part of the citizenry — perhaps a greater number than even the victorious Agathocles himself had killed? No less mad than that kind of rite must be judged those public rites of which some belong to the Mother, in which men make offerings of their own virility — for having cut away their sex, they become neither men nor women — and others honor Virtue — a goddess otherwise known by the name Bellona — where it is the priests' own blood, not some other victim's, that gets offered up. For with their shoulders slashed, brandishing drawn swords in each hand, they run about, are carried away, rage in frenzy. Quintilian, therefore, says excellently in his 'Fanaticus': if a god compels this, he is angry. Are these things even sacred rites? Would it not be preferable to live as cattle live, rather than bow down to gods so bloodthirsty, so profane, so utterly impious? But whence these errors and such great outrages have flowed, we shall discuss in their proper place. Meanwhile let us look also at the rest, which are free of crime, lest we seem, out of eagerness to attack, to choose only the worst examples. The rites of the Egyptian Isis concern how she either lost or found her small son. For first her priests, their bodies shaved bare, beat their breasts and lament, just as she herself had done when she lost him; then a boy is brought forth as though found, and that mourning is turned into joy. Thus Lucan writes that Osiris is a god 'never sought with sufficient care.' For they are always losing him, always finding him. There is represented in the rites, then, an image of a thing that really happened — which, if we have any sense, surely shows that she was a mortal woman, and nearly childless, had she not found her only son. This did not escape that very poet in whom the young Pompey, on hearing of his father's death, speaks thus: 'I shall dig up from the tomb the divinity now honored by the nations, Isis, and scatter through the crowd the linen-shrouded Osiris.' This is Osiris, whom the common people call Serapis. For it is customary, when the dead are consecrated as gods, to change their names — I suppose so that no one may think them to have been men. Thus Romulus, once dead, was turned into Quirinus; Leda was turned into Nemesis; Circe into Marica. And Ino, after she hurled herself into the sea, became Leucothea, and 'Mother Matuta,' and her son Melicertes became Palaemon and Portunus. The rites of Ceres of Eleusis are not unlike these. For just as there the boy Osiris is sought amid his mother's lamentation, so here Proserpina, carried off into an incestuous marriage with her uncle, is sought; the tale that Ceres searched for her through Sicily bearing torches lit at Etna's summit explains why blazing torches are hurled about as part of her rites. At Lampsacus, the acceptable victim for Priapus is a donkey, and the reason for this sacrifice is given in the Fasti as follows. When all the gods had gathered for the feast of the Great Mother, and, sated with banqueting, were passing the night in games, Vesta lay down on the ground and fell asleep; there Priapus plotted against her sleep and her chastity, but she was roused by the untimely braying of the donkey on which Silenus was riding, and the lecher's design was thereby foiled. For this reason the people of Lampsacus habitually slaughter a donkey to Priapus as though in vengeance, while among the Romans that same animal, in honor of preserved chastity, is crowned with loaves at the Vestal rites. What could be more shameful, more disgraceful, than that Vesta should be a virgin only by the kindness of a donkey? But the poet invented a story. Surely, then, is it any truer what those who wrote the 'Phaenomena' report, when they speak of the two stars of Cancer that the Greeks call 'the Asses' — that they had been donkeys which carried Father Liber across when he could not cross a river, and that he gave one of them as a reward the power of speaking with a human voice? And so a contest arose between it and Priapus over the size of their private parts; Priapus, defeated and enraged, killed the winner. This is far more absurd, but poets may say whatever they please. I will not further expose so unseemly a mystery, nor strip Priapus bare, lest something appear worth laughing at. Granted that poets invented these things — but they must have invented them to conceal some greater indecency. Let us ask, then, what that is. And indeed it is quite plain. For just as a bull is sacrificed to the Moon because it has similar horns, and the Persians placate with a horse the sun-god girded with rays, so that a swift victim not be given to a slow god, so in this case, because the size of the male member is monstrous, no victim more fitting could be found for the monster than one that could imitate the very thing to which it is sacrificed. At Lindus, a town of Rhodes, there are rites of Hercules whose manner differs greatly from all others, since they are celebrated not with 'good words,' as the Greeks call it, but with curses and execration, should so much as an unintended good word slip from someone's lips during the solemn ceremonies, this counts as a violation of the rite. The reason given for this — if there can be any reason in matters so utterly foolish — is as follows. When Hercules had arrived there and was suffering hunger, he came upon a plowman laboring in his field and pressed the man to part with one of his oxen for a price. The man refused, saying it could not be done, since all his hope of tilling the land rested on those two young oxen. Hercules, with his usual violence, since he could not get one, took both. But the unfortunate man, seeing his oxen about to be slaughtered, avenged his injury with curses — which was most gratifying to that refined and urbane hero. For while he prepared the feast for his companions and devoured another man's oxen, he listened with laughter and guffaws to the man cursing him most bitterly. But afterward, once his valor had won him a decision that divine honors be granted, the citizens raised an altar in Hercules' name, which by that deed he named 'Bouzygos' ('ox-yoker'), at which two yoked oxen were to be sacrificed just as those he had stolen from the plowman, and he appointed that very man his priest, and ordered him always to use the same curses in performing the sacrifices, since he declared he had never dined more pleasantly. These are no longer sacred rites but sacrileges, in which that is held holy which, if done in any other context, would be most severely punished. As for the rites of the Cretan Jupiter himself, what else do they show but how he was either hidden away from his father or nursed? There is the she-goat of the nymph Amalthea, who nourished the infant with her udders; concerning which Germanicus Caesar says in his poem on the Aratea: 'She is thought to be Jupiter's nurse, if truly the infant Jupiter suckled at the most faithful udders of the Cretan goat, which by its bright star bears witness to its beloved foster-child.' Musaeus is the authority that Jupiter used the hide of this she-goat as a shield when fighting against the Titans, whence he is called by the poets 'aegis-bearing.' Thus whatever was done in hiding the child is reenacted symbolically in the rites. But the mystery of his mother contains the same thing, which Ovid sets out in the Fasti: 'Steep Ida now resounds for a long while with clashing, so that the child may wail safely with infant mouth. Staves strike against shields for some, against hollow helmets for others — this is the Curetes' task, and this the Corybantes'. The deed lay hidden, and imitations of the ancient act remain: the goddess's attendants strike bronze and hoarse-sounding hides. They clash cymbals in place of helmets, drums in place of shields; the pipe gives forth its Phrygian strains, as it did of old.' Sallust rejects this whole notion as though invented by poets, and wishes to interpret it ingeniously, saying that the Curetes are called the fosterers of Jupiter because they were the first to understand things divine, and that antiquity — as it magnifies everything else — celebrated them as fosterers of Jupiter. How greatly that learned man erred, the matter itself now makes clear. For if Jupiter is the first of both gods and religions, if before him no gods were commonly worshipped, because those who are worshipped had not yet been born, then it is evident that the Curetes were, on the contrary, the first to understand nothing divine — for it was precisely through them that every error entered in, and all recollection of the true God was wiped away. From these very mysteries and ceremonies, then, men ought to have understood that they were making supplication to dead men. I do not, then, insist that anyone believe the fictions of the poets; let him who thinks these poets are lying instead examine the writings of the pontiffs themselves, and turn over whatever literature there is concerning sacred matters: he will perhaps find more than we adduce, from which he may understand that everything held sacred is empty, absurd, and invented. But if anyone, having attained wisdom, lays aside his error, he will surely laugh at the follies of men nearly out of their minds — I mean those who either dance in indecent leaping, or run naked, oiled, garlanded, or masked, or smeared with mud. What shall I say of shields already rotting with age? When men carry these, they suppose they are bearing the gods themselves upon their shoulders. For Furius Bibaculus is counted among the outstanding examples of piety, who, though he was praetor, nevertheless carried the sacred shield with his lictors going before him, though the office allowed him exemption from that service by privilege of his rank. He was not, then, so much a Furius as plainly a madman, who thought he could adorn his praetorship with this service. And rightly does Lucretius cry out, given that it is men neither uncultured nor coarse who do such things: 'O foolish minds of men, O blind hearts! In what darkness of life, in what great perils, is passed whatever span of time this is!' Who, having any sanity, would not laugh at these mockeries, seeing men, as though out of their minds, do in earnest what, if anyone did them in jest, would seem far too wanton and foolish?
Among the Romans, it was that famous King Numa who founded these vanities, and who, more than anyone, ensnared the crude and untrained minds of his people in strange new superstitions. To lend the scheme some semblance of authority, he pretended that he met by night with the goddess Egeria. In the grove of Aricia there stood a certain deeply shadowed cave, out of which a stream ran from a spring that never failed. There he would withdraw, having sent every witness away, so that he could pretend he was passing on to the people, at the bidding of this divine consort, whatever rites pleased the gods most. Indeed, his real model was the cunning of Minos: that Cretan king would withdraw into a cavern sacred to Jupiter, linger there a long while out of sight, and then reappear carrying laws he insisted Jupiter had personally handed down to him. The aim, in both cases, was to make subjects obey not from mere command alone, but from religious dread as well. Persuading shepherds of such things, in fact, proved no great task. He went on to appoint pontiffs, flamens, Salii, and augurs, and to parcel out gods among the various clans; in this way he calmed the wild temperament of his still-young people and steered them away from war and toward the pursuits of peace. Yet whatever deceptions he practiced on others, he never once deceived himself. Long afterward, when Cornelius and Baebius held the consulship, diggers working in the field of the scribe Petilius, beneath the Janiculum, turned up two stone chests: one held the body of Numa, the other seven books in Latin on pontifical law, together with an equal number in Greek on the discipline of wisdom — and by these he had undercut sacred rites of every kind, not merely the ones he himself had founded. Once this discovery reached the senate, a decree followed ordering the books destroyed, and Quintus Petilius, the urban praetor, duly burned them in front of an assembly of the people. It was a foolish move nonetheless: what was gained by burning the books, when the burning itself — done precisely because the books discredited sacred rites — became a matter passed down in memory forever? Not one man in that senate escaped being a fool, since the books might have been destroyed while the affair itself never entered the record at all. So it was that, wishing to display to later generations just how devoutly they had guarded their religion, they ended up, by testifying to it, eroding the very authority of that religion. But if Numa was the one who founded foolish rites among the Romans, then before him, in Latium, there had already been Faunus, who set up unholy rites in honor of his grandfather Saturn, who counted his father Picus among the gods, and who made his own sister and wife, Fenta Fauna, into a goddess as well. Gavius Bassus records that she went by the name Fatua, since — much as Faunus did for men — she was in the habit of chanting the fates to women. Varro, for his part, writes that her chastity was so complete that, for as long as she lived, no man beheld her except her own husband, nor did anyone else so much as hear her name spoken. It is for this reason that women offer sacrifice to her away from men's eyes, calling her the Good Goddess. Sextus Clodius, however, in the book he composed in Greek, tells a different story: that she was Faunus's wife, and that, having secretly drunk a whole jar of wine against royal custom and propriety and grown drunk from it, her husband beat her with myrtle rods until she died; but afterward, overcome with regret at what he had done and unable to bear missing her, he raised her to divine status — which is why a wine jar wrapped in cloth has a place in her rites. So Faunus, too, bequeathed no small share of delusion to later ages, though anyone with sense sees straight through it. Lucilius, in fact, ridicules the folly of people who take mere images for gods, writing these lines: the bogeys and hobgoblins set up by Fauns and by Numa Pompilius — this fellow shakes before them, staking everything on their power. Just as small children believe every bronze statue is alive and human, so these grown men take every fiction for truth, imagining a heart beats inside the bronze. A painter's gallery — nothing real in it, invention throughout! The poet likened foolish men to infants, but I would say they are considerably less sensible than that. Infants, after all, mistake statues for people, while these men mistake them for gods; infants are misled by their age into believing what isn't so, these men by their own folly; and infants, at least, will soon enough grow out of being fooled, whereas the emptiness of these men only lingers and swells further. It was Orpheus who first brought Father Liber's sacred rites onto Greek soil, and who first held them on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia, near Thebes, where Liber himself had been born close by; and because he so often set the mountain ringing with the music of his lyre, it came to be called Cithaeron. Those rites still bear the name Orphic today — the same rites during which Orpheus himself was later torn apart, limb ripped from limb; and this happened at roughly the same time as the story of Faunus. Which of the two actually came first, though, is open to question, since Latinus and Priam sat on their thrones in the very same years, as did their fathers before them, Faunus and Laomedon — and it was during Laomedon's reign that Orpheus arrived with the Argonauts on the shore of the Trojans. Let us push on, then, and ask who, before anyone else, first introduced the worship of the gods altogether. Didymus, in his commentary on Pindar, states that it was Melisseus, ruler of Crete, who first offered sacrifice to the gods and to bring in new rites along with processions for sacrifice; that he had two daughters, Amalthea and Melissa, who fed the infant Jupiter on goat's milk and honey — the source of that poetic legend in which bees are said to have flown down and filled the child's mouth with honey — and that Melissa was appointed by her own father as the very first priestess of the Great Mother, which is why the priestesses of that same Mother are still called Melissae to this day. The Sacred History, however, tells us that once Jupiter had secured control over affairs, his arrogance grew so great that he had shrines built to himself in many places. As he traveled from land to land, wherever he arrived in some region he would bind the kings or leading men of that people to himself through hospitality and friendship, and upon leaving each one he would order a shrine raised to him bearing his host's own name, as though this would keep alive the memory of their friendship and pact. This is how the temples of Jupiter Ataburius and Jupiter Labrandius came to be built, since Ataburus and Labrandus had served as his hosts and allies in war; likewise Jupiter Laprius, Jupiter Molion, Jupiter Casius, and others of this same sort. He devised this scheme with great cunning, so as to secure divine honor for himself while giving his hosts a name that would endure, bound up forever with religion. They, in turn, were delighted and gladly submitted themselves to his authority, celebrating annual rites and festivals for the honor of their own names. Aeneas did something comparable in Sicily, giving the city he founded the name of his host Acestes, so that Acestes would afterward take pleasure in loving, enlarging, and beautifying it of his own free will. In this fashion Jupiter spread devotion to himself across the whole world, setting an example that others would go on to copy. Whether, then, the custom of worshipping the gods began with Melisseus, as Didymus claims, or with Jupiter himself, as Euhemerus holds, one thing remains settled regardless: the period from which the gods began receiving worship. Melisseus, certainly, came long before in age, since he raised Jupiter as one would a grandson. It may well be, then, that either before Jupiter was born, or while he was still a boy, Melisseus had already established the worship of the gods — that is, worship of the boy's own mother (Ops), of his grandmother Earth, who had been the consort of Uranus, and of his father Saturn — and that through this very precedent and practice he himself pushed Jupiter toward the pride that later led him to dare claim divine honors for himself.
Now that we have traced the origin of these empty superstitions, it remains for us to establish also the times in which those men lived whose memory is worshipped. Theophilus, in his book on chronology addressed to Autolycus, says that in his history Thallus states that Belus, whom the Babylonians and Assyrians worship, is found to have been three hundred and twenty-two years earlier than the Trojan War, and that Belus was a contemporary of Saturn, both having grown to manhood at the same time. And this is so true that it can be established by reasoning itself. For Agamemnon, who waged the Trojan War, was the great-great-grandson of Jupiter, and Achilles and Ajax his great-grandsons, and Ulysses of the same degree, while Priam's line was a much longer one.... Some authors, however, hold that Dardanus and Iasius were the sons of Corythus rather than Jupiter's own; had things been otherwise, Jupiter would not have been able to take his own great-grandson Ganymede for shameful ends. So, if you match up the corresponding years of the ancestors of those I have named above, the reckoning agrees. Now, from the destruction of the city of Troy, one thousand four hundred and seventy years are reckoned. From this computation of dates it is clear that Saturn, who was the begetter of all the gods, was born no more than one thousand eight hundred years ago. Let them not, then, boast of the antiquity of their sacred rites, since their origin, their nature, and their dates have all been laid bare. There remain yet some further points that would be of great use in refuting these false religions, but I have decided to bring the book to an end here, lest it grow beyond measure. These matters must be pursued more fully, so that, once everything that seems to stand in the way of truth has been refuted, we may be able to instill true religion in men who wander uncertainly through ignorance of what is good. Wisdom's opening task, in fact, lies in seeing through falsehood, while its second task is coming to know what is true. So whoever has gained from this initial lesson of ours, in which falsehoods have been laid bare, will thereby be spurred toward the knowledge of truth — a pleasure than which nothing sweeter exists for mankind — and will then stand ready for the wisdom of heavenly teaching, provided he approaches it eagerly, prepared to learn what remains.
Though in my first book I demonstrated the falsity of the gods' religions — for those beings whose varied and disparate cults were embraced across the whole earth by a foolish popular consensus were themselves mortal, and having finished their lives, surrendered to death under divine necessity — still, so that no doubt remains, this second book will expose the very wellspring of these errors and lay bare every reason men were misled: first into believing gods existed at all, and later, gripped by inveterate conviction, into clinging most perversely to the cults they had adopted. For now that their emptiness stands convicted and mankind's impious vanity laid bare, I long to proclaim the grandeur of the single God, taking up instead a weightier and more valuable charge: to call men back from crooked roads and reconcile them to themselves, so that they will not — as certain philosophers do — hold themselves in such contempt, nor imagine themselves feeble, superfluous, worthless, born for absolutely nothing; a notion that drags most of them down into vice. Believing, as they do, that no god cares for us at all, or that nothing remains after death, they hand themselves over entirely to their appetites, and, supposing it permitted, throw themselves thirstily into swallowing every pleasure — a course that carries them heedlessly into death's own snares. They are simply ignorant of what constitutes man's true reason; had they been willing to grasp it, they would above all recognize their own Lord, follow after justice and virtue, refuse to lay their souls beneath earthly illusions, refuse to hunger after the lethal delights of lust, and finally hold themselves in high regard, grasping that man contains more than meets the eye — a power and nature that can be kept intact only once depravity is set aside and the worship of their true Father embraced. Indeed, as often as I turn my thoughts, as one should, to the sum of things, I find myself amazed that the grandeur of the one God who upholds and governs everything has sunk into such forgetfulness that the sole being deserving worship is, of all things, the one chiefly ignored — and that men have been driven into a blindness so deep they set dead things above the true and living God, ranking the earthbound and the buried above the very founder of the earth itself. Yet this human impiety might still be excused if the mistake sprang purely from not knowing the divine name at all. But when we so often observe the very worshipers of the gods both admitting and proclaiming a supreme deity, what excuse can they possibly count on for their irreverence, seeing they refuse to honor the one being no man is permitted to remain entirely unaware of? Indeed, whenever they swear an oath, make a wish, or offer thanks, it is not Jupiter or a crowd of gods they invoke, but God — so forcefully does truth, driven by nature itself, break loose even from reluctant hearts. This, though, does not happen in good times. It is precisely when men are enjoying his gifts and owe honor to his divine generosity that God slips most completely from their memory. But should some grave necessity press upon them, that is when God comes back to mind — should the terror of warfare thunder, should some plague's deadly force settle in, should a lasting drought starve the crops, should a savage storm or hail come crashing down. Then people flee to God, beg him for aid, pray for his rescue. If a man is being tossed about at sea by a raging wind, it is God he calls on; if some other force is crushing him, it is God he begs instead; and if a man, driven to the extremity of begging, pleads for his food, he calls on God alone, seeking mercy from other men in the name of that one divine God. So it is only amid misfortune that God ever crosses their minds; the moment fear subsides and danger has passed, they rush eagerly instead to the temples of the gods, pouring libations, offering sacrifice, hanging garlands — while toward the God they had begged in their hour of crisis, they do not utter so much as a single word of thanks. That is how prosperity breeds excess, and excess, like every other vice, breeds irreverence toward God in turn. What cause should we suppose lies behind this, if not some twisted power, forever at war with truth, that revels in human error and whose single unending task is to pour out darkness and blind men's minds — so that they will not see the light, will not even look up at the sky, and will not keep faith with their body's own nature? For while every other creature, its body bent forward, gazes at the ground, since it was given no reason or wisdom, we alone were granted an upright frame and a face held aloft by God the maker — which shows plainly that the cults of the gods have nothing to do with human reason, since they force a creature born for heaven to bow down before earthly objects of worship. For our sole Parent, when shaping man — a creature possessed of understanding and reason — lifted him up out of the dust and set him standing to contemplate his own maker. A gifted poet captured this precisely: while all other creatures look bowed toward the earth, man was given a face held high and told to gaze upon the heavens, lifting his eyes upright toward the stars. That is exactly why the Greeks call him ánthrōpos — because he looks upward. Those who look downward instead of up therefore disown themselves and give up any claim to the name of man — unless, that is, they suppose our upright form was given to us for no reason whatsoever. God certainly did not intend for us to look upon the sky for no purpose. Birds do it, after all, and nearly every mute creature can see the sky; but only we were given the particular gift of viewing it while standing firm and upright, so that we might search for religion there, contemplating with the mind — since the eyes cannot manage it — the God whose dwelling that is; something no one does, of course, who instead worships bronze or stone, mere earthly things. It is utterly wrongheaded that while the body's posture — a merely temporary thing — stands upright, the soul, which is everlasting, should be bent low; since our shape and stance signify nothing except that a man's mind ought to look toward whatever his face looks toward, and that the soul should stand as upright as the body, so that the ruling part follows the model set by what it rules. But men, forgetting both their own name and their reason, drop their eyes from on high, fasten them to the ground, and cower before objects shaped by their own hands — as if anything crafted could outrank its own craftsman.
What lunacy is it, then, to mold objects that one will later dread, or to dread objects one has molded oneself? 'It is not the objects themselves we fear,' they say, 'but those beings whose likeness was shaped and whose names were used to consecrate them.' But surely your fear comes from supposing these beings dwell in heaven — for if they truly are gods, nothing else is possible. Heaven lies open above you, and yet your gaze never lifts toward it, your voice never calls their names there, nor do your rites ever unfold beneath that open sky. Why do walls, timber, and stone draw your gaze more than the place where you actually believe they reside? What purpose do temples serve, or altars, or, finally, the statues themselves, which stand as memorials to either the dead or the absent? The whole custom of shaping likenesses was, after all, devised by human beings for one purpose — to hold onto the memory of those removed by death or kept apart by absence. So under which heading shall we file the gods? Among the dead — but then who could be foolish enough to worship them? Among the absent — but then worship makes no sense either, if they can neither watch our deeds nor hear our prayers. And if gods cannot in fact be absent at all — since, being divine, they see and hear everything no matter where in the world they happen to be — then their statues serve no purpose, given that they are already present everywhere; simply speaking their names in prayer to these listeners would be enough. 'But,' comes the reply, 'they are present nowhere except beside their own images.' Precisely — the way ordinary folk imagine the souls of the dead hovering around their graves and the remains of their bodies. Yet once that god has actually arrived in person, his statue serves no further purpose. Consider this: suppose someone repeatedly gazes at a portrait of a man traveling abroad, drawing comfort from it during his absence — would that same person still seem sane if, once the man had returned and stood right there, he kept staring at the portrait and chose it over the sight of the living man himself? Certainly not. So then, a man's portrait seems needed while he is far off, but becomes pointless once he arrives; whereas any image of God — whose power and spirit, poured out everywhere, can never actually be absent — is, without exception, always pointless. But they worry that their whole religion would collapse into emptiness if they had nothing visible before them to worship, and this is why they set up statues — which, being images modeled on the dead, resemble the dead in one respect: they possess no capacity for sensation whatsoever. But whatever represents the everlasting, living God ought itself to be alive and capable of feeling. And if the very word 'image' derives from 'resemblance,' how can objects that neither feel nor stir be judged to resemble God at all? The true image of God, then, is not the thing shaped by human fingers out of stone, bronze, or any other substance, but the human being himself, who feels, moves, and carries out countless significant acts. Nor do these thoroughly foolish men grasp that, had their statues actually been able to feel and move, the statues themselves would have turned around and worshiped the man who carved them — mere rough, jagged stone or shapeless raw matter, had he not given them shape. Man, then, should be reckoned something like their parent, since it was by his hands they came into being and through him they first acquired shape, appearance, and beauty — and so whoever does the making surpasses whatever gets made. Yet nobody looks up to or shows reverence for the maker himself; instead people dread what he has produced — as if the product could somehow outdo its own producer. Seneca puts it well in his Moral Essays: people venerate the statues of the gods, kneel to beg from them, worship them, spend whole days seated or standing at their side, throw coins at them, and slaughter victims for them — and yet, for all this reverence toward the statues, they scorn the very craftsmen who carved them. Could anything be more inconsistent than looking down on the sculptor while bowing to the statue, refusing even to invite to your table the man who fashions your gods for you? What force, then, what capability could these objects possibly possess, when their own maker lacks it himself? He could not even pass on to them the abilities he did possess — sight, hearing, speech, motion. Could anyone really be foolish enough to believe there is something divine within a statue of a god, when it contains nothing even of a man beyond his mere outline? But no one stops to think this through, since they have been poisoned by an empty conviction, and their minds have soaked up folly's venom to the core. So it is that beings who can feel bow to things that cannot, beings gifted with reason bow to things without it, the living bow to the lifeless, and creatures born of heaven bow to mere dirt. So I am moved, as though standing on some high watchtower where everyone could hear me, to shout out that line from Persius: 'O souls bowed toward the earth, empty of anything heavenly!' Turn your gaze upward to the sky instead — the very sight your maker, God, roused you to behold. He gave you a face lifted high, yet you stoop it toward the dirt; minds set high, standing erect toward their own Parent along with your bodies, you push down toward lower things, as if regretting you were not born walking on four legs. It is unfitting for a creature of heaven to be leveled with earthbound things sinking toward the ground. Why strip yourselves of heaven's gifts, bending face-first into the dust of your own free will? Wretched as you are, you wallow on the ground, hunting downward for what you should have sought on high. These frail toys shaped by mortal fingers, made from whatever raw material comes to hand, are nothing but the earth they were born from. Why then submit to things beneath you? Why heap earth on top of your own heads? By bowing yourselves to earth and lowering yourselves beneath it, you plunge yourselves willingly down toward the underworld and sentence yourselves to death, since only death and the underworld rank lower and baser than earth. Should such a fate ever be worth avoiding, scorn for the ground beneath your feet is what it would take, all while your frame stayed upright as it was made — upright so that both eye and mind might be turned together toward the one who fashioned you. And to despise and trample the earth means nothing more than refusing to worship statues, since they are molded from earth, and likewise refusing to crave riches and scorning bodily pleasure, since wealth and the very body we inhabit are themselves earth. Worship the living, so that you may live — for whoever hands over himself and his soul to the dead is bound to die.
But what good does it do to declaim in this fashion to the common crowd and to unlearned men, when we see that even educated and prudent men, though they understand the emptiness of their religions, nevertheless persist, by some perversity, in worshipping those very things they condemn? Cicero understood that what men adored was false. For after saying much that tended toward the overthrow of religion, he still says such matters should not be argued before the public, lest such disputation extinguish the religions publicly received. What is to be done with a man who, though he perceives that he is in error, deliberately dashes himself against the rocks so that the whole people may stumble too, and gouges out his own eyes so that everyone may be blind? He does no good to the others whom he allows to err, none to himself who joins in the errors of others, nor does he finally put to use the good of his own wisdom, to fulfill in deeds what he has grasped in mind; rather, knowingly and deliberately, he puts his foot in the snare, so that he himself, along with the others whom, being wiser, he ought to have freed, is caught as well. Why not rather, Cicero, if you have any courage in you, put the people's wisdom to the test? Here is a cause worthy of exercising all your eloquence — there is no need to fear that your speech would fail you in so good a cause, you who have often defended bad causes copiously and boldly. But no doubt you fear the prison of Socrates, and so you dare not take up the defense of truth. Death itself, being a wise man, was owed your contempt; far nobler would it have been to die for noble words than for base ones, and no Philippic could have won you greater praise than dispelling humanity's error and calling men's minds back to sanity through your own argument. Let us grant, though, that timidity — something a wise man should never harbor: why then do you persist in this very same error? I see you venerating earthly things made by hand: you understand they are empty, and yet you do the same things as those you yourself confess to be utter fools. What good, then, was it that you saw the truth, which you would neither defend nor follow? But even those who perceive that they err, err willingly: how much more the unlearned crowd, which delights in empty pageantry and views everything with childish minds, is charmed by trifles and captivated by the appearance of images, and cannot weigh any single thing within itself so as to understand that nothing perceptible to mortal eyes deserves worship, mortality being its necessary condition. Small wonder, then, that such people fail to see God, when such people do not even see the man whom they believe they see. For what is presented to the eyes is not the man, but the man's receptacle; and its quality and shape are perceived not from the outline of the vessel that contains it, but from deeds and character. Those, then, who worship images are bodies lacking men, because they have given themselves over to bodily things and perceive no more through mind than through flesh, when in truth discerning subtler things beyond the reach of bodily sight belongs properly to the soul's task. That same philosopher and poet gravely accuses such men as base and abject, who, against the reason of their own nature, prostrate themselves before earthly things to be venerated. For he says: they make souls humble through dread of the gods, and press them down, weighed to the ground. When he said this, he certainly meant something else, namely that nothing at all ought to be worshipped, since the gods do not care for human affairs. Indeed, in another place he confesses that religion and the worship of the gods is an empty duty: nor is there any piety in being often seen veiled, turning oneself toward a stone, approaching every altar, falling prostrate on the ground, spreading the palms before the shrines of the gods, sprinkling the altars with the abundant blood of four-footed beasts, or binding vow to vow. If these things are indeed vain, lofty and exalted souls ought not to be called away and pressed down to earth, but should think of nothing but heavenly things. False religions, then, were attacked by the more prudent, because they perceived them to be false, yet nobody advanced the true religion, since its nature and location were alike unknown to them. And so they held it as though there were none at all, because they could not find the true one, and in that way they fell into an error much greater than that of those who held the false one. For those worshippers of frail things, however foolish they are — because they set heavenly things in things corruptible and earthly — nevertheless retain something of wisdom and can be excused, since they hold to the highest duty of man, if not in fact, at least in intention, seeing that the only, or at least the greatest, distinction between men and dumb beasts lies in religion. But these others, the wiser they were in understanding the error of false religion, the more foolish they became in not believing that any true religion existed. And so, since it is easier to judge others' affairs than one's own, while they saw the downfall of others they did not look ahead to what lay before their own feet. In both cases, then, the utmost folly is found, along with a certain whiff of wisdom, so that you might be at a loss which to call the more foolish — those who take up a false religion, or those who take up none. But as I said, indulgence can be granted to the unlearned, who confess that they are not wise; it cannot be granted to those who, professing wisdom, display folly instead. I am not indeed so unfair as to think they ought to have divined the truth by themselves — which I admit could not be done — but I do demand of them what by reason itself they could have provided. For they would have acted more prudently if, understanding that some true religion existed, and having openly attacked the false ones, they had plainly declared that the true one was not held by men. Perhaps, though, this notion swayed them — namely, that a genuine religion, were one to exist, would announce and defend itself, leaving room for nothing else. For they could by no means see why, or by whom, or in what manner the true religion was being suppressed, since that belongs to the divine mystery and heavenly secret; and unless this is taught, no one can know it by any means. Here is the sum of the matter. The unlearned and foolish hold false religions to be true, because they neither know the true one nor understand the false; the more prudent, on the other hand, because they do not know the true one, either persist in those they understand to be false, so as to seem to hold to something, or worship nothing at all, so as not to fall into error — though this very thing is the greatest error of all, to imitate the life of cattle under the shape of a man. Grasping falsehood, to be sure, does mark a kind of wisdom — yet only the human kind; past that point, no man can advance further. And so many philosophers, as I have shown, did away with religions altogether. But to know what is true belongs to divine wisdom; and man cannot reach this knowledge on his own, unless God himself imparts it to him. Hence the philosophers reached what stood as the summit of merely human wisdom: knowing what was not true, without ever managing to state what was true. There is a well-known saying of Cicero's: 'Would that I could find the truth as easily as I can refute what is false.' Since this exceeds the powers of the human condition, the capacity for this task has been given to us, to whom God has handed down the knowledge of truth. The four remaining books will serve to set this out; for now, as we have begun, let us go on exposing what is false.
As for majesty in images — what could they possess, given they existed wholly at the whim of some insignificant human, free either to fashion them or leave them unmade? Hence in Horace, Priapus speaks thus: 'Once I was a fig-wood trunk, useless timber, when the craftsman, uncertain whether to make a bench or a Priapus, chose that I be a god. A god I then became, the greatest terror of thieves and birds.' Who would not feel safe with so mighty a guardian? Thieves, foolishly enough, dread Priapus's rigid member, even though the very birds — which men suppose are driven off by the terror of his sickle or his member — land, build nests, and dirty these craftsman-made images, for all that they closely resemble men. But Horace, as a writer of satiric verse, mocked the vanity of men; yet those who make such things think they are doing something serious. Indeed the greatest of poets, a man prudent in other matters, is foolish in this alone, and foolish not in a poetic but in an old-womanish way, when in those most polished books he even bids this be done: 'and let the guardian of thieves and birds, with his willow sickle, keep watch as the protection of Hellespontine Priapus.' They worship, then, mortal things, or things made by mortals: for these can be broken, burned, or perish. Buildings crumbling with age often shatter them; consumed by fire they fall away into ash; and very often, unless their own great size protects them or careful guarding fences them in, they end up as loot for thieves. Fearing objects that themselves require protection from collapse, flame, or theft — what greater madness could there be? What vanity to hope for any protection from things that cannot protect even themselves? What perversity to run to the aid of things that, when violated, go unavenged unless their own worshippers step in to avenge them! So where does truth reside? It resides where religion faces no force, where nothing stands exposed to violation, where sacrilege has no foothold. But whatever is subject to eyes and hands is, because it is fragile, utterly alien to any reason of immortality. In vain, then, do men adorn and deck out gods with gold, ivory, and jewels, as if indeed they could take any pleasure from such things. What use are costly gifts to beings that feel nothing? Or is it like giving them to the dead? By the same reasoning, the bodies of the deceased are anointed with perfumes and costly garments and wrapped and buried in the ground — in this way men honor gods who neither felt anything when they were being made nor know anything now that they are worshipped; for they did not gain sensation through consecration. Persius did not approve of golden vessels being brought into temples, thinking it superfluous among religious rites, since it is an instrument not of holiness but of greed. It is far better, he says, to bring to a god whom you rightly worship, as an offering, justice and right composed in the mind, the sacred recesses of the soul, and a heart steeped in noble honor. He felt this excellently and wisely. He ridiculously went on to claim this 'temple gold' referred to dolls a young girl offers Venus — trinkets he likely scorned simply for being so small. What escaped his notice was this: those divine statues and figures, shaped in gold and ivory by Polyclitus, Euphranor, and Phidias, amount to nothing but oversized dolls — dedicated, moreover, not by girls, whose playthings deserve some leniency, but by grown, bearded men. Rightly, then, does Seneca also mock this same folly. 'We are not,' he says, 'children twice, as the common saying goes, but always children; the only difference is that we play at bigger games.' So to these playthings, decked out and grown large, men bring perfumes, incense, and spices; to these they sacrifice rich and fat victims, though these have a mouth but lack the function of teeth; to these they present cloaks and expensive apparel, despite their having no need whatsoever for clothing; to these they consecrate gold and silver, which those who receive possess no more than those who gave them. Nor undeservedly did Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, having gained mastery of Greece by victory, hold such gods in contempt, plunder them, and mock them, seeing that he even accompanied his acts of sacrilege with jesting words. For when he had stripped the golden cloak from Olympian Jupiter, he ordered a woolen one put in its place, claiming gold weighed heavy in the summer heat and chilled in winter's cold, whereas wool suited both seasons equally well. The same man, removing the golden beard from Aesculapius, said it was incongruous and unfair that, while his father Apollo was still beardless and smooth, the son should be seen bearded before the father. Likewise he took away the bowls, ornaments, and small figures held out in the images' outstretched hands, saying he was receiving them, not stealing them; since refusing gifts freely offered by those from whom men sought blessings would be both foolish and thankless in the extreme. All this he did with impunity, because he was king and victor; indeed his usual good fortune followed him — for he lived to old age and passed the kingdom on to his son by his own hand. In his case, then, since men could not avenge the sacrileges, the gods themselves should have been their own avengers. Yet if some humble man had done any such thing, whips, fires, racks, crosses, and whatever else angry and raging men could devise stand ready for him. Yet in punishing those caught committing sacrilege, they betray their own doubt in their gods' power. For why do they not leave to the gods themselves, above all, the task of avenging themselves, if they think the gods capable of anything? Indeed they even suppose it happened by the gods' own power that plunderers of sacred things were caught and held, and they rage not so much out of anger as out of fear that, if they do not avenge the wrong done to the gods, the penalty will be sought from themselves — an incredible vanity indeed, to think that the gods will harm them for the crimes of others, when those very gods, by whom they were violated and despoiled, could do nothing to harm the wrongdoers themselves. But, it will be said, often the gods themselves too have taken vengeance on the sacrilegious. This could have happened by chance, as sometimes, though not always, occurs; but I shall show shortly how it happened. For now I ask why the gods did not avenge on Dionysius so many and so great sacrileges, when he held the gods up to mockery not secretly but openly. Why did they not keep this man, so powerful a despoiler of the sacred, away from their temples, their rites, their images? Why, even after sacred objects had been carried off, did he sail prosperously? A fact he himself, jesting as was his habit, testified to: To his fellow travelers, anxious about shipwreck, he remarked: 'Notice, would you, just how fair a crossing the immortal gods grant to plunderers of temples?' But perhaps he had learned from Plato that the gods are nothing. What of Gaius Verres, whom Cicero, prosecuting him, likens to this very Dionysius, to Phalaris, and to tyrants generally? Did Verres not strip Sicily bare, hauling off divine images together with the shrines' ornaments? It would be tedious to go through every instance; let one be recalled, in which the accuser, with all the powers of his eloquence, with every effort of voice and body, lamented over Ceres — whether of Catina or of Enna: of the one, so great was the religious awe that it was forbidden for men even to enter the secret inner sanctuary of her temple; of the other, so great the antiquity that all histories say the goddess herself first discovered grain on the soil of Enna, and that her virgin daughter was carried off from that very place. Indeed, in the Gracchan period, when the republic was disturbed by seditions and portents, and it was found in the Sibylline verses that the most ancient Ceres must be appeased, envoys were sent to Enna. This Ceres, then — either most sacred, whom it was not even lawful for men to see for the sake of worship, or most ancient, whom the Roman senate and people had propitiated with sacrifices and gifts — was carried off with impunity from her secret and ancient inner shrine by slave brigands sent in by Gaius Verres. And when this same man, asserting that the Sicilians had begged him to take up the cause of the province, used these words: that they no longer even had gods in their own cities to whom they might flee for refuge, since Gaius Verres had carried off their most sacred images from their most revered shrines — as though stripping these gods from their cities and temples somehow banished them from the heavens too. From which it is clear that these gods have nothing more in them than the material out of which they were fashioned. Nor undeservedly did the Sicilians take refuge with you, Marcus Tullius — that is, with a man — since for three years they had learned by experience that those gods were worth nothing; for they would have been most foolish to flee for the defense of human wrongs to gods who could not even be angry on their own behalf against Gaius Verres. But, it will be said, Verres was condemned for these crimes. It was not the gods, then, who took vengeance, but the diligence of Cicero, by which he either crushed Verres's defenders or withstood their influence. What of the fact that for Verres himself this amounted less to a conviction than to a reprieve, so that, just as the immortal gods had granted Dionysius, carrying off the spoils of the gods, a good voyage, so too they seem to have granted Verres a good rest, in which he could enjoy his sacrileges in tranquility? For afterward, amid the burning civil wars, sheltered under the pretext of his condemnation from all danger and fear, he heard of the grave and pitiable ends of others, and he who alone seemed to have fallen while all others stood, in fact stood alone while all others fell, until the triumviral proscription — the very same that carried off Cicero, the avenger of the gods' violated majesty — carried him off too, glutted with plunder wrung from sacrilege, and by then worn down with age and long living. Indeed he was fortunate in this one respect: news reached him, before his own death, of his accuser's brutal end — the gods, no doubt, providentially arranging that this sacrilegious plunderer of their own religion should not die before he had taken the comfort of that vengeance.
So it is far wiser to set aside these senseless, empty things and fix one's gaze instead on the seat and home of the true God — he who hung the earth on a stable footing, scattered the sky with burning stars, and lit the sun as mankind's brightest and only such light, a token of his singular majesty; who wrapped the lands in seas, ordered the rivers into their unending flow, and bid the plains stretch wide, the valleys settle low, the woods dress themselves in leaves, and the stony peaks climb upward. None of that, to be sure, is Jupiter's doing — Jupiter, born a bare seventeen hundred years back — but the work of that true craftsman, the source from which a better world sprang, the one we name God, whose origin, being beyond our grasp, should not even be probed. For a man's wisdom to be whole and complete, it is enough that he grasp God's existence. The full weight of that grasp comes down to this: to revere and honor the shared father of humankind, the maker of marvels. From here comes the folly of those dull, thick-hearted souls who bow before the elements themselves as gods, though these are mere made things devoid of any feeling. Struck by wonder at God's handiwork — the sky strewn with its lights, the ground spread with plain and peak, the sea threaded with rivers, pools, and springs — such people, dazed by what they beheld and forgetting the unseen craftsman behind it, fell to worshiping his handiwork instead, never grasping how far greater and more astonishing is the one who made all this from nothing. Although they can see these things obey divine law and serve, under an unbroken compulsion, man's needs and uses, still they count them as gods — thankless toward heaven's gifts, having placed their own handiwork over the most generous of fathers, God himself. Yet should it surprise anyone that savages or the untaught stumble this way, when Stoic philosophers hold the identical view — reckoning that whatever moves in the heavens deserves a place among the gods? Lucilius the Stoic puts it this way in Cicero's pages: 'I cannot fathom such steadiness among the stars, such vast harmony of the seasons across so many differing paths through all of time, apart from mind, reason, and plan; and because we observe these qualities in the heavenly bodies, we are forced to number them, too, among the gods.' Shortly before this he had said: 'What remains,' he says, 'is that the stars move by their own will; whoever grasps this yet still denies gods exist commits not mere ignorance but impiety.' We, however, deny it outright, and we judge you philosophers not simply unlearned and impious but blind, foolish, and out of your senses — you who have surpassed the ignorant in vanity while claiming to correct their ignorance. They take the sun and moon for gods; you go further and make gods of the stars as well. Give us, then, the secret rites of the stars, so we might build each one its altar and shrine, so we might learn the proper ritual, the proper day, the proper names and prayers for honoring each — unless, perhaps, we are meant to lump together, with no distinctions drawn, this endless swarm of trifling deities. And notice: the very reasoning by which they conclude all heavenly bodies are divine actually undoes their case. If they suppose the stars are gods because their courses are fixed and orderly, they are mistaken — for that very fact reveals they are not gods, since they lack any freedom to depart from their set paths. Were they truly gods, they would roam wherever they liked, unconstrained, the way living creatures roam the earth — for such creatures, having free will, wander at whim, each pulled along by its own mind. The stars, then, move not by choice but by necessity, bound to serve the duties and laws laid upon them. Yet Lucilius, reasoning from the very match between events and seasons, understood their courses could not be accidental, and from that concluded they must be willed — as if such steady, ordered movement were impossible unless the stars themselves knew their own task. How hard the truth proves for the unlearned, and how simple for those who understand! 'If the stars' motion,' he claims, 'is not accidental, then nothing is left but that it be willed.' Not so — it is exactly as plain that it is not willed as that it is not accidental. 'How, then, do they hold to such constancy in finishing their courses?' The answer is plain: God, the universe's craftsman, so arranged and engineered them that they trace their paths through the sky's expanse by a design both divine and astonishing, so as to bring about the seasons in their turning succession. Consider: if Archimedes of Syracuse could shape, from hollow bronze, a model bearing the universe's very likeness — fitting sun and moon within it so that, day by day, they traced uneven motions mirroring the heavens' own turning, showing not just the sun's advance and retreat or the moon's growth and shrinking but even the varied paths of fixed and wandering stars as that sphere revolved — could God not have brought into real existence the very things a man's cleverness merely managed to copy in imitation? Suppose that Stoic saw those star-shapes painted and cast in that bronze sphere — would he claim they moved by their own intention rather than by their maker's skill? There is, then, in the stars an order suited to running their courses, yet that reasoning belongs to God, who made and rules everything, not to the stars, which simply move. Had he wished the sun to halt, day would surely last forever; likewise, were the stars motionless, who would doubt night would never end? But to bring about the alternation of day and night, he chose to set them moving, and moving so variously that there would result not only the exchange of light for dark, marking off set stretches for labor and for rest, but also of heat and cold, so that each season's particular force might serve either the sprouting or the ripening of crops. Because the philosophers failed to perceive this cleverness of divine power behind the stars' courses, they took the stars for living creatures, as though moved by their own feet and choice rather than by God's design. Yet who fails to see why God devised things this way? Clearly so that, once the sun's light withdrew, night would not press down unbearably with blinding, grim, dreadful blackness and so bring harm to living creatures. And so he both painted the sky at a stroke with astonishing variety and softened the darkness itself with countless small lights. How much more sensibly, then, did Ovid speak than those who fancy themselves devoted to wisdom, when he saw that those lights had been set there by God to banish the terror of the dark! In the work where he briefly lays out the Phaenomena, he closed with these three lines: 'So many likenesses, of such shape, has God fixed upon the sky, and scattering them through the black dark, bid them cast their clear glow upon the frost-bound night.' But if the stars cannot possibly be gods, then neither can sun or moon be gods, for they are set apart from the stars' light not by kind but merely by size. And if none of these are gods, then the sky that holds them all cannot be one either. In just the same way, if the earth we walk on, plow, and work down to its depths is not God, then plains and mountains cannot be gods either; and if not, the whole earth cannot be taken for a god. Likewise, if water — which serves living creatures for drinking or washing — is not God, then neither are the springs it flows from; and if springs are not gods, neither are the rivers they feed; and if rivers, too, are not gods, then the sea that those rivers form cannot be reckoned God either. But if sky, earth, and sea — each a portion of the universe — cannot be gods, then the universe entire is no god either, though these very Stoics insist it is both a living, thinking being and, on that account, divine. On this point their own logic has turned against itself so thoroughly that nothing they claim survives their own arguments. Here is how they reason: it cannot be that something which, of itself, produces sentient beings should lack sentience itself; the universe produces man, who has sentience; therefore the universe itself has sentience. Similarly: nothing can lack sentience if one of its parts possesses it; and since man has sentience, the universe, of which man is supposedly a part, must have it too. The premises hold true enough — that whatever begets a sentient being must itself be sentient, and that whatever has a sentient part must itself have sentience — but the assumption feeding their conclusion is false, since the universe does not beget man, nor is man part of the universe. It was, in fact, the very same God who made man and the universe alike from the start, and man does not belong to the universe as a limb belongs to a body — the universe can perfectly well exist without man, the way a city or a house can exist without any single occupant. Rather, just as a house shelters one man and a city shelters one people, so the universe shelters the whole of humankind; and the thing inhabited is one matter, the thing that inhabits, quite another. Yet these Stoics, busy trying to prop up their false premise that the universe is both sentient and divine, never noticed where their own logic would lead them. For if man is part of the universe, and the universe has sentience because man senses — then, since man is mortal, the universe must be mortal too by strict necessity, and not merely mortal but liable to every disease and passion besides. Conversely, if the universe is God, its parts must surely be immortal, which would make man a god too, since they call him a part of the universe. And if man is a god, then cattle, beasts, every kind of animal, bird, and fish must be gods as well, since they sense in just the same way and are equally parts of the universe. That much could almost be tolerated — the Egyptians, after all, do worship such creatures. But the logic runs on until even frogs, gnats, and ants must count as gods, since they too have sentience and belong to the universe. Such is always the fate of arguments built on a false foundation: they end in nonsense and absurdity. And consider this too — these same men claim the universe was constructed for the benefit of gods and men alike, as though it were some house held in common. But then the universe can be neither God nor a living thing, if it was constructed — for a living being is not constructed but born; and if it was built, then surely it was built the way any house or ship is built. There must, then, exist some god who crafted the universe, making the thing made one matter and its maker another. How self-contradicting and absurd it is, further, that while they insist the fires of heaven and the universe's other elements are gods, they simultaneously call the whole universe, taken together, God! How can one single god be assembled out of a stockpile of many gods? If the stars are gods, the universe cannot be God but only the gods' dwelling place. Yet if the universe is God, then everything within it is not gods at all but merely parts of God — and mere parts surely cannot rightly claim the title of god on their own. No one, after all, would rightly call the many limbs of one man many separate men. Still, the comparison between a living creature and the universe does not really hold, for a living creature, being endowed with sentience, has limbs that share in that sentience too, going senseless only once severed from the body. What, then, does the universe truly resemble? The Stoics themselves make it plain when they admit it was made — made so as to serve, in effect, as a shared dwelling for gods and men together. If, then, it was constructed the way a house is, then neither the universe nor the elements composing it can be God, since a house cannot govern itself, nor can the materials that make it up. So it is not only plain truth but their own words that undo them. For just as a house, built to be lived in, senses nothing on its own and stands under the authority of whoever built or occupies it, so the universe, sensing nothing by itself, stands under the authority of the God who fashioned it, made for God's own purposes.
The unwise, then, sin in a twofold manner: first by ranking the elements — that is, what God has made — above God himself, and second by adoring those same elements once shaped into human form. So they fashion images of sun and moon cast as human figures, and likewise of fire, earth, and the sea, giving these the names Vulcan, Vesta, and Neptune, and never make offering to the bare elements out in the open. Such a craze for images has taken hold of men that the genuine articles are now counted cheap by comparison: naturally, what delights them instead is gold, gems, and ivory. Dazzled by the shine and beauty of such things, they imagine no religion can exist wherever these fail to glitter. In this way, greed and covetousness get worshiped under cover of the gods' names. For they suppose the gods crave exactly what they themselves crave — and this very craving is what fuels daily theft, murder, and banditry, and drives wars that topple peoples and cities the world over. So they dedicate their loot and plunder to these gods — gods who must plainly be feeble and short of the highest virtue, given that greed can master them. Why, after all, should we call them heavenly if they hunger after earthly things, or blessed if something is lacking to them, or incorruptible if they delight in the very objects whose pursuit rightly earns human greed its condemnation? People approach their gods, then, less for religion's sake — which can have no place at all amid ill-gotten, perishable goods — than to drink in gold with their eyes, to admire the sheen of smoothed marble or ivory, and to handle, with an appetite that never tires of looking, robes set with gems and colors or cups studded with gleaming stones. The more lavishly a temple is decked out, the more beautiful its statues, the greater the majesty people credit it with — proof enough that their religion amounts to nothing but what human greed finds admirable. Such are the rites men inherit from their forebears and cling to defending with the utmost stubbornness, never asking what these rites truly are, but trusting them as genuine and proven on this single ground: that the ancients passed them down. Antiquity carries such weight as authority that merely questioning it is treated as a crime, and so it is accepted everywhere as though it were an already-settled truth. In Cicero's dialogue, Cotta addresses Lucilius thus: 'There, Balbus, is what Cotta the priest thinks. Now let me hear your own view: from you, as a philosopher, I expect a reasoned case for religion, whereas from our forebears I am meant to take belief on faith with no reason offered at all.' If belief is what you have, why then demand a reason — a reason that might just as easily undo that belief? But if you hold that a reason must be sought, then you do not truly believe, since seeking is exactly what one does in order to follow the reason once it is found. Notice: reason now shows you that the gods' rites are not genuine — so what will you do? Will you side with your forebears, or instead with the reasoning that came not from someone else's prompting but from your own discovery, once you had torn every religion up by its roots? Choose reason, and you must break from your ancestors' customs and authority, since only what reason dictates can be right; choose loyalty to your forebears instead, and you must admit that they were fools who served rites invented against reason, and that you are a fool too, honoring what you yourself have shown to be false. Yet our opponents keep hurling the weight of ancestral authority against us with such insistence, so let us at last ask who these ancestors were — the very men whose sanction supposedly makes abandoning their ways an unpardonable crime. When Romulus set out to found his city, he called together the herdsmen among whom he had been raised; and finding their numbers too thin for building a city, he set up a sanctuary for refugees. Into this place poured, from every direction, the worst men from the surrounding country, taken in without regard to their standing. Out of this mixed crowd he welded together a people, and for his senate he picked out the eldest among them, naming them fathers, so that all business would be conducted by their counsel. Propertius the elegist writes of this senate: 'A horn once summoned the early Quirites to assembly; a hundred men, the senate often convened in a meadow. The senate-house, now gleaming aloft with its purple-clad members, once held fathers dressed in hides, men of rustic heart.' Such were the fathers whose rulings learned and careful men now serve with such utter devotion, treating as true and unalterable for all future generations whatever a hundred hide-clad old men happened to decide — men who, as noted in the first book, Numa Pompilius tricked into believing genuine the rites he himself was inventing. Does it really make sense that later ages should hold their authority in such esteem — men whom, while alive, no one, however high or low his station, thought fit even to marry into?
Therefore, above all in the matter where the whole course of life hangs in the balance, each person ought to trust himself, relying on his own judgment and his own perceptions to search out and weigh the truth—rather than be deceived through trust in the errors of others, as if he himself possessed no share of reason. God has given to all, in due measure, wisdom, so that they might both investigate what they have not heard and weigh what they have heard. Nor does it follow that those who came before us in time came before us in wisdom as well; nor that wisdom is somehow used up by those who came first, if indeed it is given equally to all; it cannot be seized and held, any more than the light and brightness of the sun can be, since as the sun is to the eyes, so wisdom is the light of the human heart. Since, then, to be wise—that is, to seek the truth—is innate in everyone, those strip themselves of wisdom who accept the discoveries of their forebears without any judgment of their own, and let themselves be led by others as cattle are led. But this is where they go wrong: once the name of 'ancestors' has been set up, they think it impossible either that they themselves should understand more, simply because they are called their juniors, or that those others should have erred, simply because they are called their elders. What, then, prevents us from taking our example from those very people—so that just as they handed down to later generations the falsehoods they had found, we, having found the truth, might hand down better things to those who come after us? There remains a great question, one whose treatment comes not from native wit but from learning, and it must be unfolded at length so that nothing at all is left in doubt. For perhaps someone will take refuge in the claim, handed down by many authors of unquestioned standing, that these very beings whom we have shown not to be gods have very often displayed their majesty through prodigies, dreams, auguries, and oracles. And indeed many things worthy of wonder can be listed. First, that when Attus Navius, the greatest of augurs, warned Tarquinius Priscus to undertake nothing new without first taking the auspices, and the king, making light of the credibility of his art, told him to announce, after consulting the birds, whether what he himself had conceived in his mind could be done, and Navius affirmed that it could—'Take, then,' said the king, 'this whetstone, and cut it in two with a razor.' And Navius took it without hesitation and cut it. Then there is the tale that Castor and Pollux were seen at the Lake of Juturna during the Latin war, washing the sweat from their horses, when the shrine dedicated to them, which stood next to the spring, opened of its own accord. That same pair, riding white horses, reportedly appeared during the war against Macedon to Publius Vatienus as he journeyed toward Rome by night, announcing that King Perseus had been defeated and taken captive that very day—a report a letter from Paulus confirmed as true a few days afterward. It is also told as marvelous that the statue of Fortuna Muliebris spoke more than once, and likewise that of Juno Moneta: when Veii had been captured and one of the soldiers, sent to move the statue, jokingly and in play asked her whether she wished to move to Rome, she answered that she wished it. Claudia too is put forward as an example of a wonder. For when, at the bidding of the Sibylline Books, the Idaean Mother was on her way to Rome, the vessel bearing her stuck fast among the shallows of the Tiber, resisting every effort to shift it; it is said that Claudia—a woman always suspected of unchastity because of her excessive care for her looks—knelt down and begged the goddess that, should she judge her pure, the ship would follow her sash; and so the craft, which the whole young manhood of the city had failed to stir, was drawn along by this one woman alone. Equally wondrous is the story that, when a plague raged, Aesculapius was summoned from Epidaurus and is said to have freed the city of Rome from a long-standing pestilence. Cases of sacrilege, too, can be counted, in which the gods are believed to have avenged their own wrong through punishments visited on the offenders in plain sight. Appius Claudius the censor, when he transferred the rites of Hercules to the public slaves, was struck blind, and the family of the Potitii, who had betrayed the rite, was wiped out within a single year. Likewise the censor Fulvius, when he stripped marble tiles from the temple of Juno Lacinia to roof the temple of Fortuna Equestris that he had built at Rome, both lost his mind and, after losing two sons serving in Illyricum, was consumed by the deepest grief of spirit. Turullius, prefect of the fleet under Mark Antony, when he cut timber for his fleet in the sacred grove of Aesculapius at Cos, was later killed by Caesar's soldiers on that very spot. To these examples is added Pyrrhus, who, after taking money from the treasury of Proserpina at Locri, was shipwrecked and dashed upon the shores near the goddess's temple, so that nothing survived intact except that money. Ceres of Miletus likewise grew greatly in the esteem men held for her: after Alexander's forces took the city and soldiers rushed in to plunder her temple, a sudden blaze of light struck every one of them blind. Dreams too are cited which seem to show forth the power of the gods. For Jupiter is said to have appeared in sleep to a plebeian named Tiberius Atinius and instructed him to report to the consuls and senate that the leader of the dance at the last Circus games had displeased him, because a certain Autronius Maximus had led a slave who had been flogged, yoked under the fork, through the middle of the circus to punishment, and that the games therefore ought to be held again; and when he neglected this, he lost his son that very day and was himself seized by a grave illness; and when the same vision came to him again, asking whether he had suffered punishment enough for scorning its bidding, men bore him on a litter into the presence of the consuls; and once the entire affair had been set before the senate, his body was restored to health and he walked home unaided. That dream, too, was no less wondrous, by which Caesar Augustus is said to have been saved. For when, caught up in the civil war against Brutus, he had decided, being gravely ill, to stay out of the battle, a vision of Minerva appeared to his physician Artorius, warning that Caesar ought not, on account of his bodily weakness, to remain in the camp. And so he was carried on a litter into the battle line, and that same day the camp was captured by Brutus. Many further examples of this kind might still be adduced, yet I worry that dwelling too long on laying out these opposing cases would make me seem to have strayed from my subject, or else open me to a charge of empty talkativeness.
I will now lay out a reasoned account of all this, so that these difficult and obscure matters can be grasped more readily, and I will strip away every trick of the counterfeit divinity that has led men to stray far off the road of truth. But my starting point will lie much further back, so that a reader who comes to this without any prior grounding in the truth can be taught, and can finally understand what stands as the root and cause of these evils—and once the light has reached him, can see plainly both his own failings and those of humankind as a whole. God, supreme in devising and supreme in executing, was on the point of undertaking this work of the world; and because the wellspring of complete and perfect goodness resided in him, as it always does, so that goodness might rise from him like a river and pour out far and wide, he generated a spirit resembling himself, one furnished with the powers belonging to God the Father. In what manner he willed this to happen, we shall attempt to set out in the fourth book. After that he made a second being, and in this one the mark of divine descent did not hold firm. Poisoned, so to speak, by envy welling up from within, this being slid from good toward evil, and of his own free choice—a choice God himself had granted him without constraint—he assumed a name that stood opposed to what he had been. From this episode it becomes plain that envy is the wellspring from which every evil flows. He envied the one who had gone before him, a being who through steadfastness both earns approval and is cherished by God the Father. This former-good-now-evil being the Greeks name diabolos, and among us he is called the accuser, since he lays before God the very offenses into which he himself lures mankind. So then, once he had taken up the construction of the world, God placed this first and greatest Son in charge over the entire undertaking, employing him at once as adviser and as craftsman for devising, arranging, and bringing every part to completion, since this Son is complete in foresight, in reasoning power, and in strength. I speak of him now only briefly, because his power, his title, and his nature call for fuller treatment elsewhere. Let nobody ask out of what raw materials God fashioned works of such magnitude and wonder, since he made all of it from nothing at all. Nor should anyone give ear to the poets who claim that chaos existed at the outset—that is, a jumble of things and elements all mixed together—and that God only later split apart that whole heap, sorting each piece out of the tangled mass, ranging them into order, and so both equipped and beautified the world. Such people fail to grasp God's power, imagining that he could accomplish nothing except by working from material already lying ready at hand; and this response is an easy one to give them. Even philosophers stumbled into the same mistake. Cicero, for instance, when treating the nature of the gods, writes this: "In the first place, then, it is not likely that the matter out of which everything sprang was itself produced by divine foresight; rather, it possesses, and has always possessed, force and character of its own. Just as a builder, when he means to construct something, does not manufacture the material himself but makes use of what lies ready, and just as a modeler works the same way with clay, so too divine providence needed matter on hand—not matter it created, but matter it simply found available. But if matter was not fashioned by God, then neither were earth, water, air, and fire made by him." How many flaws crowd into these ten lines! First, this is the very man who elsewhere, across almost every one of his disputations and books, championed providence and attacked with his sharpest arguments those who denied it existed—yet here he attempts, like some turncoat or deserter, to do away with providence altogether. Should one wish to argue against him on this point, no thought or labor is even required; his own words can simply be read back to him, for no one could refute Cicero more forcefully than Cicero refutes himself. Yet let us concede this much to the Academics and their habitual method, that people of thoroughly independent mind be allowed to say and think whatever they please—let us instead weigh the claims themselves. He says it is not probable that matter was made by God. What proof do you offer for that? You have said nothing to establish why it should be improbable. To me, on the contrary, it seems entirely probable—and not on a whim, either, once I consider that something greater must reside in God than the powerless figure you reduce him to, granting him nothing beyond mere craftsmanship. In what, then, would that divine force differ from a human being, if, like a man, God too stood in need of borrowed help? And he would indeed need such help if he could accomplish nothing unless matter were handed to him by another. If that were so, his power would plainly be incomplete, and the one who supplied the matter would have to be judged more powerful still. By what name, then, would we call the being who surpasses God in power? For it counts as greater to produce one's own materials than merely to arrange what belongs to someone else. But if nothing can possibly be more powerful than God—and God must necessarily be complete in power, in reason, and in capability—then the very one who fashions matter must also be the one who fashions everything composed from that matter. Nothing could or should exist without God either making it or consenting to it. But, he says, it is probable that matter both has and has always had its own force and character. What force could it possess with no one to give it, what character with nothing to generate it? If it possessed force, it took that force from something else—and from whom could it take it, if not from God? If it possessed character, which by definition comes from being born, then it was born—and by whom, if not by God, could it have been brought forth? For nature, from which you claim everything arose, produces nothing at all if it lacks intelligence; yet if it has the capacity to generate and to make, then it necessarily possesses intelligence, and for that very reason must be God, since no other name can be given to a force that combines foresight in devising with the skill and capability to make. On this point Seneca, sharpest of all the Stoics, saw better, recognizing that nature is nothing other than God himself. "Shall we then," he asks, "withhold praise from God because his virtue is inborn rather than learned from anyone else? No—we shall praise him all the more, for though that virtue is inborn, he is the one who gave it to himself, since God himself simply is nature." So then, when you credit nature with the origin of things while stripping that credit from God, you are floundering in the same mire, Geta, twisting back to confess under a different name the very thing you denied under the first: whatever you say cannot come from him, you plainly admit does come from him once you rename it. There follows a wretchedly weak comparison. As a builder, Cicero says, does not himself manufacture his materials when constructing something, but uses what is ready to hand—and a modeler works the same way with clay—so too divine providence needed matter close at hand, not matter of its own making but matter already prepared. No, quite the opposite is true: God would then be of lesser power if he worked from something already supplied, which is exactly the human condition. A builder without timber builds nothing, because he cannot produce the timber itself; and that incapacity belongs to human weakness. God, however, makes his own material precisely because he is able to—capability is what defines deity, for a being unable to do this would not be God at all. A human being works from what already exists because mortality renders him weak, and that weakness confines him to a fixed and modest degree of power; God, by contrast, works from what does not yet exist because eternity renders him strong, and that strength grants him boundless capability, limitless as his own life, with neither bound nor measure. Why, then, is it any wonder that God, intending to build the world, first prepared the very matter from which he would build it, and prepared it out of nothing? For it would be an outrage for God to borrow anything from outside himself, given that everything exists from him or within him. Were something to exist prior to him, were anything at all to be made by a hand other than his own, he would immediately forfeit the very power and title of deity. For if matter was never made — just as God, who formed this world out of matter, was not — then two eternal and mutually opposed principles stand established. And that arrangement cannot hold without conflict and ruin, since two forces of differing character and force must inevitably collide. Both, then, cannot remain eternal if they stand against each other, for one must necessarily overcome the other. It follows that whatever is eternal must be single in nature, so that everything else might descend from it as from a single source. Either, then, God arose out of matter, or matter arose out of God—and which of these is closer to the truth is not hard to see. Of these two, one can perceive and sense, the other cannot. The power to bring something into being belongs only to what senses, what understands, what thinks, what moves. Nothing can be begun, made, or brought to completion unless reason has foreseen both the manner of its making before it exists and the manner of its persisting once it has been made. In short, the one who makes something is the one who has both the will to make it and the hands to carry that will through. But whatever lacks sensation lies inert and lifeless forever; nothing can spring from a thing where no voluntary motion exists. Since every living creature depends on reason, it plainly cannot be born from something devoid of reason, nor can something be drawn from a source where that thing is simply absent. Nor should anyone raise the objection that certain creatures seem to spring out of the soil — for it is not the earth by itself that produces them, but the spirit of God, apart from which nothing at all is generated. God, therefore, cannot have arisen from matter, since a sensing being cannot possibly spring from an insensible one, a rational being from a brute one, an impassible being from a passible one, a bodiless being from a bodily one; matter, rather, must derive from God. Whatever exists as solid, tangible body receives its force from outside itself; whatever receives force in this way is subject to dissolution; whatever can dissolve will eventually perish; whatever perishes must necessarily have had a beginning; and whatever had a beginning had some source from which it arose—that is, some maker endowed with sense, foresight, and the skill to make. That maker can be none other than God. Since he possesses sense, reason, foresight, capability, and power, he is able both to create living beings and to fashion lifeless ones, because he understands the proper method for making each. Matter, on the other hand, cannot have existed forever, since if it had, it could undergo no change at all—for what has always existed never ceases to exist, and where a beginning has never been present, an end cannot be present either. Indeed it is more plausible that something with a beginning should lack an end than that something lacking a beginning should possess one. If, then, matter was never made, nothing at all can be made out of it; and if nothing can be made from it, it does not even qualify as matter, since matter by definition is that from which something is made. Whatever a thing is made from is destroyed and becomes something else the moment it undergoes the maker's shaping hand. Since matter reached its end at the very point the world was fashioned from it, matter must also have had a beginning. For whatever is destroyed had first been constructed; whatever is dissolved had first been bound together; whatever is brought to an end had first been begun. If, then, we can infer from matter's transformation and termination that it once had a starting point, by whose hand could it have been brought about except God's? God alone, therefore, is the one who was never made, and for that reason he alone can destroy other things while himself remaining beyond destruction. He will endure forever exactly as he is, because he was generated from nothing outside himself, and his origin and birth depend on no other thing capable of changing and dissolving him. He exists entirely from himself, as we stated in the first book, and is therefore exactly what he willed himself to be: incapable of suffering, unchangeable, incorruptible, blessed, eternal. Now consider the conclusion with which Cicero closes his argument—far more absurd still. As he puts it: deny that God shaped matter, and you must likewise deny that earth, water, air, and fire were his handiwork. How cleverly he slid past the real danger! He had earlier taken up that premise as though it needed no proof, even though it stood far less certain than the very point he used it to establish. Deny that God fashioned matter, he claims, and you must equally deny that God fashioned the cosmos. He preferred to draw a false conclusion from a false premise rather than a true one from a true premise, and though uncertain claims ought to be proven from certain ones, here he drew his proof from an uncertain claim in order to overturn something that was in fact certain. That the world is the product of divine foresight—leaving aside Trismegistus, who proclaims exactly this, leaving aside the Sibylline verses, which announce the same thing, leaving aside the prophets, who with one breath and one voice bear witness to the world's workmanship and craftsmanship by God—is agreed upon by nearly every school of philosophers as well: the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Peripatetics, which together make up the chief disciplines of thought. Indeed, from those original seven sages down to Socrates and to Plato, it was taken as settled and beyond doubt, until, many generations later, a single deranged figure emerged—Epicurus—bold enough to deny what stood most evident, purely out of a hunger for novelty, so that a school might carry his name. Finding nothing genuinely new to offer, yet still wished to appear to differ from everyone else, he chose instead to demolish the old—an effort in which every philosopher who barked back at him from every side exposed his error. It is therefore more certain that the world was fitted together by providence than that matter was compacted together by providence. One should not, then, deny the cosmos its divine origin simply because its underlying matter lacks a proven divine origin; rather, the world's plain dependence on providence should lead us to conclude that its matter, too, owes its existence to that same divine hand. Reason favors crediting God with matter's origin—since nothing lies beyond his capability—far more than it favors stripping God of credit for the cosmos, given that nothing whatsoever can arise apart from mind, reasoning, and deliberate design. Yet the fault here lies not with Cicero but with his school. Having taken up an argument meant to dismantle the nature of the gods—a subject on which the philosophers endlessly chattered—he judged, out of ignorance of the truth, that all divinity ought to be swept away together. He could indeed sweep away "the gods," since they never existed in the first place; but when he tried to overturn the divine providence residing in the one true God, because he had set himself against truth itself, his arguments gave out and he necessarily tumbled into this pit, with no way to climb back out. Here, then, I hold him fast, pinned and unable to move, since Lucilius, who argued the opposing side, fell utterly silent. This is the hinge on which the whole matter turns; everything revolves around this single point. Let Cotta free himself from this whirlpool if he can—let him produce arguments to show that matter existed always, shaped by no providence at all, and let him demonstrate how anything heavy and solid could either exist without a maker or undergo change, ceasing to be what it had always been so as to become what it had never been. Should he manage to prove that, I will then, and only then, concede that the world too was not established by divine providence—and even then I would grant it only while holding him fast in other snares. For he will be forced back, against his own will, into claiming that both matter, from which the world derives, and the world, which derives from matter, sprang up by nature—while I will maintain that this very nature simply is God. Nothing capable of marvels—that is, nothing governed by the highest reason—can act without possessing mind, foresight, and power. And so it follows that God made everything, and nothing whatsoever can exist that did not trace its origin back to God. Yet this same man, whenever he plays the Epicurean and refuses to grant that the world was made by God, likes to demand what hands, what machines, what levers, what workforce could ever have raised so vast a construction. Perhaps you would have seen for yourself, had you been able to exist at the moment it was made. But so that man could not witness God's handiwork directly, God chose not to introduce him into this world until every part of it stood complete. In truth he could not have been introduced any earlier at all: how could he have survived while the sky was still being built overhead and the earth still being laid down below, while moist elements, perhaps, were still congealing under extreme cold or hardening and solidifying under fiery heat? Or how could he have lived before the sun was even set in place, before crops or animals yet existed? It was therefore necessary that man be formed last, only once the finishing touch had already been applied to the world and to everything else within it. And indeed the sacred scriptures teach precisely this: man came last among God's works, ushered into a dwelling already raised and fully furnished for him—since everything else existed for his sake. Even the poets admit as much. Ovid, once the world stood complete and every living creature had been shaped, adds this: "A creature more sacred than these, and capable of a loftier mind, was still lacking—one fit to hold dominion over the rest—and so man came to be." It must be reckoned wrong, then, to pry into matters God intended to keep hidden. Cicero's own inquiry, however, sprang not from any eagerness to learn but from a wish to refute, since he was confident nobody could answer it—as though the impossibility of describing exactly how these things were made should be taken as proof that they were not divinely made at all. Suppose you had grown up inside a house built and decorated with great skill, yet had never once witnessed any construction: would you conclude that the house had not been built by human hands, simply because you had no idea how it had been built? Surely you would put to that house the very question you now put to the world: what hands, what tools could ever have achieved work on such a scale—especially if you were looking at massive stones, immense blocks, towering columns, the entire structure raised up sublime and lofty. Would this not seem to you to exceed the bounds of ordinary human strength, precisely because you would have no idea that it had been achieved not so much through brute force as through reason and skilled craft? And if a human being—in whom nothing is perfect—can nonetheless accomplish through reason far more than his limited strength alone would allow, why should it strike you as unbelievable that the world is said to have been made by God, in whom, precisely because he is perfect, neither his wisdom knows any limit nor his strength any measure? We see his works plainly with our eyes, yet by what means he produced them is beyond even the reach of the mind to grasp, because—as Hermes puts it—the mortal cannot draw near the immortal, the temporal cannot draw near the eternal, the corruptible cannot draw near the incorrupt, meaning it cannot come close enough for understanding to follow. And so a creature still bound to earth cannot take in a clear view of heavenly matters, because it remains hemmed in, as though under guard, by its own body, and is thereby kept from perceiving all things with a sense set free and unbound. Let it be understood, then, how foolish it is to go searching after things that cannot be put into words—for that is nothing less than overstepping the limits of one's own condition, failing to grasp how far it is permitted for a human being to advance. Indeed, when God opened truth to mankind, he chose that we should know only what mattered for a person to know in pursuit of life; whatever pertained instead to idle and unlawful curiosity he kept silent about, so that it might remain hidden. Why, then, do you go searching for things you cannot know—and would gain no greater happiness from knowing even if you could? Wisdom reaches its completion in a human being once that person recognizes both that God is one and that everything in existence was made by him.
Now that we have refuted those who think otherwise about the world and about God its maker than the truth holds, let us return to the divine construction of the world, as it is handed down in the hidden writings of holy religion. God, then, made the heaven before all else, and raised it aloft to serve as the dwelling-place of God its own founder. Next he laid the foundation of the earth and set it beneath the heaven, so that man, together with the other kinds of living creatures, might dwell upon it. This he willed to be encircled and held together by moisture. But his own abode he marked apart and filled with radiant lights: he adorned it with the sun, with the moon's gleaming disk, and with the sparkling signs of the glittering stars. Darkness, on the other hand, which is the opposite of these, he established on the earth; for the earth holds no light of its own, unless it receives it from heaven, in which he placed everlasting light and the gods above and unending life, and, contrariwise, on the earth, darkness and the world below and death. For these are as far removed from those higher things as evils are from goods and vices from virtues. Of the earth itself, too, he established two opposite and differing parts, namely east and west. God claims the east as his own, since from him springs light itself, from him comes the brightness that illumines all things, and through him we are raised up into life without end; the west, on the other hand, is attributed to that troubled and corrupted mind, since it conceals the light, since darkness follows always in its train, and since through it men decline into sin and are lost. Light, then, is the east's own possession, and within light dwells the very principle of life; darkness belongs to the west, harboring within itself both death and ruin. Next, by the same reasoning he measured out the other two regions, south and north, which regions are joined to those first two by a kind of fellowship. For the region that burns with the sun's heat lies nearest to and borders on the east, while the one that is numb with cold and perpetual frost belongs to the same quarter as the farthest setting. For just as darkness is the opposite of light, so is cold the opposite of heat. As heat, then, stands nearest to light, so does the south stand nearest to the east; as cold stands nearest to darkness, so does the northern region stand nearest to the west. To each of these regions he assigned its own season: spring to the east, summer to the southern region; autumn belongs to the west, winter to the north. In these same two regions, the southern and the northern, is also contained a figure of life and of death, since life lies in heat and death in cold. And just as heat comes from fire, so does cold come from water. Following the same division of these regions, he also made day and night, which fill out, in alternating succession, those unbroken and revolving spans and cycles of time that we call years. The day, which the rising east first supplies, must belong to God, as do all things that are better; but the night, which the farthest west brings on, belongs, of course, to him whom we have called the rival of God. And God, foreknowing what was to come, made these two things for this reason also, that in them a kind of image might be shown of both true religion and false superstitions. For just as the sun, which rises to bring the day — though it is but one (whence Cicero would have it that it is called "sol," because, when the stars are hidden, it alone appears) — yet because it is a true light of perfect fullness, illuminates all things with its most potent heat and its most brilliant radiance, so in God, though he is one, his majesty and power and splendor are perfect. But the night, which we say has been allotted to that wicked counter-god, shows forth, by its likeness, his many and various religions. Though the stars appear countless and seem to flicker and gleam, they are, after all, not whole and solid bodies of light, so they give off no warmth, nor can their sheer number overpower the dark. Two primary elements thus emerge, each holding a power set against and opposed to the other — namely heat and moisture — and God devised these in marvelous fashion so that all things might be sustained and brought into being. Since God's own power dwells within fire and heat, had he not moderated that burning force by blending into it the substance of cold and moisture, nothing could ever have come into existence or held together — whatever had begun to be would have been consumed at once in a blaze. This is why certain philosophers and poets claimed the world was composed of a discord that harmonizes; yet the reasoning behind it wholly escaped them. Heraclitus said that all things were born from fire, Thales from water. Each saw something, yet each was mistaken, because if either alone had existed, water could not have been born from fire, nor, in turn, fire from water; rather it is truer that all things are generated from a mixture of both together. Fire indeed cannot be mixed with water, since the two are hostile, and if they come to close quarters, whichever prevails must necessarily destroy the other; but their substances can be mingled — the substance of fire being heat, that of water, moisture. Rightly, then, does Ovid say: when moisture and heat have taken on a due measure together, they conceive, and from these two all things arise. And since fire is at war with water, moist vapor creates all things, a discordant harmony fit for offspring. For the one is, as it were, a masculine element, the other feminine; the one active, the other passive. For this reason it was established by the ancients that the bonds of marriage be sealed by the rite of fire and water, since the offspring of living creatures take bodily form and are given life by heat and moisture. For since every living creature consists of soul and body, moisture supplies the substance of the body, heat that of the soul — as we may learn from the young of birds, which, full of thick moisture, cannot take bodily form nor have their bodies given life unless the craftsman-heat broods over them. It was also customary to forbid exiles the use of fire and water, for it still seemed a wicked thing to put men, however guilty, to death outright. So, once the use of those things on which human life depends was forbidden, it was reckoned just as if the man on whom that sentence had fallen had been punished with death. So much were these two elements held to be primary that men believed neither the origin of man nor his life could hold together without them. Of these two elements, one is held in common with the beasts, while the other is granted to man exclusively. For since we are a heavenly and immortal creature, we make use of fire, which has been given to us as proof of our immortality, since fire comes from heaven; and because its nature is mobile and strains upward, life's own principle resides in it. The remaining creatures, being entirely mortal, rely on water alone, which is a bodily and earthly element; and because its nature is mobile and inclines downward, it displays the shape of death. For this reason cattle neither look up to heaven nor have any sense of religion, since the use of fire is foreign to them. But how or by what means God either kindled or distilled these two primary elements, fire and water, only he who made them can know.
When the world, then, had been thus completed, he commanded that living creatures of various kinds, of unlike forms, both great and small, should come into being. Male and female of each kind were brought forth together, and from their offspring air, earth, and sea grew full; and to every kind God, in its proper measure, gave nourishment drawn from the ground, so man could put them to use — some for food, without doubt, others for clothing, and those of great strength to help in the working of the land, whence they are called "beasts of burden." When all things had thus been arranged in a wonderful order, he determined to build for himself an everlasting kingdom and to call into existence souls beyond counting, on whom he would confer immortality. Next he fashioned for himself a likeness gifted with sense and reason — that is, cast in the shape of his own image, than which none could be more flawless — molding man from the wet clay of the earth, whence man (homo) is so called, because he is fashioned out of soil (humus). Accordingly Plato says that the human form is godlike (theoeides), and the Sibyl says: "man is my image, possessing right reason." Of this fashioning of man the poets, too, have handed down an account which, though corrupted, is not altogether different: for they said that man was made from clay by Prometheus. The fact did not deceive them, but the name of the maker did. For they had not touched at all upon the letters of truth, but gathered from fables and dim opinion, and distorted, those things that had been handed down by the utterance of the prophets and were kept within the sanctuary of God — just as truth, when scattered abroad among the common people in varied reports, tends to be corrupted, with everyone adding something to what he has heard — these things they wove into their songs. And here, in truth, their folly showed itself, for they credited a mortal with a work so marvelous and so godlike. For what need was there for man to be fashioned out of clay, when he could have been begotten by the same process by which Prometheus himself was born of Iapetus? If Prometheus was a man, he could beget a man, but he could not make one; and that he was not of the number of the gods his punishment on Mount Caucasus makes plain. Nor indeed did anyone ever call his father Iapetus, or his uncle Titan, a god, because supremacy in the kingdom belonged to Saturn alone, through whom, together with all his descendants, divine honors were obtained. This fiction of the poets can be refuted by many arguments. It is agreed among all that a flood came to destroy and remove wickedness from the face of the earth; philosophers, poets, and chroniclers of antiquity alike speak of it, and on this point above all they concur with the prophets' own testimony. If, then, the flood came about for this reason, that the wickedness which had grown through excessive multiplication of mankind might be destroyed, how could Prometheus be the one who made man, given that they themselves claim his son Deucalion was the sole survivor, spared for his righteousness? And how could one generation, sprung from a single stock, have repopulated the whole earth so speedily? But evidently they corrupted this story too, as they did the former one, since they did not know either at what time the flood occurred on earth, or who deserved, on account of righteousness, to be preserved while the human race perished, or how, or with whom, he was preserved — all of which the prophetic writings teach. It appears, then, that what they relate about the workmanship of Prometheus is false. But since I have said that poets are not accustomed to lie outright, but rather to wrap and obscure what they say in figures, I do not say that they lied, but rather that Prometheus was the first of all to shape a likeness of man out of soft and rich clay, and that from him first arose the art of fashioning statues and images, since indeed he lived in the time of Jupiter, when temples first began to be established and new forms of worship of the gods began. Truth, in this way, gets dressed up in falsehood, and a deed originally attributed to God came instead to be credited to a man who merely copied the divine work. As for the rest, the shaping of the real and living man out of clay belongs to God. This too Hermes hands down, who said not only that man was made by God in the image of God, but even attempted to explain by what subtle reasoning he formed each single member of the human body, since there is not one of them that does not serve as much for necessary use as for beauty. This, indeed, even the Stoics, when they discourse on providence, attempt to show, and Tully, following them, touches upon this rich and abundant subject briefly in a number of places, though I now pass over it for this reason, that I have recently written a book of my own on this subject to my pupil Demetrianus. I cannot pass over this point here, that certain philosophers, in error, say that men and the other living creatures arose from the earth without any maker, whence comes that line of Virgil: "and the earth-born race of men lifted their heads from the hard fields." And those especially held this view who deny that there is providence, for the Stoics attribute the fashioning of living creatures to divine skill. Aristotle, however, freed himself from the trouble and difficulty by saying that the world has always existed; and so, he says, the human race and the other things that are in it have no beginning, but have always existed and always will. Yet we observe that every individual living creature, once absent, comes into being and later passes away — which shows that its whole kind, too, must at some point have started, and must at some point stop, precisely because it had a start. For all things must be contained within three times — past, present, and future. To the past belongs origin, to the present, substance, to the future, dissolution. Each single man displays all three: birth marks our beginning, living our being, dying our end. This, too, is why men imagined three Fates — one starting the thread of a man's life, a second spinning it onward, a third snapping and closing it off. Yet across mankind as a whole, only the present moment ever shows itself; from it, all the same, we can work out both the past, namely its beginning, and the future, namely its passing away. Since it exists at all, it must have started at some point — nothing, after all, can come to be without a start — and having started, it must likewise come to an end at some point; for that whole cannot be immortal which is made up of mortal parts. For just as we perish one by one, individually, so it could happen that all should perish at once by some single event — whether by barrenness of the lands, which is wont to happen in particular regions, or by a pestilence spread everywhere, which for the most part lays waste single cities or regions, or by a fire loosed upon the world, such as is said once to have happened under Phaethon, or by a flood of waters, such as is handed down to have occurred under Deucalion, when the whole human race was destroyed except for one man. If that flood happened by chance, then surely it could also have happened that even that one man who survived should have perished. But if he was preserved by the will of divine providence, which cannot be denied, in order that mankind might be restored, then it is plain that the life or the destruction of the human race lies in the power of God. And if he is able to destroy it entirely, because he destroys it part by part, it is plain that it had a beginning at some point; and its fragility, just as it points to a beginning, so too it points to an end. If these things are true, Aristotle will not be able to defend the claim that the world itself did not have a beginning. And if Plato and Epicurus wrest this admission from Aristotle, then Epicurus will, however unwillingly, wrest from both Plato and Aristotle — who, eloquent as they are, held that the world will always be — the same admission, since it follows that it must also have an end. But more on this in the last book; now let us return to the origin of man.
They say that at certain revolutions of the heaven and movements of the stars a kind of ripeness arose for the sowing of living creatures, and so the young earth, holding within itself the generative seed, put forth from itself certain little pods resembling wombs — about which Lucretius says: wombs grew fastened to the earth by roots — and that when these had matured, nature forced them to burst and they poured forth tender living creatures. Then the earth itself overflowed with a certain moisture like milk, and by that nourishment the creatures were fed. How, then, could they have endured or avoided the force of cold or heat, or have been born at all, when the sun would scorch and the cold would pinch? "There was, in the beginning of the world," they say, "neither winter nor summer, but a perpetual mildness and an even springtime." Why then do we see none of this happening now? "Because it was necessary that it happen once only, so that the creatures might be born; but once they had begun to exist, this was granted to them, the earth ceased to bear, and the condition of the seasons changed." How easy it is to refute such falsehoods! First, nothing in this world can exist otherwise than as it began. For neither the sun nor the moon nor the stars — it is not that they did not exist, or that when they did exist they had no fixed courses, and that the divine ordering which regulates and governs their motions began only afterward together with them. Next, if it is as they say, then providence must necessarily exist, and they fall into the very thing they most flee. For before the creatures were yet born, someone certainly provided that they should be born, lest the earth lie deserted and untended and bristling with waste. But that human beings could arise out of the ground with no parents to attend them called, of necessity, for a plan of great intelligence; and further, that the moisture congealed from the earth should be shaped into the various forms of bodies, and again that, once endowed from the pods that covered them with the capacity of living and feeling, they should be poured forth as though from the womb of mothers — this is a wondrous and inextricable provision. But let us suppose that too happened by chance; certainly what follows cannot be chance occurrences — that the earth should continuously flow with milk, that the temper of the air should be even. And granted that such conditions were fixed so that these newly formed creatures might be fed and kept safe from harm, some divine reasoning must have arranged it beforehand. But who can provide, except God? Let us see, nevertheless, whether that very thing which they keep repeating could have happened — that men were born from the earth. If anyone considers how long, and by what means, an infant is reared, he will surely understand that those earth-born boys could not have been nourished without any nurse. For they had to lie helpless for many months before their sinews grew strong enough to move and shift position — a process that a single year could hardly accomplish. Now consider whether an infant could have survived lying in the same place and in the same condition in which it was brought forth for many months, without dying, buried and corrupted by the mixture of the very moisture of the earth that was meant to feed it together with the filth of its own body. So it can in no way have happened except that it was reared by someone — unless perhaps all creatures were not born tender but full-grown, a thing it never occurred to them to claim. All that reasoning, then, is impossible and empty, if indeed it can be called reasoning, when what it does is establish that there is no reason at all. Whoever claims that everything arose spontaneously, crediting divine providence with nothing, is not defending reason at all — he is destroying it. But if nothing can come to be, and nothing can be born, without reason, it is plain that divine providence exists, whose proper name is reason. God, then, the maker of all things, made man. Cicero saw this too, though he lacked knowledge of the heavenly writings, for in the first book of his work on the laws he handed down the same thing the prophets did. I set down his words: this creature, provident, keen, versatile, sharp, endowed with memory and full of reason and counsel, whom we call man, has been begotten by the highest god under a certain distinguished condition. For alone among so many kinds and natures of living things does he share in reason and thought, while all the rest are without it. Do you see that a man, though far removed from knowledge of the truth, nevertheless understood — because he still preserved something of the image of wisdom — that man could have been begotten by none but God? Yet divine testimonies are needed, lest human ones alone not suffice. The Sibyl bears witness that man is God's work: he alone is God the creator, unconquerable, ruling; he himself fixed the form and shape of mortal men; he himself mingled the nature of all things, the begetter of life. The sacred writings contain the same. God, then, truly acted as a father to us: with his own hands he shaped the body, and with his own breath he gave us the soul that lets us draw air; everything we are we owe entirely to him. Had it been necessary for us to know how he did this, he would have taught it, just as he taught the other things which brought us knowledge both of our former error and of the true light.
Since he had first shaped the male after his own likeness, he then formed the female too in the image of that same man, so that the two sexes, mingled together, could bring forth children and cover the whole earth with their numbers. In fashioning man himself, God drew together and brought to completion the two substances we said stand opposed to each other, fire and water. Once the body was shaped, into it he breathed a soul drawn from his own everlasting source of spirit, so that man might carry within himself a likeness of the world, which itself holds together out of opposing elements. Man is thus made up of soul and body — heaven and earth, so to speak — for the soul that gives us life springs, as it were, down from heaven, from God, while the body is drawn from earth, out of whose clay it was, as we said, formed. Empedocles — one can hardly say whether to class him among poets or philosophers, since like Lucretius and Varro among the Romans he wrote of nature in verse — set down four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, perhaps borrowing from Trismegistus, who taught that God built our bodies out of these same four: a trace of fire is in them, a trace of air, a trace of water, a trace of earth, yet none of these elements is purely fire, air, water, or earth. Nor is this untrue: earth's share lies in our flesh, moisture's in our blood, air's in our breath, fire's in our living warmth. Yet blood cannot be pulled apart from the body the way moisture can be drawn from soil, nor can our vital warmth be separated from breath the way flame parts from air — so that, of everything, only two real elements turn up, and the entire logic of them is bound up in how our body is put together. Man, then, was made out of things at odds with one another, just as the world itself is built from light paired with dark, life paired with death: God ordained these two to contend within man, so that if the soul — which springs from God — should win out, it would be immortal and would dwell in unending light, but if the body should overcome the soul and bring it under its rule, it would dwell in endless darkness and death. Yet this defeat does not mean that unjust souls are simply snuffed out; rather, they are punished without end. That penalty we term the second death, itself as everlasting as immortality. The first kind we may define this way: death is when a living creature's nature comes undone — or, put differently, when body and soul part ways. The second we define so: it is undergoing pain without end — or, put differently, it is the sentencing of souls, according to what they have earned, to punishment forever. None of this touches the dumb animals, whose souls do not come from God but from the common air, and so simply dissolve at death. In this partnership, then, between heaven and earth — a partnership pictured in man himself — the higher share belongs to what is God's, namely the soul, which rules the body, while the lower share belongs to what is the devil's, namely the body; and because the body is earthly, it ought to answer to the soul just as earth answers to heaven. It is, so to speak, a small vessel that this heavenly spirit occupies as a temporary lodging. Each has its task: what comes from heaven and from God should command, while what comes from earth and from the devil should obey. Even the disreputable Sallust did not miss this, writing: our whole strength rests in mind and body alike; it is the mind's command and the body's obedience that we chiefly rely on. Well said — had he only lived by his own words. Instead he gave himself over to the vilest pleasures and, by the corruption of his own life, undid the very maxim he had written. But if the soul is indeed fire, as we have demonstrated, then like fire it should reach upward toward heaven so as not to be quenched — that is, toward the immortality that belongs to heaven; and just as a flame cannot burn or stay alive unless some rich fuel sustains it, so too the soul's nourishment and food is justice alone, and by justice it is kept alive. After all this, God set man — brought into being by the process just described — in Paradise, a garden of the richest fertility and greatest delight, which he had planted in the eastern regions with trees and timber of every kind, so that man might live on their varied fruit and, spared any toil, might devote himself wholly to serving God the Father. He then gave man fixed commands: keeping them meant remaining immortal, breaking them meant being struck down by death. The command itself was this — that he not taste the single tree standing at the center of Paradise, the one where God had lodged knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Then that accuser, begrudging God's handiwork, turned every trick and piece of cunning he had toward bringing man down, so as to rob him of immortality. He first deceived the woman into eating the forbidden food, and through her convinced the man as well to cross God's law. Once they had gained the knowledge of good and evil, shame over his own nakedness came upon him, and he hid from God's presence — something he had never done before. Then God, having passed sentence on the sinners, drove man out of Paradise to earn his living by labor, and hedged Paradise itself about with fire so that man could not reach it again — not until God holds his final judgment on earth and calls back the righteous, his worshippers, to that same place, death having been abolished, exactly as the sacred voices teach, and as the Erythraean Sibyl says: those honoring the true, everlasting God inherit life, dwelling forever, for the whole span of the age, in that very Paradise, a garden in full bloom. Since these matters belong to the end of things, we shall deal with them in the final section of this work; for now, let us lay out what belongs to the beginning. So death followed man in keeping with God's sentence, as the Sibyl too teaches in her own verse, saying: man, shaped by the sacred hands of God, whom the serpent led astray by trickery into reaching death's portion and gaining knowledge of both good and evil. In this way man's life became something bound by time — long still, but now stretched out only to a thousand years. Varro was well aware that this had come down through divine writings and was common knowledge among every people, yet he tried nonetheless to argue why the ancients were believed to have reached a thousand years of age. His claim was that the Egyptians counted months as years, so that a year was completed not by the sun's circuit through the twelve signs but by the moon, which crosses that same zodiac belt in the space of thirty days. This argument is transparently false: no one has ever actually lived to see a thousandth year, while today those who reach a hundred — which happens quite regularly — live out no fewer than twelve hundred months. Trustworthy writers, moreover, report that reaching a hundred and twenty years is common enough. But since Varro did not know why or when man's lifespan had shrunk, he shrank it himself in his reckoning — though he should have realized that a man could live out one thousand four hundred months.
But afterward, when God saw the world filled with wickedness and crimes, he resolved to destroy the human race by a flood. Yet, in order to restore its multitude, he chose one man, who alone remained, amid the corruption of all others, a singular example of righteousness. At six hundred years of age, this man constructed a vessel following God's own instructions, and inside it he, his wife, his three sons, and their three wives all survived while the flood submerged even the tallest peaks. Then, when the world had dried, God, cursing the injustice of the former age, and lest length of life again be the cause of devising evils, gradually reduced the age of man through successive generations and set the limit at a hundred and twenty years, which it was not permitted to pass. When this man had come out of the ark, as the sacred writings teach, he worked the soil with great care and, using his own hands, set out a vineyard. From this fact those are refuted who suppose Liber to be the discoverer of wine; for he preceded not only Liber but also Saturn and Uranus by many ages. When this vineyard had first borne fruit, he joyfully drank of the new wine even to drunkenness and lay naked. One of his sons, called Ham, witnessed this and, rather than covering his father's exposed body, left and reported it to his brothers. But they, taking up a cloak, entered with their faces turned away and covered their father. When the father learned what had been done, he disowned and expelled that son. As an exile, he took up residence in the region we today know as Arabia, and that territory came to bear his own name, Canaan, its people afterward called Canaanites. This was the first people to be ignorant of God, since its founder and originator had not received the worship of God from his father, being cursed by him; and so he left ignorance of the divinity to his descendants. From this people the neighboring nations, as their numbers increased, sprang up in turn. That father's own line, by contrast, came to be known as Hebrews, the people who kept alive the worship of God. But once their numbers had swelled beyond what their territory could contain, their young men — some sent out by parents, others going of their own will, pressed by want — left as wanderers to find new places to settle, scattering far and wide until they had filled every island and the whole world, and, cut off from that sacred original stock, built new customs and institutions to suit themselves. But first of all, those who had occupied Egypt began to look up to and worship the heavenly bodies. And because, owing to the quality of the climate, they were not sheltered by dwellings, and in that region the sky is never veiled by clouds, they took note of the courses and effects of the stars, gazing at them often with more curious and unrestrained attention as they revered them. Afterward they invented monstrous figures of animals to worship, led on by certain prodigies, whose originators we shall soon disclose. The rest, who had scattered over the earth, marveling at the elements of the world — sky, sun, earth, sea — revered them without any images or temples, and offered their sacrifices to them in the open, until, as time went on, the most powerful kings made temples and images and instituted the worship of these with victims and incense. Thus the nations, straying from the knowledge of God, began to exist. Those, then, are mistaken who contend that the worship of gods existed from the beginning of things, and that paganism is older than the religion of God, which they suppose was invented later, because they do not know the source and origin of truth. Let us now return to the beginning of the world.
As humanity's population started to grow, God foresaw that the devil — granted authority over the earth from the very start — could use deception to corrupt or destroy mankind just as he had done originally, and so God dispatched angels to watch over and tend the human race. He charged them above all that, not defiled by contact with the earth, they should not lose the dignity of their heavenly nature. That is, he forbade them to do the very thing he knew they would do, so that they could not hope for pardon. And so, as they dwelt among men, that most deceitful ruler of the earth gradually enticed them by familiarity itself into vices, and defiled them through unions with women. Then, not received back into heaven because of the sins in which they had immersed themselves, they fell to earth. Thus the devil made them, out of angels of God, his own satellites and ministers. But those who were begotten from them, since they were neither angels nor men but bore a certain intermediate nature, were not received into the world below, as their parents were into heaven. Thus two kinds of demons came to be, one heavenly, the other earthly. These are the unclean spirits, the authors of the evils that are done, over whom that same devil is prince — for which reason Trismegistus calls him the ruler of demons. Grammarians say that demons are so called as though from daēmones, that is, knowing and skilled in matters — for they think these to be gods. They do know a good deal of what lies ahead, though hardly everything, for God's full counsel is kept beyond their reach, which is why their answers usually hedge toward outcomes that could go either way. The poets both know that these are demons and say so. Hesiod hands this down: these are demons, by the will of great Zeus, good spirits upon the earth, guardians of mortal men. This was written because God had dispatched them to watch over humankind in the first place; yet, though they now bring men to ruin, these spirits still want to be seen as protectors, so that worship falls to them instead of to God. Philosophers too discuss them. For Plato even attempted to describe their natures in the Symposium, and Socrates used to say that a demon was constantly at his side, one that had attached itself to him from boyhood, by whose nod and will his life was governed. The whole art and power of the magi likewise rests on the inspiration of these spirits, by whom, when invoked, the sight of men is blinded by illusions, so that they do not see the things that are, and think they see things that are not. As I have said, these corrupted, fallen spirits roam across every corner of the earth, and, seeking some comfort for their own downfall, they labor to bring men down with them. And so they fill everything with snares, deceits, tricks, and errors: for they cling to individual men and occupy whole households, going from door to door, and assume for themselves the name of "genii" — for that is how they are rendered as demons in Latin speech. Men consecrate them in the innermost parts of their homes, pour out libations to them daily, and, knowing them to be demons, worship them as earthly gods and as averters of the evils which they themselves cause and inflict. Being subtle, intangible spirits, they slip inside the bodies of men and, operating covertly within their innards, ruin their health, trigger illness, terrify their minds with dreams, and rattle their sanity with madness, all so as to drive men, through these torments, to seek help from them.
The logic of all these deceptions is hidden from those who have no share in the truth. For men suppose that beings who can do nothing but harm are doing them a service when they simply stop harming them. Someone may perhaps say, then, that these beings ought to be worshipped, so that they will not harm us, since they are indeed capable of harm. They do harm, certainly, but only those by whom they are feared — men whom the mighty and exalted hand of God does not shield, because they are strangers to the mystery of truth. But the righteous, that is, the worshippers of God, these spirits dread; for when adjured in his name they depart from the bodies they possess, and, lashed as it were by the scourge of his words, it is not merely as demons that they admit themselves; they also blurt out their own names — the very ones worshipped in the temples. Such confessions usually occur with their own devotees looking on, not to shame the cult but, if anything, to their own credit, since lying is impossible for them — not before the God who compels them under oath, nor before the righteous whose speech racks them. And so, often with the loudest shrieking, they proclaim that they are being scourged and are burning and are on the point of leaving: such is the power that the knowledge of God and righteousness holds. Whom, then, can they harm, except those whom they hold in their power? Hermes himself affirms that those who have come to know God are safe not only from the assaults of demons but are not even bound by fate. 'Piety,' he says, 'is the one safeguard: for over the pious man neither evil demon nor destiny has mastery. God delivers the pious man from every evil, since piety alone stands as mankind's single good.' As for the nature of piety, he explains it elsewhere: 'For piety is knowledge of God.' Asclepius, his own pupil, developed this same idea more fully, setting it out in the polished treatise he addressed to the king. Both of them affirm that demons are the enemies and tormentors of mankind, whom Trismegistus for that reason calls 'wicked angels' — so well did he know that beings once heavenly had come to be corrupted and earthbound.
It is from these beings that astrology, haruspicy, augury, and the things called oracles, and necromancy, and the magic art, and whatever other evils men practice openly or in secret, took their origin — all of which are false in themselves, as the Erythraean Sibyl testifies: 'since all these things are delusion, which foolish men pursue day after day.' Yet these same authors, by making their presence felt, cause themselves to be believed true; thus, with a feigned divinity, they mock the credulity of men, since it does not suit them to reveal the truth. These are the ones who taught men to fashion images and statues, who, in order to turn men's minds away from the worship of the true God, caused the crafted faces of dead kings, adorned with exquisite beauty, to be set up and consecrated, and put on for themselves the names of those men as though they were masks. But the magicians, and those whom the common people rightly call sorcerers, when they practice their execrable arts, summon these spirits by their true names — the very heavenly names read in the sacred writings. These unclean and wandering spirits, in order to throw everything into confusion and pour errors into human hearts, sow and mix falsehood with truth. For they themselves invented the fiction that the heavenly beings are many and that Jupiter is king of them all, because heaven in fact holds a great many angelic spirits under one single Lord and Father of all — God; but they wrapped the truth in false names and stole it from men's eyes. For God, as I taught at the beginning, has no need of a name, since he is one alone, nor do the angels, being immortal, either allow or wish to be called gods; their one and only office is to serve the will of God and to do nothing at all except by his command. As we put it, God governs the world the way a governor rules a province: no one would call his attendants partners in ruling the province, even though it is their service that keeps the business running. And yet these attendants can do something beyond the governor's orders, through their own ignorance, which belongs to the human condition; but the one who oversees the world and governs the universe — who knows everything, from whose divine sight nothing escapes — alone possesses power over all things, and in the angels there is nothing but the necessity of obedience. And so they wish no honor to be paid to themselves, since all their honor belongs to God; but those who abandoned God's service, being enemies of truth and betrayers of their maker, attempt to seize for themselves the title and worship due to gods — not because the ruined care for honor (for what honor is there for the ruined?), nor in order to harm God, who cannot be harmed, but in order to harm men, whose devotion and understanding of the one true majesty they labor to subvert, lest they should be able to gain the immortality which these spirits themselves lost through their own wickedness. And so they pour out darkness and cloud the truth in fog, so that men will not know their Lord and Father; and to lure them the more easily, they hide themselves in temples, attend all the sacrifices, and often produce prodigies, by which men, struck with amazement, place their trust in the images of a supposed divinity and power. From this comes the story that a stone was cut by a razor at the augur's word, that a wish to move to Rome was voiced through Juno of Veii, that Fortuna Muliebris foretold a danger, that Claudia's hand drew the ship after it, that Juno stripped bare and the Locrian Proserpina and Milesian Ceres took vengeance on the sacrilegious, and Hercules on Appius, and Jupiter on Atinius, and Minerva did the same in Caesar's case; hence too the story that a serpent brought from Epidaurus rid the city of Rome of plague — for the ruling demon himself was carried there in his own shape without any disguise, since the envoys sent for that purpose brought back with them a serpent of wondrous size. But it is above all in the oracles that they deceive, since the profane cannot recognize their trickery for what it is, apart from the truth, and so they suppose that commands and victories and wealth and prosperous outcomes are granted by these very beings — indeed that many a time their nod has rescued the republic from dangers looming over it, dangers which they themselves had announced by their responses and, once appeased by sacrifices, turned aside. But all of this is deception. For since they foresee the dispositions of God, being once his ministers, they insert themselves into these matters, so that whatever has been done or is being done by God may seem, above all, to be their own doing; and whenever, according to God's decree, some good is impending for a people or a city, they promise, by prodigies or dreams or oracles, that they themselves will bring it about — provided temples, honors, and sacrifices are granted them. Once these are given, when the thing that was bound to happen occurs anyway, they win for themselves the highest veneration. That is why temples get dedicated, fresh statues get consecrated, and herds of victims are put to the knife; but even when this is done, the life and safety of those who did it are, none the less, being sacrificed away. And whenever dangers are impending, they profess to be angry for some silly and trivial cause, as Juno was said to be angry with Varro because he had set a handsome boy on the chariot to hold the trappings — and for this reason the Roman name was nearly wiped out at Cannae. Yet if it was a second Ganymede Juno feared, why should Rome's young men have borne the punishment for it? Or if the gods care only for generals and disregard everyone else, why did Varro alone escape, who had done this thing, while Paulus, who had done nothing to deserve it, was killed? Plainly, then, no unjust will of Juno had anything to do with what befell the Romans, when Hannibal destroyed two Roman armies by both cunning and courage. For Juno could not have dared either to defend Carthage, where her weapons and her chariot were kept, or to harm the Romans, since she had heard that a race would arise from Trojan blood one day to overthrow the towers of Tyre. But these are the games of those beings who conceal themselves behind the names of the dead to set traps for the living. And so, whether the danger that threatens can be averted or not, they wish it to seem that, once appeased, they have turned it aside; or if it cannot be averted, they contrive that it should seem to have happened because they were scorned. In this way, among men who do not know them, they build up authority and fear for themselves. By this cunning and these arts they have made the knowledge of the one true God grow stale among all the nations. For, ruined by their own vices, they rage and go on the prowl, seeking to ruin others; and it was for this reason too that they devised human sacrifice — enemies of the human race that they are — so as to devour as many souls as possible.
Someone will say: 'Why then does God allow this to happen, and not come to the rescue against such evil delusions?' So that evil may contend with good, so that vices may stand opposed to virtues, so that he may have some to punish and others to honor. For in the last times he has determined to judge the living and the dead — a judgment I shall discuss in my final book. So he waits until the ages reach their close, when his wrath will be unleashed with heavenly might and power, exactly as the terrifying warnings the righteous prophets foretold make plain. For now, however, he allows men to err and even to be impious against himself, being himself just and gentle and patient. For it cannot be that one in whom virtue is perfect should not also have perfect patience. Hence some suppose that God is not angry at all, since he is not subject to passions, which are disturbances of the mind, because every living thing that is affected and moved is by that very fact frail. This opinion utterly destroys truth and religion. But let us set aside for now this question of the wrath of God, since it is a richer subject and must be pursued more fully in a work of its own. Whoever, then, worships and follows these most wicked spirits will possess neither heaven nor light, which belong to God, but will fall instead into the place which, as I have argued, fell by the allotment of all things to the prince of evil in person — that is, darkness, the underworld, and everlasting punishment. I have shown the worship of the gods to be empty in a threefold way: first, because the images that are worshipped are the likenesses of dead men, and it is perverse and absurd for a man's image to receive the worship owed to a god's image — for one thereby worships what is lesser and weaker; and it is an inexpiable crime to abandon the living to be a slave to the monuments of the dead, who can give neither life nor light to anyone, since they themselves lack both; nor is there any other god beside the single One under whose power and judgment every soul stands subject. Second, because the sacred images themselves, to which the emptiest of men are enslaved, are wholly without sense, since they are earth. And who does not see it is wicked for an upright creature to bend down and worship the earth? — the earth which was placed beneath our feet for this very reason, that it should be trodden underfoot by us, not adored, since we were raised up out of it and given an upright stature above the other living things precisely so that we would not roll back downward nor cast this heavenly face of ours down to the ground, but direct our eyes to the place toward which the very condition of our nature has directed them, and adore nothing else, worship nothing but the one name alone of our maker and father, who for this reason shaped man upright, that we might know we are summoned to what is above and heavenly. Third, because the spirits who preside over these acts of worship, condemned and cast down by God, wander over the earth; and they can offer their worshippers nothing at all, since power over things belongs to the One alone, but they ruin them instead with deadly enticements and errors, since it is their daily task to spread darkness over men, so that the true God will not be sought by them. For that reason worship is not owed to them, since God's sentence already lies upon them. It is indeed the gravest sin to hand oneself over to the power of beings whom, if you follow righteousness, you can master and drive away and put to flight simply by invoking the divine name. And if it is plain that these forms of worship are empty in all the ways I have shown, it is clear that those who make supplication to the dead, or venerate the earth, or hand over their souls to unclean spirits, have lost the reasoning of men, and will pay the penalty of their impiety and wickedness — men who, in rebellion against the Father of the human race, God himself, have broken every law by adopting rites beyond any atonement.
Whoever, then, strives to safeguard the mystery of man and to hold fast to the reason of his own nature must lift himself up from the ground and, with mind raised on high, direct his eyes toward heaven. Let him not seek God beneath his feet, nor dig out of the dust something to worship, because whatever lies beneath a man must necessarily be lower than man; rather let him seek it aloft, seek it at the peak, since only what stands over man can exceed man in greatness. Yet God exceeds man in greatness, and so it is above, not beneath, that he must be sought, in the highest region rather than the lowest. There can be no doubt, then, that there is no true religion wherever there is an image. For if religion belongs to things divine, and nothing is divine except in the heavenly realm, then images are without religion, because nothing heavenly can exist in a thing made from earth. This can indeed be seen, by anyone wise, from the very word itself. For whatever is a copy must necessarily be false, and that which falsely imitates truth by paint and pretense can never take on the name of the true. And if every act of imitation is not, above all, a serious matter, but is rather a kind of game and jest, then what exists in images is not religion but a mere mimicry of religion. All falsehoods, then, must be set aside so that we may lay hold of the true, and earthly things trodden down so that we may attain the heavenly. For this is how things stand: whoever casts his soul, whose origin is from heaven, down to the depths below, falls to the very place to which he has cast himself; and so it is fitting that a man, mindful of his reason and of his standing, should always strive and stretch upward toward the things above. Whoever does this will rightly be judged wise, righteous, truly a man, and indeed worthy of heaven — one whom his own Father will recognize not as bowed low, nor cast down toward the earth like a four-footed beast, but standing upright, just as he made him.
Unless I am mistaken, a great and difficult portion of the task I have undertaken is now finished, and, with the majesty of heaven granting me the power of speech, I have driven off the errors that had grown inveterate among men. But now a greater and harder struggle awaits me, this time with the philosophers, whose towering learning and eloquence stand opposed to me like some massive wall. For just as before I was pressed by the sheer numbers, the near-consensus of all the nations, so now I am pressed by the authority of men outstanding in every kind of praise. Yet who does not know that a few learned men carry more weight than a great many untaught ones? Still, I do not think these men, too, should be despaired of, as though they could not be turned from their opinion, with God and truth as our guides; nor do I think them so stubborn as to deny, with sound and open eyes, that they see the brightest sun. If only what they themselves are accustomed to profess is true — that they hold fast to the pursuit of the discovery of truth — I shall surely bring it about that they believe the truth they sought was, after long searching, at last found, and confess that it could not have been discovered by human intellect alone.
I could wish—since truth is still thought to lie in obscurity, whether because the common crowd, enslaved by ignorance and mistake to various foolish superstitions, keeps it hidden, or because philosophers, whose wits in their perversity muddy it rather than shed light on it—that I might attain, even if not the eloquence that was in Marcus Tullius (for his was exceptional and admirable), at least some faculty near to eloquence, so that truth, which by its own power avails so much, might also, resting on the strength of talent, at last put itself forth, and, once the errors both of the public and of those thought wise had been shaken and refuted, might bring the clearest light to the human race. And indeed I would wish this for two reasons: either because men can more readily believe a truth that is adorned, seeing that they believe even a lie when captivated by ornamented speech and the allurement of words; or at least so that the philosophers themselves might be overwhelmed by us with their own weapons, the very ones in which they are accustomed to take pleasure and confidence. But since God has willed the nature of the matter to be such that plain and naked truth is the more brilliant—because it is adorned enough in itself, and therefore is corrupted when painted over with ornaments added from outside—while a lie, on the other hand, pleases by a borrowed appearance, because being corrupt in itself it fades and dissolves unless it is smeared over and polished with an ornament sought elsewhere, I bear with equanimity that only a modest talent has been granted to me. Indeed, trusting not in eloquence but in truth, I took up this task—one my own strength may well be too small to carry through—and even if I should fall short, truth itself, aided by God to whom the gift belongs, will see it finished. For it is well known to me that mediocre pleaders have repeatedly bested the greatest orators—such is truth's power that even in trifling matters its own clarity is its defense—so why should I think that in this greatest of causes truth would be overwhelmed by men who are indeed clever and eloquent, yet who speak falsehoods, and that it would not appear clear and bright by its own light, even if not through my own speech, which flows rather thinly from a slender spring? Nor, if the philosophers were remarkable in the learning of letters, would I grant them also the knowledge and understanding of truth, which no one can attain by thinking or disputing. Nor do I now fault the eagerness of men who longed to grasp what is true, since God shaped human nature to crave truth above all; but this is my charge, this my rebuttal: their honorable, admirable intent produced no matching result, for they grasped neither what truth itself was, nor the manner, the place, or the frame of mind in which it must be pursued. Thus, while wishing to come to the aid of human errors, they themselves wrapped themselves in snares and in the greatest errors. To this task, then, of refuting philosophy, the very order of the subject I have undertaken has led me. For since all error springs either from a false religion or from what passes for wisdom, refuting it demands overturning both alike. Since scripture has passed down to us the teaching that philosophers' reasonings are foolish, this claim itself needs to be established by fact and argument, lest anyone, led by the honorable name of wisdom or deceived by the splendor of empty eloquence, should prefer to trust human things rather than divine. These things, indeed, have been handed down briefly and without adornment. For it was not fitting that, when God spoke to man, he should support his own words with arguments, as though otherwise faith would not be given him; rather he spoke as it was fitting he should, as the greatest judge of all things, whose part it is not to argue but to declare. But that is proper to him as God: we, on the other hand, holding testimonies of God's voice for each particular case, will show just how much more solid the arguments are that support true things—given that falsehood itself gets defended well enough to pass for true. Therefore there is no reason why we should hold the philosophers in such honor that we should be terrified of their eloquence. For they were able to speak well, as learned men, but to speak truly in no way at all, because truth was never something they had learned from the one being who alone possesses it. Nor indeed shall we accomplish anything very great by convicting them of an ignorance which they themselves very often confess. Only on this single point—precisely where trust in them should have been placed, yet is withheld—will I attempt to demonstrate that never were they more honest than in confessing their own ignorance.
Now, since the previous two books have already shown the religions to be false, and have likewise laid out where the whole error originates, this book's task is to show also how empty and false philosophy is, so that, once every error has been removed, truth may stand revealed and shine forth clearly. Let us begin, then, with philosophy's common name, so that once its head is struck down, we gain easier passage to cutting apart the whole body—if it even deserves to be called a body, given that its parts and limbs disagree with each other and hold together by no joint, seeming instead to twitch as scattered, disjointed things rather than truly live. As its own name shows and as its practitioners define it, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. What better proof, then, that philosophy is not wisdom than the very sense carried by its name? A man who pursues wisdom plainly does not yet hold it, but pursues it in hope of one day possessing it. In other arts, what the pursuit achieves and where it leads is plain: once a person masters them through learning, they stop being called a pursuer of the craft and become instead its craftsman. Out of modesty, though, philosophers styled themselves pursuers of wisdom rather than wise men. Pythagoras himself coined this name, being somewhat wiser than the men before him who had considered themselves sages; he grasped that no human pursuit could arrive at wisdom, and concluded that a thing still incomplete and unattained should not be given a name implying completion. And so, when he was asked what he professed himself to be, he answered: a philosopher, that is, a seeker of wisdom. If, then, philosophy seeks wisdom, it is not itself wisdom, because that which seeks must necessarily be one thing, and that which is sought another; nor is the seeking itself rightly directed, because it can find nothing. For my part, I would not even grant that philosophers are pursuers of wisdom, since by that pursuit wisdom is not reached. For if the capacity to find truth lay within that pursuit, if that pursuit were, as it were, a road to wisdom, it would at some point have been found. But since, after so many ages, with so many talents worn down in the search for it, it has not been grasped, it is clear that there is no wisdom to be found there. Those, then, who philosophize do not pursue wisdom; they merely think they pursue it, because they do not know where or of what kind the thing they seek is. Whether, then, they pursue wisdom or do not pursue it, they are not wise, since that can never be found which is either not rightly sought or not sought at all. Let us see, however, whether by this pursuit anything at all can be found, or nothing.
Philosophy is thought to consist of two things, knowledge and opinion, and nothing else. Knowledge cannot come from talent, nor be grasped by thinking, because to have knowledge properly within oneself belongs not to man but to God. But mortal nature does not admit of knowledge except what comes from outside. For this reason divine skill opened up eyes and ears and the other senses in the body, so that through those passages knowledge might reach the mind. Take, for instance, the desire to investigate or grasp what underlies natural phenomena: is the sun truly the size it looks, or many times greater than the whole earth; is the moon a solid ball or hollow; are the stars fixed in the sky or floating freely through the air; what size and substance makes up the sky itself; does it stand still or spin at unimaginable speed; how deep is the earth, and what props hold it suspended? To try grasping such matters through argument and guesswork resembles nothing so much as trying to picture, through mere talk, the character of some far-off nation's city—one whose name alone has reached our ears, sight and report of it both entirely absent. If we should claim for ourselves knowledge in a matter that cannot be known, would we not seem to be raving, daring to assert what we could be refuted on? How much more must those who think they know things of nature, which cannot be known by man, be judged mad and out of their senses! Rightly, then, did Socrates, and the Academics who followed him, do away with claims to knowledge, since that belongs not to one who disputes but to one who divines. It remains that opinion alone has a place in philosophy: for wherever knowledge is absent, opinion possesses the whole of it. For a man holds an opinion precisely about what he does not know. Those, then, who dispute about matters of nature merely hold the opinion that things are as they argue. They do not, therefore, know the truth, since knowledge belongs to what is certain, opinion to what is uncertain. Let us return to that earlier example. Come, let us guess at the condition and character of a city we know by nothing but its name. Likely enough, its stone walls enclose a plain, its buildings rise high, its streets run in number, and its temples stand splendid and richly furnished. Let us describe, if you like, the customs and appearance of its citizens. But when we have said this, another will argue the contrary, and when he too has finished his speech, a third will rise, and others after him, and they will form opinions very different from ours. Which, then, of all these will be truer? Perhaps none. 'Yet everything that falls within the realm of possibility has already been stated, meaning one among these claims has to be correct.' Still, no one will know which speaker hit the truth. It may happen that all have erred in some part and touched upon truth in some part. We should be fools, then, if we sought this out by disputation: for someone may come along who will laugh at our opinions and hold us for madmen, wishing as we do to form an opinion about the character of a thing we do not know. But there is no need to search out matters set far away, from which perhaps no one will come to refute us. Come, let us guess what is happening right now down in the forum, or over in the senate house. Even that lies beyond our reach. Let us say, with only one wall between, what is happening: only someone who actually heard or witnessed it could know that. So no one dares to declare it, since the plain fact standing right there, not any argument, would instantly prove him wrong. And yet this very thing is what the philosophers do, who dispute about what goes on in the sky, but they think they can do so with impunity because no one arises to refute their errors. But if they supposed that someone would come down who would teach them that they were raving and lying, they would never dispute about those matters which they cannot know. Nor, however, should their impudence and boldness be considered any the more fortunate for not being refuted: for God refutes them, he to whom alone the truth is known, even though he seems to close his eyes to it, and he reckons the wisdom of men as the height of folly.
Rightly, then, did Zeno and the Stoics reject the holding of opinion. For to suppose that you know what you do not know is not the mark of a wise man, but rather of a rash and foolish one. So, granting Socrates's claim that nothing can be known, and Zeno's that one should form no opinions, philosophy in its entirety collapses. What of the fact that it is destroyed not only by these two, who were the chief figures of philosophy, but by all of them, so that it now appears to have already been finished off long ago by its own weapons? Many sects now divide philosophy, each holding a different view. In which of them shall we place truth? Certainly it cannot be in all of them at once. Let us designate whichever one we please: then wisdom will not be in all the others. Let us go through them one at a time: by the same logic, granting truth to one sect means stripping it from every other. For each single sect overturns all the others, in order to establish itself and its own doctrines, and does not grant to any other that it is wise, lest it should confess itself foolish; but just as it does away with the others, so it too is done away with by all the others. Philosophers ready to charge it with folly are never in short supply. Praise any sect as the true one, and the rest will brand it false. Shall we believe, then, one sect praising itself and its own teaching, or the many who charge the ignorance of one upon another? It must be more correct, of necessity, what the greater number holds than what one man alone holds. For no one can judge rightly about himself: as a noble poet testifies, the nature of all men is so constituted that they see and judge other people's affairs better than their own. Since, then, all things are uncertain, either all must be believed or none. If none, then they are not wise, since each one thinks himself wise; if all, they are equally not wise, since each one is denied to be wise by all the others. Thus they all perish in this manner, and, like those sown men of the poets, cut one another's throats in turn, so that not one is left standing out of them all: and this happens because they have a sword but no shield. If, then, each individual sect is convicted of folly by the judgment of the many other sects, then all are found to be empty and vain: thus philosophy consumes and destroys itself. Once Arcesilaus, who founded the Academy, grasped this, he collected the sects' objections against one another along with famous philosophers' admissions of ignorance, arming himself against every one of them—and in doing so founded a fresh philosophy built on refusing to philosophize. From him, then, as its author, two kinds of philosophy began to exist: the one old, which claims knowledge for itself; the other new and opposed to it, which takes knowledge away. In these two kinds I see a rift, something like civil war: wisdom itself cannot be split in two, so to which side do we assign it? Should the nature of things prove knowable, this whole troop of newcomers is doomed; should it prove unknowable, the old guard is finished; and should the two sides be evenly matched, philosophy, commander over them all, perishes just the same, split as it is: for nothing can be at odds with itself without perishing. But if, as I have shown, no man can have any inner and properly his own knowledge, since human weakness makes such knowledge impossible, then the argument tips in Arcesilaus's favor. Yet even he will not stand firm, since it is not possible that absolutely nothing can be known.
Nature itself, along with steady practice and life's own demands, forces us to know a great many things. And so one would have to perish, unless one knew what things are useful for life, so as to seek them, and what things are dangerous, so as to flee and avoid them. Besides this, there are many things that experience has discovered. For the varied courses and movements of the sun and moon and the paths of the stars, and the reckoning of the seasons, have been worked out; and physicians have learned the nature of bodies and the properties of herbs; and farmers the nature of the soils, and likewise the signs of coming rains and storms have been gathered. In short, there is no art that does not rest upon knowledge. Arcesilaus, then, if he had any wisdom, ought to have distinguished which things could be known and which could not. But if he had done so, he would have brought himself down to the level of the common crowd. For the common people are sometimes wiser, since they are wise only to the extent that is needed. If you should ask one of them whether he knows anything or nothing, he will say that he knows what he knows, and will admit that he does not know what he does not know. Arcesilaus was right, then, to dismantle other men's teachings, but wrong in setting up his own. Blanket ignorance cannot amount to wisdom, since knowing is precisely wisdom's task. So, having toppled the philosophers by showing that they knew nothing, he forfeited the title of philosopher himself, given that his own doctrine holds nothing can be known. For he who reproaches others because they do not know ought himself to be one who knows; but since he knows nothing, what perversity, what insolence is it, to set himself up as a philosopher on the very grounds on which he strips that title from everyone else! For they can answer him thus: 'If you prove that we know nothing, and that therefore we are not wise, because we know nothing, then you too are not wise, since you likewise confess that you know nothing: what, then, has Arcesilaus accomplished, except that, having finished off all the philosophers, he ran himself through with that same blade as well?'
Is wisdom then nowhere to be found? No indeed—it dwelt among these very men, though it went unseen by anyone. Some thought that everything could be known: these certainly were not wise; others thought nothing could be known: these too were not wise. The first group erred in giving too much to man, the second in giving too little; on both sides, in both directions, they lacked measure. Where then is wisdom? It lies in neither supposing that you know everything, which belongs to God, nor that you know nothing, which belongs to a beast. For there is a middle ground proper to man, namely knowledge joined and tempered with ignorance. Knowledge in us comes from the soul, which arises from heaven; ignorance from the body, which comes from earth. Hence we have some fellowship both with God and with the animals. Since we are made of these two elements, with one part shining with light and the other shrouded in darkness, so that a share of knowledge and a share of ignorance were each allotted to us. Across this bridge, as it were, one may cross without danger of falling; but all those who have leaned to one side or the other have fallen either to the right or to the left. Let me explain how each side went astray. The Academics, arguing against the natural philosophers from obscure matters, concluded that there is no knowledge at all, and, content with a few examples of things beyond comprehension, embraced ignorance as though they had abolished all knowledge, when they had only abolished it in part. The natural philosophers, on the contrary, drew from things that are plain the argument that everything can be known, and, content with what is evident, upheld knowledge as though they had defended it entirely, when they had defended it only in part. Thus neither side saw clearly nor obscurely; rather, while each, hands locked in struggle, either clung to knowledge alone or tried to wrest it away, neither saw the door set in the middle that would have led them through to wisdom. But Arcesilaus, master of ignorance, wishing to overturn all philosophy in his rivalry with Zeno, the leader of the Stoics, took up—citing Socrates as his authority—the position that nothing at all can be known. In this way he refuted the opinion of the philosophers who had supposed that truth had been dug up and discovered by their own talents. Clearly, because that wisdom had been mortal and, established only a short time before, had already reached its highest growth, so that it was now bound to grow old and perish, the Academy suddenly arose like the old age of philosophy, to finish off what was already fading, and to some extent Arcesilaus rightly saw that it is arrogant, or rather foolish, to think that knowledge of truth can be grasped by guesswork. Yet he cannot refute someone speaking falsely unless he himself already knows what is true. Since Arcesilaus attempted to do this without knowing the truth, he introduced a kind of philosophy we may call in Latin unstable or inconsistent. Suppose knowledge of anything were impossible—even so, one fact would still have to be grasped: total ignorance would erase the very assertion that grasping anything is impossible. Whoever states, as a settled matter, that no one knows anything, is by that very statement claiming to have grasped and understood something—so something, after all, can be grasped. A parallel case, often cited in the schools as self-defeating, runs thus: a man dreamed he should place no trust in dreams. Trusting the dream commits him to distrust; distrusting it commits him to trust. In the same way, if grasping anything were impossible, one thing would still have to be grasped—namely that nothing is grasped; yet once that is grasped, the claim of universal ignorance collapses under its own weight. So the whole position undoes and contradicts itself. But this cunning man wanted to snatch knowledge away from the other philosophers in order to hide it at home for himself—for surely a man who asserts something does not thereby deprive himself of it, even while he deprives others—yet he accomplishes nothing; he only exposes himself and betrays his own theft. It would have shown far greater wisdom and honesty had he carved out one exception, declaring only that the reasons and explanations behind celestial or natural phenomena specifically lie hidden and unknowable, since no one can teach them, and should not even be pursued, given that seeking will not uncover them. Had he inserted this exception, he would have warned the natural philosophers not to inquire into matters that exceed the limits of human thought, he would have freed himself from the odium of the charge against him, and he would certainly have given us something to follow. As it is, however, in drawing us back from following the others, so that we should not wish to know more than we can, he has drawn us back no less from following himself. For who would want to labor so as to know nothing, or take up a teaching of such a kind that even ordinary knowledge is lost along with it? If this is a teaching, it must consist of knowledge; if it is not, who is so foolish as to think it worth learning a thing in which either nothing is learned or even what one already knew is unlearned? Therefore, since neither everything can be known, as the natural philosophers supposed, nor nothing, as the Academics supposed, all their philosophy has been extinguished.
Turning next to the second branch of philosophy—the one they themselves label moral philosophy—we find it holds within it the entire rationale for philosophy as a whole; the first branch offers mere intellectual pleasure, whereas this one carries practical value besides. And since in arranging the course of life and shaping conduct the danger of error is greater, a correspondingly greater diligence is required, so that we might grasp the proper manner of living. In the former matter some allowance can be granted, because whether they say something true, they do no good, or whether they rave, they do no harm; but here there is no room for disagreement or error. All must hold one view, and philosophy itself must teach as though with a single mouth, because if any error is made here, the whole of life is overturned. In that first part, though the danger is less, the difficulty is greater, because the obscurity of the subject matter compels people to hold different and varied opinions; here, though the danger is greater, the difficulty is less, because everyday practice and daily experience can teach what is better and truer. Let us see, then, whether the philosophers agree, or what they offer us toward living life more rightly. It is not necessary to go through everything; let us choose one point, and the chief one, on which the whole hinge of wisdom turns. Epicurus judges the highest good to be pleasure of the mind; Aristippus, pleasure of the body; Callipho and Dinomachus joined honor with pleasure. Diodorus placed the highest good in freedom from pain, Hieronymus in not suffering pain, the Peripatetics in the goods of mind, body, and fortune together. For Herillus the highest good is knowledge; for Zeno, it is to live in agreement with nature; for certain Stoics, it is to follow virtue. Aristotle placed the highest good in honor and virtue. These are, roughly, all the opinions of all of them. Faced with such a scattering of views, which one should we trust, which one should we side with? Every one of them carries equal weight. Were we capable of choosing the superior view, philosophy would already be superfluous to us, for we would already possess the wisdom needed to sit in judgment on wise men's opinions. Yet we approach philosophy precisely because wisdom is what we lack and hope to gain—so by what standard could we possibly judge, not yet having taken our first step toward wisdom? This is all the more true given that the Academic is standing right there, tugging at our cloak, warning us to trust no one at all, while offering nothing of his own that we might follow instead.
What then remains, except that, setting aside these quarrelsome and stubborn litigants, we come to the judge—namely the giver of a simple and untroubled wisdom, one able not only to form us and set us on the way, but even to render a verdict on their disputes? Through this wisdom we come to know man's true and highest good. Before I begin to speak of it, all those opinions must be refuted, so that it may appear that none of those men was wise. Since the question concerns the proper function of man, the highest good of the highest of living creatures ought to be established in something that cannot be shared with the other animals. Just as teeth belong to wild beasts, horns to cattle, wings to birds, so something proper to man alone must be assigned to him, without which he would lose the very rationale of his condition. For whatever is given to all creatures for the sake of living or reproducing is indeed a natural good, but it is not the highest good, unless it is something proper to each particular kind. He was therefore not wise who believed the highest good to be pleasure of the mind, since, whether this is understood as tranquility or as joy, it is common to all. As for Aristippus, I do not think he even deserves an answer—a man forever rushing headlong into bodily pleasures and serving nothing but his belly and his lust; no one doubts he was no man at all. He lived in such a way that nothing distinguished him from a beast except one thing: that he could speak. But if speech were granted to a donkey, a pig, or a dog, and you asked them what they meant when they chase after females so madly that they can scarcely be pulled away, neglecting even food and drink, why they violently drive off other males, or, even beaten, do not give up but, though often battered by stronger rivals, only pursue all the more fiercely, why they fear neither rain nor cold, undertake labor, and do not shrink from danger—what else would they answer except that the highest good is bodily pleasure? That they seek this so as to be affected by the sweetest sensations, and that these sensations are worth so much to them that, in pursuit of them, they think no labor, no wounds, not even death itself ought to be refused. Shall we then seek our precepts for living from men who feel exactly what creatures devoid of reason feel? The Cyrenaics say that virtue itself deserves praise only because it produces pleasure. "Yes indeed," says the shameless dog, or that filthy pig wallowing in mud, "for this is why I fight my opponent with all my strength, so that my virtue may bring me pleasure, of which I would necessarily be deprived if I retreated defeated." Shall we then learn wisdom from men whom nothing but their tongue, not their judgment, distinguishes from cattle and beasts? To hold that freedom from pain is the highest good is not properly the view of the Peripatetics or the Stoics, but of philosophers fit for the sickbed. For who does not understand that this was argued by men who were sick and lying in some kind of pain? What could be more absurd than to hold as the highest good something a physician could supply? One must suffer pain, then, in order to enjoy this good—and indeed suffer it severely and often, so that afterward the absence of pain will be all the sweeter. The most wretched man, then, is the one who has never suffered pain, because he lacks this good—whereas we used to think him the happiest, precisely because he was free of misfortune. Not far from this same folly is the man who said that feeling no pain at all is the highest good; for setting aside that every creature naturally shuns pain, no one can promise himself this good, since the most any of us can do toward securing it is merely wish for it. But the highest good cannot make anyone happy unless it always remains within his own power; and this, freedom from pain, is granted to all living creatures not by virtue, not by learning, not by effort, but by nature itself. Those who joined pleasure with honor wanted to escape this common ground, but instead they produced a self-contradictory good, since whoever is devoted to pleasure necessarily lacks honor, and whoever pursues honor lacks pleasure. The good of the Peripatetics is excessively multiple, and, apart from the goods of the mind—about which there is great dispute as to what they even are—it can be seen to be shared with the beasts. For the goods of the body, that is, soundness, freedom from pain, and health, are no less necessary to dumb animals than to man, and perhaps even more so, since man can be helped by medicine and by the care of others, whereas dumb animals cannot. The same holds for what they term the goods of fortune: man requires wealth to keep himself alive, much as animals require pasture and prey to keep themselves fed. In proposing a good lying outside man's own control, they have made the whole of man subject to a power external to himself. Let us listen also to Zeno—for he too sometimes dreams of virtue. 'The highest good,' he says, 'is to live in agreement with nature.' We must then live in the manner of beasts. For all the things that ought to be far from man are found precisely in beasts: chasing pleasures, feeling fear, practicing deceit, lurking in wait, killing—and, most tellingly of all, having no knowledge of God whatsoever. What then does this teach me, to live according to nature, when nature itself inclines toward the worse and, through certain gentler enticements, plunges us into vice? Or if he says that beasts have one nature and man another, on the ground that man is born for virtue, there is something to this, yet it still will not serve as a definition of the highest good, since there is no animal that does not live according to its own nature. He who made knowledge the highest good gave man something proper to him, yet men pursue knowledge as a means to something further, never as an end in itself. Who, after all, is satisfied by mere knowing, apart from some gain that knowledge might bring? Arts are learned in order to be practiced, and they are practiced either for the necessities of life, or for pleasure, or for glory. That, then, is not the highest good which is not sought for its own sake. What difference, then, is there between holding knowledge to be the highest good and holding to be the highest good those very things which knowledge itself produces—namely sustenance, glory, pleasure? These are not proper to man, and therefore not the highest goods either, for the desire for pleasure and for sustenance belongs not to man alone but to dumb animals as well. What of the desire for glory? Is it not found even in horses, who exult when victorious and grieve when defeated? So great is their love of praise, so great their concern for victory. Not without reason does the greatest of poets say that one must see for oneself what pain there is for the defeated, what glory in the winning palm. But if the things that knowledge produces are shared with other animals, then knowledge is not the highest good. Besides, there is no small flaw in this definition, in that knowledge is proposed without qualification. For then all who know some skill will begin to seem blessed—indeed, even those who know evil things, so that the man who has learned to prepare poisons would be as blessed as the one who has learned to heal. So I ask toward what object this knowledge is meant to point. Suppose its object is the causation of natural phenomena—what happiness would come to me from learning the Nile's source, or from any of the other things natural philosophers speculate wildly about regarding the sky? What of the fact that concerning such matters there is no knowledge at all, but only opinion, which varies according to each man's wit? It remains, then, that the highest good be knowledge of good and evil. But why did he prefer to call the highest good knowledge rather than wisdom itself, when the meaning and force of both words are the same? Yet no one up to now has said the highest good is wisdom, though that would have been a better way to say it. For knowledge alone is of little use for embracing the good and shunning the evil, unless virtue is added as well. For many philosophers, though they discoursed on good and evil, nevertheless, driven by nature, lived otherwise than they spoke, because they lacked virtue. But virtue joined with knowledge is wisdom. It remains for us to refute also those who held virtue itself to be the highest good—an opinion Marcus Tullius himself held, in which they were quite thoughtless. For virtue itself is not the highest good, but the maker and mother of the highest good, since one cannot arrive at that good without virtue. Both points are easy to grasp. For I ask them whether they think one arrives easily at that splendid good, or only with difficulty and labor. Let them sharpen their wits and defend their error. If one can arrive at it easily and without any labor, then it cannot be the highest good. What reason would there be to torment ourselves, to wear ourselves out laboring day and night, if the object of our search lay so close at hand that anyone could seize it without the slightest mental effort? But if even some common and ordinary good is achieved only through labor, since the nature of good things is set on a steep climb and of evil things on a downward slope, then the highest good must be attained only by the greatest labor. And if that is wholly true, a second virtue would be required just to bring us to the virtue termed the highest good—an absurd and ill-fitting result, virtue reaching itself through nothing but itself. If one cannot arrive at any good except through labor, it is clear that virtue is the means by which one arrives, since the very function and office of virtue lies in undertaking and enduring labors. Therefore the highest good cannot be that through which one must necessarily arrive at something else. But these men, not knowing what virtue produces or toward what it tends, and finding nothing more honorable, stopped short at the very name of virtue, which they said must be sought with no benefit proposed—so that they made for themselves a good that itself stood in need of good. Aristotle did not depart far from them, holding that virtue joined with honor is the highest good—as though any virtue could be dishonorable, or as though, should it possess any baseness, it would cease to be virtue at all. But he saw that it could happen that virtue is judged badly by a perverse opinion, and so he thought that regard must be paid to human esteem—yet whoever does this departs from what is right and good, since it is not within our power for virtue to be honored according to its true merit. For what is honor but a lasting distinction bestowed on someone by the favorable rumor of the people? Suppose, though, that men's mistaken and corrupt judgment produces an unfavorable verdict instead—what becomes of virtue then? Shall we cast virtue aside because fools judge it shameful and base? Since virtue can be oppressed and harassed by ill will, in order for it to be its own proper and lasting good, it ought to need no assistance from outside itself, but should stand and rely on its own strength alone. And so no good is to be hoped for from man on its account, nor any evil to be shunned.
I come now to the highest good of true wisdom. Its nature must be defined in this way: first, that it belongs to man alone and falls to no other living creature; second, that it belongs to the soul alone and cannot be shared with the body; finally, that it cannot come to anyone without knowledge and virtue. This boundary excludes and dissolves all their opinions, for nothing they have said fits it. I will now say what it is, so as to teach what I have set out to teach: that all the philosophers were blind and foolish men, who were never able to see, understand, or even suspect what had been appointed as the highest good for man. When Anaxagoras was asked for what purpose he had been born, he answered: to see the sky and the sun. Everyone admires the remark and deems it fit for a philosopher, yet to my mind he simply had nothing better to offer and blurted this out at random rather than stay silent — something he should have worked out and turned over in his own thought beforehand, had he truly been wise, since a man ignorant of his own reason for being can scarcely count as a man. But let us suppose it was not said off the cuff but was a considered utterance. Let us see, in these few words, how many and how great were his errors. His first fault: he made sight the entire measure of what a man owes, crediting the mind with nothing and the body with everything. What then? If he were blind, would he lose his humanity? That cannot occur unless the soul itself has perished. And what of the remaining parts of the body — are they left without any function of their own? What of the fact that more is lodged in the ears than in the eyes, since learning and wisdom can be received by the ears alone, but not by the eyes alone? You were born, you say, to see the sky and the sun: who brought you into this spectacle, or what does the sight of the sky and of nature confer on you? Surely so that you might praise this immense and wonderful work. Confess, then, that all things have a maker — God — who ushered you into this world to witness and to praise so great a work of his own making. You believe it a great thing to see the sky and the sun; why not thank the one responsible for this kindness? Why not weigh, in your own mind, the power, providence, and might of him at whose works you marvel? For it must be that he who accomplished such marvels is far more marvelous still. Suppose a host invited you to a fine dinner and welcomed you splendidly — would anyone call you sane if you prized the pleasure above the one who gave it to you? So it is that the philosophers refer everything to the body, seeing nothing further with the mind, nothing beyond what meets the eye. And yet, once all the functions of the body are set aside, man's reason for being must be located in the mind alone. We are not born, then, in order to look upon the things that have been made, but to contemplate the very maker of all things, that is, to perceive him with the mind. Wherefore if someone should ask a person who is truly wise for what reason he was born, he will answer fearlessly and readily that he was born for the sake of worshipping God — the God who begot us for this very purpose, that we might serve him. And to serve God is nothing other than to guard and preserve righteousness through good works. But that man, ignorant as a man of divine things, reduced so great a matter to almost nothing, choosing only two things as worthy of his gaze. Yet suppose instead he had claimed his birth was meant for beholding the world — even granting that this would encompass everything and ring grander, he still would not have satisfied what duty requires of a man, because just as the soul is worth more than the body, so God is worth more than the world, since God both made the world and governs it. It is not the world, then, that is to be contemplated with the eyes, since both are bodily, but God who is to be contemplated with the mind, because just as God himself is immortal, so he willed the soul to be everlasting. And the contemplation of God consists in venerating and worshiping the common parent of the human race. But since this was absent from the philosophers, and they lay prostrate on the earth in their ignorance of divine things, we must conclude that Anaxagoras, for all the things he said he was born to see, in truth saw neither the sky nor the sun. Man's reasoning, then, is made plain, if only he be wise: what distinguishes him is humanity — and humanity, in turn, amounts to nothing but justice; justice itself is simply piety; and piety, at last, is nothing else than recognizing God as father.
The highest good of man, therefore, lies in religion alone. For the other things, even those thought to be proper to man, are also found in the other animals. When they distinguish and recognize their own cries by particular signals among themselves, they appear to converse. Some semblance of laughter, too, appears in them, when with ears laid back, mouth drawn, and eyes relaxed into playfulness, they sport either with a man or with their own kind. What of their mates and their young? Do they not show something like mutual love and tenderness? Again, those creatures that look ahead and store up food display a kind of foresight. Signs of reason, too, are detected in many: for when they seek out what is useful to them, guard against harm, avoid danger, and prepare for themselves hiding places opening onto several exits, surely they understand something. Can anyone deny that reason is present in them, when they often outwit man himself? For those whose task is the making of honey, when they inhabit their assigned dwellings, fortify their encampments, build their homes with an art beyond description, and serve their king, I do not know whether something like perfect prudence is not present in them. It is uncertain, then, whether the qualities attributed to man are shared with the other living creatures; but they are certainly without religion. My own view is this: every animal possesses some measure of reason, but the mute creatures hold it merely to keep life going, whereas man holds it as well for passing life on. And because in man reason itself is perfected, it is called wisdom, which makes man exceptional in this, that to him alone it has been given to understand divine things. On this point Cicero's judgment is true: he says that among all these many kinds, man alone possesses any notion of the divine, and that no people, however refined or however wild, is ignorant of the fact that some deity ought to be honored, even a people that cannot say what form that deity should take. From this it follows that he who as it were remembers whence he sprang acknowledges God. Those philosophers, then, who wish to free souls from all fear, take away religion as well, and rob man of his own particular and singular good — a thing utterly cut off from right living and from all humanity, since just as God subjected all living things to man, so he subjected man himself to God. For why do those very philosophers argue that the mind should be directed toward that place toward which our face is lifted? For if we are to gaze upon the sky, this is surely for no other reason than religion; strip away religion and our tie to the sky vanishes entirely. So either we must gaze upward or bow down to the earth. To bow down to the earth we cannot do even if we wished, since our posture is upright. We must gaze, then, upon the sky, to which the very nature of our body summons us. But if it is agreed that this must be done, it must be done either so that we may serve religion, or so that we may come to understand the workings of the heavens. But we can in no way come to understand the workings of the heavens, because nothing of that kind can be discovered by mere reasoning, as I taught above. Religion, then, must be served; and whoever does not take it up prostrates himself upon the earth and, following the life of beasts, strips himself of his humanity. Wiser, then, are the uneducated, who, even if they err in choosing their religion, still remember their own nature and condition.
It is agreed, then, by the consent of the whole human race, that religion ought to be embraced. But how error creeps into it must be explained. God shaped man's nature to crave and reach for a pair of things at once, religion together with wisdom. Men go astray, though, because they embrace one at the expense of the other — either seizing religion and letting wisdom slide, or giving themselves over solely to wisdom and letting religion slide — when in truth neither stands as genuine without its partner. So they tumble into a multitude of religions, all false, and precisely because they set aside the wisdom that might have shown them a plurality of gods is impossible; or else they chase after wisdom, but a false one, and precisely because they neglected the one supreme God's religion, the sole thing able to school them in true understanding. So it is that those clinging to just one of the pair wander a crooked road thick with grievous mistakes, for man's duty and the whole of truth alike lie bound up inseparably within this twofold thing. I marvel, therefore, that not a single philosopher ever arose who found the seat and dwelling place of the highest good. For they could have inquired thus: whatever the highest good is, it must necessarily be set before all men alike. Pleasure is what all creatures seek, but this is shared with the beasts, has no power to confer honor, brings satiety, harms in excess, diminishes with advancing age, and is not attained by many — for those who lack means, who are the greater number, must also lack pleasure. Pleasure, then, is not the highest good — indeed it is not a good at all. What of riches? Even less so: they fall to fewer people, most often by chance, often to the sluggish, sometimes even through crime, and are still coveted by those who already possess them. What of kingship itself? Not that either: not all men can reign, and it is necessary that all be capable of the highest good. Let us seek, then, something set before all. Perhaps virtue? No one could dispute that virtue counts as a good — indeed a good belonging to everyone. But if it cannot be blessed, since its very nature and force consist in the endurance of evils, then it is surely not the highest good. Let us seek something else. Yet one finds nothing lovelier than virtue, nothing more fitting for the wise to pursue. Since baseness is reason enough to flee vice, loveliness gives reason enough to chase virtue. So consider this: could something everyone agrees is good and honorable really carry no reward, no recompense at all, so utterly fruitless that it yields no benefit whatsoever? Such great toil, such hardship, such a fight waged against all the evils crowding this life — it has to yield some great good as its fruit. But what shall we say this is? Pleasure? But nothing base can be born of what is honorable. Riches? Power? These are fragile and fleeting things. Glory? Honor? The remembrance of one's name? But all these do not reside in virtue itself but in the estimation and judgment of others; indeed virtue is often hated and afflicted with harm. Rather, the good that is born of virtue ought to be so bound to it that it cannot be torn away or separated from it; nor can the highest good be understood except as belonging to virtue alone, in a form so complete that neither addition nor subtraction could touch it. And is it not the case that the very duties of virtue consist in scorning all these things? For not to desire, not to seek, not to love pleasures, wealth, power, honors, and all the things that are counted as goods — things which everyone else pursues, conquered by desire — this surely is the mark of virtue itself. It achieves, then, something loftier and more splendid, and it does not resist these present goods without cause, except that it longs for things greater and truer. Let us not despair of finding it, only let our thought range over every possibility, for the rewards being sought are no light or trifling matter.
If one asks what it is for the sake of which we are born, and what virtue accomplishes, we can investigate it in this way. Man consists of two parts, soul and body. Many things belong to the soul alone, many to the body alone, and many are common to both, as is virtue itself, which, whenever it is referred to the body, is called by the distinguishing name of fortitude. Since, then, fortitude belongs to both, a struggle is set before both, and from that struggle victory belongs to both: the body, because it is solid and can be grasped, must necessarily clash with solid and graspable things; the soul, however, because it is subtle and invisible, engages with enemies that cannot be seen or touched. And who are the enemies of the soul but desires, vices, and sins? If virtue conquers and puts these to flight, the soul will be spotless and pure. From what, then, can we gather what the fortitude of the soul accomplishes? Surely from its counterpart and equal, that is, from the fortitude of the body: once the body enters into any struggle or contest, victory aims at nothing but survival itself. Whether the opponent is human or beast, what is at stake is staying alive. Therefore, just as the body by conquering achieves this, that it not perish, so too the soul seeks to endure; and just as the body, when conquered by its enemies, is punished with death, so the soul, when overcome by vices, must necessarily die. What difference, then, will there be between the struggle of the soul and that of the body, except that the body seeks a temporal life, the soul an everlasting one? If, then, virtue is not blessed in itself — since, as I said, its whole strength lies in enduring evils, if it disregards all the things that are sought after as goods, if its highest degree opens onto death, since it often rejects the life that others desire and bravely takes up the death that others fear — if it is necessary that it produce from itself some great good, because labors undertaken and endured even to the point of death cannot be without reward, and if no reward worthy of it is found on earth, since it despises everything that is fragile and perishable, what remains but that it produce something heavenly, since it holds all earthly things in contempt and strives toward higher things, since it looks down on what is lowly? And this can be nothing other than immortality. Rightly, then, did Euclid, no obscure figure among the philosophers, who founded the Megarian school and dissented from the rest, say that the highest good is that which is alike and ever the same. He surely understood the nature of the highest good, though he did not spell out what it was; but it is immortality and nothing else at all, since it alone can neither be diminished, nor increased, nor changed. Seneca too, without meaning to, fell into admitting that virtue's reward is nothing else than immortality; in the very book he wrote on untimely death, he praises virtue by saying: it alone can grant us immortality and set us on a level with the gods. The Stoics, whose school he followed, likewise hold that no one can attain blessedness apart from virtue, so virtue's reward is indeed a blessed life, granted that a blessed life is rightly credited to virtue. Virtue, then, is not to be sought for its own sake, as they claim, but for the sake of the blessed life, which necessarily follows virtue. This argument could have taught them what the highest good was. This present life in the body, however, cannot be blessed, since the body leaves it exposed to misfortune. Epicurus, for his part, terms god blessed and incorruptible, on the grounds that god is eternal. Blessedness, after all, must be complete, nothing may disturb, lessen, or alter it, and nothing counts as blessed unless it is beyond corruption. And nothing is incorruptible except what is immortal. Immortality alone, then, is blessed, because it cannot be corrupted or dissolved. But if virtue can belong to man — which no one can deny — then blessedness too can belong to him: for it cannot be that one endowed with virtue is wretched. And if blessedness can belong to man, then immortality too, which is blessed, can belong to man. The highest good, then, is found to be immortality alone, since no other animal attains it, nor does the body, nor can it come to anyone lacking knowledge and virtue, in other words, lacking acquaintance with God and with justice. How right, how true this desire is, is shown by the very longing for this present life, which, though temporal and utterly full of toil, is nevertheless sought and desired by all: for the old desire it no less than the young, kings no less than the lowest of men, and the wise no less than fools. So great a thing is it, as Anaxagoras thought, to contemplate the sky and the light itself, that people are willing to endure whatever miseries may come. Since, then, this toilsome and brief life is judged a great good not only by the consensus of men but even of the other animals, it is clear that this same thing becomes the highest and perfect good if it lacks both an end and every evil. Indeed, no one would ever have arisen who despised this brief life, or who would undergo death, except in hope of a longer life. Consider those who freely gave themselves over to death for their countrymen's safety: Menoeceus in Thebes, Codrus in Athens, Curtius and the two Decii Mures in Rome. None of them would have chosen dying over life's benefits, unless each believed that immortality among his fellow citizens' memory awaited him. And though they did not know the way to immortality, the reality did not deceive them. For if virtue holds riches and wealth in contempt because they are fragile, and pleasures because they are brief, then it likewise holds fragile and brief life in contempt, in order to obtain something solid and everlasting. This very train of thought, then, advancing step by step and considering everything, leads us to that excellent and singular good for whose sake we are born. If the philosophers had done this, and had not preferred stubbornly to defend what they had once seized upon, they would surely have arrived at this truth, just as I have now shown. But even if this was not the case with those who extinguish the heavenly soul along with the body, even those who maintain the soul's immortality should nonetheless have grasped why virtue is placed before us: that once desires are subdued and the pull of earthly things has been overcome, our souls, cleansed and triumphant, may come back to God, the very source from which they came. For this reason we alone among living creatures are raised upright to look upon the sky, so that we may believe our highest good lies in the highest place; for this reason we alone receive religion, so that from this we may know that the human spirit is not mortal, seeing that it both longs for and perceives God, who does not die. So among all the philosophers who took up either knowledge or virtue as the highest good, they indeed held to the path of truth, but did not arrive at the summit. For these are the two things that together bring about what is sought: knowledge provides that we know how and where we must arrive, virtue that we actually arrive. Neither is worth anything without the other: for from knowledge virtue is born, and from virtue the highest good. The blessed life that philosophers have forever pursued and go on pursuing, be it through worshiping the gods or through philosophy, simply does not exist, and for this reason could not be found by them, since they went looking for the highest good in the lowest place instead of the highest. And what stands at the summit, if not heaven and God, the source from which the soul comes? What is the lowest but earth, from which the body comes? And so, though certain philosophers located the highest good in the soul rather than the body, they nevertheless tied it to this present life, which terminates with the body, and thereby dragged it back down to the body after all, to which belongs all this time that is spent on earth. It is therefore not without reason that they failed to grasp the highest good, since whatever pertains to the body and lacks immortality must necessarily be the lowest. Blessedness, then, does not belong to man in the way the philosophers supposed, but it belongs in this way: not that one is blessed while living in the body — which must necessarily be corrupted so that it may be dissolved — but rather when the soul, freed from partnership with the body, lives in spirit alone. In this life we can be blessed only in this one way: if we appear least of all to be blessed, if, fleeing the enticements of pleasures and serving virtue alone, we live amid all miseries and labors, which are the exercises and strengthenings of virtue, and if, in short, we hold to that rough and difficult road which has been opened for us toward blessedness. The highest good, then, which makes men blessed, can exist only in that religion and teaching to which the hope of immortality is joined.
The matter seems to demand at this point that, since we have shown that immortality is the highest good, we now prove this very point — that the soul is immortal. On this subject there is enormous dispute among the philosophers, and yet those who held a true view of the soul were unable to explain or prove anything, since, lacking this divine instruction, they brought forward neither true arguments by which they might win the case nor testimonies by which they might prove it. We will handle this matter more fittingly in the final book, where the blessed life comes up for discussion. What is left is philosophy's third division, the one they term logic, covering the whole of dialectic and every argument concerning speech. Divine teaching requires none of this, for wisdom resides in the heart rather than on the tongue, and the style of speech employed matters not at all. It is things, not words, that are sought. And we are not discussing the grammarian or the orator, whose expertise lies in how one ought to speak, but the wise man, whose teaching concerns how one ought to live. But if that physical reasoning is not necessary, nor this logical reasoning either, since neither can make a man blessed, then philosophy's entire strength must reside in ethics alone, the branch to which Socrates reportedly gave himself, abandoning every other pursuit. But since I have shown that the philosophers erred in this branch as well, failing to grasp the highest good for the sake of attaining which we are born, it is clear that all philosophy is false and empty, since it neither equips one for the duties of justice nor perfects a man's obligation and reason. Let them know, then, that they are mistaken who suppose philosophy to be wisdom; let them not be dragged along by anyone's authority, but rather favor and draw near to truth. There is no room here for recklessness; the penalty of folly must be paid for eternity, if either an empty personality or a false opinion has deceived one. But a man, whoever he is, if he trusts himself — that is, trusts a fellow man — is, not to say a fool who does not see his own error, certainly arrogant in daring to claim for himself what the human condition does not allow. One may see how far the very greatest master of the Roman tongue himself was mistaken, from this one statement of his: having stated in his books on duties that philosophy amounts to nothing but the love of wisdom, and defined wisdom in turn as knowledge encompassing both divine and human matters, he went on to add: whoever finds fault with the pursuit of this, I confess I hardly understand what he thinks worthy of praise. For if one seeks delight of mind and rest from cares, nothing rivals the labors of people perpetually in search of whatever serves and points toward a good, blessed life. Or if one seeks a system of steadiness and virtue, either this is the art by which we attain them, or there is no art at all. Claiming that no skill governs the weightiest matters, when even trivial things require some skill, betrays careless speakers who go badly wrong on what matters most. But if there is some discipline of virtue, where will it be sought once you have abandoned this manner of learning? For my part, though I have taken pains to acquire whatever small skill in speaking I could, out of my zeal for teaching, I have never been eloquent, since I have not so much as set foot in the forum; but the very goodness of the cause must make me eloquent, for the knowledge of divinity and truth itself suffice to defend it fluently and abundantly. I would wish, then, that Cicero might rise for a little while from the dead, so that this most eloquent man might be taught by an unpolished little fellow: first, what he thinks is worthy of praise, he who finds fault with that pursuit called philosophy; next, that this is not, as he assumed, the skill through which one learns virtue and justice, nor is any other discipline; and finally, since there is a discipline of virtue, where it is to be sought once one has abandoned that manner of learning which he himself sought not in order to listen and learn. For from whom could he have learned, when he knew that no one possessed it? But as he was accustomed to do in his legal cases, he wished to press hard by questioning and drive to a confession, as though he were confident that absolutely nothing could be answered that would prevent philosophy from being the mistress of virtue. And this indeed he openly declared in the Tusculan Disputations, turning his speech directly to philosophy itself, as though he were showing off in a declamatory style of speaking. Philosophy, he exclaims, guide of life, hunter of virtue and banisher of vice, without you what would have become not merely of us, but of the entire human race? You are the discoverer of laws, you have been the teacher of morals and discipline — as if she herself perceived anything on her own, and not rather that he who bestowed her ought to be praised. He might just as well have given thanks in the same way to food and drink, since without these things life could not stand, though in them, as in her, there is no consciousness of the benefit; and yet, just as those are nourishment for the body, so wisdom is nourishment for the soul.
Lucretius, then, speaks more correctly when he praises the one who first discovered wisdom, but foolishly in supposing that it was discovered by a man — as if that man he praised had found it lying about somewhere, like pipes found by a spring, as the poets say. But if he praised the discoverer of wisdom as a god — for so he says: no one, I think, will have been born of mortal body. For if, as her own known majesty of things demands, it must be said — he was a god, a god, illustrious Memmius — even so, he ought not to have been praised as a god for having discovered wisdom, but for having made man capable of grasping wisdom; for he who praises a part diminishes the praise of the whole. But he, in praising the man who nevertheless ought for this very reason to be held as a god, for having discovered wisdom, thus says: will it not be fitting that this man be reckoned worthy of a place among the number of the gods? This makes plain that his praise was aimed either at Pythagoras, by my earlier account the first man to adopt the title philosopher, or at Thales of Miletus, credited as the first to examine the nature of things. Thus, while seeking to exalt the man, he brought the matter itself down: for it is not a great thing, if it could be discovered by a man. But this may be forgiven a poet. Yet that same man, the perfect orator, the same supreme philosopher — not to reproach the Greeks, whose fickleness he always condemns and yet follows — praises wisdom herself, whom elsewhere he calls a gift, elsewhere an invention of the gods, poetically figured, praising her to her face. He complains gravely, too, that some have arisen who found fault with her. He asks whether anyone would actually dare condemn the parent of life, fouling himself with such an act of parricide, while showing so little reverence and so much thanklessness. Well then, Marcus Tullius — is it we who deserve the executioner's sack as parricides, simply because we refuse to call philosophy life's parent? Or is the true culprit you, so irreverent and thankless toward God — not toward that statue you kneel before in the Capitol, but toward the one who fashioned the world, brought mankind into being, and lavished wisdom itself among his other heavenly gifts? Is she, in your reckoning, virtue's teacher, or life's own parent? Whoever has approached her must necessarily be far more uncertain than he was before. Even the location of virtue itself remains something the philosophers have never clarified. As for what life philosophy fathers, her own instructors grew old and died without ever settling the question of how one should live. Of what truth can you profess her the seeker-out, you who so often testify that, though there has been so great a multitude of philosophers, not one wise man has yet arisen? So what exactly did this so-called teacher of life instill in you? Slandering a formidable consul and turning him, through venomous rhetoric, into an enemy of his own country? But let us set aside those things that can be excused in the name of fortune. You gave yourself to philosophy with a diligence matched by no one, familiar as you were, by your own frequent boast, with every one of its schools, and you illuminated it in Latin letters and showed yourself an imitator of Plato. Tell me, then, what you learned, or in which school you found truth. In the Academy, of course, which you followed, which you approved. But this teaches nothing except that you know that you know nothing. Your own books, then, convict you of how little can be learned from philosophy for the conduct of life. These are your own words: to me we seem not only blind as regards wisdom, but dull and blunted even as regards those things that seem in some degree perceptible. So if philosophy truly teaches how to live, why did you describe yourself as blind, dull, and blunted, precisely when her instruction should have brought you clear perception and understanding, moving amid the fullest light? Just how much faith you placed in philosophy's truth appears in the counsel you gave your own son: that one should indeed know philosophy's precepts, yet live by the community's customary ways instead. Could anything be more self-contradictory? Granted that philosophy's precepts deserve to be known, they would need knowing precisely so that we might live wisely and well; but if one ought to live according to the customs of the community, then philosophy is not wisdom, since it is better to live by the customs of the community than to live philosophically. For if what is called philosophy is wisdom, then surely whoever does not live according to philosophy will live foolishly; but if one who lives by the customs of the community does not live foolishly, it follows that whoever lives philosophically lives foolishly. By your own judgment, then, philosophy stands condemned of folly and emptiness. In the Consolation, too — that is, in a work not meant as a jest — you pronounced this judgment on philosophy: but I know not what error and pitiable ignorance of the truth holds us fast. Where, then, is the teaching authority of philosophy, or what did that parent of life teach you, if you pitiably do not know the truth? And if this confession of error and ignorance was wrung, almost against your will, from the depths of your own heart, why do you not, for once, confess the truth to yourself: that philosophy, which you extolled to the skies in praise though it teaches nothing, cannot be the teacher of virtue?
Seneca was led astray by the same error - for how could anyone hold to the true path once Cicero himself had gone astray? - when he says that philosophy is nothing other than the correct reasoning about how to live, or the knowledge of living honorably, or the art of conducting a right life. We will not be mistaken, he says, if we call philosophy the law of living well and honorably, and whoever has called it the rule of life has given it its proper due. But here he plainly failed to consider what the word 'philosophy' commonly means. Since it is scattered among so many sects and schools of thought, and possesses nothing certain — nothing, in short, that all its followers accept in common and speak of with a single voice — what could be more false than calling it the rule of life, when the clashing of its own precepts blocks and confuses the straight path? Either it is a law of living well whose principal tenets are wildly discordant with one another, or it is a knowledge of conducting life in which nothing is achieved by all this arguing on opposite sides except that no one knows anything. For I ask: does he think the Academy counts as philosophy or not? I do not suppose he would deny it. But if it does, then none of what he says applies to philosophy at all - for the Academy, in order to render everything uncertain, abolishes law, denies that there is any art, overturns reason, corrupts the rule, and does away with knowledge altogether. All those claims of his, then, are false, because they cannot apply to a thing that is forever uncertain and that to this day explains nothing. There is, therefore, no reasoning or knowledge or law of living well established except in that one true heavenly wisdom, which had remained unknown to the philosophers. For that earthly wisdom, being false, is varied, manifold, and wholly at odds with itself. And just as this world has a single maker and ruler, God, and a single truth, wisdom too must be one thing, undivided, since nothing true and good can reach perfection unless it stands alone. But if philosophy could truly shape a life, then no one but philosophers would be good, and everyone who had not studied it would always be wicked. Yet since there have always existed - and still exist - countless people who are or were good without any formal teaching, while among philosophers it has been exceedingly rare to find one who did anything in life worthy of praise, who, in the end, fails to see that these men are not teachers of the very virtue they themselves lack? For if one examines their characters closely, one finds them irritable, greedy, lustful, arrogant, insolent, hiding their own vices under the pretense of wisdom, and doing at home the very things they had condemned in the lecture hall. Perhaps I exaggerate for the sake of accusation - but does not Cicero himself admit and lament this very thing? How rare, he says, is the philosopher found to be so disciplined in character, so ordered in mind and life, as reason demands - one who treats his own teaching not as a display of learning but as the law of his life, who obeys himself and abides by his own decrees? One can see some so frivolous and boastful that it would have been better for them never to have studied at all; others slaves to money, others to glory, many slaves to their lusts, so that their manner of life is astonishingly at war with their own speeches. Cornelius Nepos, too, writes to that same Cicero in these terms: so far am I from thinking philosophy the mistress of life and the perfecter of the happy life, that I judge no one has more need of teachers of how to live than the very people who spend their time debating it. For I see that a great many of those who lecture in the schools most eloquently on modesty and self-restraint live themselves immersed in every kind of lustful desire. Likewise Seneca, in his Exhortations, says: most philosophers are of this sort - eloquent in denouncing their own faults. If you listen to them declaiming against greed, against lust, against ambition, you would think they were confessing their own indictment - so thoroughly do the curses they hurl in public rebound upon themselves. One ought to view them the way one views doctors, whose labels promise remedies while their boxes hold poisons. Some of them, indeed, feel no shame at all for their vices, but instead fabricate excuses for their own disgrace, so that they may even seem to sin honorably. The wise man, this same Seneca says, will do even things of which he does not approve, so that he may find a passage to greater things; he will not abandon good conduct, but will adapt it to the occasion, and the very things others use for glory or pleasure, he will use for the sake of getting things done. And a little further on: the wise man will do all the things the extravagant do and all the things the ignorant do, but not in the same manner or with the same purpose. And yet whatever purpose lies behind an act that is wrong in itself changes nothing, for actions are visible while motives remain hidden. Aristippus, the master of the Cyrenaics, kept company with the notorious courtesan Lais. This scandal the grave teacher of philosophy defended by claiming that there was a great difference between himself and Lais's other lovers - namely, that he possessed Lais, while the others were possessed by her. What a splendid wisdom, worthy of imitation by good men! Would you really entrust your children to his instruction, so that they might learn how to keep a mistress? He said there was a difference between himself and the profligate, namely that they squandered their own fortunes while he indulged himself for free. Yet in this the courtesan proved the wiser one, for she had turned the philosopher into her procurer, so that, corrupted by the example and authority of so great a teacher, all the young men flocked to her without any shame whatsoever. What difference did it make, then, with what intention the philosopher visited so notorious a courtesan, when the people and his own rivals saw him more depraved than the most dissolute of men? Nor was it enough for him to live this way - he began to teach his lusts as well, and carried his own habits from the brothel into the lecture hall, arguing that bodily pleasure is the highest good. Such an execrable and shameful doctrine was not born in the heart of a philosopher, but in the bosom of a courtesan. And why should I speak of the Cynics, among whom it was customary to have intercourse with their wives in the open street? Is it any wonder that from dogs, whose way of life they imitate, they also took their very name? There is, then, no mastery of virtue in this discipline, since even those who teach the more honorable precepts either fail to practice what they urge, or, if they do practice it - which happens rarely - it is not their teaching but their nature that leads them to what is right, for nature often drives even the untaught toward praiseworthy conduct.
But in fact, since they hand themselves over to perpetual idleness, take up no virtue at all, and spend their whole lives doing nothing but talking, what else should they be considered but idle? For wisdom, unless it expresses itself in some action through which it exerts its power, is empty and false, and Cicero is right to rank statesmen - who govern the republic, who found cities or preserve those already founded through justice, who safeguard the safety and freedom of citizens through good laws, wholesome counsel, or weighty judgments - above the teachers of philosophy. For it is better to make men good than to sit shut up in some corner prescribing things to be done which not even the ones speaking them actually do; and since they have removed themselves from real action, it is clear that they invented this art called philosophy merely to exercise their tongues or to distract their minds. Those who only teach and do not practice strip their own precepts of weight. For who would obey, when the very teachers instruct that one need not obey? It is good, certainly, to prescribe right and honorable things, but unless you also do them, it is a lie, and it is absurd and unfitting to keep goodness not in one's heart but merely on one's lips. They seek from philosophy, then, not usefulness but amusement. And Cicero himself attested to exactly this. Assuredly, he says, all their disputation - though it contains the richest springs of virtue and knowledge - nevertheless, when compared with their deeds and accomplished works, I fear may be found to have brought less benefit to the practical affairs of men than amusement to their leisure hours. Yet he need not have feared, since he was speaking the truth; but as though afraid of being charged by the philosophers with betraying some mystery, he did not dare declare outright what was true - namely, that they do not argue in order to teach, but to amuse themselves in their idleness. Since they claim authority over how affairs should be conducted, yet themselves conduct nothing, they ought to be counted as mere chatterers. But clearly, because they contributed nothing of good to actual life, they neither obeyed their own decrees themselves, nor has anyone through so many ages been found who lived by their laws. All philosophy, therefore, must be thrown away, because wisdom is not something to be pursued endlessly without limit or measure, but something to be actually possessed - and possessed promptly. For we are not granted a second life, in which, having sought wisdom in this one, we might then be wise in the other; in this life both must happen. It ought to be found quickly, so that it can be taken up quickly, lest anything be lost from a life whose end is uncertain. Cicero's Hortensius, arguing against philosophy, gets caught in its own clever trap: for in maintaining that one ought not to philosophize, he nevertheless appeared to be philosophizing, since it is the business of a philosopher to debate what should or should not be done in life. We ourselves are free of this charge, untouched by it, for we do away with philosophy, since it is a human invention, while we defend wisdom, since it is a divine tradition, and we affirm that it ought to be embraced by everyone. When Hortensius abolished philosophy without offering anything better in its place, he was thought to be abolishing wisdom itself, and was the more easily driven from his position, since it is agreed that man is born not for folly but for wisdom. Besides, there is another argument against philosophy of great force, one that this same Hortensius used - namely, that one can tell philosophy is not wisdom from the fact that its beginning and origin can be pinpointed. When, he asks, did men begin to be philosophers? Thales, I suppose, was the first. This is, indeed, a recent age - so where, then, among the ancients before him, was this love of investigating truth hiding? Lucretius says the same thing: this understanding and reasoning about nature was discovered only recently, and I myself, the very first among the first, am now able to render it into the speech of my own country. And Seneca states that the origins of wisdom took shape less than a thousand years ago. For many ages, then, the human race lived without reason - which Persius mocks when he says that wisdom came to the city along with pepper and dates, as though wisdom had been imported along with spices and merchandise. But if wisdom accords with human nature, it must necessarily have begun along with man himself; and if it does not, then human nature could not even grasp it at all. But since human nature does receive it, wisdom must necessarily have existed from the beginning; philosophy, therefore, since it did not exist from the beginning, is not the same thing as true wisdom. But since the Greeks had never had contact with the sacred writings of truth, they plainly failed to grasp how wisdom had been corrupted; believing, then, that human existence lacked wisdom altogether, they fabricated philosophy - a project in which they tried, through argument, to unearth a truth hidden from and unknown to them, mistaking this pursuit, out of sheer ignorance of the truth, for wisdom itself.
I have said what I could, briefly, about philosophy in itself. Let us now turn toward the philosophers themselves — not to do battle with men already unable to stand, but to chase down those who flee before us, fallen upon our own ground. Of all the schools, that of Epicurus has always drawn the largest crowd, not because it holds anything true, but because the popular name of pleasure lures in so many. No one, after all, lacks some bent toward vice. Beyond that, to pull the crowd toward himself, Epicurus tailors his words to whatever character he is addressing. The idle man he excuses from ever learning his letters; the greedy man he releases from giving to the public; the cowardly he keeps away from politics, the lazy from labor, the fearful from war. To the irreligious he declares that the gods trouble themselves with nothing; the man who serves only his own comfort and cares nothing for others is told to give nothing away, on the ground that a wise man works purely for himself in everything. For one who shuns company, he praises solitude; to the miser he teaches that a person can survive well enough on plain water and porridge. The man who despises his wife is offered a long list of the joys of staying single; the man saddled with worthless children hears childlessness praised as a blessing; the man who mistreats his parents is assured that natural bonds are meaningless. To the soft man, unable to bear suffering, he calls pain the worst evil there is; to the brave one, he says a wise man remains happy even under torture. Whoever hungers for fame and influence is urged to curry favor with kings; whoever cannot stomach such trouble is urged to avoid the court altogether. In this way the clever fellow assembles a following out of the most contrary characters imaginable, and in trying to satisfy them all he ends up more divided against himself than they are against each other. Now it should be shown where this whole doctrine of his springs from, and what gave it birth. Epicurus noticed that hardship regularly falls upon good men — poverty, labor, exile, the loss of those they love — while the wicked prosper instead, gaining power and honor; he noticed that innocence offers little protection and crime often goes unpunished; he noticed death striking without regard to a person's character, and with no order or measure by age: some live to be old, some are snatched away as babies, some die already grown strong, some are cut down while still in the bloom of youth by an early grave, and in war it is frequently the finer men who are beaten and killed. What disturbed him most was that the especially devout were the ones hit hardest by misfortune, whereas those who ignored the gods entirely or worshipped without any reverence suffered lighter troubles, or none — and even temples themselves were often struck by lightning and burned. This is the very grievance Lucretius voices about god: "let him then hurl his bolts and wreck his own shrines, and, retreating into the wilderness, vent his rage there, wasting his weapon — one which so often misses the guilty and strikes down the innocent and undeserving instead." Yet had he managed to gather even a trace of the truth, he would never have claimed a god was wrecking his own shrines — since the shrines are struck precisely because they belong to no god. The Capitol, chief seat of Rome's city and its religion, has caught fire from lightning not merely once but repeatedly; and how clever men explained this can be seen from a remark of Cicero's, who claimed the flame arose by divine intent — not to destroy Jupiter's earthly house, but to demand something grander and loftier still. He said as much, in the same vein as Lucretius, in the books he wrote of his consulship: "for the father who thunders on high, seated upon starry Olympus, made straight for his own strongholds and glorious shrines, and hurled his fire down upon the Capitol's seat." Through this obstinate folly, then, men not only missed the true God's power and greatness, but doubled down on their impious error by fighting, against every principle, to rebuild a shrine heaven's judgment had condemned so many times already. While Epicurus was mulling all this over, driven — as he saw it — by the sheer unfairness of it (for that is how it looked to someone blind to the real cause), he concluded that providence did not exist. Having convinced himself of that, he then set out to defend the idea, and in doing so tangled himself in a knot of errors with no way out. If there truly is no providence, he must explain how the world turned out so orderly, so carefully arranged. There is no order, he answers: plenty of things were made worse than they should have been. And this godlike fellow proceeded to find fault with them one by one! Had I world enough to answer each complaint, it would be simple to prove the man neither wise nor sound of mind. Take another point: if providence is nothing, how do the bodies of living creatures come arranged with such foresight, each limb set in place by some remarkable design to serve its own purpose? None of providence's planning, he says, went into shaping living creatures. Eyes were not made in order to see, nor ears to hear, nor a tongue to speak, nor feet to walk — since these parts came into being before there was any seeing or hearing or speaking or walking to be done. So these organs were not created for a use; rather, the use grew up afterward out of them. If providence is nothing, why does rain fall, why do crops grow, why do the trees leaf out? These things do not happen, he says, for the benefit of living creatures, since providence gains nothing by them — everything simply happens on its own. So where, then, does everything that happens come from, or how does it come to be? None of it, he answers, is providence's doing: there are tiny seeds drifting through empty space, and wherever these happen to clump together by chance, everything is generated and takes shape. Why, then, do we neither feel nor see these particles? Because, he says, they have no color, no warmth of any kind, no smell at all. They lack taste and moisture too, and are so tiny that no blade could ever slice or split them. In this way, having started from a lie, he was driven by the logic of his own claim straight into nonsense. Where, after all, are these little bodies supposed to be, or where do they come from? Why did no one but Leucippus alone ever dream them up, from whom Democritus took the idea and passed this legacy of foolishness down to Epicurus? If these particles exist, and are solid as claimed, then surely they could be seen by someone looking closely enough. And if they all share one identical nature, how could they produce such different things? By varying their arrangement and position, he says, the way letters combine: though the alphabet has only so many letters, arranged variously they can spell out endless words. But letters, unlike these particles, come in distinct shapes to begin with. Even so, he insists, these first elements too are rough in some cases, hooked in others, smooth in still others. If something projects from them, then they can indeed be sliced and split apart. But if they are smooth and need hooks to join, they cannot stick together — so they must have hooks, in order to link with one another. Yet if they are said to be so tiny that no iron blade could ever cut through them, how could they possibly carry hooks or corners? Anything that projects, after all, could surely be broken off. And besides, by what pact, by what shared intention, do they come together so that something might be constructed out of them? Lacking any sense of their own, they cannot combine so purposefully either, since nothing but reason can accomplish anything reasonable. This foolishness could be exposed a hundred different ways — but my argument must press onward. This is the man who, as Lucretius sings, "surpassed the human race in wit and dimmed every other star, as the sun in the sky outshines them all." I can never read those lines without laughing. He was not even speaking of Socrates, or Plato — men regarded as kings among philosophers — but of a man such that no madman, however far gone, ever babbled more foolishly. So this emptiest of poets did not merely dress up a mouse in the praises fit for a lion — he crushed it flat beneath them. And this same man claims to free us from fear of dying, on which subject his exact words run: "while we exist, death is absent; once death arrives, we no longer exist. Death, therefore, means nothing to us." What a slippery trick this played on us! As though it were death once it has already happened that people dread — when by then all feeling has been stripped away — rather than the actual process of dying, which is what strips the feeling away in the first place. There is, in fact, some stretch of time in which we have already ceased to exist, yet death has not yet quite arrived, and this in-between moment seems the truly miserable part: that death is beginning just as we are ceasing. Nor was it said without reason: "death itself brings no misery; the approach toward death is what brings misery" — that is, wasting away from sickness, absorbing a blow, taking a blade into the flesh, burning in fire, being torn apart by teeth. These are the things people dread, and not because they lead to death, but because they carry with them terrible suffering. Go ahead, then, and try to argue that suffering is not an evil — yet he himself names it the single worst of all evils! How, then, could I possibly avoid fear, if whatever brings about death, or comes before it, is itself an evil? And there is this further problem: the whole argument collapses from the start, because souls do not perish at all. Not so, he insists — whatever comes into being together with the body must likewise perish together with the body. I have already noted earlier that I am setting this question aside for now, saving it for the final volume, where I intend to take apart this belief of Epicurus — whether it truly originated with him, or with Democritus, or with Dicaearchus — using both reasoned argument and testimony from scripture. But perhaps what he really offered his followers was a promise of impunity for their vices: he was, after all, an advocate of the most shameless pleasure, believing that man was born for no purpose but to seize it. Anyone hearing such a claim affirmed — what reason would he have left to hold back from wickedness or crime? If souls are simply going to vanish, then let us chase after riches so we can grab hold of every delight available. And if we lack the means, let us seize them secretly, by trickery, or by force, from whoever does have them — all the more so if no god at all takes any interest in human affairs: whenever the hope of getting away with it smiles on us, let us grab and let us kill. It is, after all, the mark of the wise man to do wrong whenever it is both useful and safe — since if any god does sit in heaven, he takes no anger out on anyone. By the same logic it is foolish to do good, since favor moves such a god no more than anger does. Let us, then, serve our pleasures however we are able, since before long we shall be nothing whatsoever. So let no day pass, not even a single moment, without some pleasure in it — lest, since we are ourselves destined one day to perish, this very life we are living should perish along with us before its time. He does not spell all this out in so many words, but his reasoning teaches it all the same. For when he argues that a wise man does everything purely for his own advantage, he is measuring every action by what it gains him. So whoever takes in these shameless lessons will conclude that no good deed is worth doing, since doing good serves someone else's interest, and that crime need not be avoided either, since plunder comes bundled together with wrongdoing. If some pirate captain, or the leader of a gang of bandits, wanted to rally his men toward robbery, what speech could he possibly give other than the very one Epicurus gives? That the gods care for nothing; that neither anger nor favor moves them; that the punishments of the underworld need not be feared, since souls die along with the body and no underworld exists at all; that pleasure is the highest good there is; that no true bond unites humanity; that each man should look out only for himself; that no one loves another except for his own benefit; that a brave man has nothing to fear from death, nor from any pain, since even under torture, even while burning, he can claim indifference to it all. Is there really any reason to take this for the voice of a wise man, when bandits could borrow it word for word and put it to just as good a use?
Others take the opposite view, arguing that souls live on after death — chiefly the Pythagoreans and the Stoics. They deserve some pardon, since they land on the true position, yet I cannot help finding fault with them, because they stumbled onto truth by luck rather than by understanding. And so, even in the very matter where their thinking was correct, they still went somewhat astray. Fearing the argument that concludes souls must necessarily die along with the body, since they are born along with it, they claimed instead that souls are not born at all, but are inserted into bodies from elsewhere, passing from one to another. They saw no other way for souls to outlast the body except by showing they had already existed before it. So the mistake on each side comes out roughly equal, though one errs about the past and the other about the future. No one, in fact, has ever grasped the truest position of all — that souls are indeed born, yet do not perish — because none of them understood why that should be so, or what the true nature of humankind actually was. Many of those who suspected souls were eternal, imagining they were bound for heaven, took their own lives — Cleanthes did, Chrysippus did, Zeno did, and Empedocles too, who leapt into the burning craters of Etna in the dead of night, hoping that his sudden disappearance would make people believe he had gone off to join the gods. Among the Romans there was Cato, who spent his whole life mimicking Stoic pretension. Democritus held a different theory altogether, yet he still handed his own head over to death by his own choice — an act than which nothing could be more wicked. If a murderer is guilty for destroying a man, then a man who kills himself bears that same guilt, since he too destroys a man. In fact this deed deserves to count as the graver crime, since only God has authority to punish it. Just as we did not choose to enter this life on our own, so too we may leave this dwelling of the body — a place entrusted to our keeping — only when its very owner commands it, the one who placed us here to live for exactly as long as he wills, until he gives the order for our release. And should some violence be forced upon us, we must bear it calmly, since the soul of an innocent person, once destroyed, cannot go without justice, and we have a great judge in whom vengeance always remains whole and reserved. All those philosophers, then, are murderers — Cato included, that very prince of Roman wisdom, who is said to have read straight through Plato's book on the immortality of souls before taking his own life, driven to that ultimate wrong by a philosopher's authority. Even so, he seems to have had some motive for dying: his hatred of servitude. But what of the man from Ambracia, who, after reading that same book, hurled himself to his death for no reason except that he believed what Plato wrote? Truly a cursed teaching, one to be fled from, if it drives people out of life itself! Yet if Plato had understood and taught by whom immortality is granted, and how, and to whom, and for what deeds, and at what point in time, he would never have pushed either Theombrotus or Cato toward a voluntary death — he would instead have guided them toward life and toward justice. To my mind, Cato sought a reason for dying less to escape Caesar than to fall in line with Stoic doctrine, which he followed, and to win fame for himself through some grand act; I cannot find what harm could possibly have come to him had he simply lived on. Gaius Caesar, merciful as he was, wanted nothing more, even amid the fiercest fighting of the civil war, than to be seen deserving well of the republic by sparing Rome's two finest citizens — Cicero and Cato both. But let us come back to those who praise death as something good. You complain about life as though you had truly lived it, or had ever once worked out why you were born at all. Would not our true and common father rightly rebuke you with that line from Terence — learn first what living really means, and only then, if life still displeases you, resort to that remedy? You resent being subject to misfortune, as if you deserved any good thing at all — you, who do not even know your own father, your master, your king, and who, though your eyes take in the brightest daylight, carry a mind still blind, buried deep in the darkness of ignorance. This same ignorance has led some to claim, shamelessly, that we were born for precisely this reason — to pay the penalty for crimes; I cannot imagine anything more deranged to say. Where, after all, or in what crimes, could we possibly have taken part, we who did not exist beforehand at all? Unless, perhaps, we are meant to believe that foolish old man who claimed, falsely, to have once lived as Euphorbus. I suppose, being of humble birth, he simply adopted a lineage for himself out of Homer's verses. What a marvel, this singular memory of Pythagoras — and what a pitiful lapse in the rest of us, none of whom recall who we were before! But maybe it was some accident, or some special grace, that let him alone avoid the waters of Lethe, never tasting the drink of forgetfulness. Clearly this vain old fellow, the way idle old women often do, spun stories as if for gullible children. But had he actually respected the people he told these tales to, had he regarded them as real men, he would never have granted himself such shameless license to lie. His vanity, though — the emptiest of men — earns nothing but mockery. And what should we make of Cicero? He claimed at the start of his Consolation that men are born to pay for crimes, then repeated the very same claim later, as though scolding anyone who failed to see life as a punishment. He was right, at least, to admit beforehand that he himself was held captive by error and by a miserable ignorance of the truth.
Those who argue that death is a good thing know nothing of the truth, and so they reason like this: should nothing follow death, death carries no evil, since with it all sense of evil vanishes; yet should souls persist, death counts as something good, because immortality then follows. Cicero explained this view in his Laws: let us congratulate ourselves, since death will bring us either a better condition than the one we have in life, or certainly not a worse one — for a soul thriving without a body is a divine life, and a soul without any perception at all suffers no evil whatsoever. This sounds clever, as such people imagine, as though nothing else were possible. Yet both halves of it are false. For the sacred writings teach that souls are not extinguished, but are either rewarded for righteousness or punished everlastingly for their crimes. It cannot be right that a man who lived wickedly and prospered should escape what he deserves, nor that a man who suffered greatly for the sake of justice should be cheated of his reward. This is so true that the same Cicero, in his Consolation, declared that the just and the unjust do not dwell in the same regions. For, he says, those wise men of old did not think the same path to heaven lay open to everyone; they taught that souls stained by vice and crime are dragged down into darkness and left lying in filth, whereas souls kept chaste, clean, whole, and uncorrupted, further polished by worthy pursuits and skills, rise on a swift, effortless flight toward the divine — toward a nature resembling their own. But this claim contradicts his earlier argument. That earlier position assumed, as if it were necessary, that every human being born is granted immortality. What then becomes of the distinction between virtue and crime, if it makes no difference whether one is an Aristides or a Phalaris, a Cato or a Catiline? But no one perceives this contradiction of facts and opinions except one who holds the truth. If someone were to press us on whether dying counts as good or bad, our answer would be that everything hinges on the manner in which the life before it was conducted. For just as life itself is good if lived with virtue, and evil if lived with crime, so death too must be weighed by the deeds of the life that preceded it. Thus it follows that if a life has been spent in devotion to God, death is not an evil, because it is a passage into immortality; but if otherwise, it must necessarily be an evil, since, as I said, it delivers the soul over to eternal punishment. So what conclusion remains, except that error grips anyone who craves dying as though it were a blessing, or shuns living as though it were a curse? Except that they are supremely unfair, who will not weigh a few troubles against many blessings. For though they spend their whole lives pursuing exquisite and varied pleasures, they long to die the moment any bitterness comes upon them, and they behave as though they had never known good fortune, simply because they have once known bad. So they condemn the whole of life and imagine it holds nothing but evils. From this arose that foolish saying, that what we call life is really death, and what we fear as death is really life; and that the first blessing is not to be born, and the second is to die as soon as possible. To lend this saying greater authority, it is attributed to Silenus. In his Consolation, Cicero claims that never entering existence ranks as the supreme good, sparing one these shoals of life altogether; failing that, the next best course, once born, is fleeing fortune's grip at the earliest chance, as one would flee a blaze. That he himself believed this utterly empty saying is plain from the fact that he added something of his own to embellish it. So I ask: best for whom, exactly, since not existing leaves absolutely nobody around to benefit — good and evil alike depend entirely on there being a perceiver. And further, why did he think all of life nothing but reefs and fire? As if it lay in our own power not to be born, or as if fortune, rather than God, granted us life, or as if the manner of living had anything resembling a fire. Plato's own saying is no better — that he used to thank nature on four counts: for making him human instead of some mute beast, male instead of female, Greek instead of foreign-born, and lastly an Athenian who happened to live when Socrates did. Ignorance of the truth spawns blindness of mind and multiplies errors on a scale words can hardly capture. I would flatly maintain that nothing more foolish has ever been said in human affairs — as if Plato, had he instead come into the world as a foreigner, or a female, or even a mule, would somehow still be that identical Plato rather than simply whatever creature he was born. But of course he had put his faith in Pythagoras, who, in order to stop men from eating animals, taught that souls pass out of one body and travel into the bodies of other animals. This is both an empty and an impossible notion. Empty, because there was no need to place old souls into new bodies, when the same craftsman who once made the first souls could just as easily go on making new ones forever; and impossible, since a rightly reasoning soul is no freer to alter its own essential condition than flame is free to burn downward, or fire to spill itself sideways against a river's current. This supposedly wise man therefore imagined it feasible for the very soul inhabiting Plato at that moment to become trapped within some mute beast's body, all while retaining human consciousness — capable of grasping, and lamenting, its confinement in flesh unsuited to it. How much more sensibly he would have spoken had he said he gave thanks for being born clever and teachable, and born into means that allowed him a liberal education! For as to his being born at Athens, what benefit was there in that? Have there not been very many men of outstanding talent and learning in other cities, each one better than all the Athenians put together? How many thousands of men, do we suppose, were born at Athens and in the time of Socrates and were nonetheless ignorant and stupid? Wisdom, after all, comes from nowhere near the bricks or the location of one's birthplace. And what good, really, was it to congratulate himself on being born in the time of Socrates? Could Socrates lend his own talent to those who studied under him? Plato somehow forgot that Alcibiades and Critias sat just as faithfully at that same Socrates's feet — one growing into his homeland's most savage enemy, the other into the harshest tyrant of them all.
Let us examine, then, exactly what greatness resided in Socrates that would make a supposedly wise man feel grateful for the timing of his own birth. I do not deny that he was somewhat more sensible than the rest, who supposed that the nature of things could be grasped by human intelligence — in which I judge them to have been not merely lacking in sense but downright impious, since they wanted to thrust their prying eyes into the hidden places of that heavenly providence. We know that at Rome, and in most cities, there are certain sacred rites which it is forbidden for men even to look upon. Those who may not defile them accordingly abstain from looking, and if by chance or accident some man does catch sight of them, the offense is expiated first by his punishment and then by the repetition of the sacrifice. What, then, should be done with those who wish to pry into things that are not permitted at all? Surely those who seek by impious disputations to profane the secrets of the universe and this heavenly temple are far more guilty than someone who merely entered the shrine of Vesta, or of the Good Goddess, or of Ceres. Those inner sanctuaries, though men are not allowed to enter them, were at least built by men. Yet such philosophers do more than dodge any charge of impiety — worse still, they actually gain a name for eloquence and acclaim for supposed brilliance. And what if they actually could discover something? As it is, they are as foolish in their assertions as they are shameless in their inquiries, since they can neither find anything nor defend it even if they did find it. For even if they should stumble by chance upon the truth — which happens often enough — it only gives others the chance to refute it as false. No one, after all, comes down from heaven to render a verdict on everyone's opinions. So no one could doubt that those who chase after such questions are foolish, absurd, and out of their minds. Socrates, then, had some measure of ordinary human sense, in that, recognizing such things could not be discovered, he kept himself away from questions of that kind — though I fear he showed that sense only in that one respect. Much about him deserves not only no praise but outright censure, and in this he was very much like his own countrymen. Let me pick out one example that everyone would agree on. Socrates left behind a well-known maxim — that whatever lies above us holds no relevance for us. Following that logic, we might as well crawl on all fours and repurpose the hands meant for noble labor as extra feet; let heaven, to whose contemplation we were raised up, mean nothing to us; let even the light itself be of no concern to us — though surely it does concern us, at least for the sake of getting our food. But if this is what he meant — that we ought not to discuss heavenly matters — then he could not even grasp the reasoning behind the things that lay right under his feet. What then? Did he simply misspeak? That hardly seems likely; rather, he plainly meant what he said — that religion deserves no serious attention at all — but if he had said so openly, no one would have tolerated it. For who does not sense that this world, put together with such wonderful design, is governed by some providence, since nothing can hold together at all without some guiding hand? A house crumbles the moment its resident departs; a rudderless ship sinks beneath the waves; a corpse deserted by its soul rots away — by that same logic, surely nothing so immense as this universe could have arisen without a maker, or endured so long without one steering it. Now if his aim was to overturn the official state religions, I would not object — I would even praise him, if he had found something better himself. But this very man used to swear by the dog and the goose. What a buffoon of a man, as Zeno the Epicurean called him — foolish, ruined, hopeless, if he meant it as mockery of religion; and mad, if he did it in earnest, treating so contemptible a creature as a god! Who, after this, would dare criticize the superstitions of the Egyptians, when it was those very superstitions that Socrates at Athens confirmed by his own authority? And was it not the height of foolishness that, before he died, he asked his friends to sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius which he had vowed to him? Apparently he was afraid that before Rhadamanthus the judge he might be charged with failing to pay his vow to Asclepius. I would think the man had lost his mind, had he died delirious from illness; but since he did this in full possession of his senses, it is he who is out of his mind, whoever thinks such a man was wise. Such, then, is the man in whose lifetime a so-called wise man congratulates himself on having been born!
Let us look nonetheless at what Socrates actually taught. Having rejected the whole of natural philosophy, he turned instead to inquiring about virtue and duty. It seems certain enough that he schooled his students thoroughly in what justice requires. Under Socrates's teaching, then, it did not escape Plato that the force of justice lies in equality, since all men are born under the same conditions. Therefore, he says, let them own nothing private or personal, but, so that they may be equal — as the principle of justice requires — let them hold everything in common. This can be tolerated, so long as it seems to be said only of money. How impossible and unjust this itself is I could show in many ways, but let us grant, all the same, that it could happen: everyone, after all, will be wise and will despise money. Where, then, did this notion of community lead him? Marriages too, he says, must be held in common — that is, many men are to flock to the same woman like dogs, and whichever wins by strength gets her, or else, if they are patient like philosophers, they wait and take their turns, as though visiting a brothel. Such is Plato's remarkable idea of fairness! What becomes, then, of chastity as a virtue? What becomes of faithfulness in marriage? Take these away, and all justice is taken away with them. Yet this same man said that states would be blessed if either philosophers ruled or rulers turned philosopher. Would you really hand power to a man so just, so fair, who would strip some of what is theirs and hand it to others, who would sell off women's honor to common use — an act that not even a tyrant, let alone a king, has ever committed? And what reasoning did he offer for this thoroughly shameful scheme? A state will be harmonious, he says, and bound by ties of mutual affection, if all belong to all — husbands, fathers, wives, and children alike. What a tangled mess this makes of humankind! And how could affection survive at all, when nothing fixed remains to be the object of it? Which man would love a woman, or which woman a man, unless the two had always shared a household, unless a devoted heart and mutually guarded trust had woven a bond exclusively their own? Such virtue has no place in that promiscuous indulgence. In the same way, with every child belonging to everyone, what father could cherish children as truly his, unable even to be certain which ones were? Who would honor anyone as a father, given that no one can trace his own parentage? The result is that he will treat a stranger as his father, and even his own father as a stranger. And besides, how can a wife be held in common but not a son — since a son, of necessity, can only be conceived by one father? So this very community collapses of itself, with nature itself protesting, for the sake of that one father. It remains only that he wanted wives held in common purely for the sake of harmony. But nothing is a more violent source of discord than the pursuit of one woman by many men. And if Plato could not have been warned off this by reasoning, he could certainly have been warned by examples — both of dumb animals, which for this very reason fight most fiercely of all, and of men, who for this same cause have always waged their bitterest wars against one another.
It remains, then, that this community of his amounts to nothing but adultery and lust — vices which virtue exists above all to root out utterly. And so he never found the harmony he was looking for, because he did not see where it actually comes from. For justice carries no weight in things external to us, not even in the body; it dwells wholly and entirely in the mind of man. Whoever, then, wishes to make men equal ought not to strip away their marriages or their possessions, but their arrogance, their pride, their swelling self-importance, so that the powerful and the exalted may know themselves the equals even of the most destitute beggars. Once arrogance and unfairness are stripped away from those who have wealth, whether some possess more money than others becomes entirely irrelevant, provided their minds stand on equal footing — and only devotion to God can accomplish that. So he thought he had discovered justice, when in fact he was utterly overturning it, because the community that matters must be one of minds, not of fragile possessions. For if justice is the mother of all the virtues, then when each of them is individually removed, justice itself is overturned. Now Plato, before anything else, did away with frugality — which surely cannot exist where nothing is one's own; he did away with self-restraint, since there is nothing left from which to restrain oneself, once nothing is another's; he did away with moderation; he did away with chastity — virtues which are of the greatest importance in both sexes; he did away with modesty, shame, and decency, if things usually judged disgraceful and shameful are now to begin being considered honorable and lawful. Thus, in wishing to grant virtue to everyone, he stripped it from everyone. For the ownership of property provides the very material out of which both vices and virtues arise, while community of possessions provides nothing but license for vice. Men who keep many women, after all, can be called nothing but debauched wastrels. Likewise, women shared among many men cannot properly be called adulteresses, since there is no fixed marriage to violate, but they must necessarily be called prostitutes and whores. So he has reduced human life to the level — I will not say of dumb beasts, but of cattle and wild animals. For nearly all birds form pairs and mate, and defend their nests, as though they were marriage beds, with a devoted and united spirit, and love their own young because they are certain those young are theirs, and drive away any strange young thrust upon them. But this so-called wise man, going against the custom of mankind and against nature itself, chose to imitate creatures more foolish than himself; and since he saw that among other animals the roles of male and female were not divided, he decided that women too ought to serve as soldiers, take part in public councils, hold office, and assume command. And so he assigned them arms and horses — from which it would logically follow that men should take up the wool and the loom and carry infants. He failed to see how impossible these proposals were, and the proof lies in the fact that, to this day, no nation on earth has ever been found, whether too foolish or too wise, that lived in any such way.
Since, then, even the foremost philosophers themselves are caught in such vanity, what should we suppose of their lesser followers? They never seem so wise to themselves as when they boast of their contempt for money. "A brave spirit," they say. But I wait to see what they actually do, and where that contempt leads. They flee and abandon the estates handed down to them by their parents as though they were an evil, and, so as not to suffer shipwreck in a storm, they hurl themselves headlong into calm waters of their own accord — brave not through virtue but through a perverse fear, like men who, fearing to be slain by an enemy, kill themselves first, so as to escape death by death. So these men throw away, without honor and without gratitude, what could have won them the glory of generosity. Democritus is praised for having left his fields and allowed them to become public pasture. I would approve, had he given them as a gift. But nothing is done wisely which, if done by everyone, would be useless and harmful. Still, this negligence is tolerable. What of the man who turned his whole estate into coin and poured it into the sea? I am not sure whether he was sane or mad. "Go," he said, "down to the depths, you wicked desires; I will drown you, lest you drown me." If your contempt for money is so great, turn it into a kindness, turn it into an act of humanity — give it to the poor. With the very wealth you meant to throw away, you could rescue crowds of people from starving, from thirst, from going unclothed. Follow, at the very least, the reckless frenzy Tuditanus showed: throw it to the crowd to be seized. You can both escape from money and still put it to good use, since whatever benefits the many is not truly lost. But who approves Zeno's doctrine that all sins are equal? Let us pass over what everyone has always laughed at; it is enough, to expose the madness of the man's error, that he counts mercy among the vices and diseases. He strips from us the feeling on which nearly the whole conduct of human life depends. For since man's nature is weaker than that of the other animals, which heavenly providence has armed with natural defenses either to endure the assaults of the elements or to ward off attacks with their own bodies, but to man none of these has been given — in place of all of them he has received the feeling of compassion, properly called humanity, by which we look out for one another. For if man grew savage at the sight of another man, as we see happens among creatures whose nature is to wander alone, no human community would exist at all, no impulse or design to build cities, and indeed life itself would not be safe enough, since human weakness would then be exposed both to the other animals and to men themselves raging against one another like beasts. No smaller a madness appears in others. For what can be said of the man who declared that snow is black? How consistent it would have been for him also to say that pitch is white! This is the same man who said he was born for the very purpose of seeing the sky and the sun — he who, with the sun shining, could see nothing on the earth. When the mathematicians claimed the moon's disk exceeded the earth's size eighteenfold, Xenophanes accepted it with the utmost credulity, and — true to such foolishness — he added that inside the moon's hollow curve sat a second earth, home to another race living just as we do here. These moon-dwellers, then, would need a moon of their own to light their nights, the way ours lights us; conceivably our own sphere is nothing but the satellite of some still lower earth. According to Seneca, a certain Stoic once weighed whether the sun, too, deserved a population of its own — foolish indeed even to have hesitated over it. For what would he have lost by granting it? But I suppose the heat deterred him, lest he expose so great a multitude to danger, for fear that, should they perish from excessive heat, so great a disaster would be blamed on him.
What then? Do those who think there are antipodes, people standing with their footprints opposite ours, say anything sensible? Could anyone be foolish enough to think there exist people with feet positioned above their heads? Or that objects lying flat in our world dangle there inverted, with crops and trees sprouting downward, and rain, snow, and hail dropping upward toward the ground? And people marvel that hanging gardens are counted among the seven wonders, when philosophers make hanging fields, hanging cities, hanging seas, and hanging mountains! We must lay bare the source of this error too, for such men are always deceived in the same way. Once they have assumed something false at the outset, led on by a resemblance to the truth, they are bound to run into further error in what follows. Thus they fall into many absurdities, because whatever agrees with false premises must itself be false. But once they have put their trust in the first assumptions, they no longer examine what kind of things follow from them, but defend them by every means, when instead they ought to judge whether those first premises were true or false by what follows from them. What reasoning, then, led them to the antipodes? They observed the courses of the stars moving toward their setting, the sun and moon always setting in the same direction and always rising from the same direction. But since they could not see what mechanism regulated their course, nor how they returned from setting to rising, and since they supposed the sky itself curved downward on every side — which it must appear to do, given its immense breadth — they concluded that the world was round like a ball, and from the movement of the stars they supposed that the sky itself revolves; thus the stars and sun, once set, are carried back around to their rising by the very rotation of the universe. So they even built spheres of bronze in the shape of the world and engraved on them certain fantastic images which they said were the stars. From this roundness of the sky it followed that the earth must be enclosed within its curve. And if that were so, the earth itself would also have to be like a ball; for it could not be otherwise than round, being enclosed within something round. And if the earth were round, it would necessarily present the same appearance on every side of the sky — that is, raise mountains, spread out plains, and lay down seas. And if this were so, that final absurdity followed as well: that there is no part of the earth not inhabited by men and other living things. So the roundness of the sky invented these hanging antipodes. And if you ask those who defend such monstrosities how it is, then, that everything does not fall down into that lower part of the sky, they answer that it is simply the nature of things for weights to be drawn toward the center, and so that everything converges toward the center the way spokes gather in a wheel's hub; while light things, such as mist, smoke, and fire, are carried away from the center, so as to seek the sky. I do not know what to say of such people, who, once they have gone astray, persist stubbornly in their folly and defend empty claims with empty arguments — except that I sometimes think they either philosophize as a joke, or, knowingly and deliberately, take up falsehoods to defend, as if to exercise or display their cleverness on bad material. I could myself demonstrate through numerous arguments that the sky can in no way lie beneath the earth, if this volume were not already nearing its close, and if other topics more essential to what I am now writing did not still await me. Since cataloguing the errors of every philosopher individually is not a job for one single book, let it suffice to have listed a few, from which one may understand the character of the rest.
Now we must say a few things about philosophy in general, so that, having established our case, we may bring it to a close. That greatest imitator of Plato among us judged that philosophy is not for the common people, since only the learned can attain it. "Philosophy," he says, "is content with few judges, deliberately shunning the multitude." But it is not wisdom if it recoils from the company of men, since wisdom, if given to man at all, is given to all without distinction, so that there is no one whatsoever incapable of grasping it. Yet these men embrace the virtue given to the whole human race in such a way that they alone, it seems, wish to enjoy this public good, as jealous as though eager to seal shut or pluck out the eyes of every other person, keeping them from beholding the sun. Denying wisdom to mankind, after all, amounts to nothing less than stripping the genuine, divine light from human minds. Yet if wisdom lies within the reach of human nature, then craftsmen and farmers and women and, in short, everyone who bears human form ought to have been taught, so that they might become wise, and a people of the wise ought to have been formed out of every tongue, condition, sex, and age. So it is the strongest proof that philosophy neither aims at wisdom nor is itself wisdom, that its mystery is celebrated only by a beard and a cloak. Even the Stoics sensed this, for they said that slaves and women too ought to philosophize; so did Epicurus, who invites the wholly uneducated to philosophy; likewise Plato, who wished to compose his ideal state out of the wise. They indeed attempted to do what the truth demanded, but it could go no further than words — first, because many skills are needed before one can even approach philosophy. These common subjects must be learned for the purpose of reading, because amid such variety of matters not everything can be learned by hearing, nor retained in memory. No small effort must also be given to grammar, so as to know the correct manner of speech; that alone must take up many years. Nor can rhetoric be left unlearned, so that what you have learned you may be able to bring forth and express. Geometry too, and music, and astronomy are necessary, since these arts have some kinship with philosophy. All of this cannot be fully learned either by women, who must learn, before reaching maturity, the duties soon needed for household life; nor by slaves, who during those very years must above all serve those from whom they might learn; nor by the poor, or craftsmen, or farmers, who must earn their daily bread by labor. For this reason Cicero says that philosophy shrinks from the multitude. But, one might say, Epicurus will admit the uneducated. How, then, will they understand what is said about the first principles of things, matters so tangled and involved that even cultivated men scarcely grasp them? So amid questions this tangled in darkness, muddled further by differing abilities, and clothed in the ornate language educated speakers favor, where is room left for those without training or learning? In the end, no woman has ever been taught to philosophize, in all of recorded memory, except one — Themista — and no slave except one, Phaedo, who, it is said, they redeemed from his miserable servitude and taught. They also count Plato and Diogenes, who nonetheless were not slaves but fell into servitude — they had been taken captive. Plato, it is said, a certain Anniceris ransomed for eight thousand sesterces. And so Seneca attacked with insults this very man who had ransomed him, for having valued Plato too cheaply — mad, it seems to me, to be angry at a man for not losing more money: as if he ought to have weighed out gold as though for the dead Hector, or piled up more coin than the seller had even asked. And among barbarians, none at all except one, Anacharsis the Scythian, who would never even have dreamed of philosophy had he not first learned the language and letters.
What, then, heavenly teaching accomplishes — which nature itself demanded be done, but which they themselves could neither achieve nor saw achieved by philosophers — it alone can bring about, because it alone is wisdom. Could they possibly have persuaded anyone, who cannot persuade even themselves? Could they suppress anyone's desires, temper anger, restrain lust, when they themselves give way to vice and admit that nature is the stronger power? But because God's precepts are simple and true, everyday experience shows how powerful they are in the souls of men. Hand me a man prone to rage, foul in speech, out of control — a handful of God's words is all it takes for me to turn him gentle as a lamb. Give me one who is greedy, miserly, tight-fisted — I will straightaway give him back to you generous, scattering his own money with open hands. Give me one afraid of pain and death — he will at once scorn crosses and flames and the bull of Perillus. Give me one who is lustful, adulterous, a glutton — you will soon see him sober, chaste, self-controlled. Give me one cruel and thirsting for blood — that very fury will be changed into pure gentleness. Give me one unjust, foolish, sinful — he will at once become fair, prudent, and innocent: for by one washing all wickedness is done away. Such is the strength divine wisdom carries: once it enters a man's heart, one blow banishes folly, that root of every sin — and to accomplish this no payment, no books, no midnight study is required. These things happen freely, easily, quickly — let the ears only lie open and the heart thirst for wisdom. Let no one be afraid: we do not sell water, nor charge a fee for sunlight. God's spring flows richly and without limit, freely accessible to every person, and this light from heaven dawns for anyone who has eyes to see it. Has any philosopher ever accomplished this, or could he, even if he wished? Though they spend their whole lives in the pursuit of philosophy, they cannot make anyone else better, nor even themselves, if nature has stood even slightly in the way. And so their wisdom, at its very best, does not root out the vices but merely conceals them. But God's few precepts so change the whole man, and, having stripped off the old, restore him new, that you would not recognize him as the same person.
What then? Do they teach nothing similar at all? On the contrary, a great deal, and they often come close to the truth, but their precepts carry no weight, because they are human and lack the greater authority — that is, the divine. So no one believes, because the one who hears considers himself as much a man as the one who instructs him. Moreover, nothing among them is certain, nothing that comes from real knowledge, but since everything is done by conjecture, and much that is offered is contradictory and varied, it is the mark of a most foolish man to wish to obey their precepts when it is doubtful whether they are true or false — and so no one obeys, because no one wants to labor toward an uncertain goal. The Stoics say that virtue alone can make life happy. Nothing could be truer. But what if a man is tortured, or afflicted with pain? Can anyone be happy among the executioners? Indeed, pain inflicted on the body is the very material of virtue, and so a man is not miserable even amid torments. Epicurus goes further still, claiming the wise man stays happy always — even enclosed within Phalaris's bronze bull, he will call out: "How sweet this is, and I care nothing for it." Would anyone not mock such a claim, given that a man wholly devoted to pleasure has taken up, absurdly, the pretense of courage? For it cannot be that anyone should count bodily torture among pleasures, when it is enough, for the fulfillment of virtue's duty, simply to endure and bear it. Where does that leave you Stoics, and you, Epicurus? Even under torture, by your account, the wise man remains happy. Should this rest on the glory of having endured, he will never get to savor it, since the torment may well kill him; should it rest instead on future memory, then either he feels nothing at all, assuming the soul dies with the body, or, if something does persist, it brings him no benefit whatsoever. So what fruit, then, does virtue actually yield? What happiness of life? They say he will die with a calm mind. You offer me a good lasting one hour, or perhaps one moment, for the sake of which it is not worthwhile to be worn down by miseries and toils through an entire life. And how much time, after all, does death occupy? When it comes, whether you meet it with a calm mind or an anxious one no longer makes any difference. So it turns out that nothing else is sought from virtue except glory. But this is either useless and short-lived, or else it will not follow, given the corrupt judgments of men. Virtue thus bears no fruit at all if virtue itself dies and decays. Hence those who have written on the subject were gazing merely at virtue's shadow, never at virtue in itself. For their eyes were fixed on the earth, and they did not lift their gaze upward, so as to behold virtue as she truly showed herself from the regions of heaven. This explains why their precepts win no obedience: whenever they champion pleasure they are teaching vice outright, and whenever they champion virtue instead, the only penalty they threaten for wrongdoing is shame, and the only prize they promise for virtue is honor and praise — since, in their view, virtue ought to be pursued purely for itself, with no further motive. The wise man, then, is happy even amid torments — but when he is tortured for the sake of faith, for justice, for God, that endurance of pain will make him truly and supremely happy. For God alone has the power to reward virtue, and his reward is immortality and nothing less. Those who do not seek this, and do not hold to the religion under which eternal life lies, surely know nothing of the true force of virtue, whose reward is unknown to them, nor do they look toward heaven, though they think they do, when they pursue things beyond their reach — for there is no other way of looking toward heaven except either to take up religion or to believe one's own soul is immortal. For whoever understands that God must be worshiped, or holds before himself the hope of immortality, has his mind fixed on heaven, and even though he does not see it with his eyes, he sees it by the light of his soul. But those who do not take up religion are earthbound, because religion comes from heaven; and and those who believe the soul dies together with the body are equally earthbound in their gaze, since past the body — which is merely earth — they perceive nothing further that endures forever. It profits nothing, then, that man has been so formed as to gaze at the sky with upright body, unless with an upright mind he also perceives God, and his whole thought is engaged in the hope of everlasting life.
Therefore nothing else in this life gives our reason, or our whole condition, anything to rest upon, except acknowledging the God who begot us, together with devoted, religious worship of him. Since the philosophers wandered from this, they were certainly not wise. They did indeed seek wisdom, but since their search went about it wrongly, they slipped far off course and fell into errors so deep that they failed to hold even the common sense that ordinary people have. For they were not content merely to refuse to affirm true religion; they actually tore it down, while under the guise of a false virtue they tried to free men's minds from all fear. This overthrow of religion found itself a name: nature. For these men, either because they did not know by whom the world had been made, or because they wanted to persuade others that nothing had been brought to perfection by a divine mind, claimed nature was mother to everything that is—as though declaring that all things arose spontaneously, on their own. By that very word they plainly confess their own thoughtlessness. For nature, once you take away providence and divine power, is simply nothing at all. But if by 'nature' they mean God, what perversity it is to call it nature rather than God! If, on the other hand, nature is the principle or necessity or condition of coming-to-be, then it is not perceptible by itself, and there must instead be a divine mind that by its own providence supplies to all things the beginning of their coming-to-be; or if by nature they mean the sky and the earth and everything that has been born, then nature is not God but God's handiwork. By a similar error they believe there is a kind of goddess called Fortune, who toys with human affairs through various chances, simply because they do not know where their good and bad fortunes come from. They imagine themselves squared off to do battle with her, yet they give no account of why or for what reason, but only boast that at every moment they are locked in combat with Fortune. Indeed, whenever they have tried to console others for the death and loss of loved ones, they have torn the name of Fortune to pieces with the sharpest accusations, and there is scarcely any discussion of theirs about virtue in which Fortune is not battered. Marcus Tullius, in his Consolation, says that he had always fought against Fortune and had overcome her, since he had bravely beaten back the assaults of his enemies; that even being driven into exile from his own country, stripped of home and homeland, had not broken him under her blows; yet losing his dearest daughter left him, by his own shameful admission, defeated by Fortune. 'I yield,' he says, 'and I raise my hand.' What could be more pitiable than a man who collapses like this? 'Foolishly,' he says—yet this is a man who professes to be wise! What, then, is the point of taking on the name of wisdom? What is the point of that lofty contempt for worldly things, paraded in such grand language? What is the point of a bearing set apart from everyone else's? Or why dispense any teachings of wisdom whatsoever, when no wise man has ever actually turned up? And does anyone blame us for denying wisdom to philosophers, when they themselves admit to knowing nothing and being wise about nothing? For whenever they fail so completely that they cannot even get a grip on anything—as they do in everything else—it is then, when reminded of their ignorance, that they leap up as if possessed and cry out that they are blind and senseless. Anaxagoras declares that all things are wrapped in darkness; Empedocles complains that the pathways of the senses are too narrow, as though thought needed a chariot and a team of four; Democritus says that truth lies sunk as if in some well so deep it has no bottom—foolishly, as in everything else. For truth is not sunk as in a well, where a man might either climb down or simply fall in, but rather set as on the very peak of a lofty mountain, or better, in the sky itself—which is the truest thing of all. For why should he have said it was pressed down to the depths rather than raised to the heights? Unless, that is, he'd rather situate the mind down in the feet, in the soles of the heels, than up in the chest or skull. So far were they removed from truth itself that not even the posture of their own bodies reminded them that truth was to be sought on high. Out of this despair was born that famous confession of Socrates, that he knew nothing except this one thing—that he knew nothing. From this arose the Academy as a school—if "school" is the right word for a place where not-knowing is both taught and absorbed. Yet even the ones who did claim to possess knowledge could not consistently hold on to what they believed they knew. Because their reasoning could not hold together, owing to their ignorance of divine matters, they were so inconsistent, so uncertain, so often contradicting themselves, that one could not tell or judge what they actually thought or wanted. Why, then, take up arms against men already dying on the point of their own blade? Why labor to tear down those whom their own speech tears down and destroys? Cicero says that Aristotle, attacking the ancient philosophers, called them either utter fools or the most boastful of men for supposing that philosophy had been brought to perfection by their own talents; but that he himself could see that, since so much progress had been made in a few years, philosophy would soon be entirely complete. Well then, when was that time? When was it completed, or by whom? For as to his saying that those were the greatest fools who thought wisdom had been perfected by their own talents—that is true; but he himself was not sensible enough either, supposing philosophy to have been founded by earlier generations, built up further by his contemporaries, and destined for completion by those still to come. For what is never sought along its true path can never be found.
But let us return to what we set aside. Fortune, then, is nothing in itself, and must not be treated as though it possessed any kind of consciousness, since Fortune is simply the sudden and unexpected outcome of chance events. Yet the philosophers, so as never to be wrong about anything, insist on being wise even about something foolish: they change Fortune's sex and say she is not a goddess, as the common people think, but a god. Yet the same men sometimes call her Nature, sometimes Fortune, because—as the same Cicero says—she brings about many things unexpected to us on account of the obscurity and our ignorance of their causes. Since, then, they do not know the causes by which something happens, they necessarily do not know who brings it about either. That same Cicero, in a markedly weighty work meant to hand his son philosophy's lessons for living, writes: 'Who does not know how great Fortune's power is in both directions?' For when we enjoy her favoring breeze, we arrive at the outcomes we wished for, and when she blows against us, we are struck down. First of all, a man who says nothing can be known has said this as though both he and everyone else knew it. Then, a man who tries to render doubtful even things that are clear has here supposed something to be clear which ought, above all, to have been doubtful to him—since, for anyone wise, the claim is simply untrue. 'Who does not know?' he asks — well, I do not. Let him instruct me, supposing he's able, as to what this power amounts to, what this favoring gust is, and what its opposite might be. It is shameful, then, for a clever man to state something he could not prove if it were denied. Finally, since it is he who says that assent ought to be withheld, because it is the mark of a foolish man to give rash assent to things unknown, he has here plainly trusted the opinions of the crowd and the untaught, who think that Fortune is the one who hands out good and bad to men. For they fashion her image with a horn of plenty and a rudder, as though she both bestows wealth and holds the steering of human affairs. Vergil agrees with this opinion, calling Fortune all-powerful, and so does the historian who says: 'But indeed Fortune rules over everything.' What place, then, remains for any other god? Why isn't she declared sole ruler, given her greater power, or given exclusive worship, given total power? Or if she only sends evils, let them offer some reason why, if she is a goddess, she should be envious toward men and wish them ruined, when she is worshipped religiously by them; why she should be kinder to the wicked and harsher to the good; why she should lay ambushes, strike men down, deceive them, drive them out; who appointed her the eternal tormentor of the human race; and finally, why she should have drawn so evil a lot of power that she conducts and obscures everything more by whim than by truth. These are the questions, I say, that philosophers ought to have investigated, rather than rashly accusing an innocent Fortune, who, even granting she exists at all, cannot on their own showing be proved so hostile to men as is supposed. And so all those speeches in which they tear apart the injustice of Fortune and, in the most arrogant terms, boast of their own virtues set against her, are nothing but the ravings of a thoughtless frivolity. Let them, then, not envy us, to whom God has laid open the truth—we who know, just as we know that Fortune is nothing, that there does exist a wicked and treacherous spirit, hostile to the good and an enemy of justice, who does the opposite of what God does, whose reason for envy we explained in the second book. This spirit, then, lies in ambush against everyone: those who do not know God he hinders with error, buries under folly, wraps in darkness, so that no one manages to reach that knowledge of God's name where wisdom and everlasting life alone reside; but those who do know God he attacks with cunning and guile, so as to entangle them through desire or lust, so as to drive them, corrupted by flattering sins, toward death; or, if his deceit gains nothing, he tries to strike them down by force and violence. This is why, at the very beginning of the transgression, he was not immediately thrust down by God into punishment—so that he might train man, through his own malice, toward virtue; for virtue, unless it is exercised, unless it is strengthened by continual struggle, cannot become perfect, since virtue is the brave and unconquered endurance of evils to be borne. From this it follows that there would be no virtue at all if there were no adversary. And so, since men felt the force of this perverse power resisting virtue but did not know its name, they invented for themselves the empty word 'Fortune'—how far removed this is from wisdom, Juvenal declares in these lines: 'You have no divine power, if there is good sense: it is we, Fortune, we who make you and set you in heaven as a goddess.' So it was foolishness, error, and blindness—or, in Cicero's phrase, sheer ignorance of things and their causes—that gave rise to the names Nature and Fortune. Yet just as men fail to recognize their true adversary, they likewise fail to recognize virtue, whose recognition follows from recognizing that adversary. And if virtue is joined to wisdom, or, as they themselves say, is itself the very same thing as wisdom, then they must necessarily be ignorant of what it consists in. No one can arm himself with genuine weapons without knowing which foe he must arm against, and no one can defeat an adversary while striking, mid-combat, at a mere shadow instead of the enemy in front of him. For he who, intent on something else, neither foresees nor guards against the blow aimed at his vitals will be laid low.
I have shown, as far as my modest ability allowed, that the philosophers kept to a path far astray from the truth; yet I am aware how much I have passed over, since my proper task was not a full disputation against the philosophers. But it was necessary to turn aside in this direction, in order to show that so many great minds were spent on falsehoods, lest anyone shut out from corrupt religions should think of turning to them instead, as if he would find something certain there. There is, then, one hope for man, one salvation, and it lies in this teaching which we defend; the whole of man's wisdom consists in this one thing, that he should know God and worship him. This is our doctrine, this is our conviction. As loud as my voice can carry, I bear witness, I announce, I state plainly: this—this right here—is the very thing every philosopher spent a whole lifetime hunting for and never managed to seize, hold, or pin down, since each one either preserved a corrupted religion or ripped it out entirely, roots included. So let those depart who bring confusion into human life rather than guidance. After all, what could they possibly teach, and who could they possibly guide, given that they have never yet guided themselves? What sick man can the sick heal, what blind man can the blind lead? Let all of us, then, who care for wisdom, turn ourselves this way instead. Or shall we wait until Socrates comes to know something, or Anaxagoras finds a light in the darkness, or Democritus drags truth up out of his well, or Empedocles widens the pathways of his mind, or Arcesilaus and Carneades come to see, to perceive, to grasp? Behold: a voice out of heaven, instructing us in truth and revealing a light brighter even than the sun. Why are we so unjust to ourselves that we hesitate to take up the wisdom which learned men, wearing out their lives in the search, were never able to find? Whoever wishes to be wise and happy, let him listen to the voice of God, let him learn justice, let him come to know the mystery of his own birth, let him hold cheap what is human and take up what is divine, so that he may attain that highest good for which he was born. Now that all false religions have been dismantled and everything that used to be, or could be, said in their defense has been refuted, and now that the schools of philosophy have likewise been shown wanting, we must come to the true religion and the true wisdom—since, as I shall show, the two are joined together—so that we may establish it by arguments, by examples, and by fitting witnesses, and may show that the folly which these worshippers of the gods never tire of throwing in our faces belongs not to us at all, but wholly to themselves. And although in the earlier books, in refuting false religions, and here, in demolishing false wisdom, I have already indicated where the truth lies, the next book will show more clearly still what true religion and true wisdom are.
As I turn it over in my mind and often ponder it, that earlier condition of the human race seems to me both astonishing and shameful: that through the folly of a single age, which took up various religions and believed there were many gods, mankind fell so suddenly into such ignorance of itself that, truth being taken from its sight, neither the worship of the true God nor any rational account of humanity was retained, men seeking the highest good not in heaven but on earth. For this reason the happiness of the ancient ages was certainly changed. For men began, having abandoned the parent and founder of all things, God, to venerate the senseless figments of their own fingers. What that depravity produced, what evils it brought, the matter itself declares. For having turned away from the highest good — which is blessed and everlasting precisely because it cannot be seen, touched, or grasped — and from the virtues that agree with that good, which are likewise immortal, and having slipped down to these corrupt and fragile gods, devoting themselves to the things by which only the body is adorned, fed, and delighted, they sought for themselves an everlasting death together with their gods and with bodily goods, since every body is subject to death. Injustice and impiety, of the same kind as these religions, therefore followed, as was inevitable. For men ceased to lift their faces toward heaven; instead, minds pressed downward clung to earthly things — to earthly religions just as to earthly goods. There followed the disintegration of the human race, and fraud, and every kind of wickedness, because, since they scorned the everlasting, incorruptible goods that man by rights should crave above everything else, and chose instead what was temporary and fleeting; and men's confidence in evil grew greater, since they preferred the crooked to the straight because it was more immediate. Thus a fog and darkness overtook human life, which in earlier ages had moved in the clearest light. And, fittingly for this depravity, once wisdom itself had vanished, men at last started awarding themselves the label "wise." Yet in that very era when everybody counted as wise, the label of wisdom belonged to nobody at all — if only that word, later thrown open to the public and by then whittled down to a handful, had held onto its genuine meaning! For perhaps those few, by talent or authority or constant exhortation, could have freed the people from vice and error. But wisdom had so utterly perished that from the very arrogance of the title it is plain none of those so called was truly wise. And yet, before this thing called philosophy had even been devised, there are said to have been seven men who, because they were the first of all to dare inquire and dispute about matters of nature, deserved to be considered and called wise. O wretched and calamitous age, in which throughout the whole world only seven were fit to be summoned by the name of man! For no one can rightly be called a man except one who is wise. But if all the rest besides these seven were fools, then not even those seven were truly wise, since by the judgment of fools no one can truly be wise. So far was wisdom from them that not even afterward, as learning increased and many great minds bent constantly toward this very goal, could it be perfected or the truth grasped. For after the glory of those seven sages, it is astonishing with what eagerness the whole of Greece blazed to search out the truth. And first they judged the very name of "wisdom" too arrogant, and called themselves not wise men but lovers of wisdom. By doing this they condemned both those who had rashly assumed for themselves the name of sages as men in error and folly, and admitted their own ignorance besides — a fact they never tried to hide. Whenever nature had, so to speak, blocked their talents from reaching some matter so that they had no account to give of it, they were in the habit of confessing outright that they knew and perceived nothing at all. Hence those are found to be far wiser who saw themselves as unwise in some part than those who believed themselves wise.
Since, then, neither those who were called wise were truly wise, nor did those who came later hesitate to confess their ignorance, what remains except that wisdom must be sought elsewhere, since it was not found where it was being sought? What cause, then, should we suppose there was, that though sought by so many minds and over so much time with the utmost effort and labor, it was not discovered — except that the philosophers sought it outside its proper bounds? For since these men, having traveled through and explored everything, nowhere grasped any wisdom, and since it must exist somewhere, it appears that it is above all to be sought precisely where the label of folly seems to lie: under whose covering God, so that the hidden mystery of his divine work should not lie exposed, concealed the treasury of wisdom and truth. For this reason I am indeed accustomed to marvel that, when Pythagoras and later Plato, inflamed with love of tracking down the truth, had penetrated even to the Egyptians and the Magi and the Persians in order to learn the rites and sacred things of those nations — for they suspected that wisdom was bound up with religion — they never went near the Jews alone, among whom at that time alone it existed, and to whom they could more easily have gone. Yet I hold that divine providence itself steered them away, denying them any means of grasping the truth, since foreigners were at that point still forbidden to gain acquaintance with the religion and justice belonging to the one true God. For God had determined, as the last age drew near, to send from heaven a great leader, who would reveal to the nations abroad that truth which had been taken away from a faithless and ungrateful people. I shall attempt to discuss this matter in this book, once I have first shown that wisdom is so bound up with religion that neither can be torn from the other.
The worship of the gods, as I taught in the first book, does not possess wisdom — not merely because it subjects the divine creature, man, to earthly and fragile things, but because nothing is discussed there that avails toward the cultivation of morals and the shaping of life; nor does it contain any inquiry into truth, but merely a ritual observance, one carried out not through any devotion of the mind but through the mere labor of the body. On that ground it cannot be reckoned true religion, seeing that it makes men neither more just nor more virtuous through any teaching. In just the same way, philosophy without religion — meaning without the highest form of piety — fails to count as genuine wisdom. After all, if the power governing this world sustains humankind with astonishing generosity and, as it were, dotes on it with fatherly indulgence, that power surely expects gratitude and honor in return; and no man can claim a reasoned piety while remaining thankless for gifts sent from heaven — hardly the behavior of someone wise. Since, then, as I said, philosophy and the worship of the gods are separated and widely divided from one another — for there are professors of wisdom through whom, certainly, one does not gain access to the gods, and there are priests of religion through whom one does not learn wisdom — it is clear that neither the one is true wisdom nor the other true religion. For this reason philosophy could not grasp the truth, nor could the worship of the gods give an account of itself, which it lacks. But where wisdom coheres with religion in an inseparable bond, both must necessarily be true, because in worshiping we ought also to be wise — that is, to know what and how we ought to worship — and in being wise we ought also to worship, that is, in deed and act to carry out what we have come to know. So where do wisdom and religion actually meet? Naturally, in the place where a single God receives worship, where every deed and every life traces back to one source and one sum total — put simply, wherever the very people teaching wisdom also serve as God's priests. Nor should anyone be troubled by the fact that it has often happened, and can happen, that some philosopher takes up a priesthood of the gods; but when that happens philosophy and religion still are not united; instead, philosophy goes quiet during the sacred rites, and religion goes quiet whenever philosophy takes the floor. For that religion is mute — not only because it belongs to mute things, but because its rite lies in the hand and in the fingers, not in the heart or on the tongue, as does ours, which is true. That is why wisdom is embedded in religion and religion in wisdom — the two cannot be pulled apart, since being wise amounts to nothing more than honoring the true God through worship that is just and devout. Here is a further argument that helps us see and confirm that worshiping many gods runs contrary to nature: every god who is worshiped by man must necessarily, amid the solemn rites and prayers, be addressed as "father" — not merely as a mark of honor, but also for good reason, since he is older than man and, like a father, provides life, safety, and sustenance. Thus Jupiter receives the title of father from those who pray to him, and the same goes for Saturn, Janus, Liber, and each of the rest in turn — a thing Lucilius mocks in his council of the gods: that there is none of us but is called, to a man, either "best father" of the gods, or father Neptune, Liber, father Saturn, Mars, Janus, father Quirinus. But if nature does not allow that one man should have many fathers — since he is begotten from one alone — then to worship many gods too is against nature and against piety. One, therefore, is to be worshiped, who can truly be named father; and he must likewise be lord, since just as he can indulge, so too he can restrain. He is to be called father because he grants us many great gifts; he is to be called lord because he holds the greatest power of chastising and punishing. That the same being who is father is also lord, the reasoning of civil law likewise demonstrates. For who could raise children unless he held over them the power of a master? Nor is it without cause that he is called "father of the household," even if he has only sons: the name "father" plainly embraces even the slaves, since "household" follows upon it, and the name "household" embraces even the sons, since "father" precedes it. Hence it is clear that the very same man is both father of his slaves and lord of his sons. Indeed, a son is emancipated by the hand as though a slave, and a freed slave takes the name of patron as though a son. But if for this reason he is named father of the household, so that it may appear he is endowed with a twofold power — since he ought both to indulge, because he is father, and to restrain, because he is lord — then the same person is slave who is also son, the same is lord who is also father. Just as, then, by the necessity of nature there can be only one father, so too there can be only one lord. For what will a slave do, if many masters command different things? Religions of many gods, therefore, are against reason and against nature, since there cannot be many fathers, nor many lords, and yet gods must necessarily be called both fathers and lords. It follows that no one can hold onto truth while answering to a crowd of fathers and lords at once — a mind splintered that way just drifts in every direction; and religion likewise cannot stand firm without a single, fixed home. The worship of the gods, then, cannot be true, in the same way that marriage cannot be so called where one woman has many husbands — such a woman will instead be named either a prostitute or an adulteress; for one in whom modesty, chastity, and fidelity are absent must necessarily lack virtue. So too the religion of the gods is unchaste and unclean, because it lacks fidelity, because that unstable and uncertain honor has neither head nor origin.
From these things it appears how closely wisdom and religion are bound to one another. Wisdom looks toward sons, which demands love; religion toward slaves, which demands fear. For just as sons ought to love and honor a father, so slaves ought to worship and revere a lord. But God, who is one, since he sustains both roles, of father and of lord, we ought both to love him, because we are his sons, and to fear him, because we are his slaves. Neither, then, can religion be separated from wisdom, nor wisdom set apart from religion, since it is the same God who must both be understood — which belongs to wisdom — and honored — which belongs to religion. But wisdom comes first, religion follows, since to know God comes first, to worship him follows. So in these two names there is one single force, though they seem to be different things: for the one is set in perception, the other in action; yet they are alike two streams flowing from one spring. And the spring of both wisdom and religion is God, from whom, if these two streams wander away, they must necessarily dry up; and those who do not know him can be neither wise nor religious. Thus it happens that both philosophers and worshipers of the gods resemble either disowned sons or runaway slaves, since the former do not seek a father, nor the latter a lord. And just as the disowned do not obtain their father's inheritance, nor runaways their pardon, so too philosophers will never gain immortality — the very inheritance belonging to the heavenly kingdom, that highest good they pursue above everything — and worshipers of the gods will never dodge the sentence of eternal death, the true lord's reckoning against those who have deserted his majesty and his name. That God is at once father and lord, both sides failed to know — both the worshipers of the gods and the very professors of wisdom — because either they thought nothing at all was to be worshiped, or they approved false religions, or, even if they understood the force and power of the supreme God, as did Plato, who says there is one maker-god of the world, and Marcus Tullius, who admits that man was begotten by the supreme God under a certain splendid condition, still they did not render to him the worship owed as to the highest father, which would have followed as a necessary consequence. That gods cannot serve as either fathers or lords is demonstrated not merely by their sheer number, as shown above, but by logic too: nowhere is it recorded that mankind was shaped by the gods, and no evidence exists that the gods came before humanity began — indeed men clearly already walked the earth before Vulcan, Liber, Apollo, or Jupiter himself were even born; nor is the fashioning of man usually assigned either to Saturn or to Heaven, his father. But if none of those who are worshiped is handed down as having shaped and instituted man from the beginning, then none of them can be called man's father, and so not god either. It is not right, therefore, to venerate those by whom man was not begotten, since... he cannot be begotten by many. One alone, therefore, is to be worshiped — he who came before Jupiter, before Saturn, before heaven itself and earth. For it must necessarily be he who shaped man, who made heaven and earth before man existed. Father is the title owed solely to the one who created; lord belongs solely to the one who rules, wielding genuine and unending authority over life and death. Whoever does not worship him is both a foolish slave, who either flees his own lord or does not know him, and an impious son, who either hates or does not recognize his own true father.
Given that I have already demonstrated the inseparability of wisdom and religion, what remains is to turn to a discussion of these two subjects in their own right. I am well aware how difficult a discussion of heavenly matters is, but still it must be ventured, so that truth, once brought to light, may lie open, and many may be freed from error and ruin — those who scorn and reject it while it lies hidden under a covering of apparent folly. Yet before turning to a discussion of God and his works, a few preliminary words about the prophets are needed, since I must now draw on their testimony — something I had held off from doing in the previous books. Anyone keen on laying hold of the truth needs, above all, to do more than devote attention to interpreting the prophets' words — he must also dig carefully into the era each one lived in, so as to learn what they predicted and how many years passed before each prediction came true. Nor is there any difficulty in establishing these things. For it is attested under which king each of them suffered the prompting of the divine spirit, and many writers have published books on chronology, beginning from the prophet Moses, who preceded the Trojan War by nearly nine hundred years. He, after ruling the people for forty years, had as his successor Joshua, who held the leadership for twenty-seven years. From then they were under judges for three hundred and seventy years. Then, the form of government changing, they began to have kings. These held power for four hundred and fifty years, right up to Zedekiah's reign, when the Babylonian king besieged and captured the Jews, who then suffered a lengthy servitude — lasting until Cyrus the Great, seventy years later, returned them to their own lands and homes — Cyrus, who took up rule over the Persians at the same time that Tarquinius Superbus ruled at Rome. Since, then, the whole sequence of times can be gathered both from Jewish and from Greek and Roman histories, the times of each of the prophets individually can likewise be established; and among them Zechariah was without question the final one, generally agreed to have prophesied during the eighth month of King Darius's second regnal year. So it is found that the prophets are older even than the Greek writers. All this I set forth so that those who strive to discredit the sacred scripture as something new and recently invented may recognize their error, not knowing from what source the origin of holy religion has flowed. But if anyone, having gathered and examined these chronologies, lays a sound foundation for his teaching, he will grasp the truth thoroughly and, once truth is known, will set aside error.
God, then, the maker and founder of all things, as we said in the second book, before he set about this magnificent work of the world, begot a holy and incorruptible spirit, whom he would call his son. And although he afterward created countless others, whom we call angels, this one alone he judged worthy of the title of the divine name, as "firstborn," since he is strong with the power and majesty of his father. That he is the son of the most high God and possesses supreme power is confirmed not merely by the prophets' voices agreeing together, but also by what Trismegistus proclaimed and what the Sibyls foretold. Hermes, in that book entitled the Perfect Discourse, uses these words: "He who governs and fashioned everything that is, the one we are accustomed to name God, made a second god, visible and open to perception — perceptible, I mean, not because he himself has perception (whether he does or not will be addressed later), but because he directs that second god toward perception and toward sight — and having made this being first, unique, and singular, he found him beautiful and utterly filled with every good thing, so he marveled at him and cherished him deeply as his own child." The Erythraean Sibyl opens her song by tracing its origin to the most high God, and toward its close she hails the son of God, in the following lines, as guide and ruler over everything: "the all-nourishing creator, who set sweet breath in all things and made God the guide of all." And again at the end: "another has God given to faithful men to honor." And another Sibyl declares that he ought to be known thus: "know him as your God, the son of God." And indeed he himself is the son of God who spoke through Solomon, that wisest king full of the divine spirit, the words which we set down below: "The Lord brought me into being as the first of his undertakings, the start of all his works; he set me in place before the age began: earlier than the earth's forming, earlier than the depths being fixed, earlier than the springs of water breaking forth, he brought me to birth ahead of every hill. The Lord shaped the far regions and the uninhabited edges under the sky. While he was fitting the heavens together, I stood at his side, and while he was setting apart his own throne; while he was raising sturdy clouds over the winds and steadying the springs beneath the sky, while he was laying down earth's massive foundations, I was there with him, arranging all things. I was the one he delighted in. Day after day I took joy before him, as he rejoiced over the finished sphere." That is why Trismegistus names him God's craftsman, and the Sibyl calls him counselor: God the Father equipped him with wisdom and power of such a degree that he relied on this son's counsel and hands in shaping the world.
Perhaps someone may ask at this point who this one is, so powerful, so dear to God, and what name he bears, whose first birth not only preceded the world but whose foresight ordered it and whose power built it. The first thing to grasp is this: even the angels dwelling in heaven have no knowledge of his name — only he himself and God the Father know it — and it will stay hidden, as scripture attests, until the divine plan reaches completion; nor, further, can a human mouth pronounce it, as Hermes teaches in these words: "behind this cause stands the will of a God who is good, and no human mouth is capable of uttering his name." And a little later, to his son: "There is, my child, a certain unspeakable and holy account concerning the one Lord of all, and concerning God who thinks of all things in advance, whom it is beyond man to utter." But although his name, which the most high Father set upon him from the beginning, is known to no one but himself, he nevertheless has one designation among the angels and another among men. Among men, indeed, he is named Jesus. Christ is not a personal name at all, but a designation of authority and rule — the very term the Jews applied to their own kings. Yet the sense of this title needs unpacking, on account of those who mistakenly, through a shift of one letter, call him "Chrestus." Among the Jews there was a long-standing rule requiring a sacred oil to be prepared, so that anyone summoned to the priesthood or to kingship could be anointed with it, and just as now among the Romans the purple garment is the mark of royal dignity assumed, so among them the anointing with the sacred ointment conferred the name and the power of kingship. But since the ancient Greeks used to say chriesthai for "to be anointed," which is now called aleiphesthai, as that line of Homer shows — "and when the maidservants had bathed them and anointed them with oil" — on this basis we give him the name Christ — meaning Anointed — which in Hebrew is rendered Messiah. Hence in certain Greek writings, badly translated from the Hebrew, one finds written "eleimmenos," from aleiphesthai. But by either name kingship is signified — not that he was to obtain this earthly kingdom, whose time has not yet come, but rather a heavenly, everlasting one — a topic reserved for discussion in the final book. Now, however, let us speak of his first birth.
First of all, we bear witness that he was born twice: first in spirit, afterward in flesh. Hence in Jeremiah it is said thus: "before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." And again: "blessed is he who existed before he was born" — which has happened to no one but Christ. Though he was from the beginning the son of God, he was born again a second time according to the flesh. This twofold birth of his has brought great error into human minds and has spread darkness even over those who held to the mysteries of the true religion. But we shall show this plainly and clearly, so that lovers of wisdom may be instructed more easily and carefully. Whoever hears that he is called the son of God must not conceive in his mind so monstrous a notion as to suppose that God produced offspring through the union and intercourse of some woman — a thing which only a bodily creature subject to death does. But God, since he was still alone, with whom could he have united himself? Or since he was of such great power that he could accomplish whatever he willed, he certainly had no need of another's partnership in order to create — unless perhaps we should suppose, as Orpheus thought, that God is both male and female, as though he could not have generated otherwise unless he possessed the power of both sexes, as if he had either coupled with himself or could not have brought forth without coupling. But Hermes too held this same opinion, when he calls him "his own father" and "his own mother." But if that were so, then just as the prophets call him father, so he would also be called mother. How then did he beget? First, divine works can neither be known nor recounted by anyone; yet the sacred writings instruct us — it is set down there — that this son of God is to be understood as God's Word, and that, in the same way, the rest of the angels are God's spirits. For speech is a spirit uttered together with a voice signifying something. Yet since spirit and speech issue from different organs — spirit through the nostrils, speech through the mouth — a great gulf separates this son of God from the rest of the angels. The others emerged from God as spirits without voice, since they were fashioned not to hand down God's teaching but to serve. He, by contrast, though likewise spirit, came forth from God's mouth accompanied by voice and sound, in the manner of speech — precisely because he was destined to employ his voice among the people, being the one who would in time carry God's teaching and heavenly mystery to humankind. God addressed him first of all, so that speaking through him God could reach us, and so that he could disclose God's voice and intention to us. He is rightly, then, termed God's speech and word, because God took hold of the sounding spirit issuing from his own mouth — conceived not in a womb but in thought — and by an inexpressible power belonging to his majesty shaped it into a being alive with its own understanding and wisdom; and in the same way he formed his other spirits into angels. Our own spirits can dissolve, since we ourselves are mortal; God's spirits, by contrast, live, endure, and perceive, since he himself is deathless and the source of feeling and life. Even our voices, though they scatter into the air and fade, mostly survive once fixed in writing — so how much more should we trust that God's voice lasts forever, carried along with sense and power, flowing from the Father the way a stream flows from its source! And if anyone is astonished that a god could be brought forth from God through the sending-out of a voice and a spirit, that astonishment will surely vanish once he becomes acquainted with the sacred sayings of the prophets. Even those unfamiliar with the divine scriptures may perhaps know already that Solomon and David his father were exceptionally powerful kings who were prophets besides; of the two, the later one to reign came a hundred and forty years before the fall of Troy. David, the composer of the sacred hymns, writes in this way in Psalm 32: "by the word of God the heavens were made firm, and by his spirit all their host." And again in Psalm 44: "my heart has poured forth a good word; I speak of my works to the king" — testifying, clearly, that no one but the son alone has knowledge of God's works, since he is God's word and is destined to reign without end. Solomon likewise demonstrates that this same figure is God's word, the one through whose hands the fabric of the world was made. "I," he says, "issued from the mouth of the Highest before every created thing. In the heavens I brought it about that unfailing light should rise, and I wrapped the whole earth in cloud. I made my home in the heights, and my throne rests on a pillar of cloud." John hands down the same truth in this form: "At the origin the Word already existed, and the Word was present alongside God, and the Word was God himself. This one was present alongside God at the origin. Everything came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be."
But the Greeks say logos better than we say verbum or sermo: for logos signifies both speech and reason, given that he embodies at once God's voice and God's wisdom. Even the philosophers were not ignorant of this divine speech, since Zeno proclaims that the ordainer of nature and the maker of the universe is the Logos, giving him also the names fate, the compulsion driving all things, God, and the mind of Jupiter — following, of course, that custom by which they are accustomed to take Jupiter for God. But the words are no obstacle, so long as the sense agrees with the truth. What Zeno named the mind of Jupiter is, in fact, the spirit of God. As for Trismegistus, who somehow tracked down almost the whole of the truth, he often described the power and majesty of the Word, as that earlier passage shows, in which he confesses that there is a certain ineffable and holy discourse, whose full account exceeds the measure of man. I have spoken briefly, as best I could, of the first birth. Now, concerning the second, since it is on this that controversy chiefly turns, we must discuss it at greater length, so that those eager to grasp what is true may be offered a clear beam of insight.
Men need above all to grasp this: from its very outset, the design of the most high God was arranged so that, as the world's age drew near its end, God's son had to come down to earth, there to raise up a temple for God and to teach righteousness — and this not through the might of an angel nor any heavenly power, but as a man, bound by mortal limits. His teaching work complete, wicked hands would seize him and hand him over to death; yet by his own power he would master death and rise from it, so that the man he had put on and carried within himself might be given hope of conquering death and a place among the rewards of immortality. In order that nobody be left unaware of this design, we shall demonstrate that everything now fulfilled in Christ was foretold in advance. Let no one lend credence to our assertion unless I show that the prophets, long ages beforehand, foretold that the son of God would one day be born as a man, and would work wonders, and would scatter the worship of God across every land on earth, and would at last be fixed to a gibbet, and would rise again on the third day. And when I have proved all this from the very writings of those who did violence to their own God while he made use of a mortal body, what else will stand in the way of its being clear that true wisdom is found in this religion alone? Now from the beginning the origin of the whole mystery must be told. Our ancestors, who were the chief men of the Hebrews, when they were suffering from barrenness and want, crossed over into Egypt for the sake of grain, and staying there a long time, were oppressed under the intolerable yoke of slavery. Then God took pity on them: after four hundred and thirty years he led them out, delivering them from the grip of Egypt's king, with Moses as their guide — the very man through whom God later gave them the law. In that leading-out God showed the power of his majesty. For he brought the people across the middle of the Red Sea, an angel going before and splitting the water, so that the people could walk on dry ground — which, as the poet more truly says, the wave stood around, curved into the shape of a mountain. Hearing of this, the tyrant of the Egyptians pursued them with a great force of his own men, and having rashly plunged into the still-open sea, he perished, his entire army lost with him, once the waters closed back together. The Hebrews, having entered the wilderness, saw many wonders. When thirst afflicted them, a single strike of the rod against the rock sent a spring of water bursting forth, giving the people relief; then later, hunger struck, and bread rained down from the sky. A wind, moreover, drove quails straight into their camp, leaving them satisfied with more than mere heavenly bread — a truly abundant meal. Yet for these divine kindnesses they did not render honor to God, but, once freed from slavery and once thirst and hunger had been set aside, having slipped into wantonness, they gave their hearts over to the impious customs of Egypt. Indeed, once Moses their guide had climbed the mountain and remained there forty days, they fashioned a golden head of an ox, which they call Apis, to go before them as a standard. Offended by this sin and crime, God visited the impious and ungrateful people with grievous punishments as they deserved, and subjected them to the law which he had given through Moses. Afterward, when they had settled in a certain desert part of Syria, they lost their old name of Hebrews, and, since the chief of their tribe was Judah, they were called Jews, and the land they inhabited, Judea. At first no king ruled over them; rather, ordinary magistrates governed the people according to the law — holding office not for a single year, as Roman consuls did, but through an unbroken tenure. Then, the title of judges having been removed, royal power was introduced. But while the judges held their government, they often took up corrupt religions, and God, offended by them, repeatedly subjected them to foreigners, until, softened again by the people's repentance, he freed them from servitude. Likewise under the kings, harassed by the wars of their neighbors on account of their offenses, at last they were captured and led away to Babylon, and paid the penalty of their impiety in heavy servitude, until Cyrus came to the throne, who at once restored the Jews by edict. From then on they had tetrarchs down to Herod, who lived under the rule of Tiberius Caesar: in the fifteenth year of whose rule — in the consulship of the two Gemini, ten days before the Kalends of April — the Jews nailed Christ to a cross. Such is the sequence of these events, the pattern preserved within the secrets of holy scripture. But first I shall show for what reason Christ came to earth, so that the foundation and reasoning of the divine religion may become clear.
Whenever the Jews pushed back against the wholesome commands and, wandering from the divine law, slid into the impious worship of idols, God kept filling just and chosen men with his holy spirit, raising up prophets among the people, so that through them he could reproach with threatening speech the sins of that ungrateful nation, while still pressing them toward repentance for their wrongdoing. He warned that unless they repented, and, throwing off their empty follies, came back to their God, he would alter his covenant with them — that is, he would hand the inheritance of immortal life over to nations beyond their own, and gather to himself, from among foreigners, a different and more faithful people. Yet they, when the prophets rebuked them, did not merely reject their message but, stung by having their sins laid bare, tortured those same prophets to death in elaborate ways. All of this the sacred writings keep on record. For the prophet Jeremiah declares: my servants the prophets — I sent them to you before dawn broke, yet you paid me no heed nor turned your ears toward me, though I told you: let every one of you turn away from his wicked path and from your most vile pursuits, so that you may go on living in this land, the one I gave to you and your ancestors from one age to the next. Do not follow after foreign gods to worship them, and do not stir me to anger through the works your hands have made, bringing your own ruin. Ezra as well — a prophet active under that very Cyrus who restored the Jews — speaks in this way: they turned away from you and threw your law behind their backs, and slew your prophets, the very ones who begged them to turn back to you. So too Elijah, in the third book of Kings: I have burned with jealous zeal for the Lord God almighty, for the sons of Israel abandoned you, tore down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword; I alone remain, and now they hunt for my life. Because of these wrongs of theirs, he rejected them for good, and stopped sending prophets their way. Instead he commanded that his own firstborn son — the maker and counselor behind his works — come down from heaven, so that he might carry God's sacred religion across to the gentile nations, meaning those who had not recognized God, and teach them the righteousness that the unbelieving people had cast aside. That he would eventually do this he had foretold long before, as shown by the prophet Malachi, who says: you bring me no delight, declares the Lord, nor will I take an offering from what your hands provide, since from where the sun rises to where it sets my name will be honored among the nations. Likewise David, in the seventeenth Psalm: you will make me chief over nations; a people unknown to me now serves me. Isaiah too speaks along these lines: I am coming to bring together every nation and language, and they will arrive and behold my glory. And I will place a sign among them and dispatch some of the survivors to the distant nations who have never heard of my glory, and they will announce my glory to the nations. God, then, meaning to send down to earth the surveyor who would lay out his temple, chose not to send him in heavenly majesty and splendor, so that the people — ungrateful toward God — would be drawn into the deepest error and suffer the penalty for their crimes, for having refused to accept their own Lord and God, exactly as the prophets had long since predicted would occur. Isaiah — whom the Jews themselves cut in two with a saw in their utmost cruelty and killed — says this: listen, heaven, and pay attention, earth, for it is the Lord who has spoken: sons I have fathered and brought up, yet they have scorned me. The ox recognizes the one who owns it, and the donkey knows its master's stall, but Israel does not know me, and my people fail to understand. Jeremiah says something similar: the turtledove and the swallow recognize their season, and the birds of the field observe when it is time for them to arrive, but my people do not recognize the Lord's judgment. How is it you claim: we are the wise ones, and we have the Lord's law with us? The scribe's false measuring line has been drawn to no purpose; those who thought themselves wise have been put to shame, seized with trembling and taken prisoner, all because they spurned what the Lord had spoken. So then, to return to what I had started saying — when God resolved to send mankind a teacher of virtue, he decreed that this same figure be born a second time in the flesh, made like a man, so he could serve as guide, companion, and master to humanity. Yet because God is merciful and devoted to his own, he sent this teacher to the very people he had come to despise, so as not to close off the path to salvation from them permanently, but instead to grant them free choice to follow God — so that those who did follow, as very many indeed have, might win the reward of life, while those who through their own fault rejected their king would bring death's penalty on themselves. He therefore arranged for him to be born among them, from their own lineage, so that, had he instead been a foreigner, they might have claimed a legitimate excuse under the law for refusing him — and also so that no nation on earth whatsoever would be shut out from the hope of immortality.
Coming down, then, from heaven, that holy spirit of God selected a holy virgin, into whose womb it could pour itself. She, having drawn in and grown full of the divine spirit, conceived, and, untouched by any man, her virgin womb suddenly grew large. Now if certain creatures are known to conceive from wind or breeze alone, why should it strike anyone as odd when we assert that a virgin was made pregnant by God's spirit, since anything he wishes is effortless for him? This might well seem unbelievable, if the prophets had not already sung of it, ages in advance, as something destined to happen. Solomon, in his nineteenth ode, puts it this way: the virgin's womb grew feeble and took in a child, and she grew heavy, becoming, in profound tenderness, a mother while still a virgin. So too the prophet Isaiah, in these words: therefore the Lord himself is going to give you a sign: a virgin is going to conceive within her, bearing a son, and you will name him Emmanuel. What clearer statement could there be than that? The very Jews who killed him used to read this passage. If anyone suspects we are inventing this, let him go ask them himself, let him take it from their own mouths above all — testimony from one's enemies is remarkably solid proof of truth. He was, in fact, never actually called Emmanuel but rather Jesus, a name that in Latin signifies bringer of salvation, or savior, since he arrived bringing salvation to every nation; yet the prophet, by using this other name, signaled that God was going to come among men in flesh. Emmanuel, after all, translates as 'God with us' — because, once born from the virgin, it became necessary for people to acknowledge that God dwelt among them, meaning here on earth, in mortal flesh. This is why David, in Psalm 84, states: truth has risen up out of the earth — since God, the source of truth, assumed an earthly body, in order to open a path of salvation for earthly beings. Isaiah likewise says: yet they refused to believe, and angered the holy spirit, so he turned and became their enemy. He himself waged war and called to mind the ancient days, he who brought up out of the earth a shepherd for sheep. And elsewhere he made plain who that shepherd would be, saying: let the heavens above rejoice, and let the clouds be clothed in righteousness; let the earth open wide. Let the savior spring up. For I, the Lord God, am the one who made him. Now this savior, as noted earlier, is Jesus. But the same prophet foretold elsewhere in this manner: look, a child has been born for you, a son has been granted to you, dominion resting upon his shoulders, and his name will be called 'messenger of great counsel.' God the Father sent him for this purpose: that he might disclose to every nation beneath the sky the sacred mystery of the one true God — a mystery withdrawn from the unbelieving people who had so repeatedly offended against God. Daniel too foretold similar events. In a nighttime vision, he says, I saw — and there, one resembling a son of man, arriving amid the clouds of the sky, and he approached all the way to the Ancient of Days. Those standing nearby brought him forward, and he was given rulership, honor, and dominion, so that every people, tribe, and tongue would be his servants; his authority endures forever, will not pass away, and his rule can never be brought down. How then can the Jews both acknowledge and look forward to God's Christ, when they turned away from this very one for no reason but that he was born of a man? Since God ordained that this same Christ should enter the world twice — first to proclaim the one God to the nations, then a second time to rule — how can those who refused to believe at his first arrival trust in his second? Yet the prophet has captured both arrivals within a few words. Look, he says, one like a son of man arriving amid the clouds of the sky. He did not say 'like a son of god' but 'like a son of man,' indicating that he was to take on flesh here on earth — so that, having assumed the shape and mortal state of a human, he could teach righteousness to mankind, and, once he had carried out God's commands and made the truth known among the nations, be made to suffer death itself, thereby overcoming and breaking open the underworld too, and so at last rise again and journey to the Father, carried upward on a cloud. The prophet adds still more on this point, stating that once he had made his way into the presence of the Ancient of Days, he was set there before him. By 'Ancient of Days' he meant the Most High God, whose beginning and age lie beyond comprehension, since he alone has existed across every age, just as he will continue to exist through every age to come. David bore witness that this Christ, following his suffering and rising again, would ascend to God the Father, in Psalm 109, saying: the Lord spoke to my Lord: take your seat at my right hand, until I make a footstool of your enemies beneath your feet. Since this prophet was a king himself, whom else could he mean by his own Lord — one enthroned at God's right hand — except Christ the Son of God, who rules as King over kings and Lord over lords? Isaiah states this even more directly, in this saying: the Lord speaks thus, to his anointed one, my Lord — I have grasped his right hand — so that nations will submit before him; and I will crush the power of kings, throwing open gates before him, so that cities remain unbarred. I will march ahead of you and flatten the mountains, break apart the bronze doors, and snap the iron bars in two. And I will hand over to you treasures kept hidden and unseen, so you may recognize that I am the Lord God, who summons you by name. In the end, on account of the virtue and faith he displayed toward God while on earth, rulership, honor, and dominion were granted to him, and every people, tribe, and tongue serves him; his power endures forever and will never pass away, and his kingdom can never be destroyed. This can be understood in two senses: even now he holds unending power, since every nation and tongue honors his name, professes his greatness, follows what he taught, and models itself on his virtue — he possesses dominion and honor in that every tribe on earth obeys what he commands; and, in a further sense, later, when he returns in glory and might to judge each soul and bring the righteous back to life, he will then truly gain rule over the whole earth. At that point, once every evil has been stripped from human life, that golden age the poets describe — that is, an age of justice and peace — will dawn. But we will take these matters up at greater length in the final book, when the discussion turns to the second coming; for now, let us bring this to a close as we started, with his first coming.
When the supreme God, the parent of all things, resolved to relocate his own worship, he sent a teacher of righteousness down from heaven, in order that new worshippers might receive through him a new law, not by using a man as he once had done. Yet he willed this teacher to be born in human form all the same, so that in every way he would resemble the Father most high. God the Father himself — origin and source of everything — lacking any parents of his own, is most rightly styled by Trismegistus "fatherless" and "motherless," since none brought him forth. For that very reason the Son, too, needed to undergo two births, so that he might likewise earn both titles. At his first, spiritual birth he had no mother, since God the Father alone begot him, with no maternal part involved; at his second, fleshly birth he had no father, since he came forth from a virgin's womb with no paternal part involved — so that, holding a nature midway between God and man, he might, as though by hand, draw our fragile and weak nature up toward immortality. Through the Spirit he became God's Son; through the flesh, humanity's son — meaning at once both God and man. His divine power showed itself in the deeds he performed; man's weakness showed itself in the suffering he underwent (why he took up that suffering I shall explain a little further on). Meanwhile, we learn from the prophets' predictions that he was both natures together, God and man combined. Isaiah attests to his divinity with these words: "Egypt is worn out with toil; the traders of Ethiopia and the towering men of Saba will pass over to you in chains, your captives now, walking behind you, bowing low and pleading with you, for God dwells among you and besides you no god exists. You alone are God, though we failed to recognize it — God and savior of Israel. Everyone set against you will be put to shame and humiliation, brought down to confess you." In the same way the prophet Jeremiah declares: "Ours is this God; none beside him deserves such reckoning — the one who found out wisdom's whole road and handed it to his servant Jacob, to Israel his beloved. Afterward he appeared upon the earth, and dwelt among mankind." Likewise David writes in the forty-fourth Psalm: "Your throne, God, endures forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of fairness. You loved righteousness and despised wrongdoing; therefore the Lord your God anointed you with the oil of joy." Through that word he revealed the name too, since, as I explained earlier, he was called Christ from the anointing. Jeremiah next teaches that this same one was man, saying: "He is a man — yet who has recognized him?" Isaiah likewise says: "The Lord will send them a man to rescue them, one who, in judging, shall heal them." Moses too, in Numbers, speaks in this manner: "A star will rise from Jacob, and a man will arise out of Israel." For this reason, when the Apollo of Miletus was consulted on whether he had been a god or a man, he answered thus: "mortal in flesh, wise in wondrous deeds, yet caught by Chaldean sentence, nailed fast, he met a bitter end." In that first line he spoke truly enough, but he cunningly misled his questioner, who had no notion at all of the mystery behind that truth — for it looks as though he denied his divinity. Yet since he admits mortality according to the flesh, a claim we too make, it follows that he was divine according to the spirit, a claim we likewise make. Why, after all, would there be any need to mention flesh at all, if merely calling him mortal would have done? Truth forced his hand, so he could not deny how matters stood, any more than he could deny — in what he said — that the man had been wise. What is your answer to that, Apollo? If he was wise, his teaching must be wisdom, and no rival teaching is; and his followers alone are wise, no others. Why, then, are we generally taken for fools, for empty and senseless people, when we follow a teacher whom even the gods' own oracle admits to be wise? And when Apollo says he performed astonishing deeds — the very thing that most secured belief in his divine nature — he appears already to side with us, since he states the same facts we take pride in. Yet he catches himself again, and slides back into demonic trickery. Having been compelled to speak the truth, he would already have exposed himself as a traitor to the gods and to himself, had he not covered over, with a deceptive lie, what the truth had forced out of him. So he adds that the wonders were real enough, but wrought not by divine power — by magic instead. Small wonder Apollo could talk the ignorant into believing that, when the Jews themselves — who passed for worshippers of the highest God — thought the very same thing, even as those miracles were happening daily before their eyes. Not even watching such great power at work could move them to believe him divine, though they saw it with their own eyes. That is why David — read by them ahead of every other prophet — condemns them in the twenty-seventh Psalm this way: "Repay them according to their deeds, since they failed to grasp the works of the Lord." That Christ would be born, in the flesh, from David's own house, both David and the other prophets proclaimed. Isaiah records: "And it shall happen in that day: a root of Jesse, one who rises to rule the nations — in him the nations shall place their hope, and his resting place shall be glorious." And elsewhere: "A shoot shall come out from the root of Jesse, and a bloom shall climb up from that root; and God's spirit shall settle upon him — a spirit granting wisdom and insight, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and reverence; a spirit of fearing God shall fill him completely." Jesse, now, was David's father, and it was from Jesse's root that this bloom was foretold to climb — the very one the Sibyl speaks of: "a pure blossom shall flower." Likewise, in the second book of Kingdoms, it was Nathan the prophet who got sent to David, when David had it in mind to raise a temple for God. "And the word of the Lord reached Nathan, saying: Go, tell my servant David: thus says the Lord God almighty — it is not you who will build me a dwelling-house; rather, once your days are complete and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you and set up his kingdom. He will build me a house bearing my name, and I will establish his throne for all ages, and I will act as a father to him, and he will act as a son to me. His house will hold to faithfulness, and his kingdom forever." But so that the Jews would fail to grasp this, here is the reason: Solomon, David's son, built God a temple and a city, naming it Jerusalem after himself. Consequently they applied the prophet's words to Solomon. Yet Solomon received his royal authority from his own father, whereas the prophets were speaking of one not yet born, who would come after David had gone to rest with his ancestors. Besides, Solomon's reign did not last forever — he ruled only forty years. Moreover, he was never termed son of God, only son of David; and the house he built never attained the faithfulness the church has attained, the church being the true temple of God — not built within walls, but within the heart and faith of those who believe in him and are termed the faithful. That temple of Solomon's, however, being made by human hands, likewise fell by human hands. Finally, his own father, in Psalm one hundred twenty-six, foretold his son's undertakings this way: "Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor pointlessly; unless the Lord watches the city, its watchman keeps guard for nothing."
From all this it is clear that the prophets, one and all, foretold concerning Christ that he would, one day, being born in the body from David's line, set up for God an everlasting temple — called the church — and would summon every nation to true worship of God. This is the house of faith, this the deathless temple, and whoever fails to offer sacrifice within it forfeits the reward of immortality. Since Christ built this temple, vast and eternal, he must necessarily hold within it a priesthood without end, and no one may reach the temple, or come into God's sight, except through its founder. David teaches this same point in Psalm one hundred nine, saying: "Before the morning star I brought you forth. The Lord has sworn and will not go back on it: you are a priest forever." Similarly, in the first book of Kingdoms: "I will raise up for myself a priest who keeps faith, one who will carry out everything that is in my mind, and for him I will build a house that keeps faith, and he will walk in my presence all his days." As for who exactly would receive this promise of an everlasting priesthood from God, Zechariah made it thoroughly clear, naming him outright. His words run thus: "And the Lord showed me Jesus the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord's presence, with the devil positioned at his right to accuse him. And the Lord told the devil: may the Lord silence you, he who has chosen Jerusalem; look — a burning stick snatched out of the fire! Now Jesus wore soiled clothing, and stood before the angel's presence. And the angel spoke, addressing those standing before him: Strip the soiled clothing off him, dress him in a robe down to his feet, and place a clean headpiece on his head. So they dressed him in garments and placed the headpiece on top of him. And there the angel of the Lord took his stand, testifying to Jesus, saying: Thus says the Lord almighty — walk in my paths and keep my commands, and you will govern my house, and I will grant you companions from among those standing here. Listen, then, Jesus, great priest." Who, then, would not conclude that the Jews' minds were seized at that very moment, when — despite reading and hearing all this — they laid wicked hands on their own God? Yet from Zechariah's own lifetime down to the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar's reign, when Jesus was nailed to the cross, roughly five hundred years can be counted, since Zechariah reached adulthood in the era of Darius and Alexander, not long after Tarquin the Proud had been expelled. Once more, though, the Jews fell into the same error, supposing these words concerned the Jesus who was Moses' successor, son of Nun, or else the priest Jesus son of Jehozadak — neither of whom matches anything the prophet describes. Neither man was ever clad in filth, since one had been an extremely powerful leader and the other a priest; neither underwent hardship of the sort that would make him seem a burning stick pulled from the fire; neither ever stood in the presence of God and his angels; nor was the prophet describing events already past rather than events still to come. He was speaking, then, of Jesus the Son of God, showing that this one would arrive first in a lowly state and in the flesh. That is exactly what the soiled garment represents — that he would build a temple for God, and, like a stick charred in fire, be burned — meaning, he would suffer torment at human hands and finally be snuffed out. Ordinary speech calls a half-burned, extinguished stick pulled from the hearth-fire precisely that — a firebrand. And how, under what commission, he would be dispatched by God into the world, God's own Spirit made known through the prophet, teaching that, once he had carried out the will of the Father most high in complete faithfulness and constancy, he would be granted judgment and dominion without end. "If you walk in my paths," it says, "and keep my commands, you will govern my house." What God's paths and commands actually were is neither uncertain nor unclear. God, seeing that wickedness and devotion to false gods had grown so powerful across the whole earth that his own name had all but vanished from human memory — since even the Jews, the only people entrusted with God's mystery, had abandoned the living God to serve idols, caught in demons' snares, and, though rebuked by the prophets, refused to turn back to him — sent his own Son, chief among the angels, to humanity, to turn people away from wicked and empty worship toward recognizing and worshipping the true God, and likewise to guide their minds from foolishness to wisdom, from wrongdoing to righteous deeds. These, then, are the paths God commanded him to walk, these the commands he charged him to observe. And he indeed proved faithful to God: he taught that God is one, and that only he should be worshipped, and he never once declared himself to be God, since he would have broken faith had he — sent to abolish false gods and establish the one true God — introduced yet another god beside that one. Doing so would not have been proclaiming the one God, nor the one who sent him, but pursuing business of his own, cutting himself off from the very one whose light he had come to make known. Precisely because he proved this faithful, because he claimed absolutely nothing for himself, so as to carry out fully the commands of the one who sent him, he was granted the rank of an eternal priest, the honor of a supreme king, the authority of a judge, and the very name of God.
Having discussed the second birth—the one by which he revealed himself to mankind in the flesh—we turn now to those marvelous deeds that the Jews, despite their being signs of a heavenly power, dismissed as sorcery. As soon as he began to reach manhood, John the prophet immersed him in the waters of the Jordan River, so that a spiritual washing could cleanse away sin: not any sin of his own, for he bore none, but that belonging to the flesh he had assumed—so that, just as the Jews had been taken up through circumcision, the nations too might find salvation through baptism, that is, through being drenched in a cleansing dew. Then from heaven a voice rang out: You are my son; this day I have brought you forth—a saying already foretold, one finds, in David. Upon him descended the Spirit of God, taking the shape of a white dove. From that point forward he set about performing the mightiest of deeds, relying not on magical illusion, which shows nothing genuine or substantial, but on heavenly force and authority—things the prophets had long ago sung of and announced. His deeds number so many that no single volume could take them all in. I will therefore pass through them quickly and in general terms, naming neither persons nor places, so as to reach the account of his passion and cross, the goal toward which my narration has been straining all along. Even Apollo styled his powers as portent-working, for wherever his path led, he restored to health—in a single word, in a single instant—the sick, the feeble, and those gripped by every sort of ailment: so thoroughly that men paralyzed throughout their limbs, their strength suddenly regained, hauled off themselves the very pallets on which they had just been carried in. To those lame or crippled in the feet, he granted not merely the ability to walk but even to run. Those whose blind eyes were sunk in the deepest darkness, he brought back to their earlier sight. He likewise released the tongues of the mute for speech and conversation, and just so opened the ears of the deaf, letting hearing enter them; those defiled and marred with blemishes he made clean again. None of this he accomplished by hand or by any medicine, but by word and by command—exactly as the Sibyl too had predicted: 'accomplishing all things by a word, and curing every ailment.' It is no wonder, then, that he performed marvels merely by speaking, for the Word of God was exactly what he himself was, sustained by heavenly power and authority. Nor was it enough for him to give strength back to the weak, wholeness to the crippled, and health to the sick and failing—he even raised the dead, summoning them back to life as if waking them from sleep. Watching this, the Jews of that era claimed these deeds sprang from demonic power, even though their own people's hidden writings held that everything would unfold exactly as it did. Among the prophets they read, for instance, the words of Isaiah, who declares: 'Take strength, hands that hang limp, and weak knees, find comfort. You who are faint of heart, do not fear, have no dread. Our God will render judgment; he in person will come and rescue us. Then the blind man's eyes will open and the deaf will hear; then the lame will bound like a deer, and the mute tongue will speak clearly, because water has burst forth in the wilderness and a stream in a parched land.' And the Sibyl sang the very same thing in these lines: 'the dead will rise, the lame will run with utmost speed, the deaf will hear, the blind will see, and those unable to speak will speak.' Drawn by these powers and divine works of his, a vast crowd of the crippled, the sick, and those hoping to bring their own for healing kept following him, so he climbed a remote mountain, meaning to pray there. After he had remained there three days and the crowd was going hungry, he summoned his disciples and asked how much food they had brought along. They answered that among them they had only five loaves and two fish. He directed that these be brought and had the crowd recline in groups of fifty. As the disciples carried this out, he himself broke the bread into small pieces and tore apart the fish's flesh, and in his hands both kept multiplying. Once the disciples had set the food before the crowd as he directed, five thousand men ate until they were full, and afterward the leftover scraps still filled twelve baskets. What more astonishing thing could be told or done? Yet the Sibyl had sung long before that this would happen, in verses that run: 'from five loaves at once, and one fish of the sea, he will fill five thousand men in the wilderness, and, gathering every scrap left behind, he will fill twelve baskets, for the hope of nations.' I ask, then, what magic craft—whose only skill lies in tricking the eyes—could ever have brought this about. That same man, about to withdraw to the mountain to pray as was his custom, told his disciples to take a small boat and go on ahead of him. Setting out as evening already bore down, they found themselves fighting a headwind. And once they had reached the middle of the strait, he caught up with them on foot across the sea, as though he were treading solid ground—unlike the poets' fable of Orion striding the deep, whose body, partly submerged, rises above the waves only at the shoulder. Again, when he had fallen asleep on the boat and the wind had begun raging toward utter peril, he woke from sleep and at once commanded the wind to fall silent and the waves, then running at their highest, to settle down—and at his word, calm followed immediately. Do the sacred writings lie, then, when they teach that his power was such that at his command the winds obeyed, the seas served, diseases retreated, and the underworld submitted? And what of the fact that the Sibyl's own verses had taught these same things beforehand? One of them, mentioned above, speaks thus: 'with a word he will still the winds, and calm the raging sea, walking upon it on feet that trust in peace.' And another says: 'he will walk upon the waves, will free men from disease, will raise the dead, will banish many pains, and from a single purse there will be bread enough for a crowd of men.' Faced with this evidence, certain shameless men habitually take refuge in claiming these are not genuine Sibylline verses at all, but forgeries composed by our own side. No one who has actually read Cicero, Varro, and the other ancient writers who mention the Erythraean Sibyl and her sisters will think so—authors who died before Christ was born according to the flesh, and from whose very books we draw these examples. I do not doubt, indeed, that in earlier ages these verses passed for delirious ravings, since no one grasped them; for they proclaimed certain wonders so monstrous that neither their reason, their timing, nor their author was made clear. And in fact the Erythraean Sibyl herself said it was destined that people would call her mad and a liar—her own words run: 'they will call the Sibyl a raving liar; but once everything has come about, then you will call me to mind, and no one will any longer name me mad, prophetess of the great God.' These verses, then, lay unnoticed for many ages, but were recognized only afterward, once the birth and passion of Christ had unlocked their hidden sense—just as had also happened with the prophets' sayings. For though the people of the Jews had read these words across fifteen centuries and more, they went unheeded until Christ gave them meaning, both by his word and by his deeds—since the prophets had foretold him—nor could what they spoke of be grasped in any way until every bit of it had come to pass.
Let me turn now to the passion itself, the very thing routinely flung at us as a reproach—that we worship someone who was a man, and one whom other men subjected to a notorious punishment and torment—so as to demonstrate that this passion was undertaken for a purpose so great and so divine that power, truth, and wisdom are all bound up together within it alone. For even had he lived in perfect blessedness on earth and reigned his whole life through at the summit of good fortune, no man of sense would have taken him for a god or deemed him worthy of divine honor. That is what people do who have no part in genuine divinity: they not only gaze up at but actually consecrate wealth that crumbles, power that is fragile, and goods owed to somebody else's favor, and, knowing full well what they do, they devote themselves to the memory of the dead, paying homage to fortune long since snuffed out—fortune that wise men never thought fit to worship even while it lived and stood before them. Nothing among earthly things, after all, can be worthy of reverence or fit for heaven; virtue alone, justice alone, can be judged a good that is true, heavenly, and lasting, precisely because it is never given to one man or stripped from another. Since Christ arrived on earth furnished with this very virtue and justice—or rather, since he is himself virtue and he is himself justice—he came down in order to teach it and to mold mankind after it. Having carried out this teaching office and this embassy from God, it was thanks to that same virtue, both taught and enacted by him at once, that every nation both could and did come to believe him a god, and rightly so. So then, as a great crowd kept streaming to him continually, whether drawn by the justice he taught or by the wonders he performed, and as they listened to his precepts and came to believe him sent by God and God's own son, the chief men among the Jews and their priests were stirred by rage—for he rebuked them as sinners—and twisted by envy—for they saw themselves despised and left behind as the multitude flocked to him—and, worse than either, blinded by their own folly and error and forgetful of the heavenly commandments and the prophets, they conspired together against him and hatched a wicked scheme to destroy and torment him. The prophets had described all this long beforehand. David, for instance, right at the opening of his psalms, foreseeing by the spirit how great a crime they were about to commit, calls blessed the man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked. And Solomon, in the book called Wisdom, put it this way: 'Let us set a snare for the just man, since he displeases us and throws the sins of the law back in our faces. He professes knowledge of God and styles himself the son of God. To us he has become a living rebuke of our own thoughts; merely to look at him is a burden to us, for his life differs from other men's and his paths run a different course. We are reckoned by him as worthless nothings; he keeps himself apart from our ways as though from filth, and he sets the future of the righteous above all, and boasts that God is his father. Let us then find out whether what he says is true, and put to the test what fate awaits him. Let us interrogate him with insults and torture, so we may learn what he calls reverence and put his patience to the proof. Let us sentence him to the most disgraceful of deaths.' Such were their schemes, and in scheming them they strayed, for their own folly had blinded them and they did not grasp the mysteries of God. Has he not laid out that unholy plot, hatched by the wicked against God, almost as if he had stood there and watched it happen? And yet from the time Solomon sang these words to the moment the deed itself took place, a thousand and ten years went by. We add nothing here, we invent nothing: the men who committed the crime had this text in their own hands, they had read the very passage describing what they would do. And even today the heirs of their name and of their guilt still hold these words, and in their daily readings they proclaim aloud their own condemnation, foretold by the prophets' voice, yet they never once let it reach their hearts—which is itself part of their condemnation. So the Jews, often reproved by Christ for their sins and their injustice, and all but forsaken by the common people, were roused to put him to death—and it was his very humility that emboldened them to dare it. For when they read of the power and splendor with which the Son of God was to descend from heaven, yet beheld Jesus himself as humble, plain, and without beauty, they refused to believe him the Son of God, not realizing that the prophets had foretold two comings of his: the first hidden, in the lowliness of flesh; the second manifest, in the might of majesty. Of the first, David speaks in the seventy-first psalm: 'He will come down like rain upon fleece, and in his days justice will spring up, together with abundance of peace, until the moon itself is taken away.' Just as rain falling on fleece cannot be noticed, since it makes no noise, so too, he meant, Christ would come to earth unsuspected by anyone, in order to teach justice and peace. Isaiah likewise handed down the same idea: 'Lord, who has put faith in what we have reported, and to whom has the arm of God been laid bare? We proclaimed him in his presence like a child, and like a root planted in parched ground. He has neither shape nor splendor; we looked at him, and he possessed no shape and no beauty, but a form devoid of honor, falling short of every other man. A man set amid affliction, one who knows how to endure weakness—for he was turned away from and left uncounted. It is our sins he carries, our griefs he suffers, though we ourselves supposed him caught in sorrow, affliction, and torment; yet he was pierced through on account of our wrongs, and made feeble because of our own sins. Upon him rests the instruction that brings us peace, and by his wounds we are made whole. Like sheep we have all wandered astray, and God delivered him up on account of our sins.' And the Sibyl expresses the very same idea: 'pitiable, dishonored, without shape, amid pitiable things he will grant hope.' Because of this very humility, failing to recognize their own God, they entered upon that abominable plan to rob of life the one who had come precisely to give them life.
Yet for the anger and envy they nursed shut up within their hearts, they offered other pretexts: that he was undoing the law God gave through Moses — namely, that he did not rest on the Sabbath but worked toward saving men, that he drained circumcision of meaning, that he removed the ban on eating pork — practices in which the sacraments of the Jewish religion reside. So for these reasons the remaining portion of the people, not yet won over to Christ, was stirred up by the priests into condemning him as godless for undoing God's law — though what he did followed not his own judgment, but God's will and the prophets' predictions. For Micah announced that a new law would be given, in this way: 'Law shall come forth out of Zion, and the Lord's utterance out of Jerusalem; he will render judgment among countless nations, refute them, and strip bare the powerful peoples.' For that earlier law given through Moses was handed down not on Mount Zion but on Mount Horeb — a law the Sibyl revealed would one day be dissolved by God's son, saying: 'But when all these things I have foretold are accomplished, then in him the whole law is dissolved.' Moses himself too — the very man through whom they received the law they cling to so obstinately, thereby falling away from God and failing to know him — had already predicted that God would send a supreme prophet, one standing above the law, to carry God's will to mankind. In Deuteronomy he set it down thus: 'The Lord spoke to me: From among their kinsmen I will raise up a prophet resembling you, placing my message in his mouth, so he may declare to them whatever I command; and whoever refuses to heed what that prophet proclaims under my name, him I will punish.' Through the very giver of the law, then, God made known that he would send his son — a law living and present — and would abolish that older law delivered through a mortal, so that by an eternal one he might once more ordain a law without end. Likewise, concerning the abolition of circumcision, Isaiah prophesied thus: 'So speaks the Lord to Judah's men and Jerusalem's inhabitants: make among yourselves something new, and plant no seed among the briars. Cut yourselves for your God — cut away the covering of your heart's flesh — or else my fury will blaze forth like fire, and no one will put it out.' Likewise Moses himself: 'In the final days God will cut away your heart's covering so you may love the Lord your God.' Likewise Joshua, son of Nun, his successor: 'The Lord told Joshua: fashion for yourself extremely sharp flint blades, then sit and cut the sons of Israel a second time.' By this he meant that a second cutting was coming — not of flesh, as the first had been, a rite the Jews still keep, but of heart and spirit, the one Christ, the true Joshua, delivered. For the prophet's words are not 'the Lord spoke to me' but 'to Joshua' — a sign that he meant not himself but Christ, the one God was addressing at that moment. That Joshua carried Christ's figure within him. Originally named Hoshea, he was renamed Joshua by Moses, who sensed what lay ahead — so that, chosen to command the army against Amalek, who assailed Israel's sons, he might defeat the foe through the pattern hidden in his new name, and guide the people into the promised territory. For that same reason he succeeded Moses — to show that the fresh law brought by Christ Jesus would take the place of the older one given through Moses. After all, cutting the flesh itself lacks any real purpose, since had God wanted this, he would simply have shaped man from the start without a foreskin at all. Instead, this second cutting stood as a figure pointing to baring the breast — meaning we are meant to live with a heart laid open and free of pretense, since the body part that gets cut bears some resemblance to the heart and is a source of shame. For this reason God commanded it be exposed, so that through this sign he might caution us against keeping the breast concealed — that is, against hiding some disgraceful deed within the recesses of conscience. This, then, is the cutting of the heart the prophets speak of — the one God shifted from mortal flesh onto the soul, since the soul alone endures. For wanting, out of his everlasting devotion, to look after our life and welfare, he offered us repentance through that cutting: if we lay bare the heart — meaning if we confess our sins and make amends enough before God — pardon is granted us, pardon withheld from the defiant and from those who hide their misdeeds, before him who examines not the face, as a man would, but the hidden depths within the breast. The ban on pork points toward this same lesson. In ordering them to abstain from it, God's main intent was that they grasp the need to keep away from sin and impurity. This creature is mired in filth and uncleanness, never once raising its gaze skyward, but with its whole body and snout bent toward the ground, forever enslaved to its stomach and its feed; while alive it offers no other use, unlike other creatures — some carry riders, some assist in farm labor, some haul wagons by the neck, some bear burdens on their backs, some supply clothing from their hides, some yield milk in abundance, and some stand guard over homes. He therefore prohibited eating swine's flesh — meaning he forbade copying the pig's manner of living, an animal raised for nothing but slaughter — so that, enslaved to appetite and pleasure, people would not become useless for practicing justice and thereby meet death; likewise so they would not wallow in filthy lusts as the pig does when it gorges in mud, or become slaves to earthly idols, smearing themselves with mire. For those who worship gods — that is, mud and soil — smear themselves with filth. In this way every precept of Jewish law aims at displaying righteousness, for they were delivered indirectly, so spiritual truths might be understood through fleshly figures.
So then, as Christ was bringing to completion what God had willed and had foretold many centuries earlier through his prophets, they, stirred up by these very events and ignorant of the sacred scriptures, banded together to condemn their own God. Knowing this was coming, and repeatedly saying he had to suffer and be killed for the salvation of many, he nonetheless withdrew along with his disciples. This was not an attempt to dodge what he had to bear, but a lesson in how one ought to act amid any persecution, lest anyone seem to have caused it by personal wrongdoing; he further declared that betrayal awaited him at the hand of one of his own. So Judas, drawn in by a payment, delivered him over to the Jews. They seized him and brought him before Pontius Pilate, then serving as governor of Syria, demanding crucifixion, with no charge against him beyond his claim to be God's son and king of the Jews — and beyond his statement, 'Tear down this temple, built over forty-six years, and in three days, without hands, I will raise it again,' meaning his own suffering was near and that once killed by the Jews he would rise on the third day. For he himself had been God's true temple. They hounded him over these words as though they were cursed and blasphemous. Once Pilate had heard this, and the man offered no word in his own defense, Pilate declared that he saw nothing in him deserving condemnation. But those thoroughly unjust accusers, joined by the crowd they had roused, began shouting back, clamoring fiercely for his crucifixion. Pontius then gave in, worn down both by their outcry and by the urging of Herod the tetrarch, who dreaded losing his throne; yet he did not himself pass sentence, handing him instead to the Jews so they could judge him under their own law. They led him off after scourging him with whips, and before nailing him up they made sport of him: dressing him in a purple-hued robe, crowning him with thorns, they saluted him mockingly as king, gave him gall to eat, and mixed him a draught of vinegar. After that they spat on his face and beat him with open hands. A dispute broke out among the executioners over his clothing, and his tunic and cloak went to whoever won the throw of the lots they cast between themselves. Through all of this, he let no sound escape his lips, as if he had no voice at all. Then they strung him up between two condemned robbers, placing him at the center, and nailed him to the wood. What am I even to mourn first in a crime this vast, or what words could capture such an outrage? This is not the cross of Gavius I am recounting, the one Cicero pursued with every ounce of his rhetorical strength, pouring out the whole wellspring of his genius, denouncing as a monstrous wrong that a Roman citizen had been hoisted onto a cross in defiance of every statute. Yet however innocent that man was, however undeserving of such a penalty, he remained a mortal, harmed by a wicked man who cared nothing for justice. What, then, are we to say of the outrage of this cross, where God himself was hoisted up and nailed down by his own worshippers? Who could ever be found eloquent enough, so richly stocked with matter and language, whose speech, pouring out in such overflowing abundance, might rightly lament that cross which the world itself, together with all its elements, mourned? Both the prophets, through their spoken word, and the Sibyl, through her verses, had already made known that events would run this course. In Isaiah it is found written thus: 'I am not defiant, nor do I resist: my back I offered to the lash, my cheeks to blows, and I did not turn my face from the disgrace of being spat upon.' Likewise David in Psalm 34: 'Whips were massed against me, yet they took no notice; they were undone, feeling no remorse; they put me to the test and jeered at me with mockery, grinding their teeth against me.' The Sibyl too showed the very same things to come: 'Into lawless hands, hands of the unbelieving, he shall later come; with impure hands they will strike God with blows, and with foul mouths spit venomous spittle upon him; and his innocent back they will simply hand over to the whips.' Likewise, regarding his silence, which he kept unbroken right up to death, Isaiah spoke again in this way: 'He was brought forward like a sheep for sacrifice, and like a lamb before its shearers utters no sound, so he did not open his mouth.' And the Sibyl mentioned above: 'And though struck he shall stay silent, so that none may discover what word he speaks or whence he came, until he speaks to the dead; and he shall wear the crown woven of thorns.' As for the food and drink offered him before they nailed him up, David says in Psalm 68: 'They placed gall into my food, and for my thirst gave me vinegar to drink.' The Sibyl too proclaimed this same event beforehand: 'For food they gave bile, and for thirst, vinegar — this is the table they will set to display their inhospitality.' And a different Sibyl scolds the land of Judea in these lines: 'Senseless as you are, you failed to recognize your own God at play among mortal minds, but instead crowned him with a fearsome wreath of thorns and mixed him bitter gall.' That the Jews would raise a hand against their own God and put him to death, these prophetic witnesses had already foretold. In Ezra it is written thus: 'Ezra spoke to the people: this Passover is our deliverer and our shelter. Reflect, and let it settle into your heart, that we are meant to bring him low as a sign; afterward we will place our hope in him, so that this place will not be forsaken for all time, declares the Lord God of hosts. Should you refuse to trust him or heed what he announces, you will become a laughingstock among the nations.' From this it is clear the Jews have no hope left except by washing away that blood and placing their trust in the very man they killed. Isaiah too marks out their crime, saying: 'In his lowliness his sentence was lifted away. Who can tell of his origin? For his life will be cut off from the land, led off to death because of my people's crimes. And I will assign the wicked to his burial place and the rich to his death, since he committed no wrong nor spoke deceit with his mouth. For this he will gain many as his own and divide the plunder of the mighty, because he was given over to death and counted among wrongdoers; he himself carried the sins of many and was handed over on account of their crimes.' David too in Psalm 93 (94): 'They will hunt down the life of the righteous and pass sentence on innocent blood, yet the Lord has become my shelter.' Likewise Jeremiah: 'Lord, make it known to me, and I shall understand. Then I saw their intentions: like a guileless lamb I was brought to slaughter; against me they schemed a plot, saying, come, let us throw wood into his bread, and wipe his life from the land, and his name shall be remembered no longer.' Now the wood stands for the cross and the bread for his body, since he is the sustenance and life of everyone who trusts both in the flesh he bore and the cross on which he was hung. About this Moses himself spoke still more plainly in Deuteronomy: 'Your life will hang before your very eyes, and you will be afraid by day and night, unable to trust in your own life.' The same author again, in Numbers: 'The Lord is not strung up as a mere man, nor does the son of man endure threats as one.' Zechariah too handed this down: 'And they will gaze upon me, the one they pierced through.' Likewise David in Psalm 21 (22): 'They pierced through my hands and feet, counted every one of my bones; and they themselves stared and looked on me, dividing my clothes among themselves and casting lots for my garment.' None of this, of course, was the prophet speaking about himself — he was a king and never went through such things; rather God's spirit spoke through him about one who would undergo them a thousand and fifty years afterward, that being the span reckoned from David's reign to Christ's cross. Solomon too, his son, founder of Jerusalem, foretold that the city itself would fall in retribution for that sacred cross: 'But should you turn away from me, says the Lord, and fail to keep my truth, I will drive Israel out from the land I gave them, and this house, raised for them under my name, I will cast away out of my sight entirely; Israel will become ruin and disgrace among the peoples, and this house will lie abandoned, so that everyone passing by will marvel and ask: why has God brought such harm upon this land and this house? And people will answer: because they forsook the Lord their God, pursued their king — the one most cherished by God — and tortured him in deep humiliation; that is the reason these calamities have come upon them from God.'
What more remains to say about the crime of the Jews, except that by then they had gone blind and been gripped by a madness beyond cure — reading these very words day after day, yet neither grasping them nor managing to hold themselves back from doing them? Hung up, then, and nailed fast, he called out to God with a great cry and gave up his spirit of his own accord. That very hour brought an earthquake; the temple curtain dividing its two inner chambers was ripped in two; the sun vanished all at once, and darkness covered the land from the sixth hour until the ninth. Concerning this the prophet Amos bears witness: 'On that day, declares the Lord, the sun will go down at noon, and daylight itself will grow dark; I will turn your festival days into mourning and your songs into wailing.' Likewise Jeremiah: 'She who gives birth was struck with dread, her spirit weary, and the sun went down on her while it was still midday; she was crushed and cursed — the remnant of them I will hand over to the sword before the eyes of their foes.' And the Sibyl: 'The temple veil shall be split apart, and at midday a vast, shadowy night shall fall for three hours.' Even with these events occurring, not even such heavenly signs let them recognize their crime; but since he had foretold rising from the dead on the third day, they feared that his disciples might steal the body away, leading everyone to believe he had truly risen and causing far greater turmoil among the people — so they took him down from the cross, sealed him inside a tomb, and ringed it securely with a military watch. Yet on the third day, before daybreak, a sudden tremor threw open the tomb, and while the guards — dazed and paralyzed by terror, seeing nothing — stood by, he emerged whole and living from the grave and set out for Galilee to find his disciples; and nothing was found within the tomb save the cloths that had wrapped and enclosed his body. That he would not stay among the dead but would rise on the third day — this the prophets had already sung. David in Psalm 15 (16): 'You will not leave my soul among the dead, nor allow your holy one to witness decay.' And again in Psalm 3: 'I lay down and slept, then rose, for the Lord gave me his support.' Hosea too, first among the twelve prophets, testified concerning his rising: 'This is my wise son, and so he will not now hold back amid the affliction of his children; I will pull him free from death's grip. Where now, death, is your sentence, or where your sting?' The same prophet elsewhere: 'He will restore us to life after two days, on the third day.' And so the Sibyl said he would set a limit to death after a sleep of three days: 'He shall accomplish death's portion, having slept the third day, and then, loosed from among the dead, shall come into the light, the first to reveal to the summoned the beginning of resurrection.' For by overcoming death he won life for us; no other hope of reaching immortality, then, is given to mankind, except by believing in him and taking on the bearing and enduring of Christ's cross.
He therefore went off to Galilee — unwilling, as he was, to display himself to the Jews, for fear of driving them toward a repentance that would cure their impiety — and, once his disciples had assembled again, he laid bare for them both the wording of the sacred writings and what the prophets had kept hidden. None of this could be grasped in any way until after his suffering, since it was his own person and passion that these writings foretold. This is why Moses and those very prophets speak of the law given to the Jews as a 'testament': a testament cannot be ratified, nor can its contents be known, before the one who made it has died, since until then it stays sealed shut. Thus, had Christ not undergone death, this testament would have remained unopened — in other words, God's mystery would never have been unveiled or grasped. Yet the whole of scripture falls into two testaments: the portion preceding Christ's coming and passion, namely the law and the prophets, bears the name 'old', while whatever was set down after his resurrection is termed the 'new testament'. The old belongs to the Jews, the new to us; still, the two are not at odds, since the new brings the old to fulfillment, and one and the same Christ stands as maker of both, who, by accepting death on our behalf, appoints us heirs of the eternal kingdom once the Jewish people has been cast off and disinherited. So Jeremiah the prophet attests, speaking in this way: 'Look, days are approaching, says the Lord, when for Israel's house together with Judah's house I shall bring to completion a testament that is new — unlike the one I set in place for their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from Egypt's land, since they failed to keep faith with that testament of mine, and so I turned away from them, says the Lord.' The same prophet elsewhere says something similar: 'I abandoned my own house, I gave up my inheritance into the grip of its enemies; my inheritance turned against me like a lion in the woods, it raised its voice at me — for that I came to hate it.' Given that his inheritance is the heavenly kingdom, he plainly does not mean that he hates the inheritance as such, but rather the heirs, who turned out ungrateful and godless toward him. 'My inheritance turned against me,' he says, 'like a lion' — meaning, I became prey and food devoured by my very own heirs, who slaughtered me as if I were livestock. 'It raised its voice at me' — meaning, they pronounced verdicts of death and crucifixion upon me. Now where he says above that he would bring the new testament to completion for the house of Judah, he indicates that the earlier testament, delivered through Moses, had never reached perfection, whereas the one to come through Christ would arrive at completion. By 'the house of Judah and Israel' he certainly does not intend the Jews, whom he cast off, but rather ourselves — summoned by him from among the nations to take their place through adoption, and named children of the Jews. This is exactly what the Sibyl proclaims when she declares: 'the sacred lineage of the blessed Jews, dwellers under heaven.' Isaiah, meanwhile, teaches what sort of people this would turn out to be, in the passage where the supreme Father addresses the Son: 'I, the Lord God, summoned you unto righteousness; I will grasp your hand and give you strength, and I have set you as a testament for my people, a light for the nations, so as to open blind eyes, lead out those held fast in chains, and those seated in darkness out from the prison-house.' Seeing, then, that we once sat in darkness like the blind, penned like prisoners within folly's cell, ignorant of God and of truth, we have since been given light by him — he who by his own testament took us in as his own, freed us from wicked chains, brought us forward into wisdom's light, and welcomed us into the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom.
With the preaching of the gospel and of his name now arranged for his disciples, a cloud abruptly enveloped him and carried him up into heaven — this on the fortieth day following his passion, exactly as Daniel had foretold when he wrote: 'and behold, one arriving amid heaven's clouds like a son of man, who came all the way to the Ancient of Days.' Scattered across the provinces, the disciples set church foundations down everywhere, themselves performing wonders great and nearly unbelievable in the name of God, their master, since at his departure he had furnished them with power and authority, so that this fresh proclamation's design could take root and gain confirmation. He also disclosed to them everything still to come — proclaimed by Peter and Paul at Rome, a proclamation that has survived preserved in writing. Among many other astonishing things stated there, they foretold that before long God would dispatch a king to defeat the Jews, raze their cities flat, and lay siege to the Jews themselves until hunger and thirst broke them down. It would then happen that they would resort to eating their own people's flesh and devour each other; at last, once captured, they would fall under enemy control, and would witness, right before their eyes, their wives subjected to the harshest brutality, their maidens defiled and forced into prostitution, their boys snatched away, their infants smashed against the ground, and finally the whole land ravaged by sword and flame — the captives driven from their homeland for good, on account of their scorn toward the Son of God, dearest and most approved of all. And so, once these people had perished — Nero having put them to death — Vespasian erased the very name and nation of the Jews, bringing to pass everything that had been predicted.
What strikes as false and unbelievable those whom the genuine teaching of the heavenly writings has left uninstructed has, I believe, now found its confirmation. Yet, so that we can also refute those excessively — and self-harmingly — shrewd people who withhold their trust from divine things, let us expose their mistake using their own style of argument too, so that eventually they may see plainly that things had to unfold exactly as we have demonstrated they did. And though before impartial judges it would suffice to offer either testimonies unaccompanied by arguments, or arguments unaccompanied by testimonies, we are nonetheless not satisfied with just one, having both available to us, so that no perversely clever opponent is left room either to misread us or to argue back. Such people deny that anything at all could be subtracted from an immortal nature; in short, they deny that it suited God to consent to become man, loading himself with the flesh's frailty so as to submit himself to sufferings, to pain, to death — as if it would not have been simple enough for him to appear before men free of bodily weakness, teaching them righteousness with all the greater authority as one openly declared to be God, since then everyone would surely have obeyed his heavenly commands, had the might and authority of a commanding God backed them. 'Why,' these people ask, 'did he not arrive among men as God to instruct them? What made him lower and weaken himself to such a degree that mortals were able to hold him in contempt and subject him to punishment? Why did he suffer violence at the hands of the weak and the mortal? Why did he fail to drive off men's hands, whether by his power or by evading them through his divinity? Why did he not at least disclose his majesty right at the moment of death, and instead was marched to judgment as if helpless, sentenced as if guilty, put to death as if mortal?' I will take up these objections one by one, and will let no one remain misled. These things happened for a reason both great and marvelous: whoever comes to understand it will not merely stop marveling that God suffered torment at human hands, but will readily perceive that he could not even have been taken for God at all, had the very things now objected to not actually occurred.
Take anyone who lays down rules for men and molds the lives and character of others — I ask: should he himself carry out what he prescribes, or not? Fail to do it, and his rules carry no weight. For when what is prescribed is good, when it puts human life on its best footing, the one prescribing it ought not to remove himself from the group of men among whom he lives; he ought to live exactly as he instructs others to live, lest, living otherwise, he strips his own rules of credibility and makes his teaching seem trivial by undoing in practice what he labors in words to fasten down. Every single hearer of one who issues commands resists having the obligation to obey forced upon him, as though his freedom were thereby being confiscated. So he answers such a teacher along these lines: 'What you order is beyond me, since it cannot be done. You bar me from anger, you bar me from craving, you bar me from being roused by lust, you bar me from sorrow, you bar me from dreading death — yet nature so resists this that every living creature is bound by these very feelings. Or, if you truly believe nature can be overridden this way, then do it yourself, you who issue the order, so I may see that it is possible. But given that you yourself do not do it, what nerve is this — wanting to saddle a man born free with rules you will not keep yourself? Learn your lesson first, teacher, and straighten out your own conduct before you set about mending everyone else's.' Who could call this reply unjust? Rather, a teacher of that stripe earns nothing but ridicule, and finds himself mocked in return, since he will plainly be seen mocking others. So what is left for such a teacher to do, once these charges are leveled at him? How can he strip the defiant of their excuse, except by proving through his own present conduct that what he teaches can actually be done? This is exactly why nobody heeds what the philosophers prescribe. Men, after all, prize examples over words, since talk comes cheap while delivery is costly — if only as many lived rightly as spoke rightly! But those who prescribe without practicing forfeit all credibility: mere men doing so will be dismissed as trivial, while a god doing so will meet the excuse of human weakness. What is left, then, is that deeds must back up words — precisely what the philosophers cannot manage. And so, given that the teachers themselves succumb to the very passions they insist must be conquered, they can train nobody in the virtue they falsely preach, which is why they suppose that a perfectly wise man has never existed at all — meaning one in whom supreme learning and knowledge stood united with supreme virtue and flawless justice; and in this they were not wrong. For no one since the world began has proved to be such a man, except Christ, who conveyed wisdom both in word and confirmed his doctrine through present virtue.
Come, then, let us examine whether a teacher dispatched from heaven could possibly fall short of perfection. I am not yet discussing the one they deny to have come from God at all. Suppose merely that some figure is to be sent down from heaven to lay virtue's foundations under human life and mold men toward justice. Nobody could doubt that a teacher so sent from on high must be flawless in the knowledge of everything, just as in virtue, or else heaven and earth would show no difference whatsoever. In man, after all, there exists no teaching that originates purely from within: a mind confined within earthly organs, hampered by the body's decay, cannot by itself either grasp or hold onto truth unless taught from outside itself. And even granting it the fullest capacity, it still could never reach the summit of virtue or withstand every vice, whose raw material is lodged within the body itself. From this it follows that no earthly teacher can be perfect. The heavenly teacher, though — granted knowledge by his divinity and virtue by his immortality — must inevitably be flawless and whole in teaching, as in every other respect. Yet this cannot come about at all unless he takes up a mortal body of his own. Why it could happen no other way is easy to see. Suppose he were to approach men purely as God — setting aside that mortal eyes could neither behold nor withstand the splendor of his majesty — God as such could never teach virtue, since, lacking a body, he would fail to perform what he taught, leaving his instruction incomplete. Whereas, granted that the height of virtue consists in enduring pain patiently for justice and duty's sake, and that it is virtue not to dread death itself even under threat, but to face it courageously when it comes, that flawless teacher must both prescribe these things and back them up by deed, since anyone laying down rules for living has to eliminate every possible excuse, so as to impose on people the necessity of obeying — through shame rather than compulsion — while still leaving them free, so that a reward stands ready for the obedient, since they could have refused had they wished, and a penalty for the disobedient, since they could have complied had they wished. How, then, can this excuse be eliminated, unless the teacher himself does what he teaches, going ahead, so to speak, as guide, extending a hand to whoever follows? But how can he perform what he teaches unless he resembles the one he is teaching? For should he be immune to every kind of suffering, a man could answer him this way: 'I would rather not sin, truly, but I am defeated — clothed as I am in flesh both weak and fragile; it is this flesh that lusts, that grows angry, that dreads pain and death. So I am driven against my own will into sin, not from wanting it but from being forced; I sense myself sinning, yet the necessity built into my frailty pushes me on, and I have no strength to resist it.' What answer could that teacher of righteousness give to this? How could he confute a man pleading the excuse of the flesh for his own wrongdoing, unless he too had put on flesh, thereby proving that flesh, too, is capable of virtue? Defiance, after all, can only be disproved by example. Men cannot possess the resolve you teach unless you have first shown it yourself, since human nature insists on being seen as drawn toward vice not merely excusably but even justifiably; hence the master and teacher of virtue has to become as close to man as possible, so that by conquering sin in his own person he might teach that man, too, can conquer it. But were he immortal, he could offer man no example whatsoever. For some stubborn person would stand up and say: 'You, of course, do not sin, being free of this body; you feel no craving, since an immortal needs nothing — but I require a great many things simply to keep this life of mine going. You fear no death, since it holds no power over you; you scorn pain, being incapable of suffering any harm — yet I, being mortal, dread both, since they inflict on me torments of the harshest kind, ones my fragile flesh cannot endure.' The teacher of virtue, then, needed to strip away this excuse as well, so that nobody could blame his sinning on necessity rather than his own fault. Therefore, for him to be perfect, the one being taught must have nothing left to object with, so that were the man to say, 'What you command is impossible,' the teacher could reply, 'Look — I do it myself.' 'But I am clothed in flesh, whose very nature is to sin.' 'And I wear that same flesh, yet sin holds no dominion over me.' 'For me, scorning wealth is hard, since in this body one cannot live any other way.' 'Look, a body belongs to me as well, yet still I fight off every desire.' 'I cannot bear pain or death for justice's sake, being frail.' 'Look, pain and death hold sway over me too, and yet I overcome the very things you fear, so as to make you victor over pain and death alike. I go ahead through what you claim cannot be endured: if you cannot follow one who merely commands, then follow one who leads the way.' In this fashion every excuse is stripped away, and a man is forced to admit that his own fault makes him unjust, if he fails to follow the teacher of virtue who also serves as his guide. You can see, then, just how much more complete a mortal teacher is than an immortal one — precisely because he can guide a mortal — since whoever is immune to suffering cannot teach endurance. None of this, however, means I am ranking man above God; I mean only to show that man cannot be a flawless teacher unless he is God as well, so that heavenly authority lets him impose the necessity of obedience on men — nor can God be that teacher unless clothed in a mortal body, so that by fulfilling his own precepts through deeds he binds everyone else to the necessity of obedience. It is therefore entirely clear that whoever is to guide life and teach righteousness must possess a body, and that his teaching can become full and complete, take root and gain foundation, and stand firm and fixed among men in no other way than by his undergoing the weakness of flesh and body and taking on, in his own person, the very virtue he teaches — so as to teach it simultaneously in word and deed — and likewise by being subject to death and every form of suffering, since virtue's duties consist precisely in enduring suffering and undergoing death. All of this, as I have said, the perfect teacher must himself bear, in order to teach that it can indeed be borne.
Let men, then, learn and grasp why the highest God, in sending his envoy and messenger to teach mortal beings the precepts of justice, chose to have him clothed in flesh, subjected to torment, and put to death. Justice being nowhere found on earth, he dispatched a teacher — a law brought to life, as it were — to found a new name and a new temple and to scatter true, devoted worship across the whole world, both by word and by example. Yet, so that his divine sending would be beyond doubt, he could not be born the way a man is ordinarily born, formed from two mortal parents; instead, it had to be plain that, even in taking on humanity, he remained heavenly — he came into being without a begetting father's part in it. His spiritual father was God, and just as the father of his spirit was God without any mother, so the mother of his body was a virgin without any father. He was thus both God and man at once, positioned between the two as mediator — the Greeks name him mesitēs for exactly this — so that he could draw man toward God, meaning toward immortality. Had he been God alone, as noted earlier, he could not have furnished man with examples of virtue; had he been man alone, he could not have driven men toward righteousness, unless an authority and power beyond the human were joined to it. Since man is made up of flesh together with spirit, and the spirit must win eternity by works of righteousness, the flesh — being earthly and therefore mortal — pulls its attached spirit downward with it, dragging it away from immortality into death. A spirit unaccompanied by flesh, then, could never have guided man toward immortality in any way, because it is the flesh that keeps the spirit from following God: fragile as it is and given over to sin, and sin serves as death's nourishment. This, then, is exactly why a mediator arrived — God embodied in flesh — so that the flesh might be capable of following him, and so that he might rescue man from death, whose reign lies over the flesh. He took on flesh for this very purpose: having mastered the flesh's desires, to teach that sinning is not something forced upon us, but a matter of our own choosing and will. For there is one struggle above all others that confronts us, and it is against the flesh, whose limitless desires bear down on the soul and refuse to let it keep command of itself, but instead, having bound it over to pleasures and sweet allurements, hand it over to death without end. So that we might be able to resist these forces, God both opened up and revealed to us a path for overcoming the flesh. And this virtue, complete and lacking nothing in any respect, grants to those who triumph the crown and the prize of immortality.
I have spoken of the humility and the frailty and the suffering, and why God chose to undergo these things; now the plan of the cross itself must be given, and its power set forth. What the highest Father determined from the beginning, and how he arranged everything that came to pass, is taught not only by the prophets' foretelling, which ran true concerning Christ ahead of the event, but also by the very logic that lies within the passion itself. For nothing that he suffered was empty; each carried a figure and weighty significance, exactly as did those divine deeds he performed: their force and power indeed had effect in the moment, yet at the same time pointed forward to something still to come. He opened the eyes of the blind. That a heavenly power should give back sight to those who could not see was itself remarkable; yet by this act he signified that one day he would turn toward the nations ignorant of God, kindling the hearts of fools with wisdom's light and unshutting the heart's eye so it could gaze on truth. Truly blind are those who, never seeing the things of heaven and swathed in ignorance's fog, bow down instead before things earthly and frail. He unstopped the ears of the deaf. That heavenly power was not exhausted merely in this act; rather it was foretelling that before long, those cut off from the truth would come both to hear it and to grasp it — the very voices of God himself. Rightly, then, you could name as deaf anyone who will not listen to heaven's message, to what is true, to what ought to be done. He loosed the tongues of the mute so they could speak. Wondrous was the power even in performing this single deed; but folded within it lay a further meaning, showing what would soon happen — that people who until lately had known nothing of heavenly matters would, once they had taken hold of wisdom's discipline, begin to speak of God and of truth. For a man ignorant of the true nature of divinity remains, in truth, without tongue and mute, however fluent his speech may be on every other subject. Only once the tongue begins to utter truth — that is, to set forth the power and majesty of the one God — does it finally serve the purpose its own nature intends; so long as it utters lies, it fails its proper use, and so whoever cannot speak of divine matters must be counted no better than an infant. He also restored the lame man's feet so they could walk again. Admirable was the strength shown in that divine act; but a figure was folded within it too — namely, that the wanderings and errors of this worldly life would be brought to a halt, and the road toward truth would be laid open, so that anyone walking it could arrive at the grace of God. For truly lame should be counted the one who, wrapped in the murk and gloom of foolishness and unaware where his steps lead, staggers and stumbles his way down death's road. In the same way he cleared away the stains and blemishes marking bodies that disease had defiled. These were no minor deeds of an immortal power; this force was a sign that his teaching, through righteousness's instruction, would cleanse those marked by sin's stain and the blemish of vice. Truly leprous, disease-eaten, should be reckoned those whom boundless craving drives toward crime, or whom insatiable pleasure drives toward disgrace, branding them with a stain of shame that never fades. He raised the fallen bodies of the dead, called each back by name, and summoned them from death itself. What could suit God more fittingly? What miracle in any age could rival unsealing a life already spent, adding days to a span already completed, drawing back the veil hiding death's secrets? Yet this power beyond telling was itself but the image of a still greater force — one revealing that his teaching would one day carry such strength that nations across the whole earth, estranged from God and given over to death, would, once brought to life by knowledge of the true light, reach the rewards that immortality holds. For rightly you might judge as dead those who fail to recognize God as the giver of life, who drag their souls down from heaven into the dust, and so stumble into the snares that eternal death has laid. So then, whatever he was doing at that moment was an image cast forward of things yet to come; what he displayed in bodies broken and afflicted carried the shape of spiritual realities, so that in the present he might reveal a power not of this earth, while for the future he might disclose the strength of his heavenly majesty. Therefore, exactly as his works carried within them the meaning of a still greater power, so his passion too came before us as neither an accident, nor something without purpose, nor a plain, unadorned event. Rather, just as his deeds proclaimed the great virtue and power behind his teaching, what he suffered gave notice that wisdom itself would meet with hatred in the age to come. The drink of vinegar and the taste of gall foretold, for those who would follow truth, bitterness and hardship awaiting them in this present life. And though the passion itself, bitter and harsh in its own right, gave us a preview of torments yet to come — torments that virtue itself sets before those who remain in this present age — still, that drink and food reaching the mouth of our teacher offered us a pattern for hardship, toil, and misery. All of this those who pursue the truth must bear and endure, since truth tastes bitter and draws hatred from all who, having no part in virtue, surrender their lives to pleasures that kill. As for the crown of thorns set upon his head, it declared that he would gather to himself, out of the guilty, a people set apart for God. A crown, after all, is the word for a ring of people standing in a circle. We ourselves, before we came to know God, stood as unjust — thorns, meaning evil and harmful — ignorant of what was good, cut off from any notion or practice of justice, and staining everything we touched with crime and desire. So then, gathered out of brambles and briars, we now form a ring about God's holy head, since, called by him and drawn together from every side, we stand near him as our master, our teacher, our God, and set the crown upon that king of the world, that lord over every living thing. As for the cross, it holds within it a great meaning and reasoning, which I will now attempt to set out. God, as I explained above, once he resolved to free mankind, sent down to earth a teacher of virtue — one who, through wholesome precepts, would mold men toward innocence, and through deeds performed in their presence would clear the path of justice, so that a man walking it, following his teacher, might reach eternal life. He therefore took on a body, clothing himself in flesh, in order to give to the man he had come to teach patterns and spurs toward virtue. But having, in every duty of life, provided a model of righteousness — so as to hand to man also patience under suffering and scorn for death, through which virtue reaches its full and finished form — he fell into the grip of a godless nation, even though foreknowledge of what was to come would have let him avoid it, and the very power behind his wonders could have driven it back. So he bore the torture, the lashes, the thorns; and at the last he did not shrink even from accepting death, so that mankind, with him as leader, might see death — subdued, chained, along with all its terrors — brought to defeat. Now, as to why the highest Father chose this particular kind of death above all others to let him undergo, here is the reasoning. Someone might perhaps object: 'If he was God and willed to die, why was he not granted at least some more honorable form of death? Why the cross above everything else? Why that disgraceful mode of execution, which seems beneath even a free man, guilty though he be?' First, because the one who had arrived in lowliness — to bring aid to the lowly and the poor, and to hold out hope of salvation to everyone — needed to suffer the very kind of death that the lowly and the poor commonly suffer, so that no one at all would be left unable to follow his example. Second, so that his body might remain whole, since on the third day he was destined to rise from among the dead. Nor should this go unnoticed: that he himself, in foretelling his own passion beforehand, revealed that he held the power, whenever he chose, both to lay his spirit down and to take it up again. Fixed to the cross, then, having already laid his spirit down, he made it so his executioners saw no need — as their custom would otherwise demand — to shatter his bones; instead they merely opened his side with a spear. In this way his whole and unbroken body was taken down from the gallows and laid with care inside the tomb. All this happened for one purpose: so that a body harmed and lessened would not be left unfit to rise again. There was, besides, a further leading reason God preferred the cross: it was necessary that he be raised on high, and that the passion of God become known throughout every nation. Since a man hung upon a gallows stands visible to everyone and rises above the rest, the cross was chosen instead, to mark out that he would prove so visible, so towering, that every nation across the whole world would come running to know him and to worship him. In the end, there exists no people so uncivilized, no land so far removed, where either his suffering or the vastness of his majesty remains unheard of. He therefore, in his passion, spread out his hands and thereby took the measure of the whole world, so as to show even then that from sunrise to sunset a vast people gathered from every tongue and tribe would come to shelter beneath his wings, receiving upon their brows that sign, greatest and loftiest of all. An image of this the Jews still display even now, marking their doorposts with a lamb's blood. For God, about to strike the Egyptians, commanded the Hebrews — so as to keep them untouched by that plague — to sacrifice a spotless white lamb and mark their doorposts with a sign made from its blood. And so, when in a single night the firstborn of Egypt perished, the Hebrews alone stood safe under the blood's sign — not because a beast's blood held within itself power enough to save a man, but because it stood as a picture of what was still to come. For the spotless white lamb was Christ himself — innocent, righteous, holy — who, put to death by those same Jews, brought salvation to all who would mark upon their own foreheads the sign of the blood, that is, of the cross by which his blood was poured out. The forehead, after all, is the topmost threshold of a man, and wood smeared with blood signifies the cross. In the end, the sacrifice of the lamb is named by the very people who perform it from the Greek word for suffering, since it stands as a figure of the passion, one that God, seeing the future beforehand, handed down through Moses for his people to keep. Yet even then the figure carried force enough in the moment to turn aside danger, so it might be shown just how far the truth itself would one day reach, in shielding God's people amid the last extremity the whole world will face. But by what means, or from what plague, everyone bearing this true, divine mark of blood upon their body's highest point will be kept safe — that I will teach in the final book.
For now it will suffice to explain how much power this sign carries. Whoever has witnessed how, adjured in Christ's name, demons take flight from the bodies they have seized will grasp how deep a dread this sign strikes into them. Just as he himself, while he walked among men, drove off every demon with a single word and brought the shattered, demon-maddened minds of men back to their former senses, so now his followers, invoking his name and the mark of his suffering, expel those same defiled spirits from those they possess. Proving this is no hard task. When men offer sacrifice to their gods, should anyone stand nearby bearing the sign upon his brow, the rites turn favorable toward no one, and the consulted priestess cannot deliver any oracle at all. This, too, has often stood as the leading cause behind wicked rulers persecuting the just. For when some of our own people stood beside their masters as they sacrificed, the sign placed on their foreheads sent the masters' gods fleeing, leaving them unable to trace out coming events in the victims' entrails. Once the soothsayers grasped this — spurred on by the very demons whose entrails they slit open, and complaining that unbelievers had intruded upon the sacred rites — they drove their rulers into a rage, so that these attacked God's temple and defiled themselves with genuine sacrilege, a crime later paid for through the harshest punishment of the persecutors. Even so, blind men fail to draw from this the plain conclusion — either that ours is the true religion, holding such strength to conquer, or that theirs is the false one, unable to hold its ground or meet the contest. Instead they claim the gods act this way from hatred, not from fear — as though anyone could hate except one capable of doing harm, or actually doing it. On the contrary, it would have better suited their majesty to strike down at once, with present punishment, those they hated, rather than run from them. But since they can draw near to none in whom they have spotted the heavenly mark, nor injure anyone the immortal sign has walled in like an unbreakable fortress, they harass such people through human agents and hound them using hands not their own. Should they admit these beings are demons, our case is won. It must follow that this is the true religion — the one that understands the nature of demons, sees through their cunning, blunts their strength, and, having subdued and tamed them, forces even such spiritual powers to bow before it. Should they deny it, the testimony of poets and philosophers will refute them. And if they will not deny that such beings exist and are wicked, what is left but to claim that some are gods, others demons? Let them, then, spell out for us what separates the two kinds, so we might know what deserves worship and what deserves loathing — whether the two share some bond, or stand in truth as enemies. If some kinship binds them together, how are we meant to tell them apart, or how mix without confusion the honor and worship owed to each? Yet if they stand as enemies, why do demons not fear the gods, or why can the gods not put the demons to flight? Consider: someone driven mad by a demon's urging raves and loses himself — let us bring him into the temple of Jupiter, Best and Greatest, or, since Jupiter has no skill at healing men, into the shrine of Aesculapius or Apollo. Let the priest of either god command, in that god's own name, the harmful spirit to leave the man: by no means whatsoever will it happen. What power, then, do these gods hold, if demons are not subject to them? Yet those very demons, adjured in the name of the true God, flee at once. What accounts for their fearing Christ while showing no fear of Jupiter, unless these are the very demons the crowd mistakes for gods? In short, set the two side by side: a man known to suffer a demon's assault, and the Delphic prophetess of Apollo — put both to the same test, and both alike will shudder at God's name; Apollo will quit his prophetess as quickly as that demonic spirit quits the possessed man, and once her god has been adjured and driven off, the prophetess will fall permanently silent. So then, the demons they admit ought to be cursed and the gods to whom they pray are one and the same. Should they think our word insufficient, let them believe Homer instead, who ranked even mighty Jupiter among the demons — and let them believe the other poets and philosophers too, who name these same beings sometimes demons, sometimes gods, one title true, the other false. For those thoroughly wicked spirits, wherever adjured, admit there that they are demons; wherever worshiped, falsely claim there to be gods — so as to plant error in men and lead them off from recognizing the true God, the one path by which eternal death can be escaped. These same beings, aiming to drag man down, set up for themselves an array of cults across different lands, hiding under names not truly theirs, borrowed so as to deceive. Since divinity was nothing they could claim in their own right, they seized for themselves the titles of mighty kings, hoping under those names to lay claim to the honors owed to gods. This deception can be laid bare and its truth pulled into daylight. Should anyone wish to probe deeper, let him assemble those skilled at summoning souls up from the dead. Let them call up Jupiter, Neptune, Vulcan, Mercury, Apollo, and Saturn, father of them all — every one will answer from below, will speak once questioned, and will admit the truth about themselves and about God. Let them then call up Christ: he will neither be present nor appear, for he spent no more than two days among the dead. What clearer proof than this could anyone offer? For my own part, I have no doubt that Trismegistus reached the truth through some reasoning of this kind — he who wrote of God the Father in full, and of the Son a great deal that belongs among the divine mysteries.
Given what we have already demonstrated, mankind can look nowhere else for hope of life: only by casting aside vanity and wretched error can one come to recognize God and devote oneself to him, giving up this passing existence and training in the earliest disciplines of righteousness toward reverence for true religion. For we are born on this condition, that we render to the God who begot us the just and owed obedience, that we know him alone and follow him alone. By this bond of devotion we are tied and bound fast to God — whence religion itself takes its very name, though not as Cicero explained it, deriving it from 'relegere' (to go back over), who in the second book of his work on the nature of the gods wrote thus: not only philosophers but our own ancestors as well distinguished superstition from religion. For those who prayed and sacrificed the whole day long, so that their children might outlive them (superstites), were called superstitious, while those who went back over everything that pertained to the worship of the gods and, as it were, reread it, were called religious, from 'relegere,' just as men are called 'elegant' from 'eligere' (to choose out), 'diligent' from 'diligere' (to esteem), and 'intelligent' from 'intellegere' (to understand) — for in all these words lies the same force of 'reading' that is present in 'religious.' Thus it came about that of 'superstitious' and 'religious,' the one became a name of fault, the other a name of praise. How foolish this explanation is, one may learn from the matter itself. For if, in the worship of the very same gods, both superstition and religion are engaged, the distance between them is small, or rather none at all. For what reason will anyone give me why a man who prays once for the safety of his children should be reckoned religious, and the same man, praying ten times, should be reckoned superstitious? If to do it once is best, how much more to do it often? If at the first hour, then why not through the whole day? If one victim is appeasing, surely more victims are more appeasing still, since repeated acts of homage win favor rather than give offense. For servants who are constant and frequent in their attendance do not seem hateful to us, but rather dearer. Why then should a man incur blame and take on a reproachful name for loving his children the more, or honoring the gods the more, while one who does less is praised? The same argument holds equally from the other side. For if to pray and sacrifice all day long is a fault, then so is doing it even once; if to wish repeatedly that one's children outlive one is a vice, then the man who has wished it even rarely is superstitious too. Or why should a name of vice be drawn from that than which nothing more honorable, nothing more just, can be wished? As for his claim that the religious are so called from 'relegere,' because they go back over carefully what pertains to the worship of the gods — why then should those who do this often, many times a day, lose the name of religious, when by their very constancy they surely go back over, with far greater care, the things by which the gods are worshiped? What then is the truth? Religion, clearly, is the worship of what is true; superstition, of what is false. And it matters altogether what one worships, not how one worships or what one prays for. But because worshipers of the gods think themselves religious when they are in fact superstitious, they can neither distinguish religion from superstition nor bring out the true meaning of the words. We have said that the name 'religion' is drawn from the bond of devotion: by that very bond God binds man to himself and fastens him close, since it is necessary that we serve him as our master and obey him as our father. Lucretius, then, explained the word better when he spoke of loosing the knots of religions. Those are called superstitious, however, not who wish their children to outlive them — for we all wish that — but those who cherish the surviving memory of the dead, or who, outliving their parents, kept images of them at home as if they were household gods. For those who took up new rites for themselves, so as to honor the dead in place of gods, supposing them taken up from among men into heaven, these they called superstitious; but those who worshiped the public and ancient gods, these they named religious. Whence Vergil: 'vain superstition, ignorant of the gods of old.' Yet the ancient gods, it turns out, were likewise consecrated after their deaths in just this fashion, so it follows that those who worship many false gods are the superstitious ones, while we who supplicate the one true God are the religious ones.
Someone may perhaps ask how it is that, while we claim to worship a single God, we still maintain there are two — namely God as Father and God as Son. This assertion drives a great many people into the gravest error. Though what we say seems to them plausible, they suppose we falter on this single point, that we confess a second god, and a mortal one. Of his mortality we have already spoken; let us now teach concerning his unity. In calling him God the Father and also God the Son, we are not naming two distinct beings, nor pulling them apart, for the Father cannot exist apart from the Son, and the Son likewise cannot be severed from the Father — the Father has no name without a Son, and no Son can be begotten apart from a Father. Given, then, that the Father brings forth the Son, and the Son in turn reveals the Father, both share a single mind, a single spirit, a single essence: one might picture the Father as a spring welling upward and the Son as the stream flowing from it, or the Father as the sun and the Son as a beam cast outward from it. Because that beam remains faithful and beloved to the Father above, it is never cut off from him — no more than a stream is cut off from its spring, or a beam from the sun, since the very water of the spring runs in the stream, and the sun's own light travels in the beam; in the same way, a voice cannot be severed from a mouth, nor can strength or a hand be wrenched free of the body. So when the prophets call this same being the hand of God, the strength of God, and the word of God, no division is implied at all, since both tongue, which serves speech, and hand, which holds strength, belong undivided to a single body. It may help to use a nearer example. When a man has a son whom he loves uniquely, who nonetheless remains in the household and under the father's authority, though the father may grant him the name and power of master, still, by civil right, the house is called one, and the master one. In just this way, this world forms a single household of God, and the Father together with the Son, sharing one purpose in governing it, are a single God — for the one is, in a sense, two, and the two amount to one. Nor should this astonish us, since the Son dwells in the Father because the Father cherishes him, and the Father dwells in the Son because the Son obeys the Father's will faithfully, never acting, nor having ever acted, except as the Father wished or commanded. Finally, that the Father is one God no less than the Son, Isaiah shows in that passage we set out above, when he says: they shall worship you and shall pray in you; for God is in you, and there is no other god besides you. And elsewhere he speaks in like fashion: thus says God, the king of Israel, and he who rescues him, the eternal God: I am the very first, and I am also the very last, and there is no god besides me. Having introduced two figures here — the divine king, meaning Christ, and God the Father, who raised him up from among the dead following his suffering, exactly as we showed the prophet Hosea had declared when he wrote, 'and I will pull him out of the grasp of the underworld' — Isaiah nonetheless attaches to both figures together the phrase: apart from me no god exists, rather than saying 'apart from us.' But it was not permitted that so great a bond of kinship be broken by a plural number. He is singular, alone, unconstrained, God most high, having no beginning, being himself the source from which all things spring, and within him the Son together with everything else is held. Since the intention and will of each reside in the other — or rather form a single will shared by both — each is fittingly termed one God, for everything present in the Father passes across into the Son, and everything found in the Son traces back down from the Father. That highest and singular God cannot, then, be worshiped except through the Son. Anyone who imagines he honors only the Father, while failing to honor the Son, in reality fails to honor the Father too. But anyone who accepts the Son and takes up his name genuinely honors the Father at the same time, since the Son serves as envoy, messenger, and priest to the Father most high. Through him lies entry to the grandest temple; he marks the road to light; he leads onward to salvation; he opens the gate to life.
But since many heresies have arisen, and the people of God has been torn apart by the promptings of demons, we must mark out the truth briefly and set it in its own proper dwelling, so that anyone wanting to draw life's water would not be directed toward cracked cisterns lacking any source, but would instead recognize God's richest fountain, whose flow lets him possess unending light. Before all else we ought to know that both he himself and his envoys foretold that very many sects would arise which would tear apart the harmony of the sacred body, and cautioned us to stay watchful at every moment, so that we would not stumble into the traps and tricks set by that enemy of ours whom God intended us to struggle against; and that he then gave certain commands which we must keep forever. Most people, forgetful of these, have abandoned the heavenly road and cut for themselves byways through winding paths and precipices, by which they might lead an unwary and simple portion of the people into darkness and death. Let me set out how this came to pass. There were some among us, of faith less firmly grounded, or less instructed, or less wary, who caused a split in unity and tore the church apart. Those whose faith was slippery, while pretending to know and worship God, sought after the highest priesthood, being eager rather for the increase of wealth and honor. Beaten by their betters, they preferred to withdraw along with their partisans rather than endure as their leaders those men whom they themselves had before desired to be set over. Others, lacking sufficient grounding in the heavenly scriptures, found themselves unable to answer truth's critics, who argued it was either impossible or improper for God to confine himself within a woman's womb, and that so great a heavenly majesty could not have been brought down to such weakness as to be an object of contempt, derision, and mockery to men, and finally to endure torments and be fixed to an accursed gibbet — since they could defend and refute none of this, neither by native wit nor by learning (for they did not fully perceive its force and reason), they were led astray from the straight road and corrupted the heavenly writings, so as to fashion a fresh doctrine of their own, one without root or stability. Still others, led astray by the ravings of false prophets — men whom the genuine prophets, and he himself, had already predicted would arise — abandoned God's teaching and forsook the authentic tradition. Yet every one of them, caught in demonic snares they should have anticipated and defended themselves against, forfeited the divine name and true worship through their own folly. Indeed, once called Phrygians, Novatianists, Valentinians, Marcionites, Anthropians, or some other label entirely, such people stop being Christian at all, for in losing Christ's name they take up titles that are purely human and alien. Only the catholic church, then, holds onto genuine worship. Here is truth's wellspring, here faith's home, here God's own temple: whoever does not enter it, or whoever departs from it, is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation. No one ought to flatter himself in stubborn contention. For what is at stake is life and salvation, which, unless it is guarded carefully and with diligence, will be lost and extinguished. Yet since each and every gathering of heretics supposes itself to be the true Christians and its own assembly the catholic church, one must know that the true church is that in which confession and repentance are found, curing through a healing remedy the faults and injuries brought on by the frailty inherent in the flesh. These few points I have set down for the moment, by way of warning, lest anyone, wishing to flee one error, be caught up in a greater one, through ignorance of the inner sanctuary of truth; afterward, in a separate and dedicated work, we shall fight more fully and more amply against all the sects of falsehood. It follows that, since we have said enough concerning true religion and wisdom, in the next book we shall discuss justice.
I have no doubt that if this work of ours, in which that singular founder of all things and ruler of this vast universe is asserted, should fall into the hands of any of those absurdly religious people—the sort who are impatient with excessive superstition—he will attack it even with abuse, and scarcely past the opening lines will perhaps condemn it, cast it aside, curse it, and think himself defiled and bound by an inexpiable crime if he should either read or hear these things patiently. From such a man, nevertheless, if it can be done, we ask by the law of common decency that he not condemn before he has learned the whole of it. For if the power of defending themselves is granted even to the sacrilegious, to traitors, and to poisoners, and no one may be condemned beforehand on an unheard case, we do not think it unjust to ask that whoever happens upon these pages, if he reads, read them through; if he listens, put off his verdict to the very end. But I know the stubbornness of men: we will never obtain it. For they are afraid that, once refuted by us, they will someday be forced to surrender, with the truth itself crying out against them. So they shout us down and interrupt so as not to listen, and they shut their eyes so as not to see the light we offer: by which they plainly betray the faithlessness of their own ruined reasoning, since they dare neither to examine it nor to meet it, because they know they would easily be beaten. And so, debate having been abolished, wisdom is driven from the field, and the matter is settled by force, as Ennius says. And because they are eager to condemn as guilty those whom they certainly know to be innocent, they refuse to let the question of innocence even be established—as though it were a greater injustice to condemn innocence once proven than innocence unheard. As I noted, listening might cost them the power to condemn—and fearing exactly that, they subject to torture, execution, and exile all who worship the highest God, righteous men in other words. Nor can they themselves give reasons for the hatred with which they hate so fiercely: it is because they themselves are in error that they rage against those who follow the true way, and though they could correct themselves, they instead pile their errors higher still with cruel deeds, stain themselves with the blood of the innocent, and tear souls dedicated to God out of bodies they have disemboweled. Such are the people we now try to confront and reason with, seeking to draw them out of their misguided conviction toward truth—men who would gulp down blood more readily than they would listen to a just man's words. What then? Shall we waste our labor? Not at all. For even if we cannot win these men back from the death toward which they rush so headlong, even if we cannot recall them from that wayward road to life and light, since they themselves fight against their own salvation, we will nonetheless strengthen our own people, whose conviction is not yet stable or fixed on solid roots. Many indeed waver, and above all those who have dabbled in letters, since it is exactly here that danger lies with philosophers, orators, and poets alike: their sweet-sounding speech and verses flowing with pleasant rhythm can easily snare minds that are off their guard. For this reason I have wished to join wisdom with religion, so that empty learning might do no harm to those devoted to it, so that knowledge of letters would not only fail to injure religion and righteousness but would even greatly benefit it, if the one who has learned such things becomes better equipped in virtue and wiser in truth. Besides, even if it profits no one else, it will certainly profit us: conscience will delight in itself, and the mind will rejoice to move in the light of truth, which is a food for the soul suffused with an unbelievable sweetness. But we must not despair; perhaps we are not singing to the deaf. For matters are not in so bad a state that there are no sound minds left, to whom truth is pleasing and who, once shown the right path, both see it and follow it. Let the cup only be smeared round with the heavenly honey of wisdom, so that the bitter remedy may be drunk by the unwary without offense, while the alluring sweetness at first hides beneath the guise of pleasantness the harshness of its rough taste. For this above all is the reason why sacred scripture lacks credit among the wise and learned and the leading men of this age: that the prophets spoke in a common and simple style, as though to the common people. And so they are despised by those who wish to hear or read nothing but what is polished and eloquent, and whose minds can be gripped by nothing except what soothes the ear with a more flattering sound; while whatever seems plain is judged old-womanish, foolish, and vulgar. So thoroughly do they think nothing true except what is pleasant to hear, nothing credible except what can stir delight, that no one weighs a matter by its truth, but by its ornament. They do not believe the divine writings, then, because these lack polish—but neither do they believe those who interpret them, because these too are either wholly untrained or at least too little learned. That they should also be truly eloquent is rare indeed, and the reason is not hard to see. Eloquence is in service to the age; it longs to show itself off to the crowd and to please amid base pursuits, since it more often tries to overpower the truth in order to display its own force: it seeks riches, craves honors, and finally demands the very summit of rank. Therefore it despises these things as beneath it, and flees sacred mysteries as though they were opposed to it, since it delights in the public square and craves crowds and celebrity: hence it happens that wisdom and truth stand in need of worthy heralds. And if any of the learned have by chance turned to her defense, they have not proved equal to it. Among those known to me, Minucius Felix held no mean place among pleaders of causes. His book, entitled Octavius, shows how capable a champion of truth he might have been, had he given himself wholly to that pursuit. Septimius Tertullian, too, was skilled in every kind of literature, but in expression he was not easy enough, was too little polished, and was often obscure. So even he did not find sufficient renown. One man alone, then, stood out preeminent and famous: Cyprian—since he had won great glory for himself by his profession of the orator's art, and had written a great deal admirable in its kind. His gift was fluent, abundant, sweet, and—the finest quality a style can have—transparent, leaving one unable to say whether his ornament in phrasing, his felicity in explaining, or his power to persuade stood highest. All the same, anyone unacquainted with the sacred mystery finds no delight in him beyond his bare words, for what he uttered is mystical, framed for the ears of believers alone: and so, among the learned of this age, whenever his writings happen to come to their notice, he is routinely mocked. I myself heard a certain quite eloquent man who, changing one letter of his name, called him 'Coprianus'—as if his elegant and gifted mind, suited to better things, had been wasted on old wives' tales. But if this happened to a man whose eloquence is not unpleasant, what then are we to think happens to those whose style is dry and graceless—men who could bring neither force of persuasion nor subtlety of argument nor any real sharpness to refute their opponents?
Since, then, we have lacked among ourselves capable and learned teachers who might vigorously and sharply refute the errors of the public, and defend the whole cause of truth with eloquence and fullness, this very scarcity emboldened certain men to write against a truth they did not know. I pass over those who assailed it in earlier times to no effect. When I myself, summoned to Bithynia, was teaching the art of rhetoric, and it happened that at that same time the temple of God was being torn down, two men arose there who, I do not know whether more arrogantly or more indecently, trampled upon truth as it lay prostrate and cast down. Of these, the one professed himself a high priest of philosophy, but was so corrupt that this teacher of self-restraint burned no less with greed than with lust, and lived with such lavish extravagance that this same champion of virtue in the lecture hall, this praiser of frugal poverty, dined worse at the palace than in his own house. Yet he covered over his vices with long hair and a philosopher's cloak, and—the greatest cover of all—with wealth: and to increase this wealth he insinuated himself by wondrous scheming into friendships with judges, and at once bound them to himself by the authority of his false reputation, not only so as to sell their verdicts, but also so that this influence would let him block his own neighbors, whose homes and lands he had seized and driven them from, in any attempt to reclaim their property. This man, who undermined his own arguments by his character, or rather condemned his own character by his arguments, being himself a harsh censor and the sharpest accuser against himself, just when the righteous people were suffering brutal persecution, spewed out a trio of books directed at the Christian name and faith, declaring above everything that a philosopher's task is to rescue men from their errors and steer them onto the correct path, meaning the cult of the gods whose divine power and majesty govern the universe, and to keep the untrained from being duped by the deceits of certain men, so their innocence not become prey and fodder for the cunning: and so he claimed to have taken up this task worthy of philosophy, to hold out the light of wisdom to those who could not see, not only so that, having taken up the worship of the gods, they might be healed, but also so that, laying aside their stubborn obstinacy, they might avoid the torments of the body and not choose to suffer in vain the savage mangling of their limbs. And that it might be plain for whose sake he had labored over that work, he poured himself out in praise of the rulers, whose piety and foresight, as he himself put it, had shone forth in other matters but especially in defending the worship of the gods: that at last provision had been made for human affairs, so that, impious and old-womanish superstition having been suppressed, all men might devote themselves to lawful rites and find the gods favorable to them. But when he wished to undermine the reasoning of the religion he was arguing against, he showed himself foolish, empty, and ridiculous, because this weighty counselor of another's advantage did not know either what he was attacking or even what he was saying. For if any of our people were present, though for the sake of the times they held their peace, they nevertheless laughed at him inwardly, seeing a man who professed he would enlighten others while he himself was blind, who would lead others back from error while he himself did not know where to set his own feet, who claimed he would teach others a truth he himself had never glimpsed even a single spark of—this self-styled professor of wisdom straining instead to demolish wisdom itself. All, however, found fault with him on this count: that he had undertaken this work precisely at the time when a hateful cruelty was raging. O flattering philosopher, servant of the times! But he, for all his emptiness, was held in contempt, since he neither won the favor he hoped for nor kept the glory he sought, which turned instead into blame and reproach. Another man wrote on the same subject more bitingly—one who was at that time among the judges, and who was in fact the chief instigator of the persecution: not content with that crime, he pursued in writing as well those he had already afflicted. For he composed two little books, not against the Christians—lest he seem to attack them out of hatred—but addressed to the Christians, so that he might seem to be offering them humane and kindly counsel: in these he tried to prove the falsity of sacred scripture as though it were entirely self-contradictory. He set out certain passages that seemed to him to conflict with one another, listing so many, and so deeply drawn from within the text, that one might almost think he had once belonged to the same school. But if that was so, what Demosthenes could ever defend him from the charge of impiety, since he became a traitor to the religion he had been enrolled in, to the faith whose name he had put on, and to the sacrament he had received? Unless perhaps the divine writings fell into his hands by mere chance. What rashness it was, then, for him to presume to dissect a text no one had ever explained to him! Good thing, at least, that he grasped nothing of it, or understood none of it at all—for the divine writings hold no more real contradiction than he himself held faith and truth. He tore especially at Paul and Peter and the rest of the disciples as sowers of deceit, though he himself testified that these same men were untrained and unlearned—for some of them, he says, made their living by the trade of fishing—as if he were vexed that this religion had not been devised by some Aristophanes or Aristarchus.
They were free, then, from any will or cunning to invent, since they were untrained men. And who, being unlearned, could invent things that fit together and cohere, when the most learned of philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno—contradicted and opposed themselves? For this is the nature of lies, that they cannot hold together; but their tradition, because it is true, fits together on every side and agrees wholly with itself, and for that reason it persuades, because it is propped up by a consistent reasoning. It was not, then, for gain or advantage that they invented this religion, since indeed both by precept and in practice they followed a way of life that lacks pleasures and scorns everything counted among goods, and men who not only underwent death for their faith but also knew and foretold that they themselves would die and that all who afterward followed their teaching would suffer bitter and unspeakable things. He asserted, moreover, that Christ himself, driven off by the Jews, gathered a band of nine hundred men and turned to banditry. Who would dare to resist so great an authority? Let us by all means believe it—perhaps some Apollo told him this in a dream! So many robbers have always perished, and perish daily, and you yourself have condemned many: of those men, once they had died on a cross, which was ever hailed—I won't even claim as a god, but merely as a man? Yet perhaps your belief springs from the fact that your people made Mars, a murderer, into a god—a status he never would have received had the Areopagites nailed him to a cross instead. This same man, while tearing down Christ's miracles yet not denying them, wished to show that Apollonius had done equal or even greater ones. It is a wonder he left out Apuleius, of whom many marvels are usually recounted too. Why, then, O crazed head, does no one worship Apollonius as a god—unless it is you alone, fit companion for such a god, alongside whom the true God will condemn you to everlasting punishment? If Christ was a magician because he worked wonders, then Apollonius was certainly the more skilled one, since, as you describe it, when Domitian wished to punish him, he simply vanished from the courtroom—unlike the one who was arrested and nailed to a cross. But perhaps by this very point he meant to charge Christ with arrogance, in that he made himself God, so that Apollonius might seem the more modest, since, though he did greater things, as this man thinks, he never claimed such a thing for himself. I pass over here comparing their actual deeds, since I have spoken in the second book and the one before this about the fraud and trickery of the magic art. I maintain no one exists who fails to want, more than anything, the very thing that even the mightiest kings long to have happen once they are dead. For why do men procure for themselves magnificent tombs, statues, images? Why do they strive, by some famous deed or even by dying for their fellow citizens, to win the good opinion of mankind? Why, finally, did you yourself wish to set up this detestable monument of your own genius, built as it were of the mire of your own folly, unless you hope for immortality from the memory of your name? So it is absurd to suppose Apollonius spurned what he would surely have craved had the chance arisen, since no one turns down immortality—all the more so given your claim that certain people revere him as divine, and that his statue, dedicated by the Ephesians under the title Hercules Averter-of-Evil, still receives honor today. He could not, then, be believed a god after death, because it was known that he had been both a man and a magician, and so he laid claim to divinity under the borrowed title of another's name, since he could not, and dared not, claim it under his own. Our Lord, however, could be believed a god, because he was no magician—and he was believed, because he truly was one. My point here is not that Apollonius fails to be regarded as divine merely for lack of wanting it, but rather to demonstrate our greater wisdom: we did not, as you did, instantly credit wondrous acts with proving divinity, believing a mere man to be a god on the basis of minor portents. Small wonder, then, that you—standing so distant from God's wisdom—grasp nothing whatsoever of what you have read, given that even the Jews, who had read the prophets continually since ancient times and to whom God's mystery had been committed, still failed to comprehend their own reading. Learn, then, if you have any sense at all, that it was not because he worked wonders that we came to believe him God, but because we saw that everything which had been foretold to us by the prophecy of the prophets was in fact fulfilled in him. Had he worked wonders alone, we would have thought him a magician, as you now think and as the Jews then thought, had not all the prophets, with one spirit, foretold that he would do these very things. We hold him to be God not chiefly because of his wonders and deeds but because of that very cross which you dogs lick at—since this too had been foretold in that same era. Credit for his divinity rests not on what he said of himself (for who can be trusted testifying about himself?), but on the prophets' testimony, voiced long in advance, singing of everything he would do and endure; a thing that could never happen, and can never happen, for Apollonius, or Apuleius, or any magician whatsoever. Having poured out such ravings of his own ignorance, and having strained with all his might to root out the truth utterly, he dared to entitle his wicked books, enemies of God, 'Lovers of Truth.' O blind heart, O mind darkened, as they say, with Cimmerian shadows! This man was perhaps a disciple of Anaxagoras, to whom snow was black. Yet it amounts to an identical blindness, whether one labels falsehood as truth or truth as falsehood. Clearly this cunning man wished to hide a wolf under a sheep's skin, so that under a deceptive title he might ensnare his reader. But grant that you did this out of ignorance, not malice: what truth, after all, have you brought us, seeing that, as a would-be champion of the gods, you have in the end betrayed the very gods themselves? After heaping praise on the highest God—acknowledged by you as king, as greatest, as maker of everything, as source of all good things, as father of all, as creator and sustainer of living beings—you went on to strip your own Jupiter of his throne, casting him down from supreme power to the status of a common servant. Your closing words thus stand as proof of your own foolishness, hollowness, and confusion: you claim there are gods, all while subjecting them as slaves to the very God whose worship you seek to destroy.
As for the men I mentioned earlier, once they had unfolded, right before me and to my sorrow, the impious pages they had drafted, something roused me: their haughty disrespect for religion, my own sense of what the truth actually was, and, I believe, God himself. So I undertook this task — to use every ounce of my mind's strength to answer those who accuse justice, and not merely to write against this handful, easily crushed in a few words, but to bring down, in one single onslaught, everyone anywhere engaged in or having finished that same undertaking. Plenty of others, no doubt — scattered across many places, writing not only in Greek but in Latin too — have erected their own monuments to injustice. Because answering each one individually was impossible, I decided to handle the whole matter so as to demolish the earlier authors along with everything they wrote, while also stripping later writers of any opening to write or reply. Let them simply listen: I am confident I can bring about that whoever learns these things will either accept what he once condemned or, failing that, at least stop mocking it eventually. Now Tertullian did plead this very case exhaustively in his book titled the Apology; and yet, answering one's accusers — a task confined to defense or denial — differs from the work of instruction, which is what I am doing here, a task that must necessarily hold the whole substance of doctrine within it. So I did not shy from this labor, meaning to complete what Cyprian left unfinished in the treatise where, as he himself puts it, he tries to answer Demetrianus's snarling and raging against the truth. He failed to handle that material as he should have: the man needed refutation not through scriptural testimony, which he regarded as empty invention and fabrication anyway, but through argument and rational proof. Given that Cyprian was dealing with someone ignorant of the truth, he should have set the divine readings aside briefly, to have shaped him from the beginning as one still raw, and shown him gradually the first beginnings of light, lest, the whole light being thrust upon him at once, he be blinded. For just as an infant cannot take the strength of solid, hardy food because of the tenderness of his stomach, but is nourished on the liquid softness of milk until, his strength grown firm, he can feed on sturdier fare, so too this man, since he could not yet grasp the divine, ought first to have been offered human testimonies — that is, those of philosophers and historians — so that he might be refuted above all by his own authorities. Because Cyprian did not do this, carried away by his outstanding learning in the divine scriptures, so that he was content with those alone on which faith rests, I came forward, with God's inspiration, to do this myself, and at the same time to prepare a path for others to follow. And if, urged on by us, learned and eloquent men should begin to turn themselves this way and choose rather to display their talents and their power of speech on this field of truth, no one could doubt that false religions would soon vanish and all philosophy would fall, once everyone were persuaded that this alone is religion, and this alone, likewise, is true wisdom. But I have wandered farther than I intended.
Now the discussion proposed concerning justice must be delivered. Justice is either itself the highest virtue, or is itself the source of virtue; and not only philosophers have sought her, but poets too, who came much earlier and, before the name of philosophy was even born, were regarded as wise men. These plainly understood that she was absent from human affairs, and they imagined that, offended by the vices of men, she had left the earth and migrated to heaven. And wanting to depict righteous living — since their habit is to deliver teachings wrapped in riddles — they reach back to Saturn's era, the one they name golden, drawing examples of justice from it and describing the state human life held while she still lingered on earth. And this indeed should be taken not as poetic fiction, but as truth. For while Saturn reigned, the worship of the gods had not yet been established, nor had that generation yet been consecrated to a belief in that divinity; God, in fact, was worshipped. And therefore there were neither quarrels nor enmities nor wars; wild madness had not yet bared the sword, as Germanicus Caesar says in his poem on Aratus; discord was unknown even between kin, let alone between strangers; no blade of any kind had yet been drawn. For who, with justice present and thriving, would think either of guarding himself, since no one plotted against him, or of another's ruin, since no one coveted anything? Men preferred to live content with meager fare, as Cicero relates in his own work — which is a mark proper to our own religion. Marking off or splitting a field with a boundary was not even permitted: people looked for their sustenance jointly, because God had granted the whole earth as shared property, meant for a shared existence — not so that wild, frenzied greed could seize everything for itself, leaving no one without what nature produced for everyone. This saying of the poets ought to be taken not as meaning that nothing at all was then private, but as figured in the poetic manner, so that we understand men were so generous that they did not shut away the crops that grew for them, nor brood alone over hidden stores, but admitted the poor to share in the fruit of their own labor. Rivers of milk, and rivers of nectar, already flowed. Nor is this strange, since the storehouses of the just stood open generously to all, and no greed, intercepting the gifts of heaven, made hunger and thirst common to the crowd, but all were equally abundant, since those who had gave freely and generously to those who had not. But once Saturn's son drove him out and he fled Jove's forces to Latium, stripped of his throne and exiled — because by that point people had, whether cowed by the new ruler or corrupted on their own initiative, given up worshipping God and taken instead to treating the king as God, since he himself, nearly a father-killer, set an example for others in trampling piety — justice, that most upright of maidens, quickly deserted the earth, but not, as Cicero says, to settle in Jove's kingdom and take a place in heaven. For how could she reside or dwell in the kingdom of one who drove his own father from his throne, hunted him down in war, and hurled him as an exile across the whole world? He it was who added deadly venom to the black serpents and bade the wolves prey — that is, he sowed hatred, envy, and deceit in men, so that they became as venomous as serpents, as rapacious as wolves. And indeed this is truly done by those who persecute the just and the faithful of God, and who give judges the power to rage against the innocent. Perhaps Jupiter did something of this sort to storm and overthrow justice, and for that reason he is said to have made serpents savage and to have sharpened the wolves. Then came the madness of war and the love of possession. Nor was this undeserved: with the worship of God gone, people forfeited their grasp of good and evil along with it. The shared life mankind once had fractured, and the bond holding human society together came apart. Then they began to raise their hands against one another, to lay ambushes, and to win glory for themselves from human blood.
The source of all these evils was greed, which of course burst forth from contempt of the true majesty. For they not only failed to share with others what flowed abundantly to them, but even seized what belonged to others, dragging everything into private gain; and things that individuals had once labored to produce for the use of all were now gathered into the households of the few. For in order to subject the rest to servitude, they began first to withdraw and gather up the necessities of life and to keep them shut up securely, so as to make the gifts of heaven their own — not out of any humanity, of which there was none in them, but so as to scrape together every instrument of greed and avarice. They even enacted for themselves, under the name of justice, laws most iniquitous and unjust, by which they might protect their plunder and greed against the force of the multitude. Thus their authority was measured only by how far they surpassed others in strength, in wealth, or in wickedness. And because not a shred of justice remained in them — whose functions are kindness, fairness, and compassion — they came to revel in a swollen, arrogant inequality, setting themselves above everyone else through armed escorts, weapons, and conspicuous clothing. From this they devised for themselves honors and purple robes and the fasces, so that, propped up by the terror of axes and swords, they might command, as if by the right of masters, men struck down and trembling before them. It was into this condition that that king set human life, who, having defeated and put his father to flight, seized not a kingdom but an impious tyranny by force and armed men, and abolished that golden and just age, and drove men into wickedness and impiety precisely by diverting their worship away from God onto himself — something the sheer terror of his overbearing power had extorted from them. For who would not fear a man girded with arms, surrounded by the unaccustomed flash of iron and swords? Or whom would he spare who belonged to another, when he had not spared even his own father? Whom indeed should he fear, who had defeated in war and destroyed by slaughter the Titans, a race strong and outstanding in might? What wonder, then, if the whole multitude, oppressed by unaccustomed fear, gave way to the flattery of one man? Him they revered, to him they paid the highest honor. And since the imitation of a king's habits and vices is judged a form of homage, all cast off piety, lest by living devoutly they should seem to reproach the king for his crime. Thus, corrupted by constant imitation, they abandoned the divine law, and little by little the habit of living wickedly became custom. Not a trace survived of that earlier era's devout, excellent state; justice, banished, hauled truth off with her and left men error, ignorance, and blindness in its place. The poets therefore spoke carelessly when they sang of her fleeing to Jove's realm. If justice truly stood on earth during the age they call golden, then Jove — who overturned that golden age — must indeed have been the one who drove her out. But this shift of ages and this banishing of justice amount, as I noted, to nothing more than turning away from divine religion, the one thing that makes a man cherish his fellow man and recognize the fraternal bond linking them, since God is father to all alike, so that he may share the common gifts of God, the common father, with those who do not have them, harm no one, oppress no one, shut the door neither to a guest nor his ear to one who begs, but be generous, kind, and open-handed — which Tully judged to be the praises proper to kings. That, in truth, is what justice means, and that is the golden age — corrupted first under Jove's reign, then wiped out entirely, both by Jove himself and by his whole line, once they were deified and the cults of many gods took hold.
But God, like a most indulgent father, as the last age drew near, sent a messenger to bring back that ancient age and the justice that had fled, lest the human race be tossed about forever by the worst errors. So that golden era's likeness came back, with justice truly given back to the earth, though granted only to a small number — for justice is simply devoted, reverent worship of the single God, nothing more. But someone may perhaps be troubled as to why, if this is justice, it was not given to the whole human race, nor did the whole multitude agree to it. This is a matter for a longer discussion — why God, in giving justice to the earth, kept back a diversity of response — which I have explained elsewhere, and will explain again wherever it fittingly comes up. For now it is enough to note this briefly: that virtue either cannot be perceived unless it has opposing vices, or is not perfect unless it is exercised against adversities. For God willed there to be this distance between good and evil, so that we might know the quality of the good from the evil, and likewise of the evil from the good; neither can be understood once the other is removed. God, therefore, did not shut out evil, so that the very rationale of virtue might stand. For how could patience keep its force and its name, if there were nothing that compelled us to suffer? How could faith devoted to its God earn praise, unless there were someone who wished to turn it away from God? For this reason he allowed the unjust to be more powerful, so that they might have the means to compel toward evil; for this reason he allowed them to be more numerous, so that virtue might be precious, being rare. This very point Quintilian showed admirably and briefly in the speech on the Covered Head: for, he says, what virtue would innocence be, if its rarity had not given it its praise? But since nature is so ordered that hatred, greed, and anger drive blind whatever they fix upon, a fault seems to be beyond the reach of man. Otherwise, if nature had given equal feelings to all, piety would be nothing at all. How true this is, the very necessity of reason teaches. If virtue's role is to battle courageously against evils and vices, then plainly there can be no virtue at all in a world stripped of evil and vice. So that virtue might be made whole and complete, God preserved the very opposite force it needed as an adversary to fight: shaken by trials that test its footing, it takes hold, and the more often it is struck, the more firmly it grows strong. This, no doubt, is the reason why, although justice has been sent to men, that age is still not called golden — because it did not remove evil, so as to keep that diversity which alone contains the mystery of the divine religion.
Those, then, who think no one just have justice before their very eyes, but refuse to see her. For why is it that they describe her, whether in poems or in every kind of speech, lamenting her absence, when it would be the easiest thing in the world to be good, if only they wished it? Why do you paint for us an empty justice and wish her to fall from heaven as though shaped in some statue? Behold, she is in your sight: take her up, if you can, and set her in the dwelling of your own breast, and do not think it a difficult thing or foreign to the times. Be just and good yourselves, and the justice you are searching for will come after you unbidden. Cast every wicked thought out of your hearts, and at once that golden age will return to you — something achievable only once you take up worship of the one true God. Yet you, keeping the gods' cults intact, still long for justice on earth — an outcome that simply cannot occur. Nor indeed could it happen even then, in the time you suppose, since — those gods you impiously worship not yet being born — it must have been the worship of the one God alone that prevailed across the earth: the God, that is, who curses wickedness and demands goodness, whose shrine is not made of stone or clay but is man himself, carrying as he does the very likeness of God — a shrine decorated not with gold and jewels that decay, but with the everlasting gifts the virtues bring. Learn, then, if there is anything left of your reason, that men are wicked and unjust for this reason, that gods are worshipped; and that for this reason all evils grow daily heavier upon human affairs — because people have forsaken the one who made and rules this world, because irreverent cults contrary to right conduct have been embraced, and finally because you do not even allow God to be worshipped, even by the few. But if the one God alone were worshipped, there would be no quarrels and wars, since men would know themselves to be sons of the one God, and therefore bound together by the sacred and inviolable tie of a divine kinship; there would be no plots laid, since men would know what punishments God prepares for those who kill souls — he who sees through hidden crimes and even thoughts themselves; there would be no frauds and robberies, if men had learned, at God's bidding, to be content with their own and with little, preferring solid and eternal things to the fragile and the fleeting; adultery, debauchery, and the selling of women's bodies would vanish, if everyone understood that God condemns any desire pursued beyond the aim of producing children; nor would a woman ever be forced by need to defile her own modesty chasing the most disgraceful means of living, since men would restrain their lust, and the devout and religious generosity of those who have would come to the aid of those who have not. There would not, then, as I have said, be all these evils on earth, if all swore themselves to the law of God, if all did what our one people alone does. Human affairs would be so blessed, so golden in state, were gentleness, devotion, peace, innocence, fairness, restraint, and faith to reside across the entire globe! Governing men would then require none of these countless, varied laws, since a single divine law would be enough to secure flawless innocence, nor would there be need of prisons or the swords of magistrates or the terror of punishments, since the wholesome force of the heavenly precepts, poured into human hearts, would of itself train men to the works of justice. As things stand now, though, men do evil simply because they do not grasp what is right and good. This indeed Cicero saw: for, disputing on the laws, he says that just as the world, in one and the same nature, holds together and is sustained by all its parts agreeing with one another, so all men, though joined together by nature, are set at odds by depravity, and fail to grasp that they share one blood and answer to the very same guardianship — a truth that, if firmly grasped, would let men live as the gods do. It is, therefore, this unjust and irreverent worship of the gods that has introduced every evil by which humanity destroys itself, one against another. For those who denied God, the common father of all, like faithless and rebellious children, could not possibly hold on to piety.
And yet at times they do sense that they are bad, and they praise the condition of ages past, and from their own habits and deserts they conjecture that justice is absent; and when it presents itself before their eyes, so far from welcoming and acknowledging it, they hate it violently, persecute it, and strive to wipe it out. Let us suppose for the moment that this is not the justice we follow: how then, if that justice should come which they think is the true one, would they receive it? These are men who tear apart and kill people whom they themselves admit to be imitators of the just, because such people do good and righteous things — whereas if they only killed the wicked, they would still be men to whom justice would refuse to come, since the sole reason justice ever left the earth was the shedding of human blood. How much worse, then, when they murder the pious and treat the very followers of justice as enemies — no, as worse than enemies? For even when soldiers assail the lives, wealth, and children of enemies with sword and fire, still mercy is shown to the conquered, and there is room for clemency amid arms; or if cruelty must be indulged to the full, nothing more is done to them than killing or being led into slavery. But what is done against men who do not even know how to do wrong is beyond telling, and none are held more dangerous than those who, of all people, are innocent. So it is that men of utter shamelessness venture even to invoke justice by name — creatures whose savagery outstrips that of wild beasts, who prey upon God's most gentle flock as wolves do, plundering through a black fog, blind and rabid with the belly's foul compulsion. But these are made savage not by hunger of the belly but by rabid hearts, and they go about not in black mist but in open plunder, and no conscience of their crimes ever calls them back, to keep them from profaning with that mouth — dripping with the blood of the innocent like the gaping jaws of beasts — the holy and pious name of justice. What, above all, shall we say is the cause of so great and so stubborn a hatred? Is it that truth breeds hatred, as the poet says, as though moved by some divine breath? Or that they blush to be wicked in the presence of the just and the good? Or rather both together? For truth is always hateful for this reason: the sinner wants free room to sin, and thinks he cannot otherwise enjoy the pleasure of wrongdoing securely unless there is no one to whom his misdeeds are displeasing. So, treating them as living proof of their own crimes and depravity, they labor to root them out and sweep them away entirely, finding their very presence burdensome — as though their own conduct stood convicted by the comparison. For why should there be some who are inconveniently good, whose right living reproaches the corrupted morals of the public? Why are not all equally wicked, rapacious, shameless, adulterous, perjured, greedy, deceitful? Rather, let those be removed in whose presence it shames them to live badly — men who, though silent and using no words, nonetheless strike and lash the brow of sinners simply by the unlike manner of their life. For whoever dissents seems to rebuke. Nor is it any great wonder that this happens against men, when for the very same reason a people once set in hope and not ignorant of God rose up even against God himself; and the same necessity that assailed the very author of justice now pursues the just. So they harass them and torment them with elaborate kinds of punishment, and it is not enough for them to kill those they hate unless cruelty also makes sport of their bodies. Should some, however, desert the heavenly oath — whether dread of suffering or death drives them to it, or plain treachery of their own — and agree to the accursed rites, such men are praised and heaped with honors, so that others may be lured by their example. Those, however, who have prized their faith and refused to disown their worship of God draw the entire brunt of the butchery's fury, as though thirsting for blood; and these they brand as reckless, given how little regard they show for their own flesh — as if any recklessness could exceed torturing and rending limb from limb a man whose innocence is plain. So utterly is all shame gone from men in whom all humanity is absent, that they turn back against just men the very reproaches that fit themselves. For they call them impious — they, forsooth, the pious ones, who shrink from human blood! — when, if they would only weigh their own conduct against that of those they condemn as impious, they would understand at once how false they are, and how much better suited to themselves are all the charges they level against the good, whether in word or deed. For it is never from our number, but always from theirs, that men arise who lie in wait armed on the roads, who plunder the seas, or, where open banditry is not allowed, secretly mix poisons; who murder their wives to gain their dowries, or their husbands so as to marry adulterers; who strangle the children born to them, or, if they are too tender-hearted for that, expose them; who hold back their incestuous cravings from neither daughter nor sister nor mother nor even a priestess; who plot treason against their own countrymen and native land; who do not even dread the sack reserved for parricides; who, finally, commit sacrilege and strip the very temples of the gods they worship — and, to mention lighter and more ordinary things, who angle for inheritances, forge wills, and rob or exclude the rightful heirs; who prostitute their own bodies to lust; who, forgetful of what sex they were born, vie with women in submission; who defile and profane even the holiest part of their own body against all that is right; who cut away their own virility with the knife and, more criminal still, do so in order to become priests of religion; who spare not even their own lives, but sell their souls to be publicly extinguished; who, sitting as judges, either ruin the innocent for a bribe or let the guilty go unpunished; who reach with their poisons even at the sky itself, as though the earth were too small to hold their malice: such wrongs, mark you, and far worse besides, are committed without fail by the selfsame people who worship the gods. Amid all this, what room is there for justice? And I have gathered only a few instances out of many, not to accuse, but to show. Whoever wishes to know it all, let him take up the books of Seneca, who was both the truest describer and the sharpest scourge of public morals and vices. Lucilius too painted this murky life of ours, compactly and briefly, in these verses: 'But now, from dawn to dusk, holiday and workday alike, the whole people and the senators fling themselves about the forum day after day, never once stepping back, every one of them devoted to a single shared pursuit and craft: to deceive warily, to contend by guile; to rival one another in flattery, to feign being a good man; to set traps, as if every man were an enemy to every other.' But of these things, what can be charged against our own people, whose whole religion is to live without crime and without stain? Since, then, they see themselves and their own doing the things we have named, while our people do nothing but what is fair and good, had they any sense at all, they might grasp from this single fact that doers of good are the pious ones, while it is they — perpetrators of unspeakable acts — who stand impious. For it cannot be that men who go astray in nothing in all the acts of their life should go astray in the very highest matter — that is, in religion, which is the head of all things: for impiety embraced in that which is highest would follow through into everything else. Equally, it cannot be that men who go astray in every part of their life should not also be deceived in religion, since piety, holding its rule at the summit, would keep its own consistency through all the rest. Thus, on either side, one can know from the character of the things that are done what the summit itself, from which they flow, must be.
It is worth the trouble to learn their piety, so that from those things they do out of clemency and devotion one may understand the character of what they do against the very laws of piety. And lest I seem to attack anyone too harshly, let me take up some poetic persona, one that stands as the very greatest example of piety. In Vergil, that king than whom none was more just in righteousness or greater in war and arms — what proofs of justice has he offered us? He had bound behind their backs the hands of those he meant to send as offerings to the shades, meaning to sprinkle the flames with their slaughtered blood. What could show more mercy than this brand of piety — offering up human lives as sacrifices to the dead, and nourishing the flames with human blood in place of oil? But perhaps this fault was not his own but the poet's, who defiled a man remarkable for piety with a remarkable crime. Where, then, poet, is that piety you praise so often? Behold the pious Aeneas seizing alive these four youths born of Sulmo, and as many more whom Ufens raised, to sacrifice them as offerings to the shades, and to drench the pyre's flames with captive blood. Why, then, did he say, at that very moment when he was sending bound men off to sacrifice, 'indeed I would even have spared the living,' when he was ordering the living, whom he held in his power, to be slaughtered like cattle? But this, as I said, was not his fault — he perhaps had never learned letters — it is yours, poet, who, though learned, still did not know what piety was, and believed that this very deed, done in wickedness and abomination, was an act of piety's duty; evidently he is called pious for this one reason, that he loved his father. And what of it, that good Aeneas cut down a suppliant whose pleas deserved no contempt? For, adjured by that same father and by the hope of his rising son Iulus, he showed no mercy at all, ablaze with fury and rage. Can anyone, then, think this man possessed any virtue in himself, who blazed up in frenzy like stubble, and, forgetting the shade of the father by whom he was implored, could not rein in his anger? In no way, then, is he pious, who slew not only those who did not resist but even those who begged for mercy. Someone will say here: what, then, or where, or of what kind is piety? Surely it is found among those who know nothing of wars, who keep peace with everyone, who remain friends even toward their foes, who cherish every human being as a brother, who know how to master anger and to calm every rage of the soul through tranquil restraint. What blindness, then, what a cloud of darkness and error has covered the hearts of men, who become most impious precisely when they think themselves most pious! For the more devoutly they serve these earthly images, the more wicked they become against the very name of true divinity. And so, in proportion to the merit of their impiety, they are often visited with graver misfortunes; and because they do not know the cause of this, the whole blame is laid on fortune, and here the philosophy of Epicurus finds its opening, holding that the gods have nothing to do with human affairs, are touched by no favor, moved by no anger, since they often see the despisers of the gods prosperous and their worshippers wretched. This they say for this reason: since these men seem religious and naturally good, it is believed they deserve nothing like what they often suffer. Yet they console themselves by blaming fortune, not perceiving that if there were any such thing as fortune, it would never harm its own worshippers. Rightly, then, does punishment follow piety of this sort, and an offended divinity strikes them, for the crime of men wrongly religious, with heavy misfortune: for although they may live by upright morals, in perfect faith and innocence, still, because the gods they serve practice impious, unholy rites that the one true God abhors, they remain cut off from justice and from any right to the title of true piety. Demonstrating that god-worshippers cannot be good and upright is, in fact, not difficult. Take blood: how could men abstain from it, venerating as they do the blood-soaked deities Mars and Bellona? How will they spare their parents, who worship Jupiter, the expeller of his own father, or their own infant children, who worship Saturn? How will they guard chastity, who worship a goddess naked and adulterous, all but prostituted among the gods? How will they refrain from theft and fraud, who know of Mercury's thefts, teaching that to deceive is not fraud but cleverness? How will they restrain their lusts, who venerate Jupiter, Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, and the rest, whose adulteries and assaults upon males and females alike are common knowledge not merely among scholars but are performed and sung on public stages, spreading the knowledge to everyone else besides? Amid all this, can men be just — men who, even if good by nature, are nonetheless trained by their very gods into injustice? For to appease the god you worship, you need the very things you know delight and please him. Thus a god molds his devotees' conduct to match his own divine nature, for imitation is the most devout form of worship there is.
So it goes with those men who conform to the character of their own gods. Because justice is stern and bitter, they exercise against the just, violently, that very impiety which they practice in everything else, and not without cause are they called beasts by the prophets. Excellently, then, does Marcus Tullius say: 'Indeed,' he says, 'granting that everyone would sooner perish than be turned into some beast's shape, even while keeping a human mind, how much more pitiable is it to bear a beast's temper inside a man's form?' And to my mind, the gap in worth between soul and body is exactly the measure of that greater misery. And so they scorn the bodies of beasts, though they themselves are fiercer than beasts, and are quite pleased with themselves for having been born human, of which they retain nothing but the outline and general shape. Name a Caucasus, an India, a Hyrcania that ever bred beasts so grotesque, so bloodthirsty! For the rage of every wild beast rages only until the belly is filled, and once hunger is satisfied it grows quiet at once. That, that alone, is the true beast, at whose single command black blood is poured out everywhere: cruel mourning everywhere, terror everywhere, and death in every likeness. No one can describe as it deserves the monstrousness of so great a beast, which, though it lies in one place, rages with iron teeth across the whole world, and not only scatters the limbs of men but crushes the very bones and reduces them to ashes in its fury, so that no place for burial should remain — as though those who confess God were seeking that men should come to their graves, and not rather that they themselves should come to God! What savagery is this, what madness, what insanity, to deny light to the living and earth to the dead? I say, then, that nothing is more wretched than these men whom necessity has found, or made, into the ministers of another's fury, the henchmen of an impious command. For this was no honor, no advancement in rank, but a condemnation: by man, to the butcher's trade; by God, to everlasting punishment. But what each has done, singly, across the whole world, it is impossible to relate. What number of volumes could contain so endless, so varied kinds of cruelty? For once given power, each man raged according to his own character. Some, out of excessive fear, dared more than they were ordered; others out of their own private hatred of the just; some by a natural savagery of mind; some in order to please, and by this service to pave their way to higher rank; some rushed headlong to kill, as did one man in Phrygia, who burned an entire congregation together with their meeting-house itself. But this man, savage as he was, turns out in a way the more merciful; for the worst sort of all is that in which a false semblance of clemency beguiles — that judge is the graver, the crueler executioner, who resolves to put no one to death outright. And so it cannot be told how many, and how grievous, kinds of torment such judges have devised, in order to reach the end they had set themselves. Yet they act this way not solely to claim credit for sparing every innocent life — I have personally overheard men vaunting that no blood was shed under their watch in this regard — but also from envy, lest they themselves suffer defeat, or their victims earn glory for their own courage. And so, in inventing forms of torment, victory alone occupies their minds — aware, as they are, that what unfolds is a struggle, a fight to be won. I myself watched a governor in Bithynia swell with astonishing delight, behaving as if he had conquered some barbarian tribe, simply because a man who had held out bravely for two years finally appeared to be breaking. So they strive to win, and inflict elaborate agonies on bodies, and avoid nothing so much as letting the tortured die — as though death alone could make men blessed, and not also torments, the more grievous they are, the greater the glory of courage they produce. But these men, in their stubborn folly, order careful attention to be given the tortured, so that their limbs may be renewed for further torments and fresh blood restored for punishment. What could be so devoted, so kind, so humane? They would not have tended with such anxious care those whom they loved. This is the schooling of the gods; to such works do they train their worshippers; such are the rites their sacred things demand. Nay more, these most criminal murderers have even framed impious laws against the pious: for sacrilegious statutes and unjust legal opinions of the jurists are read to this day. Domitius, in the seventh book of his work On the Duty of the Proconsul, collected the wicked rescripts of the emperors, to instruct men what punishments ought to be inflicted on those who confessed themselves worshippers of God.
What should one do with those who call it law when the torture-devices of ancient tyrants rage madly against the innocent? These men teach injustice and cruelty as their trade, and yet still they wish to be regarded as just and prudent — blind, dull men, ignorant of the facts and of the truth. Is righteousness so hateful to you, ruined minds, that you rank it among the worst crimes? Is innocence so despised among you that you judge it worthy not merely of a plain death, but count it the vilest of all offenses to have committed no offense, and to keep one's heart untouched by any contagion of wickedness? And since we are speaking here alongside the worshippers of the gods, let us do you some good through this conversation, for such is our law, our task, our religion. Should we strike you as wise, follow our example; should we strike you as fools, scorn us, laugh at us even, as you please — our foolishness does us good regardless. Why tear us to pieces? Why bring affliction upon us? Your wisdom is not something we envy; we prefer this foolishness, we embrace it, we believe it serves us to love you and to heap upon you, who hate us, everything we have. There is a passage in Cicero, not far from the truth, in the argument that Furius makes against justice. He asks: suppose there are two men, one of them excellent, most fair-minded, of the highest justice and singular good faith, the other marked by notorious wickedness and boldness — and suppose the state is so mistaken as to think the good man wicked, criminal, and vile, while judging the other, who is the worst of men, to be of the highest honesty and trustworthiness; and because of this universal opinion the good man is harassed and seized, his hands are cut off, his eyes are gouged out, he is condemned, bound, burned, driven into exile, reduced to want, and in the end is considered by everyone's judgment — even a fair one — the most wretched of all; while, on the contrary, that wicked man is praised, honored, loved by all, and all honors, all commands, all riches, all resources are heaped upon him from every side, so that he is judged by everyone's estimation the best of men and most deserving of every good fortune — who, then, would be so mad as to hesitate over which of the two he would rather be? Indeed, he framed this example almost as a prophecy of the evils that righteousness would one day bring upon us, and of the shape those evils would take. For all these things our people suffer, through the depravity of those who err. Look at the state — indeed at the entire world — trapped in precisely this delusion: hunting down, torturing, condemning, and killing men who are good and just, treating them as if wickedness and impiety were their crimes. As for his saying that no one is so mad as to hesitate over which he would rather be, he — arguing as one who spoke against justice — meant that the wise man would rather be wicked with a good reputation than good with a bad one. But far be such madness from us, that we should prefer the false to the true. Shall the quality of our goodness depend on the errors of the crowd rather than on our own conscience and God's judgment? Or will any happiness ever entice us to prefer a false goodness joined to every prosperity over a true one joined to every misfortune? Let kings keep their kingdoms to themselves, the rich their riches, as Plautus says, and the prudent their prudence; let them leave us our foolishness, which is shown to be wisdom by this very fact, that they begrudge it to us. For only the greatest fool would envy another fool. Yet these men are shrewd enough to withhold envy from fools; the very diligence and alarm with which they pursue us proves they know we are no fools at all. For why should they rage so cruelly, unless because they fear that as righteousness grows stronger day by day, they will be left alone with their decaying gods? So then, if wisdom belongs to the worshippers of the gods and folly to us, what reason have they to dread that fools could ever lure the wise astray?
Since our number is always increasing from among the worshippers of the gods, and is never diminished even in the very time of persecution — for while men can sin and be defiled by sacrifice, they cannot be turned away from God, since truth prevails by its own strength — who, then, could be so witless, so utterly sightless, as to miss where true wisdom resides? Malice and fury, however, keep them from seeing it, and they judge as fools the very people who, though able to escape punishment, choose torture and death instead — even though this alone should show them that a conviction shared, with a single unanimous will, by so many thousands across the entire world cannot be folly. For if it is women who fall through the weakness of their sex — for sometimes they call this a womanish or old-wives' superstition — surely men are wise. If boys, if the young are unwise through inexperience of age, surely the mature and the old have steady judgment. If one city is foolish, all the other countless cities cannot be foolish too. If one province, one nation lacks prudence, all the rest must certainly have understanding of what is right. But since this divine law has been embraced from the rising of the sun to its setting, and every sex, every age, every people and region serves God with one and equal spirit, and everywhere the identical endurance, the identical scorn for death, is on display, they should have grasped that a cause defended all the way to death is not defended without reason, and that something solid and foundational underlies a religion which injury and harassment never dissolve, but only ever strengthen and confirm. Here again their malice betrays itself: they imagine that defiling men amounts to demolishing God's religion completely, yet reconciliation with God remains open, and not a single worshipper of his is so corrupt that, once given the chance, he fails to come back and appease him — often with even deeper devotion than before. Consciousness of wrongdoing together with dread of punishment tends to deepen a person's religion, and a faith rebuilt through repentance grows sturdier still. If, then, they themselves believe that even when they think their gods angry, these can be appeased by gifts, sacrifices, and incense, why then do they think our God so harsh, so implacable, that a man who has been forced and unwilling to pour a libation to their gods should now seem incapable of being a Christian? Unless perhaps they think that a mind once defiled will so change that men will now begin willingly to do what they did under torture. Who would willingly take up a duty that began in injury? What man, looking down at the marks scoring his own flesh, would not despise those gods even more fiercely, for whose sake he carries the eternal marks of his punishment, tokens pressed into his own flesh? So it comes about that, once peace has been granted by God, all who fled return, and, because of the miracle of such courage, a new people besides comes over to us. For when the crowd sees men torn apart by every kind of torture and, amid exhausted executioners, keeping unconquered endurance, they conclude, rightly, that unanimity among so vast a number cannot be meaningless, that persistence unto death cannot be pointless, and that no endurance could master such enormous suffering without divine aid. Robbers and men of strong body cannot endure such lacerations; they cry out and groan, for they are overcome by pain, since they lack an inspired endurance; but our people — to say nothing of the men — our children and our weak women silently overcome their torturers, and not even fire can wring a groan from them. Let the Romans go and boast of Mucius or Regulus, of whom the one handed himself over to the enemy to be killed, shame at the thought of surviving as a prisoner having driven him to it, and the other, seized by the enemy, when he saw he could not escape death, thrust his hand into the fire, to satisfy by his own act the enemy he had meant to kill, and by that punishment won a pardon he had not deserved. Behold, the weaker sex and fragile age endure to be torn apart in their whole body and burned, not from necessity — for they might avoid it if they wished — but from will, because they trust in God. This is true courage, which the philosophers too, boasting, parade not in fact but in empty words, claiming that a sober, steadfast man is defined precisely by refusing to let any terror shift his resolve, and that torment and death are worth enduring sooner than betraying one's faith, walking away from one's obligation, or letting dread of dying or sharp pain drive one into wrongdoing — unless perhaps Horace seems to them to rave in his lyric verses, when he says: the man just and firm of purpose is shaken in his settled mind neither by the fury of citizens bidding what is wrong, nor by the face of a threatening tyrant. Nothing truer could be said, if this is applied to those who refuse no torture, no death, rather than turn aside from faith and justice, who tremble neither at tyrannical commands nor at the swords of governors, so as to keep from defending, with steady mind, true and solid liberty — which alone the wise man must guard in this matter. For who is so insolent, so arrogant, as to forbid me to lift my eyes to heaven, or to impose on me the necessity either of worshipping what I do not wish, or of not worshipping what I wish? What would be left to us further, if even this, which ought to be done by will, were wrenched from us by another's lust? No one will accomplish that, if we have any of the courage needed to despise death and pain. If we hold to this constancy, why are we judged fools for doing what the philosophers praise? Rightly, then, does Seneca charge men with inconsistency when he says: they consider it the highest virtue to have a great spirit, and yet they hold for a madman the man who despises death — which is surely the height of perversity. Yet these devotees of empty religions level this very accusation out of the same blindness that keeps them from grasping who the true God is — those whom the Erythraean Sibyl calls deaf and senseless, that is, unable either to hear or to perceive divine things, but fearing and worshipping earth shaped by their own fingers.
As for the reason why they think the wise foolish, there is good cause for it — since their mistake is not baseless — a point we must lay out carefully for them, so that, should it prove possible, they might finally see where they have gone wrong. Justice by its very nature has a certain appearance of folly, which I can confirm by both divine and human testimonies. Yet nothing may be gained with such men unless, drawing on the very authorities they themselves accept, we show them this: justice, inseparable as it is from genuine wisdom, cannot belong to anyone who does not also appear foolish. Carneades, philosopher of the Academic school, whose force in argument, whose eloquence, whose sharpness of mind, whoever does not know for himself will learn from the report of Cicero or of Lucilius, in whom Neptune, arguing about a most difficult matter, shows that it cannot be explained — not even if Carneades himself, sent back from the underworld, took it up — when he was sent as ambassador from Athens to Rome, he argued at length about justice, with Galba and Cato the Censor, the greatest orators of that time, listening. But he himself overturned his own argument the next day with a contrary argument, and demolished the justice he had praised the day before — and this was no philosopher's steady, weighty conviction, but rather a rhetorical drill in which he took up either side of the question. This he was accustomed to do, so that he could refute others who asserted whatever they pleased. That argument by which justice is overthrown is recalled by Lucius Furius in Cicero — I suppose because he was discussing the republic, so as to bring in a defense and praise of justice, without which he thought the republic could not be governed. But Carneades, in order to refute Aristotle and Plato, the champions of justice, gathered together in that first speech everything that was said on behalf of justice, so that he might then overturn it, as he did. Toppling a rootless justice presented no difficulty at all, given that no philosopher anywhere on earth then possessed any clear grasp of its nature or its kind. And would that so many and such great men had had as much wisdom and as much knowledge, along with their eloquence and spirit, to carry out a defense of the highest virtue, whose origin lies in religion and whose principle lies in fairness! But those who did not know the first part could not hold the second either. My aim first is to lay out, briefly and to the point, what justice actually is, making clear thereby that the philosophers never grasped it and so could not defend a thing they scarcely understood. Although justice embraces all the virtues together, still there are two that are its chief elements, which cannot be torn or separated from it: piety and fairness. For faith, temperance, honesty, innocence, integrity, and other such things can exist, whether by nature or by ancestral custom, in men who do not know justice — as has always been the case; for the ancient Romans, who used to boast of their justice, were in fact boasting of those virtues which, as I said, can proceed from justice yet be separated from its very source. But piety and fairness are, as it were, its veins, for the whole of justice consists of these two springs; yet its head and origin lie in the first, and all its force and reason lie in the second. Piety, moreover, is nothing other than the knowledge of God, in the very terms Trismegistus rightly gave it, a definition we have noted before in another place. If, then, piety is to know God, and the sum of that knowledge is to worship him, then whoever does not hold to the religion of God certainly does not know justice. For how can one know that virtue itself, who does not know whence it arises? Plato indeed spoke much of the one God, from whom he says the world was established, but nothing of religion — for he had dreamed of God, not come to know him. But if Plato himself, or anyone else, wished to carry out a defense of justice, his first task should have been tearing down the cults of the gods, seeing that they stand opposed to piety. And because Socrates attempted to do just this, he was thrown into prison, making plain, even then, the fate awaiting anyone who would champion genuine justice while devoting himself solely to the one God. The other part of justice is fairness: I mean by fairness not merely judging well, which is itself praiseworthy in a just man, but making oneself equal with others — what Cicero calls equability. For God, who both begets men and breathes life into them, willed all to be equal, that is, alike; he set the same condition of living for all, brought all forth for wisdom, promised immortality to all; no one is excluded from his heavenly gifts. For just as he divides his one light equally among all, sends forth springs for all, provides food for all, grants all the sweetest rest of sleep, so he grants fairness and virtue to all alike. No one before him is slave, no one master; for if the same father belongs to all, we are all free by equal right. No one is poor before God except one who lacks justice; no one rich except one who is full of virtues; no one holds distinction unless goodness and innocence mark his character; no one most illustrious except one who has performed abundant works of mercy; no one most perfect except one who has fulfilled every degree of virtue. That is why justice eluded both Romans and Greeks alike: they maintained a graded hierarchy among men, running upward from poor to wealthy, from the lowly to the powerful, and from ordinary citizens clear up to the towering authority of kings. For where all are not equal, there is no fairness, and inequality itself excludes justice, whose whole force lies in this, that it makes equal those who have come to the same condition of this life by an equal lot.
When, then, these two springs of justice are altered, all virtue and all truth are destroyed, and justice itself withdraws again to heaven. That is why that good discovered by the philosophers is not true, because they did not know either whence it arose or what it accomplished — a thing revealed to no people other than our own. Someone may say: are there not among you as well some poor, some rich, some slaves, some masters? Is there no difference at all between individuals? None — nor is there any other reason why we call one another by the name of brothers, except that we believe ourselves equal. It is because we weigh everything human by spirit rather than by body that, whatever differences exist among bodies, no one among us remains a slave in our eyes; instead we treat and address such men as brothers in spirit and fellow-servants in faith. Wealth likewise confers no true distinction, except where it lets a person shine more brightly through virtuous deeds. Possessing riches is not what makes a man rich; putting them to use in acts of justice is; and those who seem poor are nonetheless rich in this, that they are not in need and desire nothing. Although, then, we are equal — free and slave, rich and poor — in humility of spirit, before God we are distinguished by virtue: each person is the more exalted the more just he is. For if justice consists in making oneself equal even to one's inferiors — though even in this alone one excels, in that one has made oneself equal to those beneath — yet if one behaves not merely as an equal but even as a lesser, one will certainly attain, by God's judgment, a far higher degree of dignity. For indeed, in this worldly life, since all things are brief and perishable, men set themselves above one another and contend over rank — than which nothing is more shameful, nothing more arrogant, nothing further removed from the reasoning of wisdom; for all these earthly things are contrary to the things of heaven. For just as the wisdom of men is the height of folly before God, and folly, as I have taught, is the height of wisdom, so before God he is humble and lowly who has been conspicuous and exalted on earth. For, to say nothing of the fact that these present goods of earth, to which great honor is given, are contrary to virtue and enervate the vigor of the mind, what nobility, what wealth, what power can ever be secure, when God can make even kings themselves lower than the lowest? And so God, taking counsel for us, set this among his divine precepts above all: whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. The wholesome force of this precept teaches that whoever has made himself plain and shown himself humble among men will be reckoned before God as excellent and distinguished. Nor is that saying false which is found in Euripides to this effect: what is here considered evil, this is good in heaven.
Why the philosophers managed neither to discover justice nor to defend it, I have already set out; my task now is to come back to what I originally intended. Carneades, seeing how shaky the philosophers' claims were, dared to attack them, sensing they could be knocked down. His argument, summed up, ran like this: men had fixed laws to suit their own convenience, laws differing by custom and often revised over time even among the same peoples, and no natural law existed at all; every creature, human or animal, is swept along by nature toward its own gain; hence justice either does not exist, or, if it does exist, amounts to sheer stupidity, since a man practicing it damages himself while tending to others' welfare. His examples ran along these lines: every nation that had grown powerful in empire, the Romans included, masters as they were of the whole earth, would have to crawl back into huts and settle into poverty and wretchedness were they truly to act justly - meaning, were they to hand back everything taken from others. Leaving these broad claims, he turned next to individual cases. Picture, he said, a decent man who owns a slave prone to running off, or a house riddled with disease and decay, flaws only he is aware of, and he decides to put it on the market: does he admit outright that the slave flees or the house is plague-ridden, or does he hide this from the buyer? Admitting it makes him honest, since he deceives no one, yet he will be branded a fool all the same, because his price will be low or there will be no sale whatsoever; hiding it makes him shrewd, since he protects his own gain, yet that same man is wicked, since he deceives. Or suppose, again, a buyer imagines he is purchasing brass while it is really gold, or lead while it is really silver - does the seller keep quiet to buy cheaply, or speak up and pay the higher price? Choosing to pay more looks like nothing but foolishness. Carneades meant, by this, for us to grasp that the man who is honest and upright is a fool, and the man who is clever is wicked, though poverty need not ruin a man's contentment. From there he climbed toward weightier matters, cases where staying just could cost a man his very life. Justice, he claimed, simply means never killing anyone and never laying a finger on what belongs to someone else. So what is the honest man supposed to do, then, if shipwrecked, when a feebler man has already claimed hold of a plank? Surely he shoves the man off so he can climb aboard and cling to it and reach safety, especially given that no one stands watching him out on the open water? A clever man does exactly that, since otherwise he himself would drown; but should he choose death over striking another, he remains honest, yet is a fool all the same, for failing to guard his own life even while guarding someone else's. Likewise, suppose his own army's line breaks and the enemy gives chase, and this honest man stumbles upon some injured soldier propped on a horse - does he spare him and get killed himself, or does he tip him off the horse to make his own getaway from the enemy? Doing so makes him clever, yet wicked all the same; refraining makes him honest, yet inevitably a fool. So, splitting justice into two categories - one civic, the other natural - Carneades demolished them both, arguing that the civic kind amounts to cleverness without being justice, while the natural kind amounts to justice without being cleverness. Sharp and toxic as these arguments plainly are, Marcus Tullius could not overturn them. For though he has Laelius speak in reply to Furius on justice's behalf, he stepped past these unanswered claims as one skirts a pitfall, leaving this same Laelius to have defended, not the natural justice already saddled with a reputation for stupidity, but rather the civic justice which Furius himself had already conceded to be cleverness - though unjust cleverness.
Concerning the argument at hand, I demonstrated how closely justice can resemble folly, so it should be clear enough that those who suppose our people foolish for their faith are deceived — though not without cause, given that we appear to do exactly what Carneades described. But now, I sense, something weightier is being asked of me - to explain why God chose to conceal justice from human eyes beneath a mask of folly. First, though, let me take up the case against Furius, since Laelius's reply fell short. Whatever his reputed wisdom, that man was never equipped to argue for true justice, since he never possessed its wellspring and origin. For us the task is far simpler: heaven's own favor has made justice something we grasp fully and know not merely by name but as a living reality. Plato and Aristotle, meaning well enough, tried to make the case for justice, and might have succeeded had their labor, their rhetorical skill, their intellectual power, been reinforced by knowledge of divine matters. Instead their efforts went nowhere and convinced no one to actually live by what they taught, since the doctrine had no anchor reaching down from heaven. What we offer stands on firmer ground, since God himself instructs us. They merely sketched justice in speech and pictured it in the mind, yet it never appeared before anyone's eyes, so they could point to no living case to back their claims. Their audience could always object that no such life was even possible, seeing that nobody had ever actually lived it. We, by contrast, back up our words with living proof drawn from actual experience. Carneades, for his part, did grasp what justice is, only he failed to see clearly enough that it was not folly - and I believe I understand his reason. He never truly believed the just man foolish; rather, knowing the man was not foolish yet unable to explain why he only seemed so, he wanted to demonstrate that truth stays hidden, thereby propping up his school's core teaching, that certain knowledge is impossible. Let us examine, then, whether folly and justice could ever really strike a bargain. According to him, the just man turns foolish the moment he refrains from grabbing the horse from a wounded rider or the plank from a drowning man to spare his own life. To begin with, I flatly deny that such a predicament could ever befall someone genuinely just, since the just man holds no hostility toward any living soul and covets not one thing belonging to another. What reason would he have to cross the sea, or to grasp after property on foreign shores, content as he is with what he owns? Why would he stir up war or entangle himself in others' madness, when his heart holds unbroken peace toward every man? Would he crave foreign goods, or human bloodshed - a man who does not even understand chasing profit, satisfied as he is with bare subsistence, who counts it a crime not merely to kill but even to stand by and witness the killing? Still, I set this point aside, granting that circumstances might drag him into such trials against his own will. Do you truly hold, Furius - or rather Carneades, since the argument is really his - that justice is so hollow, so worthless, so scorned even by God, that it can accomplish nothing and offers no shield of its own for its own defense? Naturally, those ignorant of man's sacred mystery, who therefore measure everything by this brief span of life, cannot fathom justice's real strength. Even when such men discuss virtue, granting that it is loaded with toil and hardship, they still insist it should be pursued purely for its own sake, since they have no glimpse whatsoever of its rewards, which last forever. So, judging everything by this present existence alone, they effectively reduce virtue to folly, since by their reckoning it shoulders such heavy burdens pointlessly, achieving nothing at all. But that is a matter for elsewhere; let us come back now to justice, our opening theme: so great is its power that when it turns its gaze heavenward, it merits every blessing from God. Horace, then, spoke truly when he said innocence is powerful enough to need no weapon and no strength to protect itself, no matter where its path may lead: the man clean of wrongdoing and free from crime has no need of Moorish spears, nor bow, nor quiver bristling with poisoned shafts, Fuscus, whether he crosses the scorching Syrtes, or the forbidding Caucasus, or the lands the storied Hydaspes bathes. It follows, then, that heaven's protection must shield the just man through every peril of storm and battle - that either wrongdoers too go unharmed when he sails even among murderers and thieves, purely so that one righteous and blameless life might be saved alongside theirs, or else that he alone survives while everyone else goes under. But suppose we grant that the philosopher's scenario could actually occur: what, then, is the just man to do, faced with a wounded rider on a horse or a drowning man clinging to a plank? I say without hesitation - he will choose death over killing. And justice, that singular good belonging to man, will not thereby earn the label of folly. For what could be finer, what dearer to a person, than innocence? And the further one carries it - clear to its final extremity, choosing death rather than letting anything chip away at that principle - the more perfect it necessarily becomes. Folly, Carneades claims, means sparing another's life while destroying one's own. Would you then call it foolish to die for the sake of friendship too? Why, then, do you praise those famous Pythagorean friends, one of whom pledged his life to a tyrant as security for the other's death, while the other returned just as the deadline arrived and his surety was already being led off, freeing him by his own arrival? Had folly been the verdict on these two men, no one would have celebrated them so highly for what they did - the first choosing death rather than abandon a friend, the second choosing it rather than break a promise. In fact, that very virtue moved the tyrant to spare them both in return, transforming even so cruel a nature. He is said to have even asked to join their friendship as a third member, hardly treating them as fools, but as men both good and wise. So I cannot see why, if dying for friendship or for one's word counts as supreme glory, it should not likewise be glorious to die for the sake of innocence. Hence the truly foolish ones are those who condemn us for being willing to die for God, all while praising to the skies a man willing to die for a fellow man. Finally, to close the matter, reason itself makes plain that no single person can be simultaneously just and foolish, nor simultaneously wise and unjust. The fool has no grasp of what is right and good, and so sins without fail. He is dragged along, captive to his own vices, powerless to resist, lacking the virtue he cannot even recognize. The just man, however, abstains from every sin - something achievable only through knowledge of right and wrong. And who but the wise can tell one from the other? So it follows that a fool can never be just, and an unjust man can never be wise. If this holds absolutely true, then clearly the man who refuses to take the plank from a drowning man or the horse from a wounded one is not a fool, since doing so would be sin, and the wise man avoids sin. Granted, he may look foolish to people who misjudge the true nature of things. This whole puzzle, then, gets settled less by argument than by simple definition. Folly, in fact, is error in action and speech born of not understanding what is right and good. Hence a man who will not spare even himself, in order to avoid inflicting harm - itself an evil - is no fool. That is exactly what reason and truth alike teach us. We can see in every animal, since none possess wisdom, that nature drives each to look after only itself. They harm others purely to gain for themselves, never grasping that causing harm is wrong. Man, though, knowing good from evil, refrains from harming others even at cost to himself - something no unreasoning animal could ever do - and this is precisely why innocence ranks among humanity's highest virtues. From this it follows that the truly wise man is the one who would rather perish than inflict harm, safeguarding thereby the very quality that sets him apart from mute beasts. As for the man who conceals a seller's error to buy gold on the cheap, or who hides that he is selling a runaway slave or a diseased house purely to protect his own gain - he is not wise, whatever Carneades wished to claim, but merely sly and deceitful. Slyness and deceit, though, exist even among mute animals - whether setting traps to catch others by trickery for food, or dodging the traps others have set - but wisdom belongs to man alone. Wisdom, after all, means understanding how to do what is good and right, or how to refrain from wicked deeds and words. The wise man never chases profit either, since he holds earthly goods in contempt, and he lets no one be deceived, because correcting people's mistakes and steering them back to the right path is a good man's duty - since man's nature is meant for fellowship and kindness, and this alone is what links him to God.
Now here is the actual reason someone might look foolish for choosing poverty, or even death, over harming or robbing another: people assume death wipes a man out entirely. Every mistake made by ordinary folk and philosophers alike traces back to that assumption. If nothing survives after death, then plainly the greatest foolishness would be neglecting this life, failing to stretch it out as long and as advantage-filled as one can manage - and anyone living that way inevitably strays from justice's path. But suppose something finer and longer awaits a man beyond this life - a conclusion supported both by the reasoning of eminent philosophers, by what oracles have revealed, and by the divinely inspired words of the prophets - then the wise course is plainly to hold this present life and its goods in low regard, since immortality more than makes up for whatever is lost. Cicero's Laelius, that same champion of justice, puts it this way: virtue seeks, one might almost say, nothing but honor, having no further reward. A reward does exist, though, one entirely worthy of virtue, which you, Laelius, could never have guessed at, ignorant as you were of sacred scripture. Still, he goes on, virtue accepts that reward gladly, without insisting on it. You are badly mistaken, though, if you imagine any human being could ever pay virtue's true reward - especially given your own words elsewhere: what wealth could you offer this man? What power? What kingdoms could compare? The man who reckons such things merely human judges his own goods divine. Who, then, would call you wise, Laelius, contradicting yourself as you do, later withdrawing from virtue the very claim you had granted it? No doubt, though, uncertainty about the truth leaves one's judgment shaky and inconsistent. What comes next in your argument? Suppose an ungrateful world at large, or a crowd of envious men, or powerful enemies, strip virtue of its rewards - what a feeble, hollow thing you have made virtue out to be, if its own reward can simply be stripped away! Yet if its goods truly are divine, as you claim, could men really be that thankless, that jealous, that mighty, capable of stripping away goods bestowed by divinity itself? Still, he says, virtue finds comfort in many things, relying above all on its own inherent beauty. What comfort, though? What beauty, when it so often stands accused, and that beauty itself becomes the very thing punished? What, then, if - as Furius put it - virtue is seized, tormented, exiled, reduced to poverty, its hands severed, its eyes torn out, condemned, shackled, burned, even executed by miserable means? Does virtue then forfeit its reward, or does it simply cease to exist? Neither - it will instead collect its reward before God as judge, living and flourishing without end. Strip that hope away, and nothing in human existence would look emptier or more foolish than virtue - yet virtue's own inherent goodness and dignity teach us that the soul does not perish, and that God has fixed a divine reward for it. God chose, however, to cloak virtue itself in the appearance of folly for a purpose: to keep hidden the truth's secret and the deeper meaning of his religion, to condemn as empty error those cults and that worldly wisdom which puff themselves up and revel in their own cleverness, and finally so that, once the difficulty was placed before us, a narrow road alone might carry us upward to immortality's lofty reward. I trust I have now shown why fools regard our people as fools. Choosing torment and death over lifting three fingers of incense onto the altar-fire strikes them as no less mad than valuing a stranger's life above one's own when death is on the line. What they fail to grasp, though, is the sheer wickedness of worshiping anything besides God - the one who built heaven and earth, shaped the human race, breathed life into it, and gave it light. Now, if the worst kind of slave is the one who flees his master, earning every whip, chain, treadmill, and cross going, and if a son counts equally as lost and godless for abandoning his father in disobedience, deserving disinheritance and the permanent erasure of his name from the family line - how much worse, then, is the man who abandons God, in whom master and father are united, each title owed equal reverence? Consider: a man who purchases a slave for money gives him nothing beyond food, and only for his own benefit besides. And a man who fathers a child controls neither the conceiving, the birth, nor the child's continued life - proving he is no true father at all, merely an instrument in the process of generation. What penalty, then, should await the one who deserts him who is genuinely both master and father, other than what God himself has already prepared - the everlasting fire readied for unjust souls, the very flame he warns of through his prophets against the wicked and rebellious?
Let those who murder souls—whether their own or someone else's—come to understand what an unpardonable crime they are committing: first, that in slaving for the most depraved demons (beings God has sentenced to endless punishment) they are slitting their own throats; and second, that they will not let others worship God either, but push people toward deadly rites and work as hard as they can to make sure no soul anywhere on earth remains whole enough, in its proper condition, to look up toward heaven. What can I call them but wretches who take orders from the very robbers who prey on them, imagining these robbers to be gods? They know nothing of their condition, origin, names, or rationale, yet cling to a common belief, straying willingly and indulging their own foolishness. Ask them for grounds behind this conviction and they have none to offer; instead they flee to the verdicts of their forebears — those men were wise, those men approved it, those men knew what was best — stripping themselves of their own senses and giving up reason altogether in favor of trusting someone else's mistakes. Tangled in ignorance of everything this way, they know neither themselves nor their own gods. If only they were content to wander and play the fool alone! Instead they haul others into partnership in their own ruin, as though the destruction of many might somehow console them. It is precisely this ignorance that makes them so vicious toward wise people, all while pretending concern for them, as though they merely wanted to steer them back to sound sense. Do they try to bring this about through discussion, through offering some reasoned account? Not in the least — instead through violence and torture. What astonishing, blind insanity! A wicked mind gets blamed on those trying to hold onto their faith, while a good one gets credited to the torturers! Does wickedness of mind belong to the people being torn apart against every principle of humanity and right, or rather to the ones inflicting on innocent bodies acts that not even the cruelest brigands, the angriest enemies, or the most savage barbarians ever committed? Do they lie to themselves so thoroughly that they swap and reverse the very labels of good and evil? Why not, then, call daylight night, and the sun darkness? It is, after all, the same brazenness to stick the name 'wicked' on the good, 'foolish' on the wise, and 'impious' on the just. So then—if they trust at all in their philosophy or their oratory—let them take up arms and knock down our case, if they can; let them close ranks with us and go through every point one at a time. It falls to them to mount a defense of their own gods, so that when our cause gains ground—as it keeps gaining ground day by day—they are not left abandoned along with their shrines and their absurd spectacles. And since brute force gets them nowhere (the more our religion is squeezed, the larger it grows), let them proceed instead by argument and persuasion. Let the priests step into the open—lesser and greatest alike—the flamens, the augurs, the sacrificing kings too, and whoever else serves as priest or overseer of these cults; let them summon us to a public gathering, urge us to take up worship of their gods, convince us that there are many divine beings whose will and oversight govern everything, demonstrate how the rites and the gods themselves first came down to mortal hands, spell out their source and their logic, lay out what reward comes from honoring them and what penalty from neglecting them, explain why they want human worship, and what benefit our devotion brings them, supposing they are indeed blessed beings — and let them establish every bit of it not through their own say-so (a mortal's word carries no real weight) but through some divine testimony, the way we do. There's no call for force or wrongdoing here, since religion cannot be coerced; the business has to be conducted through words rather than blows, so that it remains a matter of free choice. Let them draw the blade of their own intellects: if their reasoning holds true, let it be proven. We stand ready to listen, provided they actually teach; but silence earns no trust from us, just as savagery earns no surrender. Let them follow our example and lay out the reasoning behind the whole matter: we, after all, are not luring anyone in, whatever charge they level at us—we instruct, we demonstrate, we make it plain. So no one is held among us who does not wish to stay—a person lacking devotion and faith is of no use to God anyway—and yet nobody leaves, because truth itself keeps hold of them. Let them teach along these same lines, if they have any real confidence in their truth; let them speak up, open their mouths, and dare, I say, to debate something of this sort with us. Then their error and foolishness will be mocked, sure enough, by the very old women they scorn and by children among our own people. For seeing as they are learned enough to know from books the lineage of their gods, their exploits, their reigns, their deaths, their very graves, and to know that the rites into which they get initiated sprang either from human deeds, or from chance happenings, or even from deaths — it is unbelievable lunacy to regard as gods beings they don't dare claim were never mortal. And should they be shameless enough to deny it anyway, their own books and those of their own people expose them, and the very rites of initiation themselves prove them wrong. Let them recognize, then, from this very fact how wide a gulf separates truth from falsehood: eloquent as they are, they cannot persuade anyone, while the untrained and unlettered manage it easily, because the facts and the truth speak on their own. So why the savagery? Only so that, in trying to shrink their own folly, they end up enlarging it. Butchery and piety belong to entirely different worlds, and truth can no more be paired with force than justice can with cruelty. And they rightly dare not teach anything about their own sacred matters, for fear of being laughed at by our people and abandoned by theirs. For the ordinary crowd, whose judgment tends to be plain and unspoiled, would condemn those mysteries the moment it learned they were set up in memory of dead men, and would go looking for something truer to worship instead. That is why crafty men built trustworthy secrecy into these rites, so ordinary people would never learn what it is they are actually worshiping. Since we ourselves are well acquainted with their teachings, why do they refuse to trust us—people who know both sides—or resent us, for having chosen truth over falsehood? 'But,' they insist, 'the publicly established rites must be defended.' Ah, how upright an intention lies behind the wretches' mistake! They sense, rightly, that nothing among human affairs outranks religion and that it deserves to be defended with the utmost energy—but just as they are wrong about religion itself, so too they are wrong about how to defend it. The proper defense of religion lies in dying, not killing; in endurance, not cruelty; in loyalty, not crime — the first set belongs to bad men, the second to good, and religion by its nature has to be a matter for the good, not the wicked. For if you try to defend religion with blood, with torment, with evil, it will not be defended at all—it will be stained and violated instead. Nothing depends more entirely on free choice than religion; once the worshiper's heart turns away, it has already been taken away, already reduced to nothing. The sound approach, then, is to defend religion by endurance, or by death; keeping faith in that manner both pleases God directly and lends religion its authority. For if a soldier in this earthly service keeps faith with his king through some outstanding act — becoming more valued and dearer to him should he go on living, or, should he die, winning the highest glory for having fallen for his commander — how much more must faith be kept toward the commander of everyone, God, who is able to pay virtue's reward not only to the living but to the dead as well? The worship owed to God, then, being a form of heavenly service, calls for the deepest devotion and loyalty. How, after all, could God love a worshiper who does not love him back, or grant whatever a suppliant asks, when that person approaches prayer with neither a sincere heart nor proper attention? Yet when these people come to sacrifice, they bring their gods nothing personal or heartfelt—no integrity of mind, no reverence, no fear. Once their empty sacrifices are done, they leave their whole religion behind in the temple, right where they found it, taking nothing of it away and bringing nothing back. That is why cults of this kind can neither make anyone good nor remain steady and unchanging. People are easily led away from them, then, because nothing there teaches anything useful for living, for wisdom, or for faith. What, really, is the superstition surrounding those gods? What strength does it have? What discipline, what origin, what logic, what foundation, what substance? Where is it headed, or what does it promise, such that a person could keep faith with it and defend it bravely? In it I see nothing but a ritual that concerns fingers alone. Our own religion, by contrast, stands firm, solid, and unchanging for this reason: it instills justice, it never leaves us, it lives entirely within the worshiper's mind, and it treats the mind itself as the offering. There, all that is demanded is animal blood, smoke, and a pointless libation; here, a good mind, a clean heart, an innocent life. There, all comers are welcome without distinction — shameless adulteresses, brazen madams, indecent prostitutes; there come gladiators, robbers, thieves, poisoners, praying for nothing but to get away with their crimes. What does a bandit at sacrifice ask, or a gladiator, except the chance to kill? What does the poisoner ask, but to succeed at deceiving? What does the prostitute ask, but to sin as often as possible? What does the adulteress ask, but her husband's death, or the covering-up of her shame? What does the madam ask, but to strip many people of their belongings? What does the thief ask, but to steal more? Here, though, there is no room even for a mild, ordinary sin, and anyone who comes to sacrifice with an unclean conscience hears God's own threat against him — God, who sees into the heart's hidden corners, who is forever the enemy of sin, who demands justice, who insists on faith. Where, in this, is there any room for a wicked mind or a wicked prayer? But those poor souls cannot even grasp, from their own crimes, how evil what they worship really is, since they come to pray defiled by every kind of vice and imagine they have sacrificed piously simply by washing their skin — as if any river could rinse away the lusts locked inside a chest, or any sea could cleanse them. How much better it would be to wash the mind instead, which is what gets soiled by evil desires, and to sweep away every vice with a single bath of virtue and faith! Whoever manages that is clean enough, no matter how filthy and stained a body he carries around.
These people, though, not knowing either what deserves worship or how to go about it, stumble blindly and foolishly into the opposite error. So they worship their own enemies, appeasing with sacrificial victims the very robbers and killers who prey on them, and they lay their own souls on loathsome altars to be burned right along with the incense. In an astonishing blindness of mind, these wretches even grow angry that others are not perishing alongside them. What could beings that cannot see the sun possibly see? As though, if they really were gods, they would need human assistance against those who scorn them. So why be angry with us, if their gods can do nothing anyway? Except that in doubting their gods' power, they themselves undermine those gods — making them more irreverent than people who worship nothing at all. Cicero, in his Laws, when instructing that sacrifices be approached in purity, wrote: bring devotion, and leave wealth aside; whoever acts otherwise will answer to God as his own avenger. And rightly so: it makes no sense to lose confidence in a god whom you worship precisely on the grounds that you consider him powerful. For how could he avenge a wrong done to his worshiper if he cannot even avenge one done to himself? It is worth asking them, then, exactly whom they think they are helping by forcing reluctant people to sacrifice. The very people being coerced? But nothing forced on someone unwilling counts as a favor. 'But,' they say, 'one must look after even the unwilling, since they don't know what's good for them.' Why, then, do they harass, torture, and maim so brutally, if they truly want these people safe? Or where does such an impious piety come from, that leads them to ruin, in wretched ways, or cripple the very people they claim to want helped? Or is it really done for the gods' benefit? But a sacrifice squeezed out of someone unwilling is no sacrifice at all. Unless it comes freely and from the heart, it is a curse, whenever people are driven to it through outlawing, abuse, prison, and torture. If these really are gods who get worshiped this way, then this alone is reason enough not to worship them — that they want to be worshiped like this — clearly deserving human loathing, when their libation comes mixed with tears, with groaning, with blood pouring from every limb. We, by contrast, do not demand that anyone worship our God — who belongs to everyone whether they like it or not — against his will, nor do we grow angry with someone who fails to worship him. We trust instead in his majesty, which is as capable of avenging contempt shown toward him as it is of avenging the toils and wrongs done to his own servants. And so, when we endure unspeakable treatment, we do not resist even with a word, but hand vengeance over to God — unlike those who want to be seen as defenders of their own gods and lash out savagely against anyone who does not worship them. From this it becomes clear how little good there is in worshiping these gods, since people ought to have been drawn toward the good by goodness, not by evil; but because that whole business is evil, the service rendered to it lacks any good as well. 'But,' they insist, 'people who undermine religions deserve punishment.' Do we undermine religion any worse than the Egyptian people, who worship the most degrading shapes of beasts and livestock, and even revere as gods things too shameful to name? Do we do it worse than those very same people, who claim to worship gods and yet mock them publicly and disgracefully, even allowing comic farces about them to be staged amid laughter and delight? What sort of religion is this, or how much majesty ought we credit to something worshiped in temples and ridiculed on stage? And the people who do this pay no price for insulting the divine — they walk away honored and praised instead. Do we undermine religion worse than certain philosophers, who claim there are no gods whatsoever, and that everything that happens arose spontaneously, purely by chance? Worse than the Epicureans, who grant that gods exist but deny they care about anything, deny that they get angry, deny that gratitude moves them at all? By saying this they effectively convince people the gods deserve no worship whatsoever, seeing as they pay no attention to worshipers and feel no anger toward non-worshipers. Furthermore, when they argue against fear of the gods, their whole aim is simply to make sure nobody fears them at all. And yet all of this gets a willing hearing from people and gets argued without any consequence.
So it isn't really because we fail to worship their gods that they rage against us — plenty of others fail to worship them too — but because truth rests with us, and truth, as the saying goes quite rightly, breeds hatred. What conclusion can we draw, then, except that they have no idea what is happening to them? They are driven on by a blind, senseless rage that we can perceive clearly, though they themselves remain unaware of it. It is not truly the men doing the persecuting — men who have no genuine grievance against the innocent — but rather corrupted, ruined spirits, beings to whom the truth is both familiar and hateful, that worm their way into these people's minds and goad the unwitting into rage. For as long as peace prevails among God's people, these spirits shy away from the righteous and dread them; but once they take hold of human bodies and torment human souls, they get bound by solemn charge from those very people and are chased off by the name of the true God. On hearing that name they shake, cry out, declare that they are being burned and beaten, and when questioned about who they are, when they arrived, how they crept into the person, they confess it all. The divine name's very force racks and mangles them until exile is all that is left to them. That treatment, the blows and the threats alike, leaves them nursing an unending hatred for holy and upright men. And since they cannot harm these men directly on their own, they turn public hatred against those they find such a burden, unleashing whatever cruelty they can manage, aiming either to wear down their faith through suffering or, failing that, to wipe them off the earth entirely, so no one remains able to hold their wickedness in check. A counter-argument is obvious to me, and I won't pretend otherwise: someone could object, 'That God of yours, the one and mighty one, whom you yourself call ruler of all things and master of everyone — why does he tolerate such treatment instead of defending and repaying his worshipers? And why do those who withhold honor from him end up rich, powerful, and content, holding rank and authority, with everyone else bowing to their rule?' An explanation for this point too must be given, so no misunderstanding lingers. For above all, the reason people conclude that God's religion carries no real power is that they get misled by the appearance of earthly, present-day advantages — things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the mind's true welfare. Seeing the just go without these things while the unjust swim in them, they judge the worship of God to be empty, since they can't detect those goods present within it, and they judge the pagan rites to be genuine, because worshipers of those gods enjoy wealth, rank, and kingdoms. But people who hold this view fail to look deeply enough into what actually constitutes a human being — a power and reasoning that resides entirely in the mind, not the body. They see nothing beyond what meets the eye — the body, in other words. And since the body can be handled by eye and hand alike, it is weak, breakable, mortal; and to it belong all those goods that people desire and marvel at — wealth, rank, command — because these bring pleasure to the body, and so they crumble just as readily as the body does. The soul, though — the one place where the human being truly resides — is not exposed to the eyes, and so its goods cannot be seen either, since they rest in virtue alone; and it must therefore be as stable, steady, and everlasting as virtue itself, in which the soul's good is found.
It would take long to set forth every kind of virtue one by one and show how necessary it is for the wise and just man to hold himself far from those goods which the unjust enjoy, and by which the worship of the gods is falsely believed to be true and effective. For the question now before us, it is enough if we prove our point from a single virtue. Patience, surely, is a great and outstanding virtue, one that the common voice of the people, the philosophers, and the orators alike celebrate with the highest praise. But if it cannot be denied that patience is a supreme virtue, then it necessarily follows that the just and wise man must lie within the power of the unjust man, in order that he may practice patience. For patience is the bearing, with an even mind, of evils that are either inflicted on us or simply happen to us. The just and wise man, then, since he possesses virtue, has patience in himself; but he would be entirely without it if he suffered nothing adverse. By contrast, prosperity itself renders a man impatient and strips him of this greatest of virtues; impatient, that is, simply because he has nothing to endure. Nor can he keep innocence, which is likewise a virtue proper to the just and wise man; instead he often does harm, covets what belongs to others, and seizes by injury whatever he desires, because, void of virtue, he is subject to vice and sin, and, forgetting his own frailty, swells with a mind puffed up in arrogance. That is why the unjust, who know nothing of God, flourish in riches, power, and honors. Such rewards all belong to injustice, since none of them can endure forever, and all are pursued only through greed and violence. The just and wise man, however, since — as Laelius once said — he judges all those things human, and his own goods divine, covets nothing belonging to another, lest he wrong anyone against the law of humanity in any way; nor does he desire any power or honor, lest he do injury to someone — for he knows that all people, begotten by the same God and under the same condition, are joined by the bond of brotherhood. Content with what is his own, however small, mindful of his own frailty, he seeks nothing more than the means to sustain his life, and from what little he has he shares even with one who has nothing, because he is devout; and devotion is the highest virtue. Furthermore, he despises fleeting and corrupting pleasures, for whose sake wealth is pursued, since he is self-controlled and master of his desires. Bearing no arrogance or pride, he does not exalt himself or lift up a proud head, but is calm, agreeable, sociable, and unassuming, because he knows his own condition. This is a man who harms nobody, wants nothing that belongs to another, and will not even fight back to keep what is his when it is taken by force — his virtue teaches him to absorb an injury calmly. From such a disposition it inevitably follows that the fool gets to abuse the wise, and injustice gets to trample justice: the fool sins because injustice is his nature, while the wise man, precisely because he is just, discovers his virtue only in how he endures it. But if anyone wishes to know more fully why God allows the wicked and unjust to become powerful, blessed, and rich, while he permits the devout, by contrast, to be lowly, wretched, and poor, let him take up that book of Seneca entitled 'Why Many Evils Befall Good Men, though Providence Exists.' In it Seneca says much that is spoken not with worldly ignorance at all, but wisely, and almost as if by divine inspiration. As Seneca puts it, God treats humanity as his own children, yet lets the depraved and corrupt indulge a life of luxury and excess, since he judges them unworthy of correction. The good, however, whom he loves, he chastises more often and trains through constant hardships in the practice of virtue, and he does not allow them to be corrupted and depraved by fleeting, mortal goods. Hence no one should find it strange that God so frequently chastises us on account of our own wrongdoing. Indeed, it is precisely when we are troubled and weighed down that gratitude is most owed to our Father in his great indulgence, since he refuses to let our corruption spread any further and instead corrects it through blows and lashes. From this we understand that we are objects of God's care, since he grows angry with us because we sin. For although he could have granted his people both wealth and kingdoms, as he had earlier given to the Jews, whose successors and descendants we are, he chose instead that his people should live under the rule and authority of another, lest, corrupted by the happiness of prosperous circumstances, they slip into luxury and come to despise God's commandments, just as our ancestors did, who, often weakened by these earthly and fragile goods, strayed from discipline and broke the bonds of the law. He therefore arranged matters so that his worshippers would receive rest for keeping his commands, while correction would follow should his precepts go unheeded. And so, lest they be corrupted by ease as much as their fathers had been by license, he chose to have them pressed by those into whose hands he had placed them, so that he might strengthen those who were faltering, restore the corrupted to fortitude, and test and prove the faithful. For how can a general demonstrate the courage of his soldiers unless he has an enemy? Yet for him the adversary rises up unwilling, since he is mortal and can be conquered; but since no one can resist God, he himself raises up adversaries against his own name — opponents who wage war not on God directly, but on his soldiers — so that he may either test or strengthen the devotion and faith of his own people, until, through the lashes of affliction, he corrects a discipline grown slack. There is also another reason he permits persecutions against us: so that God's people may grow. How or why this comes about is not difficult to demonstrate. First, very many are driven away from the worship of the gods by hatred of such cruelty — for who would not shudder at such sacrifices? Then, some are drawn simply by virtue and good faith itself. Still others suppose there must be good grounds for so many people to condemn the worship of the gods as an evil, given that they would rather die than do what others do merely to go on living. Someone is led to want to know what that good thing is which is defended even unto death, which is preferred above all the pleasant and dear things of this life, and from which neither the loss of possessions, nor the loss of light, nor bodily pain, nor the torture of the inward parts can deter them. These considerations carry great weight; but the greatest causes of all have always been these: even amid their own torments, the surrounding crowd hears them declare that they sacrifice not to stones shaped by human hands, but to the God who lives in heaven — a truth many grasp and take to heart. Then, as commonly happens in matters of uncertainty, while people ask one another what the cause of such perseverance might be, many things pertaining to religion, once spread abroad, are learned in turn as they are caught up by rumor; and since these things are good, they cannot help but please. Besides, the vengeance that follows, as always happens, powerfully drives people toward belief. Nor is this a slight cause either: that unclean spirits of demons, having gained license, plunge themselves into the bodies of many people; and once these spirits are driven out, those restored to health remain devoted ever after to the faith whose power they experienced. All these many causes, gathered together into one, wonderfully gain for God a great multitude.
Whatever evil, then, the wicked rulers contrive against us, God himself permits to happen. And yet let not the most unjust persecutors, for whom the name of God has been a matter of insult and mockery, suppose that they will go unpunished, since they acted, so to speak, merely as tools carrying out his wrath toward us. God's own judgment will punish them regardless — those who, once granted power, abused it beyond what is humanly tolerable and, in their arrogance, insulted God himself, casting his eternal name impiously and wickedly beneath their feet to be trampled. For this reason God promises that he will swiftly take vengeance upon them and will wipe out the evil beasts from the earth. Yet although he is accustomed even now, in the present, to avenge the afflictions of his people, still he bids us await patiently that day of heavenly judgment, on which he himself will either honor or punish each person according to their own deserts. Wherefore let not sacrilegious souls hope that those whom they so trample down will go despised and unavenged. Those greedy, ravenous wolves who tormented righteous, guiltless souls that had committed no crime will meet the reward that is owed to them. Let us only strive that nothing but righteousness alone be punished in us by men, and let us apply ourselves with all our strength to deserve from God both vengeance for our suffering and its reward.
We have discharged the obligation of the task undertaken, with the divine spirit guiding and truth herself standing surety; the duty of asserting and setting forth that truth was laid on me by learning, by faith, and by the Lord himself, apart from whom nothing whatsoever can be known or set out. Now I turn to what stands as the foremost and weightiest portion of this undertaking: teaching the rite and the sacrifice by which God should rightly be worshiped. This, indeed, is the very office belonging to man, and here alone rests the total reckoning of things and the entire design of a blessed existence — since it was for this very purpose that we were shaped and granted breath by him: not so that we would stare up at the heavens and at the sun, as Anaxagoras imagined, but so that with a mind clean and undivided we would honor the one who fashioned both sun and sky. Though in the books preceding this one I defended the truth as best my limited gift allowed, it can nonetheless emerge with the greatest clarity from the rite itself. That holy and singular majesty craves nothing from mankind except innocence alone; whoever brings this offering to God will have sacrificed with sufficient piety, with sufficient reverence. Yet humanity, having cast justice aside, though defiled by crimes and outrages of every description, counts itself devout merely for staining shrines and altars with the gore of slaughtered animals, or drenching hearths with the outpouring of fragrant, aged wine. They go so far as to lay out consecrated feasts and rich banquets, as though offering a portion of these to beings who might share in them. Whatever strikes the eye as rare, whatever costs dearly in craftsmanship or fragrance — this they decide will please their gods, not on any rational ground concerning divinity, of which they are ignorant, but purely out of their own appetites; nor do they grasp that God has no want of earthly riches. They savor nothing beyond the earth, and measure good and bad solely by bodily sense and pleasure. By that same yardstick they calculate religion, exactly as they arrange every act of their entire existence. And since they have once and for all turned from contemplating heaven and surrendered that heavenly faculty of theirs into bondage to the flesh, they loosen the reins on their appetites, as though hoping to carry pleasure off with them, racing to snatch it at every possible instant — though it is the soul that should command the body's service, not the body that should command the soul's. These very people reckon riches to be the supreme good; and when honest means fail to secure it, dishonest ones will. They defraud, they steal, they plunder, they set traps, they swear false oaths — in short, nothing restrains them and nothing troubles their conscience, so long as they glitter with gold, blaze with silver, gems, and fine garments, cram their insatiable stomachs with wealth, and parade about forever surrounded by throngs of household servants clearing a path through the crowd before them. Afflicted in this way, steeped in indulgence, they snuff out the mind's vitality, and while imagining themselves to be living at their fullest, they race toward death at the utmost speed. For as we explained in the second book, heaven's reckoning belongs to the soul, while earth's belongs to the body. Those who disregard what benefits the soul and chase after what benefits the body dwell amid darkness and death — the domain of earth and flesh — since life and light come down from heaven. And because they have become strangers to that light through their servitude to the flesh, they remain far removed from grasping anything of divine matters. That very blindness weighs down the wretched everywhere alike: just as they fail to recognize who the true God is, so too they fail to recognize what true worship is.
They slaughter, then, plump and richly fed victims for God as if he hungered, pour out wine as if he thirsted, kindle lamps as if he labored amid darkness. Yet if they could suspect or conceive in their minds the nature of those heavenly goods — whose vastness even we, still enveloped in earthly bodies, cannot grasp through the senses — they would at once recognize their own utter folly in these empty observances; or if they were willing to gaze upon that heavenly light we call the sun, they would immediately perceive how little that God — who himself granted so brilliant and so clear a light for human use — has any need of their small lamps. And yet, when within so tiny a disk (which, owing to its remoteness, appears no wider than a human head) there dwells such brilliance that no mortal eye can bear to look at it, and the merest attempt brings on a haze and darkness that dims the sight, what measure of light and radiance ought we then to imagine surrounds God himself, in whose presence no night ever falls? He has tempered this very light so that it would injure no living creature through excessive glare or fierce heat, granting it only as much of these qualities as mortal frames could bear or as ripening crops might demand. Can a man, then, be judged sound of mind who offers the giver and author of light a gift of candlelight or wax-taper flame? No — he asks something else of us entirely: not a smoky light but, in the poet's words, one clear and flowing — namely, the light of the mind, on whose account the poets call us 'the living' — a light no one can display except one who has come to recognize God. But the gods of the pagans, being earthly, require lamps so as not to be plunged into darkness; and their devotees, since they have no taste for anything heavenly, drag down even the rites meant to serve those gods to an earthly level, since on earth light truly is needed, given its dark and shadowed nature. So it is that they assign to their gods not a heavenly temperament but a human one, and thus believe that what is needed and pleasing to them matches what we ourselves need — food when hungry, drink when thirsty, clothing against the cold, and lamplight once the sun goes down, so that we can still see. There is, then, no proof more telling, no clearer indication, that these gods — whatever life they once may have had — are now dead, than the rite itself, which belongs entirely to the earth. What heavenly benefit, after all, can lie in the blood of cattle poured out to stain their altars? Unless, perhaps, they imagine that the gods dine on what men themselves scorn even to touch. And whoever supplies them with this rich fare — bandit, adulterer, poisoner, or murderer of kin though he be — will count as blessed and fortunate; such a man they cherish, such a man they shield, granting him whatever he has desired. Persius, therefore, rightly mocks superstitions of this sort in his characteristic way: 'At what price,' he asks, 'will you purchase the ears of the gods? With lungs and greasy entrails?' He understood well enough that it is not flesh that is required to satisfy heaven's majesty, but a mind made holy, a righteous soul, and a heart noble — as he himself puts it — through natural honor. This is heavenly devotion: not what consists of perishable things, but what consists of the virtues belonging to a soul whose origin is heaven above; here is genuine worship — where the worshiper's own mind offers itself to God, spotless, as the sacrificial victim. Yet how this goal is to be reached, how it is to be carried out, the discussion in this book will explain. For nothing could be more splendid or more suited to humanity than instructing people in righteousness. In Cicero's Hortensius, Catulus, ranking philosophy above everything else, declares he would rather own a single slim volume on duty than deliver a lengthy speech defending the rebellious Cornelius. This view, though credited to Catulus — who perhaps never actually voiced it — should really be attributed to Cicero, its author, who wrote it, I suspect, to promote the treatises on duties he was about to compose, in which he himself states that nothing within the whole of philosophy surpasses in value the giving of rules for how to live. But if those who never learned the truth do this much, how much more should we undertake it — we who, schooled and enlightened by God, are capable of teaching what is genuinely true! Even so, we shall not teach as though laying out the earliest rudiments of virtue, a task without end; instead, we shall proceed as though tasked with instructing someone who, among the pagans, already appears fully formed. For their teachings — the ones they customarily offer in favor of upright conduct — will remain standing, and upon them we shall build what they do not know, so as to bring justice, which they lack, to its full completion. Since I am resolved to expose and refute their errors, no one should think I have taken anything from men I mean to correct; for that reason whatever they already hold in common with us will simply be passed over here.
Two roads necessarily mark the course along which human life must travel — one climbing toward heaven, the other plunging down to the underworld; both the poets in their verses and the philosophers in their treatises have brought these roads into view. The philosophers, for their part, insisted that one road belongs to the virtues and the other to the vices; and the one allotted to virtue, they claim, is steep and broken at its first approach — yet whoever has overcome that difficulty and reached its peak finds thereafter a level path, a bright and welcoming plain, and gathers rich, delightful fruit from every labor undertaken; whereas those discouraged by the hardship of that first stretch slip and veer instead onto the road of vice, which appears pleasant and far more traveled at its entrance, but once they have advanced a little way along it, that pleasant appearance vanishes abruptly, giving way to a steep and treacherous track, at times rough with stones, at times choked with brambles, at times split by whirlpools or rushing with torrents, so that stumbling, slipping, and falling become unavoidable. All of this is presented to show that in the pursuit of virtue the labor is greatest, yet once virtue is gained the rewards are greatest too, and the pleasures solid and lasting — while vice lures the minds of men through certain natural enticements, and having ensnared them with the appearance of hollow delights, drags them onward into bitter sorrows and misfortunes. Had they actually grasped what shape the virtues take and where their proper boundaries lie, this reasoning would deserve real praise; but no such grasp was theirs — neither of the virtues' true nature nor of the reward God reserves for those who possess them, a subject the following two books will take up. These philosophers, uncertain or ignorant of whether human souls are immortal, measured both virtues and vices according to earthly honors and penalties instead. This entire discussion of the two roads, then, ultimately comes down to a contrast between restraint and excess. They say the course of a human life resembles the letter Y, since every person, upon reaching the threshold of early youth and arriving at the point where the path forks in two directions, stands hesitant and uncertain, unsure which branch to favor; should he happen upon a guide able to steer his faltering steps toward the better path — that is, should he acquire philosophy, or eloquence, or some other honorable skill leading to a worthy outcome, something unattainable without the greatest exertion — they hold that he will pass through a life both honorable and abundant; but should he fail to find a teacher of restraint, he tumbles onto the left-hand path, which falsely imitates the look of the better one — meaning he surrenders himself to idleness, sloth, and excess, options that seem agreeable for a time to someone unaware of the true good, but which later, once every shred of standing and property has been squandered, condemn him to live out his days steeped in wretchedness and disgrace. They confined the endpoints of these two roads, then, to the body and to this earthly existence we lead. The poets, perhaps, fared somewhat better, wishing to place this fork in the road within the underworld — though they too err in setting these paths before those already dead. Both groups, then, spoke truth in part, yet both got it wrong, since the roads themselves ought to have been tied to this life, and their destinations to death. We, accordingly, speak with greater accuracy and truth in calling these two roads those of heaven and of the underworld, since immortality awaits the just and eternal punishment the unjust. How these roads either lift one up to heaven or hurl one down to the underworld I shall now set out, disclosing what the virtues are — something the philosophers never knew — then showing what rewards attend them, and likewise what the vices are and what penalties belong to them. Someone might perhaps expect me to treat vices and virtues in separate discussions, yet in speaking of the good, its opposite can be understood at the same time. For whether you introduce the virtues, the vices will retreat of their own accord, or whether you banish the vices, the virtues will step forward unbidden; such is the fixed nature of good and evil, that they wage constant war against each other, each forever driving the other out. Hence it follows that vice cannot be uprooted apart from virtue, nor can virtue be planted without vice first being removed. We present these roads, then, in a manner far removed from how the philosophers customarily present them: first, because we hold that a guide stands over each road, both guides immortal, yet one honored — who presides over the virtues and the good things of life — the other condemned — who presides over the vices and the evils. They, however, station a guide only on the right-hand road, and not even a single lasting one, since they bring in whatever teacher of some worthy skill happens to be available, one who calls people back from idleness and trains them toward prudence. Nor do they permit anyone but boys and young men to set foot on that road, evidently because such skills are learned only at those ages. We, however, lead people of every sex, standing, and age onto this heavenly journey, since God — the guide of that road — denies immortality to no one who has been born. Nor is the shape of these roads as the philosophers supposed. For what use is there in the letter Y when the matters at hand are so contrary and so different from one another? Rather, the better road faces the rising sun, the worse one its setting, since whoever follows truth and justice will, having received the reward of immortality, possess unending light, while whoever, misled by that wicked guide, has chosen vice over virtue and falsehood over truth, must inevitably be carried down toward the setting sun and into eternal darkness. I shall therefore trace out each of these roads and set forth their features and their character.
There is, then, a single road belonging to virtue and to the good, one that carries a man not toward the Elysian Fields the poets describe, but all the way to the world's own citadel, whereas the road on the left metes out punishment to the wicked and delivers them to godless Tartarus. That road belongs to the accuser, who, having established depraved rites, steers people off the celestial course and drives them onto the path leading to ruin. The look and shape of this road is arranged for the eye in such a way that it seems level and open and delightful with every kind of flower and fruit. On it God has placed everything that is counted good on earth — wealth, I mean, honor, ease, pleasure, every enticement — but together with these, equally, injustice, cruelty, arrogance, treachery, lust, greed, discord, ignorance, falsehood, folly, and the rest of the vices. The end of this road is this: when one comes to its final point, from which there is no longer any turning back, all its beauty is cut off so suddenly that no one can foresee the deception before he is hurled down and falls into the deep abyss. Anyone seized by the outward glitter of goods that belong only to the present, absorbed in chasing and savoring them, will fail to foresee what comes after death and so turns away from God; such a one will indeed be hurled down to the underworld and sentenced to punishment without end. But the heavenly road is set before us as steep and difficult, rough with bristling thorns or blocked by jutting rocks, so that everyone must walk it with the utmost toil and wear of foot and with great fear of falling. On this road God has placed justice, self-control, patience, faith, chastity, restraint, concord, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and the rest of the virtues, but together with these, at the same time, poverty, disgrace, labor, grief, and every bitterness. Whoever stretches his hope further and prefers the better things will go without these earthly goods, so that, unencumbered and light, he may overcome the difficulty of the road. For the man who has wrapped himself in royal display or loaded himself with riches cannot even enter that narrow passage, let alone hold to it. From this it can be understood why things come more easily to the wicked and unjust when they desire them — because their road slopes downward and runs easy — while for the good, what they wish for is hard to attain, because they walk a hard and steep path. The just man, then, because he has set out on a rough and difficult road, must inevitably be an object of contempt, mockery, and hatred. For all those whom greed or pleasure drags headlong envy the one who has been able to lay hold of virtue, and take it hard that someone possesses what they themselves do not. So he will be poor, lowly, obscure, exposed to wrong, and yet enduring everything bitter — but if he carries his unbroken patience through to that highest step and final goal, the crown of virtue will be given him, and by God he will be rewarded with immortality for the labors he bore in life for the sake of justice. These are the roads which God has assigned to human life: on each of them he has shown both good things and bad, but in reversed and inverted order. On the one road he has displayed temporary evils first, together with eternal goods — which is the better arrangement; on the other, temporary goods first, together with eternal evils — which is the worse arrangement — so that whoever chooses present evils along with justice obtains greater and more certain goods than those he scorned, while whoever puts present goods ahead of justice falls into evils greater and longer-lasting than those he fled. For since this bodily life is short, its evils and its goods too must necessarily be short; but that spiritual life, which is the opposite of this earthly one, being everlasting, has goods and evils that are likewise everlasting. So it happens that after brief goods come eternal evils, and after brief evils come eternal goods. Therefore, since good and evil are set before man together, each person ought to consider for himself how much better it is to weigh brief evils against everlasting goods than to endure everlasting evils for the sake of brief and passing goods. For just as in this world, when a contest with an enemy is at hand, one must labor first in order to have ease afterward — one must endure hunger and thirst, bear heat and cold, sleep on the ground, keep watch, face danger — so that, with one's dear ones safe, and one's home and property and all the goods of peace and victory intact, one may afterward enjoy them; but if instead one prefers present ease to labor, one necessarily brings upon oneself the greatest evil — for the enemy will strike first against one who offers no resistance, the fields will be laid waste, the house plundered, wife and children carried off as spoil, and the man himself killed or captured; and to prevent all this, present comfort must be put off, so that a greater and more lasting comfort may be won — so it is in this whole life: because God has kept an adversary in reserve for us, so that we might have the chance to lay hold of virtue, present pleasure must be set aside, lest the enemy overwhelm us; we must keep watch, stand our posts, go out on campaigns, and in the end shed our blood, bearing everything bitter and heavy with patience — all the more readily because our commander, God, has appointed eternal rewards for our labors. And since in this earthly campaign men exhaust so much toil to win for themselves things that can perish in the very way they were won, surely no effort should be declined by those of us who gain something that can never in any way be taken away. It was God's will, in bringing man into being for this warfare, that he stand ready unencumbered in the battle line and to watch, with mind sharply intent, against the single enemy's ambushes or open assaults — an enemy who, like a skilled and seasoned general, hunts us down by various arts, raging according to each person's nature and character. On some he unleashes insatiable greed, so as to shake them loose from the road of truth, bound as if by chains to their own riches; others he inflames with the goads of anger, so as to turn them away from contemplating God and toward doing harm instead; others he plunges into unrestrained lusts, so that, enslaved to pleasure and to the body, they cannot look toward virtue; on others still he breathes envy, so that, consumed by their own torments, they think of nothing but the good fortune of those they hate. Others he puffs up with ambitions — these are the ones who turn all the effort and care of their life toward holding public office, so as to have their names inscribed on the calendars and attached to the years. The greed of some reaches higher still — not content to rule provinces for a time by the sword, they want to be called masters, with unlimited and permanent power, of the whole human race. But those he sees to be devout he entangles in various false cults, so as to make them impious. And on those who seek wisdom he thrusts philosophy before their eyes, so that, blinded by its semblance of light, they may fail to grasp and hold the truth. Thus he has blocked every approach for mankind and hedged in the roads, delighting in the errors of the public at large. So that we might be able to see through these snares and overcome the very author of these evils, God has enlightened us and armed us with true and heavenly virtue. It is of this virtue that I must now speak.
But before I begin to set out the individual virtues, virtue itself must be defined — something the philosophers have not correctly defined, either what it is, or in what matters it consists, what it does, or what duty it involves. They have kept only the name, but have lost its force and reasoning and effect. Whatever the philosophers customarily say in defining virtue, Lucilius has gathered together and set forth in a short passage of verse, and I would rather set that down here than drag on longer than needed refuting each opinion in turn. "Albinus, virtue means being able to render the true worth of the things among which we live and move; virtue means that a man knows what each thing is truly worth; it means knowing what is right and beneficial and honorable, what counts as good and, likewise, what counts as bad, what is worthless, base, and disgraceful; virtue means grasping the proper limit and measure in what one pursues; it means being able to pay riches their true value; it means rendering to honor whatever is genuinely its due; it means standing as the enemy and adversary of wicked men and wicked conduct, and, conversely, as the champion of good men and good conduct; esteeming such people highly, wishing them well, living as their friend; and beyond that, weighing the good of one's homeland as the first concern, one's parents' good as the second, and one's own as the third and last." From these definitions, which the poet has briefly summed up, Marcus Tullius drew his account of the duties of life, following the Stoic Panaetius, and packed them into three books. How false these are we shall soon see, so that it may appear how much divine favor has bestowed upon us, in revealing the truth to us. He said that virtue is to know what is good and bad, what is shameful, what is honorable, what is useful, what is not. He could have put it more briefly by simply saying good and bad, since nothing can be useful or honorable that is not likewise good, and nothing useless or shameful that is not likewise bad. This is also the view of the philosophers, and Cicero himself shows it in the third book of the work mentioned above. Yet knowledge itself does not amount to virtue, since it does not originate within us but reaches us from outside ourselves. And whatever can pass from one person to another is not virtue, because virtue belongs properly to each individual. Knowledge, then, is the benefit of another, since it consists in hearing; virtue is wholly our own, since it consists in the will to do good. Just as, then, in making a journey it is of no use to know the road unless one also has the effort and strength to walk it, so knowledge is of no use if one's own virtue is lacking. For even most of those who sin, though not with full clarity, nevertheless sense what is good and bad, and whenever they do something shameful, they know they are sinning, and for that reason try to hide it. So although the nature of good and bad does not deceive them, they are overcome by evil desire into sinning, because they lack virtue — that is, the desire to do what is right and honorable. It follows, then, that knowing what is good and what is bad is one matter, and possessing virtue quite another, since knowledge can exist apart from virtue — as happened with most of the philosophers. And in this case, since it is rightly counted a fault not to have done what you knew you should, it is rightly the depraved will and the vicious mind — which ignorance cannot excuse — that will be punished. Therefore, just as virtue is not to know good and bad, so virtue is to do good and not to do bad. And yet knowledge is joined to virtue in such a way that knowledge comes first and virtue follows knowledge, since understanding is of no use unless action follows it as well. Horace, then, comes a little closer to the truth: "virtue is to flee vice, and this is the beginning of wisdom" — but he does it clumsily, because he has defined the one by its opposite, as if he had said, "the good is what is not bad." For if I do not know what virtue is, then I do not know what vice is either. Both, then, need defining, since the nature of the matter is such that both must necessarily be understood together, or neither understood at all. But let us do what he ought to have done. Virtue is to restrain anger, to check greed, to curb lust — for that is to flee vice. For nearly everything that is done unjustly and shamefully arises from these passions. If the onset of that agitation called anger is blunted, all the wicked conflicts among men will be put to rest — no one will plot against another, no one will rush forward to do harm. So too, if greed is kept under control, nobody will go pillaging across land or water, and nobody will march an army out to seize and ravage what is not theirs. Likewise, if the heat of lust is restrained, every age and sex will keep its purity, and no one will either suffer or commit anything shameful. So then, once these passions are calmed by virtue, every kind of crime and outrage will be removed from the life and conduct of men. And this calming of the passions and emotions comes down to this: that we do everything rightly. The entire duty that virtue carries out, then, comes down to this: not sinning. Yet no one can fulfill this duty who does not know God, since ignorance of the one from whom good things arise must necessarily thrust the ignorant man, unaware, into vices. And so, to state each one's essential task more briefly and clearly: knowing God belongs to knowledge, while worshiping him belongs to virtue — wisdom resides in the first, justice in the second.
I have already said, first, that mere knowledge of the good is not the same as virtue, and then explained what virtue is and where it is found. Next I must briefly show that these philosophers were equally in the dark about the good and the evil themselves, a point nearly settled in book three, where I treated the supreme good. Anyone ignorant of what the supreme good was could hardly avoid erring about lesser goods and evils too, for no one lacking hold of the source from which such things flow can weigh them by a true measure. That source, in the case of goods, is God; in the case of evils, it is that adversary forever hostile to the divine name, the one I have described more than once — from these two origins spring both good things and bad. What descends from God carries this property: it prepares one for immortality, the supreme good. What comes instead from that other power has this task: to pull a person away from heavenly concerns, sink him into earthly ones, and destroy him with punishment that never ends — the supreme evil. Can it be doubted, then, that every one of these thinkers failed to grasp good and evil, given that they recognized neither God nor his adversary? Consequently they anchored the goal of goods in the body and in this short span of life, a life bound to dissolve and die, and pushed their inquiry no further. Everything they teach and everything they call good stays rooted in the soil and lies flat upon the ground, since it perishes along with the body — which is itself earth. None of it serves to secure a truly human life; instead it serves the pursuit or growth of riches, honor, glory, and power, all of which are as mortal as the man who toiled to gain them. Hence the verse: virtue lies in knowing the goal and the limit of what one seeks. They teach the methods and skills for acquiring household wealth, since they notice how often it is pursued badly. But such virtue is not the kind proposed for a wise man — seeking riches is not virtue at all, for neither finding nor keeping them lies within our control. The wicked, in fact, manage both the search and the gain more easily than the good do. Virtue cannot, then, reside in the pursuit of things whose very rejection is what reveals virtue's strength and rationale; nor would virtue ever run over to the things a great and noble spirit is eager to trample and crush underfoot. It is not fitting either that a soul fixed on heavenly goods be pulled away from its imperishable wealth merely to gather fragile things for itself; rather, virtue's true accounting lies above all in securing what neither any man nor even death can take away. Given all this, the following line also holds true: virtue means being able to pay a price out of one's own riches. This verse says much the same as the first two. Yet neither the poet nor any philosopher after him could say what that price actually is, of what nature, or in what it consists. The poet, and everyone who followed him, supposed that using riches correctly meant living frugally — not staging lavish feasts, not giving away wealth carelessly, not pouring one's estate into worthless or disgraceful things. Someone might object: 'What, then — are you denying that this is virtue?' No, I do not deny it; to deny it would put me in the position of arguing the reverse. What I deny is that it is true virtue, since it is not heavenly at all but wholly of the earth, accomplishing nothing that does not stay behind on the earth. I will explain more fully, when I come to discuss the duty owed to piety, what using wealth rightly means and what benefit ought to be sought from riches. Everything that follows after this, though, is false in every respect. Declaring war on wrongdoers, or taking up the cause of the good, is something wicked men can do just as readily as good ones. Some, cloaking themselves in a false decency, carve out a path to power and perform many of the same acts good men perform — all the more eagerly, in fact, because deception is their motive. If only actually being good were as effortless as merely pretending to be! But once these men have gotten what they set their hearts and vows on and have climbed to the summit of power, they drop the mask and reveal their real character: they plunder everything, they abuse and torment, they hunt down the very good men whose cause they once claimed to champion, and they saw off the rungs by which they rose, so that nobody can climb after them the same way. Even granting, though, that defending the good belongs to good men alone as a duty — taking it up is simple, but carrying it through is not, because once you commit to the contest, the outcome rests with God's judgment, not your own, and the wicked, being generally stronger both in number and in collusion, mean that overcoming them takes good fortune as much as virtue. Does anyone doubt how often the better, more just side has gone down in defeat? That is the source of every harsh tyranny ever inflicted on citizens. Every history book overflows with such cases, but one will suffice for us here. Gnaeus Pompey set out to champion the good, taking up arms for the republic, the senate, and liberty; yet he lost, dying together with that very liberty, decapitated by Egyptian eunuchs and left unburied and discarded. Virtue, then, cannot consist in being either the foe of wrongdoers or the champion of the good, since virtue cannot be made hostage to the swings of fortune. Moreover, to rank a homeland's advantages first, once quarrels among men are set aside, amounts to nothing at all. What are a homeland's advantages, after all, but another people's or nation's losses — pushing borders outward by seizing them violently from others, expanding one's dominion, raising tribute? None of that counts as virtue; it is instead virtue's undoing. To begin with, the bond that holds human society together is torn apart, innocence is destroyed, respect for what belongs to another is destroyed, and finally justice itself is destroyed — justice, which cannot survive the splitting of the human race, and which must be driven out and exiled wherever weapons gleam. Cicero's remark holds true here: those who insist that consideration is owed to fellow citizens but not to foreigners rip apart the shared fellowship of humankind, and once that goes, kindness, generosity, decency, and justice collapse entirely. How, after all, can someone be just who injures, hates, robs, and kills? Yet these are exactly the acts of those who claim to serve their country's interests. They do not even grasp what serving it means, since they count nothing useful or worthwhile except what can be gripped in the hand — and that very thing cannot really be held onto, because it can always be torn away. So whoever amasses these so-called goods on behalf of the homeland — that is, whoever, once cities are toppled and peoples wiped out, fills the treasury with plunder, seizes territory, and enriches his fellow citizens — that man gets praised to the heavens, and people imagine the highest, most complete virtue resides in him. Such an error belongs not merely to ordinary, untaught people but to philosophers too, who supply rules even for injustice, so that folly and wickedness never lack their own teaching and authority. So when they debate the duties tied to military service, none of that reasoning applies to justice or genuine virtue at all — it applies instead to this present life and civic custom, which, as the facts themselves and Cicero's own words attest, is not the same as justice. 'But,' he says, 'we hold no solid, clearly outlined image of true right and authentic justice; we work only from shadow and likeness — would that we even kept faithfully to these! for they are drawn from nature's and truth's finest models.' What they took for justice, then, is only justice's shadow and reflection. And what of wisdom? Does he not likewise admit that none exists among the philosophers either? When Fabricius is called just, or Aristides, courage is sought as an example from the one, justice from the other, as though from a sage. Yet none of them was wise in the sense we mean by a wise man, nor were those regarded and named as such — Marcus Cato, Gaius Laelius — truly wise, nor even the famed Seven Sages; rather, through a steady run of middling conduct they bore a certain likeness and outward semblance of wisdom. If, then, wisdom is stripped from the philosophers by their own admission, and justice stripped from those thought just, then every one of those accounts of virtue must be false, since only a just and wise man can know what true virtue is — and no one is just and wise except the one instructed by God through heavenly commands.
For all those regarded as wise merely because others admit their own folly are led on by a semblance of virtue and grasp only shadows and images, nothing genuine. This happens because that deceptive road, the one running toward ruin, branches into many paths on account of how greatly people's pursuits and disciplines differ, since human lives vary and diverge so widely. For just as the path of wisdom carries a trace of folly — a point already established in the previous book — so this path, wholly composed of folly, carries a trace of wisdom that those who grasp common folly seize upon; and just as it displays open vices, it likewise carries something that looks like virtue; and just as it commits open crime, it also bears a certain semblance and look of justice. How else could that road's guide, whose entire strength and power rest on deception, lead everyone astray unless he displayed to men things resembling the truth? For God, so that His immortal mystery might stay concealed, set along His own road things that men would recoil from as wicked and shameful, so that, turned away from the wisdom and truth they sought without any guide, they would stumble into the very thing they meant to avoid and escape. And so he revealed that road of ruin and death as manifold, both because life takes many forms and because many gods are worshipped. Its guide, a treacherous deceiver, so that some distinction might seem to exist between false and true, evil and good, steers the self-indulgent one way and those called thrifty another, the untrained one way and the educated another, the idle one way and the vigorous another, fools one way and philosophers another — and not even by a single route for each. People untroubled by pleasure or riches he nudges only slightly off from this crowded public road; but those who wish to pursue virtue, or who profess contempt for worldly things, he drags along rough and broken cliffs. Still, every one of these routes that puts a good face on things is not truly a separate road, but a side-path or by-lane, seeming to branch rightward from that common way, yet all converging, in the end, on the very same destination. There that guide brings them all together, at the point where good had to be sorted from wicked, strong from weak, and wise from foolish — that is, in the matter of worshipping the gods, where, since all of them without exception were fools, he cuts every throat with one stroke and hurls them down into death. But this other road — the road of truth, wisdom, virtue, and life, of which all things there is one source, one force, one seat — is itself single, so that with like minds and complete harmony we may follow and worship the one God together; and it is narrow, since virtue has been granted to few; and it is steep, since the good, being highest and most exalted, can be reached only through the greatest difficulty and toil.
This is the road philosophers search for, yet fail to find, precisely because they hunt for it on earth, where it has no power to show itself. So they wander as if lost on a vast sea, unaware of where they are being swept, since they can neither make out the road nor follow any guide. By the same logic, this road of life must be sought the way ships seek their course on the open water: unless sailors watch some light in the sky, they drift on uncertain paths. So whoever strives to keep to the true course of life ought not to fix his gaze on the earth but on the heavens and, to put it more plainly, ought to follow not a man but God, serve not these earthly images but the God of the sky, refer everything not to the body but to the mind, and give his effort not to this present life but to the eternal one. Thus, if you keep your eyes always turned toward heaven and watch the sun where it rises, taking it as the guide of your life the way a helmsman takes a star, your feet will naturally be steered onto the road, and that heavenly light — far brighter to a sound mind than this sun we view with mortal eyes — will guide and steer you so surely that it brings you, without a single misstep, all the way to the harbor of wisdom and virtue. We must therefore take up God's law, the one meant to direct us on this path — that sacred, heavenly law which Marcus Tullius sketched in almost divine language in the third book of his work on the republic; I set down his own words below rather than saying more myself: 'True law is nothing other than right reason, matching nature, spread through every people, unchanging, eternal — a law that summons us to duty by its commands and turns us from wrongdoing by its prohibitions; yet it neither commands nor forbids upright men in vain, nor sways the wicked by ordering or forbidding them anything. Nothing may be added to this law, nor may any part of it be taken away, nor can the whole of it ever be repealed; no vote of a senate or an assembly can free us from its hold; no one needs to search out an expositor or interpreter such as Sextus Aelius; nor will a different law stand in Rome from the one at Athens, nor a different one now from what will hold later — a single law, everlasting and unalterable, will govern every nation for all time, and one figure alone will preside as shared master and governor of everyone, namely God; he is the one who devised, judges, and enacted this law, and whoever refuses to obey it is fleeing from his own self, and having rejected his own human nature, will for that very reason suffer the gravest penalties, even should he slip past every other punishment people imagine.' Who, possessing real knowledge of God's mystery, could have set out God's law as tellingly as this man did, for all that he stood far removed from any grasp of the truth? For my own part, I think that people who speak truths they do not themselves grasp should be regarded as though inspired by some prophetic spirit. And if he had likewise recognized and spelled out the very precepts that make up this sacred law, just as he perceived its force and rationale, he would have carried out not the role of a philosopher, but that of a prophet. Since he was incapable of doing so, the task falls to us, since it is to us that this same law has been entrusted by that single master and governor of all, God.
Knowing God, obeying him alone, and worshiping him alone — these together form the primary demand this law makes. A man who does not know God, the author of his own soul, cannot lay claim to reason at all; that ignorance is the height of impiety. It is this same ignorance that drives him to serve other gods, than which nothing more wicked can be committed. From it there follows an easy slide toward wrongdoing, through not knowing the true and singular good; for God, whom he refuses to know, is himself the source of goodness. Or if instead he chooses to pursue justice, being ignorant of the divine law he will embrace the statutes of his own people as though they were true justice — statutes which utility, not justice, devised. Why else have such varied and empty laws been established among every nation, if not because each people has ratified for itself whatever it judged useful to its own affairs? And how far utility departs from justice the Roman people themselves show, who by declaring wars through their fetial priests, by inflicting injuries under the cover of legality, and by continually seizing and plundering what belonged to others, gained possession of the whole world. Yet these same people think themselves just so long as they violate none of their own laws — a restraint that can equally be put down to fear, if it is the dread of present punishment that keeps them from crime. But let us grant, if you like, that they do by nature, or as the philosopher says by their own free choice, what the laws otherwise compel them to do. Will they therefore be just, simply because they obey the ordinances of men who might themselves have erred or been unjust — men like those who drew up the Twelve Tables, or who at any rate served the public advantage as the conditions of their time required? Civil law, then, which varies everywhere according to custom, is one thing; true justice, which God has set before all men, uniform and simple, is another. Whoever is ignorant of God must necessarily be ignorant of justice itself as well. But let us suppose it possible for someone, through a natural and inborn goodness, to attain the true virtues — as we are told Cimon of Athens did, who gave alms to the needy, invited the poor to his table, and clothed the naked. Even so, since the one thing that matters most is lacking — the recognition of God — all those good deeds become useless and empty, so that he has labored in vain to achieve them. All his righteousness will be like a human body without a head: though every limb keeps its place, its shape, its proper condition, yet because the part that governs everything is missing, the body has neither life nor any feeling at all. Those limbs have only the appearance of limbs; they serve no function — just as a head without a body serves none. The man who is like this is one who, though he does not fail to know God, lives unjustly; he possesses only the supreme part, but to no purpose, since he lacks the virtues that correspond to the limbs. So then, if a body is to live and feel, two things are required together — knowledge of God, functioning like a head, and the whole array of virtues, functioning like the limbs. Only so does a man become whole and living. Yet the sum of everything still lies in the head, which, though it cannot stand complete without all the limbs, can stand without some of them. Such a creature will indeed be flawed and weak, yet it goes on living — the same is true of a man who acknowledges God but still falls into sin here and there, since God is willing to forgive sins. Thus one can live without some limbs, but not at all without a head. This is why philosophers, even granting that they are naturally good, still know nothing and understand nothing. Everything they have learned and every virtue they possess is decapitated, since God — the true head governing both virtue and wisdom — remains unknown to them. Not recognizing him leaves a man effectively sightless whatever he looks at, effectively deaf to whatever reaches his ears, and mute no matter what words leave his mouth. Once, however, he comes to acknowledge the one who fashioned and fathers all things, sight, hearing, and speech are restored to him. A head has now grown upon him — the single organ where every sense converges: eyes, ears, tongue together. For truly it is the one who has gazed with the eyes of his heart upon truth, in which God resides, or upon God, in whom truth resides, who sees; it is the one who fastens the divine voice and its life-giving precepts to his own heart who hears; it is the one who, discoursing on heavenly things, proclaims the power and majesty of the one God. There is therefore no doubt that whoever fails to recognize God is impious, and that all the virtues he supposes himself to possess or to hold are to be found only on that death-dealing road that is wholly darkness. For this reason there is nothing anyone should congratulate himself on if he has gained these hollow virtues, since it is necessary that he be not merely wretched, for lacking the good things that are truly present, but also foolish, for undertaking the greatest labors of his life to no purpose. For once the hope of immortality is stripped away — the hope God promises to those devoted to his religion, for the sake of attaining which virtue is to be pursued and whatever evils occur are to be endured — it would surely be the height of folly to want to submit to virtues that bring a man calamities and hardships for nothing. For if virtue means bravely enduring and undergoing poverty, exile, pain, and death — things others fear — what good does it hold in itself, that philosophers should say it ought to be sought for its own sake? Clearly they take pleasure in pointless and empty sufferings, when they might live in peace instead. For if souls are mortal, if virtue will amount to nothing once the body dissolves, why do we flee the good things given to us, as though ungrateful or unworthy to enjoy divine gifts to the full? Yet to have those good things we would have to live wickedly and impiously, since poverty is virtue's — that is, justice's — companion. So no one is in his right mind who, with no greater hope set before him, prefers hardship, torment, and misery to the good things that others enjoy in life. But if virtue, as is most rightly said among us, is to be embraced because it is agreed that man is born for it, then some greater hope must underlie it, one that offers a great and splendid consolation for the evils and hardships that it belongs to virtue to bear. Nor, given how harsh virtue is on its own terms, can it count as good except by measuring its hardship against some greater good that outweighs it. Equally, one can abstain from these present goods only if there are other, greater goods for whose sake it is worth both foregoing pleasures and enduring every evil. And these, as I showed in the third book, are none other than the goods of eternal life. But who can guarantee this except God, who set virtue itself before us? Everything of consequence, therefore, turns on the recognition and worship of God: in this lies all of man's hope and salvation; this is the first step of wisdom, that we should know who our true father is and pay him alone the devotion that is his due, obey him, serve him with utmost devotion, and direct every act, every care, every labor toward earning his favor.
Having covered what is owed to God, I turn next to man's due — though whatever is given to man passes on to God as well, man being God's own image. Justice has two duties: union with God comes first, union with fellow man second. Religion names the former; the latter goes by mercy, or humanity. This virtue belongs properly to the just, to those who worship God, because it alone holds together the bond of common life. For God, who gave no wisdom to the other animals, made them safer instead through natural defenses against attack and danger; but man, because he fashioned him naked and frail so as to equip him instead with wisdom, gave him besides everything else this feeling of devotion, so that man might watch over man, love him, cherish him, and both receive and offer help against every danger. The greatest bond among men, then, is humanity itself; whoever breaks it must be judged wicked and a murderer of his own kin. For if we all descend from the one man whom God formed, we are certainly kindred, and so it must be counted the gravest crime to hate a fellow man, even one who has done us harm. For this reason God commanded that enmities are never to be started by us and must always be set aside, so that we might soften those who are hostile to us by reminding them of our common bond. Likewise, if we are all breathed into life and given soul by the one God, what else are we but brothers — and indeed more closely joined in soul than those united merely by blood? So Lucretius is not mistaken when he says: we are all sprung, in the end, from heavenly seed, and the same being is father to us all. Those, then, who harm their fellow man, who plunder, torture, kill, and drive out others in defiance of the law of humanity and every right, must be reckoned no better than savage beasts. Because of this kinship of common birth, God teaches us never to do evil and always to do good. And what doing good actually consists in he likewise prescribes: to bring help to the downtrodden and the struggling, to share food with those who have none. For since God is merciful, he willed us to be a social creature; and so we ought to see ourselves in other men. We do not deserve to be rescued in danger if we do not go to the aid of others; we do not deserve help if we refuse it. On this point the philosophers have handed down no teaching at all; caught up in the appearance of a false virtue, they have stripped mercy away from mankind, and in trying to cure it they have only corrupted it. And though they generally admit that the bond of human society must be preserved, by the very harshness of their so-called virtue, which is inhuman, they cut themselves loose from it. So this error of theirs, too, must be exposed here — the error of those who think nothing ought to be shared with anyone. They give more than one account of the origin and cause of the founding of cities. Some tell how the earth's earliest offspring, sprung directly from the ground, led a roaming existence through woods and fields, bound to one another by no tie of speech or law, using leaves and grass for beds and caves and dens for houses, fell prey to wild beasts and to stronger animals. Then those who had either escaped being torn apart, or had seen their neighbors torn apart, warned by their own peril, ran to other men, begged for protection, and first made their wishes known by gestures, then attempted the beginnings of speech, and by gradually attaching names to particular things worked out, little by little, a system of language. And when they saw that the group as a whole needed defending against the beasts, they began even to fortify towns, so as to secure themselves a safe night's rest, or to keep off the beasts' raids and attacks not by fighting them but by erecting ramparts against them. What minds unworthy of men, to have produced such nonsense — wretched and pitiable men, to have committed their own foolishness to writing and to memory! For though they could see that even dumb animals possess an innate capacity to gather together, or to seek one another out, or to flee danger, or to guard against harm, or to prepare for themselves beds and shelters, they nevertheless supposed that men themselves could learn only by being taught through such examples what to fear, what to guard against, what they ought to do — as though men would never have come together at all, or worked out a system of speech, if the beasts had not first devoured them. All this seemed, to others, delirious — and so it was — and they said that it was not the mauling of wild beasts that caused men to come together, but rather humanity itself; that men gathered because human nature shuns solitude and seeks fellowship and society. There is no great dispute between these two accounts, since though the causes given differ, the outcome described is the same. So either account is possible, since they do not contradict each other; and yet neither is true in any way, because men were not born from the earth across the whole world, sown like teeth from some dragon, as the poets tell it, but rather God shaped a single man, and out of him alone the entire globe came to be populated with humankind — precisely the same mechanism, in fact, that repopulated it after the flood, something they can hardly dispute. No such gathering, then, took place at the beginning, and anyone whose reason has not failed him will understand that there were never men on earth who, apart from infancy, could not speak. But let us grant, for argument's sake, that those tales the idle and foolish old men tell are true, so that we may refute them by their own reasoning and on their own terms. Suppose this was indeed why men banded together — to shore up their individual frailty through helping one another; it follows that anyone in need must receive that help. For since men entered into and ratified a society with other men for the sake of protection, that compact, safeguarded from its very origin among men, must be considered a supreme wrong either to violate or to fail to keep. For whoever withdraws himself from offering help must also be excluded from receiving it, since a man who denies his own effort to another supposes he needs no one else's. But such a man, who separates and cuts himself off from the body, must live not in the manner of a human being but in the manner of wild beasts. And if that cannot be done, then the bond of human society must be maintained by every means, because man simply cannot live without man. And the preservation of that society consists in mutual support — that is, in giving help so that we may in turn receive it. But if, as those others argue, the gathering of men came about for the sake of humanity itself, then surely man ought to recognize his fellow man. And if even those crude men, still half wild, did this before any system of speech had even been established, what obligation, then, falls on people who have since become cultivated and are linked to each other through shared speech and shared everything else — people so used to one another's company that solitude is unbearable to them?
We must therefore preserve our common humanity, if we wish to be called men in the true sense. And what is it, this preserving of humanity, but loving a fellow man because he is a man and is the same thing that we ourselves are? Strife and discord, then, are contrary to the reasoned nature of man, and that saying of Cicero is true, that a man who obeys nature cannot bring harm upon a man. If, then, it is against nature to harm a man, it must follow that to help a man is in keeping with nature. Whoever fails to do this strips himself of the very name of man, since it is the office of humanity to come to the aid of a man's need and danger. I ask, then, of those who think it beneath a wise man to be moved and to show pity: if a man, seized by some wild beast, should beg help from an armed man standing by, would they think he ought to be rescued, or not? Such is their shame that even they will not deny that humanity's demand and appeal must be honored. Likewise, if someone is trapped by fire, crushed beneath a collapsing building, drowning in the sea, or swept away by a river, surely they would not say it is beneath a man to help him. They would not be men themselves if they thought so — for no one is exempt from being subject to dangers of this kind — indeed, they will say that to save one about to perish is the mark of both a man and a courageous man. If, then, in cases such as these, because they bring danger of death upon a man, they grant that it is a matter of humanity to come to his aid, what reason is there that, if a man is hungry, thirsty, or cold, they should not think he ought to be helped? Though these situations are, by their very nature, equal to those chance calamities and call for one and the same humanity, yet they draw a distinction between them, because they measure everything not by the truth of the matter itself but by present advantage. Those whom they snatch from danger, they hope will show them gratitude in return; but the needy, because they hope for nothing from them, they reckon that whatever is given to such people is simply lost. Hence comes that detestable maxim of Plautus: he who gives food to a beggar does poorly, for what he gives is wasted, and he only prolongs the man's life into misery. But perhaps, one might say, the poet was speaking in another's character. What then? Does not Marcus Tullius, in his books on moral duties, urge this very same thing — that one ought not to give freely at all? For he says: giving that is drawn from one's own household resources drains dry the very spring of generosity. Thus generosity is undone by generosity; the more people you use it on, the less you will be able to use it on many. And the same author, shortly after, says: what is more foolish than to take care that you cannot go on doing, for very long, what you gladly do? Clearly this professor of wisdom reins men back from humanity and advises them to guard their household estate carefully, preferring to keep their strongbox rather than preserve justice. Yet, sensing that this was inhuman and wicked, he says a little later, in another chapter, as though moved by some regret: nevertheless, one must sometimes give freely, nor should this kind of generosity be wholly rejected, and often one ought to share one's household means with suitable people in need. What does 'suitable' mean here? Clearly, those who are able to repay and return the favor. If Cicero were alive today, I would surely cry out: here, here, Marcus Tullius, you have strayed from true justice, and you have destroyed it with a single word, when you measured the duties of piety and humanity by advantage. For one ought not to give to those who are 'suitable,' but rather, as far as possible, to those who are not. For that is done justly, that is done piously, that is done humanely, which you do without hope of getting anything back. Here, finally, is real, authentic justice — the very thing you confess, in your own words, that you cannot grasp as any firm and distinct image. You yourself proclaim in many places that virtue is not for hire, and you admit, in your books on the laws, that generosity is freely given, in these words: there is no doubt that one who is called generous and kind follows duty, not gain. Why, then, do you give preferentially to the suitable, unless it is so that afterward you may collect your reward? So then, with you as authority and teacher of justice, whoever is not 'suitable' will be worn down by nakedness, thirst, and hunger, and men of wealth, overflowing even to the point of luxury, will not come to the aid of the utmost need. Since, as you claim, virtue asks no wage and ought to be pursued purely on its own account, weigh justice — parent and ruler over all the other virtues — by what she is worth herself, not by what suits you, and give her preferentially to someone from whom no return can ever be hoped. Why do you pick and choose among persons? Why do you inspect their limbs? Whoever asks of you must be reckoned a fellow man simply because he considers you a fellow man. Cast aside those shadows and mere images of justice, and hold fast to the real and genuine thing itself. Give freely to the blind, the crippled, the lame, the destitute — those who will die unless you give to them. They are useless to men, but useful to God, who keeps them alive, who grants them breath, who deems them worthy of the light. Cherish them, as far as it lies in you, and sustain the souls of men with your humanity, that they not be snuffed out. Whoever can help a man on the point of death, and does not help him, kills him. But these people, because they hold neither to nature nor understand what reward lies in such an act, while fearing to lose, do lose, and fall into the very thing they most dread — that whatever they give away is either wasted entirely or of use only for the briefest time. For those who deny a small dole to the wretched, because they are unwilling to preserve their common humanity without cost to themselves, pour out their fortunes instead in order to acquire for themselves things that will perish and crumble, or at any rate gain nothing at all despite their heaviest losses. For what is one to say of those who, carried away by popularity-seeking frivolity, spend on public shows sums that would suffice for great cities, except that they are madmen and lunatics, giving to the people what they themselves lose and what none of those to whom it is given actually keep? Because all pleasure passes quickly and does not last — the delight of sight and hearing above all — people simply forget it, treating what another lost as owed no thanks, or they even take offense, should the mob's craving go unsatisfied, so that the silliest among them end up buying themselves harm with harm; and if the spectacle did please, nothing is gained beyond hollow praise and a few days' worth of chatter. In this way the wealth of the shallowest men trickles away, day upon day, into things wholly without use. Are those, then, wiser who provide their fellow citizens with gifts more useful and more lasting — namely, those who, by erecting public works, seek to win remembrance for their own name? Not even they act rightly: they bury their goods in the earth, since neither does remembrance bring anything to the dead, nor are their works everlasting, seeing that they are either shattered and collapse in a single tremor of the earth, or are consumed by some chance fire, or are torn down by some hostile assault, or at least crumble and give way from sheer age. For nothing, as the orator says, made by craft and by hand, is such that age does not wear it down and consume it. But this kind of justice and gentleness flourishes more and more with each passing day. Better, then, are those who give freely to their own tribesmen or clients — for they do provide something to fellow men, and do them good — yet even that is not true and just generosity. For there is no true beneficence wherever there is no real need. Whatever is given for the sake of favor to those who are not in need therefore perishes, or comes back with interest, and it will not be true beneficence. Even granting that the recipient welcomes it, such giving still falls short of justice, since nothing bad would result were it withheld. There is, then, one single sure and true duty of generosity: to feed those who are in need and unable to help themselves.
This is that perfect justice which safeguards the fellowship of the human race of which the philosophers speak; this is the greatest and truest fruit of riches — not to spend one's resources on private pleasure, but toward the welfare of many, seeking no benefit for oneself in the present, since justice alone is what never perishes. It must therefore be held to in every way that from an act of mercy all hope of receiving something back be entirely absent, since God alone is the one from whom this labor's due wage should be awaited. If you look for it from a human being, what you do is no longer kindness but the lending of a favor at interest, and a man cannot be thought to have done well who confers his gift not on another but on himself. Still, everything circles back to one conclusion: give to another expecting nothing in return, and you are truly giving to yourself, because God will pay your wage. Likewise God commands that whenever we prepare a dinner, we should invite to share it those who cannot invite us back and repay the favor, so that no act of our life may go without the office of mercy. Yet let no one suppose that fellowship with friends or affection for kin has thereby been forbidden him; rather, God has made known to us what the true and just work is. We must live with our neighbors in such a way that we understand: this belongs to man, that belongs to God. The chief virtue, then, is hospitality — a thing the philosophers too commend, but they wrench it away from true justice and drag it toward advantage. Cicero rightly says that hospitality was praised by Theophrastus. 'For it seems to me,' he says, 'quite fitting that the houses of distinguished men stand open to distinguished guests.' But here again he strayed in the same way he did when he said that generosity should be shown to the deserving. A wise and righteous person's household should not throw its doors open for the distinguished, but rather welcome the lowly and the outcast; for those illustrious and powerful people can lack nothing, since their own wealth both protects and honors them. Nothing should be done by a just man except what is truly beneficent. But a benefit, if it is repaid, perishes and comes to an end; we cannot keep intact something whose price has been paid back to us. The essence of justice, then, is found in those benefits which remain whole and uncorrupted — and they remain so only when bestowed on people who are in no position to repay them. But that man, in receiving the distinguished, looked to nothing but advantage, nor did this clever man conceal what profit he hoped to gain from it. He says that whoever does this will become powerful among foreigners through the favor of the leading men whom he has bound to himself by the bond of hospitality and friendship. Oh, on how many counts could Cicero's inconsistency be exposed, were I to pursue it! And it would be refuted not so much by our own words as by his. For this same Cicero maintains: the more someone directs every act toward what benefits himself, the further he falls from being a good man. It is likewise his claim that angling for favor, feigning one thing while pursuing another, appearing to act for someone else while actually serving oneself — none of this belongs to a straightforward, open character, but rather betrays a schemer, crafty, deceitful, and underhanded. How then could he defend that ambitious hospitality from being malice? You run around to every gate to invite the arriving leaders of peoples and cities into your house, so that through them you may gain power among their own citizens, and you wish to be seen as just, humane, and hospitable while you are really pursuing your own advantage? This was not so much carelessness on his part — for what could be less fitting for Cicero? — but knowingly and deliberately, through ignorance of true justice, he entangled himself in these snares. That he may be excused for this, he himself testified that he was giving precepts not for true justice, which he did not hold, but for the shadow and image of justice. So this teacher of a shadowy, imagined justice must be forgiven, and truth must not be demanded of one who admits he does not know it. — Redeeming captives from bondage counts among justice's great and splendid works, something Tullius himself likewise commended. 'And this kindness,' he says, 'is useful to the state as well — that captives be redeemed from slavery and the poor be enriched. I set this habit of kindness far above the lavish giving of gifts; this is the mark of serious and great men.' It is, then, the proper work of the just to feed the poor and ransom captives, though even among the unjust, those who do these things are called serious and great; for it is especially praiseworthy to do good to those from whom no one expected it would be done. For whoever does good to a blood relation, a neighbor, or a friend deserves little or no praise, because he is obliged to do it and would be wicked and detestable if he did not do what nature itself and the bond of kinship demand of him — and whatever he does along these lines, glory is not really his goal — avoiding reproach is. But whoever does good to a stranger, someone unknown to him, truly deserves praise, since he was led to act by humanity alone. Justice, therefore, exists precisely where there is no chain of necessity binding one to do good. This office of kindness, then, he ought not even to have ranked above the lavish giving of gifts, as though comparing two goods and choosing the better one. For that lavish giving, by which people cast their patrimonies into gifts, is empty, trivial, and utterly removed from justice. Indeed such things ought not even to be called gifts, when the only ones who receive them are those who do not deserve to receive. Equally significant among justice's works is guarding and standing up for widows and orphans left destitute and helpless — something that divine law prescribes for everyone, since even good judges consider it part of their office to favor such people by natural humanity and strive to help them. But these works belong properly to us, who have received the law, the very words of God commanding it. Those others do perceive that shielding the unguarded is simply just by nature, yet the reason behind it escapes them. For God, whose mercy is unceasing, commands that widows and orphans be defended and cherished for this reason: so that no one, out of regard and pity for his own dependents, should be held back from accepting death for justice and faith, but should undergo it without hesitation and bravely, knowing that he leaves his dear ones to God, and that they will never lack a protector. To take up the care and nursing of the sick who have no one to attend them is likewise a mark of the highest humanity and a great work; whoever does this acquires a living sacrifice for God, and what he gives to another for a time, he himself will receive from God for eternity. That final and greatest office of piety is the burial of strangers and the poor — something those teachers of virtue and justice never so much as touched, for they could not see it, since they measured every duty by advantage. In the other matters mentioned above, though they did not hold to the true line, still, because they detected some advantage in them, they were drawn, as it were, by a certain scent of truth and erred less widely; but this one, because they could see no advantage in it at all, they abandoned. Indeed there were some who thought burial superfluous and said there was no harm in lying unburied and cast aside. Such godless reasoning is rejected on two fronts — the human race as a whole condemns it, and so do the divine pronouncements that require burial. Yet even they do not dare say it should not be done; they only say that if by chance it is not done, there is no harm in it. So on this point their role is less that of people issuing commands than of people offering comfort, so that if this should happen to a wise man, he need not think himself wretched on that account. But we do not say what a wise man ought to bear, but what he himself ought to do. So we do not now ask whether the whole practice of burial is useful or not, but this: even if it is pointless, as they think, it must still be done, if only because it appears among men to be a good and humane thing to do — for it is the disposition that is sought, and the intention that is weighed. We will not, then, allow the image and form of God to lie as prey for beasts and birds, but instead return it to the ground it originally came from, and even for a stranger we will fulfill the duty owed to kin; where they are lacking, humanity takes their place, and wherever a human being is needed, there we will consider our duty to be required. And in what does the reasoning of justice consist more than in this — that what we render to our own out of affection, we render to strangers out of humanity? This is a far surer and more just kind of giving, for it is given not to a man, who gains no awareness of it, but solely to God, for whom an act of justice is the most cherished offering. Someone will perhaps say: 'If I do all this, I will have nothing left. What then? If a great number of people are in need, cold, captured, dying, so that in doing these things I may find myself stripped of my whole estate in a single day — am I to lose the wealth won by my own labor or that of my ancestors, so that I myself must then live on the mercy of others?' What? Do you fear poverty with so small a spirit — poverty which even your own philosophers praise, testifying that nothing is safer, nothing more tranquil than it? What you fear is a harbor from anxieties. Or are you unaware of the sheer number of perils and misfortunes that come bundled with such ill-gotten wealth, leaving you exposed? They will treat you well if they pass from you without your bloodshed. But as it is, you walk about laden with plunder and carrying spoils that provoke the greed even of your own people. Why then do you hesitate to put to good use what some robbery, or a sudden proscription, or some hostile plundering, may perhaps snatch from you anyway? Why be afraid to turn a fleeting, fragile good into an everlasting one, or to entrust your treasures to God's safekeeping, where you need fear no thief, no robber, no rust, no tyrant? Whoever is rich before God can never be poor. If you value justice so highly, follow it: cast off the burdens that weigh you down, free yourself from your own shackles and chains, so that, unencumbered, you may run to God. It is the mark of a great and lofty spirit to despise and trample underfoot mortal things. But if you cannot rise to this virtue — to lay your riches upon God's altar, exchanging perishable things for lasting ones — I can at least relieve your fear. None of these instructions is meant for you in isolation — they apply to the entire people, who are joined together in mind and cohere as a single body. If you alone are not sufficient for great works, do what you can according to your own strength — yet so that you excel in good works as much as you excel others in wealth. And do not now suppose you are being urged to diminish or exhaust your household estate; rather, turn toward better ends what you would have spent on useless things. From the money with which you buy wild beasts, ransom captives instead; from what you spend feeding animals for the arena, feed the poor instead; from what you use to purchase men for the sword, bury the innocent dead instead. What good does it do to enrich degenerate gladiators and train them for depravity? Turn toward the great sacrifice what would otherwise be badly wasted, so that in place of these false gifts you may have from God an eternal gift. Great is the reward of mercy, for which God promises to forgive all sins. 'If you hear,' he says, 'the prayers of one who begs of you, I too will hear yours; if you take pity on those who struggle, I too will have mercy on you in your struggle. But if you do not look on them or help them, I too will turn my mind against you and judge you by your own laws.'
As often, then, as you are asked for help, believe that you are being tested by God to see whether you deserve a hearing. Look inward at your own conscience and, insofar as lies within your power, tend to your own wounds. Yet do not suppose, because sins are wiped away by giving, that you are thereby given license to sin; for they are blotted out only if you give because you have sinned — if you sin relying on the giving, they are not blotted out. God desires above all that a man be cleansed of his sins, and therefore he commands that repentance be done; and to do repentance is nothing other than to profess and affirm that one will sin no more. Pardon, then, is granted to those who slip into sin unwittingly and unwarily; but he who sins knowingly has no claim to forgiveness. Yet even if someone has been purified of every stain of sin, let him not suppose that he should hold back from the work of giving, on the ground that he no longer has sins to wipe away. On the contrary, he ought to practice justice all the more once he has become just, so that what he formerly did as a remedy for wounds, afterward he should do it for virtue's own praise and honor. One more point deserves mention: nobody is free of fault while still weighed down by the garment of flesh, whose weakness lies open to sin's dominion in three ways — in deeds, in words, in thought. Through these steps justice advances to its highest summit. Virtue's first level is refraining from wicked deeds; its second, keeping clear of wicked speech too; its third, avoiding even wicked thoughts themselves. Whoever has climbed the first step is just enough; whoever has reached the second already has perfected virtue, since he offends neither in deed nor in speech; whoever attains the third has genuinely achieved something resembling God's own likeness, since keeping even one's thoughts free of what is wicked to do or shameful to say lies almost beyond human capacity. And so even just men, who can restrain themselves from every unjust deed, are sometimes overcome by mere frailty, so that anger provokes them into cursing, or the sight of something tempting stirs quiet desire within them. But if the mortal condition does not allow a man to be wholly free of every stain, the sins of the flesh must therefore be continually wiped away by giving. It is the single work of a wise, just, and truly living man to place his riches in justice alone; whoever lacks this, though he surpass Croesus or Crassus in wealth, must be reckoned poor, naked, and a beggar. We must take pains, then, to clothe ourselves in the garment of justice and piety, which no one can strip from us and which affords us everlasting adornment. For if the worshippers of the gods lavish care on senseless images and pour out on them whatever precious things they have, even though such images can neither make use of these things nor offer thanks for receiving them — then surely it is far more just and true to honor God's living images instead, so as to gain favor with the God who lives? For these, as they truly use whatever they receive and give thanks for it, so God, in whose sight you do good, will both approve it and pay out the reward of piety.
If, then, mercy is among men a splendid and outstanding good, and is judged the best of things by both divine testimony and the agreement of good and bad alike, it is clear that the philosophers stood far from the good proper to humanity, since they neither taught anything of this kind nor practiced it, but instead always counted as a vice this virtue which is nearly unique to mankind. Here it is worth inserting one point from philosophy, so that we may more fully expose the error of those who class mercy, desire, and fear among the soul's diseases. They do indeed try to distinguish virtues from vices, which is easy enough to do. For who could not, as they do, separate the generous man from the wasteful, the thrifty from the stingy, the calm from the sluggish, the cautious from the timid? — since these good qualities have their proper limits, and if a person oversteps them, he slides into vice: so that firmness of purpose, unless undertaken for the sake of truth, becomes shamelessness. Likewise courage, if it faces certain danger with no necessity compelling it and for no honorable cause, turns into recklessness. Liberty too, if it attacks others rather than resisting those who attack, is defiance. Even severity, unless it confines itself to punishments fitting the offense, becomes savage cruelty. And so they say that those who appear wicked do not sin of their own free choice, nor deliberately pick out evil things, but rather fall into evils under the appearance of good, because they do not know how to distinguish good from evil. These statements are not false, but they are all measured with reference to the body. For to be thrifty, or firm, or cautious, or calm, or courageous, or strict — these are indeed virtues, but virtues of this temporary life. We, however, who count this life as nothing, hold before ourselves other virtues, of which the philosophers could not even form a suspicion by any reasoning. And so they have taken certain virtues for vices and certain vices for virtues. For the Stoics strip a man of all the emotions by whose impulse the soul is stirred — desire, joy, fear, sorrow — of which the first two arise from good things, whether future or present, and the latter two from evil ones. In the same way they call these four, as I have said, sicknesses, holding that they are implanted not so much by nature as adopted through mistaken opinion, and for that reason they judge that they can be torn out by the very root, if the false opinion about good and evil things is removed. For if the wise man judges nothing to be good and nothing to be evil, he will neither burn with desire, nor exult with joy, nor be terrified with fear, nor be gripped by sorrow. We shall see presently whether they achieve what they intend, or what they actually do achieve; for now, their purpose is an arrogant one, and nearly that of madmen, who think themselves able to heal themselves and to strive against the very force and reason of nature.
The common experience of every living creature shows that these impulses are natural, not chosen, for all of them are shaken by the very same feelings. The Peripatetics, then, argue more soundly, for they deny that these can be uprooted altogether, since they are born together with us; and they attempt to demonstrate the providence and necessity behind God's - or nature's, as they call it - arming of us with these feelings, feelings that, since they often turn vicious in excess, a person can healthily temper through moderation, leaving to that person only what nature actually requires. This would not be a foolish argument, if, as I said, everything were not being referred to this present life alone. The Stoics, then, are simply mad, for they do not temper these feelings but cut them off, and in effect want to castrate a man of what nature has implanted in him. It is comparable to wishing to take fright away from deer, poison from snakes, ferocity from beasts of prey, or docility from herd animals. For whatever is given individually to dumb animals is given to man all at once, together. But suppose, as physicians claim, that joy has its seat in the spleen, anger in the bile, desire in the liver, and fear in the heart - killing the animal outright would then be simpler than extracting anything from its body, and wanting to do so is really wanting to alter the very nature of a living creature. But these clever men fail to see that when they remove the vices from a person they also remove virtue, for which alone they leave no room. For if virtue consists in restraining and checking oneself in the very grip of anger — which they cannot deny — then whoever lacks anger also lacks virtue. If virtue is to hold bodily desire in check, then whoever has no desire to temper necessarily lacks virtue. If virtue is to curb greed for another's goods, then surely no one can have virtue who lacks the very thing which the exercise of virtue is meant to restrain. So where there are no vices, there is no room for virtue either, just as there is no room for victory where there is no adversary. Thus it comes about that in this life good cannot exist without evil. Feeling, then, is like a natural fertility of the soul. For just as a field that is naturally fruitful runs wild if left fallow, so an untended soul becomes overgrown, as if with thorns, by vices that grow strong of their own accord. But once the true cultivator comes, the vices at once give way and the fruits of virtue spring up. So when God first formed man, in his wonderful providence he implanted in him beforehand these stirrings of the soul, so that man might be capable of receiving virtue as land receives cultivation, and he placed the material of the vices within the feelings, and the material of virtue within the vices. That virtue will either not exist at all, or will not be able to be exercised, if the things through which its power appears and is confirmed are absent. Let us now see what those same men who cut out the vices entirely have actually accomplished. Those four feelings, which they suppose arise from opinions about good and evil, and which they think must be torn out if the wise man's soul is to be healed — since they realize that these feelings are implanted by nature and that without them nothing can be advised or done — they substitute other things in their place and role. For desire they substitute will, as though it were not far better to desire the good than to will the bad; likewise for joy, gladness; for fear, caution. But in the fourth case their scheme for changing the name fails them. And so they have removed distress — that is, sadness and pain of soul — altogether, which simply cannot be done. For who could fail to grieve if plague has emptied his homeland, or an enemy has overturned it, or a tyrant has crushed it? Can anyone fail to grieve on seeing liberty taken away, on seeing his kinsmen, his friends, good men either driven into exile or butchered with the utmost cruelty? Unless his mind has grown so numb that all feeling has been torn from it. So either everything should have been removed outright, or their crippled, half-finished argument needed completing - meaning a replacement term was owed to distress too, since the pattern set by the earlier substitutions made this the necessary next step. For just as we rejoice at present goods, so we are pained and grieve at evils. So if joy was rebranded under a new label on the grounds that they judged it vicious, then by the same reasoning distress ought equally to have received a fresh name, since they hold it just as vicious. From this it is plain that what they lacked was not the thing but the word; and for want of that word they tried to remove that feeling entirely — indeed perhaps the greatest of all — contrary to what nature would allow. I could refute these changes of names at greater length and show either that many names have been imposed on the same things for the sake of adorning speech and enriching its resources, or at least that these feelings do not differ much among themselves. Desire, after all, has its origin in will; caution springs from fear; and joy amounts to nothing more than gladness made visible. But let us grant, as they themselves would have it, that these are distinct. Then surely they will say that desire is a persistent and continual willing, joy is gladness insolently displayed, and fear is caution exceeding and overstepping its bounds. So it turns out that they do not remove the things they judge ought to be removed, but merely temper them, since they only change the names while the things themselves remain. So these unwitting men roll back to the very point the Peripatetics reach by reasoning — namely, that since vices cannot be removed, they must be tempered in a middle course. They are wrong, then, because they fail to achieve what they intend, and after a long and rough detour they come back to the same road.
But I do not think even the Peripatetics have come close to the truth, for they grant that these are vices, only tempering them moderately. One must be free of vices even moderate ones. Rather, the first thing to establish should have been that there are no vices at all — for nothing that is born can be vicious in itself; vices arise only if we misuse our feelings, and virtues if we use them well. Next it should have been shown that it is not the feelings themselves that need moderating, but their causes. "One ought not," they say, "to be carried away by excessive joy, but to rejoice moderately and with restraint." But this is just like saying that one ought not run headlong but should walk calmly instead. Yet a man walking can go astray, and a man running can keep straight to the road. Well then — suppose I show you a case where not merely a moderate but even the slightest degree of joy is wicked, and, on the other hand, a case where even to leap for joy is not in the least blameworthy — what good will this notion of moderation do us? I ask this: in their view, should a man of wisdom feel joy on witnessing misfortune strike his enemy? Or ought he to hold his joy in check if, once the enemies are defeated or the tyrant crushed, liberty and safety have been won for the citizens? No one doubts that in the first case even a little joy is the gravest fault, and in the second even too little joy is the gravest fault. The same could be said of the other feelings. But, as I said, the exercise of wisdom does not lie in moderating these feelings themselves, but in dealing with their causes, since they are stirred by outward things; the reins should not, above all, be placed on the feelings themselves, since even small ones can carry the gravest guilt, and the greatest can be entirely without guilt. Rather, they needed to be assigned to fixed occasions, objects, and circumstances, so that they should not become vices where it is right to use them. For just as walking rightly is good and going astray is bad, so being moved by feeling toward what is right is good, and toward what is wrong is bad. If desire does not stray beyond the lawful marriage bed, then however intense it is, it remains blameless; but if it reaches after another's spouse, however mild it is, it is still the gravest vice. It is not, then, a sickness to grow angry, or to desire, or to be stirred by passion, but it is a sickness to be an angry man, a greedy man, a lustful man. For the angry man grows angry even at one he ought not, and when he ought not; the greedy man craves even what is not needed; the lustful man reaches even for what the laws forbid. So the whole of reason ought to have been directed to this: since the drive of these feelings can neither be, nor ought to be, suppressed, because it is necessarily implanted in us for guarding the duties of life, it should instead be steered onto the right road, where even its course can proceed free of stumbling and danger.
But I have been carried further than I intended by my zeal to refute them, when my purpose was to show that the things philosophers have judged to be vices are not only not vices but are actually great virtues. Of these, for the sake of instruction, I will take up the ones I think matter most to the subject. They count fear, or dread, among the worst of vices, and think it the height of weakness of soul, to which courage stands opposed; and if courage is present in a person, they say, there is no room left for fear. Does anyone then believe it possible that this very fear could be the height of courage? Certainly not. For nature does not seem able to admit that a thing should collapse into its own opposite. And yet I will show — not by some clever piece of reasoning, as Socrates does in Plato, forcing his opponents to admit what they had just denied, but simply and plainly — that the deepest fear is the highest virtue. No one doubts that it belongs to a timid and weak soul to fear pain, or poverty, or exile, or prison, or death; and whoever has not shuddered at any of these is judged the bravest of men. But whoever fears God fears none of these things at all. No argument is even needed to prove it: throughout the world, both now and in ages past, people have watched the torments imposed on those who worship God, torments for which fresh, previously unimagined tortures have been invented. The mind recoils even to recall the forms that death has taken, since the savagery of monstrous beasts has raged beyond death itself. Yet these unspeakable manglings of the body have been endured, by a happy and unconquered endurance, without a single groan. This virtue has offered to every people and province, and even to the torturers themselves, the greatest of marvels, as cruelty was overcome by patient endurance. And yet nothing produced this virtue except the fear of God. And so, as I was saying, fear should not be torn out, as the Stoics would have it, nor merely tempered, as the Peripatetics wish, but directed onto the true path; and fears must be taken away, but in such a way that this one alone is left — which, because it is lawful and true, alone brings it about that nothing else need be feared. Desire, too, is numbered among the vices; yet when its object is earthly, it is a vice, and when its object is heavenly, it turns into a virtue. For anyone who longs to reach righteousness, God, eternal life, everlasting light, and everything else God has promised humanity will look down on riches, honors, power, and even thrones. A Stoic will perhaps say that will, not desire, is needed to attain these things. But no — mere willing is not enough. Many indeed will something, but once pain touches their very depths, the will gives way while desire perseveres; and if such desire leads a person to hold in contempt everything else that others covet, then it stands as the greatest virtue of all, being the very parent from which self-restraint is born. And so we ought instead to see to it that we direct into the right course those very feelings which it is a vice to misuse. For these stirrings of the soul are like a chariot and its team: driving it well means, above everything else, that the charioteer must know the route; keeping to it lets him go as fast as he likes without disaster, whereas straying from it - even at a gentle, careful pace - will get him battered on rough terrain, sent over a cliff, or simply carried somewhere he never needed to go. So too that chariot of life, drawn by the feelings as if by swift horses, will do its duty if it holds the straight road. Fear and desire, then, if flung down toward the earth, become vices, but become virtues if directed toward things divine. They hold thrift, on the other hand, to be a virtue; but if it is merely the eagerness to possess, it cannot be a virtue, since it is wholly occupied with increasing or protecting earthly goods. We, however, do not measure the highest good by the body, but weigh every duty solely by the preservation of the soul. But if, as I taught above, one must not spare one's estate at all in order to hold fast to humanity and justice, then thrift is no virtue at all - a label that deceives, wearing virtue's mask to mislead. For frugality is indeed an abstaining from pleasures, but it becomes a vice precisely because it springs from a love of possessing, whereas one ought to abstain from pleasures while by no means being sparing with money. Being sparing with money - that is, spending it moderately - really amounts to a kind of meanness of soul, whether it stems from anxiety about future want, from despair of ever recovering what is spent, or from an inability to grasp contempt for earthly things. But they, in turn, call the man who does not spare his household wealth a spendthrift. For they distinguish the generous man from the spendthrift in this way: the generous man gives to those who deserve it, when it is fitting, and as much as is enough, while the spendthrift squanders on those who do not deserve it, when there is no need, and without regard for his household means. What then? Shall we call a man a spendthrift who gives sustenance to the needy out of pity? Yet it matters a great deal whether you lavish money on prostitutes for lust's sake or on the wretched out of humanity; whether pimps, gamblers, and procurers plunder your money, or you devote it to piety and to God; whether you stuff it into your belly and gluttony, or store it up in the treasury of justice. So just as it is a vice to pour out money for a bad purpose, so it is a virtue to do so for a good one. If it is a virtue not to spare resources that can be replaced, so as to sustain a human life that cannot be replaced, then thrift is a vice. So I would say nothing else but that they are mad, who strip man — a gentle and social creature — of what is properly his; who, having torn out the feelings on which all humanity rests, wish to reduce him to an unmoving numbness of mind, all the while striving, as they themselves say, to free the soul from disturbance and render it calm and tranquil. This cannot be done at all, since its very power and reason consist in motion; but it should not even be attempted, since just as water always standing still and quiet becomes unwholesome and in fact more turbid, so a soul that is unmoved and sluggish is useless even to itself, and will not be able to preserve life itself, since it will neither do nor think anything — thought itself being nothing other than the stirring of the mind. In short, those who claim this immobility of soul for themselves really wish to deprive the soul of life, since life is action, and death is stillness. Some things, too, they rightly hold to be virtues, but they do not keep to their proper measure. Constancy is a virtue — not in the sense that we should resist those who do us wrong (for to these one must yield; why this should be so I will explain shortly), but in the sense that, when commanded to act against the law of God and against justice, we should be terrified by no threats or torments into placing man's command above God's. It is likewise a virtue to look on death with contempt - though not by seeking it out and taking our own lives, a course that no small number of philosophers, even the most eminent, have frequently pursued, an act both wicked and abominable — but that, when forced to abandon God and betray our faith, we should prefer to accept death, and defend our freedom against the mad and senseless violence of tyrants, and with strength of soul face down all the threats and terrors of this age. Thus, with a mind lofty and unconquerable, we shall trample underfoot the pain and death that others fear. Herein lies virtue; herein lies genuine constancy, to be safeguarded and upheld in this single respect alone: that neither terror nor force can turn us away from God. Cicero's statement therefore holds true, where he asserts that justice is impossible for anyone who fears death, who fears pain, who fears exile, who fears poverty; likewise that of Seneca, in his books on moral philosophy, where he says: this is the truly honorable man — not marked out by the purple or the badge, not distinguished by the service of lictors, but inferior in nothing — who, when he sees death close at hand, is not thrown into confusion, as though he were looking at something novel; who, whether his whole body must undergo torment, or flame must be endured against his very face, or his arms stretched out upon the gallows, does not ask what he must suffer, but how well. And whoever worships God endures these things and does not fear them; therefore he is just. It follows from everything said that a person entirely cut off from devotion to the one God cannot possibly grasp or maintain the virtues, nor the exact limits within which the virtues operate.
But let us set the philosophers aside: some grasp nothing whatsoever yet parade that very blankness as if it were supreme learning, others fail to understand even the little they do know, and still others, imagining they know things they in fact do not, lapse into a witless and conceited delusion. Returning, then, to our theme, let us — the only ones to whom God has laid truth bare and sent wisdom down from the heavens — carry out what our God, the giver of light, commands. Let us bear with one another and carry the labors of this life through mutual help, yet without seeking glory for ourselves if we perform some good deed. For God warns that the worker of righteousness ought not to boast, lest he seem to have discharged an act of human kindness more out of a desire to please than out of obedience to heaven's commands, and so already hold the reward of glory he sought, and receive no share of that heavenly and divine wage. As for the rest that the worshiper of God must observe, once these virtues are grasped, the remainder is easy. Let him never lie, whether to deceive or to do harm. For it is wrong that one devoted to truth should be false in any matter and depart from the very truth he follows: on this path of justice and of every virtue, falsehood simply has no room to stand. And so the true and just traveler will not say that line of Lucilius's, that lying is not for him toward a friend or intimate — rather he will judge that lying is not for him even toward an enemy or a stranger, and he will never let his tongue, the interpreter of his mind, be at odds with his thought and feeling. If he has lent someone money, let him take no interest, yet let the kindness remain whole. Whatever meets someone's need he should give freely, keeping wholly clear of another's due. In this kind of service he ought to be content with his own, though elsewhere he need not even spare what is his, so as to do good; but to take back more than he gave is unjust. Whoever does that is, in a sense, laying a trap, so as to profit from another's need. But the just man will never fail to act with mercy, nor will he stain himself with such gain; rather he will see to it that what he lends is counted, without any loss to himself, among his good works. He should accept nothing offered by a needy man in return, so that whatever service he has rendered owes its worth entirely to being unpaid. Let him answer curses with blessing, and never himself curse, lest an evil word come from the mouth of one who reveres the good Word. Indeed let him take great care never through his own fault to make an enemy, and if someone should prove so insolent as to wrong a good and just man, let him bear it with gentleness and restraint and not take vengeance into his own hands, but leave it to God's judgment. Let him guard his innocence always and everywhere. This precept holds not only that he should not himself inflict harm, but that he should not avenge harm done to him. For the greatest and most just judge sits as watcher and witness of all things. Let him prefer this judge to any man, let him rather have this judge pronounce on his cause — one whose sentence no one can escape, by no one's defense nor by anyone's favor. And so it happens that the just man is held in contempt by all, and because he is thought unable to defend himself, he is counted as slack and idle. But whoever has taken revenge on an enemy is judged brave, is judged vigorous; everyone fears him, everyone respects him. As for the good man, even though he may be able to benefit many, people still look up more to one who can harm than to one who can benefit. Yet no depravity in other men has the power to twist the just man away from his effort to obey God; he would sooner be held in contempt, provided he keeps always to the part of the good and never falls into that of the wicked. Cicero, in that same treatise on duties, says: 'But if anyone wishes to unfold the intricate notion in his mind, let him teach himself at once that a good man is one who benefits whom he can and harms no one, unless provoked by injury.' What a plain, true statement — and he ruined it by tacking on a single pair of words! There was no reason at all to append "unless provoked by injury," as though he meant to hang a shameful little tail of vice onto the good man, stripping him of patience, greatest among every virtue there is. He claims the good man would do harm if provoked; yet by that very claim he forfeits the title good man, for the moment he does harm, the name is lost. For it is no less an evil to return an injury than to inflict one. For where do quarrels among men arise, where do fights and disputes come from, if not because impatience set against wickedness often stirs up great storms? But if you set patience — than which no truer, no more worthy-of-man virtue can be found — against wickedness, it is extinguished at once, as if you had poured water on fire. But if, on the other hand, that provoking wickedness finds impatience as its match, it will kindle so great a blaze, as though drenched in oil, that no river but only a flood of blood can put it out. Great, then, is the value of patience, which that wise man stripped from the good man. For it alone brings it about that no evil is done: if it were given to all, there would be no crime, no fraud in human affairs. What, then, could work more ruin and stand more opposed to a good man than loosening the reins on anger — a passion that robs him of the very title of man, let alone of good, given that (as Cicero himself so rightly puts it) doing harm to another runs against human nature altogether? For even cattle, if you provoke them, fight back with hoof or horn, and snakes and wild beasts cause no trouble unless you hunt them to kill; and, to return to examples among men, even the untaught and the foolish, when they suffer some wrong, are driven by a blind and irrational fury and try to pay back in kind those who harmed them. So where lies the line between a good, wise man and a wicked, foolish one, if not here: he possesses a patience nothing can conquer, absent in fools, and he knows how to master and quiet his own anger, which they, having no virtue, cannot hold back? But clearly this is where the matter deceived him: speaking of virtue, he thought that to win in any contest at all was a mark of virtue, and he could not see at all that a man who yields to grief and anger, indulging those feelings he ought rather to resist, and who rushes wherever wickedness provokes him, does not hold to the office of virtue. For whoever strives to return an injury is eager to imitate the very man by whom he was wronged. So one who imitates evil can in no way be good. In two words, then, he stripped from the good and wise man the two greatest virtues, innocence and patience. But because he himself practiced that dog-like eloquence, as Sallust reports Appius calling it, he wished man to live in dog-like fashion, snapping back when provoked. As for the destruction such tit-for-tat insult brings, and the slaughter it habitually produces, no fitter illustration exists than the grim collapse of that very teacher — a man who, striving to live by these philosophical maxims, brought about his own ruin. But if, when provoked by injury, he had held to patience, if he had learned that it belongs to a good man to overlook and to bear an insult, and had not, through impatience and rashness and something like madness, poured forth those famous speeches under another's name as their target, he would never have stained with his own head the rostra where he had once flourished, nor would that proscription have utterly wiped out the republic. A man who is wise and good, then, has no business wanting a fight or courting danger — winning lies outside our own control, and any contest can go either way; the wise and finest men instead refuse to eliminate an adversary — which cannot be done without crime and danger — but to remove the contest itself, which can be done both usefully and justly. Patience, then, must be held the highest virtue, and it was in order that the just man might attain it that God willed him, as was said above, to be despised as slack. For unless he suffers insults, no one will know how much fortitude he has in restraining himself. But if, provoked by injury, he begins to pursue the one who wronged him, he is defeated; whereas whoever checks that impulse by reason truly commands himself, truly can govern himself. This mastery of oneself is rightly called patience, and it is the one virtue set against all vices and passions. It calls the disturbed and wavering soul back to its own calm, it soothes, it restores a man to himself. Since, then, it is impossible and useless to fight against nature so as never to be moved at all, still, before that agitation leaps forth to do harm — which can be done fairly quickly — let it be put to rest. God commands that the sun not set upon our anger, lest it depart as witness to our fury. Finally, Marcus Tullius, contrary to his own precept which I mentioned a little earlier, praised forgetfulness of injuries most highly. 'I hope,' he says, 'that you, Caesar, who are accustomed to forget nothing except injuries...' If he could manage this — a man distant not merely from divine justice but from the ordinary justice of citizens and states — surely we owe it far more, standing as we do, so to speak, in line for immortality itself.
The Stoics try to root out the passions from man as if they were diseases; the Peripatetics oppose them and not only keep the passions but even defend them, saying that nothing in man exists that was not implanted by a great reason and providence. This would indeed be right, if they knew the true bounds of each thing. And so they name this anger itself a grindstone for virtue, as if bravery against a foe were unreachable without the spur of rage. In saying so they betray plainly that they grasp neither what virtue really is nor the purpose for which God gave man anger at all. For if anger was given to us so that we might use it to kill men, what is to be judged more monstrous than man, what more like the wild beasts, than that creature whom God made for fellowship and innocence? There are, then, three passions that drive men headlong into every crime: anger, desire, and lust. For this reason the poets said there were three Furies who harass the minds of men: anger craves vengeance, desire craves wealth, lust craves pleasures. But God set fixed limits to all of these; if men cross them and let these passions grow beyond measure, they must of necessity corrupt their own nature and turn into diseases and vices. What these limits are is not hard to show. Desire was given to us to acquire what is necessary for life, lust to propagate offspring, the passion of anger to check the wrongdoing of those under our authority — that is, so that under a stricter discipline the younger age may be shaped toward uprightness and justice; for unless held in check by fear, license will breed boldness, which will run into every kind of outrage and crime. And so, just as it is both right and necessary to use anger against those beneath us, so it is both destructive and impious to use it against our equals: impious, because humanity is violated; destructive, because when they resist, one side must either destroy or be destroyed. That this is the reason anger was given to man can be understood from the very precepts of God, who commands that we not be angry at those who curse and injure us, but that we always hold our hand raised over those beneath us — that is, that we correct their wrongdoing with steady discipline, lest through useless affection and excessive indulgence they be reared toward evil and nourished in vice. But men ignorant of these things and unaware of the true reasoning have driven the passions given to man for good uses beyond their proper bounds, and let them range more widely than reason demands. From this comes unjust and impious living. Men use anger against their equals: from this come divisions, expulsions, wars born against justice. They use desire to heap up wealth: from this come frauds, robberies, every kind of crime. They use lust only to seize pleasures: from this come debaucheries, adulteries, every kind of corruption. Whoever, then, keeps these passions within their proper bounds — which those who do not know God cannot do — that man is patient, that man is brave, that man is just.
It remains for me to speak briefly against the pleasures of the five senses, for the scale of this book itself now demands a limit. Since all of these are vicious and death-bearing, they must be overcome and suppressed by virtue, or else, as I said a little before concerning the passions, they must be recalled to their proper measure. All other living creatures feel no pleasure except the one that pertains to procreation. They use their senses only for the necessities of their nature: they see, so as to seek out what they need to sustain life; they hear one another and recognize each other, so that they can gather together; whatever nourishment is useful they discover by scent or taste, rejecting whatever is useless; how much they eat or drink is gauged simply by a full stomach. But to man the providence of that most skillful craftsman gave a pleasure without limit and prone to fall into vice, because he set virtue over against it, so that virtue might forever fight with pleasure as with an enemy in its own household. Cicero, in his Cato the Elder, says that fornications and adulteries and every disgraceful act are stirred up by no other enticement than that of pleasure. And since nature, or whatever deity it was, gave humankind nothing finer than the mind, no enemy threatens this divine endowment more than pleasure does; wherever lust holds sway, self-control finds no room, and virtue cannot hold its ground once pleasure rules. But god, on the contrary, gave virtue for this very reason, that it might storm and conquer pleasure and hold it back, as it tried to overstep the bounds set for it, within its prescribed limits, lest pleasure, having softened and captured man with its sweetness, bring him under its own dominion and condemn him to death everlasting. As for the eyes, their pleasure is varied and manifold: it is that which is drawn from the sight of things which delight men, whether by nature or by craftsmanship. This pleasure the philosophers have most rightly rejected. They argue it suits a human being far better, and shows far greater distinction, to look up at the sky than at carvings and engravings—to wonder at this loveliest of works, its starlight scattered like blossoms across the heavens, rather than at painted images or gem-studded ornaments. But although they have eloquently exhorted us to scorn earthly things and have roused us to gaze upon the spectacle of heaven, they nevertheless do not scorn these public spectacles. And so they take delight in them and gladly attend them; but since these are the greatest incitements to vice and have the greatest power to corrupt souls, they must be done away with by us, because they contribute nothing to the blessed life, but rather do great harm. For whoever counts it a pleasure to watch a man slaughtered before his eyes, however justly condemned for his crimes, defiles his own conscience just as much as if he were a spectator and a participant in a murder committed in secret. Yet they call these things games, in which human blood is poured out. Humanity has withdrawn so far from human beings that, while they are killing the souls of men, they think they are only playing, and are more guilty than all those whose blood they hold as their pleasure. I ask now whether men can be pious and just who, when others are placed under the stroke of death and beg for mercy, not only allow them to be killed but even demand it, and cast cruel and inhuman votes for death, never satisfied with wounds nor content with blood. Indeed they order that the fallen and wounded be struck again and that the corpses be torn apart by further blows, lest anyone deceive them with a feigned death. They even grow angry at the fighters unless one of the two is quickly killed, and, as if thirsting for human blood, they hate delay. They demand that fresh pairs be given to replace them, so that their eyes may be satisfied as soon as possible. Steeped in this custom, they have lost their humanity. And so they do not even spare the innocent, but practice on everyone what they have learned in the butchering of the guilty. Anyone laboring to walk justice's road, then, has no business joining or sharing in this public bloodshed as companion or accomplice. For when god forbids killing, he does not merely prohibit us from banditry, which is not even permitted by the public laws; he warns us also against those things which men regard as lawful. Thus it will not be lawful for the just man to serve as a soldier, since his very soldiery is justice itself, nor indeed to accuse anyone on a capital charge, since it makes no difference whether you kill by the sword or rather by a word, since killing itself is what is forbidden. And so in this precept of god no exception at all ought to be made: killing a human being is always wicked, since god willed man to be a sacred and inviolable creature. Therefore let no one think that even this may be allowed, that newborn children may be crushed to death, which is the very worst impiety; for god breathes souls into life, not into death. Yet human beings, so as to have some crime by which they do not stain their own hands, deny to still-rough and simple souls a light that was not given by themselves. Can anyone expect those who do not spare their own blood to spare another's? But these are without any dispute wicked and unjust. What of those whom a false piety drives to expose their children? Can those be thought innocent who throw their own flesh and blood as prey to dogs, and, so far as it is in their power, kill more cruelly than if they had strangled them outright? Who could doubt that whoever leaves room for another's pity is impious? For even if it should happen to him as he wished, that the child be raised, he has certainly consigned his own blood either to slavery or to the brothel. And as for what can or usually does happen to either sex through such mistaken exposure, who does not understand it, who is ignorant of it? The single example of Oedipus, entangled in a twofold crime, makes it plain. To expose a child, then, is as wicked as to kill it outright. But those who commit this murder complain of the narrowness of their means and claim they cannot support the raising of more children—as though wealth were in anyone's own power to possess, as if it were not god who, day after day, turns the wealthy into paupers and paupers into the wealthy. Wherefore, if anyone is unable to raise children because of poverty, it is better that he refrain from intercourse with his wife than that he corrupt the works of god with wicked hands. Therefore, if it is in no way lawful to commit murder, it is not even permitted to be present at one, lest any blood pollute the conscience, since indeed that blood is provided for the pleasure of the people. As for the stage too, I do not know whether it is not an even more vicious corruption. For comic plays speak of the seduction of virgins or the love affairs of prostitutes, and the more eloquent those are who have invented such disgraceful things, the more persuasively their elegance of expression works, and the more easily their rhythmic and polished verses cling to the memory of the hearers. In the same way, tragedies put on stage, before our very eyes, wicked kings guilty of murdering kin and incest, showcasing such crimes in buskined grandeur. The most shameless movements of actors, too, teach and provoke nothing other than lust; their bodies, weakened and softened into a womanish gait and bearing, counterfeit shameless women through disgraceful gestures. What shall I say of mimes, which put on display a curriculum of corruption, teaching adulteries even as they pretend them, and training people for real ones through their imitations? What are young men or girls to do when they see these things performed without shame and gladly watched by everyone? They are, without doubt, being schooled in what they might do, and lust—most strongly kindled through the eyes—catches fire in them; each pictures himself or herself, according to sex, within those very scenes, and they approve of what they laugh at, and, more corrupted by the vices that cling to them, they return to their bedchambers—not only the young, who ought not to be steeped in premature vices, but even the old, for whom it is no longer fitting to sin. As for the circus races, what do they amount to except triviality, emptiness, and frenzy? For minds are stirred into a frenzy in proportion to the frenzy of the racing itself, so that those who come to watch end up putting on more of a spectacle than the race itself, once they begin to shout and be carried away and leap up. All spectacles, then, are to be avoided, not only lest some vice settle into hearts that ought to be calm and at peace, but lest the habit of any such pleasure soften us and turn us away from god and from good works. For the celebrations of these games are festivals of the gods, since indeed they were established for the birthdays of the gods or the dedications of new temples. And in the beginning the beast-hunts, which are called shows, were assigned to Saturn, the theatrical games to Liber, and the circus races to Neptune. Gradually, however, the same honor began to be granted to the other gods as well, and individual games were consecrated to their names, as Sinnius Capito teaches in his books on spectacles. So then, whoever shows up at spectacles that draw crowds in the name of religious devotion has abandoned worship of the true god, giving himself instead to whatever deity's birthday or festival he has just observed.
The pleasure of the ears is drawn from the sweetness of voices and songs, which is, of course, just as vicious as that delight of the eyes we have spoken of. For who would not think a man wanton and worthless who keeps theatrical arts in his own house? Yet it makes no difference whether you indulge your extravagance alone at home or with the crowd in the theater. But enough has already been said about spectacles. One thing remains for us to conquer, lest we be captured by what penetrates to the innermost sense. For all those things which lack words—that is, the sweet sounds of wind and string instruments—can easily be resisted, because they do not cling to us and cannot be written down. But a composed song, and speech that flows along with sweetness, captures minds and drives them wherever it wishes. As a result, literate people, encountering the religion of god as laid out by some untrained teacher, are slower to believe. Having grown used to elegant, finely turned speeches and verse, they look down on the scriptures' plain, everyday style as beneath them. They look for what soothes the senses, and whatever is sweet persuades and settles deep into the mind while it delights. Is god, then, the craftsman of mind and voice and tongue, unable to speak eloquently? No—rather, in his highest providence, he wished the things that are divine to lack ornament, so that all might understand what he himself was speaking to all. Therefore whoever pursues truth, whoever does not wish to cast himself down, should throw off hostile and harmful pleasures, which corrupt the soul just as sweet foods corrupt the body: let the true be preferred to the false, the eternal to the brief, the useful to the pleasant. Let nothing be pleasing to sight except what you see done justly and piously; let nothing be sweet to hearing except what nourishes the soul and makes you better; and this sense above all must not be twisted toward vice, since it was given to us precisely so that we might grasp the teaching of god. So then, if hearing songs and poems can please us, let praising god in song bring us that same delight, both singing it and hearing it sung. That is the true pleasure, which is the companion and ally of virtue; it is not fleeting and brief like those pleasures sought by those who serve the body as cattle do, but lasting and delighting without any interruption. Whoever oversteps its bounds and seeks nothing else from pleasure but pleasure itself is meditating on death, for just as perpetual life lies in virtue, so death lies in pleasure. Whoever prefers temporal things will be without the eternal; whoever prefers earthly things will not have the heavenly.
As for the pleasures of taste and smell, two senses that pertain to the body alone, there is nothing that needs to be argued by us, unless perhaps someone demands that we say it is shameful for a wise and good man to be a slave to his belly and his palate, or to go about smeared with perfumes or crowned with flowers—whoever does this is certainly foolish and silly and worthless, a man whom not even the scent of virtue has ever touched. Perhaps someone will say, 'Why, then, were these things made, if not for us to enjoy?' But it has already often been said that virtue would never have come to be, had it not something to overcome. And so god made all things in order to set up a contest between two opposing things. These enticements of pleasures, then, are the weapons of that one whose single task is to storm virtue and to shut justice out from mankind. With these blandishments and sweetnesses he tickles souls, for he knows that pleasure is the crafter of death. Just as it is only through virtue and effort that god summons a person toward life, so that other power summons him toward death through delight and pleasure; and just as one arrives at true good by way of deceptive evils, one arrives at true evil by way of deceptive goods. These delights, then, must be guarded against as snares and traps, lest, captured by the softness of their sweetness, we be reduced under the dominion of death along with the very body to which we have enslaved ourselves.
I come now to the pleasure that is perceived through touch, a sense that indeed belongs to the whole body. But I think I ought to speak here not of adornments and clothing, but of desire alone, since it is this above all that must be restrained, because it is this above all that does harm. When God devised the design of the two sexes, he gave them the impulse to seek one another out and to delight in union. And so he mixed into the bodies of all living creatures a most burning craving, so that they would rush most eagerly into these passions, and by this means the various kinds might be propagated and multiplied. This craving and appetite is found to be more forceful and more intense in man, either because God wished the human race to be more numerous, or because he gave to man alone the capacity for virtue, so that there might be praise and glory in curbing pleasures and abstaining from them. That adversary of ours therefore knows well how great is the force of this craving — some have preferred to call it a necessity — and he turns it from the right and the good toward the crooked and the bad. For he sends in forbidden desires, so that people defile what belongs to others when they might lawfully possess what is their own without any wrongdoing. He throws before the eyes provocative forms, supplies kindling, and feeds fuel to the vices; then in the innermost organs he stirs up and disturbs every goad, and rouses and inflames that natural heat, until he has ensnared and entangled a man and deceived him. And so that no one should abstain from another's wife merely from fear of punishment, he even established brothels and made public the shame of unfortunate women, so as to hold up to mockery both those who commit the act and those who are forced to endure it. By these obscenities he has plunged souls born for holiness as it were into a whirlpool of filth; he has quenched their sense of shame and demanded their chastity as tribute. He has likewise joined males to males, and has contrived unspeakable unions against nature and against God's own ordinance. Thus has he steeped men and armed them for every kind of wickedness. What indeed can be holy in those who have laid a helpless age, one that needs protection, open to be ravaged and defiled by their lust? This deed cannot be recounted in proportion to the magnitude of the crime. I can call such men nothing but impious and murderers of their own kind, men for whom the sex given them by God is not enough unless they profane and wantonly abuse their own sex besides. Yet among such people even this is considered a light and almost respectable thing. What shall I say of those who practice not an abominable lust but something closer to madness? I am ashamed to speak of it — yet what should we suppose is in store for those who are not ashamed to do it? And still it must be spoken of, because it happens: I speak of those whose most foul lust and accursed frenzy spares not even their own kin. With what words, with what indignation, could I pursue so monstrous a wickedness? The magnitude of the crime overwhelms the office of speech. Since, then, lust produces such deeds and marks out such crimes, we must arm ourselves against it with the greatest resolve. Whoever cannot bridle these passions should confine them within the bounds of a lawful marriage-bed, so that he may obtain what he eagerly desires and yet not fall into sin. For what is it that ruined men really want? Surely pleasure follows honorable actions as well: if they seek pleasure itself for its own sake, they may enjoy it justly and lawfully. But if some necessity presses, then above all resolve must be summoned, so that self-restraint may struggle against desire. And it is not only the beds of others that one may not touch — God also commands and teaches us to abstain even from bodies that are common and shared, since when two bodies have been joined together they become one body. So whoever plunges himself into filth must inevitably be smeared with filth. And the body, indeed, can quickly be washed clean, but the mind, once stained by contact with an impure body, cannot be cleansed except over a long time and by many good deeds, from the defilement that has clung to it. Each person, then, ought to set before himself this truth: that the union of the two sexes was given to the living for the purpose of begetting offspring, and that this law was placed upon these passions, that they should provide for succession. Just as God gave us eyes not merely to gaze about and take pleasure, but to see for the sake of those actions that belong to the necessities of life, so too the generative part of the body — as its very name teaches — we have received for no other purpose than the producing of offspring. This divine law must be obeyed with the utmost devotion. Let all who profess themselves disciples of God be so formed and trained in character that they can command themselves. For those who indulge their pleasures, who yield to lust, hand over their soul in bondage to the body and condemn it to death, because they have surrendered themselves to the body, over which death holds power. Let each one, then, as far as he is able, shape himself toward modesty, cultivate a sense of shame, and guard his chastity by conscience and by mind; let him not merely obey the public laws, but let him who follows the law of God stand above all laws. If a man grows accustomed to these good things, he will already feel shame at falling back into worse ones — provided that what is right and honorable pleases him, since to the better sort such things are sweeter than base and dishonorable things are to the worse. I have not yet gone through all the duties of chastity, which God bounds not only within the walls of a private home but even within the limits of the marriage-bed itself, so that a man who has a wife should not wish, besides her, to have another woman, whether slave or free, but should keep faith with his marriage. For it is not the case, as the reasoning of public law would have it, that only the woman who has another man is an adulteress, while the husband, even if he has several women, is acquitted of the charge of adultery; rather, the divine law joins the two together in marriage — which is a single body — with equal right, such that whoever tears apart the union of that body is to be reckoned an adulterer. And it is for no other reason that God, though he willed that in all other living creatures the females resist the males once they have conceived, made woman alone among all creatures compliant to the male — namely, so that lust should not, by the resistance of women, drive men to seek other partners, and so, by that very act, lose the glory of chastity. But neither would a woman attain the virtue of chastity if she were incapable of sinning. For who would call a dumb animal chaste because it resists the male once it has conceived? It does so only because it must otherwise suffer pain and danger if it submits. There is no merit, then, in not doing what one is unable to do. Chastity is praised in man precisely because it is not natural but voluntary. Fidelity, then, must be kept by each toward the other — indeed, the husband must teach his wife, by the example of his own self-restraint, to conduct herself chastely. For it is unjust to demand of another what one cannot furnish oneself. And this injustice has surely brought adulteries into being, since women bear it ill that those who owe them mutual love do not keep faith with them. In the end, there is no adulteress of even the most ruined shame who does not offer this excuse for her vices: that in sinning she is not doing an injury but merely returning one. Quintilian expressed this superbly. Man, he says, is neither one who abstains from another's marriage nor a guardian of his own — the two being naturally bound together. For a husband occupied in corrupting the wives of others cannot attend to holiness in his own household, and a wife, when she falls into such a marriage, roused by that very example, thinks either to imitate him or to avenge herself. We must therefore take care not to give our own lack of self-control as an occasion for vice, but let the characters of husband and wife grow accustomed to one another, and let them bear the yoke with equal minds: let us each consider ourselves in the place of the other. For the whole of justice consists very largely in this — that you should not do to another whatever you yourself would not wish to suffer from another. These are the things that God prescribes for self-restraint. But so that no one should think he can circumvent the divine precepts, these further provisions are added, so that every pretext and occasion for deceit may be removed: that a man who marries a woman dismissed by her husband is an adulterer, as is a man who dismisses his wife for any cause other than adultery in order to marry another; for God did not wish the body to be split apart and torn asunder. Moreover, it is not only the act of adultery that must be avoided, but even the thought of it — that no one should look upon another's wife and desire her in his heart; for the mind itself becomes adulterous if it so much as paints for itself an image of the pleasure. It is truly the mind that sins, which embraces in thought the enjoyment of unrestrained desire; in the mind lies the crime, in the mind lies every wrongdoing. For even if the body is stained by no blemish, the account of chastity does not hold good if the spirit is unchaste, nor can purity be thought untouched where desire has defiled the conscience. And let no one suppose it a difficult thing to put a rein on pleasure and to confine its wandering, straying course within the bounds of purity and chastity, since it lies within human power to conquer it, and very many have kept the blessed and uncorrupted integrity of the body, and there are many who most happily enjoy this heavenly manner of life. God does not command this to be done as though he were compelling it — since men must, after all, be begotten — but rather as one who permits it; for he knows how great a necessity he has laid upon these passions. Whoever, he says, is able to do this will have an extraordinary and incomparable reward. This kind of self-restraint is, as it were, the summit and the crowning point of all the virtues. Whoever can strive toward it and win through to it, the Lord will acknowledge as his servant, the Master as his disciple; this man will triumph over the earth, this man will be like unto God, for he has laid hold of God's own virtue. These things indeed seem difficult, but we are speaking of one for whom, once all earthly things are trodden underfoot, a path to heaven lies prepared. For since virtue consists in the knowledge of God, all things are burdensome while you remain ignorant, but once you have come to know, they become easy: it is through these very difficulties that we must make our way out, we who press on toward the highest good.
Yet no one should give up, or despair of himself, merely because craving overcame him, or lust drove him on, or he was misled by error, or forced by violence, and so he slid onto the road of wrongdoing. He can indeed be restored and set free, if he regrets what he has done and, turning toward what is better, makes fitting amends to God. Cicero doubted such a thing was possible; in the third book of the Academica he wrote this: 'But if it were allowed, just as travelers who have lost their way can correct it, so too those who have pursued a crooked path of living could mend their error through repentance, the reform of their rashness would come more easily.' It is indeed allowed. When we watch our own children regret their misdeeds, we count them reformed, and although we had disowned and rejected them, we take them back anyway, cherishing and embracing them once more � so why would we doubt that the mercy of our true Father can be softened by repentance? This same Lord and most generous Parent, then, pledges to forgive the sins of those who repent, and to wipe away all the wrongdoing of one who has taken up the practice of righteousness anew. Just as a wicked life brings no benefit from earlier good conduct, since the wickedness that follows erases the record of righteous deeds, so too past sins bring no harm to one who has reformed, because the righteousness that follows wipes clean the stain left by an earlier life. Whoever regrets what he has done recognizes his earlier error � which is why the Greeks, more fittingly and with greater meaning, call it metanoia, a term we cannot capture as well in Latin with our word for "coming to one's senses." For a man troubled by his own error returns to himself and, as though rising out of madness, gets his mind back; he rebukes his own foolishness and strengthens his resolve to live more correctly. From that point on he will take special care not to be caught again in the same trap. Even dumb beasts, once caught by some trick, grow more careful afterward if they manage to escape, and forever after steer clear of whatever situations held that deceit and ambush. In just the same way, repentance renders a man careful and wary, so that he avoids the sins into which some deceit once dropped him. No one, after all, can be so watchful and so prudent that he never once slips. For this reason God, aware of our frailty, in his own tender concern has opened for mankind a harbor of safety, so that the cure of repentance might come to meet this need our weakness is subject to. So whoever has wandered off course should turn his steps back and recover and remake himself as soon as he can. But calling back one's course and climbing again into the clearer air above � that is the real task, that is the labor. Once wicked pleasures have been tasted and enjoyed, men can hardly tear themselves free of them; they would follow the right path far more easily had they never sampled that sweetness in the first place. But let them wrench themselves loose from that wicked bondage: every error will be pardoned them, provided they correct that error with a better life. And let no one imagine he gains something merely because there is no witness to his wrongdoing: the one in whose sight we live knows all things, and even though we may conceal ourselves from every human being, we cannot conceal ourselves from God, from whom nothing lies hidden and nothing can stay secret. Seneca closed his own exhortations with a striking remark: 'There exists some great power, one too great to be fully grasped by thought, and it is to its service that we devote our living. Let us make ourselves worthy of it. Locking one's conscience away inside does no good at all � let us instead stand open before God.' What truer words could have come from someone who actually knew God, than what was said by a man who had no knowledge of true religion? For in calling God's majesty greater than the human mind's thought could ever encompass, and in perceiving that human life is not, as the Epicureans claim, pointless, but rather that people serve God through their living, provided that living has been just and devout, he brushed right up against the very spring from which truth flows. He might have become a genuine worshiper of God, had anyone pointed him the way, and he would surely have rejected Zeno along with his own teacher Sotion, had he ever come across a guide to real wisdom. 'Let us make ourselves worthy of it,' he says � language fit for heaven itself, if only it had not been preceded by an admission of ignorance. 'Locking one's conscience away inside does no good at all; let us instead stand open before God': in that case there is no place left for lying, none for pretense, since walls can keep the eyes of men out, yet even the innermost depths of a person cannot keep out God's own divine power, which sees and knows the whole of a man. The same author, earlier in the same work, writes: 'What is it you're doing? What are you scheming? What is it you're hiding? Your own guardian trails right behind you. Travel took away one witness, death another, sickness yet another � but this witness stays fixed to you, and you can never be free of him. Why look for some hidden corner and dismiss your onlookers? Suppose you actually managed to escape every human eye, madman � what good does that do you, when you yourself remain the one witness who already knows?' Cicero speaks with no less force about conscience and God: 'Let him remember,' he writes, 'that he has God as his witness' � meaning, as I take it, his own mind, than which god himself gave man nothing more godlike. And elsewhere, describing the just and virtuous man, he writes: 'Such a man, I maintain, will not dare so much as think anything he would be unwilling to say openly, let alone actually do it.' Let us, then, keep our conscience clean, since it lies fully exposed to God's gaze, and, as this same writer urges, let us conduct our lives always with the awareness that we will have to give account of ourselves, and let us take it for granted that at every single moment we are being observed � not, as he put it, on some worldwide stage before an audience of men, but from above, by the one who will serve as both our judge and our witness, and before whom, when he asks us to account for our life, we will have no chance to deny what we have done. It is therefore better either to run from our conscience entirely, or of our own will to throw open our heart and drain the sickness by tearing the wounds open � wounds that no one else has the power to heal except the one who alone gave the lame their stride and the blind their sight, cleansed defiled bodies, and brought the dead back to life. It is he who will put out the fire of craving, tear lust up by the roots, strip away envy, and soothe anger; he alone will give back true and lasting health. Everyone should seek out this cure, since the soul suffers a peril worse than any that threatens the body, and treatment ought to be applied as early as possible to sicknesses still concealed. Even if someone enjoys sharp, clear eyesight, has every limb sound, and possesses the most robust bodily health throughout, I still would not call him healthy if he is swept along by rage, bloated and puffed up with pride, enslaved to lust, and burning with cravings. Rather I would call the healthy one that man who does not raise his eyes toward another's good fortune, does not marvel at riches, regards another man's wife with respect, desires nothing whatsoever and covets nothing belonging to someone else, envies no one, looks down on no one, and is humble, compassionate, generous, mild, and kind, with unbroken peace dwelling in his spirit: that is the man who is healthy, that is the man who is just, that is the man who is perfect. Whoever, then, obeys all of these heavenly commands is the true worshiper of God, whose sacrifices consist of a gentle spirit, an innocent life, and good deeds; and whoever offers these very sacrifices does so every time he performs some good and pious act. For God wants no victim at all � not from a dumb animal, nor one drawn from death and blood � but rather one made from a person and a life. This kind of sacrifice has no need of ritual branches, purification rites, or turf altars, all of which are utterly empty things, but only of what comes forth from deep within the heart. And so on the altar of God � which is truly the greatest of all altars, and which, being set up within the human heart, cannot be stained by blood � justice, patience, faith, innocence, chastity, and self-control are laid down. This is the truest rite of all; this is that law of God which Cicero termed splendid and divine, one that always commands what is right and honorable and forbids what is base and disgraceful, and obedience to this most sacred and unshakeable law is required of anyone who wants to live justly and lawfully. I have laid out only a handful of the main points of this law, since I promised to speak of only those matters that place the topmost crown upon virtue and justice. Should anyone wish to take in everything else, let him seek it at the very spring from which this stream of ours has flowed.
Now let us say a little about sacrifice itself. Plato says that ivory is not a pure gift for a god. What then — painted panels, presumably, and costly woven stuffs are pure? No: anything that can be corrupted or stolen is not a pure gift for a god. Yet while he recognized that a living creature should never be given something drawn from a corpse, he failed to notice the parallel: that flesh itself has no business being presented to a being without flesh. How much better and truer is what Seneca says: "Do you wish to think of god as great and calm, to be revered with gentle majesty, a friend and always near at hand, worshipped not with slaughter and much blood — for what pleasure does he take in the butchering of the innocent? — but with a pure mind and an upright, honorable purpose? No temple should be raised to him from rocks stacked skyward — each person must dedicate him within their own breast instead." If anyone, then, thinks that robes and gems and other things that are held precious are dear to god, that person plainly does not know what god is; he supposes god delights in things a man who spurned them would earn just praise for scorning. So what qualifies as undefiled, what befits divinity, save the very thing he himself prescribed in his own sacred law? There are two things that ought to be offered: a gift and a sacrifice — a gift for all time, a sacrifice for the occasion. But among those who understand nothing whatever of the nature of divinity, a gift is whatever is fashioned of gold and silver, likewise whatever is woven of purple and silk, and a sacrifice is a victim and whatever is burned upon the altar. But god makes use of neither, since he himself is incorruptible and all of that is corruptible. Therefore both things offered to god must be incorporeal, of the kind he does use. The gift is integrity of soul; the sacrifice is praise and hymn. For if god is not seen, then he ought to be worshipped with things that are not seen. No religion, then, is true except the one that consists in virtue and justice. How god makes use of a man's justice is easy to understand: for should a man prove righteous, once granted immortality he devotes himself to god's service without end. That all people are born for nothing but justice, both the ancient philosophers and Cicero as well have suspected. For discoursing on the laws, he says: "Of all the matters debated among learned men, surely nothing is more important than to understand clearly that we are born for justice." This alone, then, we ought to show and offer to god — that for the grasping of which he himself brought us into being. And how very true this twofold kind of sacrifice is, Hermes Trismegistus stands as a fitting witness, matching us — meaning the prophets whose teaching we hold to — both in substance and in wording. Concerning justice he spoke thus: "This word, O son, adore and cultivate. The one worship of god is not to be wicked." Likewise in that perfect discourse, when he had heard Asclepius asking his son whether it would please his father to have incense and other perfumes offered for the sacrifice of god, he cried out: "Hush, hush, good words, Asclepius! Harboring such a notion about that one singular good counts among the worst of sacrileges. None of this, nor anything resembling it, suits him: he abounds in everything that exists and stands in need of nothing whatsoever. Rather let us worship him by giving thanks, for his sacrifice is blessing alone." And rightly so. For sacrifice ought to be offered to god by word, since god is Word, as he himself has confessed. The highest rite of worshipping god, then, is praise directed to god from the mouth of a just man — which, however, in order to be acceptable to god, requires the utmost humility, fear, and devotion, lest anyone, trusting in his own integrity and innocence, fall into the fault of pride and arrogance, and by that act lose the grace of virtue. But in order to be dear to god and free of every stain, let him constantly implore god's mercy and ask for nothing else but forgiveness for his sins, even if he has none. Should he wish for something more, there's no call to put it into words before one who already knows our desires: if something good befalls him, let him give thanks; if something bad, let him make amends and confess that it happened to him on account of his own sins. And no less, let him give thanks even in adversity and make amends even in prosperity, so that he may be always the same, steady, unchanging, and unshaken. Nor should he think that this is to be done only in a temple, but also at home and even in his own bed. Let him, in short, always keep god consecrated in his own heart, since he himself is god's temple. And if he has served god, the father and lord, with this constancy, this obedience, this devotion, his justice is complete and perfect; and whoever holds to it has, as we have testified before, obeyed god, and has fulfilled his religious duty and office.
"It is well; the foundations have been laid," as the distinguished orator says. But we have not merely laid foundations sturdy and fit to bear the work — with great and solid masses we have carried the whole building almost to its summit. What remains, though much easier, is to roof and adorn it, without which the earlier labor is useless and unwelcome. For what good is it to be freed from false religions or to grasp the true one? What good to see through the emptiness of false wisdom or to recognize which wisdom is genuine? What good, I ask, to defend that heavenly justice? What good does it do to cling, through such great trials, to the worship of God — the highest of virtues — if no everlasting blessedness awaits as its divine reward? Of this we must now speak in this book, lest all that has gone before seem vain and fruitless if we leave uncertain the very purpose for which it was undertaken — lest anyone suppose such great labors are borne in vain, doubting the heavenly reward God has appointed for the one who has despised these sweet goods of earth for the sake of bare, unadorned virtue. Let us do this part justice too, with the testimonies of the sacred writings and with credible arguments as well, so that it may be equally plain that the future is to be preferred to the present, the divine to the earthly, and the eternal to the brief — since the rewards of vice are temporal, but those of virtue everlasting. I will set forth, then, an account of the world, so that both the moment and the purpose of its making by God become clear — a matter Plato, in his discourse on how the world came into being, was neither able to know nor to explain, since that heavenly mystery, learnable only from the prophets and God's own teaching, was hidden from him; and so he claimed it had been made to last forever. This is far from the truth, since whatever has a solid and heavy body must, having once had a beginning, likewise have an end. As for Aristotle, unable to see how so vast a mass of things could perish, and wishing to escape this conclusion, he claimed the world had always existed and always would — overlooking entirely that anything which exists had to begin at some point, and that nothing can exist unless it first came into being. For since we see earth, water, and fire perish, be consumed, and be extinguished — and these are certainly parts of the world — it follows that the whole, whose members are mortal, is itself mortal. Thus whatever can perish must have been born. And indeed everything that comes under the sight of the eyes is, as Plato himself says, corporeal, and therefore must be dissoluble. Epicurus alone, following Democritus, was truthful on this point, saying that the world both had a beginning at some time and would at some time perish. Yet he could give no account of it — for what reasons this great work would be dissolved, or at what time. We possess this knowledge because God himself has disclosed it to us, so that what we hold comes not from conjecture but from a tradition handed down from heaven; and I will lay it out with care, so that it may at last be plain to lovers of truth that the philosophers neither saw nor grasped the truth, but caught so faint a scent of it that they never perceived whence that sweet and pleasant fragrance of wisdom had breathed upon them. Meanwhile I think it necessary to warn my readers that these teachings of ours will either go entirely unrecognized by depraved and corrupted minds — for their sight is dulled by earthly desires, which weigh down and weaken every faculty of perception — or, even if they do recognize them, they will pretend otherwise and refuse to admit their truth, because they are dragged along by their vices and, knowing better, still favor their own wrongdoing, captivated by its sweetness, and forsake the path of virtue, offended by its harshness. For since men burn with greed and an insatiable thirst for wealth, unable to live modestly by selling or giving away what they love, they will surely prefer to think all this a fiction, since believing it would force them to renounce their desires. Likewise those driven by the goads of lust, who, as the poet says, rush headlong into madness and fire, will call what we bring incredible, because the precepts of self-restraint wound their ears — precepts that forbid them the pleasures to which they have surrendered their souls along with their bodies. And those puffed up with ambition or inflamed with love of power, who have devoted all their energy to gaining honors, will not, even if we held the sun itself out to them in our hands, give credence to a teaching that commands them, scorning all power and honor, to live humbly — and so humbly that they can endure injury without wishing to return it, should it come. These are the men who, with eyes shut, bark at the truth however they can. But those who are sound of mind — that is, not so submerged in vice as to be beyond cure — will believe these things and gladly embrace them, and whatever we say will appear to them open, plain, straightforward, and, most importantly, true and unassailable. No one favors virtue except one who is able to follow it, and following it is not easy for everyone: those are capable who have been schooled by poverty and want, which make them fit to receive virtue. For if virtue is the endurance of hardship, then those who have always lived in comfort cannot grasp virtue, since they have neither experienced hardship nor can bear it, being accustomed to and desirous only of good things, which alone they have known. So it happens that the poor and lowly, being unencumbered, believe God more readily than the rich, who are entangled in many burdens. Indeed, chained and shackled, they serve at the beck of their mistress, greed, who has ensnared them in inescapable bonds, and they cannot look toward heaven, since their minds are bent down and fixed to the earth. But the path of virtue does not admit those carrying heavy loads: the track by which justice leads a man to heaven is a narrow one indeed, and only one who is unburdened and stripped bare can hold to it. For these wealthy men, loaded with many and enormous packs, walk along the road of death, which is very broad, since ruin holds wide dominion there. To them, harsh and poisonous seem the things God commands for righteousness, and the things we discourse of concerning virtue and truth under God's instruction. If they dare oppose these things, they thereby admit themselves to be foes of both virtue and justice. Turning now to what remains, I will bring the work to its close; and what remains is that we discuss the judgment of God — which will take place when our Lord returns to earth, to render to each according to his merit either reward or punishment. And so, just as in the fourth book we spoke of his first coming, so in this book we shall report his second coming, which the Jews also confess and hope for, though in vain — since he must return to comfort those whom he had first come to summon. For those who wickedly did violence to him in his humility will find him a conqueror in power, and will suffer, by God's requital, all those things which they read but do not understand — since they, defiled by every sin and moreover stained with sacred blood, are destined for eternal punishment by the very one against whom they raised their impious hands. But we shall treat the Jews as a separate subject, in which we will convict them of both error and crime.
Now let us instruct those ignorant of the truth. By the disposition of the highest God it has been ordained thus: that this unjust age, once its span of time has run its course, will come to an end, and with all wickedness extinguished at once and the souls of the righteous recalled to a blessed life, a calm and untroubled age of peace will blossom under God's own rule — what the poets, for their part, have named the golden age. The first cause of all the philosophers' errors was this: they failed to grasp the plan of the world, which contains the whole of wisdom. This plan cannot be grasped by one's own sense or inner understanding alone — a thing they refused to accept, insisting on working it out by themselves without a teacher. And so they fell into various opinions, often contradicting one another, from which they found no way out, and, as the comic poet says, they floundered in the same mire — because their premises did not match up with reasoning, since although what they assumed was in some sense true, it could not be affirmed or proved without an understanding of truth and of matters divine — and such understanding, as I have often said, comes to no man except through what God himself has taught. For if a man could understand divine things, he could also do them, since to understand is, so to speak, to follow immediately in their tracks. But man, wrapped as he is in a mortal body, is incapable of doing what God does — and for that very reason he cannot grasp it either. Whether this is so, anyone can easily judge from the immensity of divine things and works. For if you are willing to contemplate the world together with all that is in it, you will surely understand how far God's work surpasses human works. And the wisdom of God must stand as far above that of man as God's works themselves outstrip what man can accomplish. For God, being incorruptible and immortal, is perfect precisely because his being has no end, and his wisdom is as flawless as he is, unhindered by anything, since nothing has power over him. Man, however, being subject to passion, has a wisdom likewise subject to error, and just as many things prevent a man's life from being everlasting, so many things must likewise prevent his wisdom from being perfect in fully perceiving the truth. Human wisdom, therefore, is nothing at all if it strives on its own toward the knowledge of truth, since the mind of man, bound to a fragile body and shut up in a dark dwelling, can neither range freely nor see the truth clearly — knowledge of which belongs to the divine condition. For to God alone are his own works known. Man, however, cannot attain it by thinking or by disputation, but only by learning and hearing it from the one who alone can know and teach it. That is why Marcus Tullius, rendering Socrates' words at his trial, where Socrates says the time has come for him to depart from life while those before whom he was pleading his case would go on living — asks which is better, and says: the immortal gods know, but I think no man knows. It is therefore necessary that all the schools of philosophy are strangers to the truth, because they were founded by men, and can have no foundation or firmness, since they are propped up by no divine oracles.
Turning now to the errors of the philosophers, we find the Stoics splitting nature into two components: an active force and a passive substance offered up as material for it to work upon; in the first they place the power of sensation, in the second, matter — and neither, they say, can exist without the other. But how could the agent doing the shaping and the stuff being shaped possibly be one and the same? Suppose a man claimed the potter and his clay were one and the same — would he not be judged plainly out of his mind? Yet these men, under the single name of "nature," lump together two utterly different things — God and the world, the craftsman and the work — and say that neither can exist without the other, as though nature were God mixed with the world. Sometimes indeed they so confuse the two that God himself becomes the mind of the world and the world the body of God — as if the world and God had begun to exist together, and as if God had not himself made the world! Yet this very thing they admit elsewhere, when they proclaim that it was fashioned for the sake of mankind, and that God could exist without the world if he wished, since God is a divine and eternal mind, released and free from body. Because they could not grasp his power and majesty, they mixed him into the world, that is, into his own handiwork. Hence that line of Virgil's: a mind infused through all the limbs stirs the whole mass, and mingles itself with the great body. Then where is that other claim of theirs, that the world was both made by divine providence and is also ruled by it? For if he made the world, then he once existed without it; and if he rules it, it is surely not as a mind rules a body, but as a master rules a household, a pilot a ship, a charioteer a chariot — and yet these are not mixed with the things they govern. For if everything visible to us counts as a limb of God, then those limbs — being without sensation themselves — leave God devoid of feeling, and, being mortal as limbs are, leave him subject to death as well. I could recount how often, shaken by sudden convulsions, lands have gaped open or sunk into an abyss; how often cities and islands, swallowed by the waves, have vanished into the deep; how fertile fields have been flooded into marshes, rivers and pools dried up, mountains collapsed in ruin or leveled flat with the plains; how a hidden, inward fire consumes the foundations of countless regions and many mountains. And it is little enough that God does not spare his own limbs, if man too is permitted to do something to the body of God: seas are walled in, mountains are cut away, and the earth's hidden depths are excavated in the hunt for riches. And what of the fact that even plowing cannot be done without tearing at the divine body? So we would already be criminal and impious, violating the limbs of God! Does God, then, allow his own body to be mangled, and either weaken himself or permit man to weaken him? Unless perhaps that divine sense, mixed with the world and all its parts, has abandoned the earth's surface and sunk down into its depths, so as to feel none of the pain from this constant tearing. But if this is absurd and empty, then these men themselves are as lacking in sense as the things they claim have sense — for they failed to see that, while the divine spirit is indeed spread everywhere and holds all things together by it, it does not follow that God himself, who is incorruptible, is mixed with heavy and corruptible elements. The view they borrowed from Plato comes closer to truth: that a divine maker fashioned the world and continues to guide it by his providence. It was incumbent, then, on Plato and those who held the same view, to teach and explain what reason lay behind so vast an undertaking, and for whom, or for what purpose, he brought it about. But these same Stoics claim mankind was the very reason the world came to be. I hear them. But Epicurus does not even know why, or who, made mankind itself. For Lucretius, holding that the world was not established by the gods, says: to say further that it was for man's sake they wished to prepare the splendid nature of the world is folly — for what benefit could our gratitude confer on beings immortal and blessed, that they should undertake anything for our sake? And rightly so — for they could give no reason why the human race should have been created or established by God at all. This is our task: to expound the sacred meaning of the world and of man, of which they, having no share in the sanctuary of truth, could neither touch nor see anything. So then, as I said a little earlier, though the premise they started from was sound enough — that God fashioned the world with mankind as its purpose — reason still failed them in what followed, and they could not defend what they had assumed. In the end Plato, so as not to make God's work feeble and prone to collapse, said it would remain forever. But supposing mankind was indeed its purpose, and supposing it was built to last forever, why then are the men it was built for not themselves immortal? If they are mortal, for whose sake it was made, then it too must be mortal and dissoluble — since it can be no more lasting than the very beings it was fashioned to serve. Had he reasoned consistently, he would have grasped that, being a made thing, it must likewise perish, and that only what lies beyond all touch can endure without end. As for the one who denies it was made for the sake of mankind, he holds no reasoning at all. For if he says the maker himself undertook so great a work for his own sake, then why were we born? What purpose is there in our enjoyment of the world itself? What is the point of the fashioning of the human race and all the other living creatures? Why do we lay claim to advantages belonging to others? And why, in short, do we grow, diminish, and perish? What reason is there in procreation itself? What in the unbroken succession of generations? No doubt God wished to look upon things and, like a craftsman with seals, fashion various images of himself in which to delight himself; and even so, he would nonetheless care for living creatures, and especially for man, to whose command he subjected everything. As for those who say the world has always existed — I set aside the problem that nothing can exist without first beginning to exist — a knot they cannot untie. Instead, consider this: were the world eternal and without origin, it could have no underlying reason at all. For what could reason have contrived in a thing that never had a starting point? Before anything is made or built, there must be a plan, so that how it is to be made can be arranged, and nothing can be begun at all without reason's forethought. Reason, then, precedes every work: what was not made has no reason behind it. But the world plainly has reason behind it, for it coheres and is governed — proof that it was made; and having been made, its dissolution must follow. Let them, if they are able, explain why it was made in the first place, or why it must one day come apart. Since Epicurus, or Democritus, could not teach this, he said it arose of its own accord, from seeds coming together here and there at random — seeds which, being dissolved again, would be followed by breakup and destruction. He thus corrupted what he had rightly seen, and through sheer ignorance of reason overturned all reasoning entirely, reducing the world and everything that happens in it to the likeness of some utterly empty dream, as though no reason at all could be found underlying human affairs. But when we see that a marvelous order governs the world and all its parts — the ordering of the sky and the steady course, amid all its variety, of the stars and heavenly lights, the seasons turning in their constant, marvelous order, the lands yielding their diverse abundance, the plains stretching level, the mountains standing as ramparts and defenses, the green abundance of the forests, the wholesome outpouring of springs, the timely flooding of rivers, the rich and abundant flow of the sea, the varied and useful breathing of the winds, and all the rest held together by supreme reason — what blindness would it take to imagine these things arose by chance, when the marvelous design of a supremely provident reason shines through them so plainly? If, then, absolutely nothing exists or comes to be without cause, and if the providence of the highest God is manifest from the ordering of things, his power from their greatness, and his authority from his governance of them, then dull and mad indeed are those who have said there is no providence. I would not find fault with them if they denied the existence of gods in order to affirm one God; but when they deny providence in order to affirm none at all, whoever does not think them raving is himself raving.
We already discussed providence at sufficient length in book one; and given that its reality is obvious from how marvelous its works are, the same providence must also have brought man and the rest of living creatures into being. Our next task, then, is to work out why the human race was shaped at all, since everyone agrees with the Stoic claim that the cosmos was built for humanity's benefit—though on one point they go badly astray, holding that it was made not for man but for men, when in fact the singular name “man” already takes in the whole of humankind. They fall into this because they do not realize that a single human being was formed by God; instead they imagine people sprouting up like mushrooms across every land and field. Hermes, by contrast, knew perfectly well that man had been shaped by God and after God's own image. But let me get back to the point. Nothing, in my view, comes into being purely for its own sake—whatever is made at all is necessarily made toward some use. Who, after all, is foolish or idle enough to set about producing something worthless, expecting neither profit nor benefit from it? A person constructing a house does not build it just so a house will exist, but so it can be lived in; a shipbuilder does not labor merely so a ship will appear, but so it can be put to sea; and whoever fashions any vessel does not do it merely to be seen as having made something, but so that the finished item can serve some genuine need. In the very same way, everything else that comes into being is not toiled over pointlessly but for some practical purpose. The cosmos, then, was made by God—and certainly not for the cosmos's own sake, since it has no feeling and needs nothing from the sun's heat, the moon's glow, the stirring of winds, rain's moisture, or the produce of crops. Nor, again, can it be argued that the cosmos exists to serve God himself, since he could get along perfectly well without it, as he did before it came to be, and he himself makes no use of anything contained in it or produced within it. It follows, then, that the cosmos was built for the sake of living creatures, because they are the ones who enjoy what it consists of; everything they need to survive and endure is supplied to them at the proper seasons. Likewise it is evident that the rest of the animals were shaped for man's benefit, since they serve him and were provided for his protection and use—for whether they live on land or in the water, none of them grasps the world's order the way man does. Here we must answer the philosophers, Cicero above all, who asks: “If God made everything for our sake, why did he produce so vast a supply of water-snakes and vipers? Why scatter so many deadly creatures across land and sea?” That is a huge topic for debate, but it deserves at least a brief mention in passing. Because man is put together out of things that differ from and oppose one another—soul and body, that is sky and earth, the fine and the tangible, the eternal and the temporary, the sentient and the brutish, one part lit and one part shadowed—reason and necessity alike demanded that both good and bad things be laid before man: goods to be enjoyed, evils to be avoided and guarded against. For this very reason wisdom was granted him, so that once he understood the nature of good and evil, he could put his reasoning power to work both pursuing the goods and steering clear of the evils. The other animals, lacking wisdom, were instead equipped and armored with natural coverings; man, in place of all such things, received the one thing that counted most: reason alone. So God shaped him bare and unarmed, so that wisdom itself would serve as his shield and covering—placing man's true defense and adornment not outside but within, not in the flesh but in the heart. Had there been no dangers for man to guard against and distinguish from what is good and useful, wisdom would have served no purpose. So let Cicero take note: reason was given to man either so he could catch fish for his own benefit while steering clear of water-snakes and vipers to protect himself, or because good and bad things were set before him precisely on account of the wisdom he had received, whose entire function lies in telling goods apart from evils. Great, then, right, and admirable is the strength, reasoning power, and authority granted to man—the very being for whose sake God made the cosmos itself along with everything that exists, and whom he honored so highly as to place him in charge of it all, since man alone was capable of marveling at God's handiwork. Our own Asclepiades makes this point beautifully in the book on the highest God's providence that he wrote and sent me: one might rightly conclude that divine providence assigned the position nearest to itself to the creature able to comprehend its own arrangement. Consider the sun: who looks at it and truly grasps that it is the sun and how much good it does the rest of creation? Here is the sky—who looks up and takes it in? Here is the earth—who cultivates it? Here is the sea—who sails across it? Here is fire—who makes use of it? So the highest God set all this in order not for his own sake, since he lacks nothing, but for man's sake, so that man might make fitting use of it.
Let us now explain why God made man himself: had the philosophers grasped this, they would have gone on to defend the truths they had already found, or else never plunged into their worst mistakes. This is the crux, the hinge on which everything turns; miss it, and the whole truth slips through your fingers -- it is exactly what leaves their arguments unable to hold together. Had this point dawned on them, had they understood man's whole mystery, the Academy could never have sliced through their debates and cut down all their philosophy from the flank, so to speak, without a fight. Just as God did not make the cosmos for its own benefit -- having no need of what it offers -- but for man, who makes use of it, so too man himself was made for God's own sake. “What good,” asks Epicurus, “did God get out of man, prompting him to fashion a being purely for his own benefit?” The point was that there should exist someone able to grasp his works, to perceive with the senses and proclaim aloud God's providence in arranging things, his wisdom in making them, his power in bringing them to completion -- and the upshot of all this is that man should worship God. For the one who understands these things is the one who truly worships; he renders fitting homage to the maker of everything, to his own true Father, gauging the greatness of God's majesty by the invention, the undertaking, and the completion of his works. What clearer evidence could be offered that God made the cosmos for man and man for himself than this: of every living creature, man alone is shaped so that his eyes face heaven, his features look toward God, his expression bears a family likeness to his maker, and it seems as though God lifted man from the dust, as if by an extended hand, toward the contemplation of himself? “But what,” Epicurus continues, “does man's worship add to a God already blessed and lacking nothing?” Or, if God valued man enough to build the world on his account, furnish him with wisdom, make him ruler over living things, and love him like a son, why fashion him mortal and fragile? Why expose the one he loved to every kind of harm, when it would have suited better for man to be blessed -- joined and close to God -- and everlasting like God himself, since he was shaped to worship and contemplate him? We have already touched on these matters here and there in earlier books, but because this exact topic is now what our subject demands -- our aim here being to discuss the blessed life -- these things need spelling out more carefully and fully, so that God's design, his labor, and his intent can be understood. Though he could always father countless immortal souls through his own undying spirits, as he did in begetting the angels, whose immortality stands secure without any risk or fear of harm, he chose instead an indescribable undertaking: a method for creating an endless multitude of souls, souls he would first tie to weak, breakable bodies and situate midway between good and evil, since their nature was compounded from both, he placed virtue in their path precisely so that ease and comfort would never hand them immortality; instead, only the hardest struggle and the heaviest toil would carry them through to that ineffable prize -- life everlasting. So, in order to clothe them in limbs both heavy and burdensome -- since they could not float suspended in empty space, the body's weight and heaviness dragging them down -- he decided a home and dwelling had to be constructed for them first. And thus, by indescribable power and glorious might, he built up the works of the cosmos: lifting the light elements aloft and pressing the heavy ones downward, he fixed the heavens in place and established the earth. There is no need to go through this point by point again, since we covered all of it in book two. He set lights in the sky, then, whose regularity, brightness, and movement are calibrated exactly to what living things need; and to the earth, which he intended as their home, he gave a rich capacity for producing and bringing forth things, so that through the abundance of grain, herbs, and greenery it could provide each kind with nourishment suited to its nature and needs. Then, once everything belonging to the cosmos's design was complete, he shaped man out of the very earth he had prepared beforehand as man's dwelling -- that is, he wrapped and clothed his own breath in a body of earth, so that, being composed of opposing elements, man might share in both good and evil. And just as the earth itself bears fruit abundantly, so the human body, drawn from the earth, gained the capacity to reproduce and bring forth young, so that -- being shaped from perishable material and unable to last forever -- once its allotted span of temporal life was spent, it would give way and, through unending succession, renew that frail and feeble thing it carried. Why, then, did he fashion man mortal and frail, after building the world for man's sake? First, so that an endless supply of souls could be generated and fill the whole earth with their numbers; second, so that he could put virtue before man -- that is, the endurance of hardship and toil -- through which he might win the prize of immortality. Man consists of two things -- body and soul, the one earthbound, the other belonging to heaven -- and from this duality come two lives assigned to him: a temporal life tied to the body, and an eternal life resting with the soul. We obtain the first simply by being born; we gain the second only by striving, so that immortality would not come to man, as noted earlier, free of any difficulty. The first life is earthly like the body and therefore ends; the second is heavenly like the soul and therefore has no boundary. We receive the first without knowing it and the second knowingly, because it is granted to virtue rather than to nature -- God wanted us to build up a life for ourselves within this present life. That is why he gave us this present existence: so that we might either lose that true, eternal life through our vices or earn it through virtue. The highest good is not found in this bodily existence, since just as divine necessity granted it to us, divine necessity will likewise dissolve it -- and whatever has an end cannot hold the highest good. But in that spiritual existence, which we secure through our own effort, the highest good does reside, because it admits neither evil nor end. The nature and structure of the body itself bear this out. Other animals bend down toward the ground, since they are earthly and cannot receive immortality, which comes from heaven; man, however, stands erect and gazes toward the sky, because immortality has been held out before him -- though it comes to him only if God grants it, for if every person born automatically became immortal, there would be no distinction left between the just and the unjust. Immortality, then, is not something nature simply produces, but the wage and reward earned by virtue. Indeed, a man does not walk upright the moment he is born but crawls on all fours at first, because at this stage the body's condition and this present life are shared in common with the dumb animals; only later, once his strength has grown firm, does he stand upright, his tongue loosens into speech, and he stops being a mute creature. This teaches us that man is born mortal but later becomes immortal, once he begins to live from God -- that is, to pursue righteousness, which consists in worshipping God -- once God has stirred man to look upon heaven and upon himself. That happens when a man, cleansed by the heavenly washing, sets aside his old infancy along with every stain of his former life and, having received the growth that comes from divine strength, becomes a whole and complete human being. Since God has set virtue before man in this way, even though soul and body are joined together, they remain opposed and wage war on each other. What benefits the soul harms the body -- that is, fleeing wealth, forbidding pleasures, disdaining pain and death. Likewise what benefits the body harms the soul -- namely greed and lust, through which riches are chased and the sweetness of assorted pleasures pursued, by which the weakened soul is destroyed. It is therefore inevitable that the just and wise be surrounded by every hardship, since courage is what conquers hardship; the unjust, by contrast, are surrounded by wealth, status, and power, since these are bodily, earthly goods -- but such people live an earthly life and cannot reach immortality, having handed themselves over to pleasures, virtue's enemies. This temporal life, then, must answer to that eternal one, just as the body answers to the soul. Whoever, then, chooses the life of the soul must necessarily hold the life of the body in contempt, and cannot climb toward the heights without looking down on what lies at the bottom. But whoever embraces the life of the body and flings his desires down to earth cannot ever reach that higher existence. The one who would rather live well forever will live poorly for a time and be burdened with every trouble and labor as long as he remains on earth, so as to secure divine and heavenly comfort in the end. And whoever would rather live well only for a time will live badly forever, since God's sentence will condemn him to eternal punishment for having placed earthly things above heavenly goods. This, then, is why God desires to be worshipped and honored by man as by a son honoring a father -- so that man may hold fast to virtue and wisdom, which alone gives rise to immortality. Since no one but God can grant it -- he alone possesses it -- he rewards man's devotion, by which man has honored him, with this very prize: that man may be forever blessed, dwelling with God and always in his presence.
Let us now sketch the whole argument in brief compass. The world came to be so that we could be born; we are born so that, in time, we might recognize God, who fashioned both the cosmos and us; we come to recognize him so that we might worship him; we worship him so that we might gain immortality as wages for our labor, since worshipping God demands the greatest of labors; the prize we are given for that labor is immortality itself, and its purpose is this: transformed into the likeness of angels, we owe unending service to the Lord who is also the supreme Father, and we ourselves become an everlasting kingdom belonging to God. This is the sum of the matter, God's hidden secret, the world's mystery -- and strangers to it are those who, chasing present pleasure, have surrendered themselves to earthly, perishable goods and have drowned souls born for heavenly things in deadly sweetness as though in mud or filth. Let us now ask, in turn, whether any logic at all can be found in the worship of the gods. Suppose they are many; suppose people worship them only so the gods will grant wealth, victory, honor, and other things good only for the here and now; suppose we are born for no reason; suppose no providence operates in human procreation; suppose we come into being by pure chance, purely for our own pleasure; suppose we are nothing after death -- what could be as pointless, as empty, as futile as the human condition, and as the world itself, which, despite being built on an unbelievable scale and with astonishing design, would then be devoted to utterly useless ends? Why, after all, do the winds' currents drive the clouds along? Why do lightning bolts flash, thunder roar, rain fall? Why does the earth yield crops and nourish all its various offspring? Why, in short, does the whole of nature labor so that nothing be lacking of what sustains human life -- if that life is empty, if we perish into nothingness, if there is nothing about us worth more to God? But if it is blasphemous to say so, and unthinkable that what you see built with the greatest design was not established for some equally great purpose, then what logic can possibly lie in these mistaken, corrupt religions, or in the philosophers' notion that souls simply perish? None whatsoever. What reason can they give for why the gods are so scrupulously supplied by men with offerings at their appointed times? Is it so we can hand over grain-meal, wine, the smell of incense, and the blood of cattle? None of this could please immortal beings, since these things decay, nor could it serve beings without bodies, since it is meant for bodily use -- and besides, if the gods wanted such things, they could supply them for themselves whenever they liked. Whether souls die out or last without end, then, two questions remain unanswered either way: is there any sense at all in paying cult to the gods, and who is actually responsible for having built the world? Why, when, for how long, to what degree, or for what purpose were men brought into existence? Why are they born, why do they perish, replace one another, and get renewed? What do the gods gain from being worshipped by people who will be nothing after death? What do they give, promise, or threaten that is worthy of either gods or men? Or, if souls do endure after death, what becomes of them, or what will become of them? What use would the gods have for a storehouse of souls? Where do the gods themselves come from in the first place? How, why, or from where did so many of them arise? So it turns out that if you wander from that overarching scheme we outlined above, every argument collapses and everything dissolves into nothing.
The philosophers failed to grasp this highest good, and could not grasp the truth either, although they did see and set forth, more or less, the elements of which that highest good consists. But they brought all these things forward separately and in different ways, joining to them neither the causes of things nor their consequences nor their reasons, so as to build and complete that sum which embraces the whole. It must be admitted, however, that almost the entire truth has been taught, though it lies scattered among the philosophers and their schools. We are not overturning philosophy the way the Academics are accustomed to do, whose settled purpose is to answer everything, which is more a matter of quibbling and mockery; rather, we teach that no school was so far astray, and no philosopher so empty, that he failed to see something of the truth. But because they raged with a passion for contradiction, and because they defended even their own falsehoods and undermined the truths of others, they not only let slip the truth they claimed to be seeking, but by their own fault destroyed it more than anyone. Yet had someone arisen able to collect the truth scattered among individuals and spread throughout the schools, gathering it into one body, such a person would surely share our view. Only a man skilled and knowing in the truth can do this, however, and no one can truly know the truth except one taught by God. For he cannot otherwise reject what is false and choose and approve what is true; but even if a man achieved this by chance, he would most certainly be a true philosopher, and although he could not defend it by divine testimonies, the truth itself would shine forth by its own light. Hence the error of those is incredible who, once they have approved some school and committed themselves to it, condemn all the others as false and empty, and arm themselves for battle without knowing what they ought to defend or what to refute, and attack indiscriminately everything that anyone who disagrees puts forward. Because of these most stubborn contentions of theirs, no philosophy arose that came closer to the truth; for the truth was grasped by them only in fragments. That the world was made by God, Plato said; the prophets say the same, and the same appears from the verses of the Sibyl. Those, then, are in error who said that all things sprang up of their own accord, or from tiny seeds massed together, since a thing so great, so adorned, so vast, could not have come into existence, nor been ordered and disposed, apart from some supremely wise maker, and the very reasoning by which all things are seen to cohere and be governed proclaims the artificer of a most skillful mind. That the world and everything in it was made for the sake of man, the Stoics say; the same the divine scriptures teach us. Democritus, then, erred, who thought that men, like worms, were poured forth from the earth with no author and no reason. For why man was formed is a divine mystery, and because he could not know it, he reduced human life to nothing. That men are born to attain virtue, Ariston taught; the same we are admonished and taught by the prophets. False, then, is Aristippus, who subjected man to pleasure — that is, to evil — like a beast of burden. That souls are immortal, Pherecydes and Plato argued; and this indeed is a teaching proper to our religion. Dicaearchus, then, erred along with Democritus, who argued that the soul perishes and is dissolved along with the body. That there is a lower world, Zeno the Stoic taught, and that the dwellings of the righteous are set apart from the wicked, and that the former inhabit peaceful and delightful regions while the latter pay penalties in dark places and in dreadful pits of filth; the prophets make the same plain to us. Epicurus, then, erred, who thought this was a fiction of the poets, and interpreted those punishments of the underworld as belonging to this present life. Thus the philosophers came into contact with the entire secret of divine religion and the whole of truth, yet since others refuted them, they proved unable to defend what they had found, for none of them individually had reasoning that held together, nor could they gather into one sum the things they had rightly perceived — as we have done above.
There is, then, one highest good: immortality, for the attaining of which we were formed from the beginning and born. Toward this we press, upon this human nature fixes its gaze, toward this virtue carries us forward. Since we have grasped what that good is, it remains for us to speak also of immortality itself. Plato's arguments, though they contribute much to the matter, nevertheless have too little firmness to prove and complete the truth, since he neither worked out the reasoning of this whole great mystery and gathered it into one, nor grasped the highest good. For although what he held about the soul's immortality was true, he did not discuss it as belonging to the highest good. We, then, can choose the truth by surer signs, since we do not gather it by uncertain conjecture but have learned it by divine tradition. Plato argued as follows: whatever both perceives of itself and is always in motion is immortal, for what has no beginning of motion will have no end either, since it cannot be abandoned by itself. This argument, however, would grant eternity even to dumb animals, had he not distinguished the case by adding intelligence. He added, then, in order to escape this common ground, that the human soul cannot fail to be immortal, given its astonishing skill at discovery, its speed of thought, the ease with which it perceives and takes in knowledge, its recollection of things past together with its anticipation of things to come, and its grasp of arts and matters beyond counting — none of which the other living creatures possess; all this appears divine and heavenly, because nowhere on this earth can be located the origin of a mind capable of holding and grasping so much, seeing that no trace of earthly matter is mixed within it. Rather, what is heavy and dissoluble in man must be resolved back into earth, while what is fine and subtle, being indivisible, is released from the body's dwelling as though from a prison and soars upward toward heaven, returning to its proper nature. Such, briefly summarized, is Plato's argument, though in his own text it unfolds at greater length and fullness. Pythagoras held the same view earlier, as did his teacher Pherecydes, whom Cicero records as the first to have discussed the eternity of souls. Yet although all these excelled in eloquence, in this particular dispute those who argued against this view had no less authority — Dicaearchus first, then Democritus, and finally Epicurus — so much so that the very matter over which they contended was thrown into doubt. In the end, after laying out what all these men had opined concerning death and the soul's immortality, Cicero admitted that he could not say where the truth lay. 'Which of these opinions is true,' he says, 'some god may know.' And again elsewhere: 'since each of these opinions has had the most learned men as its authors, and no one can divine what is certain.' Divination, however, is unnecessary for us, since the divine itself has revealed the truth to us.
By other arguments, then, which neither Plato nor anyone else discovered, the eternity of souls can be proved and clearly seen. These we shall gather briefly, since our discourse hurries on to describe God's greatest judgment, which will be held on earth as the end of the ages draws near. Before anything else: because man cannot see God, and lest this very fact lead anyone to conclude that God does not exist merely since mortal eyes fail to perceive him, he made, among the other wonders of his ordering, many things whose power is evident though their substance is not seen — such as voice, scent, and wind — so that these things, by their pattern and instance, let us perceive God as well, even though he does not come before our eyes, through his power, effect, and works. What is clearer than voice, or stronger than wind, or more forceful than scent? Yet although these travel through the air, reach our senses, and strike us with their force, our eyes do not see them — it is other bodily senses that register them. In the same way God cannot be grasped by sight or any other frail sense; he must instead be perceived through the mind's own vision, for his magnificent and astonishing works are visible to us. As for those who said there is no god at all, I would say they were not even men, let alone philosophers — men most like dumb beasts, made up of body alone, perceiving nothing with the mind and referring everything to bodily sense, who thought nothing existed except what they saw with their eyes. And seeing misfortune fall on good men and success on the wicked, they concluded that all things occur by chance, and that nature, not providence, had established the world. From this they slipped further into the absurdities that necessarily follow such a view. But if God exists, and is incorporeal, invisible, and eternal, then it is not credible that the soul perishes simply because it is not seen once it has departed from the body, since it is agreed that something which does not come under sight can still be sensing and alive. But someone may object that it is difficult to conceive how a soul could keep its capacity to sense apart from the bodily organs where that function normally resides. What, then, of God? Is it easy to grasp how he lives without a body? But if men believe in gods, and if these gods, being what they are, are certainly souls without bodies, then human souls must, by the same reasoning, likewise continue to exist, since from reason and intelligence itself it is understood that there is a certain likeness between man and God. Furthermore, that argument which even Marcus Tullius recognized is quite firm — that the soul's eternity can be discerned from the fact that no other animal has any knowledge of God, and that religion is almost the one thing that distinguishes man from the beasts. Since this belongs to man alone, it surely testifies that we aspire to that, desire that, and cultivate that which is akin to us and which is to be our future home. Consider the nature of the other living creatures, which the providence of the highest God bent low in body, casting them down and stretching them prostrate on the ground, so that this very fact would reveal they have no connection to the heavens above — can one, having weighed this, still miss that of all creatures man alone is a heavenly, divine animal? His body lifted up from the earth, his lofty face, his upright bearing, all seek out their own origin, and, as though scorning the lowliness of earth, strain upward, because he senses that the highest good must be sought by him above, and, mindful of his own condition, by which God made him excellent, he looks toward his own maker. This looking-toward, Trismegistus most rightly called theopteia — a beholding of God — which is found in no dumb animal. Wisdom itself, granted to man alone, amounts to nothing more than the knowledge of God, and from this it is evident that the soul neither perishes nor dissolves but abides forever, since nature itself compels it to seek and love the eternal God, aware either of its origin or of its destination. Furthermore, the fact that man alone draws on the heavenly element is no small proof of immortality. The nature of things, after all, is composed of two elements that oppose and resist each other, fire and water — one assigned to heaven, the other to earth. The other living creatures, being earthbound and mortal, rely on the heavy, earthly element; man alone employs fire, the light, lofty, heavenly element. Things that are heavy weigh down toward death, and things that are light lift up toward life, since life is at the summit and death at the bottom. And just as light cannot exist without fire, so life cannot exist without light. Fire, then, is the element of light and of life; from this it is clear that man, who makes use of it, has been allotted an immortal condition, since what is proper to him is what produces life. Virtue, likewise granted to man alone, offers a powerful argument that souls are immortal: were the soul to be extinguished, virtue could hardly align with nature, since it would then work against this present life. This earthly life, which we share with the dumb animals, seeks pleasure, in whose varied and sweet fruits it delights, and flees pain, whose harshness wounds the nature of living things with bitter sensations and strives to bring them to death, which dissolves the living creature. If, then, virtue keeps man away from the goods that nature makes desirable, while forcing him to bear the evils that nature makes avoidable, virtue would then be an evil, hostile to nature itself, and anyone who pursued it would have to be judged foolish, since he harms himself by fleeing present goods and equally pursuing evils, with no hope of a greater reward. For since we might enjoy the most pleasant delights, would we not seem to lack all sense, if we chose instead to live in lowliness, in poverty, in contempt, in disgrace, or not even to live at all, but to be racked with pain and die — gaining nothing further from these evils to compensate for the pleasure forgone? Yet virtue is no evil: it behaves honorably by spurning vicious, shameful pleasures, and bravely by fearing neither pain nor death for duty's sake — so it must be reaching toward some greater good than what it scorns. And once a man has passed through death, what remains to hope for, if not eternity itself?
Let us now turn, in turn, to those things that are opposed to virtue, so that from these too the immortality of the soul may be gathered. All vices are temporal, for they are stirred only for the present moment. The onrush of anger is quieted once vengeance is taken; the pleasure of lust ends with the body's satisfaction; desire is ended either by having enough of the things it craves or by the stirring of other passions; ambition, once it has attained the honors it wanted, grows stale. Likewise the other vices cannot stand firm or endure, but end with the very enjoyment they seek. They come, then, and they go. Virtue, however, is perpetual without any interruption, and cannot depart from the one who has once taken hold of it. For if it had intervals, if we could at times be without it, the vices, which are forever fighting against virtue, would return at once. Virtue, then, is not truly possessed if it deserts us, if it withdraws at times; but once it has established a stable dwelling in a person, it must be present in every act, and it cannot faithfully drive out and put to flight the vices unless it has fortified with a permanent garrison the heart in which it has settled. The very permanence of virtue, then, shows that the human soul, once it has taken hold of virtue, endures — since virtue is perpetual, and only the human soul is capable of virtue. Since, then, vices are contrary to virtue, their whole character must necessarily be different and opposite. Because vices are disturbances and agitations of the soul, virtue, by contrast, is the calm and tranquility of the soul; because vices are temporary and brief, virtue is perpetual, constant, and always the same; because the fruit of vices — that is, their pleasures — are equally brief and temporary, the fruit and reward of virtue must therefore be everlasting; because the advantage of vices lies in the present, the advantage of virtue lies in the future. And so it happens that in this present life there is no reward for virtue, because virtue itself is still in progress. For just as, when vices are completed in their act, pleasure and their rewards follow, so too, when virtue is completed, its recompense follows after. But virtue is never completed except by death, since even in undergoing death lies its highest duty. The reward of virtue, therefore, comes after death. In the end, Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, though hesitantly, nevertheless sensed that the highest good for man comes to pass only after death. 'With a confident spirit,' he says, 'if things should so require, a man will walk toward death, in which we know there is either the highest good or no evil at all.' Death, then, does not annihilate a man; rather it ushers him into virtue's reward. But whoever, as the same author says, has stained himself with vices and crimes and has been a slave to pleasure, being condemned, will pay an eternal penalty, which the divine scriptures call the second death — a death that is both perpetual and full of the gravest torments. For just as two lives confront man, one of the soul and one of the body, two deaths likewise confront him: the one touching the body, which everyone undergoes by nature; the other touching the soul, a fate earned through wickedness and escaped through virtue. And just as this present life, being bound to the body, is temporal and bounded by fixed limits, so this death too is temporal and reaches a fixed end, since it touches the body alone.
When, then, the times that God has fixed for death are fulfilled, death itself will be brought to an end. And since temporal life is followed by temporal death, it follows that souls will rise again to everlasting life, since temporal death has received its end. Consider too that the soul lives on forever, seizing upon divine and inexpressible fruits of its own deathlessness — and by that same logic, its dying must go on without end, paying out endless punishment and unceasing torment for its own wrongs. Matters therefore stand thus: people who prosper in this bodily, earthly existence are fated to misery without limit, since they have already grabbed the goods they chose over God — precisely what happens to worshippers of idols who ignore the true God. Those instead who pursued righteousness, who in this life suffered misery, contempt, and poverty, and who bore frequent abuse and harm precisely because of that righteousness — for virtue admits of no other path — are fated to blessedness without limit, so that, having already suffered evils, they may now also possess good things. Such precisely is the outcome for those who spurn earthly deities and crumbling goods and instead pursue a heavenly devotion to God, a devotion whose rewards, like God himself who gives them, never end. Now then — don't the products of body and mind reveal that death has no claim over the soul? The body itself, fragile and doomed as it is, produces things equally doomed to decay. Cicero remarks that nothing crafted by human hands escapes eventual ruin, whether from human violence or from age, that great destroyer of everything. Yet the mind's products, as we observe, endure forever. Everyone who, disdaining what is merely present, labored to leave something to be remembered — a monument to their talent and their achievements — was clearly seeking a name for mind and character that time could not erase. So then, if bodily products are mortal precisely because the body itself is mortal, the conclusion follows: the soul must be immortal, since we observe its products are not subject to death. Likewise, what body and mind each crave reveals that one dies while the other lasts without end. The body craves only passing things — food, drink, garments, rest, pleasure — and cannot even long for or acquire these apart from the mind's guidance and assistance. The mind, though, craves on its own many things offering the body no advantage or gain whatsoever, things not fleeting but everlasting — glory earned by virtue, a name kept in memory. Devotion to God is built from three things — reining in desire and lust, bearing pain patiently, and looking on death with contempt — and it is precisely this devotion the soul longs for, defying the body's own wishes to do so. From all this one may believe the soul does not die but is merely parted from the body, given that the body accomplishes nothing apart from the soul, whereas the mind achieves much of great weight without any body at all. Consider further: things seen by the eyes and grasped by the hand, precisely because outside force can act upon them, cannot last forever, while things that fall under neither touch nor sight, but whose power, reason, and effect alone appear, are eternal, because they suffer no force from outside? If the body is mortal because it is equally subject to force and to touch, then the soul, for that very reason, is immortal, because it can neither be touched nor seen.
Let us turn now to answering those who take the opposite side, arguments Lucretius laid out in book three of his poem. His claim runs that since soul comes into being alongside body, it must likewise die alongside body. Yet the logic doesn't hold equally for both. Body is dense, something eyes and hand alike can grasp, whereas soul is delicate, slipping past both sight and touch. Body is shaped and hardened from earthly stuff; soul, as Plato taught, carries nothing thick or heavy from the earth within it. Otherwise it could never possess such cleverness, such force, such quickness — these could only come from a heavenly source. Body, then, being shaped from a heavy and perishable element, both touchable and visible, rots away and dies, powerless against force, precisely because sight and touch can reach it; soul, however, evades every touch through its delicacy and so cannot be shattered by any blow. Hence though the pair enter existence bound and joined as one, with the earthly component serving as a kind of container for its partner drawn down from heaven's fineness, once some force pries the two apart — that parting we name death — both revert to their proper natures: the earthly part dissolves back into earth, while what came from heavenly breath persists and flourishes without end, since that divine breath itself has no end. Notably, this very Lucretius, losing track of his own argument and the doctrine he meant to uphold, penned these lines: what once came from earth sinks back into earth again, while what was dispatched from the borders of the sky, the glowing halls of heaven welcome home once more. Such words ill suited someone arguing that souls die along with bodies; but truth overpowered him, and against his intent the real account slipped through. Beyond this, his very conclusion — that the soul dissolves, meaning it dies alongside the body since both share a birth — is not only mistaken but reversible into its opposite. Death does not strike both at once: rather, after the soul departs, the body stays intact for many days afterward, and if embalmed can last a great while longer. Had they truly been fated to perish together as they were born together, the soul would not slip away suddenly leaving the body behind — instead the two would collapse together in one single moment, and the body, breath still within it, would decompose and expire exactly as fast as the departing soul — indeed, the instant the body dissolved, the soul would scatter away like liquid poured from a shattered jar. Yet given that the fragile, earthly body, once the soul has gone, does not instantly crumble back into the earth of its origin, it follows that the soul — not being fragile — endures without end, its source being eternal. His further claim, that mind grows in the young, thrives among youths, and shrinks in old people, and so appears mortal — first misses that soul and mind are two different things: one gives us life, the other gives us thought. In sleep it's the mind that rests, not the soul; in the insane, the mind is snuffed out while the soul carries on — hence such people are called not “lifeless” but “out of their mind.” So mind, meaning intellect, waxes and wanes with age, while soul stays constant throughout, and from the instant it gains the capacity for breath it continues unaltered right to the close, when, freed at last from the body's confinement, it soars back home. Further: the soul, though breathed into us by God, lacks divine knowledge because it sits shut up within the shadowy house of earthly flesh. So it listens and takes everything in, gathering understanding through the process of listening and being taught, and age does not erode this understanding but adds to it — provided youth was spent well; and should extreme old age wreck the limbs, dim the eyes, slur the tongue, or dull the ears, the fault lies with the body, not the soul. But — comes the objection — memory falters. Small surprise, if under a house collapsing into ruin the mind grows burdened and forgets what's past, since it will divine the future only when it has escaped the prison that confines it. It is further claimed the soul feels sorrow and grief, and loses awareness through drink, thereby seeming weak and mortal. This is exactly the reason virtue and wisdom matter so greatly: courage must drive off the grief born from enduring and beholding indignities, and restraint must conquer not just the pull of drink but every other pleasure too. Should the soul go without virtue, softened instead by surrender to pleasure, it becomes vulnerable to death, given that — as demonstrated — virtue builds toward immortality while pleasure builds toward death. Death, though, as already shown, does not wipe out or obliterate entirely, but instead inflicts torment without end. The soul simply cannot cease to exist altogether, having taken its origin from God's spirit, itself without end. It's also claimed the soul feels bodily illness and undergoes forgetfulness of itself, and just as it can sicken, so too it often recovers. This, then, is precisely the reason virtue must be applied above all — so no bodily pain can break it, and so any self-forgetting belongs to mind rather than soul. Mind, because it occupies a fixed region within the body, when some disease damages that region, gets pushed from its post and, shaken loose from its seat, withdraws for a time — bound to come back, naturally, once treatment and recovered health rebuild its home. Since soul is bound to body, lacking virtue it sickens through that connection, and weakness spreads to the mind from its alliance with fragility; but once torn free from the body it will thrive independently and face no further vulnerability to fragility, having shed its frail covering. It's claimed that just as a gouged-out eye, cut off from the body, cannot see anything, likewise a soul once parted senses nothing, being itself merely a piece of the body. This is mistaken and absurd: the soul isn't a piece of the body but resides within it. Just as a container's contents aren't a piece of the container, nor are items inside a house called pieces of the house, the soul likewise isn't a piece of the body, since the body serves either as the soul's vessel or its holding-place. Emptier still is the next argument, that because the soul doesn't exit the body all at once but instead works free gradually limb by limb, starting from the feet, it must therefore seem mortal — as though, had it been eternal, it would erupt free in one instant, the way it happens for those slain by the blade. But those whom illness kills release their breath more gradually, so the soul drains away bit by bit as the limbs cool in stages. Given the soul is fed by the blood's substance, much as a flame is fed by oil, once fever's heat has used up that substance, the body's farthest limbs inevitably turn cold, since the finer vessels stretch out to the body's outer reaches, and the slenderest, most distant channels run dry as the source-vein gives out. Even so, one must not conclude, merely because bodily feeling fails, that the soul's capacity to feel is snuffed out and dies along with it. It isn't the soul growing numb as the body fails but the body growing numb as the soul withdraws, since the soul takes every sensation with it as it goes. Given that the soul's presence is what supplies sensation to the body and keeps it alive, it cannot be that the soul fails to live and feel in its own right, since it is itself both feeling and life. As for the argument that if our mind were truly deathless, it wouldn't, upon dying, protest at being torn apart, but would instead simply step outward and slip off its covering the way a serpent does — I myself have never encountered anyone protesting at being torn apart in death; perhaps he'd instead witnessed some Epicurean playing the philosopher right up to his final breath, holding forth on his own coming dissolution. How, in any case, could one tell whether a person feels themselves being torn apart versus simply released from the body, given that at the very end the tongue itself goes silent? While someone still has feeling and speech, dissolution hasn't yet happened; once it has happened, feeling and speech are both gone. So the complaint about dissolution comes either too soon or too late to ever be voiced. Yet, comes the reply, before dissolution occurs, the person already grasps that dissolution is coming. And what of the fact that most of the dying, far from protesting dissolution as he claims, are instead heard declaring that they are departing, setting out, walking on — shown either through gesture or, when still capable, through spoken word? This reveals that what happens is not dissolution at all but separation, a fact establishing that the soul persists. As for the remaining Epicurean arguments, Pythagoras stands against them, teaching that souls pass out of bodies worn down by age and death and slip themselves into fresh newborn bodies, forever taking on new birth — now in a human, now in a beast of burden, now in a wild animal, now in a bird — and are immortal on this account, because they frequently exchange the dwellings of various and dissimilar bodies. Since this opinion of a deranged man was more ridiculous and more fit for the stage than for the schoolroom, it did not even deserve to be refuted seriously; whoever does so seems to fear that someone might actually believe it. We must therefore pass over what was argued, falsehood against falsehood; it is enough to have refuted what was argued against the truth.
I trust I have now made the case that the soul cannot come undone. What's left is to call in witnesses whose standing can back up these arguments. I won't turn here to the prophets, since their entire teaching and divine purpose rests on a single point — that humanity was fashioned to worship God and to receive from him deathlessness — I'll instead call on figures that the very deniers of this truth cannot help but trust. Hermes, sketching human nature to explain how God fashioned it, put it this way: 'and out of these two natures — the deathless one and the mortal one — he forged a single nature, that of humankind, making the same being partly deathless and partly mortal, and setting him thus in between the divine, deathless nature and the mortal, changeable one, so that, beholding everything, he might stand in awe of everything.' Someone might object that this figure belongs among mere philosophers, yet the Egyptians count him among the gods and revere him as Mercury, yet would grant him no more authority than Plato or Pythagoras. Let us look, then, for weightier testimony still. A man named Polites once asked the Apollo at Miletus whether the soul survives death or comes apart, and the god replied in verse: 'While bound fast within the body, sensing corruptible ills, it bows before mortal suffering; but once it wins swift freedom from the wasted frame, in the way mortals do, it rises entirely into the upper sky, unaging forever, abiding beyond every limit for all time — for the providence of God, born before all things, has decreed it so.' And do not the Sibylline oracles proclaim the same thing, foretelling a day when God shall pass judgment on both the living and the dead? We shall bring forward examples of these shortly. So the teaching of Democritus, Epicurus, and Dicaearchus regarding the soul's dissolution stands refuted. They would never risk claiming, before any sorcerer able to call the dead up by incantation and render them visible and speaking to human eyes, foretelling things to come, that souls are destroyed — and were they to try, the facts themselves, plainly before them, would expose the error. But since these men could not grasp the soul's nature, so delicate that it eludes the sight of the human mind, they concluded it simply ceases to exist. And what of Aristoxenus, who claimed no soul exists at all, not even in a living body? His view was that just as tightened strings on an instrument produce a harmonious tune — what musicians call “harmony” — so likewise within bodies, the arrangement of organs together with the strength of limbs generates the capacity to sense; nothing more ridiculous could be said. Yet this man, sound of eye but blind of understanding, failed to notice that he himself lived and possessed the very mind by which he devised this notion. Such is the common fate of philosophers: they assume that whatever fails to meet the eye simply has no existence at all — though the mind's keenness should register far more sharply than bodily sight does whatever things are grasped by reasoning and understanding rather than by vision.
Having discussed the soul's immortality, our next task is to teach in what manner it is granted to man, and when, so that here too the errors bred by the depravity and folly of certain people may be exposed — those who suppose that particular mortals were turned into gods by the decrees and opinions of other mortals, whether because they had invented crafts, or taught people to use certain crops, or passed down things of use to human existence, or slew monstrous beasts. We have already shown, in earlier books, and will show again here, just how distant such achievements stand from true immortality, so that it becomes evident that righteousness by itself confers eternal life on a man, and God alone is the giver who rewards that life everlasting. As for those said to have won immortality through their own merits — having possessed neither righteousness nor genuine virtue — what their sins and desires actually gained them was death rather than deathlessness, and rather than a heavenly prize, the torments of the underworld, shared with everyone who paid them worship. I intend to demonstrate that this judgment's hour approaches, so the righteous may receive their fitting reward and the wicked their merited punishment. Plato, along with a great many other philosophers, not knowing where things originated or the supreme instant the world came to be, claimed that countless thousands of ages had elapsed from when this magnificent ornament of a world first appeared — perhaps taking their cue from the Chaldeans, who, according to Cicero's account in the opening book of his treatise on divination, boast madly of possessing records spanning four hundred and seventy thousand years; confident no one could disprove them, they took this as license for falsehood. We, by contrast, instructed in the knowledge of truth by the divine scriptures, understand both how the world began and how it will end; that second matter we shall take up now, near this work's conclusion, having already laid out the beginning back in book two. So let the philosophers who tally the world's age in thousands of eons understand this: the sixth millennium has not yet run its course. Once that number reaches completion, an ending is bound to occur, and human affairs must be recast into something better — a claim whose grounds must be laid out first, so the logic behind it stands clear. Across a span of six days, God brought to completion the world and this astonishing work of nature, as the concealed sense of holy scripture records, and he set apart the seventh as sacred, the day on which his labors ceased. This is the Sabbath, whose very name in the Hebrew tongue derives from its number, making seven the number that is both lawful and whole. Seven days, cycling in recurrence, mark off the years' revolutions; seven fixed stars never set; and seven wandering heavenly bodies, moving unevenly and irregularly, are thought responsible for all the changes in things and seasons. Since, then, God's entire work was brought to completion across six days, the present state of the world must likewise persist across six ages — that is, six millennia. God's own great day is measured out by a cycle of a thousand years, as the prophet indicates in saying: before your eyes, O Lord, a thousand years pass like a single day. And just as God toiled through those six days fashioning such vast things, so too his truth and worship must labor across these six thousand years, with evil holding the upper hand and ruling throughout. And again, because he rested and pronounced a blessing on the seventh day once his labors were done, it follows that once the sixth millennium ends, wickedness will be swept entirely from the earth, righteousness will hold sway for a thousand years, and there will be peace and repose after the toils the world has borne for so long. I will explain in due course just how this comes to pass. We have often noted that small, slight things serve as figures and previews of greater ones — that our ordinary day, marked off by sunrise and sunset, carries the likeness of that great day defined by the thousand-year cycle. In just the same way, the molding of earthly man prefigured, for a later age, the shaping of a heavenly people. Just as God, having finished everything made for man's benefit, fashioned man himself last of all on the sixth day and brought him into the world as into a dwelling already carefully prepared, so too, in this present sixth great day, the true man takes shape through God's word — meaning a holy people is molded toward righteousness by divine teaching and commandment. And just as that first man was formed from earth, mortal and incomplete, destined for a thousand-year lifespan in this world; so now, drawn out of this present earthly era, a whole and perfected man is being shaped, so that, brought to life by God, he may reign a thousand years within that same world. Whoever searches the divine writings will discover how this consummation is to unfold and what outcome looms over human affairs. Yet the secular prophets, in harmony with the heavenly ones, likewise proclaim that things will end and collapse before long, depicting what amounts to the final decrepitude of an exhausted, disintegrating world. All that the prophets and seers foretell will happen before that ultimate close arrives, I shall gather from every source and lay out together.
Among the hidden depths of the sacred writings it is told how a grain shortage forced the leader of the Hebrews, together with his whole household and kin, across the border into Egypt. In time his descendants, lingering there and swelling into a vast nation, found themselves crushed beneath slavery's heavy and unbearable yoke; God then struck Egypt with a plague beyond healing and set his people free, leading them straight through the middle of the sea, its waves split and pushed apart on both sides so that the people crossed on dry land. When the Egyptian king tried chasing down the escapees, the sea closed back over its bed and caught him along with his entire army. Remarkable and famous as this deed was in showing God's power to the people of that day, it nevertheless served as a preview and figure of something far greater which this same God will accomplish when time reaches its final close: he means to liberate his people from the world's crushing bondage. Yet at that earlier moment God's people were a single nation, so Egypt alone bore the blow; now, though, because God's people are drawn from every language and live scattered among all nations, oppressed by those who rule them, every nation without exception — the entire world, in other words — must be struck by heavenly plagues, so that the righteous folk who worship God may finally go free. And exactly as signs then warned the Egyptians of the disaster coming their way, so too, near the very end, astonishing wonders will appear through every element making up the world, revealing to every nation the ruin bearing down on it. As this age nears its close, the state of human affairs is bound to shift and, wickedness gaining strength, sink further toward ruin, so much so that even our present era — where injustice and evil have already climbed to their peak — will look happy, nearly golden, set beside that incurable evil still to come. Righteousness, indeed, will become so rare, and wickedness and greed and lust and craving so common, that whatever good people happen still to exist then will fall prey to the wicked, hounded from every direction by the unjust; only the wicked will prosper, while the good are flung about amid every disgrace and every deprivation. Every law will collapse into chaos and legal codes will cease to exist. No one at that time will possess anything beyond what force has won or force has kept safe; audacity and violence will own everything. Trust among men will vanish, along with peace, kindness, shame, and truth — leaving neither safety nor governance nor any rest whatsoever from these evils. The entire earth will churn with turmoil, war will roar in every quarter, every nation will take up arms and turn against its neighbors; cities near one another will clash, and Egypt above all will pay the price for its foolish superstitions, drenched as though by a river running blood. A sword will then sweep across the earth, cutting down everything and flattening the whole like a harvest being reaped. Behind this ruin and chaos lies this cause: the Roman name, under which the world is presently ruled — my mind recoils from saying it, yet say it I must, since it is what lies ahead — will be wiped from the earth, and dominion will pass back to Asia, so that once again the East commands and the West serves. Nor should it strike anyone as odd that a realm built on such a colossal scale, raised across so long a span by so many able men, and eventually secured by such enormous riches, should nonetheless someday come crashing down. For nothing that human effort constructs is beyond destruction by that same human effort, since whatever mortal hands produce remains mortal itself. Earlier kingdoms too, however long they had thrived, fell in just this way. History records that Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Assyria each held sway over the earth in turn; once each had been swept away, supreme power finally reached the Romans. And the more they tower over every other kingdom in scale, the harder their eventual fall will be, since whatever stands taller than the rest carries greater weight when it collapses. Seneca showed real insight in mapping the city of Rome's history onto the stages of a human life. Its infancy, he said, fell under king Romulus, from whom Rome received both birth and, in a sense, its rearing; childhood followed under the later kings, under whose hand it grew larger and took shape through numerous disciplines and institutions. But once Tarquin took the throne, Rome — having reached something like young adulthood — found servitude intolerable, and, casting off arrogant domination's yoke, chose to answer to laws instead of kings. When its adolescence ended with the close of the war against Carthage, its strength now settled, it finally began entering young manhood. With its longstanding rival Carthage finally destroyed, Rome's power spread until sea and land alike, everywhere in the world, answered to it; then, once no king or nation remained unconquered and no enemy was left to fight, that same strength turned inward, gnawing away at Rome by Rome's own hand. This marked its first old age: torn apart by civil war and worn down by trouble from within, it collapsed back into rule by a single man, as though rolled backward into a second infancy. Having forfeited the freedom it once guarded under Brutus's leadership, it aged to the point where it could no longer stand unaided, needing the support of those who governed it as a crutch. Given all this, what else can follow old age but death? The gatherings of the prophets foretell that this will happen soon, veiling it under other names so that not everyone grasps it easily. The Sibyls, however, state plainly that Rome will fall, and indeed at God's own verdict, since Rome despised his name and, as an enemy to righteousness, butchered the people who were truth's own children. Hystaspes as well — an ancient king among the Medes, the very man from whom the river now known as the Hydaspes took its name — passed down to later generations, through the interpretation given by a boy who prophesied in his sleep, a marvelous dream: he announced, long before the Trojan people even existed, that the Roman empire and its name would vanish from the earth.
Lest anyone judge this unbelievable, I shall lay out how it will happen. To begin, the kingdom will multiply, its supreme power splintered and cut apart among many hands until it shrinks away. Civil strife will then be sown without end, and ruinous wars will allow no rest, until ten kings emerge together, dividing the world between them not to rule it but to use it up. Once these have swollen their armies to three... with their lands left empty — the start of overthrow and calamity. Everything will be wasted, broken apart, devoured. Then, all at once, a mighty enemy will rise up against them out of the farthest edge of the northern region; after wiping out three of the number who then hold Asia, he will be drawn into partnership by the rest and made supreme over everyone. Ruling with intolerable tyranny, he will torment the world, blend the human together with the divine, plot deeds too horrible and cursed to speak of, turn fresh schemes over in his mind to set up a kingdom of his own, overturn existing laws and impose his own, defile, plunder, ravage, and kill; and once his name is switched and the seat of power relocated, chaos and disorder will overtake the human race. A time will then arrive that is truly detestable and abominable, one in which no man finds life pleasant. Cities will be torn out by the roots and perish, not merely by sword and flame but by relentless earthquakes, floods, widespread disease, and recurring hunger. The very air will grow tainted, turning foul and disease-ridden, alternating between untimely downpours and pointless drought, between bitter cold and scorching heat, and the earth will yield man no harvest: no grain, no tree, no vine will produce fruit, but after promising the richest hope while flowering, they will fail at the moment of fruiting. Springs together with rivers will run dry, leaving not even water to drink, and what water remains will turn to blood or bitterness. As a result, four-footed creatures on land will perish, along with birds in the sky and fish in the sea. Marvelous signs will likewise fill the heavens, gripping human minds with utter dread — comets trailing tails, the sun gone dark, the moon discolored, stars dropping from where they course. None of this, however, will occur in familiar fashion; instead stars never before seen or known will suddenly appear. The sun will stay dim without ceasing, hardly letting day be told from night; the moon, rather than merely failing for three hours as before, will run unusual courses soaked continually in blood, leaving man unable to easily track the movement of the stars or reckon the seasons — summer will show up amid winter, winter amid summer. The year will contract, the month will shrink, and the day will be squeezed into a tight span, while stars fall in constant showers until the whole sky looks blind, stripped of every light. Even the tallest mountains will topple and be flattened level, and the sea will become impossible to sail. And so that nothing be missing from the calamities striking men and earth alike, a trumpet-blast will sound down from the sky, which the Sibyl announces in these words: a trumpet out of heaven will let loose a voice heavy with lament. Everyone, at that, will panic and shake at the sound of such mourning. Then, driven by God's wrath against men who never acknowledged righteousness, sword, fire, hunger, and disease will run wild, with a dread that never lifts hanging over everything besides. People will pray to God then, and get no answer; they will long for death, and it will not arrive. Not even nighttime will offer their fear any relief, nor will sleep touch their eyes, but worry and wakefulness will wear their souls thin; they will weep, groan, and grind their teeth, envying those already dead while mourning those still living. Through such troubles, among many others, the earth will become an empty waste, and the world will be left marred and abandoned — just as the Sibylline verses put it: the world will turn into disorder itself, as mankind perishes. The human race will be reduced so severely that barely a tenth of men will survive, and where a thousand once set out, scarcely a hundred will now come forth. As for God's worshippers, two-thirds of them will perish too, and the surviving third — the ones proven faithful — will remain.
Let me lay out more clearly how this will unfold. Once the ages draw near their close, God will send a great prophet to bring men to acknowledge him, and this prophet will be granted power to perform wonders. Wherever people refuse to listen, he will seal off the sky and hold back the rain, change water into blood, and inflict on them hunger and thirst, and if anyone attempts to harm him, fire will burst from his mouth and consume that person. Through such wonders and powers he will draw many toward worshipping God. When that prophet's mission concludes, a different king will appear, his origin Syrian and his begetting the work of a malevolent spirit; humankind will find in him its destroyer and its ruin, and along with himself he will eliminate whatever traces of the former evil still remain. This king will make war on God's prophet, defeat him, kill him, and leave his body lying unburied; yet on the third day the prophet will rise again and, while everyone watches in wonder, be swept up into heaven. That utterly vile king, however, will prove to be a false prophet himself, setting himself up and declaring himself god, demanding worship as though he were god's own son. He will be granted the power to perform signs and marvels, and through these he will trap people into adoring him. He will order fire down out of the sky, halt the sun in its path, and make an image speak, and all of this will happen at his command; wonders like these will lure in even a great number of learned people. He will then attempt to tear down God's temple and hunt down the righteous, bringing on distress and oppression unmatched since the world's beginning. Those who believe and join him will be branded like livestock, while anyone who rejects his mark will either escape to the hills or, once seized, be killed through elaborate torture. He will similarly bundle righteous men inside the scrolls of the prophets and set them ablaze. He will be permitted to ravage the earth across forty-two months. That period will see justice thrown away and innocence despised, with the wicked hunting down the good as enemies. No law, order, or military discipline will hold; nobody will honor age, recognize devotion's duty, or show mercy toward either sex or the very young — everything will collapse into confusion, mixed against what is right and against nature's own laws. In this way the whole earth will be plundered as though by one shared band of thieves. Once these things have come to pass, the righteous and those devoted to truth will cut themselves off from the wicked and escape into the wilderness. Hearing of this, the impious one, burning with rage, will march out with an enormous army, and, marshalling all his forces, will close in around the mountain sheltering the righteous, meaning to seize them. But once they see themselves hemmed in and surrounded on every side, they will cry out to God in a great voice and beg for aid from heaven, and God will listen to them, sending down a mighty king from heaven to pull them free and set them loose, wiping out the wicked entirely by sword and fire.
That these things would come to pass was foretold both by all the prophets, moved by the spirit of God, and also by the seers, moved by the instigation of demons. For Hystaspes, whom I named above, having described the wickedness of this final age, says that the pious and faithful, set apart from the wicked, will with weeping and groaning stretch out their hands to heaven and implore the good faith of Jove: that Jove would turn his gaze toward the earth, listen to what mankind was saying, and wipe out the wicked. All of this is true except one point — he attributed to Jove what God alone will do. But that too was concealed through demonic deceit: namely, that in time the Father would send his own Son, so that, once every evil had been wiped away, the faithful would go free. Yet Hermes did not conceal this. For in the book called the Perfect Discourse, after listing the evils we have mentioned, he adds this: "When these things have come to pass, O Asclepius, then the lord and father and God, and maker of the first and only God, having looked upon what has happened, and set his own will — that is, the good — against disorder, and having called back error and cleansed away wickedness, in one place by flooding it with much water, in another by scorching it with the sharpest fire, and sometimes driving it out by wars and plagues, will bring the world back to its ancient state and restore it, his own creation." The Sibyls likewise show that it will happen in no other way than that the Son of God be sent by the Father most high, to free the just from the hands of the impious and to destroy the unjust along with the raging tyrants. One of them puts it thus: "He will come, wishing to lay waste the city of the blessed. And a certain king, sent from God, will destroy all the great kings and the finest men; and thus afterward there will be a judgment of men by the imperishable one." And another again: "And then from the sun God will send a king, who will put an end to every evil of war upon the whole earth." And yet another: "He will come gentle, behold, that he may lift from our necks the heavy, servile yoke laid upon them, and loose the godless laws and the bonds of violence."
When the earth has been oppressed, then, and human strength has failed to overthrow so vast a tyranny, since the world will be captured and weighed down by great armies of brigands, that great calamity will need divine help. God, then, moved both by the peril hanging over all and by the pitiable lament of the righteous, will straightway send a deliverer. Then the midst of heaven will open in the dead and dark night, so that throughout the whole world the light of the descending God will appear like lightning; which the Sibyl put into these verses: "When he arrives, a smoky fire will blaze at the heart of night's darkness." It is this same night that we mark with vigil, in honor of our king and God's arrival — a night carrying two meanings, since on it he both regained life after his suffering and, later still, is destined to take up rule over the whole earth. He is judge, avenger, king, deliverer, and God — the one we name Christ — and before his descent he will give this sign: a sword will fall suddenly out of heaven, so the righteous will recognize that the commander of the holy host is coming down; and he will descend accompanied by angels into the middle of the earth, and an unquenchable flame will go before him, and the power of the angels will deliver into the hands of the righteous that great multitude which has surrounded the mountain, and it will be cut down from the third hour until evening, and blood will flow like a torrent; and when all his forces are destroyed, the impious one alone will flee, and his own strength will perish from him. This is the one called Antichrist, but he will falsely claim to be Christ himself and will fight against the true one, and, defeated, will flee, and will renew the war many times, and be defeated many times, until in a fourth battle, all the impious having been finished off, he is beaten down and captured, and at last pays the penalty for his crimes. And the other rulers and tyrants too, who ground down the world, will be led bound together with him to the king, and he will rebuke them and convict them and reproach them for their deeds, and condemn them, and hand them over to torments of the mind. Thus, with wickedness extinguished and impiety suppressed, the world will rest, which through so many ages, subjected to error and crime, endured an unspeakable slavery. No longer will gods made by hand be worshiped, but their images, thrown down from their temples and shrines, will be given to the fire and will burn along with their marvelous offerings; which the Sibyl too foretold in agreement with the prophets: "Mortals will cast away their idols and all their wealth." The Erythraean Sibyl promised the same: "The handmade works of the gods will be burned up."
After this the underworld will be opened and the dead will rise, and of them that same king and God will hold the great judgment, to whom the Father most high will give the fullest power both of judging and of ruling. Of this judgment and kingdom it is found thus in the Erythraean Sibyl: "When this too has reached its appointed day, and the judgment of the immortal God comes upon mortals, there will come upon men a great judgment and rule." And again in another: "Then gaping earth will show the Tartarean chasm, and all will come before the judgment-seat of the king, God." And elsewhere in the same: "I will fold back the sky, throw open the earth's hidden depths, and raise the dead to life again, breaking loose fate and death's own sting; afterward I will lead them to judgment, judging the life of the pious and the impious among men." Yet not all will then be judged by God, but only those who have lived within the religion of God. For those who did not acknowledge God — since no sentence of acquittal can be pronounced upon them — are already judged and condemned, the holy writings testifying that the impious will not rise to judgment. Those who have known God, then, will be judged, and what they have done — their wicked acts set against the good — will be weighed: if just and worthy deeds outnumber and outweigh the rest, they are granted a blessed life, but if wrongdoing tips the scale, they are sentenced to punishment. At this point someone might object: "Granting the soul's immortality, how could it still be shown as vulnerable to suffering and pain? For if it is punished for its deeds, it will surely feel pain, and thus also a kind of death; but if it is not subject to death, neither is it subject to pain; therefore it cannot suffer." To this question or argument the Stoics respond thus: the souls of men do indeed endure, and are not dissolved into nothing by the intervention of death, but the souls of the righteous return, pure, incapable of suffering, and blessed, to the heavenly seat from which they originated, or are carried off to certain fortunate fields, where they enjoy wondrous pleasures; but the souls of the impious, since they have stained themselves with evil desires, hold a kind of middle nature between the immortal and the mortal, and retain something of weakness from their contact with the flesh, and, being bound to its cravings and lusts, draw a stain that cannot be washed away and an earthly taint — which, once it has deeply taken hold through long duration, causes their souls to be reduced to that same nature, so that, though not utterly extinguishable, since they come from God, they nonetheless become capable of torment through the stain of the body, which, branded in by sins, gives rise to a sense of pain. The poet explained this view thus: "Nay, even when life has left them at their last hour, not all the evil, nor all the bodily plagues, wholly depart from the wretched; and of necessity many things, long grown together in wondrous ways, cling deep within. Therefore they are worked over by punishments, and pay the penalty for their old misdeeds." This is very nearly true. Once the soul has separated from the body, the same poet says, it resembles a light breeze, much like sleep taking flight; being pure spirit, its very fineness keeps it beyond the grasp of us bodily creatures — yet not beyond God, to whom everything, however intangible, lies open and within reach.
We hold, to begin with, that God's power is vast enough to lay hold of even bodiless things and to shape them exactly as he pleases. Angels themselves stand in awe of God, since he can discipline them in ways beyond telling, and demons likewise shrink from him, since he has the means to torment and chastise them. Little wonder, then, that souls, immortal as they are, can still suffer at God's hand. Having nothing solid or touchable within them, they cannot be harmed by anything solid or physical; but since their existence belongs wholly to the realm of spirit, only God can act upon them, for his power and being are themselves spiritual. Yet the sacred writings do reveal to you the manner in which the wicked will pay their penalty. Because they sinned while embodied, they will once more take on flesh, so that the punishment too may be borne in the body; but the flesh God clothes them in will bear no resemblance to this earthly kind — it will be unbreakable and last forever, able to endure endless torment and unending fire. And that fire is not the kind we know, the sort we rely on for daily needs, which dies out the moment its fuel runs dry. The divine fire, by contrast, sustains itself and burns on forever without any feeding at all, giving off no smoke, but flowing pure and clear like water; nothing drives it upward the way ours is driven — for our flame is forced to leap and quiver skyward only because of the grime of the earthly matter that holds it and the smoke tangled within it. That single divine flame, then, carries a twofold power: it burns the wicked even as it renews them, replacing in their bodies exactly what it consumes, feeding itself an endless supply — the very thing the poets recast as the vulture gnawing at Tityos. In this way the bodies keep regenerating without ever wasting away; the fire only scorches and delivers pain. The righteous, too, will be tested by this same fire once God has passed judgment on them. Those whose wrongdoing outweighs their merit, whether in gravity or in number, will be singed and burned by it, while those hardened by complete righteousness and ripened virtue will feel nothing at all — for something of God dwells in them that turns back and rejects the flame's force. Such is the strength of innocence that the fire retreats from it unharmed, having received from God precisely this charge: to scorch the wicked and spare the just. And let no one imagine that souls face judgment the instant they die: all are kept together in a single holding place until the appointed hour when the supreme judge weighs each one's merits. Those whose righteousness is confirmed will then receive the prize of immortality, while those whose sins and crimes stand exposed will not rise again, but will be locked away with the wicked in that same darkness, marked out for fixed punishment.
Some think these are fictions of the poets, not knowing where the poets got them, and deny that these things can happen; nor is it strange that it should seem so to them. For it is handed down by the poets in a different form from how it actually is; for although they are far more ancient than historians and orators and the other kinds of writers, still, because they did not know the mystery of the divine sacrament, and the mention of the coming resurrection had reached them by obscure rumor, they published what they had heard carelessly and lightly in the manner of an invented tale. And yet they themselves testified that they were not following a certain authority, but only an opinion, as Virgil says: "May it be right for me to tell what I have heard." Although, then, they corrupted the secrets of the truth in part, still the matter itself is found to be all the truer for the fact that it agrees in part with the prophets — which is enough proof for us. Yet there is some reason behind their error. Since the prophets kept declaring in their preaching that God's own Son would sit in judgment over the dead, word of this got around, and since they thought the ruler of heaven to be none other than Jove, they handed down that a son of Jove judges in the underworld — not Apollo, Bacchus, or Mercury — reckoned among the heavenly ones — but a figure who, though mortal, was known for justice: Minos, say, or Aeacus, or Rhadamanthus. They corrupted, then, by poetic license what they had received, or opinion changed the truth as it was scattered through different mouths and various reports. For as to their singing that, when a thousand years have passed in the underworld, souls are restored again to life — as Virgil puts it: "All these, when they have rolled the wheel through a thousand years, God calls to the river Lethe in a great throng, so that, forgetting, they may look again upon the vault above and begin once more to wish to return into bodies" — this reasoning misled them: that the dead will rise again, not a thousand years after their death, but so that, once restored again to life, they may reign with God for a thousand years. For God will come so that, once this world has been cleansed of all corruption, he may raise up the revived souls of the righteous in renewed bodies to everlasting blessedness. And so, apart from the water of forgetfulness, the rest is true; and that they invented for this reason, so that no one might object to them: "Why then do they not remember that they once lived, or who they were, or what they did?" But nonetheless the whole thing is not thought plausible, and the entire matter is rejected as though freely and fancifully invented. But when we assert and teach concerning the resurrection that souls will return to a second life not forgetful of themselves, but with the same consciousness and form, this is objected: "So many ages have already passed — who has ever risen from the dead, that we should believe it can happen by his example?" But indeed, the resurrection cannot take place while injustice still reigns. For in this age men are killed by violence, by the sword, by treachery, by poison, and are afflicted with wrongs, with poverty, with imprisonment, with torments, with proscriptions. Besides, righteousness itself draws hatred, since anyone wanting to follow God is met not merely with contempt but with every sort of abuse, tortured through countless forms of punishment, and forced — not by reason or truth, but by the abominable mangling of their bodies — into the impious worship of handmade gods. Is it fitting, then, that men should rise again or return to this same life, in which they cannot be safe? Since, then, the righteous are held so cheap, so easily destroyed, what do we imagine would occur if a person came back from death, restored to life as though returning home from banishment? Surely such a person would be removed from human sight, for fear that, upon seeing or hearing him, everyone would forsake their gods and give their devotion and worship over to the one true God. Therefore the resurrection must happen once only, when evil has been removed, since it is not right that those who have risen should either die again or be harmed in any way, so that those whose death has been sealed away may be able to lead a blessed life. But the poets, knowing that this age abounds in every evil, introduced the river of forgetfulness, lest souls, remembering their evils and toils, should refuse to return to the world above. Hence Virgil: "O father, are we to think that any souls go up from here to heaven on high, and again return to their sluggish bodies? What is this dreadful longing for the light in wretched souls?" Not knowing the timing or manner in which it was meant to occur, they imagined instead that souls were born anew, drawn back into the womb, and made to start over as infants. Hence too Plato, discussing the soul, says that from this it can be known that souls are immortal and divine: that in children their wits are quick and easily receptive, and that they grasp what they learn so swiftly that they do not seem to be learning it for the first time, but recognizing and recollecting it — in which a wise man believed the poets most foolishly.
Souls, then, are not born again — that cannot occur — but instead they will be raised and God will clothe them once more in bodies, and every deed and detail of their former life will come back to them; and there, placed among heaven's blessings and delighting in boundless riches, they will thank God for his presence among them, since he has wiped out every evil and lifted them up to his kingdom and to life without end. Concerning this resurrection the philosophers too tried to say something, as corruptly as the poets. For Pythagoras argued that souls pass into new bodies — but foolishly, claiming that they pass from men into beasts and from beasts into men, and that he himself had been restored from Euphorbus. Chrysippus did better, whom Cicero says props up the portico of the Stoics: in the books he wrote on providence, speaking of the renewal of the world, he added this: "Since this is so, it is clear that nothing is impossible, and that we too, after death, in a certain cycle of time, will be restored again to the form in which we now exist." But let us return from human matters to divine ones. The Sibyl puts it this way: "Mortal-kind as a whole is slow to believe. Yet once the reckoning for the world and for mortals finally arrives — brought about by God himself, who will judge the impious alongside the pious — he will banish the impious to darkness and fire, while all who were pious will live again on earth, as God grants them his own spirit, together with honor and life." But if it is not the prophets alone — if seers, poets, and philosophers likewise concur that the dead are destined to rise — then no one should demand of us an explanation of how. Divine works simply cannot be accounted for by reasoning; yet if God originally shaped man by some means beyond words, we should trust that the one who made him anew can bring the old man back as well.
Now let me add what still remains. The Son of the highest and greatest God will come to sit in judgment over the living and the dead, just as the Sibyl declares and testifies: for confusion will then overtake the whole earth of mortal men, when the Almighty himself comes from his throne to judge the souls of the living and the dead, and the entire world besides. And once he has blotted out injustice and pronounced the greatest of all judgments, he will call back to life those righteous ones who lived since the world began. For a thousand years he will dwell among men, ruling them under a most equitable government, as a different Sibyl proclaims in her frenzied utterance: Hear me, you mortal ones — an eternal king now reigns. Those who are then still living in the flesh will not perish, but across that same millennium will beget children beyond counting, offspring holy and beloved of God. Meanwhile those who have been raised from among the dead will stand over the living as their judges. As for the nations, they will not be wiped out entirely; a remnant will be spared as a witness to God's triumph, so that the righteous may parade them in victory and hold them in lasting servitude. During this same span the ruler of the demons, contriver of every wickedness, will be shackled in chains and held under watch through the thousand years of the heavenly reign, a time when justice will govern the earth so that he can devise no harm whatsoever toward God's people. Once he has come, the righteous will be brought together out of every land, and after judgment is complete, a holy city will rise at the center of the world, where God the Maker himself will live alongside the righteous who share his rule. It is this city the Sibyl indicates when she declares: the city God yearned for — this he fashioned brighter than the stars, than the sun, and than the moon. At that time the darkness now shrouding and blinding the heavens will be lifted away from the world; the moon will take on the sun's radiance and wane no more, while the sun itself will shine seven times more brilliant than it does today. The earth will unlock her own abundance and yield her richest harvests unbidden; honey will ooze from the rocky heights, wine will run down in streams, and the rivers will brim over with milk. In sum, the world itself will exult and every part of nature will rejoice, rescued and set free from the reign of evil, of impiety, of crime, and of deceit. In that age no beast will live on blood, no bird on prey — everything will be tranquil and at peace. Lion and calf will share a stall together; the wolf will leave the sheep unharmed, the dog will give up the hunt, hawk and eagle will do no injury, and a child will play among serpents. In a word, what the poets claimed had already come to pass in a golden age under Saturn's rule will then actually occur. Their mistake had this origin: the prophets, describing much that lay still ahead, often speak of it and lay it out as though it were already finished. This is because visions were placed before their eyes by the divine spirit, so that they beheld those very events unfolding and reaching completion as if in that moment. As their prophecies gradually spread by hearsay, outsiders unacquainted with the faith failed to grasp the sense intended, and so imagined that everything had already been accomplished in ages long past — outcomes that plainly neither were nor could have been realized while a mere mortal held power. Yet once impious cults have been swept away and wickedness restrained, and the earth made subject to God, the sailor will step back from his trade and no vessel of pine will carry goods to exchange; every land will produce every kind of crop. The ground will no longer bear the hoe, nor the vine the pruning knife; even the sturdy plowman will loose his oxen from the yoke for good. Then fields will gradually turn gold with tender grain, red grapes will hang from briars no one tended, and even hard oak will drip honeyed dew. Wool will have no need to feign varied dyes, for the ram itself, out in the meadow, will change its own fleece — now to a soft blushing crimson, now to saffron — and a scarlet tint will clothe the grazing lambs unasked. Nanny goats will come home with udders heavy with milk, and herds will no longer dread the great lions. Such was the poet's word, following the songs of the Cumaean Sibyl. The Erythraean Sibyl, however, speaks in this way: wolf and lamb will graze side by side in the mountains, leopard and kid will feed together, bear will live among calves, and the flesh-devouring lion, alongside every mortal creature, will eat straw at the stall, while serpents will lie down beside infants in their cradles. And elsewhere, on the plenty of all things, she says: then God will give great joy to mankind, for the earth, the trees, and the countless herds of the world will yield to men their genuine fruit — wine, sweet honey, white milk, and grain, finest of all things for mortal beings. And again, in the same vein: for the righteous alone will the sacred earth bear all of this — a stream honey-dripping from the rock and from the spring, and a flow of ambrosial milk given to every just soul. Thus mankind will live out a life of the utmost peace and plenty, reigning together with God; the kings of the nations will travel from earth's farthest reaches bearing gifts and tribute, to adore and exalt the great King, whose name will stand glorious and honored among every nation beneath heaven and among every king who governs upon the earth.
These are the things the prophets declare are yet to come. I have not judged it necessary to lay out their testimonies word for word, since that would prove endless, nor could a single volume hold so vast a body of material, given how many voices, speaking with one spirit, say the same thing; besides, I had no wish to tire my readers by piling up everything I have gathered and rendered from every quarter. Beyond this, my aim was to establish what I have argued chiefly on the strength not of our own writings but of those belonging to others, showing that this truth stands on record not merely among us but even among the very people who assail us — a truth they refuse to admit. Should anyone wish to examine the matter in greater depth, let him draw from the source directly, where he will discover marvels far beyond what we have brought together in these pages. Perhaps someone will now ask when these things we have set out will actually happen. I already showed earlier that this transformation is bound to occur once six thousand years have run their course, and that the last day of the final reckoning already draws near. We may recognize it from the signs the prophets foretold, for they announced the signs by which we are meant to watch for and dread, day after day, the close of the age. As for when this total will be reached, those who have studied chronology inform us, drawing their figures both from the holy scriptures and from assorted historical records, of how many years have elapsed since the world's beginning. Although their reckonings differ somewhat and their sums do not perfectly match, the whole remaining stretch anticipated appears to run no longer than two hundred years. The present state of the world itself makes plain that its downfall and collapse are near at hand, except that so long as the city of Rome remains unharmed, there seems nothing yet to fear on this score. But once that head of the world has fallen and become, as the Sibyls say it will, a mere back-alley, who could doubt that the end has already arrived for human affairs and for the whole earth? That city alone still holds everything together, and we owe it to the God of heaven to pray and to worship, that his decrees and designs — if such a thing is possible — might be postponed, lest that detestable tyrant arrive sooner than we suppose: the one destined to commit so monstrous a crime and snuff out that very light, at whose ruin the world itself is fated to collapse. Let us now turn back to relate what comes next in order.
A little earlier we noted that at the outset of the holy kingdom, God will have the prince of the demons bound. Yet once the thousand years of that reign — the seventh millennium, that is — begin nearing their close, he will be set loose once more and, freed from confinement, will go out to rouse every nation then living under the authority of the righteous, driving them to wage war against the holy city. An innumerable host of peoples will be assembled from every corner of the earth to lay siege to and encircle that city. Then God's final wrath will fall upon the nations, and he will crush them down to the very last one. First he will shake the earth with tremendous force, and by that upheaval the mountains of Syria will split apart, valleys will drop away into a chasm, and the walls of every city will collapse. God will command the sun to stay above the horizon for three full days and set it ablaze, and a scorching, excessive heat will pour down upon the defiant and impious peoples, together with showers of sulfur, hailstones of stone, and drops of fire; their very breath will dissolve in that heat, their bodies will be crushed beneath the hail, and they will cut one another down by the sword. Corpses will fill the mountains and bones will cover the plains. Yet God's own people will remain concealed in caverns of the earth throughout those three days, until his wrath against the nations and the final judgment have run their course. Then the righteous will emerge from their hiding places and discover the whole land blanketed in corpses and bones. The entire race of the impious will be destroyed down to its root, and no nation will remain any longer in this world besides the single people of God. For seven full years afterward the forests will stand untouched, with no timber cut from the mountains, for the weapons of the nations will instead be burned; war will cease and everlasting peace and rest will follow. And once the thousand years have run out, the world will be made new by God: heaven will be rolled up and the earth transformed. God will change men into a form like that of angels, white as snow, and they will stand forever in the sight of the Almighty, offering sacrifice and unending service to their Lord. At that same moment will come the second, universal resurrection of all, in which the unrighteous will rise again for eternal torment. These are the ones who worshiped objects shaped by their own hands, who either never knew the Lord and Father of the world or denied him outright. Their own lord, too, will be seized along with his servants and condemned to punishment, and with him the whole mass of the impious will burn forever in unending fire, in full view of the angels and the righteous, for the sake of their own misdeeds. Such is the teaching handed down by the holy prophets, one that we who bear the name of Christ hold to; such is our wisdom — mocked as folly and emptiness by those who either worship perishable things or cling to a hollow philosophy, since it is not our habit to argue for it or proclaim it openly. God commands us instead to keep his mystery hidden, in quiet and in silence, deep within our own conscience, and not to wrangle with stubborn argument against those genuine unbelievers who attack God and his religion out of a wish not to learn but merely to refute and deride. A mystery, after all, deserves to be concealed and guarded as faithfully as we can manage — above all by those of us who carry the name of the faithful. Yet others charge this silence of ours as proof of a guilty conscience, and from that suspicion they go on to invent shameful tales about people who are in truth chaste and innocent, believing only too readily what they themselves have fabricated.
Now that we have made our way through the seven sections of the work I set out to compose and reached the finish line, it remains for me to urge everyone to embrace wisdom together with true religion, whose whole force and function comes down to this: that once we have despised earthly things and cast aside the errors that once held us bound — slaves to fragile things, craving fragile things — we may set our course toward the everlasting rewards stored up in heaven. And to make ourselves capable of grasping them, we must, as soon as possible, set aside the tempting pleasures of this present life, pleasures that ruin the souls of men with a sweetness that destroys. What happiness it must be counted, to be lifted free of this earth's filth and go forward to meet that most just Judge, that most generous Father, who grants rest instead of toil, life instead of death, brightness instead of darkness, and eternal heavenly goods instead of earthly ones that soon pass away! No bitterness or misery we suffer in this world while pursuing righteous deeds can be weighed against or made equal to that reward. Therefore, if we mean to be wise, if we mean to be blessed, we must hold before our minds — and set squarely before ourselves — not merely that line from Terence, that one must grind at the mill, take a beating, wear the fetters, but hardships far worse than these: prison, chains, and torment must be borne, suffering must be endured, and death itself faced and undergone, since our own conscience makes it plain that neither will that fragile pleasure escape its punishment nor will virtue go without its reward from God. Everyone, then, ought to take pains either to steer himself onto the right path as quickly as he can, or, having taken up and practiced the virtues and patiently worked through this life's hardships, so that God himself will console them in the end. It was he — the one we call Father and Master, the maker who gave the sky its firmness, who set the sun in place among the other stars, who girded the earth (balanced there by its own weight) with mountains, threw the sea around it, and drew its lines with rivers, shaping the whole fabric of this world out of nothing and bringing it to completion — it was he who looked down on humanity's errors and dispatched a guide to open the road of righteousness before us. Let all of us follow him, listen to him, obey him with the utmost devotion, since he alone, as Lucretius says, cleansed the hearts of men with truthful words, fixed a boundary on both desire and fear, made plain what the highest good actually is, toward which every one of us strives, and pointed out the way — a narrow track by which we might press straight onward toward it. Nor did he stop at pointing it out — he went ahead and walked it himself, precisely so that its difficulty would give no one an excuse to flinch from choosing virtue. Let the road of ruin and deception be forsaken, if that can at all be managed — the road along which death lies concealed, masked by pleasure's enticements. And the nearer each of us, as the years tip toward old age, feels himself approaching that day when he must leave this life behind, the more he ought to weigh how purely he may depart, how blamelessly he may stand before the Judge — not following the example of those who, propped up on blind minds, when the body's strength is already giving way and the coming of the final necessity has already been signaled to them, only push themselves to drink more eagerly and more feverishly from their own lusts. Let each person free himself from that pit while he still has the chance, while opportunity remains, and turn to God with his whole mind, so that he may face without fear the day on which God, ruler and lord of the world, will judge every person by deeds and by thoughts alike. Whatever is sought after here, let him not simply set it aside but run from it, and count his own soul worth more than these deceitful goods, whose holding is uncertain and short-lived: for they slip away every day and vanish far quicker than they arrived, and even if we could enjoy them right to the very end, they would still have to be handed on to others. We can bring nothing with us except a life led well and without reproach. That man will arrive before God rich, that man wealthy, who comes attended by self-control, compassion, endurance, love, and faith. This is the inheritance that belongs to us, one that cannot be torn from anyone or handed off to someone else. Who would not wish to obtain and secure such goods for himself? Let the hungry come, so that, filled with heavenly food, they may bring their unending hunger to an end; let the thirsty come, so that with mouths open wide they may draw saving water from the everlasting spring. Through this food and drink from God, the blind will see and the deaf will hear, the mute will speak and the lame will walk, fools will grow wise and the sick will grow well, and the dead will return to life. For whoever tramples the corruption of the earth under the power of virtue, that supreme and truthful Judge will raise up to life and unending light. Let no one place trust in wealth, in high office, or even in royal authority — none of these grants immortality. For whoever casts off the reasoning proper to man and, chasing after present things, throws himself prostrate on the earth, earns the penalty owed to one who deserts his own Lord, Commander, and Father. Let us then fix our minds on righteousness, which alone, as an inseparable companion, will lead us to God, and while the spirit still governs these limbs of ours, let us serve God as tireless soldiers, keep our posts and our watches, and face the enemy we know how to recognize with courage, so that, victorious and triumphant over our vanquished foe, we may win from the Lord the prize of virtue that he himself has promised.
THE BOOK OF LUCIUS CAECILIUS TO DONATUS THE CONFESSOR, ON THE DEATHS OF THE PERSECUTORS. The Lord has heard your prayers, dearest Donatus, which you poured out before him at every hour, day after day, together with those of the rest of our brothers who by their glorious confession sought for themselves an everlasting crown as the reward of their faith. Behold, all our adversaries have been destroyed, calm has been restored throughout the world, and the church, lately thrown down, rises again, and the temple of God, which the impious had overturned, is by the Lord's mercy rebuilt with greater glory than before. For God raised up rulers who cut down the wicked and bloody rule of the tyrants and provided for the human race, so that now, as though the cloud of that most grim age had been scattered, a joyful and untroubled peace gladdens the minds of all. Now, after the violent whirlwinds of that black storm, a calm sky and the longed-for light have shone out again; now God, appeased by the prayers of his servants, has raised up with heavenly help those who lay crushed and afflicted; now, the conspiracy of the wicked being extinguished, he has wiped away the tears of the mourners. Those who mocked God now lie low; those who had overturned his holy temple have fallen in a greater ruin; those who had tortured the righteous have, in payment for their guilt, poured out their wicked lives amid heavenly plagues and torments. Late indeed this came, but heavily and justly. For God had put off their punishment so that he might display in them great and wondrous examples, by which those who came after might learn both that God is one and that he is a judge who fittingly inflicts due punishments on the wicked and on persecutors. I have chosen to bear witness to their end, so that all who are far away, and all who are yet to come, may know how the Most High God has shown his power and his majesty in destroying and blotting out the enemies of his name. It seems fitting, then, that I set forth, beginning from the founding of the church, who its persecutors have been, and with what punishments the severity of the heavenly judge has avenged it upon them.
In the last years of Tiberius Caesar, as we read it written, our Lord Jesus Christ suffered torment at the hands of the Jews, ten days before April's kalends, in the consulship of the two Gemini. Rising on the third day, he brought back together the disciples, scattered in flight by fear of his arrest; staying at their side across forty days, he unlocked their understanding, set out the scriptures that had until then lain dark and hidden, and prepared and trained them to preach his teaching and doctrine, establishing the solemn discipline of the new testament. When this task was completed, a cloud wrapped him about and, snatched from human sight, carried him up into heaven. From there the disciples, who were then eleven, having taken Matthias into the place of Judas the betrayer, and with Paul, scattered over the whole earth to preach the gospel, just as their Lord and master had commanded them, and for twenty-five years, down to the beginning of Nero's reign, they laid the foundations of the church throughout every province and city. Now when Nero was already ruling, Peter came to Rome, and by performing certain miracles, which he worked by the power of that same God who had given him the authority, he turned many to righteousness and established for God a faithful and steadfast temple. When this was reported to Nero, and he observed that not only at Rome but everywhere daily a great multitude was falling away from the worship of idols and abandoning the old ways condemned for the new religion, then—being as he was an execrable and harmful tyrant—he leapt to the task of tearing down the heavenly temple and destroying righteousness, and was the first of all to persecute the servants of God: he had Peter fixed to a cross and killed Paul. Yet he did not go unpunished. For God looked upon the affliction of his people. And so the tyrant, cast down from the height of empire and toppled from the summit, an impotent thing, vanished suddenly and nowhere was he to be found, so that not even a burial place on earth was to be seen for so evil a beast. For this reason some deluded people believe he was carried off and kept alive somewhere, the Sibyl saying that the matricide, a fugitive from the ends of the earth, would come again—so that, since he was the first to persecute, the same one would also be the last to persecute, going before the coming of Antichrist (a thing wicked to believe), just as certain of the saints declare that two prophets were carried off alive, to be kept until the last times, before the coming of Christ's holy and eternal kingdom, when it begins to descend: in the same way they suppose that Nero too will come, to be a forerunner and herald of the devil going before him to lay the earth waste and overturn the human race.
After him, when some years had passed, another tyrant arose, no less than the first: Domitian. Though he practiced a hateful tyranny, he nevertheless lay heavily upon the necks of his subjects for a very long time and reigned in safety, until he stretched out his impious hands against the Lord. But after he was driven by the instigation of demons to persecute the righteous people, then he was delivered into the hands of his enemies and paid the penalty. Nor was it vengeance enough that he was killed in his own house: even the memory of his name was erased. For though he had built many marvelous works, and had made the Capitol and other noble monuments, the Senate pursued his name so thoroughly that it left no trace of his images or of his inscriptions, branding him even in death, by the gravest decrees, with a mark of everlasting disgrace. So, with the acts of the tyrant annulled, the church was restored not merely to its former state, but shone forth much more brightly and flourishingly than before, and in the times that followed, in which many good emperors held the helm and government of the Roman empire, it suffered no assaults from its enemies and stretched out its hands to east and west alike, until at last—
For after very many years there arose an execrable creature, Decius, to harass the church—for who but a wicked man would persecute righteousness?—and as though he had been raised to that supreme height for this very purpose, he straightway began to rage against God, and just as swiftly he fell. For having set out against the Carpi, who had then seized Dacia and Moesia, he was at once surrounded by the barbarians and destroyed together with the greater part of his army, and could not even be honored with burial, but stripped and naked, as befitted an enemy of God, he lay as food for wild beasts and birds.
Not long after, Valerian too, seized with a like madness, raised his impious hands against God and, although for a short time, shed much righteous blood. But God visited him with a new and singular kind of punishment, that it might be a lesson to those who came after, that the enemies of God always receive a reward fitting their crime. He was taken captive by the Persians, and lost not only the power which he had used so insolently, but also the very freedom which he had taken from others, and lived out his life in the most shameful slavery. For Sapor, king of the Persians, who had captured him, whenever he wished to mount his chariot or his horse, would order the Roman to bend down and offer his back, and setting his foot upon him would say, mocking him with laughter, that this was the true representation—not the sort the Romans painted on tablets or walls. Thus, most fittingly triumphed over, he lived on for some time, so that for a long while the Roman name was a mockery and a laughingstock among the barbarians. And this too was added to his punishment: though he had a son who was emperor, he found no one to avenge his captivity and utter slavery, nor was he ever even demanded back. And after he ended his shameful life in that disgrace, his skin was flayed from him, and the hide, stripped of its flesh, was dyed red, and set up in the temple of the barbarians' gods as a memorial of their most famous triumph, to be always on display to our ambassadors, lest the Romans trust too much in their own strength, when they saw the skin of a captured emperor set before their own gods. Since, then, God has exacted such punishments from the sacrilegious, is it not amazing that anyone afterward would dare, in thought or in deed, to defy the sovereign majesty of the single God who governs and upholds the whole of creation?
Aurelian, who was by nature violent and headlong, though he remembered the captivity of Valerian, nevertheless forgot both his crime and his punishment and provoked the anger of God by his own cruel deeds. But he was not even allowed to accomplish what he had planned; he was struck down at once, at the very outset of his madness. Word of his blood-soaked decrees had not even made it out to the farther provinces before, at Caenofrurium, a town in Thrace, he was already lying in his own blood on the ground, cut down by his own friends over a groundless suspicion. By so many and such examples the tyrants who came after ought to have been restrained; yet they were not merely undeterred, but acted even more boldly and confidently against God.
Diocletian, who was the inventor of crimes and the deviser of evils, while he was ruining everything, could not keep his hands even from God. He overturned the whole world at once through both greed and cowardice. For he made three men partners in his rule, dividing the world into four parts and multiplying the armies, since each of the four strove to have a far greater number of soldiers than earlier emperors had had when a single ruler governed the state alone. To such a degree had the number of those receiving pay begun to exceed the number of those paying for it, that through the enormity of the levies the resources of the farmers were consumed, the fields abandoned, and cultivated land turned back into forest. And so that everything might be filled with terror, the provinces too were cut into fragments: many governors and many more officials pressed down upon single regions, almost upon single cities; likewise many accountants and masters and deputies of the prefects, whose civil business was rare indeed, but whose condemnations and confiscations were frequent, and whose exactions of countless things were not merely constant but perpetual, and in these exactions the wrongs done were unbearable. Nor can what pertained to the maintenance of soldiers be tolerated either. The same man, with insatiable greed, never wished his treasuries to grow smaller, but was forever heaping up extraordinary funds and largesses, so as to keep what he had stored away whole and untouched. The same man, by his various acts of injustice, having driven up prices enormously, tried to fix by law the prices of goods for sale. Then much blood was shed over trifling and worthless things, and out of fear nothing at all appeared for sale, and scarcity blazed up far worse than before, until the law was at last, by sheer necessity, repealed after the ruin of many. To this was added a boundless passion for building, which meant no less an exaction upon the provinces in furnishing workmen and craftsmen and wagons and everything needed for whatever works were being built. Here a basilica, here a circus, here a mint, here an arms factory, here a house for his wife, here one for his daughter. Suddenly a great part of a city would be torn down; everyone would move away with wives and children, as though the city had been captured by an enemy. And when these things had been completed at the cost of the ruin of the provinces, he would say, 'They are not well done—let them be done another way'; and again they had to be torn down and altered, perhaps only to fall once more. So he was forever mad in this way, striving to make Nicomedia equal to the city of Rome. I pass over how many perished for the sake of their property or their wealth—for this had become common and, by the habit of evil men, almost sanctioned. But the worst of it was this: wherever he saw a better-cultivated field or a more handsome building, a false charge and a capital sentence lay ready for its owner, as though he could not seize what belonged to others without bloodshed.
What of his brother Maximian, called Herculius? He was no different from him; indeed, two men could not have clung to so faithful a friendship unless there were in both the same mind, the same purpose, an equal will, the same judgment. In only this did they differ: in the one, greed was greater, but also more fear; in the other, less greed, but more spirit—not for doing good, but for doing evil. For though he held Italy, the very seat of empire, and the wealthiest provinces, Africa and Spain, lay subject to him, he was not so careful in guarding his riches, of which he had abundance to spare. And when there was need, wealthy senators were never lacking who, through suborned informers, were said to have aimed at the throne, so that the leading lights of the Senate were continually being plucked out. His most bloodthirsty treasury overflowed with wealth gained by wickedness. Moreover this pestilential man's lust was directed not only at the corruption of men, a thing hateful and detestable, but even at the violation of the daughters of the foremost families. For wherever he journeyed, young women were at once torn from their parents' embrace and made ready for him. In these things he judged himself blessed; on these he thought the happiness of his rule depended—on denying nothing to his lust and his evil desire. Constantius I pass over, since he was unlike the rest, and worthy to have held the world alone.
But the other Maximian, whom Diocletian had taken to himself as a son-in-law, was worse than not merely those two whom our own times have known, but than all the wicked men who ever were. In this beast there was an inborn barbarity, a savagery foreign to Roman blood—no wonder, since his mother had fled across the Danube into new Dacia when the Carpi were harassing that land. His body, too, matched his character: tall of stature, with flesh so vast and swollen as to be dreadful to see. In short, in his words, his deeds, and his very look he was a terror and a horror to all. Even his father-in-law feared him bitterly, and the reason for that fear was this. Narses, king of the Persians, roused by the example set at home by his grandfather Sapor, was eager, with great forces, to seize the East. Then Diocletian, being timid as ever in any disturbance and downcast in spirit, and moreover fearing the example of Valerian, did not dare to go against him himself, but sent this Maximian by way of Armenia, while he himself remained in the East, watching for the outcome. Maximian, using stratagem, had no great difficulty in crushing the barbarians, who, as is their custom, went to war with all their households and so were burdened by their numbers and encumbered with baggage; and having put King Narses to flight, he returned with vast spoil and plunder, bringing to himself arrogance and to Diocletian fear. For after this victory he was lifted up to such pride that he now disdained the title of Caesar. Upon hearing this read to him from a letter, he shouted, with a savage glare and a dreadful voice, 'Caesar—until when?' From then on he began to act with the utmost insolence, wishing to be thought and called a son of Mars, a second Romulus, and preferred to defame his mother Romula with the charge of adultery so that he himself might appear to be sprung from the gods. But I put off speaking of his deeds, lest I confuse the order of events. For after he received the title of emperor, and once his father-in-law had been stripped of power, only then did he begin to rage and to hold everything in contempt. As for Diocles—for so he was called before he became emperor—though he was overturning the state by such counsels and such associates, and though he deserved every evil for his crimes, he nevertheless reigned for a long time in the greatest good fortune, so long as he did not stain his hands with the blood of the righteous. What cause he had for beginning the persecution, I shall now set forth.
While he was in the regions of the East, being, out of fear, a searcher into future events, he was sacrificing cattle and seeking in their livers what was to come. Then some of his attendants, who knew the Lord, standing by while he sacrificed, made the sign of immortality upon their foreheads; at this the demons were put to flight and the rites were thrown into confusion. The soothsayers trembled, not seeing the usual marks in the entrails, and as though the sacrifice had not been accepted, they offered the victims again and again. But time after time the slaughtered beasts revealed nothing, until at last Tages, the master of the soothsayers, said, either from suspicion or from some vision, that the sacred rites were not answering because profane men were present at the divine ceremonies. Then, raging with fury, he ordered not only those who ministered at the sacrifices, but everyone in the palace, to sacrifice, and that any who refused be punished with blows; and having sent letters to the military commanders, he ordered that soldiers too be compelled to the abominable sacrifices, so that any who did not comply should be dismissed from the army. Thus far his fury and anger went, and he did nothing further against the law and the religion of God. Then, after some time had passed, he came to Bithynia to winter there, and at the same time Maximian Caesar too, inflamed with wickedness, arrived, to spur on the vain old man—who had already made a beginning—to persecute the Christians. I have learned that this was the cause of his madness.
His mother was a worshiper of the mountain gods, and being an exceedingly superstitious woman, she offered sacrificial feasts almost daily and gave banquets for the people of her village. The Christians abstained, and while she feasted with the pagans, they persisted in their fasting and prayers. From this she conceived a hatred against them, and her womanish grumbling stirred her son—every bit as superstitious as she was—into a drive to wipe out these people. So, having taken counsel together throughout the whole winter, with no one else admitted, and everyone supposing that matters of the highest state were being discussed, the old man for a long time resisted his fury, pointing out how ruinous it would be to disturb the whole world and to shed the blood of so many; that these people were accustomed to die willingly; that it would be enough if he merely forbade this religion to those in the palace and to the soldiers. Yet he could not turn aside the madness of that headlong man. It was therefore decided to test the opinion of his friends. For this was his malice: when he had decided to do something good, he did it without consulting anyone, so that he alone might be praised; but when it was something evil, since he knew it would be blamed, he called in many to counsel, so that whatever wrong he committed might be laid to the fault of others. So a few judges and a few military officers were admitted, and, in order of their rank, asked their opinion. Some, out of their own hatred of the Christians, judged that these enemies of the gods and of the public religions ought to be destroyed; and those who thought otherwise, perceiving the man's will, whether from fear or from a wish to please him, agreed to the same opinion. Yet even so the emperor was not so moved as to give his assent outright, but decided rather to consult the gods, and sent a soothsayer to Apollo of Miletus. The god answered as an enemy of the divine religion would. And so he was drawn away from his former resolve, and since he could resist neither his friends nor Caesar nor Apollo, he tried to keep to this much moderation: that the matter be carried out without bloodshed, though Caesar wished those who resisted the sacrifice to be burned alive.
A suitable and auspicious day for carrying out the deed was sought, and above all the Terminalia was chosen, which falls on the seventh day before the Kalends of March, as though a boundary were being set upon this religion. That day was the first cause of death and of evils, both for the emperors themselves and for the whole world. When that day dawned, in the eighth and seventh consulships of the two old men, suddenly, while the light was still uncertain, the prefect came to the church with commanders and tribunes and finance officers, and, the doors having been forced open, the image of God was sought; the scriptures that were found were burned, plunder was granted to all, there was seizing, panic, running to and fro. The emperors themselves, watching from a height—for the church, being set on high ground, could be seen from the palace—debated at length between themselves whether fire ought rather to be set to it. Diocletian's opinion prevailed, being wary lest, a great fire being started, some part of the city should burn, for many great houses surrounded it on every side. So the praetorian guards came, drawn up in battle order, with axes and other iron tools, and, sent in from every side, in a few hours leveled that towering shrine to the ground.
The next day an edict was posted providing that men of that religion should be stripped of every honor and rank, should be liable to torture regardless of what order or degree they came from, and that any legal action might be brought against them, while they themselves could bring no suit for injury, for adultery, or for property taken away; in short, they were to have neither freedom nor a voice. A certain man, though not wisely, yet with great courage, tore this edict down and shredded it, mocking as he did so and saying that victories over the Goths and Sarmatians had been posted up. He was at once seized, and not merely racked but methodically roasted, and finally, with astonishing patience, burned to death.
But Caesar was not content with the provisions of the edict; he prepared to move against Diocletian in another way. To drive him toward the plan of a most savage persecution, he had his secret agents set fire to the palace, and when part of it had burned, the Christians were accused as public enemies, and amid enormous outcry the name of the Christians was said to be burning right along with the palace: they were said to have plotted with the eunuchs to destroy the emperors, and the two rulers had nearly been burned alive in their own home. Diocletian, who always wanted to be thought shrewd and perceptive, could suspect nothing, but, inflamed with anger, ordered all his own household tortured on the spot. He sat there himself and put innocent people to the torment of fire; likewise all the judges, and indeed everyone in the palace who held any office, were given authority and applied torture. They vied with one another over who would be first to discover something; nothing at all was found, since of course no one tortured Caesar's own household. He himself was present and pressed the matter, and would not let the old man's unconsidered rage burn itself out. But after fifteen days had passed, he contrived yet another fire. This one, however, was noticed more quickly, though again no author was found. Then Caesar, having arranged his departure in the middle of winter, burst out that very day, protesting that he was fleeing so as not to be burned alive.
So the emperor now raged not only against his own household but against everyone. And first of all, he compelled his daughter Valeria, together with his wife Prisca, to submit to the defilement of sacrifice. Eunuchs who had once been most powerful, through whom he himself had formerly kept the palace running, were put to death; priests and ministers were seized and, without any proof or confession, condemned along with all their households and led away. People of every sex and age were seized for burning, and not one at a time — since the multitude was so great — but were surrounded by fire in groups; members of the household had millstones tied to their necks and were thrown into the sea. No less violently did the persecution fall upon the rest of the population. Judges scattered through every temple forced everyone to sacrifice. The prisons were full, unheard-of kinds of torture were devised, and so that no one's case might be judged without proper ceremony, altars were set up in the judges' private chambers and before the tribunal, so that litigants would first sacrifice and only then plead their cases — thus one approached the judges as though approaching gods. Letters were even sent to Maximian and Constantius asking them to do the same, though their opinion had not in fact been awaited on matters of such weight. And indeed old Maximian, a man not overly merciful, obeyed willingly throughout Italy. But Constantius, so as not to seem to be departing from the precedents set by his elders, allowed the meeting-houses — that is, mere walls, which could be rebuilt — to be torn down, but kept safe the true temple of God, which is within human beings.
So the whole earth was in torment, and apart from the Gauls, from east to west three most bitter beasts raged savagely. Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred iron-throated voices could I catch every form of the crimes, or run through every name of the punishments, that judges throughout the provinces inflicted on the just and the innocent. But why should I need to tell you these things especially, dearest Donatus, who beyond all others have felt the storm of that turbulent persecution? For when you fell into the hands of Flaccinus the prefect — no small murderer — and then of Hierocles, promoted from vicar to governor, who was the author and adviser urging the persecution forward, and finally of Priscillianus his successor, you gave proof to everyone of unconquered courage. Nine times subjected to torments and various tortures, nine times you overcame your adversary with a glorious confession; in nine battles you defeated the devil and his agents, in nine victories you triumphed over the age and its terrors. How pleasing a spectacle that was to God, to see you as victor, yoking to your chariot not white horses or monstrous elephants, but the very men who had thought to triumph over you! This is the true triumph, when the would-be masters are mastered. For they were conquered and subjugated by your virtue, since, scorning that wicked command, you overthrew every apparatus and terror of tyrannical power by steadfast faith and strength of spirit. Against you the lashes availed nothing, the claws nothing, the fire nothing, the iron nothing, the varied kinds of torment nothing: no force could take from you your faith and devotion. Such is what marks one out as a disciple of God, and such is what marks one out as a soldier of Christ, one whom no enemy can conquer, whom no wolf can snatch from the heavenly camp, whom no snare can trap, whom no pain can defeat, whom no torture can crush. Indeed, after those nine most glorious battles in which the devil was beaten by you, he did not dare engage you further, having learned through so many contests that he could not overcome you. And though the victor's crown was ready for you, he ceased to provoke you further, lest you take it up; and though you have not yet received it in the present life, it is kept whole for you in the kingdom of the Lord, in recognition of your virtues and merits. But let us return to the order of events.
After this crime had been committed, Diocletian — his good fortune having by now abandoned him — set out at once for Rome, to celebrate there the day of his twentieth anniversary, which was to fall on the twelfth day before the Kalends of December. When these solemnities had been celebrated, unable to bear the freedom of the Roman people, restless and sick at heart, he rushed out of the city as the Kalends of January approached, on which he was to enter his ninth consulship. He could not endure thirteen days so as to take up the consulship at Rome rather than at Ravenna, but set out amid raging winter weather, and, battered by cold and rain, contracted a mild but persistent illness; harassed the whole journey through, he traveled much of it in a litter. Thus, with summer past, going around by the bank of the Danube, he came to Nicomedia as his illness was already growing serious. Seeing himself weighed down by it, he nevertheless had himself brought out so as to dedicate the circus he had built, in the year following the completion of his twentieth anniversary. Then he was so overwhelmed by weakness that prayers were offered to all the gods on behalf of his life, until on the Ides of December mourning suddenly broke out in the palace, grief and tears among the officials, alarm and silence throughout the whole city. Already they were saying not merely that he had died but that he had been buried, when suddenly, the next morning, a rumor spread that he was alive, and the faces of the household and the officials changed to gladness. There were those who suspected that his death was being concealed until Caesar could arrive, lest the soldiers attempt some upheaval. This suspicion held so strongly that no one believed he was alive until he appeared on the Kalends of March, scarcely recognizable, since he had wasted away from illness for nearly a whole year. And indeed on the Ides of December he had been overtaken by death and had received his life back — but not wholly. For he became deranged, so that at certain hours he raved and at others came to his senses.
Not many days later Caesar arrived, not to congratulate his father but to force him to yield up the empire. He had recently clashed with old Maximian and had frightened him by raising the specter of civil war. So he approached Diocletian, first gently and as a friend, saying that he was now old, no longer strong, and unfit to administer the state: he ought to rest after his labors. At the same time he brought up the example of Nerva, who had handed the empire over to Trajan. Diocletian replied that it would be unseemly, after so great and lofty a height of glory, to sink into the shadows of a humble life, and less safe besides, since in so long a reign he had earned the hatred of many; whereas Nerva, having ruled only one year, unable by reason of age or lack of experience to bear the weight and care of such great affairs, had cast off the helm of the state and returned to the private life in which he had grown old. But if Galerius wished to gain the title of emperor, nothing stood in the way of everyone being called Augustus. Galerius, however, who had already seized the whole world in hope, seeing that this would gain him nothing much beyond a mere title, answered that his own arrangement ought to be preserved permanently: that there should be two senior rulers in the state holding supreme power, and likewise two juniors to assist them; between two, harmony could easily be kept, but among four equals, never. If Diocletian himself refused to step down, he would look to his own interests, so as no longer to be the lesser and the last. Already fifteen years had gone by in which he had been banished to Illyricum, that is, to the bank of the Danube, struggling with barbarian peoples, while others ruled in comfort within broader and quieter lands. Hearing this, the weak old man — who had already received a letter from old Maximian confirming whatever Galerius had said, and had learned that Galerius had been building up his army — said tearfully, “Let it be so, if this is pleasing.” It remained that the Caesars be chosen by common agreement of all. “What need is there of agreement,” said Galerius, “when it is necessary for those two to approve whatever we do?” “Very well, then. For their sons must be named.” Now Maximian had a son, Maxentius, this same Maximian's own son-in-law, a man of ruinous and evil disposition, so arrogant and defiant that he was accustomed to show reverence to neither his father nor his father-in-law, and for that reason was hateful to both. Constantius too had a son, Constantine, a most upright young man and most worthy of that high rank, who by his striking and handsome bearing, his military diligence, his good character, and his singular affability was loved by the soldiers and desired by private citizens. He too happened to be present just then, Diocletian having some while before raised him to a tribuneship of the first rank. “So what is to be done?” “He,” said Galerius, “is not worthy. For the man who scorned me as a private citizen — what will he do once he has received power?” “But this one is both likeable, and will rule in such a way as to be judged better and more merciful than his father.” “It will happen so that I shall not be able to do as I wish. Those, then, ought to be named who are in my power, who fear me, who do nothing except at my command.” “Whom, then, shall we make?” “Severus,” he said. “That drunken, sodden dancer, for whom night is day and day is night?” “He is worthy,” he said, “since he has served the soldiers faithfully, and I have sent him to Maximian to be invested by him.” “So be it. Whom else will you give?” “This one,” he said, pointing to Daia, a certain half-barbarian young man, whom he had recently ordered to be called Maximinus after his own name — for Diocletian had likewise changed part of this man's name for the omen's sake, since Maximian had shown him the utmost loyal devotion. “Who is this you are offering me?” “My relative,” he said. And Diocletian, groaning, said, “You are giving me men unfit to be entrusted with the guardianship of the state.” “I have approved them,” Galerius said. “You will see to it, since you are the one taking up the direction of the empire. I have labored enough and have provided as best I could that, while I ruled, the state should stand unharmed. If any misfortune follows, the fault will not be mine.
With these matters settled, the proceedings took place on the Kalends of May. All eyes were on Constantine; there was no doubt in anyone's mind: the soldiers who were present, and the leading men of the army chosen and summoned from the legions, were intent on him alone, rejoicing, hoping, and offering their prayers for him. There was a high place outside the city, about three miles off, on top of which Maximian himself had once assumed the purple, and there a column had been set up bearing the image of Jupiter. To this place they proceeded. An assembly of the soldiers was called. The old man began, in tears, addressing the troops: he said that he was weak, that he sought rest after his labors, that he was handing the empire to stronger men, and appointing new Caesars in his place. Everyone waited in the highest suspense to hear what he would announce. Then suddenly he proclaimed Severus and Maximinus as Caesars. Everyone was struck dumb. Constantine stood upon the platform. They hesitated among themselves whether it was Constantine whose name had been changed, when, in full view of everyone, Maximian, reaching his hand backward, pulled Daia forward from behind, pushing Constantine aside, and, having stripped him of his private clothing, set him in the midst. Everyone wondered who he was and where he came from. Yet no one dared protest, all stunned by the unexpected novelty of the affair. Diocletian threw his own purple robe, which he had just taken off, over this man, and thus Diocletian became simply Diocles once more. Then they came down, and the old king was carried out of the city by carriage through the crowd and sent back to his homeland, while Daia, only recently lifted up from herding cattle and living among the woods — at once made a shield-bearer, then immediately a bodyguard, soon a tribune, and the very next day a Caesar — received the East to trample and crush, since he understood neither soldiering nor statecraft, being now a shepherd not of cattle but of soldiers.
After Galerius had achieved what he wanted by expelling the old rulers, he now claimed to be sole master of the whole world. As for Constantius, although it was necessary that he be named first, Galerius despised him, both because he was mild by nature and because he was hampered by ill health. He expected Constantius would soon die, and if he did not, it seemed easy enough to strip him of his rank even against his will. For what could Constantius do, if forced by three men to lay down the empire? Galerius had at his side Licinius, a friend from their old days serving together and a companion since his earliest military service, whose counsel he relied on in managing everything, but he did not wish to make him Caesar, so as not to have to call him son, intending instead to name him later Augustus and brother in Constantius's place. Then he himself would hold supreme power and, having run riot over the earth at his own pleasure, would celebrate his own twentieth anniversary, and, having set up his own son — who was then nine years old — as Caesar in his place, would himself step down as well; so that with Licinius and Severus holding the highest power, and, in the rank of Caesar beneath them, Maximinus and Candidianus, he, hedged about by an impregnable wall, might spend a secure and tranquil old age. Such were the plans he was working toward. But God, whom he had made his enemy, undid all his calculations.
Having thus attained the greatest power, he turned his mind to tormenting the world that lay open before him. For after the defeat of the Persians — whose custom and practice it is that their peoples bind themselves in servitude to their kings, and the kings treat their people as their own household — this wicked man wanted to introduce that same custom into Roman territory, and from that time on he shamelessly boasted of his victory over them. And since he could not openly command this, he acted so as himself to strip men of their freedom. First of all he took away their honors. Not only town councillors but even the leading men of the cities, distinguished and most eminent persons, were tortured by him, and indeed over trivial, civil matters. If they seemed deserving of death, crosses stood ready; if not, chains were prepared. Freeborn and noble matrons were dragged off into the weaving-houses. If anyone was to be flogged, four stakes stood fixed in a shed, to which no slave was ever ordinarily bound. Why should I describe his amusements and his pleasures? He kept bears as savage and enormous as himself, which he had selected throughout the whole time of his reign. Whenever he wished to be entertained, he would order one of them brought by name. Men were thrown to them not simply to be eaten but to be devoured whole; as their limbs were torn apart he would laugh most sweetly, and he never dined without human blood being shed. For those who held no rank, the penalty was fire. This he had first permitted against the Christians by issuing laws that, once condemned after torture, they should be burned with slow fires. When they had been bound, a mild flame was set beneath their feet and held there, until the calloused skin of their soles, shrunk tight by the heat, tore loose from the bones. Then lit and extinguished torches were applied to each limb in turn, so that no part of the body was left untouched. Meanwhile their faces were doused with cold water and their mouths moistened, so that their throats, parched with dryness, would not quickly yield up their breath — which nevertheless happened in the end, when, after a whole long day, the skin having been entirely consumed, the force of the fire had penetrated to the innermost organs. Then, on a pyre built for the purpose, bodies already burned were burned again. The gathered bones, ground to powder, were thrown into rivers and the sea.
So then, what he had learned in torturing Christians he now practiced against everyone, out of sheer habit. No punishment was light in his eyes — not exile to an island, not prison, not the mines — but fire, the cross, and wild beasts were his everyday, easy resort. Household servants and administrators were corrected with the spear. In cases carrying the death penalty, execution by the sword was granted to very few indeed, almost as a favor, to those who had earned an easy death by long-standing merit. Compared to these things, the following were minor: eloquence was extinguished, advocates were done away with, jurists were either exiled or put to death, and letters were counted among the wicked arts, so that those who were learned in them were crushed and cursed as enemies and adversaries. License in all things was assumed once the laws had been dissolved, and given over to the judges. Military judges, strangers to letters and to humane learning, were sent into the provinces without legal assessors.
But this was a public calamity and a grief shared by all: a census once sent out upon the provinces and cities. With assessors spread everywhere and rummaging through everything, there was the look of hostile invasion and dreadful captivity. Fields were measured clod by clod, vines and trees were counted, every kind of animal was registered, every human head was noted down. In the towns the city folk and the country folk were herded together, every marketplace was crammed with families in droves, each person present with his children, with his slaves; the sound of torture and of whips rang out; sons were strung up against their own parents. The most loyal slaves were hauled up against their masters, wives against their husbands. When every other means had failed, men were tortured against themselves, and once pain had overcome them, they were made to declare property they did not have. No excuse was allowed for age or for sickness. The sick and the feeble were carried in; the age of each person was assessed; years were added to little children and subtracted from the old. Everything was full of grief and mourning. What men of old had done by right of war against the conquered, this man dared to do against Romans and against those subject to Rome — because his own parents had once been reduced to a census, which Trajan, victor over the constantly rebelling Dacians, imposed as a penalty. After this, money was paid per head, and a price was set upon life. Yet the same assessors were not trusted; others were sent on top of others, as if to find still more, and the sum was always doubled — not because the first found too little, but because the newcomers added whatever they pleased, so as not to seem to have been sent for nothing. Meanwhile the animals were dwindling and people were dying, and yet the taxes were still paid for the dead, so that it was no longer possible even to live, much less to die, for free. Only beggars were left from whom nothing could be extracted — misery and misfortune had made them safe from every kind of wrong. But this pious man took pity on them, so that they should want for nothing: he ordered them all gathered together, carried out on boats, and drowned in the sea. Such a merciful man, who took care that no one should be wretched while he reigned! So it was that, guarding against anyone escaping the census by pretending to beg, he slaughtered a multitude of the truly wretched against every law of humanity.
By now God's judgment was drawing near him, and the time followed in which his affairs began to slip and dissolve. He had not yet set his mind on overthrowing or driving out Constantius, being occupied with the matters I have described above, and he was waiting for his death, though he did not think it would come so soon. When Constantius fell gravely ill, he sent letters asking that his son Constantine be sent back to him to see, whom he had long been demanding in vain. But the other wanted anything but that. He had often tried to get at the young man through ambush, since he dared nothing openly for fear of stirring up civil war against himself and, what he feared most, the hatred of the soldiers; and under the pretext of exercise and sport he had thrown him to wild beasts, but in vain, since the hand of God was protecting the man. It was God who freed him from those hands at the very turning point. For when he had been asked again and again and could no longer refuse, he gave him, as the day was already declining, the token of leave, and instructed him to set out the next morning after receiving his orders — meaning either to detain him on some pretext himself, or to send letters ahead so that Severus would hold him. Constantine, foreseeing this, while the emperor was resting after dinner, hurried to leave, and, taking all the post-horses at station after station, flew away. The next day the emperor, having deliberately slept until midday, ordered him to be summoned. He was told that Constantine had set off immediately after dinner the evening before. He began to rage and fume. He demanded post-horses, so that he might have him dragged back; he was told the public relay had been stripped bare. He could hardly hold back tears. But Constantine, moving with incredible speed, reached his father just as he was failing, who commended him to the soldiers and handed over the empire into his hands. And so, on his own bed, he found the rest from life that he had wished for. Once he had taken up the empire, Augustus Constantine did nothing before restoring the Christians to their worship and to their God. This was his first decree, the restoration of the holy religion.
A few days later the laurelled portrait of Constantine was brought to the wicked beast. He deliberated a long time whether to accept it. It came very close to his burning both the image and the man who had brought it, had not his friends turned him from that madness, warning him of the danger — that all the soldiers, against whose will unknown men had been made Caesars, would have welcomed Constantine and rushed to him with the greatest eagerness, had he come in arms. So he accepted the image, quite unwillingly, and sent Constantine the purple in return, so that he might seem to have admitted him into the partnership of his own accord. His arrangements were already thrown into confusion, and he could not name a second man outside the fixed number, as he had wished. But he devised this scheme: he named Severus, who was older, Augustus, but ordered Constantine to be called, not emperor as he had actually become, but Caesar, together with Maximin, so as to push him down from second place to fourth.
His affairs seemed to him already somewhat settled, when suddenly another terror was brought to him: that his own son-in-law Maxentius had been made emperor at Rome. The cause of this upheaval was this. Having decided, once the census had been established, to devour the whole world, he had leapt to such madness that he wished not even the Roman people to be exempt from this captivity. Assessors were already being arranged to be sent to Rome to register the populace. At about the same time he had also abolished the praetorian camps. And so the few soldiers who had been left in the camps at Rome, seizing the opportunity, killed certain officials, and with the people — who were themselves stirred up — not unwilling, they dressed Maxentius in the purple. When this news reached him, he was somewhat disturbed by its novelty, though not overly frightened. He hated the man, but he could not make three Caesars. It seemed enough to have done once what he had not wanted. He summoned Severus, urged him to take up the imperial power, sent him with Maximian's army to storm Maxentius, and sent him to Rome, where those soldiers, so often received with the greatest indulgence, wished not only that the city be safe but that they might live there. Maxentius, conscious of so great a crime — though by right of inheritance he could have won over his father's soldiers to himself — nevertheless, thinking it possible that Maximian, his father-in-law, fearing this very thing, might leave Severus in Illyricum and come himself with his own army to attack him, sought some way to protect himself from the looming danger. He sent the purple to his father, who was lingering in Campania after laying down the empire, and hailed him Augustus a second time. That man, eager for revolution and one who had laid down power unwillingly, gladly seized it. Meanwhile Severus advanced and approached the walls of the city under arms. At once the soldiers raised their standards and left, handing themselves over to the man against whom they had come. What remained for the deserted man but flight? But now Maximian, his power resumed, was already meeting him, and at his approach Severus fled to Ravenna and shut himself in there with a few soldiers. Seeing that he would inevitably be handed over to Maximian, he surrendered himself and returned the purple garment to the very man from whom he had received it. By this act he gained nothing but an easy death — for his veins were gently opened, and he was made to die a slow death. [From this point his own persecute.]
Herculius, knowing Maximian's madness, began to consider that he, on hearing of Severus's death, would come inflamed with anger, having taken up hostility, with his army, and perhaps, having joined with Maximin and doubled his forces, in a way that could not possibly be resisted. So, with the city fortified and everything carefully provided, he set out for Gaul, to win Constantine over to his side by the marriage of his younger daughter. Meanwhile Maxentius, having gathered an army, invaded Italy and approached the city, intending to wipe out the senate and slaughter the people; but he found everything shut and defended. There was no hope of forcing entry; the siege was difficult; there were not enough troops to surround the walls — for he had never seen Rome and reckoned it not much larger than the cities he knew. Then certain legions, abhorring the crime that a father-in-law should attack a son-in-law, and that Roman soldiers should abandon Rome, transferred their standards and left. And now the rest of the soldiers were wavering, when he, his arrogance broken and his spirits collapsed, fearing the fate of Severus, threw himself at the soldiers' feet and begged not to be handed over to the enemy, until with immense promises he won over their spirits and turned his standards back, taking to flight in a panic — in which he could very easily have been overwhelmed, had anyone pursued him even with a few men. Fearing this, he gave his soldiers license to scatter as widely as possible and plunder or ruin everything, so that if anyone wished to pursue, he would find no supplies. So that part of Italy through which that plague-bearing column passed was laid waste — everything stripped, women violated, virgins ravished, parents and husbands tortured to make them betray their daughters, their wives, their wealth. Herds of cattle and beasts of burden were driven off as from barbarians. In this fashion he made his way back to his own quarters, this man who, once a Roman emperor, was now a ravager of Italy, having assaulted everything with the fury of an enemy. Indeed, once he had taken the name of emperor, he had proclaimed himself an enemy of the Roman name, wishing its title changed, so that it should be called not the Roman empire, but the Dacian.
After this man's flight, when the elder Maximian had returned from Gaul, he held power jointly with his son. But the young man was obeyed more than the old, since his power was in fact prior and greater — indeed he had restored power to his father in the first place. The old man bore it ill that he could not do freely what he wished, and, with a childish rivalry, envied his own son. So he planned to expel the young man, to reclaim power for himself, which seemed easy, since he had soldiers who had abandoned Severus. He called together the people and the soldiers, as if to hold an assembly on the present ills of the state. Having said much on this subject, he turned his hands against his son, calling him the author of the evils, the source of the calamities the state was suffering, and tore the purple from his shoulders. Stripped of it, the young man threw himself headlong from the platform and was caught by the soldiers. Disturbed by their anger and outcry, the impious old man was driven out of the city of Rome, like a second Tarquin the Proud.
Returning again to Gaul, where he stayed a while, he set out to meet his son's enemy Maximian, ostensibly to discuss with him the settling of the state's affairs — but in reality, so that he might, under the pretext of reconciliation, kill him and seize his kingdom, since he himself had been shut out wherever he went. Diocletian was present there too, recently summoned by his son-in-law, so that — what he had not done before — he might, in Maximian's presence, grant power to Licinius as a substitute in Severus's place. So it was done with both present. Thus at one time there were six. His plans thwarted by this, the old Maximian was already scheming a third flight: he returned to Gaul full of evil intent and crime, meaning to entrap by treachery Constantine the emperor, his son-in-law, the husband of his daughter — and, so as to deceive him, he laid aside his royal robe. The nation of the Franks was in arms. He persuaded the unsuspecting young man not to take his whole army with him, saying that the barbarians could be defeated with a few soldiers, so that he himself might have an army to seize, and Constantine could be overwhelmed for lack of numbers. The young man, trusting him as an experienced elder, obeyed him as his father-in-law, and set out, leaving behind the greater part of his troops. Maximian let a few days pass, and once he judged that his son-in-law was now deep among the barbarian tribes, he suddenly seized the purple once more, seized the treasury, and gave out largesse in his usual lavish fashion; he made up stories about Constantine that promptly rebounded on himself. The events were quickly reported to the emperor. With astonishing speed he flew back with his army. The man was caught by surprise, not yet sufficiently prepared. The soldiers went back to their own emperor. He had occupied Marseille and barred the gates. The emperor approached and addressed him as he stood on the wall, not harshly nor as an enemy, but asking what he had meant by this, what he had lacked, why he did something particularly unbecoming to him. But the other hurled curses down from the walls. Then suddenly, behind his back, the gates were thrown open and the soldiers let in. The rebel emperor, the impious father, the treacherous father-in-law, was dragged before the emperor. He was made to hear the crimes he had committed; his robe was stripped from him, and, after being reproached, his life was spared.
Having thus lost the honor of emperor and of father-in-law, unable to bear his humble state, he plotted yet another treachery, since he had gone unpunished once before. He summoned his daughter Fausta and pressed her, now with entreaties, now with flattery, to betray her husband, promising her a worthier man; he asked that the bedroom door be left open and less carefully guarded. She promised to do it, and at once reported it to her husband. A scene was arranged in which the crime would be caught in the act. A worthless eunuch was substituted, to die in the emperor's place. Maximian rose in the dead of night and saw everything favorable for his ambush. The guards were few and stationed some way off; to them, however, he said he had had a dream he wished to tell his son. He went in armed, and, having cut down the eunuch, he leapt out exulting and proclaimed what he had done. Suddenly Constantine appeared from the other side with a band of armed men. The corpse of the murdered man was brought out of the room; the manifest murderer stood stock still and mute with astonishment, as if he were hard flint or a Marpesian crag; he was reproached for his wickedness and crime. Finally he was granted the power to choose his own death, and he tied the noose of an unseemly end from a beam on high. So that man, once the greatest emperor of the Roman name, who after a long interval had, with immense glory, celebrated the vows of his twentieth year, ended his detestable life by a shameful and ignominious death, his proud throat crushed and broken.
From this man God, the avenger of his religion and his people, turned his eyes to the other Maximian, the author of the wicked persecution, so as to show in him too the power of his majesty. He too was already thinking of celebrating his own twentieth-anniversary vows, and, having already for a long time afflicted the provinces with levies of gold and silver, promising to repay them, he now, even in the name of these anniversary celebrations, inflicted a second axe upon them. Who could adequately describe with what affliction of the human race this exaction was carried out, above all in the matter of the grain supply? Soldiers of every office — or rather executioners — clung to individuals. It was uncertain who should be satisfied first; there was no mercy for those who had nothing. Multiple tortures had to be endured unless what did not exist was produced at once. Hedged in by many guards, there was no chance to breathe, no rest at any time of year, however slight. There was constant strife over the same people between the officials themselves, or between the officials' soldiers. No threshing floor was without its collector, no vintage without its guard; nothing was left for those who labored, even for their own food. Though these things were hard to bear, still snatching food earned by labor from people's very mouths could somehow be endured, at least with hope for the future. But what of clothing of every kind? What of gold? What of silver? Must not these be obtained from the sale of produce? From what, then, most mad tyrant, shall I supply these, when you carry off all the produce, when you violently seize everything that grows? Who, then, was not ruined in his goods, so that the wealth that existed under his rule might be scraped together to satisfy a vow he was never going to celebrate?
So then, once Licinius had been proclaimed emperor, Maximin, in a rage, refused to be called Caesar or to be named in third place. He therefore sent envoys to him repeatedly, asking that he defer to him, respect his own seniority, yield to his age, and give honor to his gray hairs. But the other raised his horns still more boldly and fought on the ground of priority in time, arguing that he ought to be first, since he had taken up the purple first; he disregarded his entreaties and demands. The beast raged and roared, that although he had raised him from obscurity to Caesar precisely so that he should be obedient to him, this man, forgetting so great a benefit, impiously resisted his will and his requests. Beaten by this stubbornness, he dropped the title of Caesar and proclaimed himself and Licinius Augusti, and Maximin and Constantine sons of the Augusti. Afterward Maximin wrote, as if announcing, that he had recently been proclaimed Augustus by his army on the Field of Mars. Grieved and pained, he accepted this and ordered that all four be called emperors.
By now his eighteenth year was under way, when God struck him with an incurable affliction. An evil ulcer arose on the lower part of his genitals and spread ever wider. The doctors cut and treated it. But once the scar had already formed, the wound split open again, a vein burst, and blood flowed to the point of mortal danger. The bleeding was scarcely stopped. The treatment began afresh from the start. At last it was brought to a scar again. But at a slight movement of the body it was wounded once more, and more blood ran out than before. He himself grew pale and, his strength drained, wasted away, and then indeed the flow of blood was checked. The wound began to lose all feeling to medicine; a cancer invaded everything nearby, and the more it was cut around, the more fiercely it raged; the more it was treated, the more it grew. The master healers yielded — Chiron the son of Philyra, and Melampus the son of Amythaon. Famous doctors were brought in from everywhere; human hands accomplished nothing. Recourse was had to idols: Apollo and Asclepius were prayed to, a remedy demanded. Apollo prescribed treatment; the evil grew far worse. Now destruction was not far off, and it had already seized everything below. His innards rotted outwardly, and his whole frame dissolved into decay. Yet his unhappy doctors did not stop tending and treating the evil, even without hope of overcoming it. Driven back by the remedies, the disease recoiled inward and took hold of his inner organs, and worms were bred within. The stench spread not only through the palace but through the whole city. Nor was this strange, since by now the passages of excrement and urine were confounded together. He was eaten by worms, and his body dissolved into rot amid unbearable pains. At the same time he raised horrible cries to the stars, like the bellowing of a bull that flees the altar wounded. Cooked and hot animals were placed at the seat of the flow, so that the heat might draw out the worms. When these were opened up, an uncountable swarm poured forth, and yet the fertile ruin had bred a far greater quantity of rotting flesh still within. By now his body's parts, ravaged by the various evil, had lost their form altogether. The upper part, down to the wound, had withered, and the sallow skin, in pitiable emaciation, clung close about the bones far within. The lower part, without any shape of feet, had swollen and separated like a wineskin. And this went on for a whole year, until at last, subdued by his sufferings, he was forced to confess God. Amid the pressing pain of this fresh agony he cried out at intervals that he would restore God's temple and make full amends for his crime. And now, failing, he sent out an edict of this kind:
Among the other measures we constantly arrange for the good and advantage of the state, we had previously wished, in accordance with the ancient laws and the public discipline of the Romans, to set everything right, and to see to it that the Christians too, who had abandoned the practice of their forefathers, should return to sound thinking, since somehow such a resolve had seized these same Christians and such folly had taken hold of them that they no longer followed those institutions of the ancients which their own forefathers had perhaps first established, but instead, according to their own judgment and as it pleased them, made for themselves the laws they observed, and gathered together various peoples in different groups. Accordingly, when an order of ours to this effect had been issued, that they should betake themselves back to the institutions of old, many were subjected to danger, and many indeed were struck down. And since a great many persisted in their resolve, and we saw that they neither offered to the gods the worship and reverence due, nor observed the god of the Christians, taking into account our own most gentle clemency, and considering our perpetual custom by which we are accustomed to extend pardon to all men, we judged that our most ready indulgence should be extended to them as well, so that they may again be Christians and reassemble their meeting-places, provided they do nothing contrary to public order.
This edict was published at Nicomedia on the day before the Kalends of May, in the eighth consulship of the same emperor and the second of Maximinus. Then, dearest Donatus, when the prisons were opened, you were freed from custody along with the rest of the confessors, though the prison had been your home for six years. Yet God granted him no pardon for that crime: only a few days afterward, once he had placed his wife and his son into Licinius's keeping and handed them over, with the limbs of his whole body already dissolving, a ghastly wasting disease consumed him — word of this reached Nicomedia within that same month, just as the twentieth anniversary of his reign drew near at the approaching Kalends of March.
When Maximinus heard this news, he sped from the East by relays of couriers, in order to seize the provinces and, while Licinius delayed, to claim for himself everything as far as the strait of Chalcedon; and entering Bithynia, so as to win favor for the moment, he remitted the tax to the great joy of all. Discord arose between the two emperors, and war nearly broke out. They held the opposite banks under arms, but peace and friendship were arranged on fixed terms, and a treaty was made on the very strait, and their right hands were joined. He returned unthreatened, and became again what he had been in Syria and in Egypt. First of all, he withdrew the indulgence granted to the Christians under a general edict, having suborned deputations from the cities to petition that the Christians not be permitted to build meeting-places within their towns, so that he might seem to have been compelled and driven by their persuasion to do what he was in fact going to do of his own accord. Granting their request, in an unprecedented fashion he appointed in each city a chief priest chosen from among the leading men, who would daily offer sacrifices to all their gods and, relying on the service of the old priests, would see to it that the Christians neither built meeting-places nor assembled publicly or privately, but would arrest them and by their own authority compel them to sacrifice or hand them over to the judges. Nor was this enough for him, unless he also set over the provinces individual men of higher rank, as it were high priests, and he ordered both classes to go about arrayed in white cloaks. He was, moreover, preparing to do what he had already long since done in the regions of the East. For while professing clemency in appearance, he forbade that the servants of God be killed, but ordered that they be maimed. And so confessors had their eyes gouged out, their hands cut off, their feet amputated, their noses or ears sliced away.
While he was contriving these things, he was deterred by a letter from Constantine. He therefore concealed his intent — yet if anyone fell into his hands, such men were secretly drowned at sea. Nor did he abandon his habit of having sacrifice offered daily in the palace. And he was the first to devise this: that all the animals he ate should be slaughtered at the altars not by cooks but by priests, and that nothing whatsoever should be set on his table unless it had first been offered, sacrificed, or sprinkled with wine, so that whoever was invited to dine there left defiled and unclean from it. In other respects too he resembled his master. For whatever Diocles or Maximian had left behind, he scraped up without any shame, carrying off everything. And so the granaries of private persons were shut up, storehouses were sealed, and debts for years to come were exacted in advance. From this came famine even though the fields were bearing crops; from this an unheard-of dearness of goods. Herds of cattle and flocks were seized from the fields for the daily sacrifices, by which he had so corrupted his own men that they came to despise the ordinary ration. And he squandered without discrimination and without measure, since he loaded down all his attendants, whose number was immense, with costly garments and gold coin, handed out silver among the ordinary troops and new recruits, and showered every sort of largesse on the barbarians to win them over. As for what he either took from the living or gave away as a gift to his own men whenever someone asked for another's property, I hardly know whether I should call it a matter for thanks, seeing that, in the manner of merciful bandits, he stripped his spoils without bloodshed.
But this was the capital vice, surpassing all who ever lived: his lust for corrupting others! I do not know what to call it except blind and unbridled, and yet no words, however indignant, can adequately express the matter: the enormity of the crime outstrips the power of speech. Eunuchs and procurers searched out everything. Wherever a face was more than commonly attractive, fathers and husbands had to withdraw. The garments of noble women, and likewise of virgins, were pulled off, and every limb of their bodies was inspected, lest any part of the body be unworthy of the royal bed. If any woman refused, she was drowned in water, as though under this adulterous ruler chastity were itself a capital crime against his majesty. Some men, when their wives had been violated — wives whom they held most dear for their chastity and fidelity — unable to bear the grief, took their own lives as well. Under this monster no woman's purity remained intact, except where some notable deformity kept off his barbarous lust. Finally he had introduced this custom, that no one might take a wife without his permission, so that he himself might be the first to sample every marriage; freeborn virgins, once violated, he handed over as wives to his own slaves. And his companions, under such a prince, imitated his debaucheries and violated with impunity the marriage-beds of their hosts — for who would seek redress? He seized the daughters of ordinary people wherever he pleased. Women of the highest rank, who could not simply be seized, were sought as though by way of favor, and it was not permitted to refuse once the emperor had put his name to the request, on pain of either perishing or being forced to accept some barbarian as a son-in-law. For scarcely any bodyguard stood at his side who was not of that people which, driven from their lands by the Goths at the time of the twentieth anniversary celebrations, had surrendered themselves to Maximian — that curse of the human race — so that men fleeing servitude to barbarians might instead lord it over Romans. Surrounded by such attendants and protectors, he made a mockery of the East.
In the end, once he had given free rein to his lusts in this manner, it happened that after Maximian's death Valeria came to him, thinking she would be safer staying in his territory, especially since he had a wife. But the wicked creature immediately burned with desire for her. The woman was still in mourning garments, the period of grief not yet completed. He sent envoys ahead demanding her hand in marriage, intending to cast out his wife if his suit succeeded. She replied, freely, as only she was free to do: first, that she could not discuss marriage while still in mourning attire, with the ashes of her husband — his own father — scarcely cold; second, that he would be acting impiously in repudiating a faithful wife, since he would surely do the same to her; and finally, that it would be a disgrace, unheard of and without precedent, for a woman of her name and station to take another husband in such fashion. His attendants reported to him what she had dared to say. His lust turned into rage and fury. At once he proscribed the woman, seized her property, took away her attendants, put her eunuchs to death under torture, banished her together with her mother into exile — not to any fixed place, but drove her headlong here and there in mockery — and condemned her friends on trumped-up charges of adultery.
There was a most distinguished lady who already had grandchildren by her grown sons. Valeria loved her as a second mother; and on her advice, he suspected, Valeria had refused him. He gave orders to the governor Eratineus that she be put to death with disgrace. Two other women were joined to her, equally noble; one of them had left behind in Rome a virgin daughter who was a Vestal, and had secretly been a friend of Valeria; the other had a husband who was a senator, a man not too closely connected to the Augusta. Both, however, were put to death on account of their exceptional beauty and chastity. The women were seized suddenly, not for any trial but for outright robbery — for no accuser ever came forward. A certain Jew was found, himself already guilty of other crimes, who, tempted by the hope of impunity, was induced to bring false charges against the innocent women. The judge, being fair and careful, had him escorted outside the city with a guard, lest he be stoned by the people. This tragedy was enacted at Nicaea. Torture was applied to the Jew, and he said what he had been instructed to say; and lest the women contradict him, they were beaten by the torturers to keep silent. The innocent women were ordered to be led away to execution. There was weeping and lamentation, not only from the husband present, who mourned his deserving wife, but from all whom this unheard-of and shameful business had drawn together. And lest the crowd, in its outrage, snatch the women from the executioners' hands, armored cavalry and archers were sent ahead in military formation as escort. Thus, hemmed in between ranks of armed men, they were led to their punishment; and they would have lain unburied — their household servants having fled — had not the secret pity of friends buried them. Nor was the impunity the adulterer had promised ever paid out to the false witness: fixed to a cross, he revealed the whole conspiracy, and with his last breath declared before all who watched that the women had been killed though innocent.
The Augusta herself, banished to certain desert wastes of Syria, made her plight known to her father Diocletian through secret messengers. He sent envoys and asked that his daughter be sent back to him: it accomplished nothing. Again and repeatedly he begged: she was not returned. Finally he sent a certain relative of his, a powerful military man, to remind Maximinus of his own past favors and beg on his behalf. This man too, his mission unfulfilled, reported back that his pleas had been in vain.
At the same time, by order of Constantine, the statues of the aged Maximian were being torn down, and his images, wherever painted, were removed. And because the two old emperors had usually been painted together, the images of both were taken down together. And so when Diocletian saw happen to him, while still alive, what had never before befallen any emperor, struck by a twofold sickness of spirit, he resolved that death was his only course. He tossed himself this way and that, his mind seething with grief, taking neither sleep nor food. Sighs and groans, constant tears, and continual turning of his body, now on his bed, now on the ground — thus the emperor who for twenty years had been most fortunate was cast down by God to a lowly existence, trampled by injuries, brought to loathe his own life, and in the end was worn away by hunger and anguish.
Only one now remained among the enemies of God — Maximinus — whose downfall and ruin I shall now relate. Since he harbored rivalry against Licinius, because Licinius had been preferred above him by Maximian, though he had recently confirmed friendship with him, yet as soon as he heard that Constantine's sister was betrothed to Licinius, he judged that this alliance between the two emperors had been formed against himself. He therefore secretly sent envoys to Rome to seek alliance and friendship with Maxentius, writing to him also in familiar terms. The envoys were received graciously; friendship was formed, and images of both were set up together. Maxentius gladly welcomed this as if it were divine assistance, for he had already declared war on Constantine, as though to avenge his father's death. From this arose the suspicion that the old man had feigned discord with his son in order to open a way for himself to cut down others, and, once all had been removed, to claim for himself and his son the rule of the whole world. But this was false. For his actual purpose was, once his son and the others had been destroyed, to restore himself and Diocletian to power.
By now civil war had already broken out between them. And although Maxentius kept to Rome, having received an oracle that he would perish if he went outside the city gates, the war was nonetheless waged through capable commanders. Maxentius had the greater strength, since he had taken over both his father's army from Severus and his own forces recently drawn from the Moors and Gaetulians. Battle was joined, and the troops of Maxentius were prevailing, until at last, his resolve strengthened and ready for either outcome, Constantine brought all his forces closer to the city and took up position opposite the Milvian Bridge. The day was approaching on which Maxentius had first assumed power — the sixth day before the Kalends of November — and his fifth anniversary was drawing to a close. Constantine was warned in his sleep to mark the heavenly sign of God upon the shields and thus join battle. He did as he was ordered, and marked Christ upon the shields by means of the letter X turned sideways, with its top bent round. Armed with this sign, the army took up its weapons. The enemy advanced to meet them without their emperor and crossed the bridge. The battle lines clashed on equal terms, and both sides fought with utmost force; neither side knew flight. A disturbance arose in the city, and the leader was denounced as a deserter of the public safety; and when he was seen — for the games of the Circus were being celebrated that day for his birthday — the people suddenly cried out with one voice that Constantine could not be defeated. Alarmed by this outcry, he rushed off, summoned certain senators, and ordered the Sibylline Books to be consulted; in them it was found that on that day the enemy of the Romans would perish. Encouraged by this answer to hope for victory, he went forth and came to the battle line. The bridge behind him was broken down. When this was seen, the fighting grew fiercer, and the hand of God hovered over the battle. The forces of Maxentius were routed, and he himself, turning to flight, hastened toward the bridge, which had been cut, and, pressed by the crowd of fugitives, was flung down into the Tiber. When this most bitter war was at last brought to its conclusion, Constantine, welcomed as emperor with great rejoicing by the Senate and people of Rome, learned of the treachery of Maximinus; he intercepted letters and found statues and images. The Senate, in recognition of his valor, decreed to Constantine the title of first name, which Maximinus had claimed for himself; and when news of the victory that had freed the city was brought to him, he received it no otherwise than as if he himself had been defeated. And when he further learned of the Senate's decree, he burned with such resentment that he openly declared his enmity, uttering insults mixed with mockery against the greatest of emperors.
Once affairs at Rome were settled, Constantine withdrew for the following winter to Milan. There Licinius also arrived, to receive his bride. When Maximinus learned that they were occupied with the wedding festivities, he moved his army from Syria, in the very midst of a raging winter, and by forced double marches hastened into Bithynia with his column already weakened. For amid the heaviest rains and snows and mud and cold and toil, pack animals of every kind were lost, whose pitiable carcasses strewn along the road already foretold to the soldiers the shape of the coming war and a like disaster. Nor did he even pause within his own borders, but at once crossed the strait and came in arms to the gates of Byzantium. There were garrison troops stationed there by Licinius against just such an eventuality. He first tried to entice them with gifts and promises, then to terrify them by force and assault; yet neither force nor promises availed anything. Already eleven days had passed, days enough to send messengers and letters to the emperor, when the soldiers, trusting not in their loyalty but relying on their small numbers, surrendered themselves. From there he advanced to Heraclea, and there, detained by the same tactic, he lost several more days. And by now Licinius, marching in haste with a small force, had reached Hadrianopolis, while Maximinus, having accepted the surrender of Perinthus and delayed there a while, advanced to a camp eighteen miles off — for he could go no farther, since Licinius already held the next camp an equal distance away. Licinius, gathering as many soldiers as he could from the nearby region, went out to meet Maximinus, more to delay him than out of any resolve to fight or hope of victory. For while Maximinus led an army of seventy thousand armed men, Licinius had scarcely gathered thirty thousand. His soldiers had been scattered through various regions, and the shortness of time did not allow them all to be assembled.
As the armies drew near, then, it seemed that battle would soon be joined. At that time Maximinus made a vow to Jupiter of this kind: that if he won the victory, he would blot out and utterly destroy the name of the Christians. Then, on the following night, as Licinius slept, an angel of God stood by him, warning him to rise at once and pray to the highest God together with his whole army: victory would be his if he did so. After these words, when he seemed to himself to rise, and the one who had warned him stood by still, he then taught him how, and in what words, he ought to pray. Roused from sleep, he ordered his secretary summoned and dictated these words just as he had heard them: 'O God most high, thee we entreat; O holy God, thee we entreat: to thee we commit all justice, to thee we commit our safety, to thee we commit our dominion. Through thee we live, through thee we stand victorious and blessed. Hear our prayers, God most high and holy: toward thee we lift our arms: hear us, holy God, God most high.' These words were written out on many little sheets and sent by the commanders and tribunes so that each might teach them to his own soldiers. The spirit of all rose high, believing that victory had been announced to them from heaven. The emperor set the battle for the day of the Kalends of May, which would complete the eighth year of his reign, so that Maximinus might be beaten precisely on the anniversary of his own accession, just as his rival had been beaten at Rome. Maximinus wished to strike first: the day before, in the morning, he drew up his line of battle, so as to celebrate his own anniversary the next day as victor. Word came to camp that Maximinus had moved. The soldiers took up arms and advanced to meet him. Between them lay a barren, open plain, which men call Serenus. Now both battle lines were in sight of each other. The soldiers of Licinius laid down their shields, unfastened their helmets, and stretched their hands toward heaven, following the lead of their officers, and spoke the prayer on behalf of their emperor. The doomed army heard the murmur of those praying. When the prayer had been said three times, filled now with courage, they put their helmets back on their heads and raised their shields. The emperors met to confer, but peace proved impossible with Maximinus, since he held Licinius in contempt and judged him deserted by his own troops — Licinius being close-fisted with rewards, whereas he himself gave freely; indeed this very calculation had driven him to war in the first place, so that by absorbing Licinius's army without a fight he could march at once, his forces doubled, against Constantine.
So the two forces drew nearer, the trumpets sounded, and the standards moved forward. Licinius's men made their charge and fell upon the enemy, who were so terrified that they could neither draw their swords nor throw their weapons. Maximinus rode around the line, trying now with entreaties, now with gifts, to win over Licinius's soldiers, but he was heeded nowhere. A rush was made against him and he fled back to his own men. His battle line was cut down with impunity, and so great a number of legions, so great a mass of soldiers, was mown down by a mere handful. No one remembered his name, his courage, or the rewards he had once earned, as though they had come not to fight a battle but to a death already vowed — so did the Most High God deliver them to their enemies to have their throats cut. Already a huge multitude lay strewn on the ground. Maximinus saw that things were going otherwise than he had supposed. He threw off his purple, put on the clothing of a slave, and fled, crossing the strait. As for his army, half of it was struck down, and the rest either surrendered or turned to flight; for their emperor, by deserting them, had stripped away any shame in deserting him in turn. He himself, on the Kalends of May, that is in a single night and a single day [ ], reached Nicomedia on another night, though the battlefield was a hundred and sixty miles away; and snatching up his children and his wife [ ], he set out for the East with a few companions from the palace. But in Cappadocia he halted, gathering soldiers from among the fugitives and from the East, and there he put his imperial robe on again.
Licinius, having taken over part of the army and distributed it, crossed with his forces into Bithynia a few days after the battle, and entering Nicomedia gave thanks to God, by whose help he had won the victory; it was the Ides of June, and that year's consulship belonged jointly to Constantine and to him for a third term; on that date he had a letter of this sort delivered to the governor and posted publicly, concerning the Church's restoration: Since I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, had happily met together at Milan and were discussing all matters that concern the advantage and security of the public, we judged that among the other things that seemed likely to benefit the greater number of people, the arrangements touching reverence for the Divinity ought to be settled first of all, so that we might grant to Christians and to all others free power to follow whatever religion each one wished, so that whatever divinity there is in the seat of heaven might be rendered kind and favorable toward us and toward all who are placed under our authority. We therefore judged it right, by a wholesome and most correct reasoning, to hold that no one whatsoever should be refused leave to devote his mind either to the observance of the Christians or to whatever religion he himself felt to be most fitting for him, so that the supreme Divinity, to whose worship we render free obedience of mind, might in all things grant us its accustomed favor and benevolence. Therefore it is fitting that your Devotedness should know that it has pleased us that all conditions whatsoever which were previously contained in the writings sent to your office concerning the name of the Christians, and which seemed wholly ill-omened and foreign to our clemency, should now be removed, and that now freely and simply each one of those who hold this same intention of observing the religion of the Christians should hasten to observe it, without any disturbance or molestation to himself. We judged it right to make this known most fully to your Care, so that you might know that we have granted to these same Christians a free and unconditional power of cultivating their own religion. And since you see this indulged to them by us, your Devotedness will understand that a like open and free power in the practice of their own religion or observance has likewise been granted to others also, for the sake of the peace of our times, so that each may have free power to worship whatever he has chosen; this we have done so that it might not appear that any honor or any religion has been diminished by us. And besides this we have judged it right to decree, concerning the Christians in particular, that if those same places to which they had previously been accustomed to assemble, concerning which a definite ruling had earlier been set out in the letters sent to your office, should be found to have been purchased before now by anyone, whether from our treasury or from any other source, these same places are to be restored to the Christians without payment and without any demand for a price, all delay and ambiguity set aside; and those who obtained the same by way of gift are likewise to return them as quickly as possible to these same Christians — and if those who bought them, or those who received them as a gift, should ask anything of our benevolence, let them apply to the vicar, so that provision may be made for them too through our clemency. All these things must be handed over to the body of the Christians at once through your intervention and without delay. And since these same Christians are known to have possessed not only the places to which they were accustomed to assemble, but other places also, belonging by right to their body, that is to their churches, and not to individual persons, you shall order all these, under the law we have set out above, to be restored, without any ambiguity or dispute whatsoever, to these same Christians, that is, to their body and their congregations — the rule stated above being observed, of course, that those who restore the same without payment, as we have said, may hope for indemnity from our benevolence. In all these matters you ought to furnish your most effective intervention to the aforesaid body of the Christians, so that our order may be fulfilled as quickly as possible, so that in this too, through our clemency, provision may be made for the public peace. In this way it shall come to pass that, as has been set out above, the divine favor toward us, which we have experienced in matters of such moment, may continue throughout all time to attend our successes, together with the well-being of the public. And in order that the terms of this our decree and benevolence may come to the knowledge of all, it will be fitting that you have this writing published by your own edict everywhere and brought to the knowledge of all, so that this decree of our benevolence may not remain hidden. When this letter had been published, he further urged by word of mouth that the meeting-places be restored to their former condition. So from the overthrow of the Church to its restoration there passed ten years, and some four months more.
As Licinius followed after him with his army, the tyrant fled and again made for the narrow passes of the Taurus mountain range. There he built fortifications and towers, trying to block the way, but was dislodged as the victors broke through everything, and at last took refuge in Tarsus. There, hard pressed already by land and sea and with no hope of escape left him, in anguish of soul and in fear he fled to death as though it were a remedy for the evils that God had heaped upon his head. But first he stuffed himself with food and gorged himself with wine, as those do who suppose this to be their last act, and so he drank the poison. Its force, driven back by his overfull stomach, could not take effect at once, but turned into a lingering, wasting sickness resembling plague, so that, his breath drawn out longer, he might feel the torment all the more. Already the poison had begun to rage within him. As its force made his vitals seethe, he was driven by unbearable pain to the verge of madness, so much so that for four days, frenzied with insanity, he devoured with his own hands the earth he scooped up, as though famished. Then, after many grievous torments, as he dashed his head against the walls, his eyes started from their sockets. Then at last, having lost his sight, he began to see God, with shining attendants, sitting in judgment upon him. So he cried out, as those under torture are wont to do, saying that it was not he but others who had done these things. Then, as though driven by the torments themselves, he confessed Christ, begging and imploring again and again that Christ have mercy upon him. So, amid the groans he uttered as though he were being burned, he breathed out his guilty spirit in a death of a most detestable kind.
In this way God overthrew all the persecutors of his name, so that not so much as a shoot or a root of them remained. For Licinius, once he had gained mastery of everything, first ordered the killing of Valeria, whom Maximinus in his rage had not dared to kill even after his flight, when he saw that he himself must perish; and likewise of Candidianus, whom Valeria had adopted, being the son of a concubine, because she herself was barren. The woman, however, on learning that Licinius had won, had changed her dress and mingled with his retinue in order to watch over Candidianus's fortunes; but he, because he had presented himself at Nicomedia and seemed to be held in honor, suspecting nothing of the sort, was killed. And she, on hearing of his death, at once fled. Licinius likewise put to death, under sentence of capital punishment, Severianus the son of Severus, already a grown man, who had followed the fleeing Maximinus from the battlefield, on the charge that after his death he had thought of assuming the purple. All these men, already fearing Licinius as an evil to come, had preferred to side with Maximinus, except Valeria, who, though Licinius wished it, had refused to yield to him by right of inheritance all of Maximian's goods, and had likewise refused Maximinus. Licinius also put to death Maximinus's own eldest son, a boy of eight years, and his daughter, seven years old, who had been betrothed to Candidianus. But their mother had first been cast headlong into the Orontes — the same river into which she had often ordered chaste women to be thrown. So all these wicked men, by God's true and just judgment, received the very same things they themselves had done.
Valeria too, wandering through various provinces for fifteen months in the dress of a commoner, was at last recognized at Thessalonica, and, seized together with her mother, paid the penalty. The women were led out to execution amid a vast crowd watching and pitying so great a fall, and, their heads cut off, their bodies were cast into the sea. So it was that their chastity and their rank brought about their destruction.
All these things, in good faith — for I speak as one who knows — I have believed should be committed to writing just as they happened, so that neither should the memory of such great events perish, nor, if anyone should wish to write this history, should he corrupt the truth by passing over in silence either their sins against God or God's judgment against them. To his eternal goodness we owe thanks, for he at last looked down upon the earth, since he has deigned to restore and gather together his flock, part of it ravaged by rapacious wolves, part of it scattered, and to root out the evil beasts that had trampled the pastures of the divine flock and torn apart its folds. Where now are those magnificent and famous titles of the Jovians and the Herculians, celebrated among the nations, which Diocletian and Maximian first arrogantly assumed and which afterward flourished, passed on to their successors? The Lord has indeed destroyed them and blotted them from the earth. Let us then celebrate the triumph of God with rejoicing; let us keep the victory of the Lord with praises; let us keep it with prayers by day and by night, let us keep it, that he may confirm forever the peace granted to his people after ten years. You above all, dearest Donatus, who deserve to be heard by God, entreat the Lord that he may keep his mercy, gracious and gentle, toward his servants also, that he may ward off from his people every snare and assault of the devil, and that he may guard the flourishing Church in perpetual peace.
I have often noticed, Donatus, that a great many people suppose — as some philosophers have thought too — that God is never moved to anger, whether on the grounds that the divine nature is nothing but beneficent, and it would ill suit so lofty and consummate a power to injure anyone, or on the grounds that God troubles himself with nothing whatsoever, so that from his kindness no benefit reaches us, just as no harm comes from any malice in him. Because this mistaken notion of theirs is a grave one, tending as it does to topple the whole framework of human existence, we must set out to refute it, so that you yourself are not led astray by deference to men who fancy themselves wise. Yet we do not puff ourselves up as though truth were something our own minds had captured; instead, it is God's own instruction that we follow, since he alone has the capacity to know and to unveil what is hidden. Philosophers had no part in that instruction, imagining instead that guesswork could uncover the nature of things. Yet that is altogether impossible, since the human mind, walled in by the body's shadowy dwelling, is stationed at a great remove from any view of truth; and here is where divinity parts ways with humanity — the one is marked by ignorance, the other by knowledge. So it is that some light is required of us, to chase off the darkness enveloping human thought, seeing that, bound as we are within mortal flesh, our own faculties give us no power of divination. God, however, is that very light shining in the human mind, and whoever comes to recognize him and lets him into his breast will find his heart illumined and the mystery of truth made known to him. Set God and his heavenly instruction aside, though, and error fills everything. It was for good reason that Socrates — easily the most erudite of all the philosophers — nevertheless declared, in order to lay bare the ignorance of others who imagined they grasped something, that the sole thing he knew was that he knew nothing at all. He grasped, in other words, that such learning contained no certainty, no truth whatsoever within it; nor, as some have assumed, was his profession of ignorance merely a pose adopted to confound his opponents — rather, he had glimpsed truth in part, and he bore witness to this even at his own trial, as Plato has recorded, declaring that no human wisdom existed. Such was his contempt, his mockery, his rejection of the erudition in which the philosophers of his day took such pride, that he proclaimed the very summit of learning to be his own discovery that he knew nothing. If, then, no human wisdom exists, as both Socrates taught and Plato transmitted, it follows plainly that wisdom belongs to the divine realm, and that knowledge of truth is God's alone to possess. God, therefore, is the one who must be known: truth resides in him alone, he who fathered and fashioned all things, parent of the world, invisible to the eye and barely glimpsed even by the mind — one whose worship is routinely attacked, in countless ways, by those incapable of laying hold of genuine wisdom or of following the logic behind so vast and celestial a mystery.
A whole flight of steps leads upward to the dwelling place of truth, and climbing to the very top is no feat for just anybody. Those whose vision is overwhelmed by truth's brilliance, finding no sure footing, tumble back down to flat ground. On the first step one grasps that false religions deserve that name, and abandons the irreverent cult paid to objects shaped by human hands; on the second, one perceives with the mind that a single supreme God exists, that his might and forethought brought the world into being at the start and steers it ever since; on the third, one acknowledges the servant and envoy God dispatched to earth, through whose instruction we, once loosed from the confusion that had ensnared us, might be molded and might come to practice righteousness in worshipping the one true God. From every one of these steps, as I have noted, the descent into ruin is steep and comes all too readily unless one plants one's feet with unwavering firmness. Cast down from the first step, we find those who grasp what is false yet still fail to arrive at what is true — who, spurning frail earthly images, do not turn to worship the God unknown to them but instead gape in wonder at the world's elements, paying homage to sky, earth, sea, sun, and the remaining stars. Their ignorance, however, we have already laid bare in this work's second book. As for the second step, we say those fall from it who, while sensing that one supreme God exists, are nevertheless snared by philosophers and tangled in false reasoning, so that they form notions about that single majesty at odds with the truth — some claiming God has no shape whatsoever, others holding that no feeling moves him at all, since every feeling is a mark of weakness having no place in the divine. From the third step fall those who, knowing full well God's envoy and the one who founded his everlasting and sacred house, nonetheless either reject him outright or accept him in some manner faith does not sanction; we have already answered these in part in this collection's fourth book, and will do so again, more thoroughly, once we come to address every sect that has fractured and thereby forfeited the truth. Our present concern, however, is with those who, having slipped from the second step, hold mistaken opinions about the supreme God. Some claim he grants favor to no one and never grows angry, but rather passes his existence untroubled, savoring the blessings his own immortality affords. Others strip him of anger while letting him keep his favor, reasoning that a nature surpassing in the highest virtue must be as generous as it is powerless to cause harm. So the philosophers, though united on the question of anger, split over that of favor. To bring our discussion down, in orderly fashion, to the matter at hand, here is the fourfold division we must adopt: given that anger and favor are distinct and opposing things, God must either possess anger and lack favor, or lack both together, or lack anger while possessing favor, or possess both. Nature leaves no room beyond these four options, so whatever truth we are hunting for must lie in one of them. Let us weigh each possibility, that reason, proceeding in order, may guide us to where truth lies hidden.
As for the first possibility — that God only ever grows angry and is never once moved toward favor — no one has ever claimed this, for it would be improper for God to possess the capacity to harm and wound while lacking any capacity to help or do good. What reason, what hope of deliverance, would then remain for mankind, were God the source of evils and nothing besides? And were that so, his venerable majesty would cease to hold the office of a judge with power to save and to acquit, sinking instead into the role of a mere tormentor and executioner. Yet since human affairs plainly contain good as well as evil, if God were the source only of evils, some other being would have to exist, one opposed to God, supplying us with good things instead. And should such a being exist, what name would we give him? Why, indeed, would the one who inflicts harm be more familiar to us than the one who confers benefit? But because nothing whatsoever can exist apart from God, it is hollow and absurd to imagine that divine power — beyond which nothing is loftier or finer — could inflict harm yet be incapable of conferring benefit; hence no one has ever ventured to assert it, since reason offers it no support, nor can it be credited in any fashion. With that much settled, let us move on and pursue the truth elsewhere.
Next comes the Epicurean position: God has no anger, and, by the same token, no favor either. Epicurus judged it beneath God to inflict harm or injury — something typically arising from the feeling of anger — and so he stripped him of kindness too, having noticed the corollary that a God with anger must also have favor. Rather than concede him the flaw, then, he denied him the merit alongside it. 'This,' he writes, 'is exactly why he is blessed and beyond corruption: because he cares for nothing, bothers neither himself nor anyone else.' On such terms God simply does not exist, seeing that he would be neither moved, as living beings are, nor active beyond human measure, as befits divinity; he would have no will, no action, in short nothing resembling administration worthy of a god. Yet what administration could be grander or more fitting for God than steering the world, tending to living creatures, and, above the rest, to the human race, under whose dominion all earthly things fall? What kind of blessedness, then, could God possess if he lies eternally still, inert and numb, unhearing toward suppliants and unseeing toward worshippers? What quality suits God so well as providence does? Yet if he cares for nothing and provides for nothing, he has forfeited divinity altogether. So whoever strips God of every power and every substance is saying, in effect, simply that God does not exist. Marcus Tullius, in fact, records Posidonius's report that Epicurus believed there were no gods at all, and that his talk of gods was purely to escape popular resentment — leaving the gods standing in his words while, in substance, doing away with them, since he grants them neither motion nor function. But if that is the case, what could be more dishonest? Such conduct should have no place in a serious and thoughtful man. And if he genuinely believed one thing while saying another, what is he but a lying double-talker, and thus a fool? Yet Epicurus was not devious enough to say such things merely to deceive, given that he set them down in writing for posterity to read; rather, he strayed through simple ignorance of the truth. Having been led on from the start by one seemingly sound premise, he was then swept by sheer necessity toward everything that followed from it. His starting premise held that anger is unbecoming to God. Because this struck him as true and beyond challenge, he could not sever it from its consequences: once he had stripped away one feeling, necessity forced him to strip away the rest as well. Hence whoever lacks anger surely also lacks favor, its opposite; and lacking both anger and favor, he must likewise lack fear, joy, grief, and pity alike. All these feelings share one single root, one single motion, and none of it can touch God. Yet if God has no feeling at all — since anything capable of feeling is by nature weak — then neither does he have any care or any providence. At this point the wise man's reasoning halted; what should logically have followed he passed over quietly — namely that, lacking both care and providence, God would then have no thought, no perception whatever, from which it necessarily follows that he does not exist at all. So, descending rung by rung, Epicurus stopped short at the final one, having already caught sight of the abyss beyond it. Yet what did his silence gain him, hiding the peril as he did? Necessity dragged him down regardless, against his own wish; he ended up saying what he never meant to say, because he had built his argument so that it inevitably carried him to the very conclusion he was trying to dodge. See, then, where this road leads: anger discarded, God left with nothing at all. Few, in the end, if anyone, give credence to such a view — chiefly the wicked and depraved, hoping their own crimes will go unpunished. But since this too turns out false — that God has neither anger nor favor — let us turn to the third position.
The Stoics, along with certain others, are reckoned to hold a somewhat sounder view of the divine, crediting God with favor while denying him anger. It is a seductive, popular line of reasoning: such smallness of spirit ought not touch God; one immune to injury should not imagine himself wronged by any creature; so serene and sacred a majesty should not be roused, thrown into turmoil, and hurried into fury — a thing belonging to earthly frailty; for anger, on their account, is a disturbance and turbulence of the mind, something wholly alien to God. And if even in a man, so long as he is wise and sober, anger is a disgrace — since, once it seizes a mind, it whips up waves as fierce as a raging tempest, transforming one's whole state: eyes flash, lips quiver, the tongue stumbles, teeth grind, and the face flushes crimson one moment and turns ashen the next — how much less becoming would such a monstrous change be for God? And if a man wielding authority and power, driven by anger, does terrible harm — spilling blood, toppling cities, annihilating nations, laying whole provinces waste — how much more plausible is it, they contend, that God, who holds sway over the entire human race and the world itself, would have annihilated everything, had he been prone to anger? It follows, then, that so vast and ruinous an evil ought to have no place in him. And once anger and turmoil are removed from him — being both unfitting and destructive, apt to make him inflict harm on anyone — nothing is left for him to be but mild, tranquil, kind, generous, a preserver of things. Only on these terms, they say, can he rightly be styled the universal parent, supreme and unsurpassed, as the divine and celestial nature requires. For if, among men, conferring benefit rather than harm, granting life rather than taking it, saving rather than destroying, is reckoned praiseworthy, and innocence justly ranks among the virtues, and whoever practices such things wins love, esteem, honor, and is celebrated everywhere with praise and goodwill, being judged, on account of his merits and kindnesses, closest of all to God — how much more fitting that God himself, surpassing in flawless and divine virtues, untouched by any earthly taint, should draw the devotion of the whole human race through benefits both divine and celestial? Such claims, phrased attractively and pitched to popular taste, win over a great many believers; yet those who hold this view, though nearer the truth, still stumble in part, having reflected too little on the true nature of the matter. For if God feels no anger toward the wicked and unjust, then surely he feels no love toward the righteous and just either. The position of those who strip away both anger and favor together is thus, in fact, the more internally consistent one. With opposites of this kind, one must be moved toward either both or neither. So whoever loves what is good also hates what is wicked, and whoever fails to hate what is wicked likewise fails to love what is good, since love for the good is born of hatred for evil, just as hatred for the wicked flows from love of the good. No one loves life without also detesting death, and no one pursues light except one who is fleeing darkness — nature has bound these pairs together so tightly that neither member can stand without the other. Suppose a master keeps both a good slave and a bad one in his household: he will surely not hate both alike, nor treat both alike with honor and kindness — either course would be senseless and unjust — but he speaks gently to the good one, honoring him and placing him in charge of the household, the family, and all his affairs, while punishing the bad one with curses, blows, nakedness, hunger, thirst, and chains, so that one may stand as a warning against wrongdoing while the other becomes an incentive toward merit — fear restraining some, honor spurring on others. Such a master, then, loves precisely because he also hates, and hates precisely because he also loves; some deserve love, and others deserve hatred. And just as one who loves confers good things on those he loves, one who hates inflicts harm on those he hates; and being a sound argument, this cannot be undone by any means. Empty and mistaken, then, is the view of those who grant God one of the pair while denying him the other — no less so than the view of those who deny him both. Yet the latter group, as we have shown, are not entirely mistaken, since they preserve the sounder half of the pair; the former, however, though following the same reasoning and the same underlying truth, having arrived at an entirely false conclusion, fall into the deeper error. Their argument should not have run: God feels no anger, therefore he feels no favor either — but rather: God is moved by favor, therefore he is also moved by anger. Had it been settled beyond question that God feels no anger, the other conclusion would indeed have followed of necessity. But since anger remains the more doubtful point while favor is nearly self-evident, it is senseless to try to overturn a certainty by appeal to an uncertainty, when it is far simpler to establish an uncertainty by appeal to a certainty.
These are the opinions of the philosophers about God; beyond these, no one has said anything else. But if we find that what has been said is false, there remains that one final position — which alone can contain the truth, and which was never taken up nor ever defended by the philosophers — namely, that it follows that God grows angry, since he is moved by favor. This is the position we must uphold and assert; for on it turns the whole sum and hinge of religion and piety. For no honor at all can be owed to God if he grants nothing to the one who worships him, nor any fear, if he does not grow angry at the one who does not.
Although philosophers, through ignorance of the truth, have often strayed from reason and fallen into inextricable errors — for what commonly happens to them is what happens to a traveler who does not know the road and will not admit his ignorance, so that he wanders about because he is ashamed to ask those he meets — yet not a single philosopher ever claimed that man and beast are indistinguishable from one another. Nor has anyone at all, who wished to seem even slightly wise, ever set the rational animal on a level with dumb and irrational creatures. That is done only by certain ignorant men, themselves no better than cattle, who, wishing to surrender themselves to belly and pleasure, claim that they were born by the same principle as everything else that breathes — a thing no man ought to say. For who is so uneducated as not to know, who so lacking in sense as not to feel, that there is something divine present in man? I do not yet come to the virtues of mind and intellect, by which man's kinship with God is plainly shown. Does not the very posture of the body and the shape of the face declare that we are not equal to the dumb beasts? Their nature is bent down toward the earth and toward fodder and has nothing in common with the sky, which they never look upon. Man, however, standing upright, his face lifted to contemplate the world, turns his countenance toward God, and reason recognizes reason. For this reason, as Cicero says, no animal except man has any notion of God. Wisdom is his alone, and through it comes an understanding of religion that belongs to him only; in this, either chiefly or exclusively, lies what sets man apart from the dumb creatures. As for the rest of what seems proper to man, even where it is not truly found in dumb animals, something similar to it can be seen. Speech is proper to man, yet a kind of likeness of speech exists in animals too. For they distinguish one another by their cries, and when angry they utter a sound like quarreling, and when they see each other after an interval they show their pleasure by voice. To us their voices seem formless, just as perhaps ours seem to them, but to themselves, since they understand one another, they are words. In every feeling, in fact, they give out distinct sounds by which they show the state of their mind. Laughter, too, is proper to man, and yet we see in other animals certain signs of joy — when they frisk in play, they lay back their ears, draw up their mouths, smooth their brows, and let their eyes go loose in playfulness. What is more proper to man than reason and foresight of the future? And yet there are animals that make several different exits from their burrows, so that if some danger should arise, a way of flight lies open to those trapped within — which they would not do unless they possessed some understanding and forethought. Others make provision for the future, as the ant, mindful of winter, strips and hoards a great heap of grain and stores it under cover; as the bee, which alone recognizes its home and its fixed dwelling, and, mindful of the coming winter, labors in summer and lays up what it has gathered for common use. It would take too long if I wished to go through what each kind of animal is accustomed to do that closely resembles human cleverness. But if in all these things that are usually credited to man a likeness is also found in dumb animals, it becomes clear that religion alone is the one thing of which no trace, no hint, can be found in beasts. Justice belongs to religion alone, and no other animal touches it. Man alone shares it with others; the rest are bound only to themselves. But justice is credited to the worship of God; whoever does not take this up is estranged from human nature and will live the life of cattle under a human shape. Since, then, we differ from the other animals in this almost alone, that we alone of all creatures perceive the divine power and might, while in them there is no understanding of God at all, it surely cannot be that in this respect dumb beasts should be wiser or human nature more foolish, when because of wisdom everything that breathes, indeed the whole of nature, is subject to man. Therefore, if it is reason, if it is this power in man that surpasses and rises above the other living things — namely, that he alone grasps the knowledge of God — it is clear that religion can in no way be dissolved.
But religion is dissolved if we believe Epicurus when he says: the nature of the gods, being divine of itself, necessarily enjoys immortal life in the deepest peace, set apart from our affairs and far removed from them; for being free of all pain, free of all danger, strong in its own resources, needing nothing from us, it is neither won over by our merits nor touched by anger. When he says this, does he suppose that any worship should be paid to god, or does he overturn all religion? For if god confers no good on anyone, if he returns no favor to the homage of his worshiper, what could be so vain, so foolish, as to build temples, offer sacrifices, bring gifts, and diminish one's own estate, only to gain nothing? But, it is said, an excellent nature deserves to be honored. What honor can be owed to one who cares for nothing and shows no gratitude? Or can we be bound in any way to one who has nothing in common with us? If god, says Cicero, is of such a kind that he is held by no gratitude, no love for mankind, then let him go his way. For what would I say — may he be gracious? He can be gracious to no one. What could be said of god more contemptuously? "Let him go his way" is his phrase for saying: away with him, out of sight, since not a soul can gain anything from him. But if god has no business with us and shows none, why then should we not do wrong, whenever it is possible to deceive the conscience of men and get around the public laws? Wherever an opportunity for concealment presents itself to us, let us look to our own advantage, let us take what belongs to others, whether without bloodshed or even with it, if beyond the laws there is nothing further to be feared. While Epicurus holds this view, he tears religion out by the root; and with religion gone, life falls into confusion and disorder. Yet since religion is something that cannot be done away with — so that we may keep both the wisdom that distinguishes us from beasts and the justice by which common life is made safer — how can religion itself be held or guarded without fear? For what is not feared is despised, and what is despised is certainly not worshiped. So it happens that religion, and majesty, and honor rest upon fear, and there is no fear where no one grows angry. Whether, then, you take away god's favor or his anger, or both together, religion is bound to be destroyed — and without it human life is filled with folly, crime, and savagery. For conscience restrains men a great deal, if we believe that we live in the sight of god, if we suppose that not only what we do is seen from above, but that even what we think or say is heard by god. But, some suppose, it is useful to believe this — not for the sake of truth, but for the sake of expediency, since laws cannot punish the conscience unless some terror hangs over it from above to check wrongdoing. All religion, then, is false, and there is no divinity, but the whole thing has been contrived by prudent men so that life might be led more uprightly and more innocently. This is a great question, and one foreign to the subject we have set out to treat, but since it necessarily arose, it deserves to be touched on, however briefly.
Since the opinions of philosophers of an earlier time agreed about providence, and there was no doubt that the world had been furnished by God and by reason and was governed by reason, the very first to break from that consensus, back in Socrates' day, was Protagoras: he professed no certainty either way about whether any divine power existed. His argument was judged so impious, so contrary to truth and religion, that the Athenians banished him from their borders and burned his books, which contained these views, in the public assembly. There is no need to argue over his opinion, since he pronounced nothing definite. After him, Socrates himself, and his pupil Plato, and those who flowed out from the school of Plato in different directions like streams — the Stoics and the Peripatetics — held the same view as their predecessors. Afterward, however, Epicurus said that god does indeed exist, since there must be something in the world outstanding, excellent, and blessed, but that there is no providence at all: and so the world itself was built by no reasoning, no art, no design, but the nature of things was formed by a chance clustering of certain tiny, indivisible seeds. I do not see what could be said more self-contradictory than this. For if god exists, he is certainly provident, as a god must be, and there is no other basis on which divinity could be granted to him, except that he must hold the past in memory, grasp the present, and see ahead into the future. When, therefore, Epicurus took away providence, he also denied that god exists. But when he declared that god exists, he at the same time granted that providence exists as well; for the one cannot exist at all, nor even be conceived, without the other. But afterward, in times when philosophy had already withered, there arose Diagoras of Melos, who said there was no god at all, and for this opinion was named the atheist; and likewise Theodorus of Cyrene — and both of these, because they could find nothing new after everything had already been said and discovered, chose instead to deny, against the truth, the very point on which all their predecessors, without exception, had agreed. These are the men who, after so many ages and so many minds had asserted and defended providence, slandered it. What then? Shall we refute these petty and idle philosophers by reason, or rather by the authority of eminent men, or indeed by both? But we must press on, lest our discussion wander too far from its subject.
There are those who deny that divine providence made the world; they claim instead that it was either compacted when first-elements happened to collide at random, or that it arose all at once out of nature — nature which, according to Strato, holds within itself a capacity to generate and to diminish, though it possesses no sensation and no form, so that, on this view, everything sprang into being spontaneously, without any maker or author standing behind it. Neither claim holds up; both are empty and impossible. Yet this is exactly what happens to those ignorant of the truth: they will dream up any notion whatever sooner than admit what reason itself demands. First of all, I want to know where those minute seeds came from, and from what source — the seeds whose random clustering, they claim, made the world cohere. Has anyone ever laid eyes on them? Has anyone sensed them, or heard of them at all? Or was Leucippus the only man ever given eyes — the only one given a mind? Surely he, of all men, was uniquely blind and senseless, uttering things that no man in fever could rave and no man asleep could dream. The philosophers of old had always taught that four elements compose everything. Not wanting to appear as though he were merely walking in someone else's footprints, Leucippus proposed instead that the elements themselves are built from still more basic beginnings — things incapable of being seen, of being touched, or of being felt by any bodily sense at all. "They are so tiny," he claims, "that no edge of iron is fine enough to cut or split them apart." From this he coined for them the name "atoms." Yet a problem occurred to him: if these all shared one identical nature, they could hardly produce the vast range of different outcomes we actually observe filling the world. So he declared that some are smooth, others rough, some round, some cornered, and some barbed. How much wiser silence would have been than putting a tongue to such wretched, empty purposes! Truly, I worry that anyone who thinks such claims deserve rebuttal might look just as unhinged as their author — still, let us reply to him as though he had actually said something worth answering. Supposing they are smooth and round: then plainly they cannot grip one another to build up any body, in the same way that a man trying to compress grains of millet into one solid clump would find the very slickness of the grains keeps them from fusing into a mass. But suppose instead they are rough, cornered, and barbed, allowing them to stick together — then they must be splittable and cuttable, since hooks and corners necessarily stick out in order to be capable of being sliced away. And whatever can be sliced away and torn off can equally be seen and touched. "These particles," he says, "flit restlessly through the void and are swept this way and that, the way we notice specks of dust hanging in a beam of sunlight when it pours its rays and glow through a window. Trees, plants, and every crop arise out of them; animals, water, fire, and everything else are likewise generated from them, and all things dissolve back again into these same particles." This much can be endured, so long as the subject is small things. "The world itself, too, was compacted out of these." At this point he had already reached the outer limit of sheer madness — one would think nothing further could be piled on — and yet he managed to find something to add. "Since the All is infinite," he says, "and nothing can stand empty, countless worlds must therefore exist." What conceivable power could atoms have had, that masses of such unimaginable scale could be gathered together out of things so tiny? And first I want to ask what the origin or the logic behind these seeds of his even is. If everything comes from them, then where, in turn, shall we say that they themselves came from? What nature could have supplied a stockpile vast enough to build even countless worlds? But let's excuse him, without penalty, for raving about other worlds, and turn instead to this world — the one we inhabit, the one before our eyes. He claims that everything arises out of indivisible little bodies. Were that so, nothing would ever require a seed proper to its own species: birds would hatch with no eggs at all, or eggs would appear with no bird ever laying them; every other living thing likewise would come to be without any mating, and trees and whatever springs up from the soil would carry no seeds of their own — yet these are exactly the seeds we handle and plant day after day. Why does a grain of wheat sprout into a stalk, and a stalk in turn yield grain again? Furthermore, if the clumping and gathering of atoms produced everything, then everything would coalesce right there in the air, since it is through the void that atoms are said to flit about. Why, then, can no blade of grass, no tree, no crop ever spring up or grow apart from earth, apart from roots, apart from moisture, apart from seed? This makes plain that nothing comes to be out of atoms, since every single thing possesses a nature proper and fixed to itself, a seed of its own, a law assigned to it from its very beginning. Indeed Lucretius, seemingly forgetting the very atoms he was defending, in his attempt to refute those who claim everything springs from nothing, used arguments that in fact undercut his own position. Here is what he wrote: if things arose out of nothing, every sort of thing could be born from anything whatsoever, and nothing would require a seed; and later he adds: nothing, then, must be thought capable of coming from nothing, since things need a seed from which each, once brought into being, may be carried forth into the gentle breezes of open air. Who could believe this man had any sense at all, saying such things without noticing he was contradicting himself? For this shows plainly that nothing arises through atoms, since the seed proper to each and every thing is fixed and definite — unless, that is, we are meant to believe that fire's own nature and water's own nature spring from atoms. And what of this: when substances of the hardest, most unyielding matter strike one another with enough force, fire is struck out? Surely atoms are not hiding concealed within iron or flint? Who locked them in there? Why don't they simply leap out on their own? Or how could seeds of fire possibly have kept surviving inside matter so intensely cold? I'll set aside flint and iron. Hold a glass globe filled with water up to the sun, and from the glare that bounces off the water, a flame is struck even in the bitterest cold. Are we meant to believe, then, that fire lurks inside water too? And yet without such a globe no fire can be kindled from the sun, even at the height of summer. Breathe upon wax, or let some faint vapor brush against a crust of marble or a sheet of metal, and little by little, through the tiniest droplets, water gathers and takes shape. In the same way mist rises from the breath of earth or sea: scattered, it dampens whatever it covers; or, gathered up and swept by wind toward the high mountains, it is packed together aloft into cloud and unleashes the heaviest downpours. So where, then, shall we locate the atoms of liquid — in the vapor, in the breath, in the wind? Yet nothing can exist within what can neither be touched nor seen. What, then, am I to say about living creatures, in whose bodies we see nothing shaped without reason, without arrangement, without purpose, without form — so much so that the exceedingly skillful and meticulous layout of every part and limb rules out mere chance and luck? But suppose we grant that limbs, bones, sinews, and blood really could be formed by atoms clumping together: what about sensation, thought, mind, memory, intellect — out of which seeds can those be assembled? "Out of the very smallest," he says. Then some must be larger than others — so how, in that case, can they be uncuttable? Moreover, if invisible things are what make up what cannot be seen, it follows that visible things must be what make up what can be seen. Why, then, does nobody see them? But whether you examine the invisible things inside a human being, or the tangible things that come before our eyes, who fails to see that both cases are built up according to a rational order? How, then, can things colliding without any reason at all produce something rational? For we observe that nothing in the entire universe lacks a supremely great and wondrous rational order within it — and since that order lies beyond human perception and intellect, to whom could it more rightly be assigned than to divine providence? Or do we imagine that while reason and craft shape a human likeness or statue, the man himself came about from fragments randomly crashing together? And what likeness to truth can any crafted object claim, when even the finest and most accomplished workmanship can copy nothing but a shadow, the mere outer contours of a body? Could human skill ever grant its own handiwork motion, or feeling? I will not even mention the faculty of sight, hearing, smell, and the astonishing functions of the other organs, both the visible and the hidden ones — what craftsman could ever construct a human heart, a voice, or wisdom itself? Is there, then, any sane person who imagines that what a human being cannot achieve through reason and deliberate planning could nonetheless be accomplished by atoms colliding and clumping haphazardly? See what absurdities they have tumbled into, all because they refuse to credit God with making and governing things. But let us grant them even this much — that earthly things arise from atoms: do heavenly things arise from them as well? They claim the gods are incorruptible, everlasting, and blessed, and reserve this exemption for the gods alone, so that the gods will not appear to have been compacted from a coming-together of atoms. For if the gods too had been formed out of atoms, they would be subject to dissolution, their component seeds someday breaking loose and reverting to their own nature. So then, if there is even one thing atoms did not produce, why not understand everything else the same way? But I ask: before these first-beginnings had ever generated the world, why didn't the gods build themselves someplace to live? It would seem that unless atoms had gathered and constructed the heavens, the gods would even now be dangling in the middle of empty space! By what plan, then, by what arrangement, did the atoms assemble themselves out of a chaotic heap, so that earth was gathered down below from some of them while the heavens were stretched out above, adorned with such variety of stars that nothing more magnificent could ever be dreamed up? Can anyone who beholds sights this vast, wonders like these, truly imagine that no plan, no providence, no divine reasoning produced them, but that such marvels were compacted out of fine, tiny crumbs? Isn't it practically a prodigy that a man was ever even born to say such things, or that anyone existed willing to believe him — men such as Democritus, his own student, or Epicurus, into whom this entire torrent of nonsense poured down from Leucippus's spring? But, as others claim, the world was made by nature — a nature devoid of both sensation and shape. This notion is far more absurd still. If nature made the world, it must necessarily have made it through design and reasoning, since whoever makes anything must have either the will to make it or the knowledge required to make it. If nature has no sensation and no shape, how could something possessing both sensation and shape ever arise from it? Unless, perhaps, one imagines that the exquisitely intricate, marvelous structure of living creatures could have been shaped and brought to life by something devoid of sensation — or that this entire arrangement of the sky, so providently calibrated to benefit living beings, simply sprang up all at once by some unknown accident, with no founder, no craftsman whatsoever behind it. If there exists anything, says Chrysippus, capable of producing what a human being — even one endowed with reason — cannot produce, that thing is certainly greater, stronger, and wiser than any human being. But a human being cannot fashion the heavens; therefore whatever produces, or has produced, such things exceeds humanity in skill, in design, in wisdom, and in power. Who, then, could this possibly be but God? As for nature itself, which some suppose to be, in effect, the parent of all things: if it has no mind, it will never achieve anything, never construct anything at all. For wherever there is no thought, there can be neither motion nor effective power. But if it relies on design to launch something, on reason to organize it, on skill to carry it out, on virtue to bring it to completion, and on power to rule and sustain it — why call it nature at all rather than God? Or if a coming-together of atoms, or a mindless nature, produced everything we see, then I want to know why it could construct the heavens yet could not build a city or a house, why it raised mountains out of marble yet failed to raise columns and statues. And surely the atoms ought to have assembled to produce these things too, given that they leave no possible arrangement untested! For it's no surprise that nature, lacking any mind, should have neglected to make such things. So what, then, is the truth? Surely it is this: when God set this work of the world in motion — a work than which nothing could be more orderly in arrangement, more fitting in usefulness, more magnificent in beauty, or greater in scale — he himself made whatever a human being could not have made, the human being himself included among them. Man, among them, received from him a fragment of his own wisdom, along with just enough reasoning power for earthly frailty to hold, so that he might see to his own needs by his own devices. But suppose that, within this commonwealth of the world, so to speak, no providence governs it, no god administers it, and no sense at all operates anywhere in this nature of things — then where, exactly, are we to imagine so skillful, so intelligent a thing as the human mind came from? For if the human body was molded out of clay — from which humus mankind took its very name — then the soul, which possesses wisdom, which commands the body, whose limbs obey it the way subjects obey a king and commander, and which can neither be seen nor grasped, could only have reached a human being by way of some wise nature. And just as mind and soul steer the entire body, so too does God steer the world. It hardly seems plausible that lesser, humbler things should have their own governance while the greater, highest things go ungoverned. Indeed Marcus Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations and in his Consolation, states that no earthly origin can be found for the soul: for there is nothing in souls that is composite or compacted, nothing that appears to have been born and shaped out of earth, nothing moist, nothing airy, nothing fiery about it at all. In these earthly natures there is nothing possessing the power of memory, of mind, of thought — capable of retaining the past, foreseeing the future, and grasping what is present — for such powers belong to divinity alone; nor indeed will it ever be discovered how they could have reached a human being except from God. Setting aside, then, two or three vain slanderers, since it stands established that divine providence governs the world just as it made the world, and since nobody would dare rank the view of Diagoras and Theodorus, or Leucippus's hollow invention, or the frivolity of Democritus and Epicurus, above the authority of those seven men of old called the wise, or of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the greatest philosophers, all of whom judged that providence exists — that other view, too, must be false: the one holding that the wise instituted religion out of fear and dread, so that uneducated men might be kept from wrongdoing by it. Were that true, then we have been made fools of by the ancient wise men. But if they invented religion to deceive us — indeed the whole human race — then they were not wise men at all, since falsehood never falls to a wise man. Yet suppose they really were wise: what extraordinary skill at deception would it take not merely to fool the unlearned, but to deceive Plato and Socrates too, along with Pythagoras, Zeno, and Aristotle — founders of the greatest philosophical schools — and dupe them all so effortlessly? Divine providence, then, does exist, exactly as all these men I have named perceived; by its power and might, everything we see has both been made and continues to be governed. For neither could such vastness of things, such arrangement, such consistency in preserving order and the seasons across so many ages, have ever arisen at all without a provident maker, nor could it have endured for so many ages without a powerful indwelling presence, nor be steered forever without a skilled, sentient ruler — as reason itself makes clear. Whatever possesses reason, after all, must necessarily have originated from reason. But reason belongs to a sentient, wise nature; and a wise, sentient nature can be nothing else but God. Since the world, then, possesses the reason by which it is both steered and held together, it must therefore have been made by God. And if God is the founder and ruler of the world, then religion has rightly and truly been established: for honor and reverence are owed to the author and shared parent of all things.
Now that the question of providence has been settled, our next task is to show whether we ought to believe in many gods or rather in one. I believe our Institutes already demonstrated this point well enough: many gods cannot exist, since splitting divine power and might among several would necessarily diminish it; and whatever is diminished is certainly mortal, whereas what is not mortal cannot be diminished or divided. In God alone, then, power and might reach their fullness, incapable of shrinking or growing further. Were there many gods, though, each holding some portion of power and divinity, the sum total would shrink, and none among the many could possess the whole that is divided between them: each would go without exactly what the rest held. There cannot, then, be many rulers of this world, any more than many masters in one household, many pilots on one ship, many leaders of one herd or flock, or many kings in one hive; nor, for that matter, could many suns occupy the sky, any more than one body could house several souls at once: nature as a whole is unified precisely to this degree. And if it is a spirit that nourishes the world from within, and a mind, poured through its limbs, that stirs the whole mass and mingles itself with the great body, then it is clear, on the poet's own testimony, that the sole inhabitant of the world is one god, since no body can be inhabited and governed except by a single mind. All divine power, then, must rest in a single being, one whose will and command govern everything, and his greatness is such that no human being can put him into words or take him in through the senses. Where, then, did the belief in many gods arise among men, coming to be so persuasive? Surely every being worshipped as a god was, without exception, once a man — indeed among the first and greatest of kings; and who does not know that, after their death, they were granted divine honors either for the excellence by which they had benefited the human race, or won undying remembrance thanks to the discoveries and gifts with which they had enriched human life? And not only males but females as well. This is taught by the oldest writers of Greece, whom the Greeks call theologians, and likewise by the Romans who followed and imitated the Greeks — chief among them Euhemerus, and our own Ennius, who set forth the births, marriages, offspring, reigns, deeds, and deaths and tombs of all of them. Following them, Cicero, in the third book of On the Nature of the Gods, demolished the public religions, yet he himself, no more than anyone else, could bring forward the truth he did not know. Indeed he himself testified that falsehood is easy to expose, but truth lies hidden. 'Would that I could find the true as easily as I can refute the false!' he said — and he proclaimed this not merely as an evasive Academic, but truly and from the heart, because truth can never be drawn out by human senses; what human foresight was capable of achieving, it achieved — the exposing of falsehoods. For whatever is invented and made up, being propped on no real foundation, is easily taken apart. There is, then, one first principle and origin of all things, God, as Plato both understood and taught in the Timaeus; he declares his majesty so immense that no mind can grasp it nor any tongue put it into words. This same testimony is given by Hermes — the one whom Cicero says was counted among the gods by the Egyptians, the one named Trismegistus on account of his outstanding skill and mastery of many arts, predating, by a long stretch of time, not just Plato but Pythagoras and the Seven Sages as well. In Xenophon, Socrates argues that one ought not to seek out the form of god, and Plato, in his books on the Laws, says that what god actually is should not be inquired into, since it can be neither found nor described. Pythagoras too acknowledges one god, saying that he is an incorporeal mind, spread through and intent upon the whole of nature, granting to all living things the sense of life. Antisthenes, in his Physics, said that there is one natural god, even though nations and cities have their own local gods. Aristotle and his Peripatetics, and Zeno with his Stoics, held much the same view. It would take too long to go through each one's opinion individually; though they made use of different names, they all converged on one single power that governs the world. Yet although the philosophers, the poets, and even the very worshippers of the gods often admit a supreme god, no one has ever inquired into his worship and honor, no one has discussed it — precisely because of the conviction that, being always beneficent and incorruptible, he is never angry with anyone and needs no worship at all. So true it is: where fear is absent, religion cannot exist at all.
Now that we have answered the impious and detestable cleverness — or rather madness — of certain people, let us return to our subject. We said that, with religion removed, neither wisdom nor justice can be maintained: wisdom, since only in man, and in no beast, does the grasp of divinity that sets him apart from animals appear; justice, since without God, who is impossible to deceive, holding our appetites in check, our lives would turn wicked and impious. That our actions are watched by God matters not only for the good of common life but also for the truth of the matter, because once religion and justice are stripped away, we are dragged down either into the mindlessness of cattle, our reason lost, or into the savagery of beasts — indeed worse than beasts, for even beasts spare creatures of their own species. What could be fiercer or crueler than man, if, once the higher fear is removed, he could either evade or despise the force of the laws? Fear of God alone is what keeps human society intact — the very thing by which our life is upheld, guarded, and steered. But that fear is taken away if men become persuaded that God is incapable of anger — whereas both common utility and reason and truth itself persuade us that he is moved and indignant when injustice is done. We must return once more to what came before: since we have shown that the world was made by God, let us now show why it was made.
If anyone considers the whole administration of the world, he will surely recognize how correct the Stoics are in holding that the world came into being for our benefit. For everything of which the world consists, and everything it generates from itself, has been fitted to man's benefit. Man uses fire for warmth, for light, for softening food, and for working iron; he uses springs for drink and for washing, rivers for irrigating fields and for marking out territories; he uses the earth to obtain a variety of produce — the plains yielding grain, the hills suited to vine-planting, and the mountains supplying timber and wood; he uses the sea not only for trade and for bringing supplies from distant regions, but also for the abundance of every kind of fish. And if he makes use of these elements nearest to him, there can be no doubt that he makes use of the heavens as well, since even the operations of the heavens are tuned toward making fertile the ground that we depend on for life. The sun, in its restless courses and unequal spans, completes its yearly circuits, and either rises to bring forth day for labor, or sets to draw on night for rest; and by receding further toward the south or drawing nearer toward the north, it produces the alternations of winter and summer, so that the earth grows rich with the winter's moisture and frost, and in summer's heat the leafy crops are hardened to ripeness, or those that grow in moist ground are cooked through and softened. The moon too, ruler of the nighttime hours, governs monthly spans by the alternation of light lost and light regained, and lights up the blind, bristling darkness of night with the glow of her brightness, so that summer journeys, expeditions, and labors may be carried out without hardship or trouble, since it is by night that light stubble and dry meadows are best cut. The other stars too, by their rising or their setting, mark fixed points that supply the opportune moments of the seasons. They also give guidance to ships, so that they need not wander an errant course over the vast sea, since a helmsman who observes them correctly by their rule is carried to the harbor of his intended shore. The breath of the winds draws up the clouds, so that crops are watered by rain, so that vines overflow with grapes and orchards with fruit. And these things are supplied in turn throughout the world, so that there may never be lacking what sustains human life. But, one might object, that same earth also feeds the other living creatures, and even dumb animals are nourished by its produce. Did God, then, labor for the sake of dumb animals too? By no means, since they are devoid of reason. But we understand that these too were fashioned by God, in the same way, for man's use — some for food, some for clothing, some to assist his labor — so that it is clear that divine providence wished, through the abundance of things and supplies, to furnish and adorn human life; and for that reason he filled the air with birds, the sea with fish, and the earth with four-footed creatures. The Academics, however, push back against the Stoics by asking why, granted that God made everything for man's sake, so many things hostile, harmful, and destructive to us are found, both in the sea and on land. The Stoics, failing to see the truth, gave a most inept reply to this. According to them, plants and creatures alike include many whose usefulness remains concealed for now, but which will be discovered in the course of time, just as much that was unknown to earlier ages has since been discovered by necessity and use. But what usefulness, pray, can be found in mice, in cockroaches, in serpents, which are troublesome and harmful to man? Does some medicine lie hidden in them? If it does, let it someday be found — though indeed, if they complain that this is what counts as evil, it is against evils that it would be used, which is a plain evil in itself! They say that a viper, burned and reduced to ashes, cures the bite of that same creature. How much better it would have been for it not to exist at all, than for a remedy against it to have to be sought from the very creature itself! A shorter and truer answer could have been given in this way: when God formed man as, so to speak, his own image — the supreme work of divine craftsmanship — he breathed into him alone wisdom, so that he might bring all things under his rule and dominion and make use of all the world's advantages. Yet he placed before him a choice between good and evil, because he had given him wisdom, and the whole function of wisdom lies in distinguishing good from evil. No one, after all, is able to pick out what is better and recognize the good without also knowing how to shun and refuse the bad. The two are bound to each other, so that if either is removed, both must necessarily be removed. Only once good and evil have been set before it does wisdom carry out its task, seeking the good for advantage and rejecting the evil for safety. So then, just as countless good things were given for man to enjoy, so too were evils given for him to guard against. For if there were no evil, no danger, nothing at all that could harm man, the whole material of wisdom would be removed, and it would no longer be necessary to him. If only good things were placed before his eyes, what need would there be of thought, understanding, knowledge, reason, since whatever direction he reached his hand, it would be suited and fitting to his nature? It is as if someone wished to set out an elaborate feast before infants who as yet have no judgment: each would go for whatever impulse, hunger, or even chance drew him to, and whatever they took would be wholesome and beneficial to them. What harm, then, would there be in their remaining just as they are, forever infants and ignorant of things? But if you were to mix in bitter, useless, or even poisonous things, they would surely be misled by their own ignorance of good and evil, were wisdom not added, by which they might reject the bad and choose the good. You see, then, that it is because of evils, above all, that we need wisdom: had they not been set before us, we would not be rational beings. And if this reasoning is true — which the Stoics were never able to see — then that argument of Epicurus is also dissolved. He says: 'Either God wants to remove evils and cannot, or he can and does not want to, or he neither wants to nor can, or he both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak, which does not befit God; if he can and does not want to, he is envious, which is equally foreign to God; if he neither wants to nor can, he is both envious and weak, and therefore not God at all; if he both wants to and can — which alone befits God — then where does evil come from, and why has it not been done away with?' I am aware that this line of reasoning regularly unsettles many philosophers who defend providence, and are all but forced, against their own inclination, to concede that God takes no thought for anything — which is exactly what Epicurus is aiming at. Yet a closer look at the reasoning dissolves without difficulty what looks at first like a daunting objection. Nothing that he wills lies beyond his power, since neither incapacity nor spite touches him at all; evils, then, could be taken away, but he chooses not to — and even so, that choice implies no malice on his part. He does not remove them because, as I have explained, he grants wisdom at the same time, and there is more good and delight in wisdom than there is trouble in evils. For wisdom enables us even to know God, and through that knowledge to attain immortality, which is the highest good. And so, unless we first recognize evil, we cannot recognize good either. But this Epicurus failed to see, nor did anyone else, that if evils were removed, wisdom would likewise be removed, and no trace of virtue would remain in man — since virtue's whole function lies precisely in withstanding and conquering evil's harshness. Thus, for the trifling gain of having evils removed, we would be deprived of the greatest, truest, and most properly our own good. It is settled, then, that all things — evils as well as goods — were set in place for the sake of man.
It remains for me to show why God made man himself. Just as he fashioned the world for man's sake, so he fashioned man for his own sake, to be, as it were, the priest of his divine temple, the beholder of his works and of the things of heaven. Man alone, endowed with sense and capable of reason, can understand God, admire his works, and perceive his power and might; for this reason he was equipped with counsel, mind, and prudence; for this reason alone, among all living creatures, was he formed upright in body and stance, so that he might seem roused to the contemplation of his maker; for this reason alone he received speech and a tongue, the interpreter of thought, enabling him to proclaim his Lord's majesty aloud; and finally, for this reason all things were made subject to him, so that he himself might be subject to the God who fashioned and made him. If, then, God wished man to be his worshipper, and for that reason granted him such honor that he should have dominion over all things, it is surely most just that God, who has bestowed so much, should love, and that man, who is joined to us in a fellowship of divine law, should be loved as well. It is wrong, after all, for one who worships God to inflict harm on a fellow worshipper of God. From this we understand that man was fashioned for the sake of religion and justice. Marcus Tullius bears witness to this in his books On the Laws, saying: 'But of all the things discussed among learned men, nothing is surely more important than to understand clearly that we are born for justice.' If this is entirely true, then God wills that all men be just — that is, that they hold both God and man dear, revering God the way one reveres a father, and cherishing one's fellow man the way one cherishes a brother — on just these two points justice in its entirety rests. Whoever, then, either fails to acknowledge God or does harm to another human being, lives unjustly and against his own nature, and in this way breaks the institution and law of God.
Here perhaps someone will ask where sins came from to reach man, or what depravity twisted the rule of the divine institution toward worse things, so that although man was begotten for righteousness, he nevertheless produces unjust works. I have already explained above that God set forth good and evil together, and that he loves the good, while he hates the evil that fights against the good, but that he permitted evil for a reason: so the good might shine out more brightly, given that, as my earlier teaching has shown, neither one holds together apart from the other. Indeed, the world itself is compounded of two conflicting elements bound together, the fiery and the moist, and light could not have come to be unless darkness had also existed, since there can be no above without a below, no rising without a setting, no hot without cold, no soft without hard. So too we ourselves are put together out of two equally opposed things, soul and body, of which the one is assigned to heaven, because it is subtle and untouchable, and the other to earth, because it can be grasped; the one is solid and everlasting, the other fragile and mortal. To the one, then, clings the good — light, life, righteousness; to the other cling darkness, death, and injustice. From this arose in men the corruption of their own nature, so that it became necessary to establish a law by which vices could be forbidden and the duties of virtue commanded. Since, then, there are good and bad things among human affairs, whose explanation I have set out, it is necessary that God be moved in both directions — toward favor, when he sees just things done, and toward anger, when he perceives unjust ones. But Epicurus meets us here with this objection: 'Granted that God feels joy that produces favor and hatred that produces anger, he must equally possess fear, desire, and craving, along with the remaining affections proper to human frailty.' It is not necessary that whoever grows angry must also fear, or that whoever rejoices must grieve; indeed the wrathful are generally less fearful, and those cheerful by nature grieve less. But why speak of the human affections, to which our frailty gives way? Let us consider the divine necessity — I do not wish to say 'nature,' since God is never believed to have been born. The affection of fear has its material basis in man, but not in God. Man fears because he is subject to many mischances and dangers, lest some greater force arise that might beat, plunder, tear, afflict, or destroy him; God, by contrast, is someone that poverty, harm, suffering, and death never touch, so fear is simply impossible for him, since nothing exists capable of doing him violence. Likewise the reason and cause of desire is plain in man: because he was made fragile and mortal, it was necessary to establish a second, distinct sex, through whose mingling children could come into being, keeping the race going on without end. God, however, has no room for this kind of craving, since weakness and death are both alien to his nature; he has no female counterpart whose embrace could bring him delight, nor does one destined to exist forever have any need of an heir. The same may be said of envy and greed, which fall upon man for definite and evident reasons, but upon God in no way at all. But favor and anger and pity do have a basis in God, and that supreme and singular power rightly employs them for the preservation of things.
Someone will ask what this basis is. First, men afflicted by misfortunes commonly take refuge in God, seeking to appease him and beseeching him, believing that he can drive off wrongs from them. God, then, has cause for pity — he is not so harsh and contemptuous of men as to deny help to those who struggle. Likewise, very many are persuaded that righteousness pleases God, and, because he is lord and father of all, they revere him; with constant prayers and frequent vows they offer him gifts and sacrifices, extol his name with praises, and strive to win his favor by just and good deeds. There is, then, reason why God both can and ought to show favor. For if nothing is so fitting to God as beneficence, and nothing so foreign to him as ingratitude, it is necessary that he grant something in return for the services of the best and most holy livers, lest he incur the fault of ingratitude, which is blameworthy even in a man. On the other hand, there are others, criminal and wicked, who defile everything with their lusts, harass with murders, defraud, plunder, perjure themselves, spare neither kin nor parents, and disregard the laws and even God himself. God, then, has in these a basis for anger. For it is not right that, seeing such things done, he should remain unmoved and fail to rise up in vengeance against the wicked and to destroy the pestilent and harmful, so as to provide for all the good — so much so that even in anger itself there is a kind of favor at work. Empty, then, are found the arguments both of those who, unwilling that God be angry, yet wish him to show favor — since not even this can happen without anger — and of those who think there is no movement of mind in God at all. And because certain affections never touch God at all — things like craving, fright, greed, sorrow, and envy — some have claimed that he is entirely devoid of feeling. He is indeed free of these, because they are affections of vice; but those that belong to virtue — namely, anger against the wicked, love for the good, pity for the afflicted — since they are worthy of divine power, he possesses in their own proper, just, and true form. Unless he truly had these, human life would be thrown into confusion, and the state of things would come to such disorder that, with laws despised and overcome, sheer boldness alone would reign, so that in the end no one could be safe except one who prevailed by force — thus the whole earth would be laid waste as by a common brigandage. As it is, however, since the wicked hope for punishment and the good for favor and the afflicted for help, virtues have their place and crimes are rarer. Yet it is often the case that criminals fare better while good people suffer more, with the unjust tormenting the righteous and paying no penalty for it. We shall consider afterward why these things happen; for now let us explain the matter of anger — whether there is any in God, or whether he cares for nothing at all and is not moved by the impious things that are done.
'God,' says Epicurus, 'cares for nothing.' He has, then, no power — for whoever has power must necessarily exercise care; or if he has it and does not use it, what cause of neglect could be so great that not only our race, but the world itself, should be worthless to him? 'For that reason,' he says, 'he is incorruptible and blessed, because he is always at rest.' To whom, then, has the administration of such great affairs fallen, if these things we see governed by supreme reason are neglected by God? Besides, how could something living and sentient possibly stay at rest? Rest, after all, belongs to nothing but sleep or death. Yet sleep itself brings no genuine stillness, for while our bodies lie quiet in slumber, our minds keep churning without pause; it fashions for itself images to behold, so as to exercise its own natural motion through the variety of visions, and distracts itself with falsehoods while the limbs are refreshed and gain vigor from the rest. Everlasting rest, then, belongs to death alone. But if death does not touch God, then God is never at rest. And what can God's action be but the administration of the world? But if he takes care of the world, then God takes care of the life of men, and observes the acts of each, and desires them to be wise and good. Here, then, are God's will and his divine law together; anyone who observes and follows them wins God's affection. It is necessary, then, that God be moved to anger against whoever has either violated or scorned this eternal and divine law. 'If God harms anyone,' he says, 'then he is no longer good.' It is quite a serious mistake to brand judgment — human or divine alike — with labels of cruelty and spite, as though anyone who punishes wrongdoers deserves to be called harmful himself. If that were true, our laws would be harmful too, since they impose penalties on offenders, and our judges harmful as well, for sentencing convicted criminals to death. But since a law counts as just when it gives the guilty their due, and a judge earns the name honest and good by punishing wrongdoing — because punishing the wicked protects the safety of the good — God likewise does the good no harm when he stands against the wicked. Rather, he is harmful who either harms the innocent or spares the guilty so as to harm more people. I should like to ask those who make God immovable: if someone had property, a household, a family, and his slaves, scorning the master's patience, seized all his goods, themselves enjoyed his possessions, and were honored by his household, while the master himself was despised by all, mocked, and abandoned — could such a man be called wise, who does not avenge the insults and allows those over whom he has power to enjoy his own goods? What patience could be found so great in anyone — if indeed it should be called patience and not a kind of senseless stupor? But it is easy to bear mere contempt. What if the things Cicero speaks of should happen? For I ask: if some head of a household, with his children killed by a slave, his wife murdered, his house burned, did not exact the harshest punishment on the slave, would he seem clement and merciful, or inhuman and utterly cruel? But if to forgive crimes of this sort is a mark of cruelty rather than mercy, then it is not a virtue in God to remain unmoved at things done unjustly. For the world functions like God's household, and human beings like the servants within it; if his name is held in mockery by them, what patience is it, and how great, that he yields his own honors, sees wrong and unjust things done, and is not indignant? This is proper and natural to one to whom sins are displeasing. To be angry, then, is a matter of reason: for by it offenses are removed and license is restrained, which is certainly done justly and wisely. The Stoics, however, failed to grasp that anger comes in two kinds, a right one and a wrong one, some of it just and some unjust; unable to find a cure for the problem, they chose instead to tear the whole thing out by the roots. The Peripatetics, however, said it should not be uprooted but tempered — to whom I have answered sufficiently in the sixth book of the Institutes. That the philosophers did not know what the true nature of anger was is clear from their definitions, which Seneca has listed in the books he composed On Anger. Anger, he says, is a craving to avenge an injury, or, as Posidonius puts it, a craving to punish one by whom you believe yourself unjustly harmed. Others defined it thus: anger is a stirring of the mind to harm one who has harmed or wished to harm. Aristotle's definition is not far from ours: he says anger is a craving to repay pain. This is the unjust anger of which I spoke above, which exists even in dumb animals; in man it must be restrained, lest through frenzy it rush headlong into some very great evil. Such anger has no place in God, since nothing can injure him, whereas it does occur in man, precisely because man is vulnerable: for injury brands him with pain, and pain produces the craving for revenge. Where, then, is that just anger by which men are moved against wrongdoers? It is certainly not a craving for revenge, since no injury precedes it. I do not speak here of those who offend against the laws — against whom a judge, even without fault, might be angry, yet let us grant that he ought to be of calm mind when he subjects the guilty to punishment, since he is the servant of the laws, not of his own feeling or power (for this is what those who try to root out anger would wish). But I speak chiefly of those who are under our own power — slaves, children, wives, pupils — whom, when we see them go wrong, we are stirred to correct. It is necessary that wrong things displease the good and just man, and whoever is displeased by evil is moved when he sees it done. We rise, then, to punishment not because we have been injured, but so that discipline may be preserved, character corrected, license restrained. This is just anger — and just as correcting depravity in man requires this feeling, so God requires it equally, being the source from which humanity's pattern originally came. For just as we must restrain those subject to our power, so too God must restrain the sins of all. And in order to do this, he must of necessity be angry, since it is natural for the good to be moved and stirred at another's wrongdoing. They ought, then, to have defined it thus: anger is a movement of the mind rising up to restrain sins. For Cicero's definition, that anger is a desire for revenge, does not differ much from the earlier ones. But the anger that we might call frenzy or wrathfulness should not exist even in man, because it is wholly vicious; whereas the anger directed at correcting vice should not be stripped from man, and cannot be stripped from God either, since human affairs require it and benefit from it.
'What need is there,' they say, 'for anger, since sins could be corrected without this feeling?' And yet there is no one who can look calmly upon a wrongdoer. Perhaps one who presides over the laws can, since the crime is not committed before his own eyes but is reported to him from elsewhere as something still uncertain; and a crime can never be so plain that there is no room for a defense, and so a judge may remain unmoved against one who might yet be found innocent — and when the crime, once uncovered, comes into the light, he follows the laws' verdict rather than his own. Granting this, we can say his actions proceed without anger, since he has an external standard to obey: But surely, when wrong is done at home by our own people, whether we see it or perceive it, we cannot help but feel indignation; for the very sight of wrongdoing is unworthy. Whoever is not moved at all either approves the offense — which is more shameful and more unjust — or shuns the trouble of correcting it, which a calm and quiet mind rejects and refuses unless anger goads and rouses it. But whoever, though moved, forgives out of ill-timed leniency more often than is necessary, or even always, ruins the lives of those very people whose boldness he nourishes toward greater crimes, and supplies himself with an everlasting source of trouble. The restraint of one's own anger in the face of wrongdoing is, then, itself a vice. Archytas of Tarentum is praised, who, on finding everything on his farm ruined through his overseer's fault, said, 'Wretched man, I would already have killed you with blows, were I not angry.' Men consider this a unique example of self-control, but, led astray by his authority, they do not see how foolish were both his words and his deed. For if, as Plato says, no wise man punishes because a wrong was done, but so that wrong may not be done, then it is clear what a poor example the sage set. For if slaves perceive that their master rages when he is not angry, and spares them when he is angry, they will certainly not sin lightly to avoid a beating, but as gravely as they can, so as to provoke the perverse man's temper and get off unpunished. I, for my part, would praise him if, having become angry, he had given his anger time, so that once the swelling of the mind had subsided over an interval, the punishment might be kept in measure. The penalty, then, should not have been forgiven on account of the greatness of his anger, but deferred, so that he might not brand either an offender with pain greater than was just, or himself, as punisher, with frenzy. But what fairness or wisdom is it that someone be punished for a small offense but not for the greatest? If he had actually grasped the nature of things and their causes, he would never have championed such an ill-fitted restraint, one that leaves a worthless slave glad his master had grown angry with him. For just as God equipped the human body with a range of different senses needed for living, he likewise gave the mind a range of affections that hold the scheme of life together: just as he granted desire so children could be brought into being, he granted anger so wrongdoing could be held in check. But those who do not know the limits of good and evil use desire, as they use it for corruption and pleasure, so too they use the feeling of anger to do harm, growing angry at those they hate. So they grow angry even at those who have done no wrong, even at equals or even superiors. From this, monstrous crimes are rushed into daily; from this, tragedies are often born. Archytas would therefore be praiseworthy if, having become angry at some fellow citizen and equal who had wronged him, he had nonetheless restrained himself and softened the onset of his frenzy through patience. Such self-restraint is praiseworthy, by which some great looming evil is checked; but failing to restrain the wrongdoing of one's slaves or children is itself a wrongdoing, for they will pass on to a greater evil through impunity. Here anger deserves no restraint at all — rather, if it is lying dormant, it ought to be stirred awake. And what we say of man applies equally to God, who made man in his own likeness. I pass over speaking of God's form, since the Stoics deny that God has any shape, and a vast further matter would arise were I to wish to refute them; I speak here only of the mind. If it belongs to God to think, to know, to understand, to foresee, to grant — and of all living creatures man alone possesses these — then he was made in the likeness of God. But he falls into vice for this reason: mixed with earthly frailty, he cannot preserve what he received from God incorrupt and pure, unless he is instructed by that same God in the precepts of righteousness.
But since man, as we have said, is compounded of two things, soul and body, in the one are contained the virtues, in the other the vices, and they war against one another. For the soul's goods — restraint of the appetites — stand against the body, whereas the body's goods, found in pleasures of any and every sort, work against the soul. Yet should the soul's virtue push back against desire and subdue it, that soul becomes truly godlike. From this it is plain that the soul of man, which lays hold of divine virtue, is not mortal. But here is the difference: virtue is bitter, while the enticement of pleasure is sweet, and so the great majority are conquered and dragged off toward what is agreeable. These, because they have given themselves over to the body and to earthly things, are pressed down into the earth and cannot attain the grace of the divine gift, since they have fouled themselves with the filth of their vices. But those who followed God and, in submitting to him, turned away from what the body craves — ranking virtue above pleasure and so safeguarding their innocence and justice — these God acknowledges as bearing his own likeness. Since God established a law of the utmost holiness and desires everyone to be blameless and generous, how could he fail to grow angry on seeing that law despised, virtue cast off, and pleasure pursued instead? Suppose he governs the world, as indeed he must — he surely would not disregard whatever ranks as the greatest thing within that entire world. Suppose he exercises foresight, as befits deity — he surely attends to the human race, that our existence might grow fuller, sounder, and more secure. Suppose, further, he is father and master of everything that exists — he takes delight, then, in human virtue and is roused by human wrongdoing, and from this it follows that the upright win his love while the wicked draw his hatred. 'There is no need of hatred,' someone says, 'for he has once for all determined a reward for the good and a punishment for the evil.' But suppose someone lives justly and blamelessly and yet neither worships nor cares for God at all — like Aristides, or Cimon, or many of the philosophers — will such a man go unpunished, because, while he obeyed God's law, he nonetheless despised God himself? There is, then, something for which God can rightly be angry — namely, at one who rebels against him while trusting in his own uprightness. If pride alone can draw his anger down on this man, how much more will it fall on the wrongdoer who treats both the statute and the one who wrote it with equal scorn? A human judge cannot pardon offenses, because he is bound to serve another's will; but God can, because he himself is the one who examines and judges his own law. When he laid it down, he certainly did not thereby strip himself of all power, but retains the right of forgiving.
If he can forgive, then he can also be angry. 'Why, then,' someone will say, 'are those who sin often happy, and those who live devoutly often wretched?' Because runaways and disowned sons live freely, while those under the discipline of a father or a master live more strictly and frugally. Virtue is proved and made firm through hardships, vice through pleasure. Yet the sinner ought not to hope for permanent impunity, since there is no permanent happiness; rather, as the not unpleasing poet says, a man's last day must always be awaited, and no one should be called happy before his death and his final rites, for it is the outcome that tests happiness, and no one, living or dead, can escape the judgment of God. For it lies within his power to hurl down anyone still living from the summit, just as it lies within his power to torment the dead with punishments unending. 'But surely,' comes the objection, 'were God truly angry, he would have punished on the spot, giving each his exact due.' But had he acted that way, not a single person would be left standing, since no one lives free of sin, and there are many things that incite one to sin — youth, drunkenness, poverty, opportunity, reward. The frailty of the flesh we wear is so subject to sin that, unless God made allowance for this necessity, very few indeed would perhaps be left alive; and this is why his patience is so great, and why he holds his anger in check. For since his virtue is perfect, his patience too must necessarily be perfect, since patience is itself a virtue. How many who were sinners have afterward become just, out of evil men good, out of the shameless self-controlled! How many who in their early years were disgraceful and condemned by everyone's judgment later proved praiseworthy! This certainly would not happen if every sin were followed at once by punishment. Public laws condemn only those offenders who are caught; but very many are there whose sins are hidden, very many who silence their accuser either with entreaties or with bribes, very many who evade judgment through influence or power. But if divine judgment condemned all those who escape human punishment, mankind on earth would be either rare or nonexistent altogether. Indeed, this alone might have been just cause for blotting out the human race: that men, spurning the living God, pay divine honor to fragile earthly images, as though to heavenly beings, worshiping works fashioned by human fingers. And though God the craftsman fashioned them with an upright face and erect posture, made so as to contemplate the sky and come to know God, they chose instead to bend down toward the earth and crawl upon the ground like cattle. For lowly, bent, and stooping is the man who, turned away from the sight of heaven and of God the Father, reveres the earth he ought to be treading underfoot — that is, something shaped and formed out of earth. So then, confronted with wrongdoing and sin on so vast a scale, this is what God's patience achieves: that men correct themselves, condemning the errors of their former life. In the end, there are also many good and just people, who, having cast off earthly cults, acknowledge the majesty of the one God. But although God's patience is very great and most useful, still, no matter how delayed, he brings punishment upon the guilty and refuses to let them proceed any further once he perceives they cannot be reformed.
One question remains, the last of all. For someone might well object that God is anger's very opposite, seeing that his commandments actually prohibit man from being angry at all. I could reply that human anger needed to be reined in, because it is often unjust and its impulse is immediate, being a thing of the moment. And so, in order to prevent the deeds that humble men and middling men and even great kings do under the sway of anger, its fury had to be tempered and restrained, lest, out of control of his own mind, a man commit some unpardonable crime. But God's anger is not of the moment, for he is everlasting and wholly virtuous, and anger touches him only when there is cause for it. Yet the matter is not quite so simple. For if he forbade anger altogether, he would in a sense be finding fault with his own handiwork, since in the beginning he had implanted anger [the liver] in man, seeing that the cause of this emotion is believed to be contained in the humor of the bile. He does not, then, forbid anger absolutely, since that feeling was necessarily given to us, but he forbids remaining in anger. For the anger of mortal men ought to be mortal; if it persists, enmities are confirmed toward everlasting ruin. Again, when he commanded that one might be angry yet not sin, he certainly did not tear out anger by the roots, but tempered it, so that in every act of correction we might keep measure and justice. He, then, who bids us be angry is certainly himself capable of anger, and he who bids us be quickly reconciled is certainly himself capable of being appeased; for what he commands is just and useful to the common good. But since I had said that God's anger is not a thing of the moment as man's is, who blazes up with an immediate impulse and cannot easily govern himself because of his frailty, we ought to understand that, since God is eternal, his anger too remains forever — yet again, since he is endowed with supreme virtue, he has his anger under his own control and is not ruled by it, but himself moderates it as he wills; and this in no way contradicts what was said above. For if his anger were utterly undying, there would be no room for satisfaction or grace after an offense, since he himself commands that men be reconciled before sunset; but the divine anger remains forever against those who sin forever. And so God is appeased not by incense, not by sacrifice, not by costly gifts — all of which are perishable — but by amendment of morals, and whoever ceases to sin makes God's anger mortal. For this reason he does not punish every guilty person at once, so that man may have the opportunity to come to his senses and correct himself.
This is what I had to set down about God's anger, dearest Donatus, so that you would have the means of answering those who claim God cannot be moved. It remains for me, in the manner of Cicero, to make use of an epilogue in bringing this to a close. Just as he, discoursing on death in the Tusculan Disputations, did this, so in this work we ought to bring forward divine testimonies deserving of belief, so as to overturn the conviction of those who suppose God feels no anger and thereby do away with religion altogether — and lacking religion, as our argument has already established, we sink to the level of savage beasts or witless cattle; wisdom exists nowhere but within religion, meaning within acquaintance with the one supreme God. All the prophets, filled with the divine spirit, speak of nothing else than the favor of God toward the just and his anger against the impious. What they testify would be enough on its own for us; yet since it carries no weight with those who flaunt wisdom through their hair and dress, we were obliged to refute these people as well, using reason and argument. For things are handled so preposterously that men grant divine authority to human sayings, when rather human sayings ought to have yielded to the divine. But let us now set this aside, lest we accomplish nothing with such people and the matter drag on without end. Let us seek, then, such testimonies as they can either believe or at least not resist. That there were many Sibyls has been recorded by very many and very great authorities — among the Greeks, Aristonicus and Apollodorus of Erythrae; among our own, Varro and Fenestella. All of these record that the Erythraean was the foremost and most distinguished of them all. Apollodorus takes pride in claiming her as a fellow townswoman of his own city, while Fenestella additionally reports that the senate dispatched envoys to Erythrae so that this Sibyl's verses could be carried to Rome; there the consuls Curio and Octavius saw them set up on the Capitol, a building at that time rebuilt under Quintus Catulus's supervision. In her verses are found lines of this kind concerning the supreme God, the founder of all things: 'incorruptible creator, eternal, dwelling in the sky, granting those who are good a reward far greater still, while for the wicked and unjust he rouses up wrath and fury.' Again, elsewhere, listing the crimes by which God is most provoked, she added this: 'flee lawless worship, serve the living one alone; guard against adultery and against unnatural union with males; nourish your own offspring and do not slay them. For the undying one will be angered against whoever transgresses these things.' She declares, then, that he is indignant against sinners.
But because, as I have shown, more Sibyls than one are recorded by the most learned authorities, the testimony of a single one is not enough to establish the truth as we intend. The Cumaean books, in which the fates of the Romans are written, are kept secret; but the little books of nearly all the others are not forbidden to common use. Among these, one, foretelling to all nations the wrath of God because of the impiety of men, began thus: 'a great wrath is coming upon a disobedient world; to the last age I declare the anger of God, prophesying to all men throughout every city.' Another likewise said that a flood came upon the earlier age through the indignation of God against the unjust, so that the wickedness of mankind might be wiped out: 'from the time when the heavenly God, angered, against their very cities and against all men alike, covered the earth with the sea when the flood burst forth.' In like manner she prophesied that a future conflagration would likewise blot out the impiety of men: 'and then men shall know that God is no longer mild, but heavy with wrath, and destroying the whole race of men together by a great burning.' Hence in Ovid it is said of Jupiter: 'he recalls too that it is fated that a time will come when sea, and earth, and the vaulted palace of heaven shall catch fire, and the elaborate mass of the world shall labor in ruin.' And this must necessarily come about when honor and worship of the supreme God have perished among men. Yet the same Sibyl, testifying that he is appeased by repentance for one's deeds and by amendment of oneself, added this: 'ah, wretched mortals, change your ways, and do not provoke the great God to every kind of wrath.' And again, a little after: 'nor will he destroy, but will again check his wrath, if only you all cultivate honored piety in your hearts.' Then another Sibyl declares that the begetter of things heavenly and earthly ought to be loved, lest his indignation rise up to destroy men: 'lest the undying God, once angered, utterly destroy the whole race of men and the shameless tribe of the living. One must cherish the begetter, God, wise and everlasting.' From these things it appears how empty is the reasoning of the philosophers who think God incapable of anger, and who count among his other praises this, which is most useless of all, thereby taking from him that which is most beneficial to human affairs, and through which his very majesty stands firm. This earthly kingdom and rule, unless fear guards it, is undone. Take away a king's anger — not only will no one obey him, but he will even be cast down from his height. Nay, take this feeling away from any humble man whatever, and who will not despoil him? Who will not mock him? Who will not do him wrong? So he will be able to keep neither clothing, nor home, nor food, since others will snatch away whatever he has — how much less, then, could the majesty governing the heavens possibly remain intact absent anger and fear. Apollo of Miletus, consulted about the religion of the Jews, brought forth this response: 'toward the God who is king, and the begetter before all things, whom earth and heaven and sea tremble at, and the depths of Tartarus, and before whom even the daemons shudder.' If he is as mild as the philosophers wish, how is it that at his nod not only the daemons, ministers of so great a power, but even heaven and earth and the whole of nature tremble? For if no one serves another except under compulsion, then all rule rests on fear, and fear through anger. For if one is not moved against him who refuses to obey, he cannot be compelled to obedience either. Let each person examine his own feelings, and he will understand at once that no one can be brought under rule without anger and chastisement. Where, then, there is no anger, there will be no rule either. But God has rule; therefore he must also have the anger on which rule depends. The undying merits of a father demanded as much; yet it profits us greatly toward obtaining pardon if we hold fast to his worship and knowledge, if, casting aside lowly and earthly things — possessions and goods alike — we meditate upon things heavenly, divine, and everlasting. And to do this...
THE BOOK OF LUCIUS CAECILIUS FIRMIANUS LACTANTIUS ON THE WORKMANSHIP OF GOD.
You may gauge, Demetrianus, how little peace I grant myself even amid the heaviest demands of business, from this modest book I have set down for you, in words scarcely polished, so far as my modest talent allowed, so that you might know of my daily labor and so that I might not fail to be your teacher even now, though now in a more honorable matter and a better branch of learning. If, in studies that shape nothing more than speech, you showed yourself a sufficiently eager pupil, surely you owe far greater readiness to learn where truth and life itself are at stake? Before you I now declare that no pressure of business or of time keeps me from hammering out something by which the philosophers of the school we hold to may become in time better equipped and more learned, even though at present they are poorly spoken of and commonly reproached, because they live otherwise than befits the wise and hide their vices under the cover of the name — vices which they ought either to have healed or else altogether to have fled, so as to present, by a life matching their teaching, the blessed and uncorrupted name of wisdom. Yet I refuse no labor, that I may instruct both myself and others at once. For I cannot forget myself, especially at a time when it is most needful to remember — just as I hope and wish that you too do not forget yourself. For though the demands of public office turn you away from true and just pursuits, still it cannot be that a mind conscious of its own rightness does not from time to time look up toward heaven. And indeed I rejoice that all the things counted as goods flow prosperously for you — but only so, if they change nothing in the state of your mind. For I fear that little by little the habit and pleasure of such things may creep into your soul, as commonly happens, and so I warn you, and warning again and again I will keep warning you, not to believe these amusements of earth to be great or true goods — things which are not only deceptive, because uncertain, but even treacherous, because sweet. For that wrestler and adversary of ours, you know how cunning he is, and often how violent too, as we now see. He holds all these enticing things as snares, and indeed so finely woven that they escape the eyes of the mind, and so cannot be avoided by human foresight. The height of prudence, then, is to advance step by step, since on either side a pitfall lurks and quietly sets stumbling-blocks before the feet. I urge you, therefore, either to despise, if you can, the prosperous things you now enjoy, as befits your character, or at least not to marvel at them overmuch. Remember your true Father, and in what city you were enrolled a citizen, and of what order you were: you surely understand what I mean. Nor do I accuse you of pride — of that there is not even a suspicion in you — but the words I speak concern the mind rather than the flesh, since the whole design of the body exists so that it may obey and be governed by the soul as its master. The body is, so to speak, a clay vessel holding within it the soul — the real human being — and that vessel was shaped not by Prometheus, as the poets tell it, but by that highest founder and craftsman of all things, God, whose divine providence and most perfect power it is impossible either to grasp by sense or to declare in words. Yet I will attempt, since mention has been made of body and soul, to set out an account of each, so far as the smallness of my understanding allows. And I think this task ought all the more to be undertaken because Marcus Tullius, a man of singular genius, when he attempted this in the fourth book of his Republic, bounded a subject of wide scope within narrow limits, lightly skimming only the surface. And lest there be any excuse for saying he did not carry the topic through, he himself testified that neither the will nor the effort had been lacking in him. For in the first book On the Laws, touching on this same matter in summary, he says: this topic, as it seems to me, Scipio has set out well enough in the books you have read. Yet afterward, in the second book On the Nature of the Gods, he tried to pursue this same subject at greater length. But since even there he did not set it out fully enough, I shall take up this task and boldly undertake to explain what that most eloquent man left almost untouched. Perhaps you will object that I am attempting to argue about obscure matters, when you see that men commonly called philosophers have arisen with such rashness as to pry into things that God willed to be utterly hidden and secret, and to search out the nature of things celestial and terrestrial — things far removed from us, which cannot be handled by the eyes, touched by the hand, or grasped by the senses — and yet they argue about the whole account of these things as though they wished what they put forward to be taken as proven and known. What reason, then, could anyone find to begrudge us, if we wish to examine and contemplate the workings of our own body? This is plainly not obscure, since from the very functions and uses of our limbs and the parts of each we may understand with how great a force of providence, and to what end, each was made.
For God, our maker and father, gave to man sense and reason, so that from this it might be clear we are begotten of him, since he himself is understanding, sense, and reason. To the other living creatures, since he did not grant this rational power, he nonetheless took thought beforehand for how their life might still be made secure. All of them he clothes from their own hides, that they may more easily bear the force of frosts and cold. To each kind he assigned its own particular defenses for driving off outside attacks, so that either they might fight back with natural weapons of greater strength, or the weaker among them might withdraw from danger by swiftness in flight, or those lacking both strength and speed might protect themselves by cunning or hedge themselves in with hiding-places. And so some of them are borne aloft on light feathers, some propped on hooves, some furnished with horns; some have weapons in their mouth, teeth, or curved claws on their feet: to none is a means of self-protection lacking. And if some fall as prey to the stronger, still, that their stock might not perish utterly, either they are confined to a region where nothing greater can exist, or they have received an abundant fertility for breeding, so that both the beasts that feed on blood might have sustenance from them, and the loss inflicted might be more than made up by their sheer numbers, preserving the kind. Man, however, having been granted reason and the power of feeling and speaking, he made a stranger to those things given to the other animals, because wisdom could supply what the condition of nature had denied him: he made him naked and unarmed, because he could be armed by intellect and clothed by reason. And it cannot be expressed how wonderfully those very things given to dumb beasts and denied to man serve to make them beautiful. For if God had added to man the teeth or horns or claws or hooves or tail or parti-colored hair of beasts, who would not feel how ugly a creature he would become — just as the dumb animals too, if they were fashioned bare and unarmed? If you strip from them either the natural covering of their body or the weapons with which they arm themselves, they could be neither handsome nor safe — so that, marvelously, considered for usefulness they seem well equipped, and considered for appearance, well adorned: to such a degree does usefulness in a wondrous way agree with beauty. Man, however, since God was fashioning him as an eternal and immortal creature, he armed not on the outside as the others, but within, and placed his defense not in his body but in his soul, since it would have been superfluous, once he had granted him what was greatest, to cover him also with bodily defenses, especially since these would have hindered the beauty of the human body. Hence I am accustomed to marvel at the madness of those philosophers who follow Epicurus, who find fault with the works of nature in order to show that the world is furnished and governed by no providence at all, but assign the origin of things to indivisible and solid bodies, from whose chance collisions the whole universe is born and has been born. I pass over what they find fault with concerning the world itself, in which they rave absurdly: I take up only what pertains to the matter now before us.
They complain that man is born far more feeble and fragile than the other animals are born: for these, as soon as they come forth from the womb, at once rise up on their own feet and are eager to run about, and are immediately fit to endure the open air, because they come into the light already furnished with their natural coverings, whereas man, by contrast, naked and unarmed, is cast out and thrust forth into the miseries of this life as though from a shipwreck — unable even to move himself from the spot where he was set down, unable to seek out the nourishment of milk, unable to bear the harshness of the weather. Thus, as they claim, nature plays not a mother's part toward mankind but a stepmother's, for she has been so lavish toward the mute animals, yet has poured man forth in such a state that, helpless and weak and in need of every aid, he can do nothing but foretell, by wailing and tears, the wretchedness of his own condition — as one for whom so great a passage of evils yet remains in life. When they say these things they are thought to show great wisdom, because each person, without reflection, is discontented with his own lot; but I maintain that they are never so foolish as when they say this. Weighing how matters truly stand, I recognize nothing else could have come about — not that it was impossible, for God can accomplish anything — yet surely that all-foreseeing majesty must have wrought whatever was superior and more fitting. I would like, then, to ask these fault-finders of the divine works what they think man lacks, because he is born weaker: are men therefore less well reared? Are they brought less far toward the full strength of their years? Does weakness at birth hinder either their growth or their well-being, since reason makes up for what is lacking? But, they say, the rearing of man requires the greatest labors — the lot of cattle is surely better, since once they have brought forth their young, they need only look after their own feeding: from which it follows that, their udders swelling of their own accord, milk is supplied to the young, and by nature's compulsion, without any anxious care from the mothers, the young seek it out. What then? Do not the birds, whose way of life is different, undertake the greatest labors in raising their young, so that at times they seem to display something like human intelligence? For they build their nests either of mud or construct them of twigs and leaves; going without food themselves, they sit upon the eggs, and since they cannot feed their nestlings straight from their own flesh, they instead bring food to them and spend whole days running back and forth in this manner, while by night they defend, warm, and shelter them. What more could men do, except perhaps this one thing — that they do not drive out their grown offspring, but keep them bound by a lasting tie and bond of affection? And is it not so that the offspring of birds is far more fragile than that of man, since they do not bring forth the living creature itself, but only that which, warmed by the heat of the mother's body, is made into a living creature? And even once this has been given life by breath, it is still featherless and tender, unable not only to fly but even to walk. Would it not be sheer foolishness, then, to imagine birds are treated unkindly by nature — first, in being born a second time, and then because they are so feeble that they must be fed by their parents with food gained through labor? Yet these men choose out the stronger cases and pass over the weaker ones. So I put this question to those who rank the lot of cattle above their own: given a choice from God, which would they take — human wisdom paired with weakness, or the sturdiness of cattle joined with their nature. Surely they are not so much like cattle themselves that they would not rather have even a far more fragile condition than they now have, so long as it were human, than that irrational sturdiness. But evidently these wise men want neither man's reason joined with fragility, nor the sturdiness of dumb beasts without reason. And indeed nothing is so self-contradictory and inconsistent as this: each and every creature must be furnished either by reason or by the condition of its nature. If it is furnished with natural defenses, reason is superfluous. For what will it devise? What will it do? What will it contrive? Or where would it show that spark of intellect, if nature already freely supplies whatever reasoning might accomplish? But if endowed instead with reason, why would bodily defenses be needed at all, since reason once granted can carry out nature's task on its own? And indeed reason is of such power for adorning and protecting man that nothing greater or better could have been given by God. In short, though man is of no great bulk of body, of modest strength, and of frail health, yet because he has received that which is greater, he is better equipped and better adorned than the other animals. For though he is born frail and weak, he is nevertheless safe from all the dumb beasts, while all those creatures born sturdier, even though they bravely endure the harshness of the sky, still cannot be safe from man. Thus it comes about that reason confers more upon man than nature does upon the dumb beasts, since in the latter neither greatness of strength nor sturdiness of body can prevent their being overpowered by us or made subject to our power. Can anyone, then, seeing even the Lucanian oxen — elephants — with their enormous bodies and strength, made to serve man, complain against God, the maker of things, because he received but modest strength and a small body — and not reckon the divine kindness toward himself according to its worth? That is the sign of a thankless heart, or rather — put plainly — of a deranged one. Plato, I believe to refute such ingrates, gave thanks to nature that he had been born a man. How much better and saner he was, who felt that the condition of man is the better one, than those who would rather have been born beasts! If God should happen to turn them into those very animals whose lot they prefer to their own, they would at once, no doubt, wish to return, and with loud cries demand back their former condition, since strength and sturdiness of body are not worth so much that one should go without the use of speech, nor is the free coursing of birds through the air worth going without hands. Hands achieve more than wings' lightness and function, and the tongue more than the body entire in its strength. What madness, then, is it to prefer things which, if they were given, one would refuse to accept?
They also complain that man is subject to sickness and to untimely death — indignant, evidently, that they were not born gods. 'No,' they say, 'but we show by this very fact that man was made with no providence at all, since he ought to have been made otherwise.' But what if I show that this very thing was provided for with great reason — that he should be liable to be assailed by sickness, and that his life should often be cut off in the middle of its course? For when God had determined that the living thing he had made should, of its own accord, pass over into death, so that it might be capable of death itself, which is the dissolution of its nature, he gave it a frailty by which death could find an entrance for dissolving the creature. For if it were made of such strength that sickness and disease could not approach it, then not even death could come near, since death is the sequel of sicknesses. And how could untimely death be kept away from a being for whom only a 'ripe' death had been fixed? For surely their wish is that no man should die before reaching the far end of a hundred years. How can their reasoning hold together amid such conflicting demands? For in order that no one could die before a hundred years, some strength that is immortal would have to be granted him; and once that is granted, the very condition of death is necessarily excluded. But what sort of thing could this be, that would make a man solid and unassailable against sickness and outward blows? He plainly consists of bones, sinews, organs, and blood — and none of these substances has the toughness to hold sickness and mortality permanently at bay. So then, if man is to be indissoluble up to the age they think proper to fix, from what material will they assign him a body? Everything that can be seen and touched is frail. It remains for them to fetch something from the sky, since on earth there is nothing that is not weak. Since, then, man had to be so fashioned by God that he would at some point be mortal, the very nature of the case demanded that he be formed of an earthly and frail body. It is therefore necessary that he receive death at some time or other, because he is a bodily thing; for any body whatever is dissoluble and mortal. Most foolish, then, are those who complain of untimely death, since the condition of his nature makes room for it. It follows in the same way that he must also be subject to sicknesses; for nature does not allow weakness to be absent from a body that is destined at some point to be dissolved. But let us suppose it could happen as they wish — that men should be born on the condition that no one be subject to sickness or death unless, having completed the span of his years, he has come to extreme old age. Do they not see, if it were established so, what would follow — namely that at every other time he could in no way die at all? But if he can be kept from food by someone else, he will be able to die. The logic of the matter, then, demands that a man who cannot die before a fixed day would have no need of nourishment from food, since food can be withheld. But if he has no need of food, he is no longer a man but has become a god. So, as I noted earlier, the real grievance beneath their complaint about human frailty is simply this — that men were not brought into being as deathless, eternal beings. 'No one ought to die except in old age.' And yet mortality cannot be joined together with immortality. For a being who dies in old age was never truly immortal in his youth; whoever is destined to die eventually cannot be a stranger to death's condition, and no immortality worth the name can have a boundary fixed upon it. The upshot: because everlasting life is barred to him altogether while a mortality bounded by time is granted instead, whatever his age, dying remains simply what he is. The necessity, then, fits together on every side — it neither ought to have happened otherwise, nor would it have been permissible. But these people do not see the logic of what follows, because they went wrong once at the very starting point: for once divine providence was excluded from human affairs, it necessarily followed that everything must have come into being of its own accord. From this they invented those swarms of tiny seeds and their chance collisions, because they could not see the true origin of things. Once they had backed themselves into that corner, necessity already compelled them to suppose that souls are born together with bodies and likewise perish together with bodies; for they had assumed from the start that nothing comes about by a divine mind. And this assumption itself they could prove no other way than by pointing to things in which the reasoning of providence might seem to limp. So they found fault precisely with those things in which providence expressed its own divinity most wonderfully — the very matters I have related concerning sicknesses and untimely death — when they ought instead to have considered what necessarily follows once those premises are granted. And what follows is what I have said: if man were not liable to sickness, he would need neither roofs nor clothing. For why would he fear winds or rains or cold, whose force lies in bringing on sicknesses? He received wisdom, in fact, precisely so that he might fortify his own frailty against harmful things. It follows of necessity that, since he takes on sicknesses for the sake of preserving reason, he must also always be capable of receiving death, because one whom death cannot reach must necessarily be unshakeable. But weakness carries within it the condition of death, whereas wherever there is unshakeable strength, neither old age nor the death that follows old age can find a place. Besides, if death were fixed to a certain age, man would become utterly insolent and would lack all humanity. For nearly all the bonds of humanity by which we hold together with one another arise out of fear and the awareness of our own frailty. This is why weaker, more fearful animals cluster together — lacking the strength to defend themselves alone, they rely instead on safety in numbers — while the stronger creatures live apart, confident in their own force. If man too had, in the same way, strength enough on hand to ward off dangers, and needed no other's help, what fellowship would there be, what mutual respect, what order, what reason, what humanity among men? Or what would be more loathsome than man, what more savage, what more monstrous? But because he is weak and cannot by himself live without other men, he seeks fellowship, so that life in common may become both more adorned and more secure. You see, then, that the whole rational structure of man rests above all on this: that he is born naked and frail, that he is afflicted with sicknesses, that he is struck down by untimely death. If these things were taken away from man, reason and wisdom too would necessarily be taken away. Yet I dwell too long on matters already obvious, given how clear it is that not one thing exists, nor could ever have come to exist, apart from providence. If I wished now to argue point by point about the whole of God's works, the material would be endless. But I set out to speak only of the single body of man, so as to show in it how great the power of divine providence has been — restricting myself, at least, to those matters that are graspable and open to view; for the things that belong to the soul cannot be submitted to the eyes or grasped. For now we are speaking of the very vessel of man that we see.
In the beginning, when God was fashioning living creatures, he did not wish to gather and roll them together into a round shape, so that they could move for walking and bend easily in any direction; instead, out of the top of the body itself he brought forth the head. Likewise he brought forth certain limbs at greater length, called feet, so that by alternating movements, fixed to the ground, they might carry the creature wherever its mind directed, or wherever the need of seeking food urged it on. And from the little vessel of the body itself he made four projections stand out: a pair behind, which in all creatures are the feet, and likewise a pair nearest the head and neck, which offer living things various uses. Among cattle and wild beasts, the forward limbs match the hind ones, whereas in man they take the form of hands — made not to bear weight in walking, but to grasp and to craft. A third arrangement also exists, where those same forward limbs become neither feet nor hands, but wings — rows of set feathers granting the power of flight. Thus one basic design serves different forms and uses. And in order to hold the very bulk of the body together firmly, he built, by linking larger, shorter bones to one another, something like a keel — what we call the spine — and did not wish to form it from one continuous bone, lest the creature lack the ability to walk and to bend itself. From roughly the middle of it he extended ribs on either side — that is, crosswise, flat bones — which, gently curved and drawn almost into a circle upon themselves, cover the inner organs, so that the parts which needed to be softer and less sturdy could be protected by the embrace of that solid framework. At the top of this structure, which we said resembles a ship's keel, he set the head, in which would reside the governance of the whole living creature; and it was given this name, as Varro writes to Cicero, because from it (caput) the senses and sinews take their beginning (capiunt). Now those limbs we said were put forth from the body for the sake of walking, doing, or flying, he wished to consist of few and large bones — neither too long, on account of quick mobility, nor too short, on account of firmness. A creature may have two such limbs, as man does, or four, as a four-footed animal does; yet none of them were made solid, lest sluggishness and heaviness slow down the walking, but hollow, and filled inside with marrow to preserve the vigor of the body. And these he did not finish off as an unbroken length, but gathered their extremities into thicker knots, so that they could be bound more easily by sinews and turned more safely — hence they are called joints (vertibula, from 'turning'). These knots, solidly fixed, he covered with a smooth kind of coating, called cartilage, so that they could be bent without friction and without any sensation of pain. Yet he did not shape them all in one single way. Some he made simple and rounded into a circle, precisely at those joints where the limbs needed to move in every direction, as at the shoulders, since it is necessary for the hands to be moved and turned in any direction whatever; but others he made broad and even and rounded toward one side only, precisely at those places where the limbs needed only to bend, as at the knees, the elbows, and the hands themselves. For just as it was both handsome and useful for the hands to be able to move in every direction from the point where they arise, so too, if the same freedom of movement had been given to the elbows, such motion would have been both useless and unseemly. For the hand, having lost the dignity it now has, would then, through excessive mobility, resemble a trunk, and man would plainly be a snake-handed creature — a form marvelously realized in that most monstrous beast, the elephant. For God, wishing to display his providence and power through the wondrous variety of many things, since he had not extended that animal's head far enough for its mouth to reach the ground — which would have been a horrible and hideous thing — and since he had armed that very mouth with so many projecting teeth that even if it could reach the ground, the teeth would still deprive it of the capacity to feed, brought forth between them, from the top of its brow, a soft and flexible limb by which it could grasp and hold whatever it wished, so that neither the projecting size of its teeth nor the shortness of its neck should hinder its ability to take in food.
At this point nothing holds me back from taking up, once again, a refutation of Epicurus's foolishness — since every raving word of Lucretius traces back to him. To show that living creatures were born not by any craft of the divine mind, but, as is his habit, by chance, his claim was that, at the world's outset, countless other creatures of strange form and enormous size once came into being, but that they could not survive, because either the capacity to take in food, or the means of mating and reproducing, had failed them. Plainly, in order to make room for his atoms, he wanted to exclude divine providence. But since he saw that in all things that breathe there is a wonderful rational design of providence at work, what folly — what madness! — was it to say that there had once been monstrous creatures in which reason was absent? Since, therefore, all the things we see were born together with reason — for the very act of being born cannot be brought about except by reason — it is plain that nothing at all devoid of reason could have been generated. For it was foreseen in advance, in fashioning each and every creature, how far they should use the service of their limbs for the necessities of life, and how far, once bodies were joined together, the offspring so produced should preserve every kind of living creature according to its species. For if a skilled architect, when he decides to build some great structure, first of all considers what the overall shape of the finished building will be, and measures out beforehand what place a light weight will occupy, where the mass bearing a great load should stand, what the intervals between the columns should be, and where and how the flow, exit, and catch-basins of falling water should be — all this, I say, he provides for in advance, so that whatever is necessary for the completed work may be laid out together with the very foundations — why should anyone think that God, in constructing living creatures, did not foresee beforehand what would be necessary for living, before he gave life itself? For life certainly could not hold together unless the things by which it holds together had already been made. Epicurus, then, saw the cleverness of divine reason at work in the bodies of living creatures, but in order to make good on what he had rashly assumed earlier, he added another piece of madness to match the first. For he said that eyes were not born for seeing, nor ears for hearing, nor feet for walking, since these limbs were born before there was any use of seeing, hearing, or walking, but that the functions of all these arose only after they were born. I fear that refuting such monstrous absurdities may seem no less absurd itself, but I am willing to play the fool, since I am dealing with a fool, lest he think himself too clever. What do you say, Epicurus? Were eyes not born for seeing? Then why do they see? 'Afterward,' he says, 'their use appeared.' Their birth, then, was for the purpose of seeing — since seeing is, in fact, the one thing they are capable of doing. Likewise, the very use of the other limbs shows for what purpose they were born — a use that could in no way exist unless all the limbs had been made so orderly, so providently, that they could have that use. For what if one were to say that birds were not born for flying, nor wild beasts for raging, nor fish for swimming, nor men for understanding, when it is plain that living creatures serve that very nature and function for which each was generated? But of course one who has lost hold of truth's very foundation must necessarily go astray forever. For if all things are born not by providence but by the chance collisions of atoms, why has it never once happened by chance that those first elements came together in such a way as to produce a creature that heard with its nostrils, smelled with its eyes, and saw with its ears? For if the first-beginnings leave no arrangement whatever untried, monstrosities of this sort ought to be generated every day, in which the order of the limbs would be reversed and their use utterly different. But since every kind of creature, and every limb within each kind, keeps its own laws and order and assigned uses, it is plain that nothing has come about by chance, since the ordering of divine reason is preserved without fail. But we shall refute Epicurus on other points elsewhere; for now let us continue, as we began, discussing providence.
God, then, bound and fastened together with sinews the framework of the body—what we call the bones—joining them at nodes, so that the mind, whenever it wished to move forward or to hold back, might use them like reins, and with no labor and no exertion at all, but with the least effort, could govern and bend the mass of the whole body. These he then covered with flesh, as suited each region, so that whatever was solid should be enclosed and hidden. Likewise he wove veins through that same flesh, like streams branching through the entire body, through which moisture and blood running everywhere might irrigate all the limbs with the juices of life; and having shaped that flesh in the manner fitting to each kind and place, he covered it over with skin laid on top: which he adorned in some creatures with beauty alone, in others clothed with bristles, in others armored with scales, in others decked with splendid feathers. But here is God's wonderful device: that one basic plan and one bodily arrangement should present countless varieties of form. For in almost all things that breathe there is the same sequence and order of members: first the head, and joined to it the neck; then to the neck the chest is attached, and from it the arms project; the belly clings to the chest, and to the belly in turn the genitals are joined; last of all come the thighs and feet. Nor do only the limbs keep their order and placement the same in every creature, but the parts of the limbs as well. For in the head itself the ears hold a fixed place, the eyes a fixed place, likewise the nostrils, and the mouth too, and within it the teeth and the tongue. And though all these are the same in every living thing, still there is an endless and manifold variety of shapes, because the features I have named are drawn out longer or drawn in shorter, caught up in lines that differ in countless ways. And is this not divine as well: that among so vast a multitude of living things, each single animal is most beautiful in the form proper to its own kind, so that if any feature were exchanged from one to another, nothing could seem more useless for function or more unsightly to behold? Suppose you gave the elephant a long neck, or the camel a short one, or gave feet or hair to serpents—creatures whose stretched-out length required only that their backs, marked with spots and buoyed by the smoothness of scales, should glide along in slithering, winding coils. In four-footed animals, by contrast, the same craftsman drew the chain of the spine down from the top of the head, carried it on beyond the body, and tapered it into a tail—whether to cover the shameful parts of the body out of decency, or to guard them because of their tenderness, or so that certain small and harmful creatures might be driven off from the body by its motion. Take that member away, and the animal becomes incomplete and helpless. But where reason and hands exist, it is no more necessary than a covering of hair would be—so perfectly does each thing fit its own kind, that nothing could be imagined uglier than a four-footed beast without hair, or a man covered in it. Yet although man's very nakedness has a wondrous power toward beauty, this alone was not fitting for the head. So God covered the head with hair, and since it was to sit at the very top, he adorned it like the crowning roof of a building. And this adornment was not gathered into a perfect circle or shaped round like a cap, lest the bareness of certain areas make it unsightly, but let flow loosely in some places and drawn back in others, as suited the fittingness of each region. So the brow is fenced about, hair flows down from the temples in front of the ears, its topmost part is gathered as if into a crown, and the whole back of the head, being covered, presents a picture of wondrous grace. And as for the beard, it is scarcely believable how much it contributes—to signaling that a body has reached maturity, to telling male apart from female, to giving strength and manliness their proper dignity—so that the whole plan of the work would clearly have failed to hold together, had anything been made otherwise.
Now I shall set out the design of the whole human being, and explain the uses and arrangement of each limb, both those exposed and those hidden in the body. Since, then, God had decided to make man alone, of all living things, a creature of heaven, while making all the rest creatures of earth, he raised man upright for the contemplation of the sky and set him on two feet—clearly so that he might look toward the very source from which he came—while he bent the others down toward the earth, so that, since they have no expectation of immortality, their whole bodies might be cast down toward the ground and given over to the belly and to feeding. Man's upright bearing alone, then, and his lofty stance, and his face shared with and near to God the Father, testify to his origin and to his maker. His mind, all but divine, because it has been allotted mastery not only over the living things on earth but over his own body as well, is set at the very top of the head as in a lofty citadel, from which it surveys and beholds everything. God did not shape this dwelling of the mind stretched flat and elongated as in the dumb animals, but round and globe-like, because the roundness of a sphere belongs to reason and form in their perfection. So the mind, and that divine fire within it, are covered as if by a sky of their own. Having clothed its topmost summit with its natural garment, he furnished and adorned the front part, called the face, with the members it needed for its service. First, he enclosed the orbs of the eyes within hollow sockets—from which hollowing Varro thinks the forehead (frons) took its name—and he willed there to be neither fewer nor more than two, since for beauty no number is more perfect than two, as with the two ears also. The doubling of these is scarcely believable how much beauty it lends, both because each side is adorned to match the other, and so that sounds coming from either direction may more easily be gathered in. For the very shape of the ears is fashioned in a marvelous way, since God did not want their openings to be bare and unenclosed—which would have been both less becoming and less useful, since sound could slip past the narrow gap of a simple hollow unless it were caught within a curved recess and held back by an echo—the openings themselves resembling those small vessels used to fill jars with a narrow mouth. These ears, then—whose name is given from 'drawing in' voices, whence Virgil says he 'drew in the voice with these ears'; or because the Greeks call voice itself 'akoe' from hearing, and by a change of letter 'aures' are named as it were 'audes'—God the craftsman did not wish to form of soft skin, which would take away their beauty by hanging loose and flaccid, nor of hard, solid bone, lest they be unfit for use through being stiff and immovable; but he devised something between the two, so that a softer cartilage should bind them and give them a firmness at once supple and flexible. In these the sole function established is hearing, just as in the eyes it is seeing. Of these the subtlety is especially inexplicable and wondrous, because their orbs, bearing a likeness to gems, he covered on the side that needed to see with translucent membranes, so that the images of the things placed opposite might, gleaming as in a mirror, penetrate to the inner sense. Through these membranes, then, that faculty called the mind looks out upon what is outside—lest you suppose, perhaps, that we see by the impact of images striking us, as the philosophers argue, since the function of seeing ought to belong to that which sees, not to that which is seen; nor by a stretching of air joined to the ray of sight, nor by an outpouring of rays, since if that were so, we would see more slowly than we turn our eyes, until the stretched air together with the ray, or the poured-out rays, reached the thing to be seen. But since we see in the very same instant, and often, while our attention is elsewhere, we nonetheless still perceive all the things set before us, it is truer and more evident that it is the mind which looks through the eyes at what lies opposite, as through windows glazed with translucent glass or a transparent stone. And for this reason the mind and the will are often read in the eyes. To refute this, Lucretius used a most inept argument. For he says, if the mind sees through the eyes, it would see better with the eyes gouged out and dug away, since doors torn out along with their posts let in more light than when they are shut. Surely he himself—or rather Epicurus, who taught him this—must have had his own eyes dug out, not to see the gouged sockets, the torn fibers of the eyes, the blood flowing through the veins, the flesh growing over the wounds, and finally the scars closing over, capable of admitting no light at all—unless perhaps he wanted eyes to be born like ears, so that we would see not so much through eyes as through mere openings: than which nothing could be made uglier in appearance or less useful in function. For how little could we see, if the mind, from deep within the inner recesses of the head, were straining through the narrow chinks of small hollows! As if one wished to look through a reed pipe—one would surely perceive no more than the pipe's own narrow bore allows. And so, for the purpose of seeing, it was necessary rather that the members be gathered into a rounded form, so that sight might be cast widely, and that these should sit at the front of the face, left free to take in everything around them. And so the ineffable power of divine providence fashioned two closely matching orbs and bound them in such a way that, while they could not turn all the way around, they could still move and bend as needed. And these orbs he willed to be filled with a pure, clear fluid, in the middle part of which little sparks of light are held enclosed, which we call the pupils, in which, pure and fine as they are, the sense and faculty of seeing is contained. Through these orbs, then, the mind directs itself so as to see, and by a wonderful arrangement the sight of both eyes is mingled and joined into one.
Here I would like to expose the folly of those who, wishing to show that the senses are deceptive, gather up many instances in which the eyes are mistaken—among them this one, that to the mad and the drunk everything appears doubled, as though the cause of this error were obscure. The reason is simply this: eyes come in a pair. Now listen to how this actually works. Vision arises from the mind's focused attention. Given that the mind, as noted above, treats the eyes the way one treats windows, this condition affects not merely the drunk or the deranged, but sober, sane people just as much. For if you bring something too close, it will appear double: there is a fixed distance and space at which the lines of sight of the two eyes converge. Likewise, if you turn your attention backward, as if to think, and relax the mind's focus, then the sightline of each eye separates, and each begins to see on its own. If you focus your attention again and direct your gaze, whatever appeared double comes together into one. What wonder, then, if the mind, undone by the poison and power of wine, cannot direct the eyes to see properly—just as the feet, too, grow weak for walking when the sinews go numb—or if some violent fit of madness raging in the brain breaks apart the harmony of the eyes? And this is so true that it can never happen to those who are already one-eyed, even if they become insane or drunk, that they see anything doubled. Therefore, since the reason why the eyes are deceived is plain, it is clear that the senses themselves are not false: for either they are not deceived at all, if they are sound and whole, or if they are deceived, still the mind is not deceived, since it recognizes their error.
Let us, however, come back now to God's works. So that the eyes might be better fortified against harm, he hid them under coverings of lashes, from which Varro thinks the eyes themselves get their name. For the eyelids, to which their mobility—that is, their blinking—gives their name, are fenced with hairs standing in ranks, and provide the eyes with a most fitting rampart; their constant motion, meeting with inconceivable speed, does not hinder the course of sight but rather refreshes the gaze. For the pupil—that is, that transparent membrane—ought not to dry out and grow parched, but stays bright only when it is kept moist by continual bathing; otherwise it grows dull. Again, do not the very ridges of the eyebrows, adorned with short hairs, serve as a kind of rampart and defense for the eyes, so that nothing may fall on them from above, while at the same time lending beauty? From their meeting-point the nose rises, and stretching out like an even ridge, both separates and protects each eye at once. Below, too, the cheeks swell in a fitting way, gently rising like hillocks, so that on every side the eyes gain greater safety; and the supreme craftsman took care that any rather violent blow, should one occur, would be deflected by these projections. Now the upper part of the nose is formed solid all the way to the middle, while the lower part is softened by attached cartilage, so that it can be manipulated by the fingers as needed. And in this single member, simple as it seems, three functions have been established: one, drawing breath; another, receiving smell; a third, that through its passages the refuse of the brain might drain away. And God devised these very passages with such wondrous, such divine calculation, that the opening of the nostrils should not disfigure the appearance of the face—which would certainly have happened had there been one single undivided opening. Instead he partitioned and divided it as though by a wall run through the middle, and by that very doubling made it most beautiful. From this we understand how much the number two, solidified into one simple structure, contributes to the perfection of things. For although the body is one, the whole of it could not consist of simple undivided members unless there were right and left parts. And so, just as the two feet and likewise the two hands serve not only some usefulness and function for walking or working, but also confer an admirable form and beauty, so likewise in the head—that summit, as it were, of the whole divine handiwork—the supreme craftsman split hearing into two ears, sight into two eyes, and smell into a pair of nostrils; for the brain, seat of the faculty of sensation, though one, is still divided by an intervening membrane into two parts. The heart too, which seems to be the seat of wisdom, though it is one, still has two chambers within, in which the springs of living blood are contained, divided by a wall between them—so that just as in the universe itself the sum of things governs and holds together the whole, whether as a duality arising from unity or a unity arising from duality, so too in the body the whole, composed of two parts, might exhibit an indissoluble unity. The shape of the mouth, too, and its opening set crosswise—how useful, how fitting it is cannot be told; it serves two purposes: consuming food and forming speech. Housed within, the tongue—whose motions cut the voice into distinct words—acts as the mind's spokesman, though it cannot manage the task of speaking on its own; only when its tip meets the palate, assisted further by the teeth's tapping and the lips' pressure, can it do so. Yet speech owes more to the teeth than to anything else: children, until their teeth come in, cannot yet talk, and elderly men, once their teeth are gone, lisp so badly that they appear to have tumbled back into childhood. But this pertains only to man—or to birds, in which the tongue, sharpened and quivering with precise movements, produces countless variations of song and diverse modes of sound. The tongue, moreover, has another office, which it exercises in all creatures, though not in dumb ones alone: it gathers up food that has been chewed and ground by the teeth, and, having compacted it, forces it down by its own strength and sends it on to the stomach. And so Varro thinks the tongue takes its name from binding food together. It aids beasts also in drinking: for, stretched out and hollowed, they draw up water, and having caught it in the hollow of the tongue, so that it should not flow back through slowness or delay, they dash it swiftly against the palate. This whole apparatus is covered by the vault of the palate as though by a shell, and God has walled it about, as it were, with the fence of the teeth. As for the teeth themselves, lest bare and drawn back they should inspire more horror than adornment, he adorned them with soft gums—so named from the sprouting of teeth—and, beyond that, with the lips as covering; the teeth themselves, hard as millstone, are firmer and coarser than other bones, fit for the grinding of food and fodder. The lips themselves, which before seemed joined together, how fittingly he split them apart! The upper lip he marked, just beneath the middle of the nostrils, with a slight hollow like a small valley; the lower lip he softly spread outward for the sake of gracefulness. As for the perception of taste, whoever thinks this sense resides in the palate is mistaken; it is the tongue by which flavors are perceived, and not even the whole tongue, for the sides of it, which are more tender, draw in flavor by the subtlest sensations. And although nothing is diminished from the food or the drink, still the flavor penetrates to the sense in an indescribable way, by the same reasoning by which the sense of smell takes in nothing material from any substance it perceives. As for the rest, how graceful it all is can scarcely be expressed: the chin, drawn down gently from the cheeks and closed off below in such a way that a slight indentation seems to mark its very tip; the neck, firm and rounded; the shoulders sloping down from the neck as though on soft ridges; the arms, strong and bound tight with sinews for strength, vigorous with the notable swelling of the projecting muscles, and the elbow's bend, both useful and graceful. And the hands—reason's and wisdom's instruments—what can be said of them? These the most skillful craftsman fashioned with a flat, slightly hollowed palm, so that whatever needed to be grasped might rest fittingly within it, and brought them to an end in fingers—in which it is hard to determine whether their appearance or their usefulness is greater. For their number is complete and full, their arrangement and gradation most fitting, the curve of their matching joints flexible, and the round shape of the nails, gripping and securing the tips of the fingers with their hollow coverings, provides great adornment, so that the softness of the flesh should not give way when grasping something. But this above all is wonderfully suited to use: that one finger, set apart from the rest, arises together with the hand itself and is spread out earlier in the opposite direction, as if reaching out to greet the rest, so that it alone—or above all others—holds nearly the whole power of gripping and acting, ruling and governing over the others like a magistrate; from which it even received the name thumb, because in strength and power it prevails (pollet) over the others. It has, indeed, two visible joints, not three like the others, but is joined to the hand by flesh for the sake of beauty: for had it too been divided into three joints, its ugly and unbecoming appearance would have taken away the grace of the hands. Now the breadth of the chest, held high and open to view, displays in a wondrous way the dignity of one's bearing. The reason for this is that God seems to have shaped man alone as it were lying on his back—for scarcely any other animal can lie upon its spine—while he fashioned the dumb animals as though lying on alternating sides, and pressed them down toward the earth. For this reason their chest is narrow, turned away from view and cast down toward the ground, while man's is open and upright, because a chest filled with reason given from heaven ought not to be lowly or unbecoming. The nipples too, lightly raised and crowned with small, somewhat darker circles, add no small measure of charm, given to women for nourishing their offspring, to men solely for adornment, lest the chest appear shapeless and, as it were, mutilated. Beneath this lies the flat expanse of the belly, marked roughly at its middle by the fitting sign of the navel, whose purpose was this: through it the offspring, while still within the womb, could be nourished.
It follows of necessity that I should now begin to speak also of the inner organs: to which, since they are hidden, not beauty but incredible usefulness has been assigned, given that this body of earth had to be sustained by some fluid drawn from food and drink, in the same way that the earth itself is fed by rain and frost. The most provident craftsman made in its middle a receptacle for food, so that, once broken down and dissolved, it could send life-giving fluid out to every member. Man, however, is composed of both body and soul, and the receptacle just described feeds the body only; for the soul he gave a different seat. For he made a certain kind of organ, soft and porous, which we call the lung, and he did not fashion it in the manner of a wineskin, lest the breath should be poured out all at once or inflated all at once. And so he made it indeed a solid organ, but one capable of being inflated and receiving air, so that it might gradually take in breath as the vital wind is spread through that porous substance, and gradually give it back again as it unfolds itself from within; for this very alternation, the drawing in and letting out of breath, sustains life in the body. Since, then, there are two receptacles in man, one for air, which nourishes the soul, the other for food, which nourishes the body, there must necessarily be two passages through the neck, one for food and one for breath—the upper one running from the mouth to the stomach, the lower from the nostrils to the lung. Their nature and structure differ. For the passage that runs from the mouth is made soft, and, being always closed, clings together like the mouth itself, since drink and food, being bodily things, make room for their own passage by parting and opening the throat. Breath, on the other hand, being incorporeal and fine, could not make room for itself, and so it was given an open pathway, which is called the windpipe. This consists of curved, soft bones, joined to one another like rings, in the manner of hemlock-stalks, and this passage always stays open. For breath can have no rest in its movement; and because it is always passing through, a portion hanging usefully down from the brain, which is called the uvula, restrains it as though by a kind of check, lest the breath, coming with force, should injure the delicate lining of its dwelling by drawing in a noxious current, or should bring the full force of harm to the inner organs. For this reason too the nostrils are opened only briefly, and are so named because through them scent or breath does not cease to be drawn (nare). Yet this breathing channel has an opening leading to the mouth as well as the nostrils, at the palate's furthest edge, where those looking toward the throat see the uvula begin to swell. The reason for this is not obscure: for we would have no faculty of speech if, just as the throat's passage opens only to the mouth, so the windpipe opened only to the nostrils. Divine skill, therefore, opened a path for the voice from that breathing passage, so that the tongue might exercise its function and might break the unbroken flow of the voice itself into words with its own strokes. If this channel is in any way blocked, it must necessarily render one mute; for whoever thinks there is some other cause why men are mute is certainly mistaken. It is not, as commonly believed, that they carry a bound tongue, but rather that such people expel that vocalized breath out through the nostrils in a kind of lowing sound, because the passage of the voice to the mouth is either altogether absent or not open enough to let out a full voice. This most often arises naturally, though occasionally it happens by accident too, when some illness closes off this opening and keeps the voice from ever reaching the tongue, turning would-be speakers into mutes. And when this happens, hearing too must necessarily be blocked, so that because one cannot send out a voice, one also cannot take one in. This passage, then, was opened for the sake of speech. It also serves this purpose: that when we are bathing, since the nostrils cannot bear the heat, hot air can be drawn in through the mouth; likewise if by chance cold has blocked the nasal passages with mucus, we can draw breath through the mouth, lest, with the way blocked, breath be strangled. As for food received into the belly, when mixed with the moisture of drink and thoroughly cooked by heat, its juice, spread through the members in an indescribable way, waters and vivifies the whole body. And the many coils of the intestines, wound in upon themselves yet bound together by a single ligament, form how wonderful a work of God! For when the belly has released the softened food from itself, it is gradually pushed out through those inner windings, so that whatever juice is in it, by which the body is nourished, may be distributed to all the members; and yet, lest it should anywhere adhere and stick—which could easily happen because of the frequent turnings of the coils folding back upon themselves, and could not happen without harm—he smeared the inside of them with a thicker fluid, so that the waste of the belly might more easily slide toward its exit along that slippery surface. Here too is a most delicate device: the bladder, a feature birds lack, though wholly distinct from the intestines and lacking any duct to pull urine from them, still fills up and swells with fluid regardless. How this happens is not hard to see. The parts of the intestines that receive food and drink from the belly are wider than the rest of the coils and much thinner. These surround and enclose the bladder; and when the mixed food and drink reach these parts, the thicker waste passes on and moves through, while all the moisture is filtered through that thin lining, and the bladder—whose membrane is likewise thin and fine—absorbs and collects it, so as to discharge it outward through the passage nature has opened for that purpose.
Concerning the womb also and conception, since we are speaking of internal matters, it is necessary to say something, lest we seem to have passed over anything; for although these things lie hidden out of sight, they cannot escape our understanding and reason. In males, the vessel that holds the seed is double, lying a little farther in than that receptacle for the unclean fluid. For just as there are two kidneys, and likewise two testicles, so too there are two seminal vessels, joined together nonetheless in a single structure—which we can see in the bodies of animals when they are cut open and laid bare. The one on the right holds the male seed, the one on the left the female; and in general, in the whole body, the right side is masculine, the left feminine. Some think that the seed flows only from the marrow, others that it flows from the whole body into the generative vessel and there congeals; but how this happens the human mind cannot grasp. Likewise in women the womb divides itself into two parts, which spread apart in opposite directions and curve back on themselves like the horns of a ram; the part that turns toward the right is masculine, the one toward the left, feminine. Varro and Aristotle think that conception happens in this way. They say that seed exists not only in males but also in females, and that from this children are very often born resembling their mothers—but that the female seed is purified blood; and if this is properly mixed with the male seed, both, having congealed and coagulated together, are shaped into form; and first the heart of the human being is formed, since in it resides all life and wisdom, and finally the whole work is completed on the fortieth day. These conclusions have perhaps been gathered from cases of miscarriage. Yet in the case of bird embryos, it is beyond doubt that the eyes are formed first, as is often observed in eggs; from which I think it cannot be otherwise than that the formation of the body begins from the head. As for resemblances in the bodies of children, they think this happens in the following way: when the seeds mix together and coalesce, if the male seed prevails, the offspring, whether male or female, comes to resemble the father; if the female seed prevails, the offspring of either sex corresponds in likeness to the mother. And that seed prevails, of the two, which is more abundant, for it in some way embraces and encloses the other; hence it often happens that the features of only one parent are displayed. But if the mixture is equal, from equal amounts of seed, the features too are blended, so that the common offspring seems to resemble neither parent, since it does not take its whole likeness from one alone, or else seems to resemble both, since it has borrowed a part from each. For in the bodies of animals we see that the parents' colors are sometimes blended into a third color resembling neither parent, or else both are expressed in such a way that a harmonious mixture of differently colored parts varies throughout the whole body. Differences of nature, too, are thought to arise in this way: when by chance the seed of a male line falls into the left part of the womb, the opinion is that a male is indeed born, but because he was conceived on the female side, he has in him something feminine beyond what befits masculine grace—either a striking beauty, or excessive fairness of complexion, or physical delicacy, or refined limbs, or short stature, or a light voice, or a weak character, or several of these together. Likewise, if seed of the female kind flows into the right part, a female is indeed produced, but since she was conceived on the male side, she has in her something of manliness beyond what the nature of her sex allows—either strong limbs, or unusual height, or a dark complexion, or a rough face, or an unbecoming countenance, or a strong voice, or a bold spirit, or several of these. But if the male seed reaches the right side and the female the left, both kinds of offspring come out properly formed, so that women retain in every respect the grace proper to their nature, and men preserve manly strength both in mind and in body. But how wonderful is this very institution of God, that for the preservation of each kind he devised the two sexes, male and female, by whose union through the allurement of pleasure additional offspring might be provided, lest mortality's condition should extinguish every living kind. But greater strength was given to males, so that women might more easily be brought to bear the yoke of marriage. Thus man (vir) is so called because there is greater force (vis) in him than in woman, and from this virtue (virtus) takes its name; likewise woman (mulier), as Varro explains, comes from softness (mollities), with a letter changed and dropped, as though mollier. When she has conceived and the time of birth begins to draw near, her swelling breasts are distended with sweet juices, and her fertile chest overflows with founts of milk for the nourishment of the newborn. For it would not have been fitting for so wise a creature to draw nourishment from anywhere but the region of the heart; and this very thing has been most skillfully arranged, so that a warm, rich fluid might nourish the tenderness of the new body, until it is furnished with teeth and strengthened enough to take sturdier food. But let us return to our proposed task, so that we may briefly explain what remains.
I could now lay out for you the wonderful design of the reproductive organs themselves, were I not held back by modesty from such a discussion; and so let those parts which decency requires be veiled by us with the covering of shame. As far as this matter goes, it is enough to lament that impious and godless men commit the utmost outrage, twisting the divine and admirable work of God — devised and fashioned by an inconceivable plan for the propagation of offspring — either to the most shameful profiteering or to the shameless service of obscene lust, so that from a thing most sacred they now seek nothing but empty, barren pleasure. But what of the rest of the body? Do its other parts lack either design or beauty? Consider the flesh gathered into the buttocks, so well suited to the office of sitting, and firmer there than in the other limbs, lest, pressed by the weight of the body, it should give way against the bones. Consider likewise the thighs, drawn out long and strengthened by broader masses of muscle, so that they might more easily bear up the weight of the body — a length which tapers gradually and is brought to a narrow point by the knees, whose graceful joints provide a bend most fitted to the feet for walking and sitting. The legs too are shaped not with uniform thickness, lest an unbecoming form should disfigure the feet, but are both strengthened and adorned by calves that curve gently outward and taper gradually. In the soles the plan is much the same, and yet quite different from that of the hands — for since the soles are, as it were, the foundation of the whole structure, the wondrous craftsman did not form them round (lest man be unable to stand, or need other feet to stand on, as four-footed creatures do), but rather stretched out and elongated, so that by their flatness they might render the body stable — whence they take their very name. The toes are equal in number to the fingers, but display more show than usefulness, and are therefore joined together, short, and arranged in graduated order; and the largest of them, since there was no need — as with the hand — to set it apart from the rest, has been drawn back into line, though it still appears somewhat greater in size and slightly separated from the others. This graceful kinship among them lends no small support to the effort of the feet, for we cannot break into a run unless, pressing our toes to the ground and bracing against the soil, we gather force and spring...
One can be sure the body holds countless things whose force and purpose only their Maker is able to discern. Who would claim he can explain the use or effect of that thin, transparent membrane that nets and covers the belly? Or the twin form of the kidneys — Varro's word for them supposedly comes from the streams of foul fluid he thought ran from them, though that is far off the mark, since in fact they lie back to back on either side of the spine, quite apart from the intestines. What of the spleen, or the liver, those organs that seem almost congealed out of roiled blood? What of the bitter fluid of the gall, or the mass of the heart? Unless, that is, we should trust those who locate anger in the gall, fear in the heart, and joy in the spleen. As for the liver, some hold that its office is to digest food in the belly through its warmth and embrace, while others suppose that desire for the pleasures of love is housed there. But first of all, the keenness of human perception cannot penetrate these matters, since their workings stay hidden inside and, being concealed, never disclose their purposes. Were it otherwise, the gentler animals would perhaps have little or no gall whatsoever, or less of it than the fierce ones do; the more fearful creatures would carry more heart, the lustier ones more liver, the wanton ones more spleen. Just as we know we hear by means of the ears, see by the eyes, and smell by the nostrils, so too we would surely sense that anger comes from the gall, craving from the liver, delight from the spleen. But since we have no awareness whatsoever of the source of these feelings, it is entirely possible they arise elsewhere, and that those organs actually do something quite unlike what we imagine — though we cannot prove that those who argue otherwise are mistaken. Still, I judge that everything touching the movements of mind and soul belongs to a reasoning so obscure and profound that seeing it clearly lies beyond human reach. Yet this much ought to stand certain and beyond question: that so many organs, so many varieties of inward parts, share one single office — holding the soul within the body. Yet what particular duty falls to each one is known to none but the Craftsman, since he alone understands the work of his own hands.
But as for the voice, what account can we give of it? Grammarians and philosophers define voice as air struck by breath, from which the word for 'words' is said to derive — but this is plainly false, for voice is not produced outside the mouth but within it. Nearer the truth, then, is the view that when compressed breath is driven against the obstruction of the throat, it produces the sound of the voice — much as when we blow breath down into an open reed held to the lip, and the breath, driven back and rebounding from the hollow of the reed as it grazes against the breath still descending, straining toward the opening, produces a sound, and the wind, springing back into vocal breath, is as it were animated by itself. Whether that is so, let God the Craftsman be the judge — for the voice appears to well up from deep in the chest rather than out of the mouth. Indeed, even with the mouth closed, a sound of a kind is emitted through the nostrils. Moreover the voice is not produced by the strongest breath, such as we use in panting, but is produced, whenever we wish, by a light and unconstrained breath. It has not, then, been grasped how this happens or what it even is. And do not think that I am now slipping into the position of the Academy, as though nothing at all could be understood — for while it must be admitted that many things are unknown, which God willed to exceed man's understanding, still there are many things that can be both perceived by the senses and grasped by reason. But our full argument against the philosophers will come elsewhere. Let us, then, finish out the stretch of road we are now running.
Who does not know that the workings of the mind, too, are beyond comprehension — except one who has no mind at all, since it is not even known where the mind itself is located, or of what nature it is? Philosophers have argued various things about its nature and location. I for my part will not conceal what I myself think — not that I assert it to be so, which would be the act of a fool in a doubtful matter, but so that, once the difficulty of the question has been set out, you may understand how great is the greatness of the divine works. Some have wished to place the seat of the mind in the chest. If this is so, how worthy of wonder it is that a thing set in so dark and shadowy a dwelling should move amid so great a light of reason and understanding, and further, that the senses converge upon it from every part of the body, so that it seems present in whatever region of the limbs one considers! Others located it instead in the brain, and they too had reasonable grounds for saying so: surely whatever governs the entire body should dwell at the very top, as though in the body's stronghold, and indeed nothing outranks whatever governs the totality through reason, precisely because the cosmos itself is likewise ruled from its highest point by its own lord and director. Furthermore, the organs serving all the senses — hearing, sight, and smell — sit in the head, and their pathways lead not down to the chest but up to the brain; otherwise our perception would necessarily lag, having to travel the long route down the neck before reaching the chest. These men are, perhaps, not greatly mistaken, or not mistaken at all — for it does seem that the mind, which holds dominion over the body, is set at the top of the head like God in the highest heaven, but that when it is occupied with some thought, it travels to the chest and withdraws, as it were, into some secret inner chamber, so as to draw forth and bring out its counsel as from a hidden treasury; and this is why, when we are intent on thinking and the mind has buried itself in deep concentration, we are apt neither to hear what sounds around us nor to see what stands in our way. Whether this is indeed so is truly a marvel, since no path lies open from the brain to the chest; but even if it is not so, it remains no less marvelous that by some divine means it comes to seem so. Can anyone fail to marvel that this living and heavenly faculty called mind or spirit possesses such restlessness that it does not even rest when the body is asleep, and such swiftness that in a single instant it can, if it wishes, survey the whole heaven, fly across the seas, range over lands and cities — indeed, set before its own view all things it pleases, however far and wide they may lie removed? And is it any wonder that God's own mind ranges with full attention through every part of the universe, ruling and directing all things, present everywhere and spread everywhere at once, given that the strength and reach of the human mind, though locked inside a body doomed to die, remains so vast that no barrier raised by this heavy, sluggish frame to which it is tied can stop it from granting itself, in its restlessness, free rein to wander? Whether, then, the mind dwells in the head or in the chest, can anyone grasp what power of reason causes that incomprehensible faculty to cling either to the marrow of the brain or to that twofold blood enclosed within the heart — rather than gathering from this very fact how great is the power of God, in that the spirit does not see itself, neither of what kind it is nor where it is, nor, even if it could see, could it perceive how an incorporeal thing is joined to a corporeal one? Or perhaps the mind occupies no single location at all, but is diffused across the entire body — a view that is indeed tenable, one Xenocrates, Plato's pupil, defended, since feeling can be found in any part whatsoever of the frame — in which case neither the essence of the mind nor its character can be grasped, its nature being so fine and subtle that, once infused into the solid organs, it mingles with every limb in a living, almost burning, sensation. But beware of ever thinking there is any truth in what Aristoxenus says — that there is no mind at all, but that the power of feeling arises, like a harmony in the strings of an instrument, from the structure of the body and the joining of its organs. For musicians call the tuning and concord of strings, sounding together in whole and unbroken measures without any clash, a harmony. They would have it, then, that the soul in man is constituted on the same principle as concordant tuning is constituted in strings — namely, that the firm joining of the body's several parts, and the harmonious vigor of all the limbs together, produce that sensory motion and tune the soul as well-tuned strings produce a concordant sound; and just as, in strings, when something is broken or slackened the whole scheme of the music is disturbed and undone, so in the body, when some part of the limbs has taken harm, the whole is destroyed, and once everything is corrupted and thrown into disorder, sensation perishes — and this, they say, is called death. But if that man had had any mind at all, he would never have carried the analogy of harmony from strings over to man. Strings, after all, cannot produce sound by themselves — nothing about them truly resembles or compares to a living being — whereas the soul, unprompted, both thinks and moves on its own initiative. Were something like a harmony actually present in us, it would need an outside strike to set it moving, just as strings need the hand, since left untouched by a craftsman's fingers they lie silent and inert. But no doubt that man himself needed to be struck by a hand before he could feel anything at all, since his mind, badly joined together out of limbs, lay torpid.
What is left is to discuss the soul, even though its nature and rational basis defy full comprehension. That does not mean, however, that we cannot grasp the soul's immortality, since anything that flourishes and moves under its own continual power, and can be neither seen nor touched, must necessarily be everlasting. But what the soul is, philosophers have not yet agreed, and perhaps never will. Some have said it is blood, others fire, others wind — whence it took the name anima or animus, since in Greek wind is called anemos — yet none of them seems to have said anything sound. For if the soul, when blood is poured out through a wound or consumed by the heat of fevers, appears to be extinguished, it does not follow that the nature of the soul is to be located in the substance of blood — just as, if the question arose what the light we use is, and it were answered that it is oil, since when the oil is used up the light is extinguished, though the two are certainly distinct, one being merely the nourishment of the other. So the soul seems to resemble the light, which is not itself the blood, but is fed by the moisture of the blood as the flame is fed by oil. Those, however, who believed it was fire based their claim on this: that the body stays warm as long as the soul dwells in it, and turns cold once the soul departs. But fire needs sensation to burn, is visible, and burns to the touch, whereas the soul is endowed with sensation, cannot be seen, and does not scorch — from which it appears that the soul is, in some way, something like God. Those who think it wind are mistaken on this ground, that because we draw breath from the air we seem to live by it. Varro defines it thus: the soul is air taken in through the mouth, heated in the lungs, tempered in the heart, and spread through the body. These claims are quite plainly false. Nor do I say the reasoning of such matters is so obscure to us that we cannot even grasp what cannot be true. If someone told me that the sky is made of bronze, or of glass, or, as Empedocles says, of frozen air, would I at once agree, simply because I do not know what substance the sky is made of? Just as I do not know the one thing, so I do know the other. The soul, then, is not air taken in through the mouth, because the soul is generated long before air can be taken in through the mouth. For it is not instilled into the body after birth, as some philosophers hold, but immediately after conception; for divine necessity has already shaped the child in the womb, since it lives so fully within the mother's womb that it grows in size and, by frequent movements, strains to leap forth. Indeed a miscarriage must occur if the living being within has died. The remaining parts of that definition amount to this — that during those nine months we spent in the womb, we would appear to have been dead. None of these three opinions, then, is true. Yet those who have held them are not to be called so entirely wrong as to have said nothing at all — for we do live by blood, and by warmth, and by breath together. But since it is agreed that the soul in the body is a union of all these things, none of them properly expressed what it actually is, for it can no more be expressed than it can be seen.
There follows another question, equally impossible to untangle: whether the soul and the mind are one and the same, or whether that by which we live is one thing and that by which we perceive and understand is another. Arguments are not lacking on either side. Those who say the two are one follow this reasoning: that nothing can live without sensation, nor be sensed without life, and therefore what cannot be separated cannot be considered distinct, but whatever that single thing is, it possesses both the function of living and the faculty of sensing. For this reason two Epicurean poets use 'mind' and 'soul' interchangeably. But those who say the two are distinct argue as follows: it can be understood that mind is one thing and soul another, from the fact that the mind can be extinguished while the soul remains sound — as commonly happens to the insane — and likewise from the fact that the soul is put to sleep by death, but the mind by ordinary sleep, and indeed in such a way that it not only does not know what it is doing or where it is, but is even deceived by the contemplation of unreal things. How this itself happens cannot be fully seen, though why it happens can be. For we can rest in no way unless the mind is held fast, occupied by the images of visions. The mind lies hidden, overwhelmed by sleep, like a fire smothered beneath ashes — which, if you stir it even slightly, blazes up again and, as it were, wakes. It is thus drawn off by phantom images until the limbs, steeped in slumber, are refreshed; for the body, while sensation is awake, though it lies motionless, is nevertheless not at rest, because sensation still burns and flickers within it like a flame, and holds all the joints bound to itself. But once the mind has been drawn away from its concentration to the contemplation of images, only then is the whole body finally relaxed into rest. The mind, meanwhile, is diverted by unseeing thought: driven inward by the darkness, it starts to keep company with only itself, and as it dwells upon whatever occupies its thinking, sleep creeps over it unnoticed, and thought itself gradually slides toward images close at hand — so that it begins also to 'see' the very things it had set before its own eyes. Then it proceeds further and finds for itself further diversions, so as not to interrupt the body's most wholesome rest. For just as the mind, by day, is diverted by true visions so that it does not fall asleep, so by night it is diverted by false ones so that it is not roused — for if it perceived no images at all, it would necessarily either stay awake or be sunk in unending death. The faculty of dreaming, then, has been granted by God as the reason for our sleeping, and indeed in common to all living creatures alike; but this above all is peculiar to man — that while God gave this faculty for the sake of rest, he reserved to himself the further power of teaching man future things through dreams. For histories too often bear witness that there have arisen dreams whose outcome was both immediate and remarkable, and the responses of our own seers have in part rested upon dreams. Hence dreams are neither always true nor always false, as Virgil himself attests, who held that there are two gates of dreams. But those that are false seem to occur merely for the sake of sleep, while those that are true are sent by God, so that through this revelation we may learn of some good or evil impending.
One further question that may be raised is this: does the soul come into being from the father, or is it rather the mother's, or does it spring from both together? For my own part, I claim the right to clear this matter of its uncertainty. None of these three options holds true, since souls are sown neither jointly from both nor from either parent alone. A body can indeed be born from bodies, since something is contributed from each; but a soul cannot come from souls, because from a thing so fine and incomprehensible nothing can be given off. And so the sowing of souls lies under the authority of one God alone: we are all, in the end, sprung from heavenly seed, and he is the same father to all, as Lucretius says. For from mortal things nothing but a mortal thing can be generated. Nor should a man be regarded as the father who transmitted, or breathed into a child, a soul of his own — for he has no sense of doing any such thing, and even if he did, he has no grasp in his mind of when or how it happens. From this it becomes evident that souls come not from parents at all, but from the one same God who fathers all, the sole holder of the law and principle governing birth, since he alone accomplishes it. For of the earthly father nothing is required except that, with a sensation of pleasure, he should emit or receive the moisture of the body in which lies the material of birth; beyond this task the man is helpless and can do nothing more, and that is why men wish for children to be born to them — because they themselves do not make them. All the rest belongs to God: namely, the conception itself, the shaping of the body, the breathing-in of the soul, the safe delivery, and whatever else afterward serves to preserve the human being. Our very breathing, our living, our thriving — these are gifts that belong to him. For besides the fact that by his kindness we remain whole in body, and that he furnishes us sustenance through various means, he also grants wisdom to man — something an earthly father can in no way give. That is also why fools are often born of the wise, and wise men of fools — a phenomenon some credit to destiny and the stars. Fate, however, is not a topic to be pursued here; let this much suffice: even if the stars do hold some efficacy over things, still everything is brought about by God, who made and ordered the stars themselves. Foolish, then, are those who strip this power from God and hand it over to his works. This heavenly and glorious gift of God, then — whether we use it or not — he willed to be in our own power; for once this had been granted, man was bound by a solemn pledge of virtue through which he could gain life. Great indeed is the power of man, great his reason, great his pledge: whoever does not fall away from it, and does not betray his own faith and devotion, is blessed — and, to put it briefly, must in the end be like God. For whoever measures man by the flesh is mistaken: this little body we are clothed in is merely man's housing. Man himself can be neither touched nor seen nor grasped, because he lies hidden within what is visible. If, in this life, he is soft and delicate as his lower reason demands — if, scorning virtue, he has surrendered himself to the desires of the flesh — he will fall and be pressed down into the earth. But if he defends readily and steadfastly the upright standing that is properly his, and does not become a slave to the earth he ought rather to tread down and conquer, he will earn everlasting life.
This much, Demetrianus, I have set out to you for now in few words, and perhaps more obscurely than the urgency of the subject and the occasion deserved. With this you must be content for the present, until you read more and better things, if heaven's favor comes to us. Then I shall exhort you to the teaching of true philosophy both more plainly and more truly. For I have resolved to commit to writing as much as I am able that bears on the condition of the blessed life — and indeed against the philosophers, since they are dangerous and formidable in confounding the truth. The astonishing power of their eloquence and the subtlety of their argument and disputation could easily deceive anyone; we shall refute them, partly with weapons of our own, partly with weapons drawn from their own quarrels among themselves, so that it will appear they introduced error rather than removed it. Perhaps you will wonder that I dare so great an undertaking. Shall we then allow the truth to be smothered or suppressed? I, for my part, would rather fall even under this burden. For if Marcus Tullius, the very model of eloquence itself, was often bested by men untrained and unskilled in speech — simply because they were striving for what was true — why should we despair that truth itself will prevail, by its own force and clarity, against deceptive and captious eloquence? Such men, to be sure, like to call themselves the truth's defenders — yet how can anyone argue for a matter he never mastered, or illuminate for others something he himself has failed to grasp? I seem to be promising something great, but it is a task that needs heaven's gift, that the ability and the time to carry through what I have proposed be granted to us. And if a wise man ought to desire life at all, then my one wish to go on living would be this: to achieve something deserving of that life, and something that brings benefit to my readers — if not toward eloquence, since the stream of eloquence in me runs thin, then at least toward living well, which is the thing most needed. Once that is accomplished, I shall reckon that I have lived enough and fulfilled the duty of a man, if my labor has set some men free from their errors and directed them onto the heavenly road.