Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
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.