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