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