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