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