Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
What should one do with those who call it law when the torture-devices of ancient tyrants rage madly against the innocent? These men teach injustice and cruelty as their trade, and yet still they wish to be regarded as just and prudent — blind, dull men, ignorant of the facts and of the truth. Is righteousness so hateful to you, ruined minds, that you rank it among the worst crimes? Is innocence so despised among you that you judge it worthy not merely of a plain death, but count it the vilest of all offenses to have committed no offense, and to keep one's heart untouched by any contagion of wickedness? And since we are speaking here alongside the worshippers of the gods, let us do you some good through this conversation, for such is our law, our task, our religion. Should we strike you as wise, follow our example; should we strike you as fools, scorn us, laugh at us even, as you please — our foolishness does us good regardless. Why tear us to pieces? Why bring affliction upon us? Your wisdom is not something we envy; we prefer this foolishness, we embrace it, we believe it serves us to love you and to heap upon you, who hate us, everything we have. There is a passage in Cicero, not far from the truth, in the argument that Furius makes against justice. He asks: suppose there are two men, one of them excellent, most fair-minded, of the highest justice and singular good faith, the other marked by notorious wickedness and boldness — and suppose the state is so mistaken as to think the good man wicked, criminal, and vile, while judging the other, who is the worst of men, to be of the highest honesty and trustworthiness; and because of this universal opinion the good man is harassed and seized, his hands are cut off, his eyes are gouged out, he is condemned, bound, burned, driven into exile, reduced to want, and in the end is considered by everyone's judgment — even a fair one — the most wretched of all; while, on the contrary, that wicked man is praised, honored, loved by all, and all honors, all commands, all riches, all resources are heaped upon him from every side, so that he is judged by everyone's estimation the best of men and most deserving of every good fortune — who, then, would be so mad as to hesitate over which of the two he would rather be? Indeed, he framed this example almost as a prophecy of the evils that righteousness would one day bring upon us, and of the shape those evils would take. For all these things our people suffer, through the depravity of those who err. Look at the state — indeed at the entire world — trapped in precisely this delusion: hunting down, torturing, condemning, and killing men who are good and just, treating them as if wickedness and impiety were their crimes. As for his saying that no one is so mad as to hesitate over which he would rather be, he — arguing as one who spoke against justice — meant that the wise man would rather be wicked with a good reputation than good with a bad one. But far be such madness from us, that we should prefer the false to the true. Shall the quality of our goodness depend on the errors of the crowd rather than on our own conscience and God's judgment? Or will any happiness ever entice us to prefer a false goodness joined to every prosperity over a true one joined to every misfortune? Let kings keep their kingdoms to themselves, the rich their riches, as Plautus says, and the prudent their prudence; let them leave us our foolishness, which is shown to be wisdom by this very fact, that they begrudge it to us. For only the greatest fool would envy another fool. Yet these men are shrewd enough to withhold envy from fools; the very diligence and alarm with which they pursue us proves they know we are no fools at all. For why should they rage so cruelly, unless because they fear that as righteousness grows stronger day by day, they will be left alone with their decaying gods? So then, if wisdom belongs to the worshippers of the gods and folly to us, what reason have they to dread that fools could ever lure the wise astray?
Since our number is always increasing from among the worshippers of the gods, and is never diminished even in the very time of persecution — for while men can sin and be defiled by sacrifice, they cannot be turned away from God, since truth prevails by its own strength — who, then, could be so witless, so utterly sightless, as to miss where true wisdom resides? Malice and fury, however, keep them from seeing it, and they judge as fools the very people who, though able to escape punishment, choose torture and death instead — even though this alone should show them that a conviction shared, with a single unanimous will, by so many thousands across the entire world cannot be folly. For if it is women who fall through the weakness of their sex — for sometimes they call this a womanish or old-wives' superstition — surely men are wise. If boys, if the young are unwise through inexperience of age, surely the mature and the old have steady judgment. If one city is foolish, all the other countless cities cannot be foolish too. If one province, one nation lacks prudence, all the rest must certainly have understanding of what is right. But since this divine law has been embraced from the rising of the sun to its setting, and every sex, every age, every people and region serves God with one and equal spirit, and everywhere the identical endurance, the identical scorn for death, is on display, they should have grasped that a cause defended all the way to death is not defended without reason, and that something solid and foundational underlies a religion which injury and harassment never dissolve, but only ever strengthen and confirm. Here again their malice betrays itself: they imagine that defiling men amounts to demolishing God's religion completely, yet reconciliation with God remains open, and not a single worshipper of his is so corrupt that, once given the chance, he fails to come back and appease him — often with even deeper devotion than before. Consciousness of wrongdoing together with dread of punishment tends to deepen a person's religion, and a faith rebuilt through repentance grows sturdier still. If, then, they themselves believe that even when they think their gods angry, these can be appeased by gifts, sacrifices, and incense, why then do they think our God so harsh, so implacable, that a man who has been forced and unwilling to pour a libation to their gods should now seem incapable of being a Christian? Unless perhaps they think that a mind once defiled will so change that men will now begin willingly to do what they did under torture. Who would willingly take up a duty that began in injury? What man, looking down at the marks scoring his own flesh, would not despise those gods even more fiercely, for whose sake he carries the eternal marks of his punishment, tokens pressed into his own flesh? So it comes about that, once peace has been granted by God, all who fled return, and, because of the miracle of such courage, a new people besides comes over to us. For when the crowd sees men torn apart by every kind of torture and, amid exhausted executioners, keeping unconquered endurance, they conclude, rightly, that unanimity among so vast a number cannot be meaningless, that persistence unto death cannot be pointless, and that no endurance could master such enormous suffering without divine aid. Robbers and men of strong body cannot endure such lacerations; they cry out and groan, for they are overcome by pain, since they lack an inspired endurance; but our people — to say nothing of the men — our children and our weak women silently overcome their torturers, and not even fire can wring a groan from them. Let the Romans go and boast of Mucius or Regulus, of whom the one handed himself over to the enemy to be killed, shame at the thought of surviving as a prisoner having driven him to it, and the other, seized by the enemy, when he saw he could not escape death, thrust his hand into the fire, to satisfy by his own act the enemy he had meant to kill, and by that punishment won a pardon he had not deserved. Behold, the weaker sex and fragile age endure to be torn apart in their whole body and burned, not from necessity — for they might avoid it if they wished — but from will, because they trust in God. This is true courage, which the philosophers too, boasting, parade not in fact but in empty words, claiming that a sober, steadfast man is defined precisely by refusing to let any terror shift his resolve, and that torment and death are worth enduring sooner than betraying one's faith, walking away from one's obligation, or letting dread of dying or sharp pain drive one into wrongdoing — unless perhaps Horace seems to them to rave in his lyric verses, when he says: the man just and firm of purpose is shaken in his settled mind neither by the fury of citizens bidding what is wrong, nor by the face of a threatening tyrant. Nothing truer could be said, if this is applied to those who refuse no torture, no death, rather than turn aside from faith and justice, who tremble neither at tyrannical commands nor at the swords of governors, so as to keep from defending, with steady mind, true and solid liberty — which alone the wise man must guard in this matter. For who is so insolent, so arrogant, as to forbid me to lift my eyes to heaven, or to impose on me the necessity either of worshipping what I do not wish, or of not worshipping what I wish? What would be left to us further, if even this, which ought to be done by will, were wrenched from us by another's lust? No one will accomplish that, if we have any of the courage needed to despise death and pain. If we hold to this constancy, why are we judged fools for doing what the philosophers praise? Rightly, then, does Seneca charge men with inconsistency when he says: they consider it the highest virtue to have a great spirit, and yet they hold for a madman the man who despises death — which is surely the height of perversity. Yet these devotees of empty religions level this very accusation out of the same blindness that keeps them from grasping who the true God is — those whom the Erythraean Sibyl calls deaf and senseless, that is, unable either to hear or to perceive divine things, but fearing and worshipping earth shaped by their own fingers.
As for the reason why they think the wise foolish, there is good cause for it — since their mistake is not baseless — a point we must lay out carefully for them, so that, should it prove possible, they might finally see where they have gone wrong. Justice by its very nature has a certain appearance of folly, which I can confirm by both divine and human testimonies. Yet nothing may be gained with such men unless, drawing on the very authorities they themselves accept, we show them this: justice, inseparable as it is from genuine wisdom, cannot belong to anyone who does not also appear foolish. Carneades, philosopher of the Academic school, whose force in argument, whose eloquence, whose sharpness of mind, whoever does not know for himself will learn from the report of Cicero or of Lucilius, in whom Neptune, arguing about a most difficult matter, shows that it cannot be explained — not even if Carneades himself, sent back from the underworld, took it up — when he was sent as ambassador from Athens to Rome, he argued at length about justice, with Galba and Cato the Censor, the greatest orators of that time, listening. But he himself overturned his own argument the next day with a contrary argument, and demolished the justice he had praised the day before — and this was no philosopher's steady, weighty conviction, but rather a rhetorical drill in which he took up either side of the question. This he was accustomed to do, so that he could refute others who asserted whatever they pleased. That argument by which justice is overthrown is recalled by Lucius Furius in Cicero — I suppose because he was discussing the republic, so as to bring in a defense and praise of justice, without which he thought the republic could not be governed. But Carneades, in order to refute Aristotle and Plato, the champions of justice, gathered together in that first speech everything that was said on behalf of justice, so that he might then overturn it, as he did. Toppling a rootless justice presented no difficulty at all, given that no philosopher anywhere on earth then possessed any clear grasp of its nature or its kind. And would that so many and such great men had had as much wisdom and as much knowledge, along with their eloquence and spirit, to carry out a defense of the highest virtue, whose origin lies in religion and whose principle lies in fairness! But those who did not know the first part could not hold the second either. My aim first is to lay out, briefly and to the point, what justice actually is, making clear thereby that the philosophers never grasped it and so could not defend a thing they scarcely understood. Although justice embraces all the virtues together, still there are two that are its chief elements, which cannot be torn or separated from it: piety and fairness. For faith, temperance, honesty, innocence, integrity, and other such things can exist, whether by nature or by ancestral custom, in men who do not know justice — as has always been the case; for the ancient Romans, who used to boast of their justice, were in fact boasting of those virtues which, as I said, can proceed from justice yet be separated from its very source. But piety and fairness are, as it were, its veins, for the whole of justice consists of these two springs; yet its head and origin lie in the first, and all its force and reason lie in the second. Piety, moreover, is nothing other than the knowledge of God, in the very terms Trismegistus rightly gave it, a definition we have noted before in another place. If, then, piety is to know God, and the sum of that knowledge is to worship him, then whoever does not hold to the religion of God certainly does not know justice. For how can one know that virtue itself, who does not know whence it arises? Plato indeed spoke much of the one God, from whom he says the world was established, but nothing of religion — for he had dreamed of God, not come to know him. But if Plato himself, or anyone else, wished to carry out a defense of justice, his first task should have been tearing down the cults of the gods, seeing that they stand opposed to piety. And because Socrates attempted to do just this, he was thrown into prison, making plain, even then, the fate awaiting anyone who would champion genuine justice while devoting himself solely to the one God. The other part of justice is fairness: I mean by fairness not merely judging well, which is itself praiseworthy in a just man, but making oneself equal with others — what Cicero calls equability. For God, who both begets men and breathes life into them, willed all to be equal, that is, alike; he set the same condition of living for all, brought all forth for wisdom, promised immortality to all; no one is excluded from his heavenly gifts. For just as he divides his one light equally among all, sends forth springs for all, provides food for all, grants all the sweetest rest of sleep, so he grants fairness and virtue to all alike. No one before him is slave, no one master; for if the same father belongs to all, we are all free by equal right. No one is poor before God except one who lacks justice; no one rich except one who is full of virtues; no one holds distinction unless goodness and innocence mark his character; no one most illustrious except one who has performed abundant works of mercy; no one most perfect except one who has fulfilled every degree of virtue. That is why justice eluded both Romans and Greeks alike: they maintained a graded hierarchy among men, running upward from poor to wealthy, from the lowly to the powerful, and from ordinary citizens clear up to the towering authority of kings. For where all are not equal, there is no fairness, and inequality itself excludes justice, whose whole force lies in this, that it makes equal those who have come to the same condition of this life by an equal lot.
When, then, these two springs of justice are altered, all virtue and all truth are destroyed, and justice itself withdraws again to heaven. That is why that good discovered by the philosophers is not true, because they did not know either whence it arose or what it accomplished — a thing revealed to no people other than our own. Someone may say: are there not among you as well some poor, some rich, some slaves, some masters? Is there no difference at all between individuals? None — nor is there any other reason why we call one another by the name of brothers, except that we believe ourselves equal. It is because we weigh everything human by spirit rather than by body that, whatever differences exist among bodies, no one among us remains a slave in our eyes; instead we treat and address such men as brothers in spirit and fellow-servants in faith. Wealth likewise confers no true distinction, except where it lets a person shine more brightly through virtuous deeds. Possessing riches is not what makes a man rich; putting them to use in acts of justice is; and those who seem poor are nonetheless rich in this, that they are not in need and desire nothing. Although, then, we are equal — free and slave, rich and poor — in humility of spirit, before God we are distinguished by virtue: each person is the more exalted the more just he is. For if justice consists in making oneself equal even to one's inferiors — though even in this alone one excels, in that one has made oneself equal to those beneath — yet if one behaves not merely as an equal but even as a lesser, one will certainly attain, by God's judgment, a far higher degree of dignity. For indeed, in this worldly life, since all things are brief and perishable, men set themselves above one another and contend over rank — than which nothing is more shameful, nothing more arrogant, nothing further removed from the reasoning of wisdom; for all these earthly things are contrary to the things of heaven. For just as the wisdom of men is the height of folly before God, and folly, as I have taught, is the height of wisdom, so before God he is humble and lowly who has been conspicuous and exalted on earth. For, to say nothing of the fact that these present goods of earth, to which great honor is given, are contrary to virtue and enervate the vigor of the mind, what nobility, what wealth, what power can ever be secure, when God can make even kings themselves lower than the lowest? And so God, taking counsel for us, set this among his divine precepts above all: whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. The wholesome force of this precept teaches that whoever has made himself plain and shown himself humble among men will be reckoned before God as excellent and distinguished. Nor is that saying false which is found in Euripides to this effect: what is here considered evil, this is good in heaven.