Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Let those who murder souls—whether their own or someone else's—come to understand what an unpardonable crime they are committing: first, that in slaving for the most depraved demons (beings God has sentenced to endless punishment) they are slitting their own throats; and second, that they will not let others worship God either, but push people toward deadly rites and work as hard as they can to make sure no soul anywhere on earth remains whole enough, in its proper condition, to look up toward heaven. What can I call them but wretches who take orders from the very robbers who prey on them, imagining these robbers to be gods? They know nothing of their condition, origin, names, or rationale, yet cling to a common belief, straying willingly and indulging their own foolishness. Ask them for grounds behind this conviction and they have none to offer; instead they flee to the verdicts of their forebears — those men were wise, those men approved it, those men knew what was best — stripping themselves of their own senses and giving up reason altogether in favor of trusting someone else's mistakes. Tangled in ignorance of everything this way, they know neither themselves nor their own gods. If only they were content to wander and play the fool alone! Instead they haul others into partnership in their own ruin, as though the destruction of many might somehow console them. It is precisely this ignorance that makes them so vicious toward wise people, all while pretending concern for them, as though they merely wanted to steer them back to sound sense. Do they try to bring this about through discussion, through offering some reasoned account? Not in the least — instead through violence and torture. What astonishing, blind insanity! A wicked mind gets blamed on those trying to hold onto their faith, while a good one gets credited to the torturers! Does wickedness of mind belong to the people being torn apart against every principle of humanity and right, or rather to the ones inflicting on innocent bodies acts that not even the cruelest brigands, the angriest enemies, or the most savage barbarians ever committed? Do they lie to themselves so thoroughly that they swap and reverse the very labels of good and evil? Why not, then, call daylight night, and the sun darkness? It is, after all, the same brazenness to stick the name 'wicked' on the good, 'foolish' on the wise, and 'impious' on the just. So then—if they trust at all in their philosophy or their oratory—let them take up arms and knock down our case, if they can; let them close ranks with us and go through every point one at a time. It falls to them to mount a defense of their own gods, so that when our cause gains ground—as it keeps gaining ground day by day—they are not left abandoned along with their shrines and their absurd spectacles. And since brute force gets them nowhere (the more our religion is squeezed, the larger it grows), let them proceed instead by argument and persuasion. Let the priests step into the open—lesser and greatest alike—the flamens, the augurs, the sacrificing kings too, and whoever else serves as priest or overseer of these cults; let them summon us to a public gathering, urge us to take up worship of their gods, convince us that there are many divine beings whose will and oversight govern everything, demonstrate how the rites and the gods themselves first came down to mortal hands, spell out their source and their logic, lay out what reward comes from honoring them and what penalty from neglecting them, explain why they want human worship, and what benefit our devotion brings them, supposing they are indeed blessed beings — and let them establish every bit of it not through their own say-so (a mortal's word carries no real weight) but through some divine testimony, the way we do. There's no call for force or wrongdoing here, since religion cannot be coerced; the business has to be conducted through words rather than blows, so that it remains a matter of free choice. Let them draw the blade of their own intellects: if their reasoning holds true, let it be proven. We stand ready to listen, provided they actually teach; but silence earns no trust from us, just as savagery earns no surrender. Let them follow our example and lay out the reasoning behind the whole matter: we, after all, are not luring anyone in, whatever charge they level at us—we instruct, we demonstrate, we make it plain. So no one is held among us who does not wish to stay—a person lacking devotion and faith is of no use to God anyway—and yet nobody leaves, because truth itself keeps hold of them. Let them teach along these same lines, if they have any real confidence in their truth; let them speak up, open their mouths, and dare, I say, to debate something of this sort with us. Then their error and foolishness will be mocked, sure enough, by the very old women they scorn and by children among our own people. For seeing as they are learned enough to know from books the lineage of their gods, their exploits, their reigns, their deaths, their very graves, and to know that the rites into which they get initiated sprang either from human deeds, or from chance happenings, or even from deaths — it is unbelievable lunacy to regard as gods beings they don't dare claim were never mortal. And should they be shameless enough to deny it anyway, their own books and those of their own people expose them, and the very rites of initiation themselves prove them wrong. Let them recognize, then, from this very fact how wide a gulf separates truth from falsehood: eloquent as they are, they cannot persuade anyone, while the untrained and unlettered manage it easily, because the facts and the truth speak on their own. So why the savagery? Only so that, in trying to shrink their own folly, they end up enlarging it. Butchery and piety belong to entirely different worlds, and truth can no more be paired with force than justice can with cruelty. And they rightly dare not teach anything about their own sacred matters, for fear of being laughed at by our people and abandoned by theirs. For the ordinary crowd, whose judgment tends to be plain and unspoiled, would condemn those mysteries the moment it learned they were set up in memory of dead men, and would go looking for something truer to worship instead. That is why crafty men built trustworthy secrecy into these rites, so ordinary people would never learn what it is they are actually worshiping. Since we ourselves are well acquainted with their teachings, why do they refuse to trust us—people who know both sides—or resent us, for having chosen truth over falsehood? 'But,' they insist, 'the publicly established rites must be defended.' Ah, how upright an intention lies behind the wretches' mistake! They sense, rightly, that nothing among human affairs outranks religion and that it deserves to be defended with the utmost energy—but just as they are wrong about religion itself, so too they are wrong about how to defend it. The proper defense of religion lies in dying, not killing; in endurance, not cruelty; in loyalty, not crime — the first set belongs to bad men, the second to good, and religion by its nature has to be a matter for the good, not the wicked. For if you try to defend religion with blood, with torment, with evil, it will not be defended at all—it will be stained and violated instead. Nothing depends more entirely on free choice than religion; once the worshiper's heart turns away, it has already been taken away, already reduced to nothing. The sound approach, then, is to defend religion by endurance, or by death; keeping faith in that manner both pleases God directly and lends religion its authority. For if a soldier in this earthly service keeps faith with his king through some outstanding act — becoming more valued and dearer to him should he go on living, or, should he die, winning the highest glory for having fallen for his commander — how much more must faith be kept toward the commander of everyone, God, who is able to pay virtue's reward not only to the living but to the dead as well? The worship owed to God, then, being a form of heavenly service, calls for the deepest devotion and loyalty. How, after all, could God love a worshiper who does not love him back, or grant whatever a suppliant asks, when that person approaches prayer with neither a sincere heart nor proper attention? Yet when these people come to sacrifice, they bring their gods nothing personal or heartfelt—no integrity of mind, no reverence, no fear. Once their empty sacrifices are done, they leave their whole religion behind in the temple, right where they found it, taking nothing of it away and bringing nothing back. That is why cults of this kind can neither make anyone good nor remain steady and unchanging. People are easily led away from them, then, because nothing there teaches anything useful for living, for wisdom, or for faith. What, really, is the superstition surrounding those gods? What strength does it have? What discipline, what origin, what logic, what foundation, what substance? Where is it headed, or what does it promise, such that a person could keep faith with it and defend it bravely? In it I see nothing but a ritual that concerns fingers alone. Our own religion, by contrast, stands firm, solid, and unchanging for this reason: it instills justice, it never leaves us, it lives entirely within the worshiper's mind, and it treats the mind itself as the offering. There, all that is demanded is animal blood, smoke, and a pointless libation; here, a good mind, a clean heart, an innocent life. There, all comers are welcome without distinction — shameless adulteresses, brazen madams, indecent prostitutes; there come gladiators, robbers, thieves, poisoners, praying for nothing but to get away with their crimes. What does a bandit at sacrifice ask, or a gladiator, except the chance to kill? What does the poisoner ask, but to succeed at deceiving? What does the prostitute ask, but to sin as often as possible? What does the adulteress ask, but her husband's death, or the covering-up of her shame? What does the madam ask, but to strip many people of their belongings? What does the thief ask, but to steal more? Here, though, there is no room even for a mild, ordinary sin, and anyone who comes to sacrifice with an unclean conscience hears God's own threat against him — God, who sees into the heart's hidden corners, who is forever the enemy of sin, who demands justice, who insists on faith. Where, in this, is there any room for a wicked mind or a wicked prayer? But those poor souls cannot even grasp, from their own crimes, how evil what they worship really is, since they come to pray defiled by every kind of vice and imagine they have sacrificed piously simply by washing their skin — as if any river could rinse away the lusts locked inside a chest, or any sea could cleanse them. How much better it would be to wash the mind instead, which is what gets soiled by evil desires, and to sweep away every vice with a single bath of virtue and faith! Whoever manages that is clean enough, no matter how filthy and stained a body he carries around.
These people, though, not knowing either what deserves worship or how to go about it, stumble blindly and foolishly into the opposite error. So they worship their own enemies, appeasing with sacrificial victims the very robbers and killers who prey on them, and they lay their own souls on loathsome altars to be burned right along with the incense. In an astonishing blindness of mind, these wretches even grow angry that others are not perishing alongside them. What could beings that cannot see the sun possibly see? As though, if they really were gods, they would need human assistance against those who scorn them. So why be angry with us, if their gods can do nothing anyway? Except that in doubting their gods' power, they themselves undermine those gods — making them more irreverent than people who worship nothing at all. Cicero, in his Laws, when instructing that sacrifices be approached in purity, wrote: bring devotion, and leave wealth aside; whoever acts otherwise will answer to God as his own avenger. And rightly so: it makes no sense to lose confidence in a god whom you worship precisely on the grounds that you consider him powerful. For how could he avenge a wrong done to his worshiper if he cannot even avenge one done to himself? It is worth asking them, then, exactly whom they think they are helping by forcing reluctant people to sacrifice. The very people being coerced? But nothing forced on someone unwilling counts as a favor. 'But,' they say, 'one must look after even the unwilling, since they don't know what's good for them.' Why, then, do they harass, torture, and maim so brutally, if they truly want these people safe? Or where does such an impious piety come from, that leads them to ruin, in wretched ways, or cripple the very people they claim to want helped? Or is it really done for the gods' benefit? But a sacrifice squeezed out of someone unwilling is no sacrifice at all. Unless it comes freely and from the heart, it is a curse, whenever people are driven to it through outlawing, abuse, prison, and torture. If these really are gods who get worshiped this way, then this alone is reason enough not to worship them — that they want to be worshiped like this — clearly deserving human loathing, when their libation comes mixed with tears, with groaning, with blood pouring from every limb. We, by contrast, do not demand that anyone worship our God — who belongs to everyone whether they like it or not — against his will, nor do we grow angry with someone who fails to worship him. We trust instead in his majesty, which is as capable of avenging contempt shown toward him as it is of avenging the toils and wrongs done to his own servants. And so, when we endure unspeakable treatment, we do not resist even with a word, but hand vengeance over to God — unlike those who want to be seen as defenders of their own gods and lash out savagely against anyone who does not worship them. From this it becomes clear how little good there is in worshiping these gods, since people ought to have been drawn toward the good by goodness, not by evil; but because that whole business is evil, the service rendered to it lacks any good as well. 'But,' they insist, 'people who undermine religions deserve punishment.' Do we undermine religion any worse than the Egyptian people, who worship the most degrading shapes of beasts and livestock, and even revere as gods things too shameful to name? Do we do it worse than those very same people, who claim to worship gods and yet mock them publicly and disgracefully, even allowing comic farces about them to be staged amid laughter and delight? What sort of religion is this, or how much majesty ought we credit to something worshiped in temples and ridiculed on stage? And the people who do this pay no price for insulting the divine — they walk away honored and praised instead. Do we undermine religion worse than certain philosophers, who claim there are no gods whatsoever, and that everything that happens arose spontaneously, purely by chance? Worse than the Epicureans, who grant that gods exist but deny they care about anything, deny that they get angry, deny that gratitude moves them at all? By saying this they effectively convince people the gods deserve no worship whatsoever, seeing as they pay no attention to worshipers and feel no anger toward non-worshipers. Furthermore, when they argue against fear of the gods, their whole aim is simply to make sure nobody fears them at all. And yet all of this gets a willing hearing from people and gets argued without any consequence.
So it isn't really because we fail to worship their gods that they rage against us — plenty of others fail to worship them too — but because truth rests with us, and truth, as the saying goes quite rightly, breeds hatred. What conclusion can we draw, then, except that they have no idea what is happening to them? They are driven on by a blind, senseless rage that we can perceive clearly, though they themselves remain unaware of it. It is not truly the men doing the persecuting — men who have no genuine grievance against the innocent — but rather corrupted, ruined spirits, beings to whom the truth is both familiar and hateful, that worm their way into these people's minds and goad the unwitting into rage. For as long as peace prevails among God's people, these spirits shy away from the righteous and dread them; but once they take hold of human bodies and torment human souls, they get bound by solemn charge from those very people and are chased off by the name of the true God. On hearing that name they shake, cry out, declare that they are being burned and beaten, and when questioned about who they are, when they arrived, how they crept into the person, they confess it all. The divine name's very force racks and mangles them until exile is all that is left to them. That treatment, the blows and the threats alike, leaves them nursing an unending hatred for holy and upright men. And since they cannot harm these men directly on their own, they turn public hatred against those they find such a burden, unleashing whatever cruelty they can manage, aiming either to wear down their faith through suffering or, failing that, to wipe them off the earth entirely, so no one remains able to hold their wickedness in check. A counter-argument is obvious to me, and I won't pretend otherwise: someone could object, 'That God of yours, the one and mighty one, whom you yourself call ruler of all things and master of everyone — why does he tolerate such treatment instead of defending and repaying his worshipers? And why do those who withhold honor from him end up rich, powerful, and content, holding rank and authority, with everyone else bowing to their rule?' An explanation for this point too must be given, so no misunderstanding lingers. For above all, the reason people conclude that God's religion carries no real power is that they get misled by the appearance of earthly, present-day advantages — things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the mind's true welfare. Seeing the just go without these things while the unjust swim in them, they judge the worship of God to be empty, since they can't detect those goods present within it, and they judge the pagan rites to be genuine, because worshipers of those gods enjoy wealth, rank, and kingdoms. But people who hold this view fail to look deeply enough into what actually constitutes a human being — a power and reasoning that resides entirely in the mind, not the body. They see nothing beyond what meets the eye — the body, in other words. And since the body can be handled by eye and hand alike, it is weak, breakable, mortal; and to it belong all those goods that people desire and marvel at — wealth, rank, command — because these bring pleasure to the body, and so they crumble just as readily as the body does. The soul, though — the one place where the human being truly resides — is not exposed to the eyes, and so its goods cannot be seen either, since they rest in virtue alone; and it must therefore be as stable, steady, and everlasting as virtue itself, in which the soul's good is found.