Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Now if magicians can produce phantasms and slander the souls of the dead already, if they crush boys' voices into oracular utterance, if they play off any number of miracles with the sleight-of-hand of showmen, if they even send dreams, holding as they do the standing power of angels and demons once invited in — the very power through which goats and tables have gotten into the fortune-telling business — how much more should that same power, acting on its own initiative and for its own account, strain every nerve to produce, for itself, what it merely supplies for someone else's trade! [2] Or if angels and demons work the same effects as your gods do, then where is the surpassing excellence of that divinity, which must surely be believed superior to every other power? Is it not more plausible to suppose that those who pass themselves off as gods are the very ones producing these effects that make others believed to be gods, rather than that gods exist on a par with angels and demons? [3] You draw the line, I suppose, by location, so that you count as gods those you nowhere else call gods except at their temples — so that a man is judged to rave one way if he flies over sacred towers, another way if he leaps over the neighbor's roof, and one force is pronounced at work in the man who slashes his genitals or his arms, another in the man who cuts his own throat. Compare the outcomes of the madness, and it is one and the same instigation.
[4] But so far this has been argument; now for the demonstration of the fact itself, by which we shall show that the two names denote one and the same quality. Let someone be produced right here, before your very tribunals, whom it is agreed a demon possesses; ordered by any Christian whatever to speak, that spirit will as readily confess itself a demon, telling the truth, as elsewhere it will call itself a god, telling a lie. [5] Let there likewise be brought forward one of those who are supposed to suffer the presence of a god — who, breathing in the fumes from the altars, conceive divinity out of the smell, who are cured by belching, who prophesy while gasping for breath. [6] Let that Heavenly Virgin herself, promiser of rains, let that very Aesculapius, discoverer of medicines — who on other days supplies life to men doomed to die, through his lazy underlings Thanatus and Asclepiodotus — unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, right there pour out the blood of that most insolent Christian!
[7] What could be plainer than this experiment? What proof more trustworthy? The plain truth stands out in the open; its own force attends it; there will be no room left for suspicion. You will call it magic, or some trick of that sort, only if your own eyes and ears allow you to. [8] But what objection can be raised against a thing demonstrated with such naked simplicity? If, on one hand, they are truly gods, why do the demons lie about themselves? Is it to do us a favor? Then your divinity is already subject to Christians, and it can hardly be reckoned divinity at all if it is subjected to a human being and, whenever it serves their own ends, to its own rivals. [9] But suppose instead that they are demons or spirits — why then do they elsewhere pretend to be gods? For just as those who are held to be gods would have refused to call themselves demons if they really were gods — to avoid stepping down from their majesty — so too these, whom you know outright to be demons, would not dare elsewhere to pass themselves off as gods, if there really were any gods at all whose names they were borrowing; they would surely fear to abuse the majesty of their unquestionably superior and fearsome betters. [10] So utterly nonexistent is that divinity you cling to, that if it existed, it would neither be claimed by demons in confession nor denied by the gods. Since, then, both sides converge on the same confession — denying that they themselves are gods — recognize that it is one single kind on both sides, namely demons.
[11] Now go looking for your gods; for what you had assumed to be gods you now know to be demons. And by these very same performances of ours, worked through these same gods of yours, you learn not only this — that they are neither gods themselves nor anyone else — but on the spot you also learn who is truly God, and whether he is one, and whether he is the one and only, whom we Christians profess, and whether he must be believed in and worshipped exactly as the faith and discipline of the Christians has laid down. [12] Let them say, right there, who this "Christ with his fable" is — whether a man of ordinary condition, or a magician, or one whose disciples stole him from the tomb after his death, or one who is now finally down among the dead, or rather not one who is in heaven and about to come from there with the shaking of the whole world, with the horror of the earth, with the wailing of everyone — except Christians — namely, God's power and God's Spirit, together with the Word, the Wisdom, and the Reason, and God's own Son. [13] Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh at it with you too; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from every age, with the body restored; let them say instead — if they dare — that this task before the tribunal has fallen by lot, by the agreement of Plato and the poets, to Minos and Rhadamanthus. [14] Let them at least refute the mark of their own disgrace and condemnation: let them deny that they are unclean spirits — a fact that ought to be obvious enough already from their diet of blood and smoke and the stinking pyres of cattle, and from the utterly filthy tongues of their own prophets; let them deny that, for their wickedness, they stand already condemned in advance to that same day of judgment along with all their worshippers and all their operations.
[15] And yet this whole dominion and power we hold over them rests on the mere naming of Christ and on reminding them of what awaits them, hanging over their heads, from God through the arbiter Christ. Dreading Christ within God and God within Christ, they submit themselves to those who serve God and Christ. [16] So it is that at our touch and our breath, at the mere thought and presentation of that fire, seized with terror, they even leave our bodies at our command, unwilling, in pain, and blushing with shame in your presence. [17] Believe them, when they speak the truth about themselves — you who believe them when they lie! No one lies to his own disgrace, but rather for his own honor. Testimony given against oneself deserves more trust than denial made in one's own favor. [18] These, in the end, are the testimonies your own gods habitually furnish to make Christians; the more we believe them, the more we believe in Christ as God simply by trusting them so completely. They themselves kindle confidence in our scriptures; they themselves build up the assurance of our hope. [19] You worship them, as far as I know, even at the cost of Christian blood. They would hardly want to lose such profitable, such obliging servants as you — nor would they want to be driven out by you Christians someday, if only, under a willing Christian's orders, they were allowed to lie their way out of proving the truth to you.