Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
"So," you say, "why do you complain that we persecute you, if you want to suffer, since you ought to love the very people through whom you get what you want?" We certainly do want to suffer -- but the way a soldier wants war. No one, of course, suffers gladly, since it necessarily means fear and danger; and yet he fights with all his strength, and when he wins, the very man who grumbled about the battle rejoices in it, because he gains both glory and spoils. For us the battle is being summoned before the tribunals, to fight there for the truth under threat of our lives. And the victory is winning the very thing you fought for. That victory carries both the glory of pleasing God and the spoils of living forever. But, you say, we are wrapped in flames and killed. Certainly -- once we have won. So we conquer when we are cut down; in the end we escape precisely when we are wrapped up for burning. You may call us now "faggot-men" and "stake-men," because we are bound to a half-axle stake and burned in a wreath of brushwood -- but this is the very dress of our victory, this is our palm-embroidered robe, this the chariot in which we ride in triumph.
So naturally we do not please the losing side -- that is exactly why we are reckoned desperate men, lost causes. But this "desperation" and "ruin" of yours is precisely what, in the matter of glory and fame, raises the standard of courage. Mucius of his own accord laid his right hand down upon the burning altar: what loftiness of spirit! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Etna: what vigor of mind! Some foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: what a proclamation of chastity! Regulus, so that one man should not live in place of many enemy captives, endured crucifixion over his whole body: what a brave man, a victor even in captivity! When Anaxarchus was being pounded to death in a mortar like grain, he said, "Pound, pound away at Anaxarchus's husk -- you are not pounding Anaxarchus!" What greatness of soul in a philosopher, joking even about his own death! I pass over those who bargained for praise by their own sword or some gentler kind of death. And look -- you yourselves crown contests of torture with garlands! An Attic prostitute, when her torturer had at last worn himself out, at last bit through her own tongue and hurled it straight into that furious despot's face, so that even had she wished, once beaten, to betray her fellow plotters, she would already have flung away, along with it, the very voice needed to name them. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what philosophy actually delivered, answered, "Contempt of death," and then, unmoved under the tyrant's whips, sealed his own verdict all the way to death. Indeed the whips of the Spartans, made all the sharper under the very eyes of encouraging relatives, confer as much honor on the household's endurance as blood they draw.
O permitted glory -- permitted because it is merely human! -- in which neither reckless presumption nor desperate persuasion counts as contempt of death and every kind of atrocity, in which one is allowed to suffer for country, for empire, for friendship as much as it is forbidden to suffer for God! And yet for all those people you cast statues, inscribe portraits, carve their titles for eternity. As far as monuments can manage it, you yourselves in a sense grant even the dead a kind of resurrection. Yet the man who hopes for a true resurrection from the true God, if he suffers for God -- he is insane!
Well then, go on with it, good governors -- much better in the eyes of the people if you sacrifice Christians to them -- torture us, rack us, condemn us, grind us down: your injustice is the proof of our innocence. That is why God allows us to suffer these things. Indeed, just recently, by condemning a Christian woman to the pimp rather than to the lion, you yourselves confessed that among us a stain on chastity is reckoned more atrocious than any punishment, any death. And yet nothing is gained by any refinement of your cruelty; it is rather a recruiting-lure for our sect. The more you mow us down, the more we become: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you exhort people to bear pain and death -- Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, Seneca in On Chance Happenings, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus -- and yet their words never win as many disciples as Christians win by teaching through deeds. That very obstinacy you reproach us with is itself the teacher. For who is not shaken by the sight of it into asking what lies inside the thing? And who, once he has inquired, does not draw near; and once he has drawn near, does not long to suffer, so as to buy up the whole grace of God, to secure full pardon from him by paying with his own blood? For all sins are forgiven in exchange for that. That is why we give thanks on the spot for your very sentences. Such is the rivalry between the divine order and the human: when you condemn us, God absolves us.