Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Pour out all your poisons now, hurl every weapon of slander at this name — I will not stop repelling them, though soon enough they will be blunted by the exposition of our entire discipline. [2] But for the present I will wrench those very same charges off our own body and turn them back upon you; I will expose those same wounds of crime buried deep in you, so that you fall by your own swords and your own thrusts.
[3] First, then, as to the general accusation you level at us — desertion of the institutions of our ancestors — look again, and look harder, lest you find yourselves sharing that very crime with us. [4] For behold: throughout the whole of life and custom I recognize antiquity in you as corrupted — no, obliterated. Of your laws it has already been said above that you have buried them under fresh decrees and resolutions made from one day to the next. [5] As for the rest of the arrangement of human intercourse, it lies open for all to see how far you have departed from your forefathers — in dress, in bearing, in style, in diet itself, in speech itself; for the old ways you dismiss as rancid and cast aside. [6] Antiquity is shut out everywhere, in business, in office: your own authority has toppled the whole authority of your ancestors. [7] And what is more shameful still, you are forever praising the old times and nonetheless refusing them. By what perversity ought the ways of your ancestors to have been proved worthy of surviving among you, when you reject the very things you approve? [8] But even the one thing you seem to preserve and defend most faithfully as handed down from your forefathers — the very thing for which you chiefly demand us guilty of transgression, the thing that fuels the whole hatred of the Christian name, I mean the worship of the gods — even that, I will show, is being destroyed and despised by you in just the same way. [9] Except that it is not quite the same: for there is no reason to count us despisers of gods, since no one despises what he knows does not exist at all. What truly exists can be despised; what is nothing suffers nothing: so whatever gods do exist must, of necessity, suffer contempt at the hands of those who have them. [10] All the more are you burdened, then, believing and despising, worshiping and spitting upon, honoring and provoking, all at once.
[11] One can recognize this from the very start: first, since you worship some gods and not others, those you do not worship you certainly despise. Preferring one god cannot happen without insulting another, and no choice is ever made without a rejection; whoever picks one out of many has thereby scorned the one he did not pick. [12] "But so many and so great gods cannot possibly be worshiped by everyone." Well then, you despised them from that very first moment, not troubling yourselves, it seems, to set things up so that all of them could be worshiped.
[13] But surely, you say, those wisest and most prudent ancestors of yours, whose institutions you claim you cannot renounce, especially where your gods are concerned — even they are caught out as irreligious. [14] Call me a liar if they never once decreed that no general should dedicate a shrine he had vowed in war until the senate had approved it — as happened to Marcus Aemilius, who had vowed a temple to the god Alburnus. [15] For surely it is the height of impiety, indeed the height of insult, to make the honor of divinity hang on the whim and caprice of a human vote — so that a being is no god unless the senate permits him to be one! [16] Often, too, the censors leveled temples without even consulting the people; certainly the consuls, acting on the senate's authority, drove Father Liber and all his rites out — banishing him not merely beyond the city walls but clear across the whole Italian peninsula. [17] Varro records, moreover, that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were banned from the Capitol, and their altars torn down by the senate, only to be rebuilt by the sheer force of the mob. [18] Yet even so, the consul Gabinius, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely get the victims approved amid the crowd of the people, still gave more weight to the senate's ruling than to the pressure of the mob, and forbade the setting up of altars to Serapis and Isis because the senate had decreed nothing about them.
[19] So then, in your own ancestors, even if not under the name, you have the Christian sect all the same — men who neglected the gods. If I found you at least consistent in the honors you pay, I might grant you innocent of the charge of wounded religion; but instead I find that among you superstition and impiety have conspired together from the start. [20] For in what way are you found less religious? Your private gods, whom under the name Lares and Penates you consecrate in your homes, you subject to domestic license all the same — pawning them off, pledging them for sale, as need or whim dictates. [21] These sacrileges of household defiance would be more tolerable, were it not that their very smallness makes them all the more insulting. But the complaint against your private and domestic gods finds some small comfort in this: that in public you treat divinity even more shamefully and insultingly. [22] To begin with, the gods you have relegated to the auction spear you have handed over to the tax-farmers, listed among your public revenues and put out to bid every five years. So the temple of Serapis, so the Capitol itself, is put up for sale; divinity is auctioned off, leased out, by the very same auctioneer's cry, the very same collector's demand. [23] Yet fields burdened with tribute are counted cheaper, and men's heads assessed for tax are reckoned less noble — for these are the marks of captivity, of punishment; but the gods who pay more tribute are held more holy — no, rather, the holier they are held, the more tribute they pay! [24] Majesty is prostituted for profit, religion put up for sale in trade, sanctity begs for a lease; you exact a fee for the ground the temple stands on, for entry to the shrine, for the offerings, for the sacrificial victims; you sell divinity whole — it may not be worshiped for free; and in the end more comes back to the tax-farmers than to the priests!
[25] The insult of taxing your gods was not enough for you — an insult, of course, to be measured by the contempt it betrays — nor were you content merely to withhold honor from your gods; you must also cheapen whatever honor you do give them with some further indignity. [26] For what, exactly, do you do to honor them that you do not equally offer to your own dead? [27] You build temples for the gods — you build temples for the dead just the same. You raise altars for a god — you raise altars for the dead just the same. You inscribe the same lettering on their titles, you cast the same shapes onto their statues, according to whatever trade or business or age the person had: an old man is fashioned as Saturn, a beardless youth as Apollo, a maiden as Diana, a soldier is consecrated as Mars, and a blacksmith as Vulcan. [28] So it is no wonder that you slaughter the same victims for the dead as for the gods, and burn the same incense for both.
[29] Who could excuse such an outrage, one that in effect ranks the dead alongside the gods? Kings, indeed, even have priesthoods assigned to them, along with all the rest of the apparatus — ceremonial cars and chariots, couches spread for the gods and couches spread for the dead, holy days and games. [30] Clearly, since heaven is said to lie open to these men, this too is done not without insult to the gods — first, because it is unfitting that others be numbered among them, as though it were granted to these men to become gods after death; [31] second, because no man who watched such a thing openly and plainly before the people could swear it without perjury... unless indeed he held in contempt those very gods by whom he swore, taken up into heaven though they be — he no less than those who let him swear falsely by them. [32] For they themselves agree there is nothing behind their oaths — indeed, they go further and reward the man who openly scorns the avengers of perjury. [33] Yet how many among you are ever free of perjury? No, by now the danger of swearing falsely by the gods has simply vanished, since swearing by Caesar is held the more binding oath — which itself amounts to a further eclipse of your gods, since it is easier for those who swear falsely by Caesar to be punished than for anyone who swears falsely by Jupiter!
[34] Yet contempt is the more honorable thing, carrying with it a certain glory of pride; for it sometimes arises from confidence, or from an untroubled conscience, or from a natural loftiness of soul; but mockery — the more wanton it is, the more it marks itself out for the bite of insult. [35] Consider, then, how you are found to be mockers of your own divinities. I do not even speak of how you conduct your sacrifices — how you slaughter whatever beast is half-dead and wasting away, while from the fat and healthy ones you offer up the useless bits, the heads and hooves, the plucked-off feathers and bristles — scraps you would have thrown out at home anyway. [36] I pass over what will seem the doings of a greedy belly or a sacrilegious throat, matters that come close to your ancestors' own religion; and yet your most learned men, your most weighty men — weighty and wise, so far as weight and wisdom are thought to come from learning — are also invariably the most irreverent toward your gods, and their literature never tires of heaping upon the gods things either shameful, or empty, or false. [37] Let me begin with your own poet himself — he from whom all things flow, and every sea — to whom you have granted such honor that you have taken it directly out of your gods, by glorifying the man who made sport of them. [38] We still remember Homer: he, I think, is the one who treated divine majesty as a merely human affair, steeping the gods in human accidents and passions, pitting them against one another in what amount to gladiatorial matches decided by favoritism; [39] he wounds Venus with a mortal's arrow, he keeps Mars chained for thirteen months, very nearly to perish there; the same poet parades Jupiter as all but overwhelmed by the common rabble of heaven, or wrings tears from him over Sarpedon, or shows him wallowing in the filthiest indulgence with Juno, his lust further dressed up by a whole catalogue and recitation of his mistresses. [40] After him, is there a single poet who has not, on his master's authority, taken liberties against the gods, whether by reporting the truth or by inventing lies? Nor did the tragic or comic poets spare them either, never failing to put miseries and punishments into the gods' own mouths. [41] I say nothing of the philosophers, whom the pride of their austerity and the rigor of their discipline free from all fear — some even driven by a genuine breath of truth to rise up against the gods. [42] Socrates, for one, swears by the oak and the dog and the goat, precisely to insult them. And though he was condemned for this, the Athenians later repented of the condemnation and even punished his accusers, so that his testimony now stands restored — and I can turn that very fact against you: what is now condemned in us was, in his case, proved right. [43] Diogenes too made some sort of sport of Hercules, I forget what; and Varro, the Roman pen also called Diogenes, parades three hundred Jupiters — or should I say Jupiter-figures — without heads.
[44] The rest of your wanton wits carry on your amusements at the expense of the gods' disgrace as well. Just look among yourselves at the sacrilegious wit of the Lentuli and Hostilii — whether it is your mimes or your gods you are laughing at in their turns and jokes; and you take up the scripts of the stage with the greatest relish, scripts that spell out every filthiness attributed to the gods. [45] Majesties are debauched before your eyes in a polluted body; some infamous, degraded head puts on the mask of whatever god you please. The Sun mourns a son struck down by lightning while you sit there rejoicing; Cybele sighs after a disdainful shepherd while you feel no shame; and you sit through the singing of Jupiter's own funeral dirges.
[46] You are plainly more devout in the gladiators' arena, where, over human blood, amid the filth of punishments, your gods dance out their myths and their histories, doled out to condemned criminals — or where, in the persons of the gods themselves, the guilty are punished. [47] We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated; and a man who was burned alive had put on the role of Hercules; we have laughed at the noonday games' sport made of the gods, in which Dis, father and brother of Jupiter, drags off the corpses of gladiators with his mallet, in which Mercury, winged at the scalp and fitted with a fiery brand on his staff, tests with a hot iron the bodies already dead or only feigning death. [48] Every one of these things — and whoever could track down all the rest — if they disturb the honor owed to divinity, if they level the height of majesty, must surely be reckoned as contempt: contempt on the part of those who make a habit of doing them, and contempt on the part of those who sit and enjoy them. [49] I hardly know, then, whether your own gods have more cause to complain of you than of us. ... on the other side you flatter them, you buy back whatever offense you commit, and in the end you are free to do as you please with the gods you chose to invent. We, for our part, turn away from all of it entirely.
XI.