Theophilus to Autolycus
Writers Who Flay the Air
Theophilus to Autolycus, greeting.
Writers like to turn out great stacks of books for the sake of a reputation — some about gods, some about wars, some about dates, some about useless legends and the rest of that wasted effort. That is the very thing you yourself have been busy with up to now, and you do not shrink from putting up with the labor of it. Yet although you have talked with me, you still consider the word of truth to be nonsense, and you suppose that our writings are recent and newly made. So I too will not shrink from the labor. God helping me, I will set out for you in summary how old our books are, making you a memorandum in a few words, so that you will not shrink from reading it, and so that you may recognize the drivel of the writers who wrote everything else.
Writers Who Never Saw What They Wrote About
Men who write ought to have been eyewitnesses of the things they assert, or else to have learned them accurately from people who did see them. Men who write about what nobody can check are, in a manner of speaking, flaying the air.
What good did it do Homer to write up the Trojan war and take in so many readers? Or Hesiod, his catalogue of the birth of the gods he names? Or Orpheus, his three hundred and sixty-five gods — the ones he throws out at the end of his life, saying in his Testaments that there is one God? What did Aratus gain by drawing the sphere of the world’s circle, or anyone else who said the same things, except a reputation among men — and they did not even get as much of that as they deserved. And what truth did any of them ever speak?
What good did their tragedies do Euripides and Sophocles, or the other tragic poets? Or their comedies, Menander and Aristophanes and the other comic poets? Or their histories, Herodotus and Thucydides? Or the inner sanctuaries and the Pillars of Heracles, Pythagoras? Or Cynic philosophy, Diogenes? What did Epicurus gain by laying it down that there is no providence, or Empedocles by teaching that there are no gods, or Socrates by swearing by the dog and the goose and the plane tree, and by Asclepius who was struck by lightning, and by the spirits he called on? And what did he die willingly for? What reward did he hope to get after death, and of what kind? What good did his own scheme of training do Plato, or the rest of the philosophers their doctrines? I will not count them all up; there are too many of them. We say these things in order to show how useless and how godless their thinking was.
Every one of them fell in love with an empty, worthless reputation, and so they neither knew the truth themselves nor turned anyone else toward it. What they said convicts them, since they contradicted each other, and most of them pulled down their own teachings. They did not merely overturn one another; some of them actually cancelled their own doctrines, so that their reputation ended in disgrace and stupidity — men of sense condemn them. Either they spoke about gods and then later taught that there are no gods; or, if they spoke about how the world came to be, they ended by saying that everything came about of itself; or they spoke about providence and then laid it down all over again that the world is not watched over by providence.
And what about this? They set out to write about dignity — and taught people to practice indecency and sexual immorality and adultery, and brought in loathsome acts that cannot be named. They announce that their own gods led the way in unspeakable couplings and in monstrous meals. Who does not sing of Kronos eating his own children, and of his son Zeus swallowing Metis down and getting a filthy dinner ready for the gods, with a lame smith, one Hephaestus, waiting on them, as they say? Or how Zeus not only married Hera, his own sister, but also used his foul mouth on her in a way that cannot be spoken of? The rest of his deeds, as many as the poets sing, you very likely know already. Why should I go on listing what they say about Poseidon and Apollo, or Dionysus and Heracles, or Athena the bosom-lover and Aphrodite the shameless, when we have given a more careful account of them elsewhere?
The Charges Brought Against Us
There would have been no need for me to knock any of this down, except that I see you still hesitating about the word of truth. You are a sensible man, and you put up with fools cheerfully. Otherwise you would not have been stirred by senseless people into being led off by empty talk and into trusting a rumor that got there ahead of us — godless mouths slandering us falsely, us who worship God and are called Christians. They say that all our wives are held in common and that we live in indiscriminate coupling, that we even have sex with our own sisters, and, most godless and most savage of all, that we lay hands on human flesh. They say too that our teaching has only just come along, that we have nothing to put forward as proof of our truth or of our teaching, and that what we say is foolishness.
What I wonder at most is you. In everything else you are diligent, a man who investigates every question — and you listen to us carelessly. If it were possible for you, you would not shrink from spending the night in the libraries.
Since you have read so much, then, what did you make of what is in Zeno and Diogenes and Cleanthes — everything their books contain, teaching men to eat human beings? Fathers are to be boiled and eaten by their own children; and if anyone refuses, or throws away any portion of that revolting food, the one who would not eat is himself to be devoured. Alongside these there is a saying still more godless, the one from Diogenes, who teaches children to bring their own parents for sacrifice and eat them. And what about the historian Herodotus? Does he not tell the tale of Cambyses, who slaughtered the children of Harpagus, boiled them, and set them before their father for a meal? He tells the same kind of tale about the Indians, that fathers are eaten there by their own children.
What godless teaching in the men who wrote such things down — or rather, who taught them! What impiety and godlessness in them! What minds, in men who philosophized so exactly and who advertise philosophy! The men who laid down these doctrines have filled the world with impiety.
On lawless conduct, nearly everyone who has wandered into the chorus of philosophy has spoken with one voice. Plato first — the one who seems to have philosophized with more dignity than the rest — lays it down explicitly, after a fashion, in the first book of the work entitled Republic, that all wives ought to be held in common. He uses as his precedent the son of Zeus who was lawgiver of the Cretans, so that under this pretext a great many children would be born from such unions, and so that men who were grieving might be consoled — supposedly — by intercourse of that kind.
Epicurus, along with teaching that there are no gods, also advises men to have sex with their own mothers and sisters, and that in defiance of the laws forbidding it. Solon legislated plainly on this very point, so that children would be born lawfully from a married father and not be born of adultery — so that no one would honor as his father a man who was not his father, or dishonor the man who really was his father, not knowing him. The other laws of the Romans and the Greeks forbid such things too. Why, then, do Epicurus and the Stoics lay it down that a man should sleep with his sister and mount other males? They have filled libraries with such teachings, so that this lawless coupling is learned from boyhood. And why should I wear myself out any longer over them, when they announce the same things about the beings they call gods?
They said these were gods, and then they reckoned them as nothing. Some said the gods are put together out of atoms; others, that the gods come apart into atoms; and they say the gods can do no more than men can. Plato says these are gods, and then wants them made of matter. Pythagoras, after all his toil about the gods and all his traveling up and down, ends by defining nature and saying that all things come about of themselves, and that the gods take no thought for men. And there is everything that Clitomachus the Academic brought forward about there being no gods. And what of Critias, and of Protagoras of Abdera, who says: “Whether the gods exist I cannot say, nor can I show what sort of beings they are; there are many things standing in my way.”
As for Euhemerus, the most godless of them all, it is a waste of words for us even to speak. He ventured to say a great deal about the gods, and in the end he wants there to be no gods at all, and everything to be run by things acting on their own.
And Plato, who said so much about the sole rule of God and about the soul of man, insisting that the soul is immortal — is he not found later contradicting himself, saying that some souls pass over into other men, and that some of them go into animals that have no reason? How can that doctrine of his fail to look terrible and unlawful, at least to anyone with a mind — that a man who was once a man will afterward be a wolf, or a dog, or a donkey, or some other brute beast? Pythagoras is found babbling along the same lines, besides cutting providence away altogether.
Which one of them, then, are we to believe? Philemon the comic poet, who says:
Or the men we have already named — Euhemerus and Epicurus and Pythagoras and the rest, who deny that God is to be revered and who do away with providence? About God and providence, Ariston said:
One can see how much the things others have said about God and providence disagree with each other — and that is nearly all of them. Some abolished God and providence altogether; others affirmed God and agreed that all things are governed by providence. So an intelligent listener and reader has to attend closely to what is said, as Simylus also put it:
And as Philemon says:
So we must pay attention and understand what is said, examining critically what has been uttered by the philosophers and by the rest of the poets.
They deny that there are gods, and then they admit it again themselves — and they said those gods do lawless things. Zeus first of all: the poets sing his ugly deeds, and rather tunefully. And Chrysippus, who talked a great deal of nonsense, is he not caught making it plain that Hera coupled with Zeus by mouth? Why should I list the indecencies of the one they call the mother of the gods, or of the Latian Zeus thirsting for human blood, or of Attis, who castrated himself, or the fact that the Zeus called Tragedian burned up his own hand, as they say, and is now honored as a god among the Romans? I say nothing about the sacred precincts of Antinous and of the others you call gods. Told to people with sense, such stories only raise a laugh.
So the men who worked out this philosophy stand convicted by their own doctrines, whether on godlessness or on promiscuous and lawless coupling. And the eating of human beings is found among them too, in the writings they composed; and the first ones they record as having done these things are the very ones they honor as gods.
What We Say, and the Law We Were Given
We too confess that God exists — but that he is one: the founder and maker and craftsman of this whole universe. And we know that all things are governed by providence, but by him alone. We have been taught a holy law, and we have as our lawgiver the one who is really God, who teaches us to do what is right, to revere him, and to do good. About reverence he says: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or a likeness of anything in heaven above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, and you shall not serve them; for I am the Lord your God.”
And about doing good he said: “Honor your father and your mother, so that it may go well with you and you may live a long time on the land which I, the Lord God, am giving you.”
And again, about righteousness: “You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. You shall not crave your neighbor’s wife. You shall not crave his house, or his field, or his slave boy, or his slave girl, or his ox, or his draft animal, or any beast of his, or anything at all that belongs to your neighbor. You shall not twist the case of a poor man in his lawsuit. Stand clear of every unjust word. You shall not kill the innocent and the righteous. You shall not count the ungodly righteous. And you shall not take gifts, for gifts blind the eyes of those who see and ruin righteous words.”
Moses, who was also God’s attendant, was made the servant of this divine law — for the whole world, but completely so for the Hebrews, who were also called Jews. An Egyptian king had enslaved them from early on, though they were the righteous offspring of godly and holy men: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God remembered them, and working marvels and wonders and astonishing things through Moses, he rescued them and brought them out of Egypt, leading them through what is called the desert. He settled them again in the land of Canaan, which was afterward named Judea, and he set a law before them and taught them these things. This law is great and marvelous and tends toward all righteousness, and its ten headings are the ones we have just gone through.
They were strangers living in the land of Egypt, Hebrews by descent, from the land of the Chaldeans. There was a famine at that time, and they were forced to move over into Egypt because grain was being sold there, and they stayed on in that country for a while — and all this happened to them exactly as God had announced beforehand. So, when they had lived in Egypt as strangers for four hundred and thirty years, and Moses was about to lead them out into the desert, God taught them through the law, saying: “You shall not oppress a stranger living among you; for you know the soul of such a stranger, since you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
When the people broke the law that had been given to them by God, God — being good and full of pity, and unwilling to destroy them — did more than give them the law. Afterward he also sent out prophets to them from among their own brothers, to teach them and to remind them of what was in the law, and to turn them to repentance so that they would sin no more. But if they kept on in their worthless deeds, the prophets announced beforehand that they would be handed over as subjects to every kingdom on earth; and it is plain that this has already happened to them.
About repentance, then, Isaiah the prophet says — to everyone in general, but expressly to the people: “Seek the Lord, and when you find him, call on him. And when he comes near to you, let the ungodly man leave his ways, and the lawless man his plans, and let him turn back to the Lord his God, and he will be shown mercy, for he will forgive your sins abundantly.”
And another prophet, Ezekiel, says: “If the lawless man turns back from all the lawless things he has done, and keeps my commands, and does what I count right, he will surely live; he will not die. None of the wrongs he has done will be remembered against him; he will live by the righteousness he has done. For I do not want the death of the lawless man, says the Lord, so much as that he turn back from his evil way and live.”
Isaiah again: “Turn back, you who plot a deep and lawless plan, so that you may be saved.” And another, Jeremiah: “Turn back to the Lord your God, like a grape-picker to his basket, and you will be shown mercy.”
The sayings in the holy Scriptures about repentance are many — countless, rather — since God always wants the human race to turn back from all its sins.
Further, on the righteousness the law spoke of, what the prophets and the Gospels have is found to agree with it, because all of them were Spirit-carriers and spoke by one Spirit of God. Isaiah, at any rate, spoke this way: “Take the evils away from your souls. Learn to do good. Search out justice. Rescue the one who is being wronged. Give the orphan a hearing, and see that the widow gets her rights.”
And the same prophet said: “Undo every bond of injustice. Loosen the knots of forced contracts. Send the crushed away in release, and tear up every unjust document. Break your bread for the hungry, and bring homeless poor people into your house. If you see someone naked, clothe him, and do not overlook your own family and offspring. Then your light will break out early, and your healing will spring up quickly, and your righteousness will go on ahead of you.”
Jeremiah says the same: “Stand on the roads and look, and ask which is the good way of the Lord our God, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. Judge a just judgment, for in these things is the will of the Lord your God.” So too Hosea says: “Keep justice, and draw near to the Lord your God, who made the sky firm and created the earth.”
And another, Joel, spoke in agreement with these: “Gather the people. Make the assembly holy. Bring in the elders. Gather the infants nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom come out of his bedroom and the bride out of her bridal chamber. And pray to the Lord your God without letting up, so that he will have mercy on you and wipe away your sins.”
And likewise another, Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty says. Judge with true judgment, and let each of you show mercy and compassion to his neighbor. Do not oppress the widow or the orphan or the stranger living among you, and let none of you nurse a grudge in your hearts against his brother for some wrong — says the Lord Almighty.”