Punished for a Name

To the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus, victors over Armenia and Sarmatia, and, above all else, philosophers.

Across the world you rule, greatest of sovereigns, different peoples follow different customs and laws, and not one of them is kept back by law or by fear of a sentence from holding to his ancestral ways, however ridiculous those ways may be. A man of Ilium calls Hector a god, and bows to Helen, taking her for Adrasteia. The Spartan reveres Agamemnon as Zeus, and Philonoe the daughter of Tyndareus; the man of Tenedos reveres Tennes. The Athenian sacrifices to Erechtheus as Poseidon, and the Athenians hold rites and mysteries for Agraulus and Pandrosus, the women who were judged guilty of irreverence for opening the chest. In a word, nation by nation and people by people, men bring whatever sacrifices they please and hold whatever mysteries they please. The Egyptians even count cats and crocodiles and snakes and asps and dogs among their gods. [b]

All of this you permit, and so do the laws. You have judged that to hold no god at all is irreverent and profane, and that each man must be allowed to treat as gods the ones he chooses, so that fear of the divine may keep people from doing wrong. Then why is our name hated by you — and do not let yourselves be knocked off course, as most people are, by what you have merely heard? Names do not deserve hatred. It is the wrong act that calls for judgment and punishment.

So, admiring your mildness and your gentleness, your peaceable and generous temper toward every man, individuals live under equal law; cities share in honor according to their standing; and the whole world enjoys deep peace under your good sense.

But we who are called Christians — for us you have taken no such thought. We do no wrong. As this discourse will show, of all people we are the most reverent and the most upright toward the divine and toward your government. Yet you allow us to be driven, robbed, and persecuted, while the crowd makes war on us for our name alone. So we have dared to set our own case before you — and this discourse will teach you that we suffer without a trial and against all law and reason — and we beg you to give some thought to us as well, so that we may stop at last being slaughtered at the word of informers.

For what our persecutors take from us is not only money; the shame they put on us is not only to our standing; the damage they do is not to anything else we would count great. All of that we think little of, however serious it looks to most people. We have been taught not to hit back when we are struck, and not even to go to law with the men who drag us off and rob us; but when they insult us with a blow on the cheek, to offer the other side of the head to be struck as well, and when they take our tunic, to hand over the cloak too. But once we have given up our property, they plot against our bodies and our souls, dumping a heap of charges on us — charges that have never so much as crossed our minds, and that belong to the idle talkers themselves and to the whole tribe of their kind.

If anyone can prove that we are guilty of a wrong, small or great, we do not ask to be let off the penalty; we are ready to undergo whatever punishment is bitterest and least merciful. But if the accusation goes no further than a name — and to this day what people say about us is nothing but the common, unsifted rumor of the crowd, and no Christian has been convicted of a crime — then it falls to you, greatest and most generous and most learned of emperors, to clear this abuse away from us by law. Then, just as the whole world has shared in your kindness, man by man and city by city, we too may be grateful to you, proud that we have stopped being the objects of false accusation. [e]

For it does not match your justice that everyone else charged with a crime should go unpunished until he is convicted, while in our case the name carries more weight than the evidence at the trial — the judges not asking whether the man on trial has done any wrong, but heaping insult on the name as though the name were itself the crime. Yet no name, by itself and on its own account, is reckoned bad or good. Names look bad or good because of the actions that lie underneath them. You know this more clearly than anyone, coming as you do from philosophy and from every branch of learning.

That is why the people tried before you have confidence, even when they are on trial for the gravest things. They know you will examine their lives, and that you will not side with the names if the names are empty, or with the charges in the indictment if the charges are false. They take the verdict that condemns and the verdict that acquits on the same terms.

So what is granted to everyone alike, we claim for ourselves: not to be hated and punished because we are called Christians — what does the name have to do with our being bad men? — but to be tried on whatever charge anyone brings, and then either released once we have cleared ourselves of the accusations, or punished if we are caught out as criminals; punished not for the name, since no Christian is a bad man unless he is only playing the part, but for the wrong done. This is how we see men judged who belong to philosophy. Not one of them is thought good or bad by the judge before the trial on account of his knowledge or his skill. If he is found to be unjust he is punished, and no charge sticks to philosophy for it — the bad man is the one who does not practice philosophy as the law requires, and the knowledge itself is blameless — and if he clears himself of the slanders, he goes free. Let there be the same equal treatment in our case. Let the lives of the accused be examined, and let the name go free of every charge.

As I begin this defense, I must ask you, greatest of emperors, to listen to us as fairly as you listen to anyone else, and not to be swept along by the common, unreasoning rumor and make up your minds in advance, but to turn your love of learning and your love of truth on our teaching too. Then you for your part will make no mistake out of ignorance, and we, having cleared ourselves of what the crowd’s unsifted rumor says, will stop being made war on.

Three charges are brought against us: that we are atheists, that we hold dinners in the manner of Thyestes, and that we have intercourse in the manner of Oedipus. If these things are true, spare no part of us. Go after the crimes. Kill us root and branch, our wives and our children with us, if any Christian lives like an animal. And yet even animals do not touch the flesh of their own kind. They mate by a law of nature, and only at the one season for producing young, not whenever they please; and they know who has done them good. [f]

So if anyone is more savage than the animals, what penalty could he undergo that would be thought to match crimes of that size? But if these things are only made-up stories and empty slander, originating in the fact that by a law of nature vice is set against virtue and that by a divine law opposites war against one another — and you yourselves are our witnesses that we do none of these wrongs, since you have given the order that no one is to denounce us — then what is left is for you to make an examination of our life, our teachings, and our loyalty and obedience to you and to your household and your government, and so at last to grant us no more than you grant the men who persecute us. For we will defeat them, since we hand over even our lives for the truth without flinching.

Take first the claim that we are atheists. I will meet the charges one at a time, so that we are not laughed at for having no answer to the men who make them. The Athenians had good reason to charge Diagoras with atheism. He not only laid the Orphic teaching out in public, and made common property of the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Heracles to boil his turnips; he came right out and declared that there is no god at all. [h]

But we separate God from matter, and show that matter is one thing and God another, and that the distance between them is great — that the divine is uncreated and everlasting, seen by mind and reason alone, while matter is created and perishable. Is it not out of all reason to fasten the name of atheism on us?

If we thought as Diagoras thought, when we hold so many pledges of reverence for God — the good order of the world, its agreement all the way through, its size, its color, its shape, its arrangement — then the name of irreverence, and the reason for our being hounded, might fairly be rubbed off on us. But our teaching brings forward one God, the maker of this universe, who did not himself come to be — since what is does not come to be, but what is not — and who has made all things through the Word that comes from him. So we are wronged twice over: we are slandered and we are persecuted.

Poets and philosophers have not been voted atheists for turning their minds to God. Euripides, speaking of the ones whom common assumption ignorantly names as gods, is at a loss: [k]

But of the one who is grasped by knowledge, as the mind holds him, he lays it down firmly:

For as to those so-called gods, he saw no real beings underneath them for the names to be applied to — “Zeus, whoever Zeus is, I know only by report” — nor did he see the names being applied to things that actually exist; for where there are no real beings underneath, what good are the names? But the true God he saw from his works, using his eyes to think out what is unseen from what appears in air, in ether, and on earth. The one whose works these are, and by whose spirit they are driven like a chariot, he concluded to be God. And Sophocles sings the same note with him:

He is teaching about the nature of God, whose beauty fills both of these, and teaching both where God must be and that he must be one.

Philolaus too, when he says that all things are enclosed by God as in a guardhouse, shows both that God is one and that he is above matter. Lysis and Opsimus define God in these ways: the one says that he is a number that cannot be spoken, the other that he is the amount by which the greatest number exceeds the number nearest to it. So, since ten is the greatest number for the Pythagoreans — being the tetractys and holding within it all the arithmetical and harmonic ratios — and since nine lies next to ten, God is a unit, that is, one; for the greatest number exceeds the next one below it by one. [p]

Then there are Plato and Aristotle. I am not going through what they have said about God as though I were setting out the philosophers’ teachings with any exactness. I know that as far as you surpass all men in understanding and in the strength of your rule, so far do you master them all in the precision of your learning, succeeding in every branch of it better than the men who have cut off a single part of it for themselves. But since it is impossible to show, without citing names, that we are not the only ones who confine God to one, I have turned to their opinions.

So Plato says: “To find the maker and father of this universe is hard work, and once you have found him it is impossible to tell everyone.” By that he has in mind one God, uncreated and everlasting. And if he knows others as well, such as the sun and the moon and the stars, he knows them as created: “Gods of gods, of whom I am the maker and the father of works that cannot be dissolved unless I will it; for everything that has been bound can be loosed.” So if Plato is not an atheist for having in mind one uncreated God, the craftsman of all things, neither are we atheists, who know and hold fast the God by whose Word all things were made and by whose Spirit they are held together.

Aristotle and his followers bring forward one God, a sort of composite living creature, and say that he is put together out of soul and body. His body they take to be the region of ether, together with the wandering stars and the sphere of the fixed stars, all moving in circles; his soul is the reason that presides over the body’s motion, itself unmoved, but becoming the cause of that motion.

The Stoics, too, though they multiply the divine in name by the titles they use for the changes of matter — matter which they say the spirit of God passes through — in fact hold that God is one. For if God is a craftsmanlike fire moving methodically toward the making of a world, holding within himself all the seed-principles by which each thing comes to be according to fate, and if his spirit runs through the whole world, then by their own account God is one: named Zeus for the seething of matter, Hera for the air, and called by other names for whatever part of matter he passes through.

So then: nearly everyone agrees, even against his will, when he comes to treat the first principles of the universe, that the divine is one; and we for our part insist that the one who set this whole order in place is that God. Why is it, then, that they are free to say and write about the divine whatever they please, while against us a law stands in force — us, who have something we understand and have rightly believed, that God is one, and who can set it out with proofs and arguments that agree with the truth? [t]

For poets and philosophers went at this the way they went at everything else, by guesswork. Each was stirred by his kinship with the breath that comes from God, and by his own soul, to search out whether he could find the truth and understand it. But they could go only far enough to think their way around it; they were not found to have grasped it, because they did not think it right to learn about God from God — each learned from himself. That is why each of them came to a different verdict about God, about matter, about forms, and about the world.

But for the things we understand and have believed, we have prophets as our witnesses, men who have spoken out about God and about the things of God by a spirit from God. And you yourselves would say, standing above everyone else as you do in understanding and in reverence toward what is truly divine, that it would be unreasonable to give up trusting the Spirit that comes from God, who moved the mouths of the prophets as a player moves his instruments, and to give our attention instead to human opinions.

Now as to the teaching that from the beginning there has been one God, the maker of this universe — look at it this way, so that you may have the reasoning behind our faith as well. If from the beginning there were two gods, or more, then either they were in one and the same place, or each of them was in his own. [v]

In one and the same place they could not be. It is not that being gods makes them alike; it is that being uncreated makes them unlike. Created things are like the patterns they were made from, but the uncreated are unlike, since they have not come from anything and have not been made after anyone’s pattern. Or is God one the way a hand and an eye and a foot are parts belonging to one body and fill out one man between them? Socrates, after all, was put together and divided into parts, precisely because he was created and perishable; but God is uncreated, cannot be acted upon, and cannot be divided, and so is not made up of parts.

But if instead each of them exists on his own — the maker of the world being above the things that have come to be, and around the things he has made and set in order — where is the second, or where are the rest? For if the world has been finished as a sphere and shut in by the circles of heaven, and the maker of the world is above the things that have come to be, holding the world in place by his providence over them, what place is there for the second god, or for the rest? He is not in the world, because the world belongs to another. He is not around the world, because the God who made the world is above it. And if he is neither in the world nor around it — since everything around it is held by this God — where is he? Above the world and above God? In another world, or around another? But if he is in another or around another, then he is no longer around us, since he does not rule this world; and he is not great in power either, since he is in a bounded space. And if he is not in another world — for all things are filled by this God — and not around another — for all things are held by this God — then he does not exist at all, since there is nothing for him to be in.

Or what does he do, when the world belongs to another, and he is above the maker of the world, and yet is neither in the world nor around the world? Is there some other thing, then, for him to stand on? But God and what belongs to God are above him. And what place will there be, when this God has filled the regions above the world? Does he exercise providence, then? And in fact, if he exercises no providence, he has made nothing. And if he neither acts nor exercises providence, and there is no other place for him to be in, then this God we are speaking of is the one God from the beginning, and the sole maker of the world.