We Have Left You

Drug-craft, and every form of it, comes out of the same contrivance. If a person is cured by matter because he trusts matter, he will be cured far better by holding on to the power of God. Poisons are compounds of matter, and in exactly the same way the things that heal are made of the same stuff. And if we refuse the worse kind of matter, there are still people who set out to cure by combining one bad thing with another, and who will put evils to work for a good end. But think of a man who has had dinner with a bandit. He is no bandit himself, and yet he takes his share of the punishment for having sat at that table. It is the same with a man who is not evil but has mixed himself in with what is base, using it for what he takes to be good: God the Judge will punish him for having had a share in it. [a]

Why is it that a man who trusts the management of matter is unwilling to trust God? Why not go to the more powerful Master instead? Why treat yourself the way the dog does with grass, or the deer with a viper, or the pig with river crabs, or the lion with monkeys? Why do you make gods for me out of the things in the world? And why is it that when you treat your neighbor you get called his benefactor? Follow the power of the Word instead.

Demons do not heal. They take people captive by a trick, and the most admirable Justin was right when he called the creatures I have been describing bandits. Bandits have a practice of taking people alive and then handing them back to their households for a fee. In the same way the so-called gods settle into somebody’s limbs, and then work up a reputation for themselves through dreams. They order such people to come out in public; and there, in front of everyone, once they have had their fill of what this world offers, they fly away from the sick, cancel the disease they had contrived in the first place, and put people back the way they were.

You have no grasp of any of this, so let us who do know teach you — even though you claim to look down on death and to need nothing but yourselves. Your philosophers fall so far short of that discipline that some of them take six hundred gold pieces a year from the Roman emperor for no useful service at all, so that they will not even have to grow their beards for free. Take Crescens, who built his nest in the great city. He outdid everyone in the sexual use of boys, and he was thoroughly devoted to money. And this man, who claimed to look down on death, was so afraid of death himself that he worked to fasten death on Justin, and on me too, as though death were an evil — all because Justin, by proclaiming the truth, kept convicting the philosophers of being gluttons and frauds. And which of the philosophers did he ever hound, except you alone? [g]

If you say, agreeing with our teachings, that death is not to be feared, then do not die out of a mad craving for human fame, the way Anaxarchus did. Learn to look down on death because you know God. The construction of the world is beautiful; the life lived inside it is base. You can watch men who do not know God playing to the crowd as though they were at a festival.

And what is divination? Why have you been taken in by it? It is a servant to you of the world’s grasping appetites. You want to make war, so you take Apollo as your adviser in slaughter. You want to carry off a girl, so you pick a spirit to help you do it. You are sick through your own fault, and, like Agamemnon wishing for ten counselors, you want gods on your side. A woman drinks water and goes into a frenzy, loses her mind in the fumes of frankincense, and you say she prophesies. Apollo knew things beforehand and taught the fortune-tellers — and in the business with Daphne he proved false to himself. An oak, you tell me, gives oracles, and birds announce what is coming. So you are lower than the animals and the plants! Then it must be a fine thing to become a divining stick, or to take over what belongs to the birds of the air.

The one who makes you love money is the same one who tells your fortune about getting rich; the one who stirs up faction and fighting is the one who foretells victory in war. If you rise above the passions, you will look down on everything in this world. So do not loathe us for being the men we are. Renounce the demons and follow the one God. All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be. And if there is poison among growing things too, that came in because of our sin. I can show you a picture of all this. Only listen, and the one who believes will understand.

Even if you are cured by drugs — and I allow you that much, as a concession — you still owe God the testimony for the cure. The world still drags us down, and out of weakness I go looking for matter. The soul’s plumage was the perfect spirit; the soul threw it off because of sin, fluttered like a fledgling, and fell to the ground. Once it had left the company of heaven it began to long for a share in lesser things. The demons were resettled elsewhere and the first-formed human beings were driven out: the demons were thrown down from heaven, and the human beings were driven from earth — not from this earth, but from an order of things better than the one here. And what is left for us now is to long for that old condition and refuse everything that gets in the way. [m]

The sky is not boundless, my friend. It is limited, and it has an edge. Beyond it are the better ages, which have no change of seasons to breed the various diseases, but share in an even temperature all through. They have a day that never ends, and a light that people down here cannot approach. The men who worked out the geographies wrote up the regions as far as a human being could; but they had nothing to say about what lies beyond, since they could not see it for themselves, so they laid the blame on ebbing tides, and on one sea choked with weed and another with mud, and on one place burnt up with heat and another cold and frozen solid. We, though, have learned through the prophets the things we did not know. They were convinced that the heavenly spirit, together with the soul, will gain a garment thrown over what is mortal, and so they foretold what the rest of the souls did not know. And anyone who is naked can get this covering and run back to the old kinship.

We are not fools, men of Greece, and we are not telling idle tales, when we announce that God has come to be in the form of a man. You who insult us — set your own myths beside our accounts. Athena, so they say, was Deiphobus for Hector’s sake. Unshorn Phoebus, for Admetus’ sake, pastured the shambling cattle. The wife of Zeus came to Semele as an old woman. You take things like this seriously; how can you laugh at us? Your Asclepius died. The man who deflowered fifty young women in one night at Thespiae handed himself over as food for a fire and was gone. Prometheus was pinned to the Caucasus and suffered punishment for the good he did to human beings. On your own account Zeus is envious, and hides the dream from men because he wants them destroyed. So look at your own records, and at least accept us as men who tell the same kind of stories. Only we are not talking nonsense; it is your tales that are empty. [p]

If you talk about the birth of gods, you are also declaring them mortal. Why is Hera not pregnant now? Has she grown old? Or is there nobody left to report it to you? Believe me now, men of Greece: do not turn your myths or your gods into allegory. If you try it, the divinity you hold is destroyed, and destroyed by you. If the demons among you are the sort they are said to be, they are worthless in character; and if they get moved over into something more natural, then they are not what they are called. As for worshiping the substance of the elements — I could not be persuaded to do it, and I could not persuade my neighbor to.

Metrodorus of Lampsacus, in his book on Homer, argued very stupidly, turning everything into allegory. He says that Hera and Athena and Zeus are not what the men who set up walled precincts and sacred groves for them suppose, but the substances of nature and certain arrangements of the elements. And Hector, of course, and Achilles and Agamemnon and every last Greek and foreigner, along with Helen and Paris — all of them being of the same kind — you will say were brought in for the sake of the plot, and that not one of these people ever existed. We have put all this forward only for the sake of argument. It is not right even to set our own understanding of God beside men who are rolling about in matter and mud.

And what sort of thing is your teaching? Who would not sneer at your public festivals, which are put on with wicked demons for an excuse and turn people into a disgrace? I have often watched a certain man — watched him and been amazed, and after the amazement despised him — at how he is one thing inside and lies about it outside, pretending to be what he is not. He puts on airs of extreme delicacy and twists himself into every shape: now flashing his eyes about, now bending his hands this way and that, raving through a face of clay, becoming now Aphrodite and now Apollo. He is a one-man accusation against all the gods, a summary of superstition, a slanderer of heroic deeds, an actor of murders, a recorder of adulteries, a treasury of madness, a trainer of men who take the woman’s part with men, the reason people end up condemned — and a man like this is praised by everybody. [t]

I have refused him, a liar in everything: his godlessness, his practices, and the man himself. But you are carried off as plunder by men like that, and you abuse the people who take no part in your pursuits. I have no wish to sit gaping at a crowd of singers, and I do not want to be worked on in sympathy with a man who is nodding and swaying against nature. What is so marvelous, or so exceptional, about what goes on among you? They pipe obscenities out through the nose and move in ways nobody should, and your daughters and your sons sit and watch men lecture from the stage on how adultery ought to be done. Fine lecture halls you have, where every wretched thing done at night is announced out loud and the audience is entertained with the pronouncing of filthy speeches. And fine poets you have, liars who cheat their hearers with figures of speech.

I have seen men weighed down by their own training and carrying about a load of their own meat, with prizes and wreaths set out in front of them and the presidents of the games urging them on — not toward courage, but toward a rivalry of violence and faction; and the better puncher is the one who gets crowned. These are the smaller evils. As for the greater ones, who would not hesitate to speak them out? Some men take up idleness for the sake of debauchery and sell themselves to be killed. The man who works for his living sells himself; the rich man buys the killers. Witnesses take their seats for it. Boxers fight in single combat over nothing at all, and nobody comes down into the arena to help. [v]

Is this the fine thing you people put on? The leading man among you gathers an army of murderers and undertakes to keep them like a band of robbers. The robbers go out from him, and all of you come together for the show and turn into judges — partly of the wickedness of the man staging it, and partly of the men fighting. And the man who missed the killing is upset, because he was not condemned to be a spectator of wicked, godless, filthy deeds. You slaughter animals in order to eat meat, and you buy human beings in order to serve cannibalism to your soul, feeding it on the most godless spilling of blood. The bandit murders in order to take something; the rich man buys gladiators in order that they may be murdered.

What good does he do me, the man who goes mad in Euripides and reports Alcmaeon’s murder of his mother? He does not even keep the bearing of a human being. He gapes wide, carries a sword around, screams, is burned alive, and wears a robe no human being should wear. And good riddance to the myth-mongering of Acusilaus, and to Menander, the versifier of the same tongue. Why should I stand in awe of the flute-player out of the legend? And why should I busy myself, as Aristoxenus did, with Antigenides of Thebes? We hand these useless things over to you. Now you — either be persuaded by our teachings, or hand yours over to us the same way. [x]

What great and marvelous thing do your philosophers accomplish? They leave one of their shoulders bare, they wrap themselves in long hair, they grow beards, they carry around the claws of wild animals. They say they need nothing, and yet, like Proteus, they need a tanner for the wallet, a weaver for the cloak, and a woodcutter for the staff — and, for their greed at table, they need the rich, and a cook. You there, man, envying the dog: you do not know God, and so you have gone over to imitating an animal with no reason in it. You shout in public with an air of authority and make yourself your own avenger; if you get nothing, you fall to abusing people; and philosophy turns into your trade for making money. [y]

You follow Plato’s teachings, and a man playing the sophist after Epicurus stands up and shouts you down. Next you want to be an Aristotelian, and a follower of Democritus abuses you. Pythagoras says he had been Euphorbus, and he is the heir of the teaching of Pherecydes; Aristotle denies that the soul is immortal. You inherit lines of teaching torn by faction, and, being out of tune yourselves, you fight against people who are in tune with each other. One of you says God is a body; I say he has no body. That the world cannot be dissolved; I say it is being dissolved. That the world burns up at intervals; I say it happens once for all. That Minos and Rhadamanthys are the judges; I say God himself is. That the soul alone is made immortal; I say the scrap of flesh along with it is made immortal too.

What harm do we do you, men of Greece? Why do you hate people who follow the word of God as though they were the filthiest of men? There is no cannibalism among us. You educated men are the ones who have turned false witness. Among you, Pelops is served up as a dinner for the gods — Poseidon’s beloved — and Kronos eats his sons, and Zeus swallows Metis.

Stop parading words that belong to other people, decking yourselves out, like the jackdaw, in feathers that are not your own. If every city took back from you the vocabulary that belongs to it, your clever arguments would collapse. You ask what God is, and you do not know what is inside you. You gape at the sky, and you fall into pits. The way your books are arranged is like a labyrinth, and the people who read them are like the jar of the Danaids. [ac]

Why do you carve time up for me, saying that one part of it has gone by, one part is present, and one part is still to come? How can what is still to come pass by, if the present exists? People on a ship think, because they do not know better, that the hills are running past while the ship is carried along. In the same way you do not see that it is you who are running past, and that the age stands still, for as long as the one who made it wants it to be.

Why am I put on trial for saying what is mine, while you are in a hurry to pull everything of mine down? Were you not born the same way we were? Do you not have a share in the same government of the world? Why do you claim that wisdom belongs to you alone, when you have no other sun, no other risings of the stars, no more distinguished birth, and no death set apart from the rest of humanity’s? The grammarians were the beginning of your babble. You who parcel wisdom out have been cut off from the wisdom that goes by truth, and you have handed the names of the parts around to individual men. You do not know God, and by making war on yourselves you destroy one another. That is why all of you together are nothing. You claim the words as your own property, but you argue like a blind man talking to a deaf one.

Why do you hold carpenters’ tools when you do not know how to build? Why do you take up words while standing a long way off from deeds, puffed up by your reputation and flattened by your misfortunes? You misuse appearances against all reason: in public you march in procession, and you hide your teachings away in corners. Once we saw you for what you are, we left you. We no longer touch what belongs to you; we follow the word of God. Why, man, do you get up a war among the letters of the alphabet? Why do you knock their sounds together as if in a boxing match, with that Athenian lisp of yours, when you ought to be speaking more naturally? If you talk Attic without being an Athenian, tell me why you do not talk Doric. How is it that the one strikes you as more barbarian, and the other as pleasanter for conversation?