No Temples, No Altars

Now I would like to meet the man who says, or believes, that we are initiated by the killing of an infant and by its blood. Do you think it possible for a body so soft and so small to take those deadly wounds? For anyone to open, pour out and drain off the fresh blood of a newborn, of a person who has barely come into existence? Nobody can believe that except a man who could bring himself to do it. [a]

And I notice that you yourselves expose the children you have fathered — sometimes to wild animals and to birds, sometimes crushing them, strangled in a wretched kind of death. There are women who take drugs and put out the beginning of the human being to come inside their own bodies, committing murder on their child before they have even given birth to it.

These practices come down to you straight from the teaching of your gods. Saturn did not expose his children; he ate them. No wonder infants were sacrificed to him by their own parents in parts of Africa, with kisses and caresses to hush the crying, so that the victim would not be weeping when it died. Among the Tauri of Pontus, and for the Egyptian Busiris, butchering their guests was a sacred rite; and the Gauls slaughtered human — or rather inhuman — sacrifices to Mercury. Roman priests have buried a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman, alive. And to this day Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped with murder; and, as befits a son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man. I believe it was he who taught Catiline to seal a conspiracy with a pact of blood, and Bellona to soak her rites in a draft of human gore, and men to cure epilepsy with a man’s blood — that is, with something worse than the disease. And no better than he are the people who devour the wild beasts from the arena, smeared and stained with blood, or fattened on human limbs and entrails.

For us it is not lawful even to watch a killing or to hear one talked about. We shrink so far from human blood that we will not use the blood even of edible animals in our food.

As for the incestuous banquets, it is a plot of demons that has made up that enormous story against us, to stain the good name of our modesty with the disgust that so shocking a charge stirs up, so that the horror of it would turn people away from us before they ever looked into the truth. Your own Fronto did exactly that. He produced no testimony, as a man does who brings a charge; he simply scattered insults, as a public speaker does. [f]

These things have come out of your own nations rather than ours. Among the Persians a man may sleep with his mother. Marriage between brother and sister is legal in Egypt and at Athens. Your histories and your tragedies, which you read and watch with pleasure, take pride in incest, and the gods you worship are incestuous: they sleep with mothers, with daughters, with sisters. No wonder, then, that incest keeps being uncovered among you and is allowed to go on. Miserable men, you may even fall into what is forbidden without knowing it. You scatter your lusts everywhere, you father children everywhere, you often expose even the children born in your own house for anyone to pick up — so it is inevitable that you should come back around to your own children and stumble upon your own offspring. That is how you keep the story of incest going, without ever being conscious of the crime.

But our modesty is not for show. In our hearts we hold gladly to the bond of one marriage; in our desire for children we have one wife, or none at all. We share meals together that are not only decent but sober. We do not gorge ourselves at dinner or drag the feast out with wine; we temper our cheerfulness with seriousness, our talk is clean, and our bodies are cleaner still — a good many of us have never been touched at all, and enjoy a lifelong virginity rather than boast of it. So far are our people from any incestuous desire that with some of them even the idea of a decent relation between the sexes brings a blush.

And if we turn down your honors and your purple robes, that does not immediately put us on the level of the lowest of the people. We are not difficult men because we all have a taste for one and the same good; we simply gather in the same quietness in which we live at home. We are not whisperers in corners, though you either blush or are afraid to hear us in public. And that our numbers grow every day is not a ground for a charge of error; it is testimony that claims praise. In a good way of life those who belong to us stay and are not lost, and outsiders are added.

In short, we do not mark our people out by some little sign on the body, as you suppose; we recognize each other easily enough by the sign of innocence and modesty. We love one another — to your annoyance — with a mutual love, because we do not know how to hate. We call one another brothers — to your envy — because we are people born of one God and Father, companions in the same faith, fellow heirs of the same hope. You, on the other hand, do not recognize one another; you are cruel in your hatreds of each other; you will not acknowledge another man as your brother, unless it is in order to murder him.

But do you think we hide what we worship because we have no temples and no altars? What image of God should I make, when — if you think it through — man himself is the image of God? What temple should I build him, when this whole world, made by his own workmanship, cannot hold him? I am only a man, and I live spread out over a wide space; am I to shut up the power of so great a majesty inside one little building? Would it not be better that he be dedicated in our mind, consecrated in our inmost heart? [h]

Am I to offer the Lord victims and sacrifices that he produced for my own use — throw his own gift back at him? That is ingratitude, when the victim fit for the offering is a good disposition, a pure mind, an honest judgment. So the man who cultivates innocence is praying to God; the man who cultivates justice is making him an offering; the man who keeps clear of cheating is winning his favor; the man who snatches another out of danger is killing the most acceptable victim of all. These are our sacrifices; these are our rites of worship. Among us the most upright man is the most religious.

Of course the God we worship is one we neither display nor see. That is exactly why we believe him to be God: because we can be aware of him and cannot look at him. In his works, and in every movement of the world, we see his power always present — when he thunders, when he lightens, when he hurls his bolts, when he makes everything bright again. And do not be surprised that you cannot see God. Everything is driven and shaken and stirred by the wind and by the blasts of a storm, and yet neither wind nor storm comes into our sight.

We cannot even look at the sun, which is the cause of sight in every creature. The pupil of the eye shrinks back from its rays, the watcher’s gaze goes dim, and if you look too long your sight is put out altogether. Can you take the Architect of the sun himself, the very fountain of light, when you turn away from his lightning and hide from his thunderbolts? Do you want to see God with the eyes of your body, when you are not able to look at or take hold of your own soul, the thing that makes you alive and lets you speak?

But then it is said that God does not know what men are doing; that he is stationed in heaven and can neither survey the whole nor know individuals. You are wrong, man, and you are deceived. How can God be far away, when everything in heaven and on earth, and everything beyond the borders of this universe, is known to God and is full of God? Everywhere he is not only very close to us; he is poured into us. So look at the sun again. It is fixed fast in the sky, and yet it is spread over every land alike; present everywhere, it is joined and mingled with everything, and its brightness is never violated. How much more is God — who made all things and looks at all things, from whom nothing can be hidden — present in the darkness, present in our thoughts, as though in the dark. Not only do we act in him; I would almost say we live with him.

And let us not flatter ourselves about our numbers. We seem many to ourselves; to God we are very few. We divide up peoples and nations; to God this whole world is one household. Kings know what is going on in their kingdoms only because their servants report it; God needs no one to inform him. We live not only under his eye but in his lap. [k]

But it is objected that it did the Jews no good to worship the one God themselves, with altars and temples and the most scrupulous religion. Here you are guilty of ignorance: you bring up the later events while you forget, or never knew, the earlier ones. As long as they worshipped our God — and he is the same God of everyone — with purity, innocence and reverence, as long as they obeyed his wholesome commands, they went from a few to more than could be counted, from poor to rich, from slaves to kings. A handful overwhelmed great numbers; unarmed men overwhelmed armed ones as they fled, chasing them down at God’s command, with the elements fighting on their side.

Read their Scriptures through carefully; or, if you prefer Roman writings, look up what is said about the Jews in the books of Flavius Josephus or Antoninus Julianus — to say nothing of older records — and you will find that they earned this fate by their own wickedness, and that nothing happened to them that had not been foretold to them, if they kept up their stubbornness. So you will understand that they abandoned before they were abandoned; and that they were not, as you blasphemously say, taken prisoner along with their God, but handed over by God as deserters from his discipline.

Then there is the burning up of the world. It is an ordinary man’s mistake to disbelieve that fire will fall on it when no one expects it, or that the world will be destroyed by it. For which of the wise men doubts, which of them does not know, that everything which has had a beginning perishes, and everything that is made comes to an end? The sky too, and everything the sky contains, will cease just as it began. The feeding of the seas by the fresh water of the springs will pass away into the power of fire. [l]

The Stoics hold steadily that when the moisture has dried up this whole world will catch fire, and the Epicureans have exactly the same opinion about the burning of the elements and the destruction of the world. Plato says that parts of the world are flooded at one time and burnt up at another, in alternating changes; and although he says that the world itself was built to last forever and cannot be undone, he adds that to God himself, its only craftsman, it is both dissolvable and mortal. So it is no wonder if that mass is destroyed by the one who put it up.

You will notice that the philosophers argue the same things we are saying. That is not because we have been following their tracks; it is because they, out of the divine announcements of the prophets, imitated the shadow of a corrupted truth. In the same way the most distinguished of the wise men — Pythagoras first, and Plato above all — handed down the teaching of resurrection, but with the faith corrupted and cut in half. They will have it that once the bodies are dissolved the souls alone go on forever, and pass over and over again into new bodies. And they add to this, to misrepresent the truth further, that the souls of men go into cattle, birds and wild animals. An opinion like that does not deserve a philosopher’s investigation; it belongs to a comedian’s patter. But for our argument it is enough that even here your wise men agree with us to some extent.

Who is stupid enough, who is brutish enough, to dare to deny that a man who could be formed in the first place by God can also be formed again by him? That he is nothing after death, just as he was nothing before he began to exist, and that as it was possible for him to be born out of nothing, so it is possible for him to be restored out of nothing? It is harder, in fact, to begin what does not exist than to repeat what has existed. Do you think that if something is taken away from our feeble eyes it has perished as far as God is concerned? Every body — whether it dries into dust, or dissolves into liquid, or is pressed down into ashes, or is thinned away into smoke — is taken from us, but it is kept for God in the custody of the elements. And we are not afraid, as you believe, of losing anything by the way we are buried; we simply keep the older and better custom of burial in the earth.

So look how the whole of nature suggests a future resurrection, to comfort us. The sun goes down and comes up again; the stars set and return; the flowers die and come to life again; after the decay of winter the shrubs put their leaves back on; seeds do not sprout again unless they have rotted first. In the same way the body in the grave is like the trees that hide their green through the winter under a deceptive dryness. Why are you in a hurry for it to revive and come back while the winter is still raw? We have to wait for the springtime of the body too.

And I am well aware that many men, conscious of what they deserve, would rather hope than believe that they will be nothing after death; they would prefer to be put out altogether than to be restored for punishment. Their mistake is made worse both by the freedom they are given in this life and by God’s very great patience — and his judgment, the slower it is, is so much the more just.

And men are warned, in the books and poems of the most learned poets, about that river of fire and about the heat that flows in many windings out of the Stygian swamp — things which, prepared for everlasting torments and made known to them by the reports of demons and by the oracles of their own prophets, they have handed down to us. That is why even king Jupiter himself swears religiously by the scorched banks and the black pit: knowing beforehand the punishment kept for him and his worshippers, he shudders. [q]

There is no measure and no end to those torments. There the intelligent fire burns the limbs and restores them, feeds on them and feeds them. As the fires of the thunderbolt strike bodies without consuming them, as the fires of Etna and Vesuvius and of burning lands everywhere glow and are never used up, so that punishing fire is not fed by wasting away those who burn in it; it is nourished by gnawing at their bodies without ever exhausting them.

That men who do not know God are deservedly tormented as irreligious and unjust, no one but a profane man hesitates to believe; for it is no less wicked to be ignorant of the Parent and Lord of all than to offend him. And although not knowing God is enough for punishment, just as knowing him counts toward pardon, still, if we Christians are compared with you — even granting that in some respects our discipline is the poorer — we will be found much better than you.

You forbid adultery and commit it; we are born men for our own wives only. You punish crimes once they are committed; with us even to think of a crime is to sin. You are afraid of the people who know what you have done; we are afraid even of our own conscience alone, which we cannot exist without. And in the end, your prisons boil over with your own people — and there is no Christian there, unless he is accused on account of his religion, or is a deserter.