Condemned Without a Hearing

The Apology

Rulers of the Roman Empire — you who sit in judgment high on the platform, in full view of every eye, holding all but the highest place in the state: if you are not permitted to look openly into the charges brought against the Christians and sift the truth of them before the world; if in this one case alone you are afraid or ashamed to use your authority to hold a public inquiry with the care that justice deserves; if, finally, the savage sentences lately passed on our people behind closed doors stand in the way of our being allowed to defend ourselves in front of you — then surely you cannot forbid the Truth to reach your ears by the quiet back road of a silent book. [b]

She makes no appeal to you about her situation, because her situation does not surprise her. She knows she is only a stranger passing through on earth, and that among strangers she naturally finds enemies; and more than that, she knows her family, her home, her hope, her reward and her honors are all above. Meanwhile there is one thing she badly wants from earthly rulers: not to be condemned unknown. What harm does it do the laws, supreme in their own realm, to give her a hearing? In fact, will their supremacy not be all the more obvious if they condemn her even after she has made her case? But if sentence is passed on her unheard, then besides the disgrace of an unjust act you will earn the well-deserved suspicion that you knew it was unjust — that you refused to listen because you could not listen and still condemn.

This is the first ground on which we press our claim that your hatred of the name “Christian” is unjust. And the very thing that seems to excuse the injustice — ignorance, I mean — is what both makes it worse and convicts it. For what is more unfair than hating something you know nothing about, even if it does deserve to be hated? Hatred is deserved only when it is known to be deserved. Without that knowledge, how is the hatred to be shown just? Its justice has to be proved from acquaintance with the thing, not from the bare fact that a dislike exists. So when people give in to a dislike simply because they know nothing at all about what they dislike, why should it not turn out to be exactly the sort of thing they ought not to dislike? We maintain, then, that they are ignorant as long as they hate us, and that they hate us unjustly as long as they are ignorant — each being the cause of the other, whichever way you take it.

Here is the proof of their ignorance, the thing that at once condemns their injustice and excuses it: people who used to hate because they did not know what it was they hated drop their hostility the moment they come to know it. From haters they turn into disciples. Simply by getting acquainted with it, they begin to hate what they used to be and to profess what they used to hate; and there are as many of them as we are charged with having. The cry goes up that the state is overrun with Christians — that they are in the countryside, in the fortified towns, on the islands. People mourn as though over a disaster that men and women alike, every age and rank, even people of high standing, are going over to the Christian name; and still it never occurs to them that there may be some good in it they have failed to notice. They will not let a truer suspicion in. They have no wish to look closer. Here alone human curiosity goes to sleep. They love not knowing, while for others the knowing has been happiness itself.

Anacharsis rebuked the ignorant for daring to criticize the educated; how much more would he have denounced this — the knowing judged by people who know nothing at all! Because they already hate, they want to know no more. So they prejudge what they do not know to be the kind of thing that, if they came to know it, they could no longer hate. For if an inquiry finds nothing worth hating, it is surely right to give up an unjust dislike; and if its bad character does come out plainly, the hatred is not lessened in the least — you gain a stronger reason for keeping it up, with justice itself behind you.

But they say: “A thing is not good just because crowds go over to it. How many people are bent by nature toward what is bad! How many wander off into error!” No question about it. Yet when a thing is thoroughly evil, not even those it has swept away dare defend it as good. Nature covers every evil over with either fear or shame. Criminals, for instance, are anxious to stay hidden. They keep out of sight; they panic when caught; they deny the charge when accused. Even under torture they do not confess easily, and not always. When their conviction is certain, they grieve over what they did. Talking it over with themselves, they admit that bad impulses drove them, but they lay the blame on fate or on the stars. They will not admit the deed is their own, because they admit it is wicked.

What is there like this in a Christian’s case? His only shame or regret is that he was not a Christian sooner. If he is pointed out, he is proud of it; if he is accused, he puts up no defense; if he is questioned, he confesses without being pressed; if he is condemned, he gives thanks. What kind of evil is this, that lacks all the ordinary marks of evil — no fear, no shame, no dodging, no regret, no weeping? What sort of crime is it that the criminal is glad of, that he longs to be accused of, that he counts it happiness to be punished for? You cannot call it insanity — not you, who stand convicted of knowing nothing about the matter.

And if it is settled that we are the worst of men, why do you treat us differently from our fellows — from other criminals, that is — when fairness requires that the same crime get the same treatment? When these charges are brought against other people, they are allowed to use their own lips and to hire lawyers to argue their innocence. They get a full chance to answer and to argue back; in fact the law forbids condemning anyone undefended and unheard. Christians alone are forbidden to say anything to clear themselves, to defend the truth, to help the judge reach a just decision. The one thing anybody cares about is what public hatred demands: the confession of the name, not an examination of the charge. [f]

Yet in your ordinary trials, when a man confesses to murder or temple robbery or incest or treason — to take the very charges laid against us — you are not content to pass sentence at once. You do not take that step until you have gone right through the circumstances of the confession: what exactly the deed was, how often, where, in what way, when he did it, who knew about it, and who took part with him. Nothing of the sort is done in our case, though the lies spread about us deserve the same sifting, so that it could be found out how many murdered children each of us has tasted, how many acts of incest each of us has covered up in the dark, what cooks and what dogs were witnesses of what we did. What glory for the governor who managed to bring to light a Christian who had eaten a hundred babies! Instead we find that in our case inquiry itself is forbidden.

Pliny the Younger, when he was governing a province, put some Christians to death and shook others out of their firmness. Still troubled by how many there were, he finally wrote to Trajan, the emperor of the day, for advice about what to do with the rest. He explained to his master that apart from a stubborn refusal to offer sacrifice he had found nothing in their worship but meetings before dawn to sing hymns to Christ and to God, and to seal a way of life by a common pledge to one another — a pledge forbidding murder, adultery, dishonesty, and other crimes. Trajan wrote back that Christians were on no account to be hunted out, but that if they were brought in they should be punished. What a wretched ruling — one that contradicts itself out of sheer necessity! It forbids hunting them down, as though they were innocent, and orders them punished, as though they were guilty. It spares and it savages at once; it looks the other way and it strikes. Why do you cheat yourself with this dodge, Judgment? If you condemn, why do you not also investigate? If you do not investigate, why do you not also acquit?

Army posts are stationed all through the provinces to track down bandits. Against traitors and public enemies every man is a soldier; even their partners and accomplices are hunted. Only the Christian must not be looked for — though he may be brought in and accused before the judge. As if a search had any other purpose than exactly that! And so you condemn a man nobody was allowed to look for, once he is set in front of you — a man who even now, I take it, deserves punishment not because he is guilty but because he was found when it was forbidden to look for him.

And then you do not handle us in the ordinary way of criminal proceedings either. With others, when they deny, you apply torture to make them confess; Christians alone you torture to make them deny. If we were guilty of any crime, we would certainly deny it, and you with your tortures would be forcing us to confess. Nor should you hold that our crimes need no such investigation simply because our confession of the name convinces you the deeds were done. You know perfectly well what murder is, and you still make a confessed murderer give a full account of how he did it, day after day. That makes your behavior all the more twisted: you hold our crimes proved by our confession of the name of Christ, and then you use torture to drive us off that confession, so that by disowning the name we may also disown the crimes you had assumed, from that same confession, we were guilty of.

I suppose that although you believe we are the worst of mankind, you do not want us to die. That must be why you make a habit of telling a murderer to deny it, and of sending a temple robber to the rack if he sticks to his confession! Is that how it works? But if you do not deal with us as criminals, you are declaring us innocent — since it is as innocent people that you are so anxious we should not hold to a confession you know will bring down on us a sentence passed out of necessity, not out of justice.

“I am a Christian,” the man shouts. He tells you what he is; you want to hear from him what he is not. Seated in your place of authority to force out the truth, you do everything you can to get lies out of us. And he answers: “I am what you are asking me whether I am. Why do you torture me into sin? I confess, and you put me on the rack. What would you do if I denied?”

When other people deny, you certainly do not believe them readily. When we deny, you believe on the spot. Let this contrariness of yours make you suspect that some hidden power is at work here, driving you against the forms of public justice, against its very nature, against the laws themselves. For unless I am badly mistaken, the laws order offenders to be hunted out, not hidden away. They lay it down that a man who admits a crime is to be condemned, not acquitted. The decrees of the senate and the orders of your emperors say so plainly. The power you serve is civil rule, not tyranny. Under tyrants, torture used to be inflicted as a punishment in itself; with you it is softened into a means of questioning, nothing more. So keep your own rule for it: torture only as far as it is needed to get a confession. If the confession comes first, torture has no place; sentence should be passed and the guilty man handed over to the penalty he has earned — not let go. Nobody, after all, is eager to have a guilty man acquitted; it is not right to want that, and that is why nobody is ever forced to deny.

Yet you think a Christian is a man of every crime, an enemy of the gods, of the emperor, of the laws, of decent behavior, of nature itself — and you force him to deny it so that you can acquit him, which you could not do without that denial. You take liberties with the laws. You want him to deny his guilt so that you can send him out, even against his own will, blameless and clear of everything in his past. Where does this strange contrariness of yours come from? Why does it not occur to you that a confession given freely deserves far more belief than a denial squeezed out under force? Or that a man forced to deny may not be denying in good faith — that once he is acquitted, the moment the trial is over, he may laugh at your hostility, as much a Christian as ever?

So, since in everything you handle us differently from other criminals, with the single aim of stripping us of our name — and it is not ours any longer, of course, once we do what Christians never do — it becomes perfectly clear that there is no crime of any kind here, only a name. A certain power that works constantly against the truth hunts that name down out of hatred, doing it chiefly so that people will have no desire to know for certain what they know for certain they are wholly ignorant of. That is why they believe things about us for which they have no proof, and refuse to have them looked into, in case the charges they would rather take on trust should all turn out to have no foundation, and so the name that is such an enemy to that rival power should be condemned on its own confession alone, its crimes presumed and never proved. So we are tortured if we confess, punished if we hold out, and acquitted if we deny — because the whole fight is over a name. And finally, why do you read out from your charge lists that such-and-such a man is a Christian? Why not that he is a murderer as well? And if a Christian is a murderer, why not guilty of incest too, or any other filthy thing you believe about us? In our case alone you are either ashamed or unwilling to name our crimes at all. If being called a Christian implies no crime, then the name must be hateful indeed, when the name by itself is made the crime.

What are we to make of it, that most people run so blindly headlong into hatred of the Christian name that even when they speak well of a man they mix abuse of the name into the compliment? One of them says: “Gaius Seius is a good man — only he is a Christian.” And another: “I am amazed that a sensible man like Lucius has suddenly turned Christian.” It occurs to nobody to ask whether Gaius is good and Lucius sensible for the very reason that he is a Christian, or a Christian for the reason that he is sensible and good. They praise what they know and abuse what they do not know, and they let their ignorance poison their knowledge — when fairness would have you judge the unknown by the known rather than the known by the unknown. [k]

Others knew people, before they took the Christian name, as loose and worthless and wicked, and now brand them with the very thing they are praising. Blind with hatred, they trip over their own approval. “What a woman she used to be — how loose, how fond of a good time! What a young man he used to be — how wild, how filthy! And now they are Christians!” So the hated name is what they pin on a changed life. Some even trade away their own comfort for that hatred, content to take the loss so long as they are rid at home of what they hate so bitterly. A husband who is no longer jealous throws his wife out of the house — now that she is chaste. A father who used to put up with anything disinherits his son — now that the boy obeys. A master who was once easygoing orders his slave out of his sight — now that the man is trustworthy. To be reformed by the hated name is a serious offense. Goodness counts for less than hatred of Christians.

Well then, if the hatred is of the name, what fault can you find with names? What charge can you bring against a mere label, except that the word sounds foreign, or unlucky, or abusive, or indecent? But “Christian,” as far as the meaning of the word goes, comes from anointing. And even when you mispronounce it “Chrestian” — you do not even know accurately the name you hate — it comes from a word for sweetness and kindness. So in innocent people you hate even an innocent name.

But the particular objection to our group is that it carries its founder’s name. Is there anything new about a school taking its name from its master? Are not philosophers named from the founders of their systems — Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? And are not the Stoics and Academics named from the places where they met and settled? Are not doctors named from Erasistratus, scholars of literature from Aristarchus, and cooks even from Apicius? And yet nobody is offended by a name handed down from the man who started the thing, along with whatever he started.

Of course, if the group is proved to be a bad one, and its founder bad along with it, that will prove the name bad and worth our hatred, on account of what both the group and its founder are. So before taking up a dislike to the name you should have looked at the group in its founder, or the founder in his group. As it is, without sifting or knowing either one, you make the bare name the charge, you attack the bare name, and a sound by itself brings condemnation on both group and founder — of both of whom you are ignorant — because they are called such-and-such, not because they have been convicted of anything wrong.