Christians to the Lion

If anyone deserves to be called a faction, it is the people who band together to load hatred onto decent and honest men, who raise the cry against innocent blood, and who justify their hatred with the hollow argument that they take Christians to be the cause of every public disaster, every calamity that comes on the people. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile fails to send its water over the fields, if the sky will not rain, if there is an earthquake, a famine, a plague — at once the shout goes up: “Christians to the lion!” What — all those thousands, to a single animal? Tell me, please: how many disasters fell on the world and on particular cities before Tiberius reigned, that is, before Christ came? We read of the islands of Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes and Cos going down with many thousands of people on them. Plato tells us that a stretch of land larger than Asia or Africa was taken by the Atlantic Ocean. An earthquake drank up the Corinthian sea; and the force of the waves cut a piece off Lucania and left it going by the name of Sicily. None of that could have happened without the people living there suffering for it. [a]

But where — I will not even ask where the Christians were, those despisers of your gods — where were your gods themselves in those days, when the flood poured its ruinous water over the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only over the flat parts of it? That they are of a later date than that disaster is proved by the very cities where they were born and where they died, and by the cities they founded; not one of those cities could be standing today unless it belonged to the time after the flood. Palestine had not yet received its swarm of Jewish settlers out of Egypt, and the people the Christians came from had not yet made their home there, when its neighbors Sodom and Gomorrah were burned up by fire out of the sky. The country still smells of that burning. If there is fruit on the trees there, it is a promise made to the eye only: touch it and it turns to ash. Tuscany and Campania had no Christians to complain of on the day fire from heaven buried Vulsinii, and Pompeii was destroyed by fire out of its own mountain. Nobody at Rome was worshipping the true God yet when Hannibal at Cannae counted up the Roman dead by the peckful of rings pulled off their fingers. Your gods were all being worshipped, acknowledged by everyone, when the Senones had the Capitol itself under siege.

And it fits with all of this that whenever trouble has come on a city, the temples and the walls have taken the damage alike — which proves the thing was not the gods’ doing, since it caught them too.

The truth is that the human race has always deserved badly of God. First, because it gave him nothing of what it owed him: knowing him in part, it not only did not go looking for him, but even invented other gods of its own to worship. Second, because it chose not to know the Teacher of righteousness, the Judge and Avenger of sin, and so every vice and every crime grew and flourished. But if men had looked for him, they would have come to know the glorious thing they were looking for; and knowing him would have produced obedience; and obedience would have found God kind instead of angry. They ought to see, then, that the same God is angry with them now who was angry long ago, before anyone had so much as mentioned Christians. It was his good gifts they were enjoying — gifts made before they made any gods of their own. Why can they not take in that their troubles come from the same One whose goodness they never recognized? They are suffering at the hands of the One they have been ungrateful to.

And for all that is said against us, if you set the disasters of earlier times beside our own, ours fall more lightly, since God gave Christians to the world. From that time on, goodness put some check on the world’s wickedness, and men began to pray that God’s anger would be turned away. In short: when the summer clouds hold their rain and the season becomes a worry, you — stuffed with food day after day, always ready for the next banquet, your baths and taverns and brothels never shut — you offer Jupiter your rain sacrifices, you order the people out on barefoot processions, you look for heaven at the Capitol, you watch the temple ceilings for the clouds you want, turned away all the while from God and from the sky. We are dried out with fasting, our appetites held down hard, holding off as long as we can from everything a man ordinarily enjoys, rolling in sackcloth and ashes. We storm heaven; we get through to God. And when we have wrung his pity out of him, Jupiter is the one who gets the credit.

So it is you who are the source of the trouble in human affairs; the blame for public disasters lies on you, because you are the ones forever attracting them — you, who despise God and worship statues. It would surely be more natural to believe that the one who is neglected is the one who is angry, and not the ones who get every honor paid to them. Otherwise your gods act outrageously: sending trouble on their own worshippers on account of Christians, when they are bound to keep their own people clear of any punishment aimed at Christians. [h]

But you have an answer ready: “That hits your God as well, since he lets the people who worship him suffer on account of the people who dishonor him.” Grant first that he has an order and a plan in what he does, and you will not throw that back at me. The God who once and for all fixed an everlasting judgment at the close of the world does not rush the separating — and separating is what judging means — before the end comes. In the meantime he treats every sort of person alike, so that his favors and his corrections fall on all of them together. It is his will that those outside and those he has chosen should have hard times and good times in common, so that all of us get the same taste of his goodness and of his severity. We have learned this from his own mouth, so we love his goodness and we are afraid of his anger, while you treat both with contempt. That is why the sufferings of this life, so far as they overtake us, are warnings meant for our good, and in your case are punishments from God.

For our part we are not much put out by them. First, because only one thing in this life greatly concerns us, and that is getting out of it quickly. Second, because if any disaster does fall on us, it is chargeable to your offenses. And even when we are caught in the trouble along with you, since we live too close to you to escape it, we are actually glad of it, because we recognize in it what God foretold, and that confirms the confidence and the trust of our hope. But if all the evils you endure really are inflicted by the gods you worship, out of spite against us, why do you go on paying court to beings so ungrateful and so unjust? Instead of being angry at you, they ought to have been backing you up and helping you persecute Christians — and keeping you clear of what Christians suffer.

There is another ground on which we are called to account as people who do harm: we are said to be no use in the business of life. How in the world can that be true of men who live among you, eat what you eat, wear what you wear, keep the same habits and are under the same necessities of existence? We are not Brahmins or naked philosophers out of India, living in the woods, exiled from ordinary human life. We do not forget the debt of gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Maker. We refuse nothing he made, though we certainly do keep a check on ourselves, so as not to use any gift of his to excess or wrongly. So we live in this world alongside you. We avoid no forum, no meat market, no bath, no shop, no workshop, no inn, no market day, no other place where business is done. We sail with you, we serve in the army with you, we farm with you; we trade with you in exactly the same way, and we put our crafts and our work at the public’s disposal for your benefit. How we can look useless in your daily business, living with you and off the same living, I am not able to understand. [i]

Suppose I do not go to your religious ceremonies: on the holiday I am still a man. I do not take my bath at dawn during the Saturnalia so as to avoid losing the day and the night both; I bathe at a decent hour, and a healthy one, which keeps my warmth and my blood where they belong. I can be stiff and pale like you after my washing when I am dead. I do not lie down to eat in public at the feast of Bacchus, the way the beast-fighters do at their last dinner. Still, wherever I happen to eat, it is out of your supplies that I eat. I do not buy a garland for my head. What difference does it make to you how I use the flowers, when the flowers are bought either way? I find them pleasanter loose and free, waving about. Even when they are woven into a wreath, we take a wreath in through the nose; let the people who take the scent in through their hair answer for that. We do not go to your shows; but if I need any of the goods that are sold there, I will get them more easily in the shops they belong in.

Frankincense, admittedly, we do not buy. If the Arabias have a complaint to make about that, the Sabaeans may rest assured that more of their costly and precious merchandise goes into the burying of Christians than into smoking up the gods.

At any rate, you say: “The temple revenue falls off a little more every day. How few there are now who put anything in the box!” The truth is that we cannot give alms to your beggars on earth and your beggars in heaven at the same time; nor do we think we are required to give to anybody but the one who asks. So let Jupiter hold out his hand and take something — our pity spends more in the streets than yours does in the temples. But your other taxes will owe Christians a debt of thanks. The honesty that keeps us from cheating a brother makes us pay every duty owed, as a matter of conscience. Work out how much is lost through fraud and lying in the census returns — the sum is easy enough to arrive at — and it would be plain that what one branch of the revenue has to complain of is made up by the gain in the others.

I will admit without hesitation, though, that there are some people who might in a sense complain that Christians are a barren crop: pimps, for instance, and their touts, and the water-carriers of the baths; assassins, poisoners and sorcerers; and then the men who read entrails, the fortune-tellers and the astrologers. It is a fine crop Christians bear, that they bear nothing for men like these. And whatever your interests lose by the religion we hold, the protection you get from us more than covers it. What price do you put on people — I will not press the point that we drive demons out of you, or that we pray for you before the true God, since perhaps you believe none of that — but on people you have nothing whatever to fear from? [o]

And nobody stops to consider what the common good loses — a loss as real as it is great. Nobody works out the injury done to the state when men as good as we are get put to death in such numbers, when so many genuinely decent people suffer the last penalty. For that we call your own acts as witnesses, you who sit day after day trying prisoners and passing sentence on crime. Go down your long lists of men charged with every kind of atrocity. Has any cutthroat, any purse-snatcher, any temple-robber, any seducer, any man who steals the clothes off bathers, ever had “Christian” entered against his name as well? Or when Christians are brought in front of you on the strength of the name and nothing else, is a wrongdoer of that kind ever found among them? [p]

It is always your people who make the prison steam, who make the mines groan, who feed the wild animals; it is out of your people that the men who put on gladiator shows keep their herds of convicts fattened for the day. You will find no Christian in there, except simply as a Christian; and if he is in there for anything else, he is a Christian no longer.

So we, and we alone, are free of crime. Is there anything astonishing in that, if with us it is a matter of necessity? And a necessity it is. We have been taught what goodness is by God himself; we know it exactly, because a perfect Teacher revealed it; and we do his will faithfully, because the one who laid it on us is a Judge we do not dare think lightly of. Your ideas of goodness, on the other hand, come from mere human opinion, and human authority is all that holds you to them. So the moral system you live by falls short both in fullness and in the authority it would take to produce a genuinely good life. A man’s wisdom in pointing out what is good is worth no more than his authority in requiring it; the one is as easy to deceive as the other is to despise. [r]

So then, which is the fuller rule: to say, “You shall not kill,” or to teach, “Do not even be angry”? Which is more complete: to forbid adultery, or to hold a man back from a single look with desire in it? Which shows the better mind: banning wrongdoing, or banning wrong speech? Which goes further: not permitting an injury, or not even permitting an injury done to you to be paid back? And you know perfectly well that even these laws of yours, the ones that look as though they lead to goodness, were borrowed from the law of God, which is the older model. We have already said what age Moses belongs to.

But what authority do human laws actually have, when a man can get around them by generally managing to keep his crimes out of sight, and can despise them whenever appetite or need pushes him into an offense? Think about these things too in the light of how short any punishment you can inflict must be: it can never last longer than till death. That is the ground on which Epicurus makes light of all pain and suffering, holding that if it is small it is not worth minding, and if it is great it does not last. We are another matter. We take our awards under the judgment of a God who sees everything; we expect punishment from him for sin that never ends; and so we are the only ones who make a real effort at a blameless life, because we know more, because we cannot hide, and because the torment we are threatened with is not merely long but never over. We fear the one whom the man who judges the fearful will himself have to fear. We fear God, I mean, and not the proconsul.