Philosophers and the Resurrection

I think we have now given a full enough answer to the charges of crime on which these fierce demands for Christian blood are made. We have laid out our whole case, and we have shown you how we are able to prove that our account is true — from the reliability, I mean, and the age of our sacred writings, and from the admissions of the powers of spiritual wickedness themselves. Who will take on the job of refuting us — not with skill in words, but on the basis of fact, the way we have made our own case? But while the truth we hold is now plain to everyone, unbelief takes a new line. At the very moment it is convinced that Christianity is worth something — for it is well known by now, both from the good it does and simply from living alongside us — it decides that the thing is not really divine after all, but a kind of philosophy. These are exactly the things the philosophers recommend and profess, it says: innocence, justice, patience, restraint, sexual purity. [a]

Then why are we not allowed the same freedom to hold our teaching, and the same immunity, that they have — the very men we are being compared with? Or why are they not, being so like us, pressed into the same duties that we are put in danger of our lives for refusing? Who forces a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear an oath, or to hang out lamps that are no use at midday? On the contrary, they openly pull your gods down, and they attack your superstitions in their books, and you applaud them for it. Many of them even bark at your rulers, with your blessing, and are paid in statues and salaries instead of being handed over to the wild beasts. And quite right too. They are called philosophers, not Christians. The name “philosopher” has no power to put demons to flight. Why can it not do that as well, since philosophers rank demons below the gods? Socrates used to say, “If the demon allows it.” And yet Socrates, who came within sight of the truth when he denied that your gods exist, ordered a rooster sacrificed to Asclepius as he was dying — in honor of Asclepius’ father, I suppose, since Apollo had pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Thoughtless Apollo, vouching for the wisdom of a man who denied that his own kind existed!

The more hatred the truth stirs up, the more offense you give by standing by it honestly; while the man who corrupts it and merely pretends to hold it earns, on that very account, the goodwill of the people who persecute it. Philosophers only put the truth on — mocking it, corrupting it, handling it with hostile intent and spoiling it as they go, since they care for nothing but fame. Christians long for that same truth with everything in them, and keep it whole, as men who are genuinely concerned about their salvation. So we are not alike, as you imagine, either in what we know or in how we live. What definite information did Thales, the first of the natural philosophers, give Croesus when he asked him about God? He kept putting the answer off for further thought, and it came to nothing. There is not a Christian laborer who has not found God and can point him out, and go on to credit him with everything that makes a being divine — though Plato says it is far from easy to discover the Maker of the universe, and, once he is found, hard to make him known to everybody.

If we challenge you to a comparison on sexual purity, I turn to one clause of the sentence the Athenians passed on Socrates: he was pronounced a corrupter of the young. The Christian’s dealings are with a woman and no one else. I have also read how the prostitute Phryne set Diogenes’ lust on fire, and how a certain Speusippus, of Plato’s school, died in the act of adultery. The Christian husband has nothing to do with anyone but his own wife. Democritus put out his eyes because he could not look at women without wanting them and was in pain if the craving went unsatisfied; the punishment he inflicted on himself is a plain confession that he had no self-control. But a Christian keeps his eyes and is blind in this matter all the same — blind in mind against the assault of lust. If I claim that our behavior is more modest, I think at once of Diogenes tramping over Plato’s fine couches with filthy feet, moved by a pride of his own; the Christian does not put on airs even in front of a beggar. If restraint of ambition is the virtue in question, there is Pythagoras at Thurii and Zeno at Priene, both angling for supreme power; the Christian does not even run for aedile. If the contest is evenness of temper, you have Lycurgus choosing to starve himself to death because the Spartans had amended his laws; the Christian gives thanks even when he is sentenced. If the comparison is about being trustworthy, Anaxagoras denied he was holding what his enemies had deposited with him; the Christian is known for keeping faith even among people outside his religion. If honesty is to be put on trial, Aristotle disgracefully shoved his friend Hermias out of his place; the Christian does no harm even to an enemy. Just as disgracefully, Aristotle flattered Alexander instead of working to keep him straight, and Plato let Dionysius buy him for the sake of his stomach. Aristippus, dressed in purple and looking very grave, gave himself over to extravagance; and Hippias was put to death plotting against the state. No Christian ever attempted anything of the kind on behalf of his brothers, even when persecution was scattering them with every kind of atrocity.

It will be said that some of us break the rules of our own discipline too. When that happens, we stop counting them Christians; but the philosophers who do such things keep the name and the honor of wisdom. So where is the likeness between the Christian and the philosopher? Between the student of Greece and the student of heaven? Between the man whose object is fame and the man whose object is life? Between the talker and the doer? Between the man who builds up and the man who pulls down? Between error’s friend and error’s enemy? Between the man who corrupts the truth and the man who restores and teaches it? Between truth’s thief and truth’s guardian?

Unless I am completely mistaken, nothing is as old as the truth; and the age of the divine writings, which I have already proved, is useful to me here, because it makes it easier for people to take in that those writings are the treasury from which all later wisdom has been drawn. If I did not have to keep this book to a reasonable size, I would launch out and prove that as well. What poet, what teacher of rhetoric, has not drunk at the prophets’ spring? That is where the philosophers watered their parched minds — so that what makes people compare us with them is precisely what they have from us. That, I imagine, is why philosophy was banished by certain states — by Thebes, I mean, and by Sparta, and by Argos: its students were setting out to imitate our teachings. And since, as I said, they wanted nothing but fame and fine speaking, whenever they came across something in the collection of sacred writings that displeased them, they twisted it to their own purposes, in that style of research that belongs to them. They had no adequate faith that the writings were divine, so nothing kept them from altering them; and they had no adequate understanding of them either, since at that time the writings were still veiled — obscure even to the Jews, whose own property they seemed to be. [i]

For where the truth stood out by its plainness, that very plainness set fastidious men, too proud to believe, altering it; so that even what they found certain they made uncertain by mixing in their own ideas. They found God simply disclosed, and set about arguing over him — not as he had disclosed himself to them, but turning off into debates about his properties, his nature, where he lives. Some assert he has no body; others insist he has one — the Platonists teaching the first, the Stoics the second. Some think he is made of atoms, others of numbers: so Epicurus and Pythagoras differ. One makes him fire; that is how it looked to Heraclitus. The Platonists hold that he manages the world’s affairs; the Epicureans, on the contrary, that he is idle and does nothing, a nobody, so to speak, in human matters. The Stoics put him outside the world, spinning this huge mass from the outside like a potter at his wheel, while the Platonists put him inside it, as a helmsman is inside the ship he steers. They disagree in the same way about the world itself, whether it was made or never made, whether it is destined to pass away or to last forever. And the nature of the soul is argued over too: some maintain that it is divine and everlasting, others that it comes apart. Each man, as the fancy takes him, has brought in something new or refitted something old.

There is no need to be surprised that philosophers’ speculations have distorted the older Scriptures. Some of that same brood have adulterated even our newly given Christian revelation with their opinions, and corrupted it into a system of philosophical doctrine, striking off from the one road into many side-roads that lead nowhere. I mention this in case someone who learns how many parties there are among us should take that as putting us on a level with the philosophers, and condemn the truth for the different ways it is defended. But against these men who taint our purity we at once enter a plea in bar. The rule of truth is the one that comes down from Christ, handed on through his companions — and we shall prove that every deviser of a different teaching came later than they did. Everything set against the truth has been got up out of the truth itself, and the spirits of error keep this business of opposition going. They are behind every corruption of sound discipline, secretly prompting it; and they are the ones who put certain fables into circulation, so that by their resemblance to the truth those stories might damage its credit, or claim the better right to be believed. Then people would think Christians not worth believing because the poets and philosophers are not, or think the poets and philosophers worth more confidence because they are not followers of Christ.

So we get ourselves laughed at for announcing that God will one day judge the world — though the poets and the philosophers set up a judgment seat in the regions below exactly as we do. And if we hold out the threat of Gehenna, a reservoir of hidden fire under the earth kept for punishment, we get the same scorn poured on us — though they have their Pyriphlegethon, a river of flame in the country of the dead. And if we speak of Paradise, the place of heavenly happiness appointed to receive the spirits of the holy ones, cut off from any knowledge of this world by that belt of fire as if by a wall, the Elysian fields have already taken possession of their belief. Where, I ask you, do the poets and the philosophers get all this, so like ours? The reason is simply that it was taken from our religion. And if it was taken from our sacred things, as being of earlier date, then ours are the truer, and have the better claim on belief, since even the imitations of them find faith among you. If they insist their sacred mysteries sprang out of their own minds, then ours would be reflections of what is later than they are — which in the nature of things is impossible. A shadow never comes before the body that casts it, and the image never before the reality.

Come now. Suppose some philosopher maintains, as Laberius does, following an opinion of Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from a mule and a snake from a woman, and twists every argument with skillful speech to prove his view. Will he not win acceptance for it, and work up in some people the conviction that on this account they ought to keep off meat as well? May a man be persuaded to keep off it in case he should be eating some ancestor of his in his beef? But if a Christian promises the return of a man from a man — the very same Gaius from Gaius — the crowd will shout for him to be stoned, and will not so much as grant him a hearing. [o]

If there is any ground at all for human souls being moved to and fro into different bodies, why may they not return into the very substance they have left? For that is what being restored means: to be what one had been. On the other account they are no longer the very things they had been, since they could not become what they were not without first ceasing to be what they had been. If we cared to give ourselves free rein on this point, arguing over which beast one man or another would likely be changed into, we would need our leisure and a great many arguments. But we would take it up chiefly in our own defense, to set out what is far worthier of belief: that a man comes back from a man, any given person from that same person, still keeping his humanity — so that the soul, with its qualities unchanged, is restored to the same condition, though not to the same outward frame. Certainly, since the reason there is any restoration at all is the judgment that has been appointed, every man has to come forth the very same man who once existed, so that he may receive from God’s hands a verdict of good desert or the opposite. And so the body will appear as well; for the soul is not capable of suffering without solid substance, that is, without flesh, and besides, it is not right that souls should have the whole of God’s anger to bear, since they did not sin without the body, inside which everything they did was done.

But you say: “How can a substance that has been dissolved be made to appear again?” Consider yourself, man, and you will believe it. Think what you were before you came into existence. Nothing. If you had been anything, you would remember it. You, then, who were nothing before you existed, and are reduced to nothing again when you cease to be — why may you not come into being again out of nothing, at the will of the same Creator whose will made you out of nothing in the first place? Will anything new be happening in your case? You did not exist, and you were made; when you have ceased to exist again, you will be made. Explain your first creation, if you can, and then demand to know how you are to be created again. Surely it will be easier to make you what you once were, when the very same creative power made you without difficulty what you had never been before.

There will be doubts, perhaps, about the power of God — the God who hung this huge body of a world in its place, made out of what had never existed, as out of a death of emptiness and nothingness, and gave it life by the Spirit who makes every living thing alive; the world being itself the unmistakable model of the resurrection, set there as a witness to you — no, as the exact image of the resurrection. Light is put out every day and shines out again; and darkness follows in the same alternation when the light goes. The dead stars live again; the seasons begin their round the moment they are finished; the fruits are brought to ripeness and then are produced all over again. Seeds do not come up with a heavy crop unless they rot and fall apart. Everything is preserved by perishing; everything is refashioned out of death. And you, a creature of such high nature — if you understand yourself, taught even by the Pythian words — lord of all these things that die and rise: will you die only to perish forever? Wherever your dissolution takes place, whatever material agent has destroyed you, or swallowed you up, or swept you away, or reduced you to nothing, it will restore you again. Even nothingness belongs to him who is Lord of all.

You ask: “Are we to be always dying, then, and rising up from death?” If the Lord of all things had appointed it so, you would have to submit to the law of your own making, willing or not. But in fact he has no other purpose than the one he has told us about. The Reason that made the universe out of unlike elements, so that everything should be composed of opposite substances held in unity — of empty and solid, living and lifeless, graspable and beyond grasping, light and darkness, life itself and death — that same Reason has also arranged time in order, fixing and marking off its manner, so that this first stretch of it, which we have lived in from the beginning of the world, runs its temporal course down to a close, while the stretch that follows, the one we are waiting for, goes on forever. So when the boundary and the limit has been passed, that interval of a thousand years, and when the outward fashion of the world itself passes away — the fashion that has been spread like a curtain over the everlasting order, and is just as much a thing of time — then the whole human race will be raised again, to have its dues measured out according to what it has earned in this period of good or evil, and after that to be paid through the immeasurable ages of eternity. After this, therefore, there is no more death and no repeated resurrections. We shall be what we are now and no different: the servants of God, always with God, clothed with the substance that properly belongs to eternity. But the godless, and everyone who is not a true worshipper of God, will in the same way be handed over to the punishment of everlasting fire — the fire whose very nature keeps supplying them with the incorruption it burns them in.

Philosophers know as well as we do the difference between an ordinary fire and a hidden one. The fire in everyday use is a very different thing from the fire we see in God’s judgments, whether it strikes as lightning out of the sky or bursts up out of the earth through a mountaintop; for it does not consume what it scorches, but burns and repairs at once. That is why the mountains go on burning, and why a man struck by lightning is even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A remarkable proof of the eternal fire! A remarkable illustration of the endless judgment that keeps supplying its own punishment with fuel! The mountains burn, and they last. What then of the wicked and the enemies of God?