The Blood of Christians Is Seed

These same ideas are called presumption — but only when it is we who hold them. In your philosophers and your poets they pass for lofty insight and brilliant discovery. They are men of wisdom; we are fools. They deserve every honor; we deserve to be pointed at in the street — and, on top of that, to have punishments inflicted on us. [a]

Very well. Let these beliefs that stand guard over decent living rest on nothing at all, if you insist, and call them fancies. They are still necessary. Call them absurd. They are still useful, since everyone who believes them becomes a better man or woman for it, under the fear of a punishment that never ends and the hope of a happiness that never ends. It is not wise, then, to brand as false, or to write off as absurd, ideas it does you good to take for granted. There is no ground whatever for condemning as bad what is beyond question profitable. So you are guilty of the very presumption you charge us with, since you are condemning what is useful.

It is just as impossible to treat these ideas as nonsense. Suppose they are false and foolish: they hurt nobody. In that case they are like plenty of other things you attach no penalty to — silly, made-up things, which do no harm and are therefore never charged as crimes or punished. But if that is all our beliefs are, then we ought to be sentenced to ridicule, not to swords and flames and crosses and wild beasts. In that vicious cruelty the blinded crowd takes its pleasure and heaps its insults on us; and some of you take pride in it as well, and think nothing of buying popular favor with an injustice.

As though anything you do to us did not depend on our own willingness! It is certainly a matter of my own choice that I am a Christian. Your sentence, then, will reach me only if I want to be sentenced; and when everything you can do to me you can do only because I am willing, then what you can do rests with my will and is not in your power. So the people’s delight in our trouble makes no sense at all. The joy they are claiming for themselves is ours, since we would far rather be condemned than fall away from God. The men who hate us ought to be grieving rather than celebrating, because we have got the very thing we chose.

At this point you have an answer ready: “Then why do you complain that we persecute you? You ought to be grateful to us instead, for giving you the suffering you want.” [d]

It is perfectly true that we want to suffer, but in the way a soldier wants war. Nobody suffers willingly, since suffering means fear and danger. All the same, the man who objected to being sent into the fight fights with everything he has, and once he has won he is glad of the battle, because it brings him glory and plunder. Our battle is to be summoned before your courts, so that there, with execution hanging over us, we may fight for the truth. And the day is won when you get the thing you were fighting for. This victory of ours carries the glory of pleasing God and the plunder of a life that never ends.

We are beaten, you say. Yes — beaten once we have what we wanted. So we conquer by dying; we march out victorious at the very moment we go down. Call us Sarmenticii and Semaxii if you like, because we are tied to a stake made of half an axle and burned in a ring of brushwood. That is the dress we win in. It is our embroidered robe of victory. It is our triumphal chariot. Naturally, then, we do not please the side that has lost — and that is exactly why we are counted a desperate, reckless breed.

But this same desperation and recklessness you object to in us, you raise among yourselves as the very standard of courage whenever glory and reputation are at stake.

Mucius left his own right hand on the altar of his own free will: what greatness of mind! Empedocles gave his whole body at Catana to the fires of Etna: what strength of will! A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself to the funeral pyre as her second marriage: what a noble witness to her chastity! Regulus, unwilling that his one life should be counted against the lives of many enemies, endured crosses all over his body: how brave a man — a conqueror even in captivity! Anaxarchus, while he was being pounded to death with a barley pestle, kept calling out, “Pound away, pound away at the bag of Anaxarchus. It is not Anaxarchus you are pounding.” What greatness of soul in a philosopher, who still had jokes on his lips at an end like that! I say nothing of the men who have bought glory with their own sword, or with some gentler way of dying.

Look at how you award the crown even for contests in torture. The Athenian courtesan wore her torturer out, and at last bit off her own tongue and spat it in the face of the raging tyrant, so that she might spit her power of speech away with it and be unable to name her fellow conspirators, even if, once broken, she wanted to. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what good philosophy did, answered that it teaches contempt of death; handed over to the tyrant’s whip, he never flinched, and he sealed his answer with his life. And everyone knows what the Spartan lash does: laid on with the utmost cruelty while friends stand by shouting encouragement, it gives the young men who bear it honor in proportion to the blood they shed.

What a legitimate glory that is — because it is a human one! For its sake, to despise death itself and every kind of savage treatment counts as neither reckless folly nor desperate stubbornness. For its sake you may endure, for your home town, for the empire, for a friendship, everything you forbid a man to endure for God. And for men like these you cast statues, you put inscriptions on their portraits, you cut epitaphs into their tombs so that their names will never die. As far as your monuments can manage it, you give the dead a kind of resurrection yourselves. Yet the man who looks for the true resurrection from God is out of his mind, if he suffers for God!

Go to it, then, good governors. You will stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians to them. Kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to powder: your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. That is why God allows us to suffer what we suffer. Only lately, when you sentenced a Christian woman to the pimp rather than to the lion, you admitted that among us a stain on our purity is reckoned more terrible than any punishment and any death.

And your cruelty, however refined it becomes, gets you nowhere. It draws people to our school instead. The more often you mow us down, the more of us there are: the blood of Christians is seed.

Plenty of your own writers urge people to bear pain and death bravely — Cicero in the Tusculans, Seneca in his Chances, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus — and yet their words do not win as many disciples as Christians do, who teach not by talking but by doing. That very stubbornness you rail at is the teacher. Who is not stirred by the sight of it to ask what lies underneath? Who, having asked, does not come over to us? And having come over, who does not want to suffer, so as to receive the whole of God’s grace and to buy back from him every pardon by paying his own blood in exchange? For that purchase secures the release from all offenses. This is why we thank you on the spot for your sentences. The divine and the human are always at odds with each other: when you condemn us, God acquits us.