Hating What You Refuse to Know

To the Nations, Book One

Here is one proof of that ignorance of yours, which convicts your injustice at the very moment it defends it. Everyone who once shared your ignorance and your hatred of the Christian religion drops the hatred as soon as he comes to know the thing itself: the moment he stops being ignorant, he stops hating. More than that, he actually becomes what he had hated, and takes to hating what he used to be. [b]

Day after day you groan over the growing number of Christians. Your standing cry is that the state is under siege — that Christians are in your fields, in your camps, on your islands. You mourn it as a public disaster that every sex and every age, every rank in short, is going over from you to us. And even after all that, you never set your mind to asking whether there might be some good here that you have failed to notice. You will not let yourselves entertain a suspicion that might turn out to be right, and you have no appetite for a test that might come too near the mark. This is the one case in the world where human curiosity goes numb.

You love to be ignorant of what other men are delighted to have found out. You would rather not know, because you are nursing your hatred as though you understood that, once you knew, the hatred would have to end. And yet, if it turns out there is no just ground for hating us, surely the best course is to stop the injustice you have practiced up to now. If a real ground does exist, the hatred will not slacken in the least; it will pile up all the more, now that it knows itself to be just. Unless, of course, it shames you to be put right, or it galls you to be let off the blame.

I know the answer you usually make to the argument from our overflowing numbers: “A thing is not to be counted good in a hurry, just because it converts a great many people and wins them over to its side.”

I am well aware how readily the mind takes to bad courses. How many people abandon a decent life! How many take refuge in its opposite! Many, in all honesty — a great many, considering how far the times have run out. But that comparison is not a fair one. Everyone agrees in judging a wrongdoer to be a wrongdoer. Even the guilty themselves, who take the wrong side and turn away from the pursuit of good to perverse ways, are not bold enough to defend evil as though it were good. Shameful things frighten them; godless ones make them blush. In short, they want to be hidden, they shrink from being seen, they tremble when they are caught. Accused, they deny it. Even under torture they do not confess readily, and not always at all. And they certainly grieve when they are condemned. They reproach themselves for the life they have led, and when they have to account for their change from innocence to a bad disposition, they lay it on fate. They cannot say the thing is not wrong, so they will not admit that it was their own doing.

Now what is there in a Christian’s case that resembles any of this? No one is ashamed. No one is sorry — except about what he used to be. If he is pointed out for his religion, he glories in it. If he is dragged into court, he does not resist. If he is accused, he offers no defense. When he is questioned, he confesses. When he is condemned, he is glad. What sort of evil is this, in which the whole nature of evil comes to a standstill?

In our case you actually run your trials against the ordinary form of criminal procedure. When other defendants are brought up and deny the charge, you press them with torture until they confess. When Christians confess without being pressed at all, you apply the torture to make them deny. What a strange perversity: you set yourselves against a confession, and you turn the use of the torture inside out, forcing the man who admits the charge freely to wriggle out of it, and the man who is unwilling to deny it. You sit there for the express purpose of wringing out the truth, and from us alone you demand a lie — that we should declare we are not what we are. [g]

I suppose you do not want us to be bad men, and are anxious to keep us clear of the character. To be sure, you put other men on the rack and the frame to make them deny what they have the name of being; and when they deny it, you do not believe them. But let us deny it, and you believe us on the spot.

If you are convinced that we are the most dangerous men alive, why, even in the proceedings against us, are we handled differently from every other offender? I do not say you leave no room for an accusation and a denial; your practice is not to condemn a man out of hand, with no indictment and no defense. But take the trial of a murderer. The case is not closed, and the inquiry is not satisfied, the moment a man confesses himself the murderer. However full his confession, you are slow to take his word for it. Over and above the confession you go into the surrounding facts — how often he had killed, with what weapon, in what place, with what plunder, with what accomplices, and who sheltered him afterward — so that nothing whatever about the criminal escapes discovery, and every means of reaching a true verdict is at hand.

With us it is the other way around. We are the men you believe guilty of crimes more monstrous and more numerous than anyone else’s, and our charge sheets are the shortest and the lightest you write. I suppose you do not care to pile up accusations against men you are simply anxious to be rid of; or else you think there is no need to inquire into matters you already know. It is all the more perverse, then, that you should force us to deny charges of which you have, by your own account, the clearest evidence.

In fact, it would fit your hatred far better to drop every form of trial altogether. Do not strain to get a No out of us and then find yourselves obliged to acquit the very people you hate. Make us confess every last one of the crimes you lay against us, so that your resentment can feed itself on a heap of punishments, once it comes out how many of those banquets each of us has held and how many acts of incest we have committed under cover of the dark.

What am I saying? Since a hunt to root out our society will have to be conducted on a large scale, you ought to extend the inquiry to our friends and associates as well. Bring out our baby-killers and the cooks who dress the meal — yes, and the very dogs that serve as our bridesmen. Then the business would be complete. It would put a fresh edge on the crowds at the shows, too: how much more eagerly they would pack the theater if the man fighting in the ring had eaten a hundred babies! Since such horrible and unnatural crimes are reported of us, they really ought to be brought into the light, in case they begin to seem incredible and the public loathing of us starts to cool. Most people do go easy on their belief in stories like these. They are revolted at the idea that our nature could have an appetite for the food of wild animals, when nature has ruled out even the mating of animals with the human race.

In every other kind of case you are the most scrupulous and persistent of investigators, and over charges far less serious. In ours — charges so horrible, and of such surpassing wickedness that “godlessness” is too mild a word for them — you give up all that care. You decline to hear a confession, which ought always to weigh heavily with men conducting a trial, and you fail to make a full inquiry, which ought to be gone through by anyone pressing for a conviction. From this it becomes plain that the crime laid to our charge is not any conduct of ours at all. It lies entirely in our name. [i]

If there were really any actual crimes to bring against us, the names of the crimes are what would condemn us, supposing they fit; and the sentences pronounced on us would be distinct, running like this: “Let that murderer, or that man guilty of incest, or whatever else it is we are charged with, be led out to execution, be crucified, be thrown to the beasts.”

Your sentences, though, say only that a man has confessed himself a Christian. No name of a crime stands against us — only the crime of a name. And that, when you come down to it, is the whole reason for the hatred. The name is the cause. Some obscure force, strengthened by your ignorance, drives at it, so that you refuse to know for certain the one thing you are certain you know nothing about. And so, further, you do not believe what has not been proved; and, in case it should be too easily disproved, you refuse to make the inquiry — with the result that a hated name is punished on the presumption of real crimes.

So, to get the case shifted off the offending name, we are compelled to deny it; and once we deny it we are acquitted, with a complete discharge for everything in the past. We are murderers no longer, incestuous no longer — because we have lost the name.

But since that point is handled in its own place, tell us plainly instead: why are you hunting this name down to the last man? What crime, what offense, what fault is there in a name? You are barred by your own rule, which puts it out of your power to allege a crime that no legal action raises, no indictment specifies, and no sentence sets out. When a case is put before the governor, examined against the defendant, answered or denied by him, and read out from the bench — that I recognize as a legal charge.

As for the merit of a name: whatever offense names can be charged with, whatever prosecution words can be liable to, I hold that not even a complaint is owed to a word or a name, unless it has a barbarous sound, or an unlucky ring, or is indecent, or is unbecoming for the speaker or unpleasant for the hearer. Faults of that kind in mere words and names are like barbarisms and bad phrasing: a slip in grammar, a stumble in construction, a figure of speech that comes out absurd. But the name Christian, as far as its meaning goes, carries the sense of anointing. Even when you pronounce it wrong and call us “Chrestians” — for you are not sure even of the sound of this famous name — you are in fact stammering out the sense of kindness and goodness. So it is a harmless name you are running down in harmless men: a name not awkward on the tongue, not harsh to the ear, not injurious to a single living being, not foreign to our country, a good Greek word like many others we use, and pleasant in sound and in sense. Names, surely, are not the sort of thing that deserves the sword, the cross, or the beasts.

“But the sect is punished in the name of its founder.” [l]

In the first place, there is nothing unfair or unusual in a sect being marked out by its founder’s name. Philosophers are called Pythagoreans and Platonists after their masters; doctors are named after Erasistratus, and scholars of grammar after Aristarchus. So if a sect has a bad name because its founder was bad, then it is being punished as the offshoot that carries a bad name forward. But that would be jumping to a conclusion. The first step was to find out what the founder was, so that his sect could be judged from him — not to hold back the inquiry into the founder’s character on the strength of the sect.

In our case you are necessarily ignorant of the sect, because you are ignorant of its founder; or else you take no fair measure of the founder, because you make no inquiry into his sect. Either way you fasten on nothing but the name, as though in it you were running down both a sect and a founder you know absolutely nothing about.

And yet you openly allow your philosophers to attach themselves to any sect they please and to wear its founder’s name as their own, and nobody stirs up any hatred against them — although in public and in private they bark out their bitterest eloquence against your customs, your rites, your ceremonies, and your way of living, with so much contempt for the laws and so little respect for persons that they aim their free speech even at the emperors themselves and go unpunished. And what these philosophers only put on is the truth, that troublesome thing; Christians actually have it. That is why the men who possess it give the greater offense: a man who merely affects a thing plays with it, while a man who possesses it has to keep it up.

Take Socrates. He was condemned on exactly that side of his wisdom where his search brought him nearest the truth — by pulling down your gods. The name of Christian was not in the world in his day, and yet the truth was already under sentence. And you will not deny that he was a wise man, since your own Pythian god bore witness to it: “Socrates is the wisest of men.”

Truth overpowered Apollo and made him give a verdict against himself: he admitted he was no god, when he declared the wisest man to be the one who was denying the gods. On your principle, of course, Socrates was the less wise for denying them — when in truth that denial was the very thing that made him wiser.

It is exactly the way you are in the habit of talking about us. One man says, “Lucius Titius is a good man — except that he is a Christian.” And another says, “I am amazed that a man as serious as Caius Seius has turned Christian.”

In the blindness of their folly men praise what they know and blame what they do not know, and they spoil what they know by what they do not. It occurs to nobody to ask whether a man may not be good and wise because he is a Christian, or a Christian because he is wise and good — even though in ordinary human dealings it is more usual to settle what is obscure by what is plain than to prejudge what is plain by what is obscure.

Some are astonished that people they had known to be unstable, worthless, or vicious before they took this name have suddenly turned to a decent life; and they know better how to be astonished at the change than how to make it themselves. Others are so stubborn in the quarrel that they will fight against their own best interests, which are theirs for the taking if they will only have dealings with the name they hate.

I know of husbands, more than one or two, who used to worry about their wives’ conduct and could not bear even a mouse to creep into the bedroom without a groan of suspicion; and who, on discovering the reason for their wives’ new diligence and their strange attentiveness at home, offered them on loan to other men, disowned all jealousy, and would rather have been the husbands of she-wolves than of Christian women. They could give themselves up to a perverse abuse of nature, but they could not allow their wives to be changed for the better. A father disinherited the son he had stopped having to correct. A master sent to the work gang a slave he had found indispensable. The moment they discovered them to be Christians, they wished them criminals again.

For our discipline carries its own evidence in itself, and nothing gives us away but our own goodness — just as bad men, too, shine out by their own evil. Otherwise, how is it that we alone, against everything nature teaches, are branded as thoroughly evil on account of our good? What mark do we show, after all, except the first wisdom, which teaches us not to worship the trivial works of human hands; the self-control that keeps us off other men’s property; the purity that we do not stain even with a look; the compassion that moves us to help the needy; the truth itself, which makes us give offense; and the freedom for which we have even learned to die? Anyone who wants to understand who the Christians are will have to use these marks to find them.

You say of us that we are a thoroughly disgraceful set, steeped in luxury, greed, and vice. We will not deny that this is true of some. But it is testimony enough for our name that it cannot be said of all of us, or even of most of us. Even the healthiest and cleanest body has to grow a mole somewhere, or raise a wart, or be marked with freckles. Not even the sky itself is strained to so perfect a clearness that no wisp of cloud breaks it. A small blemish on the face, precisely because it shows in so visible a place, only proves how clear the rest of the complexion is. The soundness of the greater part is well attested by the slight flaw. [r]

But even if you prove that some of our people are bad, you have not thereby proved that they are Christians. Look and see whether there is any other sect where a failing in part is charged against the whole as a general stain. In running us down you are in the habit of saying to one another, “Why is so-and-so a cheat, when the Christians are so self-denying? Why is he pitiless, when they are so full of pity?” By putting it that way you are testifying that this is not what a Christian is like, since your retort asks how men who are reputed to be Christians can have such a character.

There is a great deal of difference between a charge and a name, between an opinion and the truth. Names were given for the express purpose of marking the boundary between being called a thing and being it. How many men are called philosophers who never fulfill the rule of philosophy! They all bear the name so far as their profession goes, but they hold the label without the excellence the label stands for, and they disgrace the real thing under the thin pretense of its name. Men are not of a certain character simply because they are said to be; and when they are not, it is empty to say it of them. They only deceive people who take a name for a reality, when what really settles the standing of a name is whether the fact matches it.

And in any case, people of that doubtful stamp do not meet with us, and they have no part in our fellowship. By their own offense they become yours again — since we would be unwilling to mix even with those whom your violence and cruelty compelled to recant. Though of course we should be readier to take back the ones who left our discipline against their will than those who abandoned it deliberately. In any event you have no right to call them Christians, when the Christians themselves refuse them the name, and when they have never learned to deny themselves.