Who Really Despises the Gods

Why should your empty accusations surprise me? Malice and stupidity have always grown together in one body, out of the same nature, and they have always come at us with one and the same dealer in error behind them. So no, I am not surprised. Still, since my argument requires it, I will set out a few examples, so that the sheer count of them may bring home to you the folly you fall into when you insist that we are the cause of every public disaster and every public loss. [a]

If the Tiber has flooded its banks, if the Nile has stayed in its own, if the sky has held still, if the ground has shaken, if death has laid a city waste or famine has ground it down, the cry goes up at once: “The Christians are to blame!” As though people who fear the true God had any light thing to fear, or anything else at all to fear besides an earthquake or a famine. I suppose it is because we despise your gods that we bring these blows of theirs down on ourselves.

As I have already said, three hundred years of our existence have not yet gone by. But before that time, what enormous scourges fell on the whole world, on one city and one province after another! What terrible wars, foreign and civil! What plagues, famines, fires, chasms opening and earthquakes has history set down! Where were the Christians then, when the Roman state was filling chronicle after chronicle with its own disasters? Where were the Christians when the islands of Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes and Ceos were emptied of whole populations? Or when the land Plato speaks of, larger than Asia or Africa, went down into the Atlantic? Or when fire out of the sky buried Volsinii, and flames out of their own mountain burned up Pompeii? When an earthquake swallowed the sea at Corinth? When the whole world was destroyed in the flood? And where — I will not say the Christians, who despise your gods, but where were your gods themselves? The very places and cities where they were born, where they stayed, where they were buried, and even the ones they founded prove them younger than that great ruin. Those places would not still be standing today unless the gods came after the catastrophe.

Perhaps you would rather not read these records of history and think them over — they land differently on you than they do on us — and above all you would rather not have to charge your gods with gross injustice, since they injure their own worshippers on account of the men who despise them. But then are you not convicted of being in the wrong yourselves, when you hold to be gods beings who draw no line between what you deserve and what irreligious people deserve? Or if, as is sometimes very foolishly said, you are being punished by your gods because you are too slack at wiping us out, then you have settled the question of their weakness and their insignificance. They would not be angry at you for dragging your feet over our punishment if they could do anything themselves. And in fact you admit as much in another way, every time you seem to be avenging them by punishing us. When one party’s interest is upheld by another, the defender is the greater of the two. What a disgrace, then, for gods to be defended by a human being.

Pour out all your poison now; fling every slander you have at this name of ours. I will not stop here to answer them. They will be blunted soon enough, when I come to set out our whole way of life. For the moment I am content to pull these darts out of our own body and hurl them back at you. The wounds you have made in us with your charges I will show stamped on you, so that you fall by your own swords and your own javelins. [h]

First, then. When you level at us the general charge of cutting ourselves off from our forefathers’ institutions, consider again, and again, whether you are not open to that accusation along with us. When I look through your life and your customs, what do I find but the old order corrupted — no, destroyed — by you? About your laws I have said already that you supplant them daily with new decrees and statutes. As for everything else in the way you live, how far you have moved from your ancestors: your style, your dress, your furnishings, your very food, even your speech. Anything old-fashioned you throw out as if the taste of it offended you. Everywhere, in public business and in private duty, antiquity is repealed, and your own authority has replaced all the authority of your fathers. To be sure, you never stop praising the old customs; but that only tells against you the more, since you go on rejecting them all the same. How twisted you must have been, to bestow your approval on your ancestors’ institutions — institutions too feeble to last — all the while rejecting the very things you approved.

But even that one heirloom of your forefathers that you seem to guard and defend most faithfully, in which you actually find your strongest grounds for charging us with breaking the law, and from which your hatred of the Christian name draws all its life — I mean the worship of the gods — even that, I shall prove, is being ruined and despised by you no less than by us. Unless, that is, there is no reason to count us despisers of the gods in the way you are, since nobody despises what he knows has no existence at all. What certainly exists can be despised. What is nothing suffers nothing. So the suffering must come from the people for whom the thing is real. Then the charge weighs all the heavier on you. You believe there are gods and at the same time despise them; you worship them and also reject them; you honor them and also assail them. You can see it above all from this. Since you worship various gods, one man this one and another that, you obviously despise the ones you do not worship. There is no preferring one without slighting another, and no choice is made without a rejection. A man who picks one out of many has already slighted the one he passed over. And it is impossible for gods so many and so great to be worshipped by everyone. So your contempt was at work from the very beginning, when you were not afraid to arrange matters in such a way that all the gods could not possibly be worshipped by all.

Those very wise and prudent ancestors of yours, whose institutions you do not know how to repeal — least of all where your gods are concerned — turn out to have been irreligious themselves. I am much mistaken if they did not more than once rule that no general might dedicate a temple he had vowed in battle until the senate gave its consent; as happened with Marcus Aemilius, who had made his vow to the god Alburnus. Now is it not plainly the worst irreligion — worse, the worst insult — to put the honor of a god at the will and pleasure of human judgment, so that a thing cannot be a god unless the senate permits it? Many times the censors have floored a god without consulting the people. Father Bacchus, with all his rites, was certainly cast out by the consuls on the senate’s authority, and not only out of the city but out of all Italy. Varro tells us that Serapis too, and Isis, and Harpocrates, and Anubis were shut out of the Capitol, and that the altars the senate had thrown down were put back only by mob violence. The consul Gabinius, on the first of the following January, did give a tardy consent to a few sacrifices, in deference to the crowd that had gathered; but since he had refused to decide about Serapis and Isis, he held the senate’s judgment to weigh more than the shouting of the multitude, and forbade the altars to be built. So here, among your own forefathers, you have — if not the name of the Christians — at least their policy, the thing that despises the gods.

And suppose you were even innocent of treason against them in the honor you do pay them. I still find that you have made a steady advance in superstition as well as in irreligion — for how much more irreligious you turn out to be. There are your household gods, the Lares and the Penates, which you own by a family consecration. You and your servants tread them underfoot without a thought, hawking them and pawning them for your needs or your whims. Insolent sacrilege like that might be excusable if it were not practiced on your humbler gods; as it is, it is only the more insolent. Your private household gods do have one consolation under these affronts: you treat your public gods with worse indignity still. To begin with, you advertise them for auction; you put them up for public sale; you knock them down to the highest bidder, when every five years you bring them under the hammer along with the rest of your revenues. For that you go to the temple of Serapis, or to the Capitol; you hold your sales there and conclude your contracts as though the place were a market, with the same familiar voice of the crier and the same levy taken by the quaestor.

Now land grows cheaper when it is burdened with tribute, and men lose value under the head tax — those are the well-known marks of slavery. But the gods? The more tribute they pay, the holier they become; or rather, the holier they are, the more tribute they pay. Their majesty is turned into a line of business. Men run a trade on their religion. The holiness of the gods is beggared with sales and contracts. You make merchandise of the ground your temples stand on, of the approach to your altars, of the offerings, of the sacrifices. You sell the whole godhead. You will not let them be worshipped for nothing. The auctioneers call for more repairs than the priests do.

It was not enough to have made an insolent profit out of your gods, if we are measuring the amount of your contempt. Nor are you content to have withheld honor from them; the little you do render you must cheapen with one indignity or another. What, after all, do you do to honor your gods that you do not do just as much for your dead? You build temples for the gods; you build temples for the dead. You raise altars for the gods; you raise altars for the dead. You cut the same inscription over both. You sketch the same lines for their statues, whatever best suits the character, or the trade, or the age: you make an old man of Saturn and a beardless boy of Apollo; you shape a virgin out of Diana; in Mars you consecrate a soldier, in Vulcan a blacksmith. No wonder, then, if you kill the same victims and burn the same incense for your dead as you do for your gods.

What excuse can be found for the insolence that ranks the dead — dead of whatever sort — as equal with the gods? Even to your emperors you assign the services of priests and sacred ceremonies, the processional chariots and the cars, the honors of the god’s couch and the goddess’s chair, holidays and games. Rightly enough, since heaven stands open to them; and still it is no less an insult to the gods. First, because it could not possibly be decent for other beings to be numbered with them, even granting that these were given divinity after they were born. Second, because the witness who saw the man caught up into heaven would not perjure himself so freely and so plainly in front of the people if there were not contempt for what is sworn to — contempt in him, and in the men who let the perjury pass. They feel for themselves that what is sworn to is nothing; and more than that, they go so far as to pay the witness his fee, because he had the nerve to despise the avengers of perjury in public.

And as for that, which of you is clean of the charge of perjury? By now there is no danger left in swearing by the gods at all, since an oath by Caesar carries the heavier scruple — and that circumstance itself works to your gods’ degradation, since men who perjure themselves by Caesar are punished sooner than men who break an oath to a Jupiter. Now of the two kindred feelings, contempt and derision, contempt is the more honorable, having a certain glory in its arrogance; for it can come from confidence, or from an easy conscience, or from a natural loftiness of mind. Derision is the more wanton feeling, and to that extent it points more plainly to a nagging insolence. So consider what great deriders of your gods you show yourselves to be.

I say nothing of how you indulge that feeling in the act of sacrifice: how you offer the poorest and most emaciated creatures for your victims; or else, from sound and healthy animals, only the parts that are no use as food — the heads and the hooves, the plucked feathers and the hair, whatever you would have thrown out at home. I pass over whatever the taste of the common and irreligious sort may have taken for the religion of your forefathers. But the most learned and most serious classes — and seriousness and wisdom do claim, up to a point, to come from learning — are in fact always the most irreverent toward your gods; and if their learning ever falls short, they make up for the lapse by inventing something more shameful still, a fresh folly or a fresh lie about the gods.

I will begin with the enthusiastic fondness you show for the man from whom every depraved writer gets his dreams — the man you honor exactly as much as you dishonor your gods, by making so much of the one who made such sport of them. I mean Homer. In my judgment it is he who brought the majesty of the Divine down to the level of the human condition, filling the gods with men’s falls and men’s passions. He matched them against each other with the odds swinging back and forth, like pairs of gladiators. He wounds Venus with an arrow shot from a human hand. He keeps Mars a prisoner in chains for thirteen months, with the prospect of dying there. He parades Jupiter suffering the same indignity at the hands of a crowd of rebels in heaven; or he draws tears from him over Sarpedon; or he shows him wantoning with Juno in the most disgraceful way, pleading his incestuous passion for her by describing and listing his various affairs. Since then, which of the poets has not slandered the gods on the authority of their great prince, either by betraying the truth or by inventing a lie? Have the writers for the stage, whether in tragedy or in comedy, held back from making the gods the authors of the calamities and the punishments in their plays? I say nothing of your philosophers, whom a certain breath of truth itself lifts up against the gods and keeps free of all fear, in their proud severity and their hard discipline.

Take Socrates. In contempt of your gods he swears by an oak, and a dog, and a goat. He was condemned to die for precisely that; and afterwards the Athenians repented of the sentence and even put his accusers to death. By doing so they restored the testimony of Socrates to its full value, and they let me turn this back on you: in his case you approve the very thing that is condemned in us today. Besides him there is Diogenes, who made sport of Hercules — how far, I do not know. And Varro, the Diogenes of the Roman pen, brings before us some three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they ought to be called, and all of them without heads. Your other wanton wits serve your pleasures in the same way, by disgracing the gods. Examine carefully the sacrilegious beauties of your Lentuli and your Hostii: in their tricks and their jokes, is it the players who become the object of your laughter, or your gods?

And then, what pleasure you take in the literature of the stage, which lays out every foul thing the gods ever did! Their majesty is defiled in front of you in some unchaste body. A god’s mask — any god you like — goes over some infamous and paltry head. The Sun mourns for the son a lightning bolt killed, and you laugh coarsely. Cybele sighs for a shepherd who will not have her, and it raises no blush on your cheek. You sit quietly through songs that celebrate the gallantries of Jove.

You are, of course, more religious in the gladiators’ pit — where, over spilled human blood and over the filth of the punishments, your gods dance all the same: they furnish the plots and the stories for putting criminals to death, or else criminals are punished dressed as the gods themselves. We have often seen your god of Pessinus, Attis, in a mutilated criminal; a wretch burned alive has played Hercules. And we have laughed at the sport of your midday game of the gods, when Father Pluto, Jupiter’s own brother, drags off the remains of the gladiators with a hammer in his hand; when Mercury, in his winged cap and with his heated wand, tests with the burn whether the bodies are really lifeless or only feigning death.

Who now could trace out every detail of this kind, so destructive of the honor due to the Divine and so humiliating to his majesty? All of it is reckoned up out of contempt — contempt in the men who keep acting these parts, and contempt for the gods who can be dressed up in them. So I hardly know whether your gods have more reason to complain of you or of us. You despise them on the one side and flatter them on the other; if you fall short in some duty toward them, you buy them off with a fee; in short, you let yourselves behave toward them however you please. We, for our part, live in a steady and complete refusal of them.