Every Charge Handed Back

On this charge we are said to be guilty of more than deserting the religion everyone else keeps: we are accused of bringing in a monstrous new one, because some of you have dreamed up the idea that our god is a donkey’s head. Cornelius Tacitus was the first to put that absurdity about. In the fourth book of his Histories, where he takes up the Jewish war, he begins his account with the origin of that nation and gives his own opinion about where their religion and its name came from. He tells how the Jews, wandering in the desert and suffering for want of water, were saved by following some wild donkeys, which they took to be heading for water after grazing, and how on that account the Jews came to worship the image of one of these animals. From this, I suppose, people assumed that we too, being so closely tied to the religion of the Jews, have a god of our own consecrated under the same figure. [a]

The same Cornelius Tacitus, however — who, to tell the truth, is a most talkative liar — forgets what he has just written and goes on to relate how Pompey the Great, after beating the Jews and capturing Jerusalem, went into the temple and found nothing there in the shape of an image, though he searched the place carefully. Where should their God have been found, then, if not in a temple as famous as that one, shut against everybody but the priests, and with no danger at all of a stranger walking in?

I hardly know what excuse to offer for what I am about to say, since I have no other object at the moment than to make a remark or two in passing that will apply to you exactly as it does to us. Suppose, then, that our God really is a donkey. Will you deny that you have the very same thing among you? Whole donkeys are objects of worship with you, not merely their heads, along with their patron goddess Epona; and you consecrate every herd and every head of cattle and every beast, and their stables into the bargain. Perhaps that is your grievance against us: that surrounded as we are by cattle-worshippers of every kind, we confine ourselves to donkeys.

As for the man who says we are “priests of a cross,” we will claim him as a fellow worshipper. A cross, in the material it is made of, is a piece of wood; and among you, too, what is worshipped is a wooden figure. The only difference is that with you the wood is shaped like a man, while with us the wood is its own shape. Never mind the shape for the moment, so long as the material is the same. The form does not matter either, so long as what we are talking about is the actual body of a god. But if a dispute is going to arise on that point, let me ask what the difference is between the Pallas of Athens, or the Ceres of Pharos, and a length of wood made into a cross, when each of them is a rough stock without shape, the barest first rough-out of a statue in unworked wood. [f]

Every piece of timber fixed upright in the ground is a part of a cross, and the greater part of its mass at that. But we are credited with the whole cross — crossbeam and all, of course, and the peg that sticks out for a seat. So you have all the less excuse: you dedicate to religion only a maimed and unfinished piece of wood, while other people consecrate the complete structure.

The truth, though, is that your religion is nothing but cross from top to bottom, as I shall show. What you do not realize is that your gods take their origin from this very gibbet you hate. Every image, whether carved out of wood or stone, or cast in metal, or produced out of some richer material, must have had a modeler’s hands at work on it. And this modeler, before doing anything else, hits on the shape of a wooden cross, because our own body naturally takes on the hidden, buried outline of a cross. The head rises up, the back runs straight, the shoulders stick out at the sides; simply stand a man up with his arms and hands stretched out and you have the general outline of a cross. Starting from this rough shape, which serves him as a prop, he lays on a covering of clay, gradually completing the limbs and filling out the body, and covering the cross inside with the shape he means to press into the clay. Then, working from this design with compasses and lead molds, he has everything ready for his image, which is to be brought out in marble, or clay, or whatever the material is that he has settled on for his god. So the order runs: after the cross-shaped frame, the clay; after the clay, the god. By a well-understood routine the cross passes into a god by way of the clay. You consecrate the cross, then, and the consecrated god begins to take his origin from it.

Take a tree by way of example. It grows up into a whole system of branches and leaves and reproduces its own kind, whether it sprang from an olive pit, or a peach stone, or a peppercorn duly softened underground. Now if you transplant it, or take a cutting off one of its branches to start another plant, what will you credit the new growth to? Will it not be to the grain, or the stone, or the pit? Because, as the third stage belongs to the second and the second in the same way to the first, the third has to be traced back to the first through the second in between. There is no need to labor the point, since by a law of nature every kind of produce throughout the natural world traces its growth back to its own source; and just as the product is contained in what first caused it, so that cause agrees in character with the product. Since, then, in the making of your gods you worship the cross that gives rise to them, here is the pit and the grain from which the wooden material of your idols is propagated.

You do not have to look far for examples. Your victories you honor with religious ceremony as deities, and they are more august in proportion to the joy they bring you. The frames you hang your trophies on have to be crosses: they are, so to speak, the very core of your parades. So in your victories the religion of the camp makes even crosses objects of worship. It adores your standards, it swears its oaths by your standards, it puts your standards ahead of Jupiter himself. And all that display of images and that show of solid gold are so many necklaces hung on crosses. In the same way, the banners and ensigns your soldiers guard with no less holy care are the streamers and the clothing of your crosses. You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship crosses bare and plain.

Others, with more regard for good manners — that has to be admitted — suppose that the sun is the god of the Christians, because it is well known that we pray facing east, or because we make Sunday a day of celebration. What of it? Do you do any less? Do not plenty of you, out of an affectation of worshipping the heavenly bodies now and then, move your lips toward the sunrise? You, at any rate, are the ones who have let the sun into the calendar of the week; and out of all the days you have picked his day, in preference to the one before it, as the most suitable in the week for staying out of the bath altogether, or putting the bath off until evening, or for taking your rest and holding your dinners. [k]

By taking up customs like these you are deliberately drifting out of your own religious rites into other people’s. The sabbath feasts and the “pure supper” are Jewish; so are the ceremonies of the lamps, the fasts of unleavened bread, and the prayers said down along the shore — practices your gods, of course, have nothing whatever to do with. So, to come back from this digression: you who reproach us with the sun and Sunday should consider how close you stand to us. We are not far off from your Saturn and your days of rest.

Rumor has brought in a fresh slander about our God. Not long ago, in that city of yours, a thoroughly worthless man — a deserter from his own religion, a Jew, in fact, who had lost nothing but his skin, and that flayed off him by the wild beasts he hires himself out to fight day after day, sound in body and so with a skin still to lose — carried a caricature of us about in public with this caption under it: Onocoetes. The figure had a donkey’s ears, wore a toga, held a book, and had a hoof on one foot. And the crowd believed this disreputable Jew. What other set of people is the seedbed of every slander against us? So all over the city it is Onocoetes, Onocoetes. [n]

Since it is not even yesterday’s news, however, and so has no standing whatever from age, and is weak enough on the character of the man who made it, I shall please myself by using it simply to hand back. Let us see, then, whether you are not to be found in our company here as well. It makes no difference what shape the things are, when what we are dealing with is deformed images. You have among you gods with a dog’s head and a lion’s head, gods with the horns of a cow, a ram and a goat, gods shaped like goats and like snakes, gods with wings on foot, head and back. Why brand our one God so conspicuously? There is many an Onocoetes among yourselves.

Since we stand on a level with you over the gods, it follows that there is no difference between us over sacrifice either, or even over worship — if you will let me make good my comparison out of another kind of evidence. We open our religious service, or initiate our mysteries, by killing an infant. As for you, since your own dealings in human blood and the killing of infants have faded from your memory, you shall be duly reminded of them in the proper place. For now I hold most of the instances back, so as not to look as though I were handling the same topics everywhere. [r]

Meanwhile, as I said, the comparison between us does not fail on this side either. If we are child-killers in one sense, you can hardly be reckoned child-killers in any other, because although the laws forbid you to kill newborn infants, there is no law that is got around with more impunity, or in greater safety, with the public knowing all about it and a whole generation voting its approval. There is no great difference between us; only, you do not kill your infants as a sacred rite, or as a service offered to God. But then you do away with them more cruelly, because you expose them to the cold and to hunger and to wild animals, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning. And if there does turn out to be some difference between us in this matter, you must not overlook the fact that it is your own dear children whose life you put out; and that will make up for — will more than make up for — whatever tells against us on other grounds.

Well, but we are said to dine on our own unholy sacrifice. Putting off to a more suitable place whatever likeness to that practice can be found among yourselves, we are not far behind you in appetite. If in your case the offense is unchastity and in ours cruelty, we still stand on the same footing — granting our guilt, if you like, for the sake of the argument — in nature itself, where cruelty is always found keeping company with unchastity. But after all, what do you do less than we do? Or rather, what do you not do far more of? Is it a small thing, I wonder, in your eyes, to thirst for human entrails, when you devour grown men alive? Is it a trifle to lap up human blood, when you draw off the blood that was meant to live? Is it a light matter to feed on an infant, when you consume one whole before it has ever come to birth?

Now I come to the hour for putting out the lamps, and for using the dogs, and for practicing the deeds of darkness. And on this point I am afraid I shall have to give in to you, for what charge of the same kind am I going to be able to bring against you? But you ought to commend us at once for the cleverness with which we make our incest look modest: we have invented a counterfeit night, so as not to pollute the real light and the real dark, and we have even thought it right to do without earthly lamps and to play tricks on our own conscience as well. For whatever we do ourselves, we suspect in other people, whenever we care to be suspicious. [v]

Your incest, on the other hand, people enjoy at full liberty, in the face of day, or in the natural night, or under the open sky; and the better it goes, the less you know how it has turned out, since you indulge in it publicly, in the full knowledge of broad daylight. Our own misdeeds, at least, we can recognize even in the dark. You know perfectly well that the Persians, according to Ctesias, live with their mothers quite openly, knowing exactly what they are doing and feeling no horror at it; and it is common knowledge that the Macedonians do the same thing constantly, and with entire approval. Once, when the blinded Oedipus came out on their stage, they met him with laughter and derisive cheers. The actor pulled off his mask in great alarm and said,

“Gentlemen, have I displeased you?” “Certainly not,” the Macedonians replied. “You played your part well enough. But either the author was very silly, if he invented this mutilation as the price of the incest, or else Oedipus was a great fool for his pains, if he really punished himself like that.” And then they shouted to one another, “He drove at his mother!”

But how small a stain, you say, one or two nations can leave on the whole world! While we, of course, have infected the very sun and polluted the entire ocean! Name me one nation, then, that is free of the passions which lure the whole human race toward incest. If there is a single nation that knows nothing of sleeping together as age and sex require it — to say nothing of lust and license — that nation will be a stranger to incest. If any nature can be found so far removed from the human condition as to be liable to neither ignorance nor error nor bad luck, that alone could be brought forward with any consistency as an answer to the Christians.

Consider, then, the license that drifts about among men’s passions as if they were the winds, and ask yourself whether there are any communities that the full strong tide of passion fails to carry into this great sin. In the first place, when you expose your infants to the mercy of strangers, or leave them to be adopted by better parents than yourselves, do you forget what an opening for incest you have furnished, how wide a field you have thrown open for it to happen by accident? No doubt those of you who are more serious, out of self-restraint and careful thought, keep away from the lusts that could produce results of that kind, wherever you happen to be, at home or abroad, so that no indiscriminate scattering of seed, or loose reception of it, will produce children for you unawares — children whom their own parents, or else other children, might afterward meet in unwitting incest, since lust pays no attention to anybody’s age. Every act of adultery, every case of fornication, all the license of the public brothels, whether committed at home or carried on out of doors, serves to confuse bloodlines and tangle up family relationships, and so leads on to incest; and that is where your actors and your clowns get the material for their shows.

It was out of that same source that so flagrant a tragedy lately broke on the public: the case the prefect Fuscianus had to decide in court. A boy of noble birth, having strayed too far from home through the carelessness of the servants minding him, was lured away by some passers-by and carried off. His paltry Greek attendant, or somebody else, had gone into the house and seized him, in true Greek fashion. He was taken away into Asia, and when he had come of age he was brought back to Rome and put up for sale. His own father bought him without knowing him, and used him for sex. Afterwards, as his habit was, the master sent the young man out to the estate in chains, as a slave; and the tutor and the nurse had already been banished there as a punishment. The whole story is laid before them. They tell each other their misfortunes: they, how they had lost their charge when he was a boy; he, how he had been lost since his boyhood. But they agreed on the main point, that he was a native of Rome and of a noble family; perhaps he gave sure proofs of who he was besides. And so — God willing it, in order to fasten a stain on this age of ours — a feeling about the timing takes hold of them; the dates fit his years exactly; even their eyes bring something of his features back; certain peculiar marks on his body are counted off. His master and mistress, who are now none other than his own father and mother, press an anxious and drawn-out inquiry. The slave dealer is examined. The wretched truth all comes out. When their wickedness becomes plain to them, the parents find a cure for their despair by hanging themselves; and to their son, who outlived the miserable business, the prefect awarded their property, not as an inheritance, but as the wages of disgrace and incest.

That one case was public outbreak enough to expose the sins of this kind that are secretly committed among you. Nothing happens among human beings in a single isolated instance. Yet it seems that only in a single isolated instance can such a charge be drawn out against us, and even then only in the mysteries of our religion. You keep leveling it at us — and the like of it can be traced among yourselves, even in the ordinary course of your lives.