Words the Soul Lets Slip

The Soul’s Testimony

Suppose a man wants to convict the rivals and persecutors of Christian truth out of their own authorities — to show that they are untrue to themselves and unjust to us in the same breath — and so sets out to gather testimony in truth’s favor from the philosophers, the poets, and the other masters of this world’s learning and wisdom. He will need a very inquisitive mind, and a still better memory, to carry the search through. In fact some of our own people, who kept up that kind of digging in the old literature and kept their memories stocked with it, have published books of exactly this sort, and we have them in hand. In them they set out where the pagan traditions came from and what they amount to, and on what grounds the received opinions rest. From those books anyone can see at once that we have taken up nothing new and nothing monstrous — nothing we cannot support out of ordinary, well-known writings, whether we are throwing an error out of what we believe or letting a truth in. [b]

But human hardness of heart, and its refusal to believe, leads men to slight even their own teachers — men otherwise approved and highly renowned — the moment those teachers touch on an argument that serves the Christian defense. Then the poets are fools, for giving the gods human passions and human stories. Then the philosophers have no sense, for knocking at the gates of truth. A man counts as wise and shrewd just as far as the point where what he says is almost Christian; but if he sets himself — even in a mere affectation of judgment and wisdom — to reject their ceremonies, or to convict the world of its wrongdoing, he is certain to be branded a Christian.

So we will have nothing to do with that literature and that teaching. Its best results are twisted, and it is believed for its errors rather than for its truths. We shall lay no weight on it, even if some of its authors have said that there is one God and one only. Let it even be granted that there is nothing in pagan writers a Christian can approve, so that no one is left able to throw a single word of reproach at us. Not everyone knows those teachings anyway, and those who do have no confidence that they are true. Still less will men agree to our own writings, which nobody consults for guidance unless he is already a Christian.

So I call in a new witness — one better known than all literature, more discussed than any body of teaching, more public than anything ever published, greater than the whole human being, by which I mean the whole of what belongs to a human being. Stand up, soul, and speak. Are you a divine and everlasting substance, as most philosophers hold? Then you are all the less likely to lie. Or are you the very opposite of divine, a mortal thing, as Epicurus alone thinks? Then you have all the less reason to lie here. Whether you came down from heaven or sprang out of the earth; whether you are put together out of numbers or out of atoms; whether you begin when the body begins or are put into it later; from whatever source and in whatever way you make a man a reasoning creature, able beyond all others to think and to know — stand up and give your evidence.

But I am not calling you as you are when you have been shaped in the schools, drilled in libraries, fed in the academies and colonnades of Athens, and belch out wisdom. I am speaking to you plain, rough, uneducated, untaught — the soul as those have you who have nothing but you, the thing of the road and the street and the workshop, and nothing besides. It is your inexperience I want, because nobody puts any confidence in the little experience you do have. What I am asking you for is what you bring with you into a man: the things you know either from yourself or from your maker, whoever he is. You are not Christian, as I know perfectly well; a person becomes a Christian, he is not born one. And still Christians press you hard for your evidence. They press you, an outsider, to testify against your own friends, so that those friends may be put to shame in front of you — because they hate us and laugh at us over the very things that make you their accomplice.

We give offense by announcing that there is one God, that the name God belongs to him alone, that everything comes from him, and that he is Lord of the whole universe. Give your evidence, if you know this is true. Out in the open, with a freedom we ourselves are not allowed, we hear you say in private and in public: “God grant it.” “If God wills.” [g]

By phrases like those you declare that there is one who is God in a class of his own, and you admit that all power belongs to the one whose will you look to as Sovereign. In the same moment you are denying that any of the others is truly God, since you call those by their own names — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. The one you give no name but God, you are affirming to be God alone; and although you do sometimes call the others gods, you plainly use the word of them as a title that is not really theirs, but borrowed, so to speak.

The character of the God we proclaim is not unknown to you either. You regularly say: “God is good. God does good.” And you plainly suggest the other half of it — but man is bad. In setting the two against each other you are reproaching man, in an indirect and roundabout way, for his wickedness in deserting a God as good as that. Again: with us, blessing is one of the most sacred acts of our religion and our life, because it belongs to a God of kindness and goodness — and you say “God bless you” as readily as any Christian could want. And when you turn God’s blessing into a curse, in the same way your own words confess along with us that his power over us is absolute and entire.

There are some who do not deny that God exists, but hold that he is neither a searcher of men, nor a ruler, nor a judge. They treat with particular contempt those of us who come over to Christ out of fear of a judgment to come. As they see it, they are honoring God by relieving him of the bother of keeping watch and the trouble of taking notes — they will not even allow that he is capable of anger. “If God gets angry,” they say, “then he can be corrupted and moved by passion; and anything that passion and corruption can be said of can also perish, which God cannot do.”

But these same men admit elsewhere that the soul is divine and given to us by God, and there they trip over a piece of the soul’s own testimony that answers them. If the soul is divine, or given by God, then it certainly knows the one who gave it; and if it knows him, it certainly fears him too — all the more since he has endowed it so amply. Does it not fear the one whose favor it is so eager to have and whose anger it is so anxious to escape? Where does the soul’s natural fear of God come from, then, if God cannot be angry? How can anyone dread a being whom nothing offends? What is feared, if not anger? And where does anger come from, if not from watching what is done? And what makes anyone keep watch, if not a judgment in prospect? And where does judgment come from, if not from power? And to whom do supreme authority and power belong, if not to God alone?

And so, soul, out of your own knowledge, with nobody sneering at you and nobody stopping you, you are always ready to call out: “God sees all.” “I leave you to God.” “May God repay it.” “God will judge between us.” How does that happen, when you are not Christian? How is it that with the garland of Ceres on your head, wrapped in the purple cloak of Saturn, dressed in the white robe of the goddess Isis, you call on God as judge? Standing under the statue of Aesculapius, decorating the bronze image of Juno, fitting out Minerva’s helmet with its dark figures, you never once think of appealing to any of them. In your own forum you appeal to a God who belongs somewhere else; in your own temples you let honor be paid to an outside god. What a striking witness to the truth — one that wins a testimony for us Christians right in the middle of the demons!

But when we say that demons exist, some disciple of Chrysippus begins to curl his lip — as though the plain fact that we alone drive them out of men’s bodies were not proof enough that they are there. Yet your own curses are evidence enough that such beings exist and that you strongly dislike them. When you want a word that fits how much you hate a man, you call him a demon: the man who disgusts you with his filthiness, or his malice, or his insolence, or any other vice we lay to the charge of evil spirits. When you are annoyed, or contemptuous, or revolted, Satan is constantly on your lips — the very one we hold to be the angel of evil, the source of error, the corrupter of the whole world, who at the beginning trapped man into breaking God’s command. [l]

And when man was handed over to death because of his sin, the whole human race, tainted in its descent from him, became the channel that passed his condemnation on. So you see your destroyer. He is fully known only to Christians, or to whatever group confesses the Lord; and yet even you know something of him at the very moment you are shuddering at him.

Now to a point that touches you more nearly, since it bears on your own well-being. We maintain that after this life has passed you still exist; that you look forward to a day of judgment; and that you are assigned, according to what you deserve, either to misery or to happiness — and in either case forever. And we maintain that for you to be capable of this, your former substance must come back to you: the matter and the memory of the very same human being. You could feel neither good nor evil unless you were given that sensitive bodily frame again, and there would be no basis for a judgment at all without producing the very person on whom the sentence falls. [p]

This Christian view is nobler than the Pythagorean, since it does not move you into animals. It is more complete than the Platonic, since it gives you a body again. It is more honorable than the Epicurean, since it saves you from being wiped out. And still, because of the name attached to it, it is treated as nothing but emptiness and folly — a mere presumption, as they call it. But we are not ashamed of ourselves if our presumption turns out to have your backing.

In the first place, when you speak of a man who has died, you say of him: “Poor fellow.” Poor — surely not because he has been taken away from the good of life, but because he has been handed over to punishment and condemnation. At other times you speak of the dead as out of all trouble; you profess to think life a burden and death a good thing. You are in the habit of calling the dead “at rest,” too — when you go back out to their graves beyond the city gates with food and delicacies, and make the offerings to yourself rather than to them, and when you come away from the graves staggering with wine.

But I want your sober opinion. You call the dead poor when you are saying what you actually think, when you are at a distance from them. At their feast, where in a sense they are present and lying at table with you, it would never do to run down their condition. You cannot help flattering the people on whose account you are dining so richly. So do you call a man poor who feels nothing? Then how is it that you curse a man whose memory comes back to you with the sting of some old injury still in it, and curse him as somebody who can be hurt by your curse? Your prayer against him is that “the earth may lie heavy on him,” and that there may be trouble “for his ashes among the dead.” And in the same way, when you feel kindly toward a man you owe favors to, you ask for “rest to his bones and ashes,” and your wish is that among the dead he may “lie pleasantly.”

If you have no capacity for suffering after death, if no feeling is left, if in a word being cut off from the body wipes you out — then what makes you lie against yourself, as though you could suffer somewhere else? Why fear death at all, for that matter? There is nothing after death to be afraid of, if there is nothing to be felt. It may be said that death is dreadful not for anything it threatens afterward, but because it robs us of the good of life. Yet it also puts an end to life’s discomforts, which are far more numerous, so that its terrors are softened by a gain that more than covers the loss. There is no reason to be troubled over losing good things when the loss is amply made up by so great a benefit as release from every trouble. There is nothing dreadful about the thing that delivers you from everything dreadful.

If you shrink from giving up life because your experience of it has been sweet, still there is no need to be alarmed about death, so long as you have no knowledge that it is evil. Your dread of it is the proof that you do know its evil. You would never think it evil — you would have no fear of it whatever — unless you were sure that after it there is something that makes it evil, and so a thing of terror.

Let us leave the natural way of fearing death out of it this time. It is a poor thing for anyone to fear what cannot be avoided. I will take the other side and argue from a cheerful hope reaching past the end of our life here, for the desire to be famous after death is inborn in almost every class of people. I have no time to speak of the Curtii and the Reguli, or the brave men of Greece, who give us countless cases of death despised for the sake of later renown. Who alive today has no wish to be spoken of often once he is dead? Who does not put every effort into keeping his name alive — by works of literature, or by the plain glory of his virtues, or even by the splendor of his tomb? How is it in the soul’s nature to have these ambitions for after death, and to work with such astonishing effort at preparing things it can only use once it is gone? It would care nothing for the future if the future were altogether unknown to it.

But perhaps you feel surer of going on feeling after you leave the body than you do of any future resurrection — a teaching laid at our door as one of our presumptuous suppositions. Resurrection is the soul’s teaching too. If someone asks after a person lately dead as though he were still alive, the answer that comes at once is: “He has gone.” Gone — so he is expected back.

These testimonies of the soul are as simple as they are true, as commonplace as they are simple, as universal as they are commonplace, as natural as they are universal, and as divine as they are natural. I do not think they can look trivial or feeble to anyone who considers the majesty of nature, from which the soul draws its authority. Grant the authority of the teacher, and you must grant it in the pupil too. Nature is the teacher here, and her pupil is the soul. But everything the one has taught and the other has learned came from God — the Teacher of the teacher. [v]

And what the soul is able to know from the teaching of its chief instructor, you can judge from what is inside you. Think about the thing that makes you able to think. Consider the thing that plays the prophet in your forebodings, the augur in your omens, the foreseer of what is coming. Is it any wonder that a thing given by God to man knows how to see ahead? Is it anything very strange that it knows the God who gave it? Even fallen as it is, the victim of the great adversary’s scheming, it does not forget its Maker, or his goodness and his law, or the end that is coming for itself and for its enemy alike. Is it odd, then, that a thing divine in its origin should say the same as what God has made known to his own people?

But a man who will not take those outbursts of the soul as the teaching of a nature born with us, and as the secret deposit of a knowledge we were born holding, will say instead that the habit — the bad habit, one might say — of talking this way was picked up and hardened out of the opinions in published books circulating widely among men. Yet the soul unquestionably existed before writing, and speech before books, and ideas before anyone wrote them down, and man himself before the poet and the philosopher. Are we to believe, then, that before literature and its publication nothing of the kind we have been pointing out ever came out of a man’s mouth? That nobody spoke of God and his goodness, nobody of death, nobody of the dead?

Speech was destitute, I suppose. In fact it could not have existed at all — it would have been missing the very subjects without which it cannot exist even now, when it is so much fuller and richer and wiser — if the things that come to mind so easily today, that stick to us so constantly, that lie so close to us, that are somehow born on our very lips, had no existence in ancient times, before there was any writing in the world, and before there was a Mercury at all, I think. And where, I ask, did writing itself come to know — and then spread abroad for speech to use — what no mind had ever conceived, no tongue put out, and no ear taken in?

But plainly the Scriptures of God — whether they belong to Christians or to the Jews, into whose olive tree we have been grafted — are far older than any secular literature; or let us only say a little older, as we have shown in the proper place when we were proving them trustworthy. So if the soul took these sayings from writings at all, we must believe it took them from ours and not from yours, since instruction comes more naturally from the earlier books than from the later. The later ones waited to be taught by the earlier. And granting that some light has come from you, it still flowed originally from the first spring; and whatever you may have taken from us and handed down, we claim as entirely ours. That being so, it makes little difference whether the soul’s knowledge was put into it by God or by God’s book. Why then, man, will you hold to a view with so little ground under it — that those testimonies of the soul came out of the merely human guesswork in your literature and were hardened into place by common use?