Witness Against Itself

Believe your own books, then; and believe our Scriptures all the more, since those writings are divine. But where the witness is the soul itself, give Nature the same confidence you give them. Out of the three, choose whichever one you find to be truth’s most faithful friend. If your own writings are not to be trusted, still, neither God nor Nature tells lies. And if you are willing to trust God and Nature, then trust the soul — and in doing that you will be trusting yourself. You certainly do value the soul. It is what gives you whatever greatness you have; you belong to it; it is everything to you; without it you can neither live nor die; and for its sake you even push God aside. [a]

So, since you are afraid of becoming a Christian, summon the soul and put her to the question. Why does she worship someone other than your gods? Why does she pronounce the name of God? Why does she say “demons” when what she means is spirits that deserve a curse? Why does she make her protests toward the sky and keep her everyday cursing for the ground? Why does she do service in one direction and call on the Avenger in another? Why does she pass judgment on the dead? Where did she get these Christian expressions, when she has no wish to see a Christian or to hear one? Why did she hand them to us — or take them from us? Why did she teach them to us — or learn them from us as our pupil? Be suspicious of an agreement in words this exact, when the practice is so completely different.

It is sheer folly — and a denial that human nature is one thing everywhere — to claim these sayings for our own language and for Greek alone, simply because the two are reckoned close relatives among us. The soul was not a gift from heaven to Latins and Greeks only. “Man” is the one name that belongs to every nation on earth. There is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and many different sounds. Every country has its own speech, but what the speech is about is common to all. God is everywhere, and the goodness of God is everywhere. Demons are everywhere, and the cursing of demons is everywhere. The call for God’s judgment is everywhere. Death is everywhere, and the sense of death is everywhere, and the whole world over you find the witness of the soul. There is not one human soul that does not, by the light it has in itself, announce the very things we are not allowed to say above a whisper.

With perfect justice, then, every soul is both witness and defendant. In the same measure that it testifies for the truth, the guilt of its own error rests on it; and on the day of judgment it will stand in God’s court with nothing to say. You proclaimed God, O soul, but you never troubled to know him. Evil spirits disgusted you, and evil spirits were the things you worshiped. You saw the punishments of hell coming, and you took no care to avoid them. You had the taste of Christianity about you, and all the while you were the persecutor of Christians.