Christ and the Demons

We have said that this school of ours rests on the writings of the Jews, the oldest writings there are. Most people know — and we admit it ourselves — that it is fairly new, going back no further than the reign of Tiberius. So a question may be raised on that ground about where we stand: as though we were hiding a presumption of our own under the shadow of a famous religion, one that at any rate has the law’s undoubted permission. Or the question may be raised because, quite apart from the matter of age, we do not agree with the Jews about their peculiar rules for food, or about their holy days, or about the well-known mark they carry on the body, or about sharing a common name — all of which ought to be true of us if we did homage to the same God they do. Besides, ordinary people by now know something about Christ, and think of him as no more than a man — the kind of man the Jews condemned — so it is natural enough that some have taken us for worshipers of a mere human being. But we are not ashamed of Christ. We are glad to be counted his disciples and to suffer for his name. And we do not differ from the Jews about God. So a word or two has to be said about Christ being God. [a]

Long ago the Jews had a great deal of God’s favor, back when the fathers of their race were known for their righteousness and their faith. That is how they came to flourish as a people, how their kingdom rose so high, and why they were so blessed that God spoke to them in revelations of their own, telling them in advance how to earn his favor and how to avoid making him angry. But how deeply they have sinned — swollen with a false confidence in their famous ancestors, and swelling on to their fall, turning off God’s road onto a road of open contempt for him — they may refuse to admit themselves; the ruin of their nation today is proof enough. Scattered, a people of wanderers, exiled from their own soil and their own sky, they roam over the whole world with no king, human or heavenly, and do not even have a foreigner’s right to set one foot in the country that was theirs. Their own sacred writers, giving warning of all this beforehand, said with one voice and equal plainness that in the last days of the world God would choose out of every nation and people and country worshipers more faithful than these, and would pour out his favor on them — and pour it out more fully, to match the larger capacity of a fuller teaching. And so he appeared among us: the one whose coming to make human nature new and to give it light God had announced in advance. I mean Christ, that Son of God.

So the supreme head and master of this grace and this training, the one who enlightens and trains the human race, God’s own Son, was announced among us — born, but not born in a way that would make him ashamed of the name Son or of where his father came from. He did not get his father by incest with a sister, or by the rape of a daughter or of another man’s wife; his father was no god in the shape of a snake, or a bull, or a bird, no lover turning himself into gold for Danaë to serve his filthy purposes. Those are your gods, and these are the vile things Jupiter did to them. But the Son of God has no mother in any sense that involves impurity. The woman people suppose to be his mother in the ordinary way had never entered a marriage at all.

But let me first discuss what he is in himself; then the manner of his birth will make sense. We have already said that God made the world, and everything in it, by his Word, his Reason, and his Power. It is perfectly plain that your own philosophers also treat the Logos — that is, the Word and Reason — as the maker of the universe. Zeno lays it down that he is the maker, having made all things on a fixed plan, and that his name is Fate, and God, and the soul of Jupiter, and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes assigns all of this to spirit, which he holds runs through the whole universe. And we say the same: the Word and Reason and Power by which we have said God made everything have spirit as their own proper substance, and in that spirit the Word is present to speak, reason abides to plan and arrange, and power is over all to carry it out. We have been taught that he came forth out of God, and that in coming forth he was begotten; so he is the Son of God, and is called God because he and God are one substance. For God too is spirit. When a ray is shot out from the sun, it is still part of the parent body; the sun is still in the ray, because the ray is the sun’s — there is no dividing of substance, only a stretching out. So Christ is spirit from spirit and God from God, the way one light is kindled from another. The parent stock stays whole and undamaged however many shoots you draw off it that carry its qualities; and in the same way what has come out of God is at once God and Son of God, and the two are one. In this way too, being spirit from spirit and God from God, he is made second in the manner of his existing — second in order, not in nature. He did not withdraw from the source he came from; he went out from it. This ray of God, then, as was always foretold in ancient times, came down into a certain virgin, was made flesh in her womb, and in his birth is God and man in one. The flesh formed by the spirit is fed, grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works — and is the Christ. Take this as a story for now, if you want to call it that; it is like some of your own. Meanwhile we will go on to show how Christ’s claims are proved, and who the people among you are who set such stories going, in order to bring down the truth those stories imitate.

The Jews knew perfectly well that Christ was coming; the prophets spoke to them. Even now they are still expecting him. There is no other quarrel between them and us except this — they hold that the coming has not happened yet. For two comings of Christ have been made known to us: a first, already fulfilled in the lowliness of a human life, and a second, hanging over a world now near its end, in all the majesty of God unveiled. By misreading the first they concluded that the second — which was the more plainly predicted, and which they set their hopes on — was the only one there is. It was the deserved punishment of their sin not to understand the Lord’s first coming; if they had understood it they would have believed, and if they had believed they would have been saved. They read in their own books how it is written of them that they are stripped of wisdom and understanding, and of the use of their eyes and ears. So, held down by that prejudgment, they had convinced themselves from his lowly appearance that Christ was no more than a man; and from that it followed necessarily that they should take him for a magician on account of the powers he showed — driving demons out of people with a word, giving sight back to the blind, cleansing lepers, putting strength back into the paralyzed, calling the dead back to life, making the very elements of nature obey him, stilling storms and walking on the sea. All of this was proof that he was the Logos of God, that original firstborn Word, attended by power and reason and grounded in spirit; and proof that the one who was now doing everything by his word and the one who had done so long ago were one and the same.

But the Jews were so infuriated by his teaching, which convicted their rulers and leading men of the truth — and above all because so many were turning aside to him — that in the end they brought him before Pontius Pilate, who at that time was administering Syria on Rome’s behalf, and by the violence of their shouting against him wrung out a sentence handing him over to them to be crucified. He had foretold this himself, which would have counted for little if the prophets of old had not foretold it as well. And yet, nailed to the cross, he showed many remarkable signs that marked his death off from every other. Of his own free will, with a word, he sent his spirit away from him, getting ahead of the executioner’s work. In that same hour the daylight was taken away, though the sun was then at its full noon blaze. People who did not know that this had been predicted about Christ naturally thought it was an eclipse. You yourselves have the record of that world-wide portent still in your archives. Then, when his body was taken down from the cross and laid in a tomb, the Jews in their eagerness to watch it surrounded it with a large military guard, in case his disciples should steal the body away — he had predicted that he would rise from the dead on the third day — and take in even the unbelieving. But look: on the third day there was a sudden shock of earthquake, the stone that sealed the tomb was rolled away, and the guard ran off in terror. With no disciple anywhere near it, the grave was found empty of everything but the dead man’s clothes. Even so, the leaders of the Jews, who had a great deal at stake both in spreading a lie and in keeping a people that paid them tribute and obeyed them from believing, put it about that his followers had stolen the body of Christ. For the Lord, you see, did not go out into public view, so that the wicked would not be delivered from their mistake, and so that faith, which is set for a great reward, might have to hold its ground against difficulty. But he spent forty days with some of his disciples down in Galilee, a district of Judea, teaching them the things they were to teach others. After that, having given them their commission to preach the good news through the world, he was wrapped in a cloud and taken up into heaven — a far more certain fact than what your Proculuses claim about Romulus.

Pilate did all of these things to Christ; and then, being by his own conscience already a Christian, he sent a report about him to the reigning Caesar, who at that time was Tiberius. Yes, and the Caesars themselves would have believed in Christ, if either the Caesars had not been necessary to the world, or if Christians could have been Caesars. His disciples too, spreading over the world, did as their divine master had told them; and after suffering a great deal themselves from persecution by the Jews — suffering it with no unwillingness, since they had no doubt about the truth — at last, under Nero’s cruel sword, they sowed the seed of Christian blood at Rome. And we will prove that even your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ. It is no small thing if, to make you trust Christians, I can bring forward the authority of the very beings on whose account you refuse to trust them.

So far we have carried out the plan we set ourselves. We have laid out the origin of this school of ours and of its name, together with this account of the founder of Christianity. From now on let no one charge us with monstrous wickedness, and let no one think the case is other than we have stated it, for no one is allowed to give a false account of his own religion. In the very act of saying that he worships a god other than the one he really worships, a man denies the object of his worship and moves his worship and homage to another; and in that transfer he stops worshiping the god he has disowned. We say it — we say it in front of everyone, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we shout it out: “We worship God through Christ.” Count Christ a man, if you like: through him and in him God chose to be known and to be worshiped. If the Jews object, we answer that Moses, who was only a man, taught them their religion. Against the Greeks we urge that Orpheus in Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, and Trophonius in Boeotia imposed religious rites. And turning to you who hold sway over the nations — it was a man, Numa Pompilius, who loaded the Romans with a heavy and expensive weight of superstitions. Surely, then, Christ had a right to make God known, since God was in fact his own by nature. His aim was not to bring louts and savages into some kind of civilization by frightening them with a crowd of gods whose goodwill has to be bought, as happened with Numa. He aimed at people already civilized, and under illusions produced by their very culture, so that they might come to the knowledge of the truth. So search, then, and see whether the divinity of Christ is real. If it is the kind of thing that transforms a man when he accepts it, and makes him truly good, then it carries with it the duty of renouncing as false whatever is opposed to it — above all, and on every ground, that which hides itself behind the names and images of the dead, and works to convince people of its own divinity by certain signs and miracles and oracles.

And we do assert that certain spiritual beings exist; the name is not an unfamiliar one. The philosophers acknowledge that there are demons — Socrates himself waited on a demon’s will. Why not? It is said that an evil spirit attached itself to him from childhood, turning his mind, no doubt, away from what was good. The poets all know about demons too. Even ignorant common people make constant use of them in cursing: they call on Satan, the chief of the demons, in their oaths, as though from some instinctive knowledge of him in the soul. Plato admits that angels exist as well. And the dealers in magic come forward, no less, as witnesses to both kinds of spirit. Our sacred books teach us, further, how from certain angels who fell of their own free will there sprang a still more wicked brood of demons, condemned by God along with the founders of their race and along with that chief we have mentioned. [p]

For now it will be enough to give some account of what they do. Their great business is the ruin of the human race. From the very beginning, spiritual wickedness has worked at our destruction. So they inflict diseases on our bodies, and other heavy disasters, and by violent assaults they drive the soul into sudden and extraordinary excesses. Their marvelous fineness and thinness gives them access to both parts of our nature. As spirits they work unseen: being invisible and beyond the senses, they show themselves not in the act but in its outcome — as when some unaccountable, unseen poison in the breeze blights the apples and the grain while they are still in flower, or kills them in the bud, or ruins them once they have reached full growth, as though the tainted air were spreading its plague-breath abroad in some way we cannot trace. In the same way, by an influence just as hidden, demons and angels breathe into the soul and rouse up its corruptions with raging passions and vile excesses, or with cruel lusts attended by errors of every kind. The worst of these errors is the one by which these gods of yours are commended to the goodwill of people who have been fooled and deceived, so that the demons may get their proper food — the smell of burnt meat and blood, when that is offered up to the images of idols. What is a daintier food to an evil spirit than turning people’s minds away from the true God by the illusions of a faked-up divination?

And here I will explain how these illusions are worked. Every spirit has wings. This is a property angels and demons have in common. So they are everywhere in a single moment; the whole world is one place to them; whatever is done anywhere in it is as easy for them to know as to report. Their speed of movement is taken for divinity, because nobody knows what they are. So they would have themselves thought, sometimes, to be the authors of the things they announce — and sometimes, no doubt, the bad things really are their doing; never the good ones. They also picked up God’s purposes long ago from the lips of the prophets, exactly as the prophets spoke them, and they still gather them from the prophets’ writings when they hear them read aloud. So, getting some hints of the future from that source as well, they set themselves up as rivals of the true God by stealing his predictions. But your Croesuses and your Pyrrhuses know only too well how skillfully these answers are shaped to fit whatever happens. On the other hand, it was in the way we have explained that the Pythian oracle was able to announce that they were cooking a tortoise together with the flesh of a lamb: in a moment the spirit had been to Lydia and back. Because they live in the air, and are near the stars, and have dealings with the clouds, they have means of knowing what is being prepared in those upper regions, and so can promise the rains they already feel coming. They are very kind about the healing of diseases, too, no doubt. First of all they make you ill; then, to get a miracle out of it, they order remedies that are either altogether new or the opposite of the usual ones; then they withdraw the harmful influence, and are supposed to have worked a cure. What need is there, then, to speak of their other tricks, or to say anything more about the power of deception they have as spirits — those Castor apparitions, the water carried in a sieve, the ship towed along by a belt, the beard turned red at a touch — all done for the one purpose of getting people to believe in the divinity of stones, and not to look for the only true God?