The Gods on Trial

Consider this as well. Sorcerers call up ghosts, and even make what look like the souls of the dead appear. They put boys to death to get an answer out of an oracle. With their conjuring tricks they put on a show of doing all sorts of wonders. They send dreams into people’s minds by the power of the angels and demons whose help they have called in — the same power that makes goats and tables give answers. If a force of evil does all that at somebody else’s bidding, how much harder will it work at its own, on its own initiative and for its own ends! And if angels and demons do exactly what your gods do, then where is the superiority of godhead, which surely ought to be above everything in power? Is it not more reasonable to hold that these spirits are making themselves out to be gods — since they produce the very proofs that promote your gods to godhead — than that the gods are on a level with angels and demons? [a]

You draw a line between one place and another, I suppose: inside their temples you count them gods, outside them you do not. You reckon that the madness which makes one man throw himself off a temple roof is a different thing from the madness that makes another throw himself off the house next door. You look at a man slashing his arms and his genitals and call his frenzy something other than the frenzy of the man who cuts his own throat. The outcome of the raving is the same, and one and the same thing is driving it.

So far we have only been trading words. Now we come to a demonstration of fact, which will show that under two different names you have one and the same thing. Bring into your courtroom a man who is plainly possessed by a demon. Let a Christian order the evil spirit to speak, and it will confess as readily that it is a demon, and tell the truth, as it lied elsewhere when it called itself a god. Or bring in, if you prefer, one of the people supposed to be filled with a god — the ones who breathe in the fumes at the altar and conceive a divinity from them, who are delivered of it by retching, who gasp it out in convulsions. Let Caelestis herself, the Virgin who promises rain; let Aesculapius, the discoverer of medicines, who has more years of life ready for Socordius and Tenatius and Asclepiodotus as they lie dying — let them, if they will not confess that they are demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, spill the blood of that most impudent Christian on the spot.

What could be plainer than a piece of work like that? What proof more to be trusted? Truth in its plainness is set out in the open; its own worth holds it up; no room is left for the slightest suspicion. Will you tell me it is done by magic, or by some trick of that kind? You will say nothing of the sort if you have been left the use of your eyes and ears. What argument can you bring against a thing displayed to the eye exactly as it is?

If they really are gods, why do they pretend to be demons? Out of fear of us? Then your godhead is a subject of Christians, and you can hardly call a thing divine when it stands under the authority of a man — and, if that adds to the shame, of the very men who are its enemies. And if they are demons or angels, why do they turn around and dare to play the part of gods? Beings passing themselves off as gods would never willingly call themselves demons if they were gods, since that would be handing in their own dignity. And beings you know to be no more than demons would not dare to act the god if the ones whose names they borrow were really divine; they would not dare to insult a higher majesty whose anger they knew was to be feared. So this godhead of yours is no godhead. If it were, demons would not lay claim to it and gods would not disown it. But both sides agree that they are not gods, so conclude from that that there is only one race here — the race of demons, and it is the real thing in both cases. Go and look for gods, then; the ones you took for gods you have found to be spirits of evil.

Since we have shown from these same gods that neither they nor any others have a claim to be divine, you can see at the same time who the true God is — whether he is the one, and the only one, that we Christians acknowledge — and whether you ought to believe in him and worship him in the way our faith and discipline require. But they will say at once, “Who is this Christ of yours, with his stories? An ordinary man? A sorcerer? A body his disciples stole out of the tomb? Is he down in the world below now?” Or is he not rather up in heaven, and coming back from there to shake the whole world, to fill the earth with terror, to make everyone wail except Christians — as the Power of God, the Spirit of God, the Word, the Reason, the Wisdom, and the Son of God?

Mock as much as you like, but get the demons to join in the mockery, if you can. Let them deny that Christ is coming to judge every human soul that has existed since the world began, clothing it again with the body it laid down at death. Let them state before your court that the work has been assigned to Minos and Rhadamanthus, as Plato and the poets agree. Let them at least clear themselves of the brand of disgrace and condemnation. Let them deny that they are unclean spirits — though their taste proves it past doubt: blood, and smoke, and the stinking carcasses of sacrificial animals, and the filthy talk of their own attendants. Let them deny that, condemned already for their wickedness, they are being kept for that very day of judgment, along with all their worshippers and all their works.

All the authority and power we have over them comes from naming the name of Christ and reminding them of the disasters God threatens them with at the hands of Christ as Judge — disasters they expect to catch up with them one day. Fearing Christ in God and God in Christ, they become subject to the servants of God and Christ. So at our touch and our breath, overwhelmed by the thought of those fires and by the sight of them, they leave the bodies they have entered when we tell them to: unwilling, in misery, and shamed in front of you.

You believe them when they lie; believe them, then, when they tell the truth about themselves. Nobody plays the liar to bring disgrace on his own head; a man lies for the sake of his honor. You are quicker to trust a person who makes a confession against himself than one who denies a charge on his own behalf. So it has happened more than once that these testimonies from your own gods have made men Christians: by giving them full credit, we are led to believe in Christ. Your own gods kindle our faith in our Scriptures; they build up the confidence of our hope. You do homage to them with the blood of Christians too — I know that well. So they would never willingly lose people so useful and so dutiful to them, people they are anxious to keep hold of in case one day you turn Christian and rout them — if, that is, it were possible for them to lie at all while a Christian has them in his power and means to prove the truth to you.

This whole confession of theirs — that they are not gods, and that there is no God but the one we worship — is quite enough to clear us of the charge of treason, above all treason against the religion of Rome. For if it is certain that the gods do not exist, then there is no religion in the case at all; and if there is no religion, because there are no gods, then we are certainly not guilty of any offense against religion. Instead the charge falls back on your own heads. You worship a lie, and so you are guilty of the very crime you charge us with — not merely by refusing the true religion of the true God, but by going further and persecuting it. [j]

But grant that these objects of your worship really are gods. Is it not the common view that there is one above them, higher and more powerful, the ruler of the world, so to speak, with absolute power and majesty? For the usual way of parceling out divinity is to give one god an emperor’s supreme command and to put the departments into the hands of many, the way Plato pictures great Jupiter in heaven with a whole train of gods and spirits around him. On that showing we ought to give equal respect to the procurators, prefects, and governors of the divine empire. And yet what a crime a man commits who, meaning to win more favor with Caesar, shifts his efforts and his hopes to somebody else, and will not admit that the title of God, like the title of Emperor, belongs to the supreme head alone — when among us it is a capital offense to call anyone but Caesar himself by the highest title, or even to hear it done.

Let one man worship God and another Jupiter. Let one lift his hands in prayer to the sky and another to the altar of Fides. Let one — if this is how you choose to see it — count the clouds while he prays, and another count the panels of the ceiling. Let one dedicate his own life to his God, and another the life of a goat. Take care you do not give a further ground for the charge of irreligion by taking away freedom of religion and forbidding a man his choice of god, so that I am no longer allowed to worship whom I want and am forced to worship whom I do not. Not even a human being would care to have unwilling homage paid to him. That is why the Egyptians themselves have been allowed by law to keep their ridiculous superstition, free to make gods out of birds and beasts, and even to sentence to death anyone who kills a god of that kind.

Every province, in fact, and every city has its own god. Syria has Astarte, Arabia has Dusares, Noricum has Belenus, Africa has its Caelestis, Mauretania has its own petty kings. These are Roman provinces, I think — and yet I have not said that their gods are Roman, since they are not worshipped at Rome any more than the ones raised to divine rank over Italy itself by a town’s own decree: Delventinus at Casinum, Visidianus at Narnia, Ancharia at Asculum, Nortia at Volsinii, Valentia at Ocriculum, Hostia at Satrium, Father Curis among the Faliscans — and it is from him that Juno got her surname.

We are the only people, in fact, who are kept from having a religion of our own. We give offense to the Romans; we are shut out of the rights and privileges of Romans, because we do not worship the gods of Rome. It is a good thing there is a God of all, whose we all are whether we will or not. But with you a man is free to worship any god except the true God — as though he were not rather the God everyone should worship, the God to whom everyone belongs.

I think I have given proof enough on the question of false and true divinity, having shown that it rests not merely on debate and argument but on the testimony of the very beings you take for gods, so that the point needs no further handling. Still, since I have come to the Romans naturally enough, I will not dodge the argument invited by a groundless claim — the claim of those who say that the Romans have been lifted to such a height of power that they have become masters of the world as the reward for their remarkable devotion to religion, and that the beings they worship must certainly be divine, since those who honor them beyond all others prosper beyond all others. [p]

So this is the wage the gods have paid the Romans for their attentions. The empire’s progress is to be credited to Sterculus, and Mutunus, and Larentina! I can hardly think that gods from abroad would want to do more for a foreign nation than for their own, and hand over their own homeland — where they were born, grew up, made their name, and were finally buried — to invaders from across the sea. As for Cybele: if she set her heart on the city of Rome because it sprang from Trojan stock rescued from Greek weapons, being of that same stock herself; if she foresaw her own removal to the nation that would avenge her, the nation that would put down Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia — then let her see to it that her own country was conquered by Greece in the first place.

And in our own day the Great Mother has given a remarkable proof of the greatness she has bestowed on the city as a favor. Marcus Aurelius was lost to the state at Sirmium on the seventeenth of March. A week later her most holy high priest was pouring out unclean offerings of blood drawn from his own arms, and giving orders that the usual prayers be made for the safety of an emperor who was already dead. Slow messengers! Sleepy dispatches! It is their fault that Cybele did not hear of the emperor’s death sooner, and so gave the Christians an opening to laugh at a goddess so unworthy of the name.

Jupiter, again, would surely never have let his own Crete fall at the first blow before the Roman fasces, if he remembered that cave on Ida, and the cymbals of the Corybantes, and the sweet smell of the woman who nursed him there. Would he not have raised his own tomb above the whole Capitol, so that the land covering Jove’s ashes might be the mistress of the world instead? Would Juno have wanted the Carthaginian city destroyed — a city she loved enough to neglect Samos for it — and destroyed by a nation of Aeneas’ sons? As far as I know: “Here were her arms, here was her chariot; even then the goddess was working and nursing this to be the ruler of the nations, if the Fates would in any way allow it.” Jove’s unlucky wife and sister had no power to prevail against the Fates. “Jupiter himself is upheld by fate.” And yet the Romans have never paid such homage to the Fates, who gave them Carthage against Juno’s purpose and against her will, as they have paid to that worthless prostitute Larentina.

There is no doubt that quite a few of your gods once reigned on earth as kings. If they now have the power to bestow empire, then when they were kings themselves, from whom had they received their royal honors? Whom did Jupiter and Saturn worship? Some Sterculus, I suppose. Or did the Romans, along with the home-born ones, later worship some who were never kings? In that case those gods were living under the rule of others — rulers who did not yet bow to them, since they had not yet been raised to godhead. So the giving of kingdoms belongs to somebody else, seeing that there were kings before these gods had their names entered on the roll of divinities.

But how thoroughly foolish it is to credit the greatness of the Roman name to religious merit, when it was after Rome became an empire — or call it a kingdom still — that the religion she professes made most of its progress. Is that how it stands now? Has her religion been the source of Rome’s prosperity? Numa did set going an appetite for superstitious observances, but religion among the Romans was not yet a matter of images or temples. Its ways were frugal, its rites were plain, and there were no Capitols shouldering their way toward the sky; the altars were makeshift ones of turf, the sacred vessels were still Samian earthenware, the smoke went up from those, and no likeness of a god was to be seen. In those days the skill of the Greeks and Etruscans in image-making had not yet flooded the city with its products. So the Romans were not remarkable for devotion to the gods before they came to greatness — which means their greatness was not the result of their religion.

Indeed, how could religion have made a people great when they owe their greatness to irreligion? Unless I am mistaken, kingdoms and empires are won by wars and enlarged by victories; and you cannot have wars and victories without taking cities, and often destroying them. That is a business in which the gods get their share of the disaster. Houses and temples come down alike; priests and citizens are slaughtered without distinction; the plundering hand falls on sacred and on ordinary treasure alike. So the Romans have as many acts of sacrilege to their name as they have trophies. They can boast as many triumphs over gods as over nations; they still hold as much battle plunder as there are statues of captured gods left standing. And the poor gods put up with being worshipped by their enemies, and decree an empire without limit to men whose injuries deserved punishment at their hands far more than their pretended homage deserved a reward. But beings with no awareness can be dishonored with impunity, just as they are worshipped in vain. You certainly cannot believe that devotion to religion has plainly raised a people to greatness when, as we have put it, they either grew by injuring religion or injured religion by growing. And the peoples whose kingdoms have been absorbed into the one great mass of the Roman empire were not without religion of their own when their kingdoms were taken from them.

Examine it, then, and see whether the one who hands out kingdoms is not the God who is Lord both of the world that is ruled and of the man who rules it; whether the one who appointed the changes of dynasties and their seasons is not the God who was before all time and made the world a body of times; whether the rise and fall of states is not the work of the God under whose sovereignty the human race once lived with no states at all. [x]

How do you let yourselves go so far wrong? Why, the Rome of rural simplicity is older than some of her gods; she was a kingdom before her proud, vast Capitol was built. The Babylonians held dominion before there were Pontiffs, the Medes before the Fifteen, the Egyptians before the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. And here is one more point. If the religions of Rome give empire, then Judea in the old days would never have been a kingdom, despising as it did every one of these idol gods — Judea, whose God you Romans once honored with sacrificial victims, and whose temple you honored with gifts, and whose people you honored with treaties, and which would never have come under your scepter except for that last and crowning offense against God: rejecting Christ and crucifying him.