Caesar Is Not God

What we have said so far is enough to answer the charge that we insult your gods, since we cannot be accused of harming what does not exist. When we are summoned to sacrifice, we flatly refuse, because we know exactly what is going on. We are certain who really receives those services: spirits working behind images made profane and behind the names of men turned into gods. Some people think it madness that we will not simply sacrifice, walk away unharmed, and keep our convictions to ourselves; that we would rather hold stubbornly to what we confess than save our own skins. So your advice, it seems, is that we should cheat you. But we know where advice like that comes from, who is behind all of it, and how every effort is made — now by clever persuasion, now by pitiless violence — to break our steadiness. [a]

It is that spirit, part demon and part angel, who hates us because he himself is cut off from God and who is eaten up with envy at the favor God has shown us. He turns your minds against us by an influence you never see, shaping them and driving them into exactly the twisted judgments and the unjust cruelty we described at the beginning of this book, when we first took up the argument. For although the whole force of demons and spirits of their kind is under our control, they behave like bad slaves, who mix defiance with fear and enjoy hurting the very people they are afraid of. Fear breeds hatred as well as obedience. Besides, they are desperate — already under sentence — and while the punishment is delayed it is some comfort to them to have the use of their own malice in the meantime. And yet the moment a hand is laid on them they give in and accept their lot; the people they fight from a distance they beg for mercy at close quarters. So when they break out against us, their masters — a mutiny in a slave barracks, a prison, a mine, or any other penal gang — they know the whole time that they are no match for us, and it is precisely that which makes them throw themselves the more recklessly into ruin. We fight back reluctantly, as though they were our equals, and we defeat them by holding on to the very thing they attack. Our victory over them is never more complete than when we are condemned for refusing to let go of our faith.

It was easy enough to see that forcing free men to sacrifice against their will is unjust — even in other acts of religious service a willing mind is required. So it ought to be counted plain absurdity for one man to force another to honor the gods. A man should go to them of his own accord, out of his own sense of need. Otherwise, exercising the freedom that is his by right, he is entitled to say: “I want none of Jupiter’s favors. And who are you, exactly? Let Janus scowl at me with whichever of his faces he likes. What business is that of yours?” [d]

It must be these same evil spirits who have put you up to forcing us to sacrifice for the emperor’s welfare. You are under a compulsion to use force, exactly as we are under an obligation to face what that force does to us. Which brings us to the second charge: that we are guilty of treason against a more exalted majesty. For you pay Caesar a deeper dread and a more intense reverence than you pay Olympian Jupiter himself — and, if you only realized it, with good reason. Is not any living man better than a dead one, whoever the dead man is? Still, your reason for doing it is nothing but this: you can feel the presence of a power you can actually see. So here too you stand convicted of irreverence toward your own gods, since you show more respect to a human ruler than you show them. And among you a man will perjure himself far more readily by all the gods together than by the single genius of Caesar.

First, then, let it be shown that the beings you sacrifice to really are able to protect the emperor or anybody else — and then convict us of treason. Let it be shown that angels and demons, spirits of the worst kind, do any good; that the lost can save; that the condemned can set free; that the dead — and you know quite well what I mean — can defend the living. Surely the first thing they would see to is the safety of their own statues and images and temples, which in fact owe their protection, I think, to the guards Caesar posts. In fact I believe the very material they are made of comes out of Caesar’s mines, and there is not a temple standing that does not depend on Caesar’s will. Yes, and plenty of gods have felt a Caesar’s displeasure. It helps my case just as much when they share in his favor and he grants them some gift or privilege. How can beings who are in Caesar’s power like this, who belong to him outright, hold Caesar’s protection in their hands? How can you imagine them giving Caesar what they are far more likely to receive from him? That, then, is the ground on which we are charged with treason against the imperial majesty: that we will not put the emperors underneath their own property, and will not go through a piece of playacting on their behalf, since we do not believe their safety rests in hands made of lead. It is you who are irreverent, and to a high degree — looking for that safety where it is not, asking it from those who have none to give, and walking past the One who holds it entirely in his power. On top of that, you persecute the people who do know where to look for it, and who, knowing that, are also able to obtain it. [e]

We pray for the safety of our emperors to the eternal God, the true God, the living God — the very one whose favor they themselves must want more than any other. They know who gave them their power. They know, since they are men, who gave them life in the first place. They are convinced that he alone is God, that they depend entirely on his power and on no other, that they come second to him, and that after him they hold the highest place of all, ahead of and above every god. And why not, since they stand above all living men, and the living, simply by being alive, stand above the dead? They think about how far their power reaches, and that is how they come to understand who is highest; they admit that all their strength comes from the one against whom their strength is nothing. Let the emperor make war on heaven; let him lead heaven captive in his triumph; let him post guards over heaven; let him tax heaven! He cannot. He is great precisely because he is less than heaven. He himself belongs to the one to whom heaven and every created thing belongs. He receives his scepter from the same source as his humanity, and his power from the same source as the breath of life. [f]

That is where we lift our eyes, with hands spread open, because they are guiltless; with heads uncovered, because we have nothing to be ashamed of; and, in the end, with no prompter, because our praying comes out of the heart. We pray without stopping for all our emperors: for a long life, a secure empire, a safe imperial house, brave armies, a loyal senate, an honest people, a world at peace — everything a man could want, and everything a Caesar could want. I can ask these things of no one but the God I know will grant them, both because he alone gives them and because I have a claim on his giving. I am his servant. I pay honor to him alone. I am persecuted for his teaching. And I offer him, at his own demand, that rich and better sacrifice which is prayer, sent up from a body kept pure, from a soul without stain, from a spirit made holy — not a penny’s worth of incense grains, the tears of an Arabian tree; not a few drops of wine; not the blood of some worn-out ox for which dying is a mercy, brought with a filthy conscience on top of everything else that is offensive about it. When your victims are inspected by those disgusting priests, one has to wonder why the inspection is not of the men sacrificing rather than of the animals. With our hands stretched out to God like this: tear us with your iron claws, hang us on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads off with the sword, turn the wild beasts loose on us. The very posture of a Christian at prayer is a body already made ready for every punishment. Go on, then, good governors: wring the soul out of a man while he is begging God on the emperor’s behalf. Brand God’s truth and devotion to his name as crime.

But we are only flattering the emperor, you say, and faking these prayers of ours to escape being punished. Thank you for the mistake — it gives us the chance to prove what we claim. You think we care nothing for Caesar’s welfare? Then look into what God has said. Examine our sacred books. We do not keep them hidden, and all sorts of accidents put them into the hands of people who are not ours. You will learn from them that we are commanded to a generosity so wide that we pray to God for our enemies and ask blessings for the men who persecute us. And who are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians than the very people we are charged with committing treason against? Indeed, the Scripture says so in as many words, and plainly enough: “Pray for kings, and rulers, and powers, so that everything may be peaceful for you.” For when the empire is shaken and the shock is felt in its other limbs, we too are somewhere in it — and though nobody thinks of us as men given to disorder, we live in some place or other that the disaster touches. [i]

There is another and a greater reason why we must pray for the emperors — indeed, for the whole standing of the empire and for Roman affairs in general. We know that a tremendous upheaval hangs over the whole earth; that the very end of all things is threatening dreadful suffering; and that the one thing holding it back is the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no wish to be caught by all that, and when we pray for its delay we are helping Rome last longer. More than that: though we refuse to swear by the genii of the Caesars, we do swear by their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii. Do you not know that these genii are called daemones, and that the diminutive, daemonia, is used of them as well? What we respect in the emperors is God’s own arrangement, since it is he who set them over the nations. We know that there is something in them that God has willed, and we want what God has willed kept safe; an oath sworn on it we count a great oath. But demons — your genii, that is — we are in the habit of driving out, not of swearing by them and so paying them the honor due to God. [k]

But why go on any longer about the reverence and religious respect Christians have for the emperor, whom we cannot help looking up to as a man called to his office by our Lord? On solid grounds, then, I can say that Caesar is more ours than yours, since it is our God who appointed him. And because he is mine in that sense, I do more for his welfare than you do — not merely because I ask it from the one who is able to give it, or because I ask as a man with a claim to be heard, but also because, by keeping Caesar’s majesty inside its proper limits, putting it under the Most High, and refusing to make it divine, I commend him all the more to the favor of God, the only one I rank him below. I put him under someone I hold to be more glorious than he is. I will never call the emperor God. I could not do it without lying; I would not dare to make a fool of him; and he himself does not want that high name for himself. If he is only a man, it is in his own interest as a man to leave God the higher place. Let him think it enough to bear the name of emperor. That too is a great name, and God gave it. To call him God is to take his real title away from him: if he is not a man, he cannot be emperor. Even in the middle of a triumph, riding high on that chariot, he is reminded that he is human. A voice at his back keeps saying in his ear: “Look behind you. Remember that you are a man.” And it only adds to his exultation that he blazes with a glory so far beyond the ordinary that he has to be warned about his own condition. It adds to his greatness that he needs such a reminder — in case he should begin to think himself divine. [m]

Augustus, who founded the empire, refused even the title “Lord,” since that too is a name belonging to God. For myself, I am willing to give the emperor the word, but in its everyday sense, and only when I am not being forced to say “Lord” in God’s place. Toward him I stand as a free man. I have one true Lord only, the almighty and eternal God, who is the emperor’s Lord as well. How can a man who is truly the father of his country be its master? The name that belongs to family devotion is a warmer thing than the name of power; that is why the heads of households are called fathers rather than masters. Much less, then, should the emperor be given the name of God. To profess that we believe he is God takes the vilest flattery — a deadly one, in fact. It is as though you already had an emperor and gave the title to someone else: would you not give enormous and unforgivable offense to the man who actually reigns? And the man on whom you bestowed the title would have that same offense to fear. Give God all your reverence, if you want him favorable to the emperor. Stop worshipping any other being as divine, and stop believing that any other is. Stop giving the sacred name to a man who has need of God himself. And if flattery like that is not ashamed of its own lie when it addresses a man as divine, let it at least be afraid of the omen it carries. To give Caesar the name of god before he has been made one is to call down a curse on him. [n]