See How They Love

So this is the reason Christians are counted public enemies: that we pay the emperor no empty, false or foolish honors; that, holding to the true religion, we would rather keep his festival days with a clear conscience than with the usual debauchery. It is a splendid tribute, no doubt, to carry fires and couches out into the street, to feast from one end of the block to the other, to turn the city into one enormous tavern, to make mud with wine, to run in packs into acts of violence and shamelessness and every enticement to lust. Is public joy really shown by public disgrace? Do things that are indecent on other days become fitting on the holidays of princes? Do men who keep the rules of decency out of respect for Caesar break them for his sake? Is devotion to be a license for immorality, and religion the excuse for every kind of riot? [a]

Poor us — we deserve everything we get. For why do we keep the emperors’ vow-days and great celebrations chastely, soberly, decently? Why, on the day of rejoicing, do we neither drape our doorposts with laurel nor push the daylight back with lamps? When a public holiday calls for it, apparently the proper thing is to dress your house up like a brand-new brothel.

Now, about this homage paid to a lesser majesty — the ground on which we are charged with a lesser sacrilege, because we do not celebrate the holidays of the Caesars in a way that modesty, decency and purity all forbid (they were set up as opportunities for license rather than out of any worthy motive) — about this I am anxious to show how loyal and truthful you are. It may turn out that here too the people who will not let us be counted Romans, but call us enemies of Rome’s rulers, are worse than we wicked Christians.

I appeal to the people of Rome themselves, the native stock of the seven hills. Does that Roman tongue of theirs ever spare a Caesar? The Tiber and the beast-schools can testify. Suppose nature had covered our hearts with something transparent that the light could pass through: whose heart would not be found engraved all over with the scene of one Caesar after another presiding at a handout of money? And this at the very moment they are shouting, “May Jupiter take years from us and add them to yours!” Words like these are as foreign to a Christian’s mouth as wanting a change of emperor is foreign to his character.

But that is only the rabble, you say. Granted; yet the rabble are Romans too, and nobody demands the death of Christians more often than they do. Of course the other classes, as their higher rank requires, are religiously loyal. No breath of treason has ever come out of the senate, the knights, the camp, the palace. Where, then, did a Cassius come from, or a Niger, or an Albinus? Where did the men come from who set on the Caesar between the two laurel groves? Where the men who took up wrestling so as to learn how to strangle him? Where the men who broke into the palace in full armor, bolder than all your Tigerii and Parthenii? If I am not mistaken, they were Romans — which is to say, they were not Christians.

Yet every one of them, on the very eve of his treason, was offering sacrifices for the emperor’s safety and swearing by his guardian spirit — one thing on the lips and another in the heart. And no doubt they were in the habit of calling Christians enemies of the state. Even now men are turned up daily as accomplices or sympathizers in these crimes and conspiracies, the last gleanings after a whole vintage of traitors. Think how green and leafy the laurels were that they hung on their doorposts, how tall and bright the lamps that smoked up their porches, how elegant and gaudy the couches with which they carved up the Forum among themselves — and not to celebrate a public rejoicing at all, but to get an advance taste of their own vow-days by sharing another man’s festival, and to set up the model and image of what they hoped for, with the emperor’s name already changed in their minds.

The same homage is paid, dutifully too, by the men who consult astrologers and fortune-tellers and augurs and magicians about the life of the Caesars — arts made known by the angels who sinned and forbidden by God, which Christians do not use even in their own affairs. But who has any reason to inquire into an emperor’s life unless he has some wish or scheme against it, or some hope of what comes after it? Inquiries about a friend are not made in the same spirit as inquiries about a sovereign. A relative’s anxiety is one thing; a subject’s is quite another.

If men who bear the name of Romans turn out to be enemies of Rome, why are we, merely because we are regarded as enemies, refused the name of Romans? We can be Romans and enemies of Rome at the same time, seeing that men who pass for Romans are found to be enemies of their own country. [g]

So the affection and loyalty and respect owed to emperors do not consist in tokens of homage like these, which even hostility can perform with enthusiasm, chiefly as a cover for its own plans. They consist in the things God lays on us just as surely as they are held necessary toward all men, emperors included. Acts of real goodness of heart are not owed by us to emperors alone. We never do good with an eye to the person, since we act in our own interest, as men who take no payment in praise or reward from any human being, but from God, who both requires and repays a goodwill that plays no favorites. We are the same toward emperors as toward our ordinary neighbors. We are equally forbidden to wish evil, to do evil, to speak evil, to think evil of anyone at all. What we may not do to an emperor we may not do to anyone else; and what we would not do to anybody, all the more we should not do to the man God has been pleased to raise so high.

If we are commanded to love our enemies, as I said earlier, whom is there left for us to hate? If we are wronged, we are forbidden to pay it back, in case we become as bad as the men who wronged us — so who can be hurt at our hands? [h]

Cast your minds back over your own record. How often you deal out savage cruelty to Christians, partly because you want to and partly because the laws tell you to! How often the mob, paying no attention to you, takes the law into its own hands and comes at us with stones and fire! With the frenzy of a Bacchic riot they do not even spare our dead: they drag them out of the rest of the tomb, out of what you might call the sanctuary of death — changed as they are, and no longer whole — and cut them up and pull them apart.

Yet, bound together as we are and always ready to give up our lives, what single act of revenge for injury can you point to? If it were held right among us to pay evil back with evil, a single night and a torch or two would settle the account handsomely. But God forbid that a religion from God should avenge itself with human fire, or should flinch from the sufferings that test it.

If we did want to play the open enemy, and not merely the secret avenger, would we be short of strength — of numbers or of resources? The Moors, of course, the Marcomanni, the Parthians themselves, or any single people, however great, that lives in one territory and is shut inside its own borders, must outnumber a people spread over the whole world! We are only of yesterday, and we have filled every place you have — cities, islands, forts, towns, market squares, the camp itself, the tribes, the councils, the palace, the senate, the forum. All we have left you is the temples of your gods.

What wars would we not be fit for, and eager for, even against heavier odds — we who give ourselves up so willingly to the sword — if our religion did not count it better to be killed than to kill? Even unarmed, raising no flag of revolt, simply as your enemies, we could carry on the fight by nothing more than walking out on you. If a mass of people as large as this broke with you and took itself off to some remote corner of the world, the loss of so many citizens, of whatever quality, would shame the empire by itself; in fact the desertion would be punishment enough. You would be horrified at the emptiness you found yourselves in, at the silence over everything, at the stunned look of a dead world. You would have to go looking for subjects to govern. You would have more enemies left than citizens. As it is, the sheer number of Christians is what makes your enemies so few — nearly everyone in one city after another belongs to Christ.

And yet you would rather call us enemies of the human race than enemies of human error. Who would rescue you, then, from those hidden enemies who are always at work wrecking your souls and ruining your health? Who would save you, I mean, from the attacks of the evil spirits that we drive out for no fee and no wages? That by itself would be revenge enough for us: to leave you from now on in the free possession of unclean spirits. But instead of reckoning up what you owe us for so great a protection — we who are not merely no trouble to you but necessary to your well-being — you prefer to hold us enemies. And so we are: not enemies of man, but of man’s error.

Ought not Christians, then, to be given not merely somewhat milder treatment, but a place among the lawful societies, seeing they are guilty of none of the crimes people dread from the illegal kind? Unless I have the matter wrong, such associations are banned out of a prudent concern for public order, so that the state should not be split into parties — which would naturally cause trouble at the voting assemblies, in the councils, in the town senates, at special meetings, even at the public shows, where rival supporters collide. That is all the more likely now that men have begun, with an eye to profit, to treat their own violence as an article to be bought and sold. [l]

But we are men in whom every appetite for glory and public honor is dead, and we have no pressing reason to take part in your public meetings. Nothing is more foreign to us than affairs of state. We recognize one commonwealth that takes everyone in: the world.

We renounce your shows as firmly as we renounce what gave rise to them — things we know were conceived out of superstition — since we give up the very objects the performances are built on. Nothing is said or seen or heard among us that has anything in common with the madness of the racecourse, the indecency of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, or the pointless exertions of the wrestling-ground. Why should you take offence at us for differing from you about your pleasures? If we will not share in what you enjoy, the loss is ours, if there is a loss at all, and not yours. We reject what pleases you; you have no taste for what delights us. You let the Epicureans settle for themselves what real pleasure is — peace of mind, as they called it. The Christian, for his part, has plenty of pleasures of that kind. What is the harm in that?

I will go straight on, then, and show what is distinctive about the Christian community. Having refuted the evil charged against it, I can point out the good in it. [n]

We are a body welded together by a shared confession of religion, by one and the same discipline, and by the bond of a common hope. We come together as a gathering and a congregation so that, praying to God as if with massed force, we may lay siege to him with our petitions. This is a violence God is glad of. We pray, too, for the emperors, for their officials and for everyone in authority; for the state of the world, for quiet everywhere, and for the postponement of the end.

We meet to read our sacred writings, whenever anything about the present time forces us either to look ahead or to look back. In any case, we feed our faith with those holy words, we lift our hope, we make our confidence steadier — and we tighten our hold on good habits just as much by driving home God’s commands. In the same place encouragement is given, and correction and holy censure are administered. The work of judging is carried on among us with great seriousness, as it must be among men who are certain they are in God’s sight; and it is the sharpest possible preview of the judgment to come when a man has sinned so badly that he has to be cut off from our prayer, our assembly and every holy dealing we have. Men of proven character among our elders preside over us, and they get that honor not by purchase but by what they have shown themselves to be. In the things of God nothing whatever is bought or sold.

We do have a chest, but it is not filled with entrance money, as though our religion had a price on it. On one day a month each man puts in a small coin — if he likes, and only if he likes, and only if he can. Nobody is compelled; it is all voluntary. These are, so to speak, the savings of devotion. The money is not drawn out for banquets or drinking parties or eating-houses, but to feed and bury poor people, for boys and girls left without property and without parents, for old people now confined to the house, for the shipwrecked; and if any are in the mines, or exiled to the islands, or shut up in prison for nothing but their loyalty to God’s church, they become the foster-children of what they have confessed.

But it is mainly a love as generous as this that brands us in some people’s eyes. “Look,” they say, “how they love one another” — while they themselves hate one another; “look how ready they are to die for one another” — while they themselves are readier to kill.

They are angry with us, too, for calling one another brothers, and for no other reason, I think, than that among themselves the words for kinship are used as a mere pretence of affection. But we are your brothers as well, by the law of the one mother we share, nature — though you are barely men, being such poor brothers. How much better the name of brother fits those who have been brought to know one God as their Father, who have drunk in one spirit of holiness, who have struggled out of the same womb of shared ignorance into the same light of truth.

Perhaps we are thought to have less claim to be true brothers just because no tragedy is ever staged about our brotherhood, or because the family property that generally destroys brotherhood among you is what makes brothers of us. Being one in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share what we own. Everything is held in common among us except our wives. That is the one point at which we break off the sharing, and it is the one point at which the rest of you practise it — you who not only take over your friends’ wives but most obligingly hand over your own, following, I suppose, the example of those wise men of old, Socrates the Greek and Cato the Roman, who let their friends have the wives they had married, for the sake, it seems, of children for themselves and for others. Whether the wives objected, I cannot say. Why should they have cared about their chastity, when their husbands gave it away so readily? What a noble specimen of Attic wisdom and Roman gravity: the philosopher and the censor turned pimps.

No wonder, then, that a love as great as ours for one another is treated by you as something filthy. You abuse even our modest meals, calling them extravagant as well as infamously wicked. Diogenes’ remark must apply to us: “The people of Megara feast as though they were going to die tomorrow, and build as though they were never going to die.” But a man sees the speck in someone else’s eye more easily than the plank in his own.

Why, the very air goes sour with the belching of so many tribes and wards and boards. The Salii cannot hold their banquet without borrowing money. It takes accountants to work out what the tithes of Hercules and the sacrificial dinners cost. For the Apaturia, the Dionysia and the Attic mysteries the finest chef is engaged. When Serapis holds his banquet, the smoke calls out the fire brigade. And it is only over the modest dining room of the Christians that anyone makes a fuss.

Our meal explains itself by its name. It is called by the Greek word for love. Whatever it costs, our outlay in the name of devotion is gain, since with the good things of the meal we help the needy — not the way it is with you, where hangers-on aim at the glory of gorging their appetites and sell themselves for a bellyful to every kind of degrading treatment, but as it is with God himself, where particular respect is shown to the lowest.

If the purpose of our meal is good, judge the rest of its rules in that light. Since it is an act of religious service, it permits nothing vile and nothing immodest. Nobody reclines at the table until he has first tasted a prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies hunger; as much is drunk as befits people who are chaste. They eat their fill as men who remember that they have to worship God during the night as well; they talk as men who know the Lord is listening. After hands have been washed and the lamps brought in, each is invited to stand out and sing to God, as best he can, either something from the holy Scriptures or something of his own composing — which is a fair test of how much he has drunk. The meal began with prayer, and with prayer it is closed. We leave it, not as troops of troublemakers or gangs of vagrants, and not to break out into indecency, but to take as much care of our modesty and our chastity as if we had come away from a school of virtue rather than a dinner.

Give the congregation of the Christians its due. Rule it unlawful if it is like the societies of the illegal kind; condemn it, by all means, if any charge can properly be laid against it of the sort that lies against secret factions. But who has ever come to harm from our meetings? We are in our congregations exactly what we are apart from one another; together we are what we are one by one. We injure nobody and we distress nobody. When the upright meet, when the good meet, when the devoted and the pure gather together, that is not to be called a faction. It should be called a council.