The Season of Scorpions

An antidote for the scorpion’s sting.

The earth breeds a great evil out of the tiny scorpion, the way a sore breeds pus. There are as many poisons as there are kinds of scorpion, as many disasters as there are species of it, as many pains as it has colors. Nicander writes about scorpions and describes them. And yet striking with the tail — and the tail is whatever runs out from the hindmost part of the body and lashes — is the one movement they all use when they attack. That string of knots in the scorpion, then, which on the inside is a thin poisoned vein, rises with a bowlike spring and draws a barbed sting tight at the end, in the manner of an engine for shooting missiles. That is why they also name after the scorpion the weapon of war which, when it is drawn back, gives the arrows their drive. The point in the creature is likewise a channel of the very finest sort, made to inflict the wound; and where it goes in, it pours out poison. [a]

The usual season of danger is summer. Its fierceness hoists sail when the wind is from the south and the southwest. Among the cures, certain substances that nature supplies work very well; magic also ties on a bandage of one kind or another; the art of healing fights back with the lancet and the cup. Some people are in a hurry and take a protective drink beforehand — but sex drains it out of them, and they are dry again. We have faith for our defense, so long as we are not struck by distrust itself as well: we make the sign at once, and speak the adjuration, and smear the heel with the creature. In fact we often help even pagans this way, since God has given us the power the apostle was the first to use, when he thought nothing of the viper’s bite.

So what does this pen of yours have to offer, if faith is already safe by what it has of its own? That it may be safe by what it has of its own at other times too, when it is up against scorpions of its own kind. These also have a troublesome smallness, and come in different sorts, and are armed in one and the same way, and are stirred up at a fixed season — and that season is nothing but burning heat. Among Christians this is the season of persecution.

So when faith is being shaken hard, and the Church is burning as the bush was, then the Gnostics break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom bubble up, hot themselves to strike, to get in, to kill. Because they know that many people are simple and inexperienced as well, and weak besides — that a very great number of Christians in fact veer about with the wind and take on its moods — they see that there is never a better moment to come at them than when fear has opened the doors of the soul, and especially when some display of savagery has already crowned the faith of the martyrs.

So, trailing the tail along for the moment, they first lay it against the feelings, or lash with it as if at empty air. “Innocent people go through such suffering. A sect that is a trouble to nobody, and this is how it is handled!” You might take the speaker for a brother, or for one of the better sort of pagans. Then they pierce. “Men are dying for no reason.” That they are dying, and that they are dying for no reason, is the first thrust in. Then they strike to kill. “But the simple souls do not know what is written, or what it means — where and when and before whom we must confess, or ought to — except that this, dying for God, is not simplicity at all, since he is the one who keeps me alive, but folly — no, madness. If he kills me, how can it be his business to keep me safe? Christ died for us once for all; he was killed once for all so that we would not be killed. If he demands the like from me in return, is he looking for salvation out of my violent death as well? Or does God beg for the blood of men, especially when he refuses the blood of bulls and goats? Certainly he would rather have the sinner’s repentance than his death. And how is he hungry for the death of people who are not sinners?”

Whom will these — and perhaps other subtle contrivances loaded with heretical poisons — not pierce, into doubt if not into destruction, into irritation if not into death? So then, you: if faith is wide awake, will you not strike the scorpion on the spot with a curse, and as far as you can with your sandal, and leave it dying in its own stupor? But if it gets its fill of the wound, it drives the poison inward and makes it hurry into the guts. At once all the senses a man had go dull, the blood of the mind freezes, the flesh of the spirit wastes away, and disgust at the Christian name comes up with a sourness in the mouth. Already the understanding is looking for somewhere to be sick; and so, once for all, the weakness it was struck with breathes out its wounded faith, either into heresy or into paganism.

And the state of things now is that we are in the middle of an intense heat, the very dog star of persecution — a state of things set going, no doubt, by the dog-headed one himself. Some Christians have been tried by fire, some by the sword, some by wild animals; others are hungering in prison for the martyrdoms they have already tasted in the meantime, having been put to the clubs and the claws besides. We ourselves have been marked down for the chase, and are like hares being ringed in from a distance; and the heretics go about as they always do.

So the state of the times has prompted me to prepare with my pen, against the little beasts that trouble our sect, our antidote for poison, so that I may work cures with it. You who read will be drinking at the same time. And the draught is not bitter. If the sayings of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, the juices come from that source. If the promise of God flows with milk and honey, the ingredients that make up this drink have the same smack. “But woe to those who turn sweet into bitter, and light into darkness.” For in just the same way those who oppose martyrdoms, making out that salvation is destruction, change sweet into bitter as well as light into darkness; and so, by preferring this most wretched life to that most blessed one, they put bitter for sweet and darkness for light.

But we are not yet to learn about the good that comes of martyrdom before we have heard about the duty of undergoing it, and we are not to learn that it is useful before we have heard that it is necessary. The question of God’s warrant goes first — whether God has willed and also commanded anything of the kind — so that those who say martyrdom is not good are not plied with arguments for thinking it profitable until they have first been beaten on that point. Heretics ought to be driven to their duty, not enticed into it. Stubbornness has to be conquered, not coaxed. And certainly a thing will be pronounced good enough in advance once it is shown to have been both instituted and enjoined by God. Let the Gospels wait a little while I set out their root, the Law, and while I find out the will of God from the writings in which I also call God himself to mind. [o]

He says: “I am God, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make yourself a likeness of the things that are in heaven, or on the earth beneath, or in the sea under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them. For I am the Lord your God.” Likewise in the same book of Exodus: “You yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven. You shall not make yourselves gods of silver, and you shall not make yourselves gods of gold.” And to this effect in Deuteronomy: “Hear, Israel: the Lord your God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your might, and with all your soul.” And again: “And do not forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall fear the Lord your God, and serve him only, and hold fast to him, and swear by his name. You shall not go after strange gods, the gods of the nations that are round about you, because the Lord your God is a jealous God among you — or his anger will be kindled against you, and destroy you from the face of the earth.”

But setting blessings and curses before them, he also says: “Blessings will be yours if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, whatever I command you this day, and do not wander from the way I have commanded you, by going and serving other gods whom you do not know.” And as to rooting them out in every way: “You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations you are to possess as an inheritance served their gods, on the mountains and the hills and under leafy trees. You shall overthrow all their altars; you shall overturn and break their pillars in pieces, and cut down their sacred groves, and burn the carved images of the gods themselves with fire, and destroy their names out of that place.” He presses the point further, for the time when they had entered the land of promise and driven out its nations: “Take heed to yourself, that you do not follow them after they have been driven out before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘As the nations serve their gods, so let me do too.’”

But he also says: “If there arises among you a prophet himself, or a dreamer of dreams, and he gives you a sign or a wonder, and it comes to pass, and he says, ‘Let us go and serve other gods, whom you do not know’ — do not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer, for the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you fear God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall go after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and serve him, and hold fast to him. But that prophet or dreamer shall die, because he has spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God.” And in another section: “If, however, your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife you hold close, or your friend who is like your own soul, urges you in secret, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods, which you do not know, and your fathers did not know, gods of the nations that are round about you, very near you or far from you’ — do not consent to go with him, and do not listen to him. Your eye shall not spare him; you shall not pity him; you shall not shield him. You shall certainly inform against him. Your hand shall be the first upon him, to kill him, and afterwards the hand of your people; and you shall stone him, and he shall die, because he has sought to turn you away from the Lord your God.”

He adds the same about cities: that if it appeared that one of them had gone over to other gods on the advice of wicked men, all its inhabitants were to be killed, and everything belonging to it put under the ban, and all its plunder gathered together at all its exits and burned with fire, people and all, in all its streets, in the sight of the Lord God. And, he says, “it shall never be lived in again. It shall not be rebuilt any more, and nothing of its accursed plunder shall cling to your hands, so that the Lord may turn from the fierceness of his anger.” Out of his loathing for idols he has framed a string of curses too: “Cursed be the man who makes a carved or a cast image, a detestable thing, the work of a craftsman’s hands, and puts it in a hidden place.” But in Leviticus he says: “Do not go after idols, and do not make yourselves cast gods. I am the Lord your God.” And in other passages: “The children of Israel are my household servants; these are the ones I led out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. You shall not make yourselves idols fashioned by hand, and you shall not set up a carved image; nor shall you set up a conspicuous stone in your land, to bow to it. I am the Lord your God.”

These words were indeed first spoken by the Lord through the lips of Moses, and they certainly apply to anyone whom the Lord God of Israel leads out in the same way, out of the Egypt of a world sunk in false religion and out of the house where men are slaves. But from the mouth of every prophet in turn, sayings of the same God sound out as well, enlarging that same law of his by a renewal of the same commands, and announcing no duty so particularly, first of all, as being on guard against every making and worshipping of idols — as when he says by the mouth of David:

Nor do I think it necessary to discuss whether God takes a worthy course in forbidding his own name and honor to be handed over to a lie, or in refusing to let those he has plucked out of the maze of false religion go back to Egypt, or in not allowing those he has chosen for himself to depart from him. So this too will not need to be treated by us: whether he has wished the rule he chose to appoint to be kept, and whether he justly avenges the abandoning of the rule he wished kept. For he would have appointed it to no purpose if he had not wished it kept, and would have wished it kept to no purpose if he had been unwilling to uphold it. My next step, then, is to put these appointments of God against false religions to the test — the completely vanquished as well as the punished — since the whole argument for martyrdoms will depend on them. [t]

Moses was apart with God on the mountain when the people, not putting up with an absence so necessary, look to have gods made for themselves — gods which he, for his part, will prefer to destroy. Aaron is pestered, and orders the earrings of their women to be brought together to be thrown into the fire. For the people were about to lose, as a judgment upon themselves, the true ornament of the ears: the words of God. The knowing fire makes them the cast likeness of a calf, reproaching them with having their heart where their treasure is as well — in Egypt, that is, which among its other animals clothed a certain ox too with sacredness. And so the killing of three thousand by their nearest relatives, because they had displeased that nearest relative of all, God, solemnly marked both where the trespass began and what it deserved.

Israel, as we are told in Numbers, turned aside at Shittim, and the people go to the daughters of Moab to gratify their lust. They are lured to the idols, so that they prostituted themselves in spirit as well. In the end they eat of the defiled sacrifices; then they both worship the gods of that nation and are admitted to the rites of Baal-peor. For this lapse into idolatry too, the sister of adultery, it took the killing of twenty-three thousand by the swords of their own countrymen to appease the anger of God.

After the death of Joshua son of Nun they forsake the God of their fathers and serve idols, the Baals and the Ashtaroth; and the Lord in his anger handed them over into the hands of plunderers, and they went on being plundered by them, and being sold to their adversaries, and they could not stand before their enemies at all. Wherever they went out, his hand was upon them for harm, and they were greatly distressed. And after this God sets judges over them, the same as our censors. But not even these did they go on obeying steadily. As soon as one of the judges died, they went on to transgress worse than their fathers had, by going after the gods of others, and serving and worshipping them. So the Lord was angry. “Since this nation has transgressed my covenant, which I established with their fathers, and has not listened to my voice, I too will give no heed to removing from before them a single man of the nations that Joshua left when he died.” And so throughout almost the whole record of the judges, and of the kings who came after them, while the strength of the surrounding nations was kept up, he meted wrath out to Israel by war and captivity and a foreign yoke, as often as they turned aside from him — and above all to idolatry.