The Physician’s Knife

So the case is clear. From the very beginning this kind of worship has been forbidden — witness the commands, so many and so weighty — and it has never been taken up without punishment following, as the examples show, so many and so striking; and God counts no offense so brazen as a trespass of this kind. That being so, we ought to go on and see the point of God’s threats and of his carrying them out. Even in those days that point was made plain, not only by men who never called the threats into question, but by men who endured martyrdom for them — and he had certainly given the occasion for martyrdom by forbidding idolatry, since otherwise martyrdoms would not happen at all. He had backed them with his own authority as well, wanting those events to come about for which he had himself supplied the occasion. [a]

This matters now, because we are being badly stung on the question of God’s will, and the scorpion drives the sting in again. He denies that this will exists; he finds fault with it. Either he hints that there is some other god whose will this is not, or he overturns our own God just the same, on the ground that this is what our God wills, or else he denies this will of God’s outright, if he cannot deny God himself. For our part, we argue about God, and about the whole body of heretical teaching, elsewhere. Here we draw the lines of the ring for one bout only, and we maintain this: the will that gave the occasion for martyrdoms is the will of no other god than the God of Israel — on the evidence of the commandments, which have always forbidden idolatry, and of the judgments, which have punished it.

For if keeping a command means suffering violence, then there is, so to speak, a command about keeping the command. It requires me to undergo the very thing by which I will be able to keep it — violence, namely, whatever violence threatens me while I am on my guard against idolatry. And in that case it is the one who gave the command who forces the obedience out of me. So he cannot have been unwilling for the events to happen by which that obedience is shown.

The order given me is not to mention any other god, not even in speech — to shape a god no more with my tongue than with my hand — and not to worship or in any way pay respect to anyone but the one who gives me the order. Him I am told to fear, so that he will not abandon me, and to love with my whole being, so that I may die for him. I serve as a soldier under that oath, and the enemy challenges me. If I hand myself over to them, I am one of them. If I keep the oath, I fight it out, I am wounded, cut to pieces, killed. And who wanted that end for his soldier, if not the man who sealed him with such an oath?

So you have the will of my God. That prick we have cured. Now let us attend to another jab, this one about the character of his will. It would take too long to prove that my God is good — a point the Marcionites have already had from us. For the moment it is enough that he is called God, since that by itself makes it necessary to believe he is good. Suppose someone assumes that God is evil: he will not be able to keep his footing on both halves of the statement. He will be bound to say either that the one he has thought evil is not God, or that the one he has proclaimed God is good. So the will of one who would not be God unless he were good will itself be good. [f]

The goodness of the very thing God has willed — martyrdom, I mean — will show this too, because only someone good has willed what is good. I insist that martyrdom is good, since it is required by the same God who forbids and punishes idolatry. Martyrdom fights idolatry and stands against it, and to fight and stand against evil can be nothing but good. Not that I deny there is rivalry among evil things as well as among good ones — but that would take a different set of circumstances. Martyrdom contends with idolatry not out of some malice the two of them share, but out of its own kindness, for it delivers people from idolatry. Who will not call good the thing that delivers from idolatry? What is the opposition between idolatry and martyrdom, if not the opposition between life and death? Martyrdom will count as life exactly as far as idolatry counts as death. A man who calls life an evil has death left to call good.

This perverseness belongs to human beings too — throwing away what is wholesome, taking what is deadly, dodging every cure that carries risk; in short, being more eager to die than to be healed. Plenty of people run from medical help as well: many out of foolishness, many out of fear and false modesty. And the healing art plainly does look cruel, what with the lancet and the burning iron and the fierce heat of the mustard. But to be cut and burned and pulled and bitten is not an evil on that account, since the pain it causes is a help. It will not be refused because it hurts; it will be applied because it has to hurt. The good that comes of it is the defense for the frightfulness of the work. The man howling and groaning and bellowing under a doctor’s hands will shortly be loading those same hands with a fee, calling them the finest operators there are, and dropping the charge of cruelty. Martyrdoms rage furiously in just the same way — but toward salvation. God too is free to heal for everlasting life by means of fires and swords and everything that hurts.

But you will admire the doctor on this count at least: that for the most part he uses properties in his cures that match the properties of the diseases, helping, as it were, from the wrong direction, coming to the rescue by the very means the trouble is owing to. He checks heat with heat, by piling on a greater load. He puts down inflammation by leaving thirst unrelieved — by tormenting, rather. He shrinks an excess of bile with one bitter little draught after another. He stops a hemorrhage by opening another small vein. And yet you will think God must be found fault with, and called jealous, for choosing to fight a disease and do good by copying the illness: to destroy death by death, to break up killing by killing, to drive out tortures by tortures, to make punishments vanish by punishments, to give life by taking it, to help the flesh by damaging it, to preserve the soul by snatching it away. What you take for wrongheadedness is reason; what you count cruelty is kindness.

So, since God works cures that last forever by means of brief sufferings, congratulate your God on the good you get. You have fallen into his hands — but you have fallen happily. He too has come up against your diseases. It is always the man who first makes work for the doctor; in short, he brought the danger of death on himself. He had received from his own Lord, as from a physician, a healthy enough regimen to live by: he was to eat everything the garden produced and keep off one small tree only, which in the meantime the Physician himself knew to be dangerous. He listened to the one he preferred and broke his regimen. He ate what was forbidden, and, gorged with the trespass, suffered an indigestion that ran toward death — richly deserving, to be sure, to lose his life outright, since that was what he had wanted.

But the swelling the trespass raised was left to run until in due time the medicine could be mixed, and the Lord slowly got the means of healing ready — all the rules of faith, which themselves resemble the causes of the illness, since they cancel the word of death by a word of life and reduce the listening that trespassed by a listening that obeys. So even when that Physician orders a man to die, he is driving out the sluggishness of death. Why does a man shrink from suffering now for a cure, when he did not shrink from suffering then for a disorder? Does he turn queasy at being killed for salvation, who was not squeamish about being killed for ruin? Will he gag at the antidote, who gaped for the poison?

But suppose God had appointed martyrdoms for us for the contest’s sake, so that we might try ourselves against our opponent — so that he might now keep bruising the one by whom man chose to be bruised. Even there it is generosity in God, not harshness, that holds the field. He wanted the man who had just been pulled out of the devil’s throat by faith to trample on him by courage as well, so that he might not merely have escaped his enemy but have thoroughly beaten him. The one who had called us to salvation has been pleased to summon us to glory too, so that people already rejoicing over their rescue might be beside themselves when they are crowned as well. [k]

How gladly the world puts on those games — the fighting festivals and superstitious contests of the Greeks, with their two sides of worship and of pleasure — has now become plain in Africa too. Cities are still pestering Carthage with congratulations, one after another, now that Carthage has been presented with a Pythian contest, long after its racecourse had grown old. So the world has come to believe there is no better way of testing how far a man’s training has taken him than to set forms of skill in competition and bring out the actual condition of bodies and of voices — the prize marking who has won, the public showing acting as judge, and pleasure giving the verdict.

Where there are contests at all, there are wounds: fists send men reeling, heels butt like rams, boxing-gloves maul, whips lay the skin open. And yet nobody will reproach the man in charge of the contest for exposing people to injury. Suits for assault stop at the edge of the racecourse. On the contrary — for all the discoloring and gore and swelling these men deal in, he will design crowns for them, no doubt, and glory, and a purse, civic privileges, contributions from the citizens, portraits and statues, and, of the sort the world can give, an eternity of fame: a resurrection by being kept in memory. The boxer himself does not complain of the pain; he wants it. The crown closes his wounds, the palm hides his blood; he is more worked up by his victory than by his injury. Are you going to call a man hurt whom you can see is happy? And not even the man who loses will reproach the superintendent for his misfortune.

Then is it beneath God to bring out kinds of skill and rules of his own into public view, into this open ground of the world, to be watched by human beings and angels and every power — to test flesh and spirit for steadiness and endurance — to give this one the palm, that one distinction, that one the rights of citizenship, that one pay — and to reject some as well, and after punishing them dismiss them in disgrace? So you dictate to God the times, or the ways, or the places in which to hold a trial of his own troop, as if it were not the judge’s business to hand down the preliminary ruling too.

Well then. Suppose he had brought faith forward to suffer martyrdoms not for the contest’s sake but for faith’s own benefit. Ought it not to have had some fund of hope, and, to increase it, to have held its own desire in check and reined in its wishes so as to strive upward — seeing that even men who discharge earthly duties are keen for promotion? Or how are there to be many rooms in our Father’s house, if not to match a range of deserts? How is one star to differ from another star in glory, unless their rays are unequal? And further: if some increase of brightness was in that case fitting for a high faith, the gain ought to have been of a kind that costs great effort, sharp suffering, torture, death. But look at the payment, when flesh and soul are handed over — and a man has nothing more precious, the one from God’s hand, the other from his breath. The very things paid away are the things whose gain is the whole benefit; the very things spent are the things that can be acquired; the same things are the price that are also the goods.

God had foreseen the other weaknesses that go with being human as well: the enemy’s stratagems, the deceiving looks of created things, the world’s traps. He foresaw that faith would be in danger even after baptism; that most people, after reaching salvation, would be lost again — soiling the wedding clothes, failing to keep oil in their little lamps — and would be the sort that has to be hunted over hills and woodland and carried home on someone’s shoulders. So he appointed a second round of comfort and a last resort: the fight of martyrdom, and the baptism of blood, which is out of danger afterward. And about the happiness of the man who has shared in these, David says: “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not charge sin.”

For strictly speaking there can no longer be anything charged against the martyrs, who in the baptism of blood lay down life itself. So “love covers a multitude of sins”; and loving God — with all its strength, by which it keeps up the fight in enduring martyrdom, and with all its soul, which it lays down for God — is what makes a man a martyr. Are you going to call these things cures, plans, ways of judging, public shows — and call them the sheer barbarity of God? Does God have a craving for a man’s blood? And I might venture to say he does, if man also has a craving for the kingdom of heaven, if man craves a sure salvation, if man craves a second birth. Nobody objects to a bargain that can plead in its own defense that both parties share alike, whether in the benefit or in the loss.

If the scorpion, swinging his tail in the air, still throws it at us that our God is a murderer, I will shudder at the thoroughly foul breath of blasphemy that comes stinking out of his heretic’s mouth — but I will embrace even such a God, with a confidence drawn from reason; the same reason by which God himself, in the person of his own Wisdom and through the lips of Solomon, has announced himself to be more than a murderer. Wisdom, he says, has slaughtered her own children. Sophia is Wisdom. She has certainly killed them wisely, if only into life, and reasonably, if only into glory. What a clever form of murder by a parent! What deftness in the crime! What a proof of cruelty — that it has killed for this reason, that the one it killed may not die! [s]

And so what follows? Wisdom is praised in song at the ways out of the city — for the death of the martyrs is praised in song too. Wisdom carries herself boldly in the broad streets, for she murders her own sons to good effect. More than that, on the top of the walls she speaks with confidence, when, as Isaiah has it, this one calls out, “I am God’s,” and this one shouts, “In the name of Jacob,” and another writes, “In the name of Israel.” Good mother! I want to be counted among her sons myself, so that she may kill me; I want to be killed, so that I may become a son.

But does she only murder her sons, or torture them as well? For I hear God say in another passage: “I will burn them as gold is burned, and test them as silver is tested.” Certainly by the means of torture that fires and punishments supply — by the martyrdoms that put faith to the test. The apostle too knows what sort of God he has assigned to us, when he writes: “If God did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us, how has he not with him given us all things as well?” You see how the divine Wisdom has murdered even her own proper, firstborn, only Son — who is certainly going to live, and to bring the others back into life besides. I can say it along with the Wisdom of God: it is Christ who handed himself over for our offenses. Wisdom has already butchered herself as well.

The quality of words does not depend on the sound alone but on the meaning too, and they have to be heard not only with ears but with minds. A man who does not understand thinks God cruel — although for the man who does not understand, a word has been published to hold back his harshness when he takes it the wrong way. For, as the apostle says: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor, to teach him? Or who has shown him the way of understanding?”

And yet the world has held it perfectly lawful for the Diana of the Scythians, or the Mercury of the Gauls, or the Saturn of the Africans to be appeased by human sacrifice; and in Latium to this day Jupiter is given human blood to taste in the middle of the city, and nobody makes an issue of it, or imagines that it happens without a reason, or that it happens by the will of his god without being worth something. If our God too had required martyrdoms for himself, so as to have a sacrifice of his own, who would have reproached him for the deadly religion, and the dismal ceremonies, and the altar that is a funeral pyre, and the priest who is an undertaker — instead of counting happy the man God had eaten?