No Personal Attacks in Arguments About the Faith

I too could paint you in your own colors and meet your insanity with a rage like yours. I could say what I know and add what I do not know. With a license like yours, or rather with your fury and madness, I could keep up a stream of things false and true alike, until I was ashamed to speak and you to hear. I could reproach you in a way that would condemn either the accused or the accuser, push myself on the reader by sheer effrontery, and make him believe that what I wrote without scruple I wrote truly. But far be it from the practice of Christians, while they are offering up their own lives, to seek the lives of others, and to become murderers not with the sword but with the will. This may suit your gentleness and innocence. For you can draw out of the dung heap in your breast both the scent of roses and the stench of corpses, and, against the prophet’s command, call bitter what you once praised as sweet. But when we are dealing with Christian subjects, there is no need for us to throw out accusations that belong in the law courts. You will hear nothing more from me than the common saying: “When you have said what you like, you will hear what you do not like.” Or, if the coarse proverb seems too common to you, and as a man of culture you prefer the words of philosophers or poets, take from me the words of Homer: “Whatever words you speak, the like you will hear.” [a]

There is one thing I would like to learn from a man of such eminent holiness and such delicate taste, a man so holy that the demons cry out in the presence of your very handkerchiefs and aprons. Whom do you take as your model in your writings? Has any one of the catholic writers, in a dispute about doctrine, accused the man he was arguing with of moral offenses? Did your masters teach you to do this? Is this the system you were trained in: when you cannot answer a man, you take off his head; when you cannot silence a man’s tongue, you cut it out? You have nothing much to boast of; you are only doing what scorpions and blister beetles do. This is what Fulvia did to Cicero, and Herodias to John. They could not bear to hear the truth, so they pierced the tongue that spoke the truth with the pin that parted their hair. It is a dog’s duty to bark in its master’s service; why may I not bark in the service of Christ? Many have written against Marcion or Valentinus, against Arius or Eunomius. Which of them ever accused his opponent of immoral conduct? Did not each of them put his whole effort into refuting the heresy? It is the scheming of the heretics, that is, of your masters, to turn to slander when they are convicted of betraying the faith. That is how Eustathius, the bishop of Antioch, was made a father without knowing it. That is how Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, cut off a third hand of Arsenius: for when Arsenius, who was thought to be dead, appeared alive, he was found to have two. Things like these are now being falsely charged against the bishop of that same church, and the true faith is under attack by gold, which is where the power of you and your friends lies.

But I need not speak of controversy with heretics, who, though they are really outsiders, still call themselves Christians. How many of our writers have contended with those utterly godless men, Celsus and Porphyry! Yet which of them left the cause he was arguing in order to busy himself with charging his opponent with crimes, crimes that belong not in the writings of the church but on the judge’s list of cases? What have you gained if you prove a man a criminal but lose your argument? There is no need at all for you to risk your own head by bringing an accusation. If revenge is what you want, you can hire an executioner and satisfy your desire. You pretend to dread a scandal, and yet you are ready to kill a man who was once your brother, whom you now accuse, and whom you always treat as an enemy. Still, I wonder how a man like you, who knows what he is doing, can be so blinded by madness as to want to do me a kindness by drawing my soul out of its prison, and not let it stay with you in the darkness of this world.