The Seed of the Word

We would not be murdered at all, and neither unjust men nor demons would be stronger than we are, if death were not a debt owed by every human being who is born. So when we pay that debt, we give thanks. And there is a piece of Xenophon’s that we think it right and timely to bring up now, for Crescens and for everyone who plays the fool as he does. [a]

Xenophon said that Heracles came to a place where three roads met and found Virtue and Vice there, appearing in the shape of women. Vice was in a soft robe, her face made up for love and blooming from all of it, bewitching to look at from the first moment; and she told Heracles that if he would follow her, she would see to it that he lived always in pleasure and dressed in the most splendid finery — finery like the finery she wore herself. Virtue’s face and clothing were dry and neglected, and she said, “But if you listen to me, you will not dress yourself in finery, or in beauty that flows away and rots. You will dress in ornaments that last forever and are truly beautiful.”

And we are convinced that anyone at all who runs from what looks good, and goes hard after what is reckoned difficult and senseless, comes into happiness. Vice has nothing in her that does not decay, and she can make nothing that does not decay; so she works by imitation. She throws the qualities that belong to Virtue, the things that really are good, around her own actions like a screen, and she drags into slavery the people whose eyes never leave the ground, hanging her own worthless qualities on Virtue. But those who have understood which qualities really are good are themselves past decay in virtue. And every sensible person ought to draw the same conclusion about Christians, about the men of the contest, and about the men who did the things the poets tell of the so-called gods — reasoning from the fact that we think nothing even of death, the thing everyone runs from.

For I myself, too, while I was still enjoying Plato’s teachings, kept hearing Christians slandered; but I also saw them with no fear of death, or of anything else people count fearful, and I understood that it was impossible for them to be living in vice and the love of pleasure. What lover of pleasure, what man with no self-control, what man who thinks a dish of human flesh is a good thing, could welcome death and let himself be stripped of everything he enjoys? Would he not rather do anything at all to go on living this present life and to stay out of the magistrates’ sight? He would hardly turn himself in to be executed. [f]

The evil demons have already had this done as well, through certain wicked men. They have killed some people on the strength of the slander against us, and they have dragged the slaves of our households — children, and women of no standing — off to be tortured, forcing them by horrible beatings to confess to the tales told about us, the very things the accusers themselves do in the open. None of it belongs to us, so we are not troubled by it. We have God as our witness for what we think and for what we do — the God who was never brought into being and whose name cannot be spoken.

For why did we not simply admit in public that these things are good, and prove them to be the divine philosophy? We could have said that we perform the mysteries of Kronos when we kill a man, and that when we drink our fill of blood, as people say we do, we are doing exactly what is done at the idol you honor — the one sprinkled not only with the blood of animals that have no reason but with human blood as well, poured out by the hand of the most distinguished and best-born man among you. We could have said that in mounting males and lying with women without restraint we are imitating Zeus and the rest of the gods, and we could have brought forward the writings of Epicurus and the poets as our defense. But because we persuade people to run from such lessons, and from the men who did such things and the men who copy them — which is what we have been fighting to do in this book — we are attacked in every possible way. And we are not troubled by that either, since we know that God watches everything and is just.

If only someone even now would climb up on a high platform and shout it out in a tragic actor’s voice: “Be ashamed! Be ashamed — you who lay to the charge of innocent people what you do openly yourselves, and who hang on them what belongs to you and to your own gods, when they have no share in it, not the smallest part of it. Change your ways! Come to your senses!”

For I too, once I had learned what an evil covering the wicked demons had thrown over the divine teachings of the Christians in order to turn everyone else away from them, laughed at the men who told the lies, and at the covering itself, and at what the crowd thought. And I confess that I pray to be found a Christian and fight with everything in me to be found one — not because Plato’s teachings are foreign to Christ’s, but because they are not the same in every respect, any more than the teachings of the others are: the Stoics, the poets, the writers of prose. [l]

Each of them spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the divine Word that is sown like seed, seeing what was akin to it. But those who contradicted themselves on the weightier matters show that they never had the knowledge that does not trip up, or the understanding that cannot be argued down. So whatever has been said well by anyone belongs to us Christians. For next to God we worship and love the Word who comes from the God who was never brought into being and cannot be named, since he became a human being for our sake, so that by sharing in what we suffer he might also bring healing. All these writers were able to see what really is, but only dimly, through the seed of the Word planted in them. For a seed of something, and a likeness of it handed out according to a man’s capacity, are one thing; the thing itself is another — the thing that is shared and imitated by grace that comes from him.

So we ask you to write your own ruling at the foot of this little book and set it out in public, so that others may know what we are, and so that people who are making themselves liable to punishment by their own fault may be able to get free of their false opinion and their ignorance of what is good — so that these things may be known to everyone. For these people are condemning themselves, so that there is no need of any other judges: human nature has in it the power to tell what is good from what is shameful; they vote us guilty for the shameful acts they say we commit, when they have no knowledge that we do them; they take pleasure in gods who did such things and who to this day demand the same from people; and they sentence us to death or chains or some other such penalty, as though we were the guilty ones. [q]

And I have thought nothing of the godless and deceiving teaching of Simon’s followers, which came out of my own nation. If you will post this publicly, we will lay that teaching open before everyone, so that they may change if they can. That is the only reason we put these pages together. Our teachings are not shameful — not by any sober judgment. They stand higher than every human philosophy. And if you will not grant that much, they are at least not like the teachings of Sotades and Philaenis and Archestratus and Epicurus, and the rest of that sort of poetry, which everyone is allowed to meet with, both performed and written. [t]

And now we will stop, having done as much as was in our power, and having added this prayer: that all people everywhere may be counted worthy of the truth. May you too, then, in a way worthy of reverence for God and of philosophy, judge justly — for your own sakes.