When Justice Left the Earth

So there was no talent for invention in these men, and no cunning either, because they had no training. And what unschooled man could invent a set of things that fit one another and hold together, when the most learned of the philosophers — Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno — said things at odds with one another, and flatly opposed? That is the nature of falsehoods: they cannot be made to hang together. But the teaching of these men, because it is true, agrees everywhere and squares with itself at every point, and that is why it persuades — it rests on a consistent plan. Nor did they devise that religion for profit and advantage. By their rules and in their actual living they followed a way of life without pleasures; they thought nothing of everything that is counted among good things; and they not only endured death for their faith, but knew beforehand and said beforehand that they were going to die, and that afterward everyone who followed their teaching would suffer cruel and godless treatment. [a]

But he claims that Christ himself was put to flight by the Jews, gathered a band of nine hundred men, and turned to robbery. Who would dare to stand against an authority so great? We must certainly believe it — perhaps some Apollo announced it to him in his sleep. Robbers have been perishing in every age, and they perish daily; you yourself have certainly condemned plenty of them. Which of them, after his crucifixion, was called — I will not say a god — but a man? Though perhaps you believed it because you have consecrated Mars, a murderer, as a god; and you would not have done that if the Areopagites had crucified him.

The same man, when he set out to demolish Christ’s astonishing deeds — without, however, denying that they happened — wanted to show that Apollonius had done as much or more. It is odd that he left out Apuleius, about whom many marvels are regularly told. Why then, you fool, does no one worship Apollonius in place of God? Unless perhaps you do, and you alone — you who deserve that god of yours, the god with whom the true God will punish you forever. If Christ is a magician because he did astonishing things, then plainly Apollonius was the better craftsman: on your own account, when Domitian meant to punish him, he vanished in the middle of his trial, while the other was arrested and crucified. But perhaps that is the very thing he meant to prove — the arrogance of Christ in making himself God — so that the other might look the more modest, since on this man’s reckoning he did greater things and still claimed nothing of the sort for himself. For now I pass over any comparison of the works themselves, because in the second book and earlier I have already dealt with the fraud and the tricks of the magical art.

This is what I say: there is no one who would not want to have happen to him after death exactly what even the greatest kings want. Why else do men build themselves magnificent tombs? Why statues and portraits? Why, by some famous action, or even by dying for their countrymen, do they work to earn a good name among men? Why, in short, have you yourself wanted to raise a monument to your own talent, built out of this loathsome folly as though out of mud, unless you are hoping for immortality from the memory of your name? It is silly, then, to imagine that Apollonius did not want the thing he would plainly want if he could get it. Nobody turns immortality down — and least of all he, since you say yourself that some worshipped him as a god, that his statue was set up under the name of Hercules the Averter of Evil, and that the Ephesians honor it to this day.

So after his death he could not be believed to be a god, because it was plain that he was both a man and a magician. That is why he made a grab at divinity under a name belonging to someone else: under his own he could not reach it, and did not dare to try. But the one we are speaking of could be believed to be God, because he was no magician — and was believed to be so because he truly was. “I do not say this to mean that Apollonius was not reckoned a god because he did not want to be. I say it so that it may be clear that we, who did not at once tie a belief in divinity to astonishing deeds, are wiser than you, who believed a man was a god on account of small marvels.” It is no wonder that you, so far removed from the wisdom of God, understand nothing at all of what you have read — when the Jews, who had read the prophets constantly from the beginning, and to whom the sacred secret of God had been entrusted, were still ignorant of what they read. So learn this, if you have any sense: we did not believe Christ to be God because he did astonishing things, but because we saw that everything happened in his case which the prediction of the prophets had announced to us. He did astonishing things: we could have taken him for a magician, as you take him now and as the Jews took him then, if all the prophets had not with one breath foretold that Christ would do those very things. So we believe him to be God not so much from his astonishing deeds and works as from that very cross which you lick at like dogs, since that too was foretold at the same time. It was not on his own testimony, then — for who can be believed when he speaks about himself? — but on the testimony of the prophets, who long beforehand foretold everything he did and suffered, that he won belief in his divinity. That could never have happened to Apollonius, or to Apuleius, or to any of the magicians, and it cannot happen at any time.

And when he had poured out all that raving nonsense of his ignorance, when he had worked so hard to destroy the truth outright, he had the nerve to give his godless, God-hating books the title Truth-Loving. What a blind heart! What a mind blacker than Cimmerian darkness, as the saying goes! Perhaps he was a pupil of Anaxagoras, for whom snow was as black as ink. But it is one and the same blindness to call truth a lie and a lie the truth. No doubt the crafty man wanted to hide the wolf under a sheep’s skin, so as to trap the reader with a dishonest title. Very well, let it stand as true; grant that you did it out of ignorance and not out of malice. Even so, what truth have you brought us, except this — that you set out as the defender of the gods and ended by betraying the very gods you defended? For you set out the praises of the Supreme God, whom you confessed to be king, most mighty, the maker of all things, the source of all honors, the parent of all, the creator and preserver of every living thing; and in doing it you took the kingship away from your own Jupiter. Having driven him out of supreme power, you reduced him to the rank of a slave. So your own summing-up convicts you of folly, emptiness, and error. You assert that the gods exist, and then you make them the subjects and slaves of the God whose religion you are trying to overturn.

So then: the men I have described had put out their sacrilegious writings in my presence and to my grief. Stirred up both by their arrogant godlessness and by my own knowledge of the truth — and, I think, by God — I have taken on this office, to refute the accusers of justice with all the strength of my mind. Not to write against these two, who could be crushed in a few words, but to overthrow at one stroke, once and for all, everyone anywhere who is doing the same work or has done it. I do not doubt that a great many others, in many places, have raised a monument to their own injustice — not only in Greek writings but in Latin ones as well. Since I could not answer them one by one, I decided the case had to be argued in such a way that I might overthrow the earlier writers together with everything they wrote, and cut off from future writers all power of writing and answering. Let them only pay attention, and I will certainly bring it about that anyone who learns these things must either embrace what he used to condemn or — the next best thing — at last stop laughing at it. [p]

Tertullian did argue the same case fully, in the treatise called the Apology. But answering accusers is one thing, and consists only in defense or denial; instructing is another, and that is what we are doing, and it has to contain the substance of the whole system. So I have not shrunk from this labor, in order to finish the subject that Cyprian did not carry through in the address where he tries to answer Demetrian — a man who, as Cyprian himself says, barked at the truth and shouted it down. Cyprian did not handle the subject as he ought to have. Demetrian should have been refuted not by testimonies from Scripture, which he plainly took to be empty, made up, and false, but by arguments and reasoning. Since Cyprian was contending against a man who did not know the truth, he ought to have laid the sacred readings aside for a while, and shaped him from the start as someone altogether untaught, and shown him the first beginnings of the light little by little, so that his sight would not go dark with the whole brightness set in front of him at once.

An infant cannot take solid, strong food, because its stomach is tender; it is kept going on liquid and soft milk until its strength is settled and it can feed on stronger nourishment. In the same way it was fitting that this man, since he was not yet able to take in divine things, should be presented with human testimonies — those of philosophers and historians — so that he might be refuted above all out of his own authorities. Cyprian did not do this, because his outstanding knowledge of the sacred writings carried him away, so that he was content with those things alone in which faith rests. So I have taken it up, with God’s favor, and at the same time I am preparing the road for others to follow. If, at my urging, learned and eloquent men begin to turn to this subject, and choose to display their talent and their power of speaking in this field of truth, then no one can doubt that the false religions will quickly disappear and philosophy fall altogether — if everyone is persuaded that this alone is religion and the only true wisdom. But I have wandered from my subject further than I meant to.

Now I must give the discussion of justice that I promised. Justice is either by itself the greatest virtue, or by itself the fountain of virtue; and it was sought not only by the philosophers but by the poets, who came much earlier and were reckoned wise before the name philosophy existed. They saw clearly that this justice was absent from the affairs of men, and they told the story that it was offended by men’s vices, left the earth, and withdrew into heaven. And to teach what it is to live justly — for they are in the habit of giving their rules in a roundabout way — they set out examples of justice from the days of Saturn, which they call the golden age, and describe what human life was like while justice was still lingering on the earth. This is not to be taken as a poet’s fiction, but as the truth. For while Saturn reigned, when the religious worship of the gods had not yet been set up, and no family had yet been set apart in the belief that it was divine, God was openly worshipped. And so there were no quarrels, no hatreds, and no wars. [u]

as Germanicus Caesar puts it in his poem translated from Aratus —

No, nor even among strangers — but there were no swords at all to unsheathe. When justice was present and in full strength, who would give a thought to protecting himself, since no one was plotting against him? Or to destroying another, since no one wanted anything?

as Cicero says in his own poem — and this is the mark of our religion.

For God had given the earth in common to all, so that they might pass their lives in common — not so that greed, mad and raving, might claim everything for itself, and what was produced for all might be lacking to any. And this saying of the poet ought not to be taken as suggesting that at that time individuals had no property of their own; it must be taken as a poetic figure. We are to understand that men were so generous that they did not shut up the fruits of the earth that had been produced for them, and did not sit alone brooding over what they had stored, but let the poor share the fruit of their labor —

And no wonder, since the storerooms of good men stood generously open to everyone. Greed did not intercept God’s bounty and so make hunger and thirst common to all; all alike had plenty, because those who had possessions gave generously and lavishly to those who had none. But after Saturn had been banished from heaven and had come to Latium —

the people, either from fear of the new king or of their own accord, became corrupt and stopped worshipping God. They began to reckon the king in God’s place, since the king himself, all but a father-killer, was an example to others that damaged their reverence —

but not, as Cicero says,

For how could she settle or linger in the kingdom of the man who threw his own father out of his kingdom, harried him with war, and drove him as an exile over the whole world?

that is, he brought hatred, envy, and scheming in among men, so that they were as poisonous as serpents and as ravenous as wolves. And that is exactly what those men do who persecute people who are just and faithful toward God, and who hand judges the power to use violence on the innocent. Perhaps Jupiter really did do something of this kind, to overthrow justice and clear it out of the way; and that is why he is said to have made the serpents savage and to have put an edge on the temper of the wolves.

and not without reason. Once the worship of God was taken away, men lost the knowledge of good and evil. So the common life men shared perished from among them, and the bond of human society was destroyed. Then they began to contend with one another, and to plot, and to win themselves glory out of the shedding of human blood.