What They Call Piety

Now and then they do see that they are wicked. They praise the way things were in the earlier ages, and they guess that Justice is absent because of what they themselves are and deserve. For though she stands in front of their eyes, they not only fail to take her in or recognize her — they hate her violently, hunt her down, and try to drive her out. Suppose for the moment that the one we follow is not Justice. How will they welcome the one they imagine to be the true Justice, if she ever comes? They torture and kill people whom they themselves admit are imitators of the just, and they do it because those people do good and just things. If they put only the wicked to death, they would still deserve to have Justice stay away from them, since she had no other reason for leaving the earth than the shedding of human blood. How much worse, then, when they kill the just, and count the followers of justice as enemies — no, as worse than enemies. Enemies come after your life, your property and your children with sword and fire, and yet once they are beaten they are spared; there is room for mercy even under arms. And if the victors decide to take their cruelty as far as it will go, nothing more is done to them than this: they are put to death, or led away into slavery. But what is done to people who know nothing of crime cannot be put into words, and no one is treated as more guilty than those who of all people are innocent. So it is the most wicked of men who dare to speak of justice — men who outdo wild animals in savagery, who tear apart the gentlest flock God has: [a]

But these men were driven mad not by the fury of hunger but by the fury of the heart. They do not prowl in a black mist; they plunder in the open. And no awareness of their own crimes ever holds them back from profaning the sacred and holy name of justice with a mouth that, like the jaws of an animal, is wet with the blood of the innocent. What are we to say is the real cause of a hatred so extreme and so stubborn?

Is it that “truth breeds hatred,” as the poet says, as though the Spirit of God had prompted him? Or is it that they are ashamed to be bad in front of people who are just and good? Or is it both? Truth is always hated for this reason: a man who sins wants a free field for sinning, and he thinks there is no safer way to enjoy the pleasure of doing wrong than to have no one around whom his faults offend. So they try to wipe such people out altogether and get rid of them as witnesses to their crimes and their wickedness. They find them a burden, as if their own way of life stood condemned. Why should anyone be good at such an inconvenient time — someone who, when public morals are rotten, passes sentence on them simply by living well? Why should not everyone be equally wicked: grasping, unchaste, adulterous, perjured, greedy, dishonest? Better to have them out of the way, these people in whose presence they are ashamed to live badly, who say nothing, but whose way of life is so unlike their own that it strikes sinners full in the face. Anyone who differs from them looks like a reproach to them.

It is not much to wonder at that this is done to men, when for the same reason the people who had been set in hope, and who were not ignorant of God, rose up against God himself. The same necessity that came against the Author of justice follows those who are just. So they harass them and torment them with carefully worked-out kinds of punishment, and they think it is not much to kill the people they hate unless cruelty can make sport of their bodies as well. But if any, out of fear of pain or death, or by their own treachery, have deserted the oath they swore to heaven and agreed to the deadly sacrifices, these men they praise and load with honors, so that their example may draw others in.

But on those who have held their faith at a high price, and who have not denied that they worship God, they fall with the whole strength of the slaughterhouse, as if they were thirsty for blood. They call them desperate, because they will not spare their own bodies — as if anything could be more desperate than to torture and tear apart a man you know is innocent. So no sense of shame is left in men who have no kindness in them at all, and they throw at just men the insults that fit themselves. They call them impious — while they themselves, of course, are the pious ones, who shrink from shedding human blood. If they would look at what they do, and at what the people they condemn as impious do, they would see by now how false they are, and how much more they deserve everything they say and do against good people.

The men who lie in wait on the roads with weapons, and who rob at sea, are not from our side but from theirs. So are the men who, when they have no power to attack in the open, secretly mix poison; who kill their wives to get their dowries, or their husbands so they can marry the men they are sleeping with; who strangle the sons born to them, or, if they are too pious for that, expose them; who hold their incestuous desires back from no one — not a daughter, not a sister, not a mother, not a priestess; who plot against their own fellow citizens and their own country; who are not afraid of the sack; who, in the end, commit sacrilege and strip the temples of the very gods they worship. And to mention things that count as minor and are common practice among them: who hunt legacies, forge wills, and push the rightful heirs out or shut them out; who sell their own bodies to another man’s lust; who forget what they were born as and compete with women in taking the woman’s part; who, against everything decent, defile and dishonor the most sacred part of the body; who mutilate themselves, and — more impious still — do it in order to be priests of a religion; who do not even spare their own lives, but sell them to be taken from them in public; who, sitting as judges, are bought with a bribe and either destroy the innocent or let the guilty go free without punishment; who reach for heaven itself by sorcery, as though the earth were not big enough to hold their wickedness. These crimes, I say, and worse than these, are committed openly by people who worship the gods.

In the middle of crimes so many and so great, what room is there for justice? And I have gathered only a few out of many, not to abuse them, but to show what they are. Anyone who wants the whole account should pick up the books of Seneca, who described the morals and vices of his day with perfect truth and denounced them with great force. Lucilius too set out that dark life briefly and tightly in these lines:

But which of these things can be charged against our own people, for whom the whole of religion consists in living without guilt and without a stain? So, since they can see that they and their people do the things we have described, while ours do nothing but what is just and good, they might have worked out — if they had any sense — that the people who do good are the pious ones, and that they themselves, who do wicked things, are the impious ones. For people who do not go wrong in any action of their lives cannot be going wrong at the main point, which is religion, the chief thing of all; impiety, once taken up at the most important point, would run on through everything else. And so people who go wrong in their whole life cannot fail to be deceived in their religion as well, since piety, if it held its ground at the chief point, would keep its course in the rest. So on either side, what the main matter is like can be known from the state of the actions people carry out.

It is worth looking into their piety, so that from their merciful and pious deeds we can understand what the deeds are like that they do against piety’s own rules. And so that I do not seem to be attacking anyone harshly, I will take a figure from the poets, and the greatest example of piety there is. In Virgil there is that king, [m]

What proof of justice did he offer us?

What could be more merciful than this piety? What more merciful than to sacrifice human victims to the dead, and to feed the fire with men’s blood as though it were oil? But perhaps this was not the hero’s own fault but the poet’s, who fouled “a man distinguished by his piety” with an outstanding piece of wickedness. Where then, poet, is that piety you praise so often? Look at pious Aeneas:

Why then, at the very moment when he was sending men off in chains to be butchered, did he say, “I would gladly grant peace to the living too” — when he had ordered that men he held alive should be killed in place of cattle? But this, as I said, was not his fault; he had perhaps had no education worth the name. It was yours. You were a learned man, and yet you did not know what piety is, and you believed that this wicked and disgusting act of his was piety properly performed. Plainly he is called pious for one reason only: he loved his father. And why should I bring up that “good Aeneas granted their plea,” and then killed them? Though they begged him by that same father of his, and “by the hope of the rising Iulus,” he did not spare them, but was “ablaze with fury.” Can anyone imagine there was any virtue in a man who caught fire with madness like dry stubble, who forgot the very shade of his father, in whose name he had been begged, and could not hold his anger back? He was no pious man at all, since he killed not only people who put up no fight but people begging for their lives.

At this point someone will ask: what then is piety, and where is it, and what is it like? It is among people who know nothing of wars, who keep harmony with everyone, who are friends even to their enemies, who love all people as brothers, who know how to hold their anger down and to quiet every passion of the mind with a calm command over themselves.

What a fog, then, what a thick cloud of darkness and error has settled over men’s hearts, so that just when they think they are at their most pious they are at their most impious. For the more religiously they honor those earthly images, the more wicked they are toward the name of the true God. And so they are often battered with worse troubles as the wages of their impiety; and because they do not know what is causing the troubles, the whole blame is laid on fortune, and the philosophy of Epicurus gets its opening — that nothing reaches the gods, that they are neither won over by favor nor stirred to anger — since men often see the gods’ despisers happy and the gods’ worshippers wretched. This happens because, when people seem religious and naturally good, no one believes they deserve the sort of thing they often suffer. They comfort themselves, though, by blaming fortune, and they do not notice that if she existed at all she would never harm the people who worship her.

Punishment rightly follows piety of that kind. God, offended by the wickedness of men who are twisted in their worship, punishes them with heavy disaster. Even when such men live in holiness, in the greatest good faith and innocence, they are strangers to justice and to the name of true piety, because the gods they worship have impious and unclean rites that the true God detests. And it is not hard to show why worshippers of the gods cannot be good and just. How will they keep from shedding blood, when the gods they worship are bloodthirsty — Mars and Bellona? How will they spare their parents, when they worship Jupiter, who drove his own father out? How will they spare their own babies, when they worship Saturn? How will they keep chastity, when the goddess they worship is naked, an adulteress, and all but a prostitute among the gods? How will they hold back from robbery and fraud, when they know the thefts of Mercury, who teaches that cheating is not fraud but cleverness? How will they keep their lusts in check, when they worship Jupiter, Hercules, Liber, Apollo and the rest, whose adulteries and affairs with women and with men are not only known to scholars but are staged in the theaters and set to song, so that everyone knows them? Among such things, is it possible for men to be just, when even if they were good by nature they would be trained into injustice by the gods themselves? For to win over the god you worship, you need the things you know please him and delight him. So it comes about that the god shapes his worshippers’ lives to match what he himself is like, since the most religious act of worship is imitation.

So, because justice is a burden and a nuisance to men who match the character of their gods, they take out on the just, by violence, the same impiety they show in everything else. And there is good reason why the prophets speak of them as beasts. Cicero puts it excellently: “If there is no one who would not rather die than be turned into the shape of an animal, even while keeping a man’s mind, how much more wretched is it to have a brute’s mind in the shape of a man! To me it seems worse in exactly the degree that the mind is better than the body.” [r]

So they look down on the bodies of animals, though they are crueler than the animals are, and they pride themselves on having been born human, though they have nothing human about them but the face and the upright frame. What Caucasus, what India, what Hyrcania ever fed beasts so savage and so thirsty for blood? Every wild animal’s rage lasts only until its appetite is filled; the moment its hunger is satisfied, it settles. Here is a real beast, at whose single command

No one can describe this beast’s cruelty as it deserves — a beast that lies down in one place and yet rages with iron teeth over the whole world, that not only tears men’s limbs apart but breaks their very bones, and rages over their ashes so that there may be no place to bury them. As though what people who confess God are after is having their tombs visited, and not rather reaching the presence of God themselves.

What brutality is this, what fury, what madness — to deny the living the light, and the dead the earth? So I say that nothing is more wretched than the men whom necessity has either found or made into servants of another man’s fury, the henchmen of an impious order. That was no honor for them, no lifting of their rank, but the sentencing of a man to torture — and to God’s everlasting punishment as well. But it is impossible to tell what each of them did all over the world. What number of books could hold kinds of cruelty so endless and so varied? Once each of them had the power, he raged according to his own temper. Some, out of sheer nervousness, went further than they were ordered. Some acted out of a private hatred of the just. Some acted from a natural savagery of mind. Some wanted to please, so that this service would open their way to higher office.

Some went quickly to killing — like a man in Phrygia who burned a whole congregation of people together with the building they met in. Yet the more cruel he was, the more merciful he turns out to have been. The worst kind of persecutor is the one flattered by a false show of mercy. He is the harsher; he is the crueler torturer, the man who makes up his mind to put nobody to death. So there is no telling what great and grievous forms of torture judges of that sort invented, to get where they meant to go. And they do this not only so that they can boast of having killed none of the innocent — I have heard some of them boasting that their term of office was bloodless in that respect — but also out of envy, so that they will not be beaten themselves and the others will not win the glory their courage has earned.

So in devising ways to punish, they think of nothing but winning. They know this is a contest and a battle. I saw the governor in Bithynia beside himself with joy, as though he had conquered some barbarian nation, because a man who had held out for two years with great spirit seemed at last to have given in. So they fight to win, and to inflict carefully studied pain on the body, and the one thing they guard against is that their victims should die under the torture — as if death alone could make those victims happy, and as if tortures did not, the worse they get, produce a greater glory of courage. With stubborn stupidity they give orders that the tortured are to be carefully nursed, so that their limbs can be made fit for more torture and fresh blood can be supplied for punishment. What could be so pious, so kind, so humane? They would not have taken such anxious care of anyone they loved.

This is the training the gods give. These are the deeds they school their worshippers in; these are the holy rites they require. And these utterly wicked murderers have invented impious laws against the pious. Sacrilegious decrees and unjust opinions of jurists are on record and are read. Domitius, in the seventh book of his work on the office of the proconsul, collected the wicked rulings of emperors, to show what punishments should be handed out to people who confessed that they worshipped God.