Worship Cannot Be Forced

What are you to make of people who give the name of justice to the torments the tyrants of long ago inflicted, raging savagely against the innocent? They teach injustice and cruelty, and still they want to be thought just and sensible — blind, dull men who know nothing of how things stand and nothing of the truth. Is justice so hateful to you, you lost minds, that you rank it with the worst crimes? Is innocence so worthless in your eyes that you think it does not deserve even a plain death — that committing no crime, and keeping a heart clean of every trace of guilt, counts as worse than any crime at all? And since I am speaking here with the worshippers of the gods in general, let us have your leave to do good among you. This is our law; this is our business; this is our religion. If we look wise to you, copy us. If we look foolish, despise us, or laugh at us if you like — our folly does us good. Why do you tear us open? Why do you torment us? We do not begrudge you your wisdom. We prefer this folly of ours; we hold on to it. We believe this is what is good for us: to love you, and to give you everything, you who hate us. [a]

There is a passage in Cicero that does not run against the truth. It comes in the argument that Furius makes against justice. “Suppose there are two men,” he says. “One of them is an excellent man, of the highest integrity, the greatest justice, remarkable good faith; the other is marked out by crime and recklessness. And suppose the state is so far in error that it takes the good man for a criminal, a scoundrel, a man to be cursed, and takes the worst of men for a model of integrity and good faith. Suppose that, following this opinion of all the citizens, the good man is harassed, dragged off, has his hands cut off and his eyes gouged out, is condemned, bound, branded, driven into exile, and left in want, until at last everyone quite properly thinks him the most wretched of men. And suppose that meanwhile the wicked man is praised and honored and loved by everybody, and that every office, every command, every kind of wealth and plenty is heaped on him — that in short everyone judges him an excellent man, worthy of every good fortune. Who, I ask you, would be mad enough to hesitate over which of the two he would rather be?”

He set out that example as if he had guessed what troubles were coming to us, and on what account; for our people suffer every one of those things at the hands of men in error. Look: the state — or rather the whole world itself — is so far in error that it hunts down good and just men, tortures them, condemns them and puts them to death, as though they were criminals and godless. As for his saying that no one is out of his mind enough to hesitate over which of the two he would rather be: he was arguing against justice, and what he meant was that a wise man would rather be bad with a good name than good with a bad one.

May that senselessness be far from us — that we should prefer what is false to what is true. Does the standing of a good man among us depend on the errors of the crowd, rather than on our own conscience and the judgment of God? Will any good fortune ever tempt us so far that we would not rather choose real goodness with every evil attached to it than false goodness with every kind of prosperity? Let kings keep their kingdoms, as Plautus says, and the rich their riches, and the wise their wisdom; let them leave us our folly. That folly is plainly shown to be wisdom by the very fact that they envy us for having it. Who envies a fool, except a man who is a bigger fool himself? But they are not fools enough to envy fools. By hunting us down with so much care and worry, they admit that we are not fools. Why else would they rage so cruelly, unless they were afraid that as justice grows stronger day by day they will be left behind along with their rotting gods? So if the worshippers of the gods are the wise ones, and we are the fools, why are they afraid that the wise will be won over by fools?

Our numbers grow all the time out of the worshippers of the gods, and they never shrink — not even in persecution itself. A man may fall into sin and be defiled by sacrificing, but he cannot be turned away from God, because the truth prevails by its own strength. So who, I ask, is foolish and blind enough not to see which side wisdom is on? But they are blinded by malice and fury, and cannot see. They think men are fools who have it in their power to escape punishment and still choose to be tortured and put to death — when from that very fact they might have seen that a thing so many thousands of people all over the world agree on, with one and the same mind, is not folly. [f]

For if women go wrong through the weakness of their sex — these people sometimes call our religion a superstition for women and old wives — then men, surely, are wise. If boys and young men have no foresight because of their age, then grown men and old men have settled judgment. If one city is foolish, plainly the countless other cities cannot all be foolish too. If one province or one nation has no sense, the rest must understand what is right. But the divine law has been received from the rising of the sun to its setting; each sex, every age, every nation and every country obeys God with one and the same mind; everywhere there is the same endurance, the same contempt for death. They ought to have understood that there is something in it — that a thing defended even to the death is not defended for nothing, that there is some foundation and solidity underneath it, which not only keeps this religion safe from injury and harassment but always increases it and makes it stronger.

Here too their malice shows itself. They think they have completely overthrown the religion of God once they have made men give way, when in fact those men are also allowed to make amends to God. There is no worshipper of God so bad that he does not come back, when he is given the chance, to make his peace with God — and come back more devoted than before. Knowing his own sin, and fearing punishment, makes a man more religious, and the faith that is restored through repentance is always much the stronger. So when they themselves think their gods are angry with them, they still believe those gods can be won over with gifts and sacrifices and incense. Why then should they imagine our God so unmerciful, so impossible to appease, that a man who has poured a drink offering to their gods under compulsion, against his will, can never be a Christian again? Unless perhaps they suppose that men who have once been defiled are going to change their minds and start doing willingly what they did under torture. Who would take up that duty willingly, when it began with an injury? Who, looking at the scars on his own sides, would not hate the gods all the more, since it is on their account that he carries the marks of a lasting punishment stamped into his flesh?

So it happens that when peace is granted from heaven, those who had turned away come back, and a new crowd of others is added besides, because of the marvel of the courage they have seen. For when people watch men being torn by one kind of torture after another, and keeping their endurance unbroken while the executioners wear out, they conclude — rightly — that the agreement of so many and the steadiness of the dying do not mean nothing, and that endurance by itself could never have got through such tortures without God’s help. Bandits and men of powerful build cannot stand being cut up like that. They shout out; they groan; the pain beats them, because they have no endurance breathed into them. But with us — leave the men aside — boys and delicate women silently defeat their torturers, and not even fire can force a groan out of them. Let the Romans go and boast about their Mucius or their Regulus. Regulus handed himself over to the enemy to be killed, because he thought it shameful to live as a prisoner. Mucius was caught by the enemy, and when he saw that he could not escape death he laid his hand on the burning brazier, to make amends to the enemy he had wanted to kill; and by that punishment he received the pardon he had not deserved. Now look: the weaker sex and the frailest age hold out while the whole body is torn and burned — and not because they must. They are free to get away if they want to. They do it by their own choice, because they put their trust in God.

But this is true virtue — the virtue the boasting philosophers also make so much of, in empty words and never in fact. They say that nothing so befits the seriousness and steadiness of a wise man as being unable to be driven off his conviction and his purpose by any torturer; that it is worth suffering torture and death rather than betray a trust, or walk away from a duty, or be beaten down by fear of death or the sharpness of pain into doing something unjust. Unless, of course, they think Horace is raving in his songs when he says: [m]

And nothing could be truer than that — if it is applied to people who refuse no torture and no kind of death rather than turn away from faith and justice, who do not shake at the orders of tyrants or the swords of governors, and so keep true and solid freedom with a steady mind. This is the one place where wisdom is to be looked for.

For who is so arrogant, who is so puffed up, as to forbid me to lift my eyes to heaven? Who can lay it on me as a necessity either to worship what I do not want to worship, or to stop worshipping what I want to worship? What will be left to us at all, if even this — a thing that has to be done by a man’s own will — is wrung out of me at somebody else’s whim? Nobody will manage it, if we have any courage at all for despising death and pain. But if we do have this steadiness, why are we judged fools for doing the very things the philosophers praise? Seneca is right when he charges people with inconsistency. The highest virtue, they say, is greatness of spirit — and the same people count a man who despises death a madman. That is plainly the height of perversity. But the followers of these empty religions press the charge with the same folly that keeps them from understanding the true God. The Sibyl of Erythrae calls them “deaf and senseless,” since they neither hear divine things nor take them in, but stand in fear of an image of clay molded by their own fingers, and worship it.

But there are strong grounds for their thinking that the wise are fools; they are not mistaken for no reason at all. I must explain this carefully, so that they may at last, if it is possible, see where they have gone wrong. Justice, by its own nature, has a certain look of folly about it, and I can prove that from both divine and human witnesses. But perhaps we would get nowhere with them unless we taught them, out of their own authorities, that no one can be just — and justice is bound up with true wisdom — without also looking foolish. [r]

Carneades was a philosopher of the Academic school. Anyone who does not know what force he had in argument, what eloquence, what shrewdness, can still take the measure of the man from the praise of Cicero, or of Lucilius, in whose poem Neptune, handling a question of the greatest difficulty, shows that it cannot be explained even if Orcus were to give Carneades himself back to life. This Carneades, sent to Rome by the Athenians as an ambassador, argued at length about justice in the hearing of Galba and of Cato, who had been censor — the greatest speakers of that day. But the next day the same man knocked down his own case with an argument the other way, and took away the justice he had praised the day before. He did it not with a philosopher’s seriousness, whose good sense ought to be firm and whose opinion settled, but as a kind of orator’s exercise in arguing both sides. That was his habit: it let him refute anyone who asserted anything at all. Lucius Furius, in Cicero, mentions that discussion in which justice is overthrown. Since Cicero was writing about the state, I take it he did this so that he could bring in afterward the defense and praise of the one thing without which he thought a state could not be governed. But Carneades, in order to refute Aristotle and Plato, who spoke for justice, collected in that first argument every point that had been made on justice’s behalf, so that he could knock them all down — as he did. It was easy to shake justice, because it had no roots: there was none of it on the earth at that time, for the philosophers to see what it was or what it was like.

I only wish that men so many and so able had had knowledge to match their eloquence and spirit, so that they could have finished the defense of this greatest of the virtues — the virtue whose origin lies in religion and whose working lies in equality. But men who were ignorant of the first part could not have the second. So I want to show first, briefly and plainly, what justice is, so that it may be understood that the philosophers did not know justice and could not defend what they were not acquainted with. Justice takes in all the virtues together, but two of them are chief of all, and cannot be pulled apart from it or separated out: piety and equality. Faithfulness, self-control, uprightness, innocence, integrity and the rest of that kind may exist, by nature or by a parent’s training, in men who know nothing of justice, and always have existed. The old Romans, who used to boast of their justice, were plainly boasting of those virtues, which (as I have said) can come out of justice and yet be cut off from the spring itself. But piety and equality are, so to speak, its veins. The whole of justice is held in those two springs. Its source and origin are in the first; all its force and method are in the second.

But piety is nothing else than the knowledge of God, as Trismegistus most truly defined it, as I have said in another place. So if piety is knowing God, and the sum of that knowledge is that you worship him, then plainly a man who does not have knowledge of God does not know justice. How can he know justice itself when he does not know the spring it rises from? Plato said a great deal about the one God, by whom he said the world was made, but he said nothing about religion. He had dreamed of God; he had not known him. If he, or anybody else, had wanted to finish the defense of justice, he ought first of all to have pulled down the religions of the gods, because they stand against piety. And when Socrates did try to do that, he was thrown into prison — so that even then it could be seen what was going to happen to men who had begun to defend true justice and to serve the only God.

So the other part of justice is equality. Plainly I do not mean the kind that consists in judging well, though that too deserves praise in a just man, but the kind that makes a man equal with everyone else — what Cicero calls evenness. God, who brings men into being and gives them breath, willed that all should be equal, that is, evenly matched. He has laid the same terms of living on all of them. He has brought them all forth to wisdom. He has promised immortality to all. No one is shut out from his heavenly gifts. Just as he shares out his one light to everyone alike, opens his springs to everyone, supplies food, and gives the sweetest rest of sleep, so he grants equality and virtue to all. In his sight no one is a slave and no one a master; for if we all have the same Father, we are all children by an equal right.

In God’s sight no one is poor except the man who has no justice; no one is rich except the man full of virtues; no one, in short, is distinguished except the man who has been good and innocent; no one is famous except the man who has done many works of mercy; no one is complete except the man who has climbed every step of virtue. So neither the Romans nor the Greeks could have justice, because they had men separated from one another by many degrees — from the poor to the rich, from the lowly to the powerful, from private men, in the end, up to the highest authority of kings. Where all are not evenly matched, there is no equality; and inequality by itself shuts justice out. For the whole force of justice lies in this: that it makes equal those who have come by an equal lot into the condition of this life.