Religion Cannot Be Forced

But no doubt this is the reason a man looks like a fool when he would rather go without, or die, than do an injury or take another man’s property — they think a man is destroyed by death. Every error, of ordinary people and of the philosophers alike, grows out of that conviction. For if we have no existence after death, then it is plainly the mark of the greatest fool not to look after the interests of this present life, so that it runs long and is filled with every advantage. But a man who acts that way must sooner or later leave the rule of justice behind. If, on the other hand, a longer and better life is still waiting for a man — and we learn this both from the reasoning of great philosophers and from the answers of seers and the divine words of the prophets — then it is the mark of a wise man to think little of this present life and its advantages, since losing the whole of it is paid back with immortality. That same defender of justice, Laelius, says in Cicero: [a]

“Virtue wants honor above everything; and virtue has no other reward.” There is another reward, and one far more worthy of virtue, which you, Laelius, could never have supposed, because you had no knowledge of the sacred writings. Virtue receives that reward readily, and does not demand it harshly. You are badly mistaken if you think a reward can be paid to virtue by a man, since you yourself said, and said quite truly, in another place: “What riches will you offer this man? What commands? What kingdoms? A man who counts such things human judges his own advantages to be divine.” So who can think you a wise man, Laelius, when you contradict yourself and, a moment later, take back from virtue what you had just given her? It is plain that not knowing the truth is what leaves your opinion unsteady and wavering.

And then what do you add? “But suppose all the ungrateful, or the many who are envious, or powerful enemies, strip virtue of its rewards.” How frail, how worthless you have made virtue out to be, if it can be stripped of its reward! If virtue judges its goods to be divine, as you said, how can anyone be so ungrateful, so envious, so powerful as to take from virtue the goods the gods conferred on her? “She certainly delights herself with many comforts,” he says, “and above all she holds herself up by her own beauty.” What comforts? What beauty? — when that very beauty is often charged against her as a fault and turned into a punishment. For what if, as Furius said, a man is dragged off and harried, driven into exile, left destitute, loses his hands, has his eyes gouged out, is condemned, chained, burned, and horribly tortured besides? Will virtue lose her reward — or rather, will she perish herself? Not at all. She will receive her reward from God the Judge, and she will live, and always flourish. Take these things away, and nothing in human life can look so useless, so foolish, as virtue — whose natural goodness and honor are themselves able to teach us that the soul is not mortal and that God has appointed a divine reward for it.

But this is why God willed that virtue itself should be kept hidden under the look of folly: so that the mystery of truth and of his religion might stay secret; so that he might show up the emptiness and error of these superstitions, and of that earthly wisdom which lifts itself too high and is so well pleased with itself; and so that, once the difficulty of the way had been set out plainly, that narrowest path might lead up to the high reward of immortality.

I have shown, I think, why our people are counted fools by fools. To choose to be tortured and killed rather than take a pinch of incense in three fingers and drop it on the brazier looks as foolish as being more careful of another man’s life than of your own when your own is in danger. For they do not know what a great act of impiety it is to worship anything other than God — who made heaven and earth, who shaped the human race, who breathed the breath of life into them and gave them light.

But if the most worthless of all slaves is the one who runs away and deserts his master, and if he is judged to deserve the lash and chains and prison and the cross and every evil; and if a son in the same way is thought lost and undutiful who deserts his father so as not to obey him, and is therefore held to deserve disinheritance and the striking of his name from the family forever — how much more the man who forsakes God, in whom two names equally deserving of reverence, Master and Father, meet together? For what benefit does a man who buys a slave give him, beyond the food he supplies for his own advantage? And a man who fathers a son has no power to bring it about that the child is conceived, or born, or lives; from which it is clear that he is not the father but only the agent of begetting. What punishments, then, does a man deserve who forsakes the one who is both true Master and true Father — other than the punishments God himself has appointed? He has prepared everlasting fire for the wicked spirits, and he threatens the same, through his prophets, against the impious and the rebellious.

So let those who destroy their own souls and the souls of others learn what a crime they are committing, one that nothing can wipe out. First, because they bring about their own death by serving the most abandoned demons, whom God has condemned to everlasting punishment. Second, because they will not allow God to be worshipped by anyone else: they work at turning men aside to deadly rites, and they take the greatest pains that no life on earth shall go unharmed — no life, that is, that looks up to heaven with its standing safe. What else shall I call them but wretched men, who obey the promptings of their own plunderers and take them for gods? They know neither their condition, nor their origin, nor their names, nor their nature. They cling instead to what the crowd is persuaded of, they go wrong willingly, and they take their own folly’s side. [j]

Ask them the grounds of that persuasion and they can give none. They fall back on the judgment of their ancestors, saying that those men were wise, that they approved these things, that they knew what was best — and so they strip themselves of every power of seeing for themselves. They say goodbye to reason while they put their confidence in other men’s errors. Wrapped in ignorance of everything, they know neither themselves nor their gods. And if only they had been willing to go wrong by themselves, and to be unwise by themselves! But they drag others along as companions in their evil, as though they were going to get some comfort out of the ruin of many. It is this very ignorance that makes them so cruel in persecuting the wise — and they pretend they are doing it for the others’ good, that they want to call them back to a sound mind.

Do they try to do it by talking with us, then, or by giving some reason? Not at all. They try to do it by force and by torture. What extraordinary, blind madness! A bad mind, it seems, is in the men who are trying to keep faith, and a good one in the executioners. Is the bad mind really in men who are tortured against every law of humanity and every principle of justice — or in the men who inflict on innocent bodies what not the cruelest robbers, not the angriest enemies, not the most savage barbarians ever practiced? Do they cheat themselves so far that they trade the names of good and evil back and forth? Why then do they not call day night, and the sun darkness? It is the same shamelessness to give the good the name of evil, the wise the name of foolish, the just the name of impious.

Besides this, if they have any confidence in philosophy or in eloquence, let them arm themselves and refute these arguments of ours if they can. Let them meet us hand to hand and go over every point. It would be fitting for them to take up the defense of their gods, in case our side keeps growing — as it does grow, daily — and theirs is left deserted, along with its shrines and its laughable mockeries. And since they can achieve nothing by violence — for the religion of God grows the more it is crushed — let them work instead by reason and by persuasion.

Let their priests come out where we can see them, the lesser ones and the greatest alike: their flamens, their augurs, their sacrificing kings too, and the priests and attendants of their superstitions. Let them call us together to an assembly. Let them urge us to take up the worship of their gods. Let them persuade us that there are many beings by whose divinity and providence everything is governed. Let them show how the origins and beginnings of their rites and their gods were handed down to mortals. Let them explain what the source and principle of these things is. Let them set out what reward there is in worshipping them and what punishment waits for neglecting them; why they want to be worshipped by men at all; and what a man’s piety adds to them, if they are already blessed. And let them establish all this not by their own assertion — a mortal man’s authority carries no weight — but by some divine testimonies, as we do.

There is no need for violence and injury, because religion cannot be forced. The thing has to be carried on by words rather than by blows, so that it is the will that is affected. Let them unsheathe the weapon of their intelligence; if their system is true, let it be argued for. We are ready to listen, if they will teach. While they stay silent we certainly give them no credit — just as we do not give way to them in their rage either. Let them copy us and set out the whole account of the matter. For we do not lure people in, whatever they say. We teach, we prove, we show. And so no one is held here against his will, since a man with no faith and no devotion is of no use to God — and yet no one leaves us, because the truth itself holds him.

Let them teach that way, if they have any confidence in the truth. Let them speak; let them find their voices; let them dare, I say, to discuss something of this kind with us — and then their error and their folly will certainly be laughed at by the old women they despise, and by our boys. For, clever as they are above all others, they know from books the family line of the gods, and their exploits, their commands, their deaths, and their tombs. They can know too that the very rites they were initiated into began either in something men did, or in accidents, or in deaths. It takes an unbelievable madness to imagine that beings are gods whom they cannot deny were mortal — or, if they are shameless enough to deny it, their own writings and their own countrymen’s will refute them; the very beginnings of the rites will convict them. So they can learn from this one thing how great the distance is between truth and falsehood: they themselves, with all their eloquence, are unable to persuade anyone, while the unskilled and the uneducated are able to, because the thing itself and the truth do the speaking.

Why then do they rage, so that in wanting to lessen their folly they only increase it? Torture and piety are worlds apart. Truth cannot be joined to violence, or justice to cruelty. But they have good reason not to venture on teaching anything about divine things: they would be laughed at by our people and deserted by their own. For most ordinary people, once they find out that these mysteries were set up in memory of the dead, will condemn them and look for something truer to worship. Those “rites of mystic awe” were established by crafty men precisely so that the people would not know what they were worshipping. But since we know their systems, why do they either not believe us, who know both sides, or else envy us for preferring truth to falsehood?

They say the public rites of religion have to be defended. Oh, with what an honorable inclination the wretched men go astray! They are aware that there is nothing among men more excellent than religion, and that it ought to be defended with all our strength; but as they are deceived about religion itself, so they are deceived about the manner of defending it. For religion is to be defended not by killing but by dying; not by cruelty but by patient endurance; not by crime but by good faith. The first of each pair belongs to evils, the second to goods, and what is good must have its place in religion, not what is evil. If you want to defend religion by bloodshed and torture and crime, you will not be defending it — you will be defiling it and profaning it. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion. If the mind of the worshipper is turned away from it, religion is taken away at once and stops existing.

The right method, then, is to defend religion by patient endurance, or by death. In that, the keeping of faith is both pleasing to God himself and adds authority to religion. If a man in this earthly warfare keeps faith with his king in some famous action, and lives, he is the more loved and welcome for it; and if he falls, he wins the highest glory, because he underwent death for his commander. How much more, then, must faith be kept toward God, the Ruler of all, who can pay the reward of virtue not only to the living but also to the dead! So the worship of God, since it belongs to a heavenly warfare, calls for the greatest devotion and fidelity. For how will God love the worshipper, if he himself is not loved by that man? Or how will he grant the petitioner whatever he asks, when the man comes to make his prayer without sincerity and without reverence?

But these men, when they come to sacrifice, bring their gods nothing from inside, nothing of their own — no uprightness of mind, no reverence, no fear. And so, when the worthless sacrifices are over, they leave their religion behind altogether in the temple, and with the temple, exactly as they found it. They neither bring any of it with them nor take any of it back. That is why observances of this kind can neither make men good nor stay firm and unchanged. Men are easily led away from them, because nothing is learned in them about how to live, nothing about wisdom, nothing about faith. What, after all, is the religion of those gods? What is its power? What its discipline? What its origin? What its principle? What its foundation? What its substance? Where does it tend? What does it promise, that a man should faithfully keep it and boldly defend it? I see nothing in it but a rite that concerns the fingers and nothing more.

But our religion is firm and solid and unchangeable, because it teaches justice, because it is always with us, because it exists entirely in the soul of the worshipper, because it has the mind itself for a sacrifice. In that religion nothing is required but the blood of animals, the smoke of incense, and the senseless pouring out of libations. In ours: a good mind, a clean breast, an innocent life. Those rites are attended, with no sorting out at all, by unchaste adulteresses, by shameless procuresses, by filthy prostitutes; they are attended by gladiators, robbers, thieves, and sorcerers, who pray for nothing except to commit their crimes and get away with it. What can a robber ask when he sacrifices, or a gladiator, except that they may kill? What can the poisoner ask, except that he not be found out? What the prostitute, except that she may sin to the limit? What the adulteress, except her husband’s death, or that her unfaithfulness stay hidden? What the procuress, except that she may strip many people of their property? What the thief, except that he may steal more?

But in our religion there is no room even for a slight and ordinary offense. If anyone comes to a sacrifice without a sound conscience, he hears what threats God speaks against him — God, I say, who sees the hidden places of the heart, who is always hostile to sins, who requires justice, who demands fidelity. What room is there here for an evil mind or an evil prayer? But those unhappy men do not understand, even from their own crimes, how evil their worship is, since they come to pray defiled with every crime; and they suppose they are offering a pious sacrifice if they wash their skin — as though any stream could wash away, or any sea purify, the lusts shut up inside their breast. How much better to cleanse the mind instead, which is dirtied by evil desires, and to drive out every vice by the one washing of virtue and faith! For the man who does that is pure enough, even though he carries a body that is soiled and unwashed.