The Cross and the Charge of Folly

Now I will speak about the mystery of the cross, in case anyone should say: if he had to undergo death, it should not have been a death that was openly disgraceful and degrading, but one with some honor in it. I know very well that many people dislike the very name of the cross and shy away from the truth because of it, though there is great reason and great power in it. He was sent for this purpose: to open the way of salvation to the lowest of men. So he made himself low, in order to set them free. That is why he underwent the kind of death that is ordinarily inflicted on people of no standing — so that everyone would have a chance to imitate him. Besides, since he was going to rise again, his body could not be mutilated in any way, or a bone of it broken, which is what happens to men who are beheaded. So the cross was preferred: it kept the body whole, with the bones unhurt, for the resurrection. [a]

To these reasons another was added. Since he had undertaken to suffer and to die, it was fitting that he should be lifted up. So the cross raised him high both in fact and in what it meant, and his majesty and power became known to everyone along with his suffering. For in stretching out his hands on the cross he plainly spread his wings toward the east and the west, and under them the nations from both sides of the world could gather and find rest.

How much this sign counts for, and what power it has, is plain from this: the whole army of demons is driven out and put to flight by it. Just as he himself, before his suffering, threw demons into confusion by a word of command, so now, by the name and the sign of that same suffering, unclean spirits that have worked their way into people’s bodies are driven out. They are racked and tormented, and they admit that they are demons, and give themselves up to the God who is harrying them. So what can the Greeks expect from their superstitions, or from their wisdom, when they see their own gods — whom they themselves do not deny to be demons as well — beaten by ordinary men by means of the cross?

So there is only one hope of life for people, one safe harbor, one refuge where they can be free: to lay aside the errors that have held them, to open the eyes of their mind and recognize God, in whom alone truth has its home; to look down on earthly things and on things made out of the ground; to count philosophy as nothing, since it is foolishness in God’s sight; and, having taken up true wisdom — that is, religion — to become heirs of immortality. [f]

But in fact they are not so much set against the truth as against their own safety. When they hear these things they loathe them as some crime that can never be atoned for. They will not even put up with listening: they think their ears are defiled by sacrilege if they hear. And they do not stop at insults now, but attack with the most abusive words they can find; and where they have the power, they persecute people as public enemies — worse than enemies, in fact. For enemies, once beaten, are punished with death or slavery, and no one is tortured after the weapons are laid down, even though those men deserved to suffer anything who chose to act in such a way that mercy had to find room among drawn swords.

Cruelty against the innocent is unheard of, and it is not worthy even of the position of a victorious enemy. What is the cause of a fury as strong as this? Plainly, because they cannot fight on the ground of reason, they push their case forward by violence; and without understanding the matter at all, they condemn as utterly dangerous the people who have declined to make a stand about their own innocence. And it is not enough for them that the people they hate without reason should die a quick and simple death. They tear them apart with tortures thought up for the purpose, to satisfy a hatred that no wrongdoing produced. The truth produces it — the truth, which is hateful to men who live badly, because they cannot stand that there are people their conduct cannot please. They want them destroyed by any means, so that with no witness left they may sin without restraint.

But they say they do these things in defense of their gods. In the first place, if they are gods and have any power or standing, they have no need of men to defend and protect them; they plainly defend themselves. Or how can a man hope for help from them if they cannot avenge even their own injuries? So wanting to be the avengers of the gods is an empty and foolish thing — except that it makes their own lack of confidence all the plainer. A man who takes on the protection of the god he worships is admitting that the god is worthless; and if he worships him because he thinks him powerful, then he ought not to want to defend the one who ought to be defending him. [i]

We, then, are acting rightly. When those defenders of false gods, in revolt against the true God, persecute his name in us, we do not fight back in act or in word. With gentleness and silence and patience we bear whatever cruelty can contrive against us. For we have confidence in God, and we look for the payment to come from him afterward. That confidence is not groundless: we have heard of, and in some cases watched, the wretched ends of all the men who have dared to commit this crime. No one has ever had it in his power to insult God and go unpunished. The man who would not learn by being told has learned by his own punishment who the true God is.

I would like to know, when they force men to sacrifice against their will, what reasoning they have in their own minds, and to whom they think the offering is being made. If it is made to the gods, that is not worship and not an acceptable sacrifice — offered by people the gods find displeasing, wrung out by violence, forced by pain. But if it is done for the sake of the people they are compelling, it is plainly no favor: nobody would accept it, and a man would rather die than take it. If what you are calling me to is good, why do you invite me by means of evil? Why with blows and not with words? Why not by argument, but by torturing my body? It is plain from this that the thing is evil, since you do not draw me to it willing, but drag me to it refusing.

What folly it is, to want to look after a man’s good against his will! Suppose someone crushed by his troubles tries to take refuge in death. You wrench the sword out of his hand, or cut the rope, or pull him back from the cliff, or pour out the poison. Can you then boast of being the man’s preserver, when the one you think you have preserved gives you no thanks and reckons you have done him harm — turning aside the death he wanted, and refusing to let him reach the end and rest from his labors? A favor is not to be weighed by the quality of the act, but by the feelings of the man who receives it. Why should you count as a favor a thing that injures me? You want me to worship your gods, which I consider deadly to me. If it is good, I do not grudge it to you. Enjoy your good by yourself. There is no reason for you to want to rescue me from my error, which I took up by my own judgment and inclination. And if it is evil, why drag me into a share of the evil? Make what you can of your own fortune. I would rather die practicing what is good than live in evil.

These things can fairly be said. But who will listen, when men of raging and unbridled temper think their own authority is diminished if there is any freedom at all in human affairs? Yet religion is the one thing in which freedom has made its home. It is voluntary above everything else, and no compulsion can be laid on anyone to worship what he does not want to worship. A man can perhaps pretend; he cannot be made to want. In fact some, from fear of torment or broken by torture, have consented to those detestable sacrifices; but what they did under compulsion they never do willingly. When the chance comes again and their freedom is restored, they run back to God and appease him with prayers and tears, repenting not of a will they never had, but of the compulsion they underwent — and pardon is not refused to those who make amends. So what does a man achieve by defiling the body, when he cannot change the will? [k]

But men of feeble understanding, if they have induced any man of courage to sacrifice to their gods, exult with unbelievable eagerness and insolence, and celebrate as though they had sent an enemy under the yoke. But if a man is frightened by neither threats nor tortures and chooses to prefer his faith to his life, then cruelty brings out all its ingenuity against him and plans things dreadful and unbearable. They know that death for the cause of God is glorious, and that it is a victory on our side if we outlast the torturers and lay down our lives for our faith and our religion; so they too strain to conquer us.

They do not put us to death. They hunt out new and unheard-of tortures, so that the weakness of the flesh may give way under the pain; and if it does not give way, they postpone the rest of the punishment and apply careful treatment to the wounds, so that when the torture is repeated on scars that are still fresh it will hurt more. And while they carry on this butchery against innocent people, they evidently reckon themselves devout, and just, and religious — for they take delight in sacrifices of that kind to their gods — while they call the others godless and desperate. What a perverse thing this is: the man who is punished though innocent is called desperate and godless, and the torturer, on the other side, is called just and devout!

But they say that men are rightly and deservedly punished when they will have nothing to do with the public rites of religion handed down to them by their ancestors. And what if those ancestors were fools to take up empty rites, as I have shown earlier? Are we to be forbidden to follow what is true and better? Why should we rob ourselves of freedom and be enslaved to other people’s errors, as though we had been made over to them? Let us be allowed to be wise; let us be allowed to inquire into the truth. But if it pleases them to defend the folly of their ancestors, why are the Egyptians let off, who worship cattle and beasts of every kind as gods? Why are the gods themselves made the material of stage mimes? And why is the man honored who mocks them most wittily? And why is a hearing given to philosophers who say either that there are no gods, or that if there are any they take no interest in human affairs and pay no attention to them, or who argue that there is no providence at all governing the world? [o]

Yet of all people it is only those who follow God and the truth who are judged godless. And since this is at once justice and wisdom, they charge it with either godlessness or folly, and never see what it is that deceives them when they call evil good and good evil. Many of the philosophers, and Plato and Aristotle above all, said a great deal about justice, maintaining and praising that virtue as highly as they could, because it gives each person what is due to him and keeps fairness in everything. The other virtues, they said, are as it were silent and shut up inside; justice alone is not turned toward itself only, and not hidden, but leans right out into the open, ready to do good and to help as many as it can — as though justice really belonged to judges only, and to men in some post of authority, and not to everyone.

And yet there is no one, not even the lowest man or a beggar, who is not capable of justice. But because they did not know what it was, where it came from, or how it worked, they assigned that highest virtue — which is the common good of all — to a few men only, and said that it hunts after no advantage of its own, but only the interests of others. And it was not for nothing that Carneades was raised up, a man of the greatest talent and penetration, to refute what they said and to overturn a justice that had no firm footing under it. It was not that he thought justice deserved blame; he wanted to show that its defenders were bringing forward no firm or certain argument about it.

For if justice is the worship of the true God — and what is so just where fairness is concerned, so devout where honor is concerned, so necessary where safety is concerned, as to acknowledge God as a parent, to revere him as Lord, and to obey his law and his commands? — then it follows that the philosophers did not know what justice was, since they neither acknowledged God himself nor kept his worship and his law. That is why Carneades was able to refute them. His argument came to this: there is no natural justice; all living creatures defend their own interests under the guidance of nature itself; and therefore justice, if it advances the advantage of others and neglects its own, must be called foolishness. [w]

For if every people that holds power — and the Romans themselves above all, who are masters of the whole world — were willing to follow justice and hand back to each man the property they seized by force of arms, they would go back to huts and to poverty. And if they did that, they would indeed be just, but they would have to be counted fools, since they would be going out of their way to injure themselves for other people’s advantage. Then again, suppose someone finds a man who by mistake is offering gold for sale as brass, or silver as lead, and he is under pressure to buy. Will he keep quiet about what he knows and buy it cheap, or will he tell the seller what it is worth? If he tells him, he will plainly be called just — and also a fool, for doing another man good and himself harm.

But a case where only property is at stake is easy to judge. What if his own life is in danger, so that he must either kill another man or die himself? What will he do? It may be that he has been shipwrecked and finds some weaker man clinging to a plank; or that his army has been defeated, and in his flight he comes upon a wounded man on horseback. Will he shove the one off the plank and the other off his horse, so that he can get away himself? If he wants to be just, he will not do it — and he will be judged a fool, for losing his own life to spare another’s. If he does do it, he will indeed look wise, because he has provided for his own interests; but he will also be wicked, because he has committed a wrong.

These things are said sharply enough, but we can answer them readily. What makes it look this way is a likeness between names. Justice bears a resemblance to foolishness, and yet it is not foolishness; and at the same time malice bears a resemblance to wisdom, and yet it is not wisdom. But just as malice, clever and shrewd though it is at preserving its own interests, is not wisdom but cunning and craft, so justice ought not to be called foolishness either, but innocence — because the just man must be wise and the fool must be unjust. Neither reason nor nature itself allows a man who is just not to be wise, since it is plain that the just man does nothing but what is right and good, and always avoids what is crooked and evil. And who will be able to tell good from evil, the crooked from the straight, except the man who is wise? The fool acts badly because he does not know what is good and what is evil. He does wrong, then, because he cannot distinguish the crooked from the straight. So justice cannot belong to the fool, nor wisdom to the unjust man. The man who has not thrust a shipwrecked man off a plank, or a wounded man off his horse, is therefore not a fool. He has held back from doing an injury, which is a sin; and avoiding sin is the wise man’s part. [z]

That he should look foolish at first sight is caused by this: they suppose that the soul is put out along with the body, and for that reason they reckon every advantage within this life. For if there is no existence after death, then plainly a man acts foolishly who spares another’s life at a cost to his own, or who looks after someone else’s gain more than his own. If death destroys the soul, we must use every effort to live longer and more to our own advantage. But if a life of immortality and blessedness remains after death, the just and wise man will certainly think little of this bodily existence and all its earthly goods, because he will know what kind of reward he is about to receive from God.

So let us keep innocence, let us keep justice, let us put up with looking like fools, so that we may be able to keep true wisdom. And if it seems senseless and foolish to men to prefer torture and death over sacrificing to the gods and getting away unharmed, let us nevertheless strive to show our faithfulness to God by every virtue and all patience. Let death not terrify us and pain not master us, so that the vigor and steadiness of our mind may be kept unshaken. Let them call us fools, while they themselves are the greatest fools — blind and dull and like sheep — who do not understand that it is a deadly thing to leave the living God and throw themselves down in adoration of earthly objects; who do not know that everlasting punishment awaits those who have worshipped senseless images, and that those who have refused neither tortures nor death for the worship and honor of the true God will obtain everlasting life. This is the highest faith; this is true wisdom; this is perfect justice. It makes no difference to us what fools decide or what worthless men think. We ought to wait for the judgment of God, so that afterward we may judge those who have passed judgment on us.