(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all mistakes found.)
Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves
three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing intially
before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi =
ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute =
' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe,
when necessary.
TERTULLIAN
TO SCAPULA.(1)
[TRANSLATED BY THE REV. S. THELWALL.]
CHAP. I.
WE are not in any great perturbation or alarm about the persecutions we
suffer from the ignorance of men; for we have attached ourselves to this
sect, fully accepting the terms of its covenant, so that, as men whose very
lives are not their own, we engage in these conflicts, our desire being to
obtain God's promised rewards, and our dread lest the woes with which He
threatens an unchristian life should overtake us. Hence we shrink not from
the grapple with your utmost rage, coming even forth of our own accord to
the contest; and condemnation gives us more pleas-are than acquittal. We
have sent, therefore, this tract to you in no alarm about ourselves, but in
much concern for you and for all our enemies, to say nothing of our
friends. For our religion commands us to love even our enemies, and to pray
for those who persecute us, aiming at a perfection all its own, and seeking
in its disciples something of a higher type than the commonplace goodness
of the world. For all love those who love them; it is peculiar to
Christians alone to love those that hate them. Therefore mourning over your
ignorance, and compassionating human error, and looking on to that future
of which every day shows threatening signs, necessity is laid on us to come
forth in this way also, that we may set before you the truths you will not
listen to openly.
CHAP. II.
We are worshippers of one God, of whose existence and character Nature
teaches all men; at whose lightnings and thunders you tremble, whose
benefits minister to your happiness. You think that others, too, are gods,
whom we know to be devils. However, it is a fundamental human right, a
privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own
convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is
assuredly no part of religion to compel religion--to which free-will and
not force should lead us--the sacrificial victims even being required of a
willing mind. You will render no real service to your gods by compelling us
to sacrifice. For they can have no desire of offerings from the unwilling,
unless they are animated by a spirit of contention, which is a thing
altogether undivine. Accordingly the true God bestows His blessings alike
on wicked men and on His own elect; upon which account He has appointed an
eternal judgment, when both thankful and unthankful will have to stand
before His bar. Yet you have never detected us--sacrilegious wretches
though you reckon us to be--in any theft, far less in any sacrilege. But
the robbers of your temples, all of them swear by your gods, and worship
them; they are not Christians, and yet it is they who are found guilty of
sacrilegious deeds. We have not time to unfold in how many other ways your
gods are mocked and despised by their own votaries. So, too, treason is
falsely laid to our charge, though no one has ever been able to find
followers of Albinus, or Niger, or Cassius, among Christians; while the
very men who had sworn by the genii of the emperors, who had offered and
vowed sacrifices for their safety, who had often pronounced condemnation on
Christ's disciples, are till this day found traitors to the imperial
throne. A Christian is enemy to none, least of all to the Emperor of Rome,
whom he knows to be appointed by his God, and so cannot but love and
honour; and whose well-being moreover, he must needs desire, with that of
the empire over which he reigns so long as the world shall stand--for so
long as that shall Rome continue.(2) To the emperor, therefore, we render
such reverential homage as is lawful for us and good for him; regarding him
as the human being next to God who from God has received all his power, and
is less than God alone. And this will be according to his own desires. For
thus--as less only than the true God--he is greater than all besides. Thus
he is greater than the very gods themselves, even they, too, being subject
to him. We therefore sacrifice for the emperor's safety, but to our God and
his, and after the manner God has enjoined, in simple prayer. For God,
Creator of the universe, has no need of odours or of blood. These things
are the food of devils.(1) But we not only reject those wicked spirits: we
overcome them; we daily hold them up to contempt; we exorcise them from
their victims, as multitudes can testify. So all the more we pray for the
imperial well-being, as those who seek it at the hands of Him who is able
to bestow it. And one would think it must be abundantly clear to you that
the religious system under whose rules we act is one inculcating a divine
patience; since, though our numbers are so great--constituting all but the
majority in every city--we conduct ourselves so quietly and modestly; I
might perhaps say, known rather as individuals than as organized
communities, and remarkable only for the reformation of our former vices.
For far be it from us to take it ill that we have laid on us the very
things we wish, or in any way plot the vengeance at our own hands, which we
expect to come from God.
CHAP. III.
However, as we have already remarked, it cannot but distress us that no
state shall bear unpunished the guilt of shedding Christian blood; as you
see, indeed, in what took place during the presidency of Hilarian, for when
there had been some agitation about places of sepulture for our dead, and
the cry arose, "No areoe--no burial-grounds for the Christians," it came
that their own areoe,(2) their threshing-floors, were awanting, for they
gathered in no harvests. As to the rains of the bygone year, it is
abundantly plain of what they were intended to remind men--of the deluge,
no doubt, which in ancient times overtook human unbelief and wickedness;
and as to the fires which lately hung all night over the walls of Carthage,
they who saw them know what they threatened; and what the preceding
thunders pealed, they who were hardened by them can tell. All these things
are signs of God's impending wrath, which we must needs publish and
proclaim in every possible way; and in the meanwhile we must pray it may be
only local. Sure are they to experience it one day in its universal and
final form, who interpret otherwise these samples of it. That sun, too, in
the metropolis of Utica,(3) with light all but extinguished, was a portent
which could not have occurred from an ordinary eclipse, situated as the
lord of day was in his height and house. You have the astrologers, consult
them about it. We can point you also to the deaths of some provincial
rulers, who in their last hours had painful memories of their sin in
persecuting the followers of Christ.(4) Vigellius Saturninus, who first
here used the sword against us, lost his eyesight. Claudius Lucius
Herminianus in Cappadocia, enraged that his wife had become a Christian,
had treated the Christians with great cruelty: well, left alone in his
palace, suffering under a contagious malady, he boiled out in living worms,
and was heard exclaiming, "Let nobody know of it, lest the Christians
rejoice, and Christian wives take encouragement." Afterwards he came to see
his error in having tempted so many from their stedfastness by the tortures
he inflicted, and died almost a Christian himself. In that doom which
overtook Byzantium,(3) Caecilius Capella could not help crying out,
"Christians, rejoice!" Yes, and the persecutors who seem to themselves to
have acted with impunity shall not escape the day of judgment. For you we
sincerely wish it may prove to have been a warning only, that, immediately
after you had condemned Mavilus of Adrumetum to the wild beasts, you were
overtaken by those troubles, and that even now for the same reason you are
called to a blood-reckoning. But do not forget the future.
CHAP. IV.
We who are without fear ourselves are not seeking to frighten you, but
we would save all men if possible by warning them not to fight with God.(5)
You may perform the duties of your charge, and yet remember the claims of
humanity; if on no other ground than that you are liable to punishment
yourself, (you ought to do so). For is not your commission simply to
condemn those who confess their guilt, and to give over to the torture
those who deny? You see, then, how you trespass yourselves against your
instructions to wring from the confessing a denial. It is, in fact, an
acknowledgment of our innocence that you refuse to condemn us at once when
we confess. In doing your utmost to extirpate us, if that is your object,
it is innocence you assail. But how many rulers, men more resolute and more
cruel than you are, have contrived to get quit of such causes altogether,--
as Cincius Severus, who himself suggested the remedy at Thysdris, pointing
out how the Christians should answer that they might secure an acquittal;
as Vespronius Candidus, who dismissed from his bar a Christian, on the
ground that to satisfy his fellow-citizens would break the peace of the
community; as Asper, who, in the case of a man who gave up his faith under
slight infliction of the torture, did not compel the offering of sacrifice,
having owned before, among the advocates and assessors of court, that he
was annoyed at having had to meddle with such a case. Pudens, too, at once
dismissed a Christian who was brought before him, perceiving from the
indictment that it was a case of vexatious accusation; tearing the document
in pieces, he refused so much as to hear him without the presence of his
accuser, as not being consistent with the imperial commands. All this might
be officially brought Under your notice, and by the very advocates, who are
themselves also under obligations to us, although in court they give their
voice as it suits them. The clerk of one of them who was liable to be
thrown upon the ground by an evil spirit, was set free from his affliction;
as was also the relative of another, and the little boy of a third. How
many men of rank (to say nothing of common people) have been delivered from
devils, and healed of diseases! Even Severus himself, the father of
Antonine, was graciously mindful of the Christians; for he sought out the
Christian Proculus, surnamed Torpacion, the steward of Euhodias, and in
gratitude for his having once cured him by anointing, he kept him in his
palace till the day of his death.(1) Antonine, too, brought up as he was on
Christian milk, was intimately acquainted with this man. Both women and men
of highest rank, whom Severus knew well to be Christians, were not merely
permitted by him to remain uninjured; but he even bore distinguished
testimony in their favour, and gave them publicly back to us from the hands
of a raging populace. Marcus Aurelius also, in his expedition to Germany,
by the prayers his Christian soldiers offered to God, got rain in that
well-known thirst.(2) When, indeed, have not droughts been put away by our
kneelings and our fastings? At times like these, moreover, the people
crying to "the God of gods, the alone Omnipotent," under the name of
Jupiter, have borne witness to our God. Then we never deny the deposit
placed in our hands; we never pollute the marriage bed; we deal faithfully
with our wards; we give aid to the needy; we render to none evil for evil.
As for those who falsely pretend to belong to us, and whom we, too,
repudiate, let them answer for themselves. In a word, who has complaint to
make against us on other grounds? To what else does the Christian devote
himself, save the affairs of his own community, which during all the long
period of its existence no one has ever proved guilty of the incest or the
cruelty charged against it? It is for freedom from crime so singular, for a
probity so great, for righteousness, for purity, for faithfulness, for
truth, for the living God, that we are consigned to the flames; for this is
a punishment you are not wont to inflict either on the sacrilegious, or on
undoubted public enemies, or on the treason-tainted, of whom you have so
many. Nay, even now our people are enduring persecution from the governors
of Legio and Mauritania; but it is only with the sword, as from the first
it was ordained that we should suffer. But the greater our conflicts, the
greater our rewards.
CHAP. V.
Your cruelty is our glory. Only see you to it, that in having such
things as these to endure, we do not feel ourselves constrained to rush
forth to the combat, if only to prove that we have no dread of them, but on
the contrary, even invite their infliction. When Arrius Antoninus was
driving things hard in Asia, the whole Christians of the province, in one
united band, presented themselves before his judgment-seat; on which,
ordering a few to be led forth to execution, he said to the rest, "O
miserable men, if you wish to die, you have precipices or halters." If we
should take it into our heads to do the same thing here, what will you make
of so many thousands, of such a multitude of men and women, persons of
every sex and every age and every rank, when they present themselves before
you? How many fires, how many swords will be required? What will be the
anguish of Carthage itself, which you will have to decimate,(3) as each one
recognises there his relatives and companions, as he sees there it may be
men of your own order, and noble ladies, and all the leading persons of the
city, and either kinsmen or friends of those of your own circle? Spare
thyself, if not us poor Christians! Spare Carthage, if not thyself! Spare
the province, which the indication of your purpose has subjected to the
threats and extortions at once of the soldiers and of private enemies.
We have no master but God. He is before you, and cannot be hidden from
you, but to Him you can do no injury. But those whom you regard as masters
are only men, and one day they themselves must die. Yet still this
community will be undying, for be assured that just in the time of its
seeming overthrow it is built up into greater power. For all who witness
the noble patience of its martyrs, as struck with misgivings, are inflamed
with desire to examine into the matter in question;(1) and as soon as they
come to know the truth, they straightway enrol themselves its disciples.
Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland beginning in
1867. (ANF 3, Roberts and Donaldson). The digital version is by The
Electronic Bible Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.
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