De Testimonio Animae

Great curiosity, and a far greater memory, is needed for the study, if anyone should wish to excerpt, from any of the most approved writings of the philosophers, or of the poets, or of any masters whatsoever of secular learning and wisdom, testimonies to Christian truth, so that its rivals and persecutors may be convicted out of their own document — guilty both of error in themselves and of injustice toward us. Some indeed, in whom both the labour of curiosity and the tenacity of memory have persevered from their former culture of letters, have composed among us little works after this manner, recording and attesting, point by point, the reason and origin of our traditions and the grounds of our opinions, by which it may be recognized that we have taken up nothing either new or monstrous, on behalf of which the common and public writings too do not patronize us with their suffrage, if we have either cast out any error or admitted any equity. But to its own masters — otherwise most approved and most select — human hardness, born of incredulity, has lent a wavering faith, wherever they strike against the arguments of the Christian defence. Then the poets are vain, when they assign to the gods human passions and fables; then the philosophers are harsh, when they knock at the doors of truth. So far will he be held wise and prudent who has pronounced something near to Christian; whereas, if he has affected anything of prudence or wisdom, whether by spurning the ceremonies or by refuting the world, he is branded as a Christian. Henceforth, then, we shall have nothing to do with the letters and learning of a perverse felicity, which is believed rather in what is false than in what is true. Let those look to it, who have pronounced concerning the one and only God. Nay, let nothing at all be cited which a Christian acknowledges, lest he be able to make it a reproach. For even what is cited, neither do all know it, nor do those who know it trust that it stands firm. So far is it from being the case that men assent to our writings, to which no one comes unless already a Christian. I summon a new testimony — nay, one better known than all literature, more in motion than all learning, more published than every edition, greater than the whole man, that is, the whole of what is man's. Stand forth in our midst, O Soul: whether you are a divine and eternal thing, according to most of the philosophers — in which case the less will you lie; or by no means divine, since indeed you are mortal, as to Epicurus alone you seem — in which case the less ought you to lie; whether you are received from heaven, or conceived from earth; whether you are put together of numbers or of atoms; whether you begin with the body, or are introduced after the body; from whatever source and in whatever way you make man a rational animal, most capable of sense and of knowledge. But I do not summon you, formed in the schools, exercised in the libraries, fed in the Attic academies and porticoes, belching forth wisdom. I address you, simple and rude and unpolished and unlettered, such as they have you who have you only — that very soul from the crossroads, from the highway, from the weaver's shop, whole and entire. I have need of your inexperience, since no one believes your little experience. I require those things which you bring into man along with yourself — which you have learned to feel either from your own self or from whatever author of yours. You are not, so far as I know, a Christian; for one is wont to become, not to be born, a Christian. Yet now Christians demand a testimony of you — from a stranger against your own people — that they may blush at you, in that they hate us and mock us for those things which now detain you, your own conscience being witness.

We do not please, when we proclaim God under this one name, the one God, from whom are all things, and under whom is the universe. Give your testimony, if so you know. For we hear you too, openly and with all that liberty which is not permitted to us, at home and abroad, pronounce thus: What God shall have given, and, If God will. By that voice you both signify that there is some one being, and confess to him all power, to whose will you look; and at the same time you deny that the rest are gods, when you call them by their own names — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. For you affirm Him alone to be God whom you name God only, so that, when you sometimes call those others gods too, you seem to use the word from another's store and as if on loan. Nor is the nature of the God whom we proclaim hidden from you. God is good, God does good is your saying. Plainly, you add, but man is evil — reproaching, of course, by a contrary proposition, obliquely and figuratively, the evil man for this reason, that he has departed from the good God. Also, since with God lies all benediction of goodness and benignity, and benediction among us is the highest sacrament of discipline and of conduct, you pronounce God bless you as readily as it is necessary for a Christian; but when you turn the saying of God into a curse, you likewise by that saying confess, according to us, that all his power over us stands fast. There are some who, though they do not deny God, yet think him no overseer and arbiter and judge — in which point especially they reject us, who fly over to this discipline through fear of the proclaimed judgement — thus honouring God, while they absolve him from the cares of observation and the troubles of animadversion, to whom they do not even ascribe anger. For if God, they say, is angry, he is corruptible and passible; and what suffers and what is corrupted can also take on destruction, which God does not take on. But these same, elsewhere confessing the soul to be divine and bestowed by God, fall into a testimony of the soul itself, to be turned back against their former opinion. For if the soul is either divine or given by God, without doubt it knows its giver, and if it knows him, surely it also fears him, and so great a one, finally, as its bestower. Or does it not fear him whom it would rather have propitious than angry? Whence then is the natural fear of the soul toward God, if God knows not how to be angry? How is he feared who knows not how to be offended? What is feared, if not anger? Whence anger, if not from animadversion? Whence animadversion, if not from judgement? Whence judgement, if not from power? Whose is the supreme power, if not God's alone? Hence then it is open to you, O Soul, from your own conscience, at home and abroad, with none to mock or forbid, to proclaim: God sees all things, and, I commend to God, and, God will repay, and, God will judge between us. Whence have you this, you who are not a Christian? Nay, very often, both wreathed with the fillet of Ceres, and clad in scarlet with the cloak of Saturn, and in the linen of the goddess Isis, and finally in the very temples, you implore God as judge. You stand beneath Aesculapius, you adorn Juno in bronze, you put black-formed helmets upon Minerva, and you call to witness none of the gods present. In your own forum you appeal to a judge from elsewhere; in your own temples you suffer another god. O testimony of truth, which among the very demons makes a witness for the Christians!

But indeed, when we affirm that demons exist — to be sure, as though we did not also prove it, who alone drive them out from bodies — some flatterer of Chrysippus mocks at us. And yet your own execrations answer that they both exist and endure abomination. You call a man demon, who is troublesome by uncleanness or malice or insolence or by whatever stain we reckon to the demons, for the necessity of hatred. Satan, in short, you pronounce in every vexation and disdain and detestation — Satan, whom we call the angel of malice, the contriver of all error, the adulterator of the whole world, through whom man, circumvented from the beginning so that he transgressed the precept of God, and on that account given over to death, thenceforth made the whole race, infected from his own seed, the transmitter of his own condemnation too. You feel, therefore, your destroyer; and although the Christians alone know him — or whatever sect there be with the Lord — yet you too know him, while you hate him.

And now, as touches your more necessary judgement — in so far as it tends to your own very state — we affirm that you abide after the discharge of life, and await the day of judgement, and according to your deserts are destined either to torment or to refreshment, both everlasting; for the enduring of which, your former substance must needs return to you, and the matter and memory of the same man — both because you can feel nothing of evil or of good without the faculty of passible flesh, and because there is no reason for judgement without the presenting of him who deserved the suffering of judgement. This Christian opinion, though much more honourable than the Pythagorean, which does not transfer you into beasts; though fuller than the Platonic, which restores to you even the dower of a body; though weightier than the Epicurean, which defends you from destruction — yet, on account of its name alone, is reckoned mere vanity and stupor and, as it is said, presumption. But we do not blush, if our presumption shall be along with you. For first, when you recall someone deceased, you call him poor little wretch — not, surely, because snatched away from the good of life, but as already assigned to penalty and judgement. But otherwise you call the deceased secure. You profess both the discomfort of life and the benefit of death. You call them secure, moreover, whenever, outside the gate, with viands and dainties, performing rites rather for your own self, you retire to the tombs, or come back from the tombs somewhat the worse for drink. But I demand your sober opinion. You call the dead poor little wretches when you speak from yourself, when you are far from them. For in their banquet, as if they were present and reclining with you, you could not reproach them with their lot. You must flatter those on whose account you live the more sumptuously. Do you then call him a poor little wretch who feels nothing? What of this — that you curse him as one who feels, when you make his memory with the bite of some offence? You imprecate a heavy earth, and torment to his ashes among those below. Equally, from a good motive, to one to whom you owe a debt of gratitude, you pray refreshment for his bones and ashes, and desire that he may rest well among those below. If there is for you no suffering after death, if no persistence of sense, if, in short, you yourself are nothing where you have left the body, why do you lie against yourself, as though you could suffer anything further? Nay, why do you fear death at all? There is nothing for you to fear after death, since nothing is to be experienced after death. For even though it can be said that death is feared not as threatening anything further, but as cutting off the advantage of life — yet, since the discomforts, far more numerous, of life equally fall away at the same time, the gain of the heavier part dissolves the fear, nor is the loss of goods now to be feared, which is compensated by another good, that is, by peace from discomforts. That is not to be feared which frees us from all that is to be feared. If you fear to depart from life, because you have known it to be excellent, certainly you ought not to fear death, which you do not know to be evil. But when you fear, you know it to be evil. But you would not know it to be evil — because neither would you fear it — if you did not know that there is something after death which makes it evil, so that you fear it. Let us now leave aside the natural form of fearing death. Let no one fear what he cannot escape. From the other side I close with you, that of a gladder hope after death. For to almost all there is an inborn desire of fame after death. It is a long task to recount the Curtiuses and the Reguluses and the Greek heroes, of whom there are countless eulogies of death despised for the sake of posthumous fame. Who is there today who does not so strive to have his memory frequented after death, that he may preserve his name, whether by works of literature, or by the simple praise of his morals, or by the very ambition of his tombs? Whence comes it that the soul today affects something which it would have after death, and so greatly prepares what shall be of use to it after its decease? Surely it would care nothing about the future, if it knew nothing of the future. But perhaps you are more certain of sense after your departure than of resurrection one day, of which we are branded as presumers. But this too is proclaimed by the soul. For if anyone should inquire about someone long since deceased as about one alive, it comes ready to hand to say, He has gone away already, and must return.

These testimonies of the soul, the more common, the more simple; the more simple, the more common; the more common, the more universal; the more universal, the more natural; the more natural, the more divine. I do not think they can seem frivolous and cold to anyone, if he reconsiders the majesty of nature, from which the authority of the soul is reckoned. As much as you grant to the mistress, so much will you adjudge to the pupil. Nature is the mistress, the soul the pupil. Whatever the one has taught, or the other thoroughly learned, has been handed down by God, the master, that is, of the mistress herself. What the soul may be able to presume concerning its principal instructor, it is in your power to estimate from that soul which is in you. Perceive that soul which makes you to perceive. Reconsider it in presages as a seer, in omens as an augur, in events as a foreseer. Is it a wonder, if, given by God, it knows how to divine for man? Is it as great a wonder, if it knows him by whom it was given? Even when circumvented by the adversary, it remembers its author, and his goodness and his decree, and its own end, and the adversary himself. Is it then a wonder, if, given by God, it sings the same things which God has given his own to know? But he who has not thought such eruptions of the soul to be the teaching of nature and the silent deposits of an inborn and innate conscience, will say rather that it is the use — now confirmed, and as it were a vice — of speaking in such a manner, owing to the opinions of published writings scattered abroad among the common people. Certainly the soul is prior to literature, and discourse prior to the book, and sense prior to the pen, and man himself prior to the philosopher and poet. Is it then to be believed that, before literature and its divulgation, men lived dumb as to pronouncements of this kind? No one spoke of God and his goodness, no one of death, no one of those below? Speech went begging, I suppose — nay, there could be none at all, since even then there were lacking those things without which not even today can speech be richer or more abundant or more prudent — if those things which today are so easy, so constant, so close at hand, brought forth as it were upon the very lips, were not so before, before letters had sprouted in the world, before Mercury, I suppose, had been born. And whence, I ask, did it befall letters themselves to know, and to disseminate into the use of speech, those things which no mind had ever conceived, or tongue uttered, or ear received? But indeed, since the divine Scriptures, which are with us or with the Jews, into whose wild olive we have been grafted, much precede the secular writings — or precede them at least by some moderate age, as we have shown in its place for demonstrating their credit — and if the soul has borrowed these utterances from letters, surely it is to be believed from ours, not from yours, because the prior are more potent for instructing the soul than the later, which themselves too endured to be instructed by the prior; since, even if we should concede that it was instructed from yours, yet the tradition would pertain to the principal origin, and whatever it has befallen you to have taken from ours and handed down would be wholly ours. And since this is so, it does not much matter whether the soul's conscience was formed by God or by the letters of God. Why then do you wish, O man, that these things should have gone forth from the human opinions of your letters into the callous habit of common use?

Believe, therefore, your own; and concerning our records, so much the more believe the divine; but concerning the soul's own judgement, believe nature likewise. Choose which of these you would more faithfully observe as the sister of truth. If you doubt your own letters, neither God nor nature lies. That you may believe both nature and God, believe the soul; so it will come about that you believe yourself too. It is surely she whom you make of as much account as she makes of you; whose you are wholly, who is all things to you, without whom you can neither live nor die, for whose sake you neglect God. For when you fear to become a Christian, confront her. Why does she worship another, yet name God? Why, when she marks out spirits to be cursed, does she pronounce them demons? Why does she call to witness toward heaven, and detest toward earth? Why does she serve in one place, in another confront an avenger? Why does she pass judgement on the dead? What words of the Christians does she have — Christians whom she will neither hear of nor see? Why has she either given us those words, or received them from us? Why has she either taught, or learned? Hold the agreement of proclamation suspect, amid so great a disagreement of conduct. You are vain, if you will reckon things of this kind to this tongue alone, or to the Greek — which are held near akin to each other — so as to deny the universality of nature. Not for the Latins, nor for the Argives alone, does the soul fall from heaven. Of all nations there is one name, Man; one soul, varied speech; one spirit, varied sound; to each nation its own tongue, but the matter of the tongue is common. God is everywhere, and the goodness of God everywhere; the demon everywhere, and the cursing of the demon everywhere; the invocation of the divine judgement everywhere; death everywhere, and the consciousness of death everywhere, and the testimony everywhere. Every soul, by its own right, proclaims aloud the things which it is not permitted to us even to mutter. Deservedly therefore is every soul both defendant and witness — defendant of error in so far as it is witness of truth — and it shall stand before the courts of God on the day of judgement, having nothing to say. You proclaimed God, and did not seek him out; you abominated the demons, and yet adored them; you appealed to the judgement of God, and did not believe it to be; you presumed the punishments of hell, and did not take precaution against them; you savoured of the Christian name, and persecuted the Christian.