CHAPTER XII
Tertullian's Apology for the Christians. many prints of human frailty to deny them to be men, and such as not only prove them men, but such also as prove it incredible they should be made gods in another world.
If you sit upon the bench to punish such miscreants, and men of honour spit at such nasty acquaintance, and the supreme God takes up such fellows to associate with His Majesty, why then do you condemn them whose colleagues in wickedness you adore?
This justice of yours is mere lampoon and satire upon heaven.
If you would get into the good graces of your deities, I would advise you to consecrate the greatest rakes you can find, for certainly a consecration of such rakes is doing honour to those they are like.
; But not to dwell longer upon things so unbecoming the divine nature, I will suppose your gods to have been good honest men, yet how many better and more noted have you left in hell?
For there have you not left the wise Socrates, the just. Aristides, the excellent General Themistocles, and Alexander the Great, Polycrates the fortunate, Croesus the rich, and Demosthenes the eloquent?
Which of your gods had more gravity and wisdom than Cato, more justice and conduct, with courage, than Scipio, more magnanimity than Pompey, more success than Sylla, more wealth than Crassus, and more eloquence than Tully?
How much more becoming had it been for him who had a foresight of these worthier personages to have stayed till their death before his creation of- — gods?
But he was in haste, I suppose, for company, and having ~ taken up those you worship, he made fast. the door, and so heave
'lies blushing now to see braver souls repining in hell.
; Z CHAPTER XII.
CONCERNING THE VANITY OF IMAGE-WORSHIP,
But I shall push these things no further, and take another course to. set you right in the notions of your gods; for by demonstrating what they are not, I shall show what they are.
And as much as I can learn of your gods, they have nothing of the venerable but ' merely their names, imposed by some old people dead and gone.
I meet with no account\of their lives but what is blended with \
Tertuthan's Apology for the Christians.
fables, and I find the' whole fabric of your religion built upon a pack of human inventions.
As for your images, I shall only observe that they are material, and often of the same matter with your common utensils ; and it is ten to one but the holy image has some sister-vessel about the house, the pots and kettles being frequently of the same metal and piece with the gods.
Nay, oftentimes the _ vessels themselves have the good luck to change their fate, and be turned into gods, by the help of consecration, which alters the _ property, and by the help of art, which alters the form, though not without great sacrilege and contumely to any of the gods in their very making.
So that it is, indeed, a mighty consolation to us who are punished for these gods, to find them suffer the like with us, before they come to be worshipful; for Christians are fastened to crosses and stumps of trees; and have you ever an image that has not been sq applied in its formation?
It is upon a frame of wood in the form of a gibbet where the body first takes its degree of divinity.
Our Christian sides are torn with nails; but how is every 'member of your poor gods mauled with hatchets, saws, and files?
We lose our heads, and your gods have none, before the lead, and the glue, and the nails set them on.
We are drawn about by wild aj beasts, and so Bacchus is drawn by tigers, Cybele by lions, and Ceres by serpents.
We are cast into the fire, and your gods are cast and founded there also.
We are condemned to the mines, and are not your gods dug out from thence?
We are banished into islands, and there is not an island but is famous for the birth or burial
_ of some god or other.
If these are the ways of deifying, then while you are plaguing Christians you are only hammering them into gods, and your punishing ought properly to be called a consecration.
But in truth your gods have not the sense -to feel the hardships they undergo in making, nor the honours you pay them when made.
And here I expect you should cry out, O blaspemy! O sacrilege! but you may gnash and foam as you please ; yet remember that you yourselves are the admirers of that Seneca, who in his book of superstition has been much severer against you upon this head than I. If, therefore,! we will not adore your statues and 1 Teitur st Statuas et Imagines frigidas anortuorum suorum simillimas non adoramus.
This passage the Magdeburgenses, says Pamelius, have wrested ' against the use' of images in the Church, and takes it ill of Zephyrus for concluding that the Christians in Tertullian's time had only the sign of the cross above the altar, and is so unfortunate in his zeal as to take occasion even from hence to justify, not only the use of images, but the worship of them too, in a very long note upon this place.
But I shall not pretend to answer a person of such hardiness, only leave it to any impartial reader, whether he can think it possible
'that Tertullian would have been so merrily seyere for this whole chapter together
. Tertullian's Apology for the Chrestians. images as cold as death, and in this so very like the bodies they
— represent, do not we deserve panegyric rather than punishment for leaving an acknowledged error? and which the very kites and mice and spiders know to be dead as well as we.!
Is it possible we can hurt those we are certain are not?
For that which is not, is not capable of suffering, because it is not.
CHAPTER ALT
CONCERNING THE IRREVERENCE OF THE HEATHEN TO THEIR GODS,
— Bur gods they are in your opinion, say you; and if so, how comes it to pass that you use them so scurvily, with such profaneness, sacrilege, and irreverence?
How dare you despise what you presume to be divine, and pull down the altars of them you fear, and ridicule the deities you defend?
Examine the charge, and -show where I falsify ; for if you worship, some one god, and some another, how can it be but you must offend the god you overlook ?
For you cannot give the preference to one, without postponing another; for in the election and reprobation of gods, as well as men, honour and dishonour are inseparable relations:
It is now, therefore, evident that you must put a slight upon the deities you — reprobate, and that you cannot be afraid of offending those whom you have the boldness to reprobate.
For as I sharply observed before, the fate of every god depends upon the vote of the senate, he must pass the house before he comes to be a god, and the house ungods him at pleasure.
As for your domestic deities called Lares,? you upon the heathens for the worship of images, had the Christians of his time done the like, by virtue of the Romish distinction between Dulia and Latria, without saying one word of such a distinction.
, nee 1 Quas Milvi et Mures et Aranee intelligunt.
Uorace himself takes the liberty of jesting in the like manner.
Mentior at st quid, merdis caput inguiner albis Corvorumt.
- * Domesticos Deos quos Lares dicitis.
These Lares were painted in the form of | a dog, as having charge of the house committed to their custody, according to that of Ovid. Fas¢. 5.
; Pervigilantque Lares, tervigilantgue Canes.
The custom in sacrificing to these domestic deities was to eat up all that was offered.
Hence that phrase, Lard Sacrificat, when a fellow eats up all before him, he sacrifices to his household god.
Lertultian's Apology for the Christians,
treat them I am sure but very homely ; for these household gods are pawned and sold and trucked like other household goods.
Saturn is forced sometimes to serve in the kitchen, and Minerva in the laundry ; for when these images are worn out, or much battered by long worshipping, they make a great many good implements ; or if the master is in want, he strips his Lares ; for necessity is the most sacred and soonest served of any god about the house.
The gods of the public, by public order, are profaned just like these gods of the house, for they are bought and sold at market auctions, and entered into your books of account, and pay duties for their deityships ; for if the capitol and the herb-market are to be leased out to farm, they are both proclaimed by the same crier, and the prices of both adjudged under the same standard, and the farm
.of the god registered by the treasurer, like any other public rent.
But the lands which are clogged with the greatest duties are the'least valuable,'and the heads which pay capitation are most ignoble,
"because these are marks of servitude.
But among the gods I find / it otherwise, for they who pay most tribute are looked upon as the 'most holy; or rather they have the most devotion paid them who _ return the most custom.
Your divine majesties are your merchandize, and their worships are carried about to taverns and alehouses a-begging.t
You demand money for entrance, and -money for a place in your temple ; it is not possible to serve your gods gratis ; you turn the penny with them all.
Besides, what honours do you confer upon your gods that you confer not upon dead men?
You give to both, chapels, and altars, and images, habited and adorned alike.
The human image is dressed out to give an idea of the age, the art, and profession of the person deceased, and the divine one is apparelled with the same design, and in the same manner to exhibit the god. How does a funeral banquet? differ from a feast 1 Circuit cauponas Religio mendicans.
Were Tertullian no doubt alludes to the practice of the} Corybantes, who with the picture of their goddess Cybele in their hands went dancing about the streets with pipes and cymbals playing before them, and keeping time to the thumps upon their breasts, and in this posture they begged all they met; and from hence were called Cybeles circulatores, the beggars or jugglers of Cybele, and in Greek—prpayipras, from parnp, which in this place signifies Cybele, the great mother of the gods, and 2yupras, an alms-gatherer or beggar.
Seine toe!
2 Quo differt ab epulo Jovis silicernium?
Silicernium was a funeral banquet to which the oldest sort were invited, and it being the custom to celebrate this feast upon a stone, the supper was termed Sz/icernium quasi Silicentum, that is,
7 PP AGH « a ae se Ne Pas cena super silicem ; and hence this word came to signify an old man ready for _the grave, or a funeral banquet, or rather, as our own proverb has it, To give the crow.a pudding.
; { ae ine |
Tertullian's Apology for the Christians. to Jove, or the vessels you make use of to pour out wine to the gods above, from those you use for the shades below?
What difference between a soothsayer and an embalmer, for they are both employed about the entrails of the dead?
Nevertheless, I must own you act consistently with yourselves in performing divine honours to the dead emperors, because you did it to them living ; and no doubt but the gods will acknowledge the favour, and thank you for putting them and their masters, the emperors, upon the level.
. But when I see you adore Larentina,! a public strumpet, with the same honours as you do Juno, Ceres, and Diana, methinks I could wish you had taken into your roll the more noted Lais and Phryne ;? when you inaugurate Simon Magus® with a statue and inscription,
To the most Holy God; when you canonize a certain Ganymede * (I know not who), nursed up in apartments at court, although, ~ indeed, your old gods are not of a better family, yet they cannot | but take it very ill that you should offer to make gods at this rate, now-a-days, as much as your forefathers did of old.
1 Larentinam publicam Scortum, etc.
This Larentina I take to be the same with Larentia in Lactantius, the wife of Faustulus, the nurse of Romulus, a noted prostitute among the shepherds, afterwards worshipped by the Romans with divine honours, as Faula, the mistress of Hercules, likewise was.
Vd. Lactant. lib, i. sec. 20. has 2 Laidem.
This same Lais was a celebrated strumpet of Corinth, of whom A. Gellius tells this story: That Demosthenes went privily to her to know her
~ price, she asked him-a thousand drachmee, or a talent, at which Demosthenes, being astonished, replied, od dvoduas wupiwy Spar pav weramérsiey,
1 will not buy repentance at so dear a rate.
Vd, A, Gell. lib. i, cap, 8, And hence that of Horace— :
'Lon cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
3 Simonem Magum Statud et Inscriptione Sancti Det inauguratis, Concerning this statue and inscription to Simon Magus, for which the Fathers have suffered ~ so unjustly from some critics, I have spoken at large in my notes upon Justin's.
Apology.
4 Nescio quem, etc.
This nameless person struck .at by Tertullian, Justin Martyr speaks out: it was Antinous, Hadrian's Ganymede, and by his order consecrated for this service.