start.44 Now you have the Lord's words and examples, leaving you no excuse. Do you say: "I shall be poor?" The Lord calls the poor blessed. "I shall have no food." "Take no thought for food," he says. As for clothing, the lilies are our example. "I needed capital." But everything is to be sold and divided among the poor. "But I ought to provide for my sons and my descendants." "No one putting his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the work." "But I was under contract." "No man can serve two masters." If you want to be the Lord's disciple, you must take up your cross and follow the Lord, that is, you must take up your straits and your tortures or at least your body, which is like a cross. Parents, wives, children are all to be left for God's sake. Are you hesitating about crafts and businesses and professions for the sake of children or parents? The proof that family as well as crafts and business are to be left for the Lord's sake was given us when James and John were called by the Lord and left both father and ship, when Matthew was roused from the seat of custom, when faith allowed no time even to bury a father. Not one of those whom the Lord chose said: "I have nothing to live on." Faith fears no hunger. It knows that hunger is to be despised, for God's sake, no less than any other form of death. Faith has learned not to be anxious for its life. How much more for a living? 45 How many have fulfilled these conditions? What is difficult with men is easy with God. We must not comfort ourselves with the thought of God's kindness and clemency so far as to indulge our necessities to the verge of idolatry. We must keep our distance from every whiff of it like the plague. And this we must do not only in the cases already mentioned, but over the whole range of human superstition, whether it is appropriated to its gods or to dead men or to kings. 46 For it always belongs to the same unclean spirits, sometimes through sacrifices and priesthoods, sometimes through public shows and the like, sometimes through festivals. 13. Why speak of sacrifices and priesthoods? And I have already written a whole volume on shows and pleasures of that 44 Luke 14:28-30. 45 Luke 6:20; Matt. 6:25 ff.; Luke 9:62; Matt. 16:24; Luke 14:26; Matt. 4:21-22; 9:9; Luke 9:59-60 and parallels. This passage was drawn on by Jerome in his Letter 14 (p. 300). 46 The Christian apologists jumped at every pagan concession to Euhemerism, the theory that the gods were deified heroes, cf. Tert., Apol., 10, "You cannot deny that all your gods were once men." Cf. c. 15 below. kind. 47 Here I must discuss the festivals and other extraordinary celebrations which we sometimes concede to our wantonness, and sometimes to our cowardice, joining with the heathen in idolatrous matters contrary to our faith and discipline. I shall first take up this issue. On such occasions, may the servant of God join with the heathen by way of clothing or food or any other kind of festive behaviour? When the Apostle said: "Rejoice with them that rejoice, and mourn with them that mourn" he was speaking about the brethren, exhorting them to be of the same mind. But in this instance there is no fellowship between light and darkness, between life and death-or we tear up what is written: "The world shall rejoice, but ye shall mourn. ." 48 If we rejoice with the world, it is to be feared that we shall also mourn with the world. Let us mourn while the world rejoices and afterwards rejoice when the world mourns. Thus Lazarus found refreshment in Hades in Abraham's bosom, while Dives was set in the torment of fire; 49 they balanced each other's vicissitudes of good and evil fortune by their contrasting reward and punishment. There are certain days for gifts, which in some cases see the claims of rank discharged, in others the debt of wages. 50 Today, you say, I shall receive what is due to me, or pay back what I owe. This custom of consecrating days is rooted in superstition. If you are altogether free from the vanity of paganism, why do you participate in celebrations dedicated to idols, as if rules about days were binding upon you too, and you must discharge your debts or receive your dues only on the correct day? Tell me in what form you want to be dealt with. Why should you go into hiding, defiling your own conscience by another man's ignorance? If you are in fact known to be a Christian, you are on trial, and you go against another's conscience when you act as though you were not a Christian. But if you conceal your Christianity, you are tried and condemned. In one way or the other you are guilty of being ashamed of God. "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me before men, I also will be ashamed of him," he says, "before my Father which is in heaven."51 14. Many Christians today have come to think it pardonable 47 De Spectaculis. 48 Rom. 12:15, II Cor. 6:14; John 16:20. 49 Luke 16:19ff. Hades translates apud inferos. 50 Mercedis debitum, cf. Mercedonios (dies) dixerunt a mercede solvenda, in the Glossaries. 51 Matt. 10:33; Luke 9:26. 7-E.L.T. to do as the world does "that the Name be not blasphemed." There is indeed a blasphemy which we must avoid completely, namely, that any of us should give a pagan good cause for blasphemy by deceit or injury or insult or some other matter justifying complaint in which the Name is deservedly blamed, so that the Lord is deservedly angry. But if the words: "Because of you my Name is blasphemed," 52 cover every blasphemy, then we are all lost, since the whole 53 circus assails the Name, for no fault of ours, with its wicked outcries. Let us stop being Christians, and there will be no more blasphemy! No, let blasphemy continue, so long as we are observing, not abandoning, our discipline, so long as we are being approved, not reprobated. The blasphemy which attests my Christian faith by detesting me because of it, is close to martyrdom. To curse the keeping of our discipline is to bless our Name. “If I desired to please men," he says, "I should not be the servant of Christ." But, you may say, the Apostle elsewhere bids us take care to please everybody: "Even as I please all men in all things." Did he please men by celebrating the Saturnalia and the New Year? Or was it by modesty and patience, by gravity, humanity, and integrity? Again, when he says: "I am become all things to all men, that I may gain all," did he become an idolater to the idolaters? Did he become a heathen to the heathen, worldly to the worldly? Even if he does not forbid us all converse with idolaters and adulterers and other criminals, saying: "For then must ye needs go out of the world," that does not imply such a slackening of the reins of good behaviour that we can sin with sinners merely because we have to live with them and mix with them. It does not mean that where there is intercourse in living (which the Apostle concedes), there can be sharing in sin (which no one permits). We are allowed to live with the heathen, but we are not allowed to die with them. Let us live with all men, let us share their joys on the ground of a common humanity, not a common superstition. We are like them in possessing human souls, but not in the way we live. We share the world with them, but not their error. 54 But if we have no right to join with outsiders in such matters, it is far more wicked to observe them among brethren. Who can uphold or defend this? The Holy Spirit upbraids the Jews for their feast-days: "Your sabbaths and new moons and 52 Isa. 52:5; Rom. 2:24; cf. I Peter 4:14-16. See also Tert., Cult. Fem., II, 11. 53 Totus, perhaps "every." 54 Gal. 1:10; I Cor. 10:33; 9:22; 5:10. ceremonies my soul hateth." 55 Do we who are strangers to the sabbaths and new moons and holy days once beloved by God, do we frequent the Saturnalia, the New Year and Midwinter festivals, the Feast of Matrons? 56 Do the presents and the New Year gifts come and go for us, the games resound and the banquets clatter for us? The heathen are more faithful to their own persuasion. They claim no Christian festival for themselves. They would not have shared the Lord's day or Pentecost with us even if they had known them. They would be afraid of being taken for Christians. We are not afraid of being proclaimed heathens. If the flesh is to be indulged at all, you have your own days, and more than they have. The heathen has a festival for each god on one day in the year only, you have one every week. Pick out all the heathen celebrations and put them in a row. They will not make up a Pentecost. 15. But "let your works shine," it says. 57 Now it is our shops and doors that shine. You can find more heathen doors without lamps and laurels than Christian. 58 What is your opinion of that kind of ceremony? If it is in honour of an idol, then honouring an idol is indubitably idolatry. If it is for a man, remember that all idolatry is for a man. Remember that all idolatry offers worship to men, since it is agreed even among the heathen that the gods themselves were once men. It makes no difference whether that superstitious worship is offered to men of the past or of today. Idolatry is not condemned on account of the persons set up to be worshipped, but of the attentions paid, which go to the demons. We must "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"-happily he added: "And to God the things that are God's." 59 What then is Caesar's? Surely the subject of the original discussion, whether or not tribute should be paid to Caesar. That was why the Lord asked to see a coin and inquired whose image it bore. When he heard that it was Caesar's, he said: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," that is, render to Caesar Caesar's image, which is on the coin, and to God God's image, which is on man. To Caesar, then, you should render money, to God yourself. If everything belongs to Caesar, what will be God's? 55 Isa. 1:14. 57 Matt. 5:16. 56 Saturnalia, Ianuariae, Brumae, Matronales. 58 Cf. Abodah Zara, I, 4: "A city in which idolatry is going on... the Wise decided that the shops with garlands are prohibited." 59 Matt. 22:21. Is it to honour a god, you ask, that the lamps are put before doors and the laurels on posts? No indeed, they are not there to honour a god, but a man, who is honoured as a god by such attentions. 60 Or so it appears on the surface. What happens in secret reaches the demons. For we ought to be well aware (I give some details which may have escaped those not proficient in secular literature) that the Romans even have gods of doorways. 61 There is Cardea, the goddess who gets her name from hinges, there are Forculus, Limentinus, and Janus, called after the doors, the threshold and the gate. Though the names are idle fictions, we may be sure that they draw to themselves demons and all manner of unclean spirits when they are used superstitiously. Consecration creates a bond. Having otherwise no individual names of their own, the demons find a name where they find anything pledged to them. The same with the Greeks. We read of Apollo Thyraeus and the Antelii, the presiding demons of doorways. Foreseeing this from the beginning, the Holy Spirit predicted through Enoch, oldest of the prophets, that even doorways would come to a superstitious use. 62 We see other doorways worshipped at the baths. So the lanterns and laurels will belong to such as are worshipped in the doorways. Whatever you do for a door, you do for an idol. At this point I call a witness on the authority of God also, since it is dangerous to suppress what has been shown63 to one for the sake of all. I know of a brother who was severely castigated in a dream, the very same night, because, upon the unexpected announcement of some public rejoicings, his slaves had garlanded his doors. He had not put the garlands out himself, or ordered them. He had gone out before it happened and reproved it when he came back. This shows that in such matters of discipline God judges us by our household. So far as concerns the honours due to king or emperor, we 60 The Emperor. 61 The Apologists often ridicule Roman polytheism by going back to its primitive stages when there was numen in everything. The material mostly comes from Varro, and there is much of it in Tertullian and in Augustine, De Civitate Dei. For the present passage cf. Rose, op. cit., 30-32, e.g.: "To go through a door is to begin something, and beginnings are heavily charged with magical significance... So important was the entrance-door that even its parts tended to assume a numen of their own." 62 Cf. nn. 9-10. 63 Ostensum... per visionem, another possible touch of Montanism; but Cyprian took dreams as supernatural warnings, and cf. Ambrose, Letter 51:14 (p. 257). |