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| Concerning the Nature of the Honor Which the Christians Pay to Their Martyrs.
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Chapter 27.—Concerning the Nature
of the Honor Which the Christians Pay to Their Martyrs.
But, nevertheless, we do not build
temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same
martyrs; for they are not our gods, but their God is our God.
Certainly we honor their reliquaries, as the memorials of holy men
of God who strove for the truth even to the death of their bodies,
that the true religion might be made known, and false and
fictitious religions exposed. For if there were some before them
who thought that these religions were really false and fictitious,
they were afraid to give expression to their convictions. But who
ever heard a priest of the faithful, standing at an altar built for
the honor and worship of God over the holy body of some martyr, say
in the prayers, I offer to thee a sacrifice, O Peter, or O Paul, or
O Cyprian? for it is to God that sacrifices are offered at their
tombs,—the God who made them both men and martyrs, and associated
them with holy angels in celestial honor; and the reason why we pay
such honors to their memory is, that by so doing we may both give
thanks to the true God for their victories, and, by recalling them
afresh to remembrance, may stir ourselves up to imitate them by
seeking to obtain like crowns and palms, calling to our help that
same God on whom they called. Therefore, whatever honors the
religious may pay in the places of the martyrs, they are but honors
rendered to their memory,332
| 332 Ornamenta
memoriarum. | not sacred rites or sacrifices
offered to dead men as to gods. And even such as bring thither
food,—which, indeed, is not done by the better Christians, and in
most places of the world is not done at all,—do so in order that
it may be sanctified to them through the merits of the martyrs, in
the name of the Lord of the martyrs, first presenting the food and
offering prayer, and thereafter taking it away to be eaten, or to
be in part bestowed upon
the needy.333
| 333 Comp. The Confessions, vi.
2. | But he who knows the one
sacrifice of Christians, which is the sacrifice offered in those
places, also knows that these are not sacrifices offered to the
martyrs. It is, then, neither with divine honors nor with human
crimes, by which they worship their gods, that we honor our
martyrs; neither do we offer sacrifices to them, or convert the
crimes of the gods into their sacred rites. For let those who
will and can read the letter of Alexander to his mother Olympias,
in which he tells the things which were revealed to him by the
priest Leon, and let those who have read it recall to memory what
it contains, that they may see what great abominations have been
handed down to memory, not by poets, but by the mystic writings of
the Egyptians, concerning the goddess Isis, the wife of Osiris, and
the parents of both, all of whom, according to these writings, were
royal personages. Isis, when sacrificing to her parents, is said
to have discovered a crop of barley, of which she brought some ears
to the king her husband, and his councillor Mercurius, and hence
they identify her with Ceres. Those who read the letter may there
see what was the character of those people to whom when dead sacred
rites were instituted as to gods, and what those deeds of theirs
were which furnished the occasion for these rites. Let them not
once dare to compare in any respect those people, though they hold
them to be gods, to our holy martyrs, though we do not hold them to
be gods. For we do not ordain priests and offer sacrifices to our
martyrs, as they do to their dead men, for that would be
incongruous, undue, and unlawful, such being due only to God; and
thus we do not delight them with their own crimes, or with such
shameful plays as those in which the crimes of the gods are
celebrated, which are either real crimes committed by them at a
time when they were men, or else, if they never were men,
fictitious crimes invented for the pleasure of noxious demons.
The god of Socrates, if he had a god, cannot have belonged to this
class of demons. But perhaps they who wished to excel in this art
of making gods, imposed a god of this sort on a man who was a
stranger to, and innocent of any connection with that art. What
need we say more? No one who is even moderately wise imagines
that demons are to be worshipped on account of the blessed life
which is to be after death. But perhaps they will say that all
the gods are good, but that of the demons some are bad and some
good, and that it is the good who are to be worshipped, in order
that through them we may attain to the eternally blessed life. To
the examination of this opinion we will devote the following
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