Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now, pitiable nations, our defense must join issue with you concerning your gods, calling on your own conscience to examine whether they are truly gods, as you wish, or falsely so, as you refuse to know. For this is the very stuff of human error, kept alive by its own craftsman, lest ignorance of the error should ever be lifted — the better to keep you guilty. Eyes are open, yet they do not see; ears gape, yet do not hear; the heart beats, yet lies stunned; the mind does not know what it perceives! In short, if this whole perversity could be dismissed by a single ruling, the case would be quickly closed, since you yourselves do not deny that all these gods were instituted by men — and from that admission alone, belief in true divinity must collapse, because nothing that had a beginning at some point in time can rightly be thought divine. And yet there are many things by which the tenderness of conscience is hardened into the callus of willful error. Truth is besieged by a mighty force — and yet is secure in her own strength! Why not? Whomever she pleases, she takes from the very ranks of her enemies and makes into allies and defenders for herself, and lays low that whole conquered multitude.
Against all this, then, our fight is joined: against the institutions of your ancestors, the authority of received tradition, the laws of those in power, the arguments of the clever; against age, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies, and miracles — all of which have propped up this adulterated divinity of yours. So, matching you point by point in your own handbooks, drawn from every branch of theology you have ever accepted — since among you the authority of the written word carries more weight than that of the facts themselves — I have chosen, for the sake of brevity, the works of Varro, who, having compiled his Antiquities of Divine Matters out of everything gathered before him, has made himself a fitting target for us to aim at.
If I question him as to who first introduced the gods, he names either philosophers, or peoples, or poets. For he distinguishes a threefold classification of the gods: one physical, which philosophers examine; another mythical, which is tossed about among the poets; a third civic, which each people has adopted for itself. So then, since the philosophers patched together the physical kind out of conjectures, the poets drew the mythical kind from fables, and the peoples simply took up the civic kind on their own initiative — where, pray, is truth to be located? In conjectures? But that is an uncertain business. In fables? But that is a shabby account. In adoptions? But that is a merely local, municipal sort of adoption. In short: among the philosophers it is uncertain, because it varies; among the poets everything is unworthy, because shameful; among the peoples everything is passively received, because merely a matter of will. Now true divinity, if you examine it rightly, is by definition such that it cannot be pieced together from uncertain arguments, nor tainted by unworthy fables, nor decided by passive adoptions; it must be held, as it truly is, certain, whole, and common — common, that is, to all. But then, whom am I to believe is a god? One that mere guesswork has reckoned up? One that legend has trumpeted? One that a city simply willed into being? Far worthier to believe in none at all than in one I must doubt, or blush for, or that was merely adopted!
II.