Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] A great evil festers in the earth out of a small creature, the scorpion. It has as many poisons as it has kinds, as many forms of death as forms of body, as many pains as colors. Nicander both describes and paints them. And yet, in every kind, the one violent gesture comes from the tail, not the mouth — whatever grows from the hindmost part of the body serves as the tail, and lashes. [Text defective here.] ...just so with scorpions: that chain of knots, poisoned within by a fine little vein, rising in an arching thrust, in the topmost point, by the mechanics of the torment, clenches into a hooked barb. [2] That is why they even name a siege-engine 'scorpion,' one that gives its missile life by drawing back. That barb is also a channel, open in a fine bore, and it pours its venom, at the point where it strikes, into the wound. Its dangerous season is chiefly summer; the south wind and the southwest wind fill its savagery like sails. As remedies, natural ones are the most numerous; a little magic is also wrapped around it; medicine meets it with the knife and the draught. [3] Some, indeed, will drink a preventive first, in their haste; but intercourse drains it off, and then they are thirsty again. For us, faith is the defense — if it is not itself struck down by a failure of nerve — the defense of at once making the sign, and adjuring, and setting the heel on the beast. [4] It is by this means, in fact, that we often come to the rescue even of pagans, given by God that same power the apostle proved true when he shook the serpent's fangs off unharmed. What, then, does this little treatise of mine offer, if faith already stands secure on its own footing? Why, that it may be safe elsewhere too, on its own account, when it suffers its own scorpions. These, too, come in a savage but limited variety, and they are armed in one way only and mustered only at one season, and that season is no other than the season of persecution's heat. [5] Among Christians, this heat is persecution. So then, when faith is aflame and the church is on fire, in the figure of the burning bush, out come the Gnostics, out crawl the Valentinians, out boil up all who argue against martyrdom, hot themselves, and eager themselves to wound, sting, kill. For they know well that many are simple and untaught, many weak, and a good number Christians only for show, if it comes to that — and they judge there is no better moment to approach than when fear has loosened the soul's defenses, especially once some fresh atrocity has already crowned the faith of martyrs. [6] So, first, still dragging their tail behind them, they apply it to the feelings, or lash out as it were at nothing: 'Can innocent people really be made to suffer like this?' — so that you might take a pagan for a brother, or even for something better. [7] 'Is this really how a sect that troubles no one is to be treated?' Then they drive the point home: 'People are dying for nothing.' 'Dying' — and 'for nothing' — that is the first stab. Next they cut deeper still: but simple souls do not know what is written, how, where, when, and before whom confession is to be made — except that this is not simplicity at all but vanity, worse, madness, to die for a God who is supposed to save me. [8] Is this how the one who is meant to save kills? Christ died for us once; he was killed once, so that we would not be killed. If he demands it again in turn, does he really expect his salvation to come from my death too? Or does God crave human blood, when he refuses even the blood of bulls and goats? Surely he wants the sinner's repentance far more than his death. And how could he not desire the death of sins? [9] These arguments, and whatever other poisoned inventions the heretics have devised, is there anyone they do not at least prick, if not destroy, or at least embitter, if not kill? But you, if your faith is on watch, tread the scorpion underfoot there and then like a sandal, curse it, and leave it to die in its own venom. [10] But if the sting has had its fill, the poison works its way in and hurries toward the vital organs; at once all the old feelings go numb, the blood of the spirit turns to ice, the flesh of the spirit wastes away, even the name turns the stomach with nausea. Then the mind itself starts looking for some way to be sick, and so the weakness, once struck, breathes out its wounded faith either into heresy or into the world. And just now the very middle of this burning is upon us, the dog-star fever of persecution itself, coming, of course, from that dog-headed one himself. [11] Some Christians have been proved by fire, some by the sword, some by beasts; others meanwhile, having tasted a foretaste of martyrdom under clubs and claws, go hungry in prison. We ourselves, like hares, marked out as game, are besieged from far off, and the heretics, true to form, run wild among us. [12] So the time has called for tempering, with my pen, a home remedy against these homegrown little beasts of ours. Whoever reads this will be drinking a cure. Nor is the potion bitter. If the Lord's sayings are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, then these ingredients of mine are drawn from there. If God's promise flows with milk and honey, then whatever leads there tastes the same. But woe to those who make the sweet bitter and turn light to darkness! [13] For that is exactly what those who argue against martyrdom do, when they interpret salvation as ruin — rendering the sweet bitter, the light dark — and so, by putting this most wretched life ahead of that most blessed one, set bitter in the place of sweet and darkness in the place of light.