Appendix II: Ex libris Tertulliani de exsecrandis gentium diis fragmentum

SECOND APPENDIX.

TO THE KIND READER, JOSEPH MARIA SUARÈS OF AVIGNON [SENDS] GREETING.

Kind Reader. Easy access to the Vatican Library lies open to me, by the kindness of the most eminent Cardinal Francesco Barberini, its librarian and my Maecenas, who might truly be called a living library, and by the goodwill of Felice Contelori, its keeper, a man furnished with every branch of learning. There, while I was surveying everything one by one, I came most opportunely upon a very old codex of parchment, written throughout in Lombardic letters, which shows an age of six or seven hundred years; and when I had run through Bede's Chronicle and the other things it contained, I found at the end a fragment of the books of Tertullian On the Execrable Gods of the Nations, whose last lines had been erased, and which is spent solely on belittling the divinity of Jupiter. When I had read it through once and again, and then had carefully compared it with what the same Tertullian writes about Jupiter in the books Against the Nations and in the Apologeticum, I found the style quite different; yet I too recognized it as pure, unmixed Tertullian, and the friends to whom I showed it all agreed. This, therefore, though a fragment, I was unwilling to let lie hidden any longer, and I now send it forth for common and public use under the auspices of Urban VIII, Supreme Pontiff, during whose most happy sitting in the Chair of Peter not only do the Muses and the more polished letters and disciplines grow green again as though their youth were restored, with poets and historians everywhere overflowing and toiling; but also, as the works of the holy Fathers come forth into the light on every side, orthodox religion lifts its head and flourishes again in every land. I pray God that He may keep him, and the most illustrious Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the Hercules of so great an Atlas, safe for a very long time for the glory of His Church. Do you, Reader, add your prayer, and use and enjoy this little gift of mine with gratitude.

FROM THE BOOKS OF TERTULLIAN ON THE EXECRABLE GODS OF THE NATIONS: A FRAGMENT RETRIEVED FROM THE VATICAN LIBRARY BY JOSEPH MARIA SUARÈS OF AVIGNON.

So great a blindness has invaded the human race that they call their enemy Lord, and proclaim the taker-away of good things to be even the giver of them to themselves, and give thanks to him; they therefore call them by human names,

not their proper [names], for they do not know their names, [though] they understand that they are demons; but they read the histories of ancient kings, and since they see that their life was mortal, they honour them with a deifying name. Jupiter,

whom they call, and whom they think the highest god, when he was born, there had been from the founding of the world up to that time about three thousand years. He is born in Greece of Saturn and Ops. And so that he might not be killed by his father, or, if it is lawful to say it, be brought forth anew, he was carried to Crete, by his mother's counsel he is nursed in the Idaean cave, he is hidden by the Cretans, men born [there], clashing their arms, he sucks the udders of a she-goat, whose flayed skin he uses as a cloak, that is, the skin of his own nurse slain by himself: but he sewed onto it three golden locks, each worth the price of a hundred oxen, as their author Homer records, if it is fair to believe it. He, at a grown age, waged war with his father for many years, overcame him, by parricide seized the house, violated his virgin sisters, one of whom he chose in marriage, drove his father away by arms: and the rest of his deeds are written. From the marriages of others, or from violated virgins, he begot for himself sons of adultery, defiled freeborn boys, oppressed peoples without law by a tyrannical and kingly rule: his father, whom in their error they suppose to have been the original god, did not know of this one being hidden in the island of Crete; the son too, whom they believe the more powerful god, does not know that the father he had put to flight is hiding in Italy: if he was in heaven, why did he not see what was being done in Italy? For the land of Italy is not in a corner. And yet, had he been a god, nothing ought to have been hidden from him: but that he whom the Italians called Saturn hid there has been clearly proved, from whose hiding the Hesperian tongue has been named Latin down to this day: as their author Virgil also records: therefore he is said to have been begotten on earth, while he both fears lest he be driven from the kingdom by him, and seeks to kill him as a rival, and does not know that the child stolen away is hiding, and afterwards the god, the son, pursues his father, the immortal seeks to kill the immortal (it can be believed), and he is deceived by the expanse of the sea, and does not know that he has fled, and while these things were being done between two gods on earth, heaven was deserted. No one was managing the rains, no one was thundering, no one was governing so great a mass of the world. For they cannot say that their doings and wars took place in heaven: for these things were happening on Mount Olympus, in Greece: but neither is heaven called Olympus, for heaven is heaven. Which, then, of their deeds shall we treat first: of the birth, of the hiding, of the ignorance, of the parricide,

about adulteries, about obscene acts, about things committed not by God but by most unclean and most savage men, who, if they were living in these times, would lie liable as defendants under all the laws, which are much more just and more severe than their acts? He struck his father with arms: the Falcidian and Sempronian law would bind the parricide in a sack with beasts. And he corrupted his sisters: the Papinian law would punish the disgrace with every penalty, limb by limb. He invaded the marriages of others: the Julian law would punish its adulterer with death. He defiled freeborn boys: the Cornelian law would condemn as sacrilegious him who was lost through transgressing the covenant, by new examples of a new intercourse. This one is shown not even to have had divinity: for he was a man; his father's flight was hidden from him. To such a man, so abominable a king, so obscene and so cruel, the honour of a god was assigned by men; and since he was certainly born on the earth and grew to adulthood through the increments of age upon it, and on it committed all these evils, and now is not on it, what is he thought to be except dead? Or does foolish error suppose that wings grew on him in old age, by which he might fly to heaven? But even these things men bereft of sense can believe, if indeed they believe that he was made a swan, to beget the Castors; and an eagle, to defile Ganymede; and a bull, to violate Europa; gold, to violate Danae; and a horse, to beget Pirithous; a he-goat, to beget Egyppa of a she-goat; a satyr, to overpower Antiope. These things those who look to adulteries, to which sinners are prone, believe easily for this reason, that they may borrow from a feigned god authority for misdeed and for every filthiness. Do they really notice how uncorrected are the other things that can be believed to be his acts, which are also true, and which they say he did without transformation? Of Semele he begets Liber, of Latona Apollo and Diana, of Maia Mercury, of Alcmena Hercules. But his other debaucheries, which they themselves confess, I do not wish to write down, lest the foulness, now buried, be renewed in the ears; but I have made mention of these few, whom those in error believe to be gods too, namely begotten of an incestuous father, adulterine, supposititious; and the living God, eternal, of everlasting divinity, foreknowing of things to come, immeasurable, they have dispersed among such abominable crimes.