Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So it is far wiser to set aside these senseless, empty things and fix one's gaze instead on the seat and home of the true God — he who hung the earth on a stable footing, scattered the sky with burning stars, and lit the sun as mankind's brightest and only such light, a token of his singular majesty; who wrapped the lands in seas, ordered the rivers into their unending flow, and bid the plains stretch wide, the valleys settle low, the woods dress themselves in leaves, and the stony peaks climb upward. None of that, to be sure, is Jupiter's doing — Jupiter, born a bare seventeen hundred years back — but the work of that true craftsman, the source from which a better world sprang, the one we name God, whose origin, being beyond our grasp, should not even be probed. For a man's wisdom to be whole and complete, it is enough that he grasp God's existence. The full weight of that grasp comes down to this: to revere and honor the shared father of humankind, the maker of marvels. From here comes the folly of those dull, thick-hearted souls who bow before the elements themselves as gods, though these are mere made things devoid of any feeling. Struck by wonder at God's handiwork — the sky strewn with its lights, the ground spread with plain and peak, the sea threaded with rivers, pools, and springs — such people, dazed by what they beheld and forgetting the unseen craftsman behind it, fell to worshiping his handiwork instead, never grasping how far greater and more astonishing is the one who made all this from nothing. Although they can see these things obey divine law and serve, under an unbroken compulsion, man's needs and uses, still they count them as gods — thankless toward heaven's gifts, having placed their own handiwork over the most generous of fathers, God himself. Yet should it surprise anyone that savages or the untaught stumble this way, when Stoic philosophers hold the identical view — reckoning that whatever moves in the heavens deserves a place among the gods? Lucilius the Stoic puts it this way in Cicero's pages: 'I cannot fathom such steadiness among the stars, such vast harmony of the seasons across so many differing paths through all of time, apart from mind, reason, and plan; and because we observe these qualities in the heavenly bodies, we are forced to number them, too, among the gods.' Shortly before this he had said: 'What remains,' he says, 'is that the stars move by their own will; whoever grasps this yet still denies gods exist commits not mere ignorance but impiety.' We, however, deny it outright, and we judge you philosophers not simply unlearned and impious but blind, foolish, and out of your senses — you who have surpassed the ignorant in vanity while claiming to correct their ignorance. They take the sun and moon for gods; you go further and make gods of the stars as well. Give us, then, the secret rites of the stars, so we might build each one its altar and shrine, so we might learn the proper ritual, the proper day, the proper names and prayers for honoring each — unless, perhaps, we are meant to lump together, with no distinctions drawn, this endless swarm of trifling deities. And notice: the very reasoning by which they conclude all heavenly bodies are divine actually undoes their case. If they suppose the stars are gods because their courses are fixed and orderly, they are mistaken — for that very fact reveals they are not gods, since they lack any freedom to depart from their set paths. Were they truly gods, they would roam wherever they liked, unconstrained, the way living creatures roam the earth — for such creatures, having free will, wander at whim, each pulled along by its own mind. The stars, then, move not by choice but by necessity, bound to serve the duties and laws laid upon them. Yet Lucilius, reasoning from the very match between events and seasons, understood their courses could not be accidental, and from that concluded they must be willed — as if such steady, ordered movement were impossible unless the stars themselves knew their own task. How hard the truth proves for the unlearned, and how simple for those who understand! 'If the stars' motion,' he claims, 'is not accidental, then nothing is left but that it be willed.' Not so — it is exactly as plain that it is not willed as that it is not accidental. 'How, then, do they hold to such constancy in finishing their courses?' The answer is plain: God, the universe's craftsman, so arranged and engineered them that they trace their paths through the sky's expanse by a design both divine and astonishing, so as to bring about the seasons in their turning succession. Consider: if Archimedes of Syracuse could shape, from hollow bronze, a model bearing the universe's very likeness — fitting sun and moon within it so that, day by day, they traced uneven motions mirroring the heavens' own turning, showing not just the sun's advance and retreat or the moon's growth and shrinking but even the varied paths of fixed and wandering stars as that sphere revolved — could God not have brought into real existence the very things a man's cleverness merely managed to copy in imitation? Suppose that Stoic saw those star-shapes painted and cast in that bronze sphere — would he claim they moved by their own intention rather than by their maker's skill? There is, then, in the stars an order suited to running their courses, yet that reasoning belongs to God, who made and rules everything, not to the stars, which simply move. Had he wished the sun to halt, day would surely last forever; likewise, were the stars motionless, who would doubt night would never end? But to bring about the alternation of day and night, he chose to set them moving, and moving so variously that there would result not only the exchange of light for dark, marking off set stretches for labor and for rest, but also of heat and cold, so that each season's particular force might serve either the sprouting or the ripening of crops. Because the philosophers failed to perceive this cleverness of divine power behind the stars' courses, they took the stars for living creatures, as though moved by their own feet and choice rather than by God's design. Yet who fails to see why God devised things this way? Clearly so that, once the sun's light withdrew, night would not press down unbearably with blinding, grim, dreadful blackness and so bring harm to living creatures. And so he both painted the sky at a stroke with astonishing variety and softened the darkness itself with countless small lights. How much more sensibly, then, did Ovid speak than those who fancy themselves devoted to wisdom, when he saw that those lights had been set there by God to banish the terror of the dark! In the work where he briefly lays out the Phaenomena, he closed with these three lines: 'So many likenesses, of such shape, has God fixed upon the sky, and scattering them through the black dark, bid them cast their clear glow upon the frost-bound night.' But if the stars cannot possibly be gods, then neither can sun or moon be gods, for they are set apart from the stars' light not by kind but merely by size. And if none of these are gods, then the sky that holds them all cannot be one either. In just the same way, if the earth we walk on, plow, and work down to its depths is not God, then plains and mountains cannot be gods either; and if not, the whole earth cannot be taken for a god. Likewise, if water — which serves living creatures for drinking or washing — is not God, then neither are the springs it flows from; and if springs are not gods, neither are the rivers they feed; and if rivers, too, are not gods, then the sea that those rivers form cannot be reckoned God either. But if sky, earth, and sea — each a portion of the universe — cannot be gods, then the universe entire is no god either, though these very Stoics insist it is both a living, thinking being and, on that account, divine. On this point their own logic has turned against itself so thoroughly that nothing they claim survives their own arguments. Here is how they reason: it cannot be that something which, of itself, produces sentient beings should lack sentience itself; the universe produces man, who has sentience; therefore the universe itself has sentience. Similarly: nothing can lack sentience if one of its parts possesses it; and since man has sentience, the universe, of which man is supposedly a part, must have it too. The premises hold true enough — that whatever begets a sentient being must itself be sentient, and that whatever has a sentient part must itself have sentience — but the assumption feeding their conclusion is false, since the universe does not beget man, nor is man part of the universe. It was, in fact, the very same God who made man and the universe alike from the start, and man does not belong to the universe as a limb belongs to a body — the universe can perfectly well exist without man, the way a city or a house can exist without any single occupant. Rather, just as a house shelters one man and a city shelters one people, so the universe shelters the whole of humankind; and the thing inhabited is one matter, the thing that inhabits, quite another. Yet these Stoics, busy trying to prop up their false premise that the universe is both sentient and divine, never noticed where their own logic would lead them. For if man is part of the universe, and the universe has sentience because man senses — then, since man is mortal, the universe must be mortal too by strict necessity, and not merely mortal but liable to every disease and passion besides. Conversely, if the universe is God, its parts must surely be immortal, which would make man a god too, since they call him a part of the universe. And if man is a god, then cattle, beasts, every kind of animal, bird, and fish must be gods as well, since they sense in just the same way and are equally parts of the universe. That much could almost be tolerated — the Egyptians, after all, do worship such creatures. But the logic runs on until even frogs, gnats, and ants must count as gods, since they too have sentience and belong to the universe. Such is always the fate of arguments built on a false foundation: they end in nonsense and absurdity. And consider this too — these same men claim the universe was constructed for the benefit of gods and men alike, as though it were some house held in common. But then the universe can be neither God nor a living thing, if it was constructed — for a living being is not constructed but born; and if it was built, then surely it was built the way any house or ship is built. There must, then, exist some god who crafted the universe, making the thing made one matter and its maker another. How self-contradicting and absurd it is, further, that while they insist the fires of heaven and the universe's other elements are gods, they simultaneously call the whole universe, taken together, God! How can one single god be assembled out of a stockpile of many gods? If the stars are gods, the universe cannot be God but only the gods' dwelling place. Yet if the universe is God, then everything within it is not gods at all but merely parts of God — and mere parts surely cannot rightly claim the title of god on their own. No one, after all, would rightly call the many limbs of one man many separate men. Still, the comparison between a living creature and the universe does not really hold, for a living creature, being endowed with sentience, has limbs that share in that sentience too, going senseless only once severed from the body. What, then, does the universe truly resemble? The Stoics themselves make it plain when they admit it was made — made so as to serve, in effect, as a shared dwelling for gods and men together. If, then, it was constructed the way a house is, then neither the universe nor the elements composing it can be God, since a house cannot govern itself, nor can the materials that make it up. So it is not only plain truth but their own words that undo them. For just as a house, built to be lived in, senses nothing on its own and stands under the authority of whoever built or occupies it, so the universe, sensing nothing by itself, stands under the authority of the God who fashioned it, made for God's own purposes.
The unwise, then, sin in a twofold manner: first by ranking the elements — that is, what God has made — above God himself, and second by adoring those same elements once shaped into human form. So they fashion images of sun and moon cast as human figures, and likewise of fire, earth, and the sea, giving these the names Vulcan, Vesta, and Neptune, and never make offering to the bare elements out in the open. Such a craze for images has taken hold of men that the genuine articles are now counted cheap by comparison: naturally, what delights them instead is gold, gems, and ivory. Dazzled by the shine and beauty of such things, they imagine no religion can exist wherever these fail to glitter. In this way, greed and covetousness get worshiped under cover of the gods' names. For they suppose the gods crave exactly what they themselves crave — and this very craving is what fuels daily theft, murder, and banditry, and drives wars that topple peoples and cities the world over. So they dedicate their loot and plunder to these gods — gods who must plainly be feeble and short of the highest virtue, given that greed can master them. Why, after all, should we call them heavenly if they hunger after earthly things, or blessed if something is lacking to them, or incorruptible if they delight in the very objects whose pursuit rightly earns human greed its condemnation? People approach their gods, then, less for religion's sake — which can have no place at all amid ill-gotten, perishable goods — than to drink in gold with their eyes, to admire the sheen of smoothed marble or ivory, and to handle, with an appetite that never tires of looking, robes set with gems and colors or cups studded with gleaming stones. The more lavishly a temple is decked out, the more beautiful its statues, the greater the majesty people credit it with — proof enough that their religion amounts to nothing but what human greed finds admirable. Such are the rites men inherit from their forebears and cling to defending with the utmost stubbornness, never asking what these rites truly are, but trusting them as genuine and proven on this single ground: that the ancients passed them down. Antiquity carries such weight as authority that merely questioning it is treated as a crime, and so it is accepted everywhere as though it were an already-settled truth. In Cicero's dialogue, Cotta addresses Lucilius thus: 'There, Balbus, is what Cotta the priest thinks. Now let me hear your own view: from you, as a philosopher, I expect a reasoned case for religion, whereas from our forebears I am meant to take belief on faith with no reason offered at all.' If belief is what you have, why then demand a reason — a reason that might just as easily undo that belief? But if you hold that a reason must be sought, then you do not truly believe, since seeking is exactly what one does in order to follow the reason once it is found. Notice: reason now shows you that the gods' rites are not genuine — so what will you do? Will you side with your forebears, or instead with the reasoning that came not from someone else's prompting but from your own discovery, once you had torn every religion up by its roots? Choose reason, and you must break from your ancestors' customs and authority, since only what reason dictates can be right; choose loyalty to your forebears instead, and you must admit that they were fools who served rites invented against reason, and that you are a fool too, honoring what you yourself have shown to be false. Yet our opponents keep hurling the weight of ancestral authority against us with such insistence, so let us at last ask who these ancestors were — the very men whose sanction supposedly makes abandoning their ways an unpardonable crime. When Romulus set out to found his city, he called together the herdsmen among whom he had been raised; and finding their numbers too thin for building a city, he set up a sanctuary for refugees. Into this place poured, from every direction, the worst men from the surrounding country, taken in without regard to their standing. Out of this mixed crowd he welded together a people, and for his senate he picked out the eldest among them, naming them fathers, so that all business would be conducted by their counsel. Propertius the elegist writes of this senate: 'A horn once summoned the early Quirites to assembly; a hundred men, the senate often convened in a meadow. The senate-house, now gleaming aloft with its purple-clad members, once held fathers dressed in hides, men of rustic heart.' Such were the fathers whose rulings learned and careful men now serve with such utter devotion, treating as true and unalterable for all future generations whatever a hundred hide-clad old men happened to decide — men who, as noted in the first book, Numa Pompilius tricked into believing genuine the rites he himself was inventing. Does it really make sense that later ages should hold their authority in such esteem — men whom, while alive, no one, however high or low his station, thought fit even to marry into?