Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
They say that at certain revolutions of the heaven and movements of the stars a kind of ripeness arose for the sowing of living creatures, and so the young earth, holding within itself the generative seed, put forth from itself certain little pods resembling wombs — about which Lucretius says: wombs grew fastened to the earth by roots — and that when these had matured, nature forced them to burst and they poured forth tender living creatures. Then the earth itself overflowed with a certain moisture like milk, and by that nourishment the creatures were fed. How, then, could they have endured or avoided the force of cold or heat, or have been born at all, when the sun would scorch and the cold would pinch? "There was, in the beginning of the world," they say, "neither winter nor summer, but a perpetual mildness and an even springtime." Why then do we see none of this happening now? "Because it was necessary that it happen once only, so that the creatures might be born; but once they had begun to exist, this was granted to them, the earth ceased to bear, and the condition of the seasons changed." How easy it is to refute such falsehoods! First, nothing in this world can exist otherwise than as it began. For neither the sun nor the moon nor the stars — it is not that they did not exist, or that when they did exist they had no fixed courses, and that the divine ordering which regulates and governs their motions began only afterward together with them. Next, if it is as they say, then providence must necessarily exist, and they fall into the very thing they most flee. For before the creatures were yet born, someone certainly provided that they should be born, lest the earth lie deserted and untended and bristling with waste. But that human beings could arise out of the ground with no parents to attend them called, of necessity, for a plan of great intelligence; and further, that the moisture congealed from the earth should be shaped into the various forms of bodies, and again that, once endowed from the pods that covered them with the capacity of living and feeling, they should be poured forth as though from the womb of mothers — this is a wondrous and inextricable provision. But let us suppose that too happened by chance; certainly what follows cannot be chance occurrences — that the earth should continuously flow with milk, that the temper of the air should be even. And granted that such conditions were fixed so that these newly formed creatures might be fed and kept safe from harm, some divine reasoning must have arranged it beforehand. But who can provide, except God? Let us see, nevertheless, whether that very thing which they keep repeating could have happened — that men were born from the earth. If anyone considers how long, and by what means, an infant is reared, he will surely understand that those earth-born boys could not have been nourished without any nurse. For they had to lie helpless for many months before their sinews grew strong enough to move and shift position — a process that a single year could hardly accomplish. Now consider whether an infant could have survived lying in the same place and in the same condition in which it was brought forth for many months, without dying, buried and corrupted by the mixture of the very moisture of the earth that was meant to feed it together with the filth of its own body. So it can in no way have happened except that it was reared by someone — unless perhaps all creatures were not born tender but full-grown, a thing it never occurred to them to claim. All that reasoning, then, is impossible and empty, if indeed it can be called reasoning, when what it does is establish that there is no reason at all. Whoever claims that everything arose spontaneously, crediting divine providence with nothing, is not defending reason at all — he is destroying it. But if nothing can come to be, and nothing can be born, without reason, it is plain that divine providence exists, whose proper name is reason. God, then, the maker of all things, made man. Cicero saw this too, though he lacked knowledge of the heavenly writings, for in the first book of his work on the laws he handed down the same thing the prophets did. I set down his words: this creature, provident, keen, versatile, sharp, endowed with memory and full of reason and counsel, whom we call man, has been begotten by the highest god under a certain distinguished condition. For alone among so many kinds and natures of living things does he share in reason and thought, while all the rest are without it. Do you see that a man, though far removed from knowledge of the truth, nevertheless understood — because he still preserved something of the image of wisdom — that man could have been begotten by none but God? Yet divine testimonies are needed, lest human ones alone not suffice. The Sibyl bears witness that man is God's work: he alone is God the creator, unconquerable, ruling; he himself fixed the form and shape of mortal men; he himself mingled the nature of all things, the begetter of life. The sacred writings contain the same. God, then, truly acted as a father to us: with his own hands he shaped the body, and with his own breath he gave us the soul that lets us draw air; everything we are we owe entirely to him. Had it been necessary for us to know how he did this, he would have taught it, just as he taught the other things which brought us knowledge both of our former error and of the true light.
Since he had first shaped the male after his own likeness, he then formed the female too in the image of that same man, so that the two sexes, mingled together, could bring forth children and cover the whole earth with their numbers. In fashioning man himself, God drew together and brought to completion the two substances we said stand opposed to each other, fire and water. Once the body was shaped, into it he breathed a soul drawn from his own everlasting source of spirit, so that man might carry within himself a likeness of the world, which itself holds together out of opposing elements. Man is thus made up of soul and body — heaven and earth, so to speak — for the soul that gives us life springs, as it were, down from heaven, from God, while the body is drawn from earth, out of whose clay it was, as we said, formed. Empedocles — one can hardly say whether to class him among poets or philosophers, since like Lucretius and Varro among the Romans he wrote of nature in verse — set down four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, perhaps borrowing from Trismegistus, who taught that God built our bodies out of these same four: a trace of fire is in them, a trace of air, a trace of water, a trace of earth, yet none of these elements is purely fire, air, water, or earth. Nor is this untrue: earth's share lies in our flesh, moisture's in our blood, air's in our breath, fire's in our living warmth. Yet blood cannot be pulled apart from the body the way moisture can be drawn from soil, nor can our vital warmth be separated from breath the way flame parts from air — so that, of everything, only two real elements turn up, and the entire logic of them is bound up in how our body is put together. Man, then, was made out of things at odds with one another, just as the world itself is built from light paired with dark, life paired with death: God ordained these two to contend within man, so that if the soul — which springs from God — should win out, it would be immortal and would dwell in unending light, but if the body should overcome the soul and bring it under its rule, it would dwell in endless darkness and death. Yet this defeat does not mean that unjust souls are simply snuffed out; rather, they are punished without end. That penalty we term the second death, itself as everlasting as immortality. The first kind we may define this way: death is when a living creature's nature comes undone — or, put differently, when body and soul part ways. The second we define so: it is undergoing pain without end — or, put differently, it is the sentencing of souls, according to what they have earned, to punishment forever. None of this touches the dumb animals, whose souls do not come from God but from the common air, and so simply dissolve at death. In this partnership, then, between heaven and earth — a partnership pictured in man himself — the higher share belongs to what is God's, namely the soul, which rules the body, while the lower share belongs to what is the devil's, namely the body; and because the body is earthly, it ought to answer to the soul just as earth answers to heaven. It is, so to speak, a small vessel that this heavenly spirit occupies as a temporary lodging. Each has its task: what comes from heaven and from God should command, while what comes from earth and from the devil should obey. Even the disreputable Sallust did not miss this, writing: our whole strength rests in mind and body alike; it is the mind's command and the body's obedience that we chiefly rely on. Well said — had he only lived by his own words. Instead he gave himself over to the vilest pleasures and, by the corruption of his own life, undid the very maxim he had written. But if the soul is indeed fire, as we have demonstrated, then like fire it should reach upward toward heaven so as not to be quenched — that is, toward the immortality that belongs to heaven; and just as a flame cannot burn or stay alive unless some rich fuel sustains it, so too the soul's nourishment and food is justice alone, and by justice it is kept alive. After all this, God set man — brought into being by the process just described — in Paradise, a garden of the richest fertility and greatest delight, which he had planted in the eastern regions with trees and timber of every kind, so that man might live on their varied fruit and, spared any toil, might devote himself wholly to serving God the Father. He then gave man fixed commands: keeping them meant remaining immortal, breaking them meant being struck down by death. The command itself was this — that he not taste the single tree standing at the center of Paradise, the one where God had lodged knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Then that accuser, begrudging God's handiwork, turned every trick and piece of cunning he had toward bringing man down, so as to rob him of immortality. He first deceived the woman into eating the forbidden food, and through her convinced the man as well to cross God's law. Once they had gained the knowledge of good and evil, shame over his own nakedness came upon him, and he hid from God's presence — something he had never done before. Then God, having passed sentence on the sinners, drove man out of Paradise to earn his living by labor, and hedged Paradise itself about with fire so that man could not reach it again — not until God holds his final judgment on earth and calls back the righteous, his worshippers, to that same place, death having been abolished, exactly as the sacred voices teach, and as the Erythraean Sibyl says: those honoring the true, everlasting God inherit life, dwelling forever, for the whole span of the age, in that very Paradise, a garden in full bloom. Since these matters belong to the end of things, we shall deal with them in the final section of this work; for now, let us lay out what belongs to the beginning. So death followed man in keeping with God's sentence, as the Sibyl too teaches in her own verse, saying: man, shaped by the sacred hands of God, whom the serpent led astray by trickery into reaching death's portion and gaining knowledge of both good and evil. In this way man's life became something bound by time — long still, but now stretched out only to a thousand years. Varro was well aware that this had come down through divine writings and was common knowledge among every people, yet he tried nonetheless to argue why the ancients were believed to have reached a thousand years of age. His claim was that the Egyptians counted months as years, so that a year was completed not by the sun's circuit through the twelve signs but by the moon, which crosses that same zodiac belt in the space of thirty days. This argument is transparently false: no one has ever actually lived to see a thousandth year, while today those who reach a hundred — which happens quite regularly — live out no fewer than twelve hundred months. Trustworthy writers, moreover, report that reaching a hundred and twenty years is common enough. But since Varro did not know why or when man's lifespan had shrunk, he shrank it himself in his reckoning — though he should have realized that a man could live out one thousand four hundred months.
But afterward, when God saw the world filled with wickedness and crimes, he resolved to destroy the human race by a flood. Yet, in order to restore its multitude, he chose one man, who alone remained, amid the corruption of all others, a singular example of righteousness. At six hundred years of age, this man constructed a vessel following God's own instructions, and inside it he, his wife, his three sons, and their three wives all survived while the flood submerged even the tallest peaks. Then, when the world had dried, God, cursing the injustice of the former age, and lest length of life again be the cause of devising evils, gradually reduced the age of man through successive generations and set the limit at a hundred and twenty years, which it was not permitted to pass. When this man had come out of the ark, as the sacred writings teach, he worked the soil with great care and, using his own hands, set out a vineyard. From this fact those are refuted who suppose Liber to be the discoverer of wine; for he preceded not only Liber but also Saturn and Uranus by many ages. When this vineyard had first borne fruit, he joyfully drank of the new wine even to drunkenness and lay naked. One of his sons, called Ham, witnessed this and, rather than covering his father's exposed body, left and reported it to his brothers. But they, taking up a cloak, entered with their faces turned away and covered their father. When the father learned what had been done, he disowned and expelled that son. As an exile, he took up residence in the region we today know as Arabia, and that territory came to bear his own name, Canaan, its people afterward called Canaanites. This was the first people to be ignorant of God, since its founder and originator had not received the worship of God from his father, being cursed by him; and so he left ignorance of the divinity to his descendants. From this people the neighboring nations, as their numbers increased, sprang up in turn. That father's own line, by contrast, came to be known as Hebrews, the people who kept alive the worship of God. But once their numbers had swelled beyond what their territory could contain, their young men — some sent out by parents, others going of their own will, pressed by want — left as wanderers to find new places to settle, scattering far and wide until they had filled every island and the whole world, and, cut off from that sacred original stock, built new customs and institutions to suit themselves. But first of all, those who had occupied Egypt began to look up to and worship the heavenly bodies. And because, owing to the quality of the climate, they were not sheltered by dwellings, and in that region the sky is never veiled by clouds, they took note of the courses and effects of the stars, gazing at them often with more curious and unrestrained attention as they revered them. Afterward they invented monstrous figures of animals to worship, led on by certain prodigies, whose originators we shall soon disclose. The rest, who had scattered over the earth, marveling at the elements of the world — sky, sun, earth, sea — revered them without any images or temples, and offered their sacrifices to them in the open, until, as time went on, the most powerful kings made temples and images and instituted the worship of these with victims and incense. Thus the nations, straying from the knowledge of God, began to exist. Those, then, are mistaken who contend that the worship of gods existed from the beginning of things, and that paganism is older than the religion of God, which they suppose was invented later, because they do not know the source and origin of truth. Let us now return to the beginning of the world.
As humanity's population started to grow, God foresaw that the devil — granted authority over the earth from the very start — could use deception to corrupt or destroy mankind just as he had done originally, and so God dispatched angels to watch over and tend the human race. He charged them above all that, not defiled by contact with the earth, they should not lose the dignity of their heavenly nature. That is, he forbade them to do the very thing he knew they would do, so that they could not hope for pardon. And so, as they dwelt among men, that most deceitful ruler of the earth gradually enticed them by familiarity itself into vices, and defiled them through unions with women. Then, not received back into heaven because of the sins in which they had immersed themselves, they fell to earth. Thus the devil made them, out of angels of God, his own satellites and ministers. But those who were begotten from them, since they were neither angels nor men but bore a certain intermediate nature, were not received into the world below, as their parents were into heaven. Thus two kinds of demons came to be, one heavenly, the other earthly. These are the unclean spirits, the authors of the evils that are done, over whom that same devil is prince — for which reason Trismegistus calls him the ruler of demons. Grammarians say that demons are so called as though from daēmones, that is, knowing and skilled in matters — for they think these to be gods. They do know a good deal of what lies ahead, though hardly everything, for God's full counsel is kept beyond their reach, which is why their answers usually hedge toward outcomes that could go either way. The poets both know that these are demons and say so. Hesiod hands this down: these are demons, by the will of great Zeus, good spirits upon the earth, guardians of mortal men. This was written because God had dispatched them to watch over humankind in the first place; yet, though they now bring men to ruin, these spirits still want to be seen as protectors, so that worship falls to them instead of to God. Philosophers too discuss them. For Plato even attempted to describe their natures in the Symposium, and Socrates used to say that a demon was constantly at his side, one that had attached itself to him from boyhood, by whose nod and will his life was governed. The whole art and power of the magi likewise rests on the inspiration of these spirits, by whom, when invoked, the sight of men is blinded by illusions, so that they do not see the things that are, and think they see things that are not. As I have said, these corrupted, fallen spirits roam across every corner of the earth, and, seeking some comfort for their own downfall, they labor to bring men down with them. And so they fill everything with snares, deceits, tricks, and errors: for they cling to individual men and occupy whole households, going from door to door, and assume for themselves the name of "genii" — for that is how they are rendered as demons in Latin speech. Men consecrate them in the innermost parts of their homes, pour out libations to them daily, and, knowing them to be demons, worship them as earthly gods and as averters of the evils which they themselves cause and inflict. Being subtle, intangible spirits, they slip inside the bodies of men and, operating covertly within their innards, ruin their health, trigger illness, terrify their minds with dreams, and rattle their sanity with madness, all so as to drive men, through these torments, to seek help from them.