Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I could wish—since truth is still thought to lie in obscurity, whether because the common crowd, enslaved by ignorance and mistake to various foolish superstitions, keeps it hidden, or because philosophers, whose wits in their perversity muddy it rather than shed light on it—that I might attain, even if not the eloquence that was in Marcus Tullius (for his was exceptional and admirable), at least some faculty near to eloquence, so that truth, which by its own power avails so much, might also, resting on the strength of talent, at last put itself forth, and, once the errors both of the public and of those thought wise had been shaken and refuted, might bring the clearest light to the human race. And indeed I would wish this for two reasons: either because men can more readily believe a truth that is adorned, seeing that they believe even a lie when captivated by ornamented speech and the allurement of words; or at least so that the philosophers themselves might be overwhelmed by us with their own weapons, the very ones in which they are accustomed to take pleasure and confidence. But since God has willed the nature of the matter to be such that plain and naked truth is the more brilliant—because it is adorned enough in itself, and therefore is corrupted when painted over with ornaments added from outside—while a lie, on the other hand, pleases by a borrowed appearance, because being corrupt in itself it fades and dissolves unless it is smeared over and polished with an ornament sought elsewhere, I bear with equanimity that only a modest talent has been granted to me. Indeed, trusting not in eloquence but in truth, I took up this task—one my own strength may well be too small to carry through—and even if I should fall short, truth itself, aided by God to whom the gift belongs, will see it finished. For it is well known to me that mediocre pleaders have repeatedly bested the greatest orators—such is truth's power that even in trifling matters its own clarity is its defense—so why should I think that in this greatest of causes truth would be overwhelmed by men who are indeed clever and eloquent, yet who speak falsehoods, and that it would not appear clear and bright by its own light, even if not through my own speech, which flows rather thinly from a slender spring? Nor, if the philosophers were remarkable in the learning of letters, would I grant them also the knowledge and understanding of truth, which no one can attain by thinking or disputing. Nor do I now fault the eagerness of men who longed to grasp what is true, since God shaped human nature to crave truth above all; but this is my charge, this my rebuttal: their honorable, admirable intent produced no matching result, for they grasped neither what truth itself was, nor the manner, the place, or the frame of mind in which it must be pursued. Thus, while wishing to come to the aid of human errors, they themselves wrapped themselves in snares and in the greatest errors. To this task, then, of refuting philosophy, the very order of the subject I have undertaken has led me. For since all error springs either from a false religion or from what passes for wisdom, refuting it demands overturning both alike. Since scripture has passed down to us the teaching that philosophers' reasonings are foolish, this claim itself needs to be established by fact and argument, lest anyone, led by the honorable name of wisdom or deceived by the splendor of empty eloquence, should prefer to trust human things rather than divine. These things, indeed, have been handed down briefly and without adornment. For it was not fitting that, when God spoke to man, he should support his own words with arguments, as though otherwise faith would not be given him; rather he spoke as it was fitting he should, as the greatest judge of all things, whose part it is not to argue but to declare. But that is proper to him as God: we, on the other hand, holding testimonies of God's voice for each particular case, will show just how much more solid the arguments are that support true things—given that falsehood itself gets defended well enough to pass for true. Therefore there is no reason why we should hold the philosophers in such honor that we should be terrified of their eloquence. For they were able to speak well, as learned men, but to speak truly in no way at all, because truth was never something they had learned from the one being who alone possesses it. Nor indeed shall we accomplish anything very great by convicting them of an ignorance which they themselves very often confess. Only on this single point—precisely where trust in them should have been placed, yet is withheld—will I attempt to demonstrate that never were they more honest than in confessing their own ignorance.
Now, since the previous two books have already shown the religions to be false, and have likewise laid out where the whole error originates, this book's task is to show also how empty and false philosophy is, so that, once every error has been removed, truth may stand revealed and shine forth clearly. Let us begin, then, with philosophy's common name, so that once its head is struck down, we gain easier passage to cutting apart the whole body—if it even deserves to be called a body, given that its parts and limbs disagree with each other and hold together by no joint, seeming instead to twitch as scattered, disjointed things rather than truly live. As its own name shows and as its practitioners define it, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. What better proof, then, that philosophy is not wisdom than the very sense carried by its name? A man who pursues wisdom plainly does not yet hold it, but pursues it in hope of one day possessing it. In other arts, what the pursuit achieves and where it leads is plain: once a person masters them through learning, they stop being called a pursuer of the craft and become instead its craftsman. Out of modesty, though, philosophers styled themselves pursuers of wisdom rather than wise men. Pythagoras himself coined this name, being somewhat wiser than the men before him who had considered themselves sages; he grasped that no human pursuit could arrive at wisdom, and concluded that a thing still incomplete and unattained should not be given a name implying completion. And so, when he was asked what he professed himself to be, he answered: a philosopher, that is, a seeker of wisdom. If, then, philosophy seeks wisdom, it is not itself wisdom, because that which seeks must necessarily be one thing, and that which is sought another; nor is the seeking itself rightly directed, because it can find nothing. For my part, I would not even grant that philosophers are pursuers of wisdom, since by that pursuit wisdom is not reached. For if the capacity to find truth lay within that pursuit, if that pursuit were, as it were, a road to wisdom, it would at some point have been found. But since, after so many ages, with so many talents worn down in the search for it, it has not been grasped, it is clear that there is no wisdom to be found there. Those, then, who philosophize do not pursue wisdom; they merely think they pursue it, because they do not know where or of what kind the thing they seek is. Whether, then, they pursue wisdom or do not pursue it, they are not wise, since that can never be found which is either not rightly sought or not sought at all. Let us see, however, whether by this pursuit anything at all can be found, or nothing.
Philosophy is thought to consist of two things, knowledge and opinion, and nothing else. Knowledge cannot come from talent, nor be grasped by thinking, because to have knowledge properly within oneself belongs not to man but to God. But mortal nature does not admit of knowledge except what comes from outside. For this reason divine skill opened up eyes and ears and the other senses in the body, so that through those passages knowledge might reach the mind. Take, for instance, the desire to investigate or grasp what underlies natural phenomena: is the sun truly the size it looks, or many times greater than the whole earth; is the moon a solid ball or hollow; are the stars fixed in the sky or floating freely through the air; what size and substance makes up the sky itself; does it stand still or spin at unimaginable speed; how deep is the earth, and what props hold it suspended? To try grasping such matters through argument and guesswork resembles nothing so much as trying to picture, through mere talk, the character of some far-off nation's city—one whose name alone has reached our ears, sight and report of it both entirely absent. If we should claim for ourselves knowledge in a matter that cannot be known, would we not seem to be raving, daring to assert what we could be refuted on? How much more must those who think they know things of nature, which cannot be known by man, be judged mad and out of their senses! Rightly, then, did Socrates, and the Academics who followed him, do away with claims to knowledge, since that belongs not to one who disputes but to one who divines. It remains that opinion alone has a place in philosophy: for wherever knowledge is absent, opinion possesses the whole of it. For a man holds an opinion precisely about what he does not know. Those, then, who dispute about matters of nature merely hold the opinion that things are as they argue. They do not, therefore, know the truth, since knowledge belongs to what is certain, opinion to what is uncertain. Let us return to that earlier example. Come, let us guess at the condition and character of a city we know by nothing but its name. Likely enough, its stone walls enclose a plain, its buildings rise high, its streets run in number, and its temples stand splendid and richly furnished. Let us describe, if you like, the customs and appearance of its citizens. But when we have said this, another will argue the contrary, and when he too has finished his speech, a third will rise, and others after him, and they will form opinions very different from ours. Which, then, of all these will be truer? Perhaps none. 'Yet everything that falls within the realm of possibility has already been stated, meaning one among these claims has to be correct.' Still, no one will know which speaker hit the truth. It may happen that all have erred in some part and touched upon truth in some part. We should be fools, then, if we sought this out by disputation: for someone may come along who will laugh at our opinions and hold us for madmen, wishing as we do to form an opinion about the character of a thing we do not know. But there is no need to search out matters set far away, from which perhaps no one will come to refute us. Come, let us guess what is happening right now down in the forum, or over in the senate house. Even that lies beyond our reach. Let us say, with only one wall between, what is happening: only someone who actually heard or witnessed it could know that. So no one dares to declare it, since the plain fact standing right there, not any argument, would instantly prove him wrong. And yet this very thing is what the philosophers do, who dispute about what goes on in the sky, but they think they can do so with impunity because no one arises to refute their errors. But if they supposed that someone would come down who would teach them that they were raving and lying, they would never dispute about those matters which they cannot know. Nor, however, should their impudence and boldness be considered any the more fortunate for not being refuted: for God refutes them, he to whom alone the truth is known, even though he seems to close his eyes to it, and he reckons the wisdom of men as the height of folly.
Rightly, then, did Zeno and the Stoics reject the holding of opinion. For to suppose that you know what you do not know is not the mark of a wise man, but rather of a rash and foolish one. So, granting Socrates's claim that nothing can be known, and Zeno's that one should form no opinions, philosophy in its entirety collapses. What of the fact that it is destroyed not only by these two, who were the chief figures of philosophy, but by all of them, so that it now appears to have already been finished off long ago by its own weapons? Many sects now divide philosophy, each holding a different view. In which of them shall we place truth? Certainly it cannot be in all of them at once. Let us designate whichever one we please: then wisdom will not be in all the others. Let us go through them one at a time: by the same logic, granting truth to one sect means stripping it from every other. For each single sect overturns all the others, in order to establish itself and its own doctrines, and does not grant to any other that it is wise, lest it should confess itself foolish; but just as it does away with the others, so it too is done away with by all the others. Philosophers ready to charge it with folly are never in short supply. Praise any sect as the true one, and the rest will brand it false. Shall we believe, then, one sect praising itself and its own teaching, or the many who charge the ignorance of one upon another? It must be more correct, of necessity, what the greater number holds than what one man alone holds. For no one can judge rightly about himself: as a noble poet testifies, the nature of all men is so constituted that they see and judge other people's affairs better than their own. Since, then, all things are uncertain, either all must be believed or none. If none, then they are not wise, since each one thinks himself wise; if all, they are equally not wise, since each one is denied to be wise by all the others. Thus they all perish in this manner, and, like those sown men of the poets, cut one another's throats in turn, so that not one is left standing out of them all: and this happens because they have a sword but no shield. If, then, each individual sect is convicted of folly by the judgment of the many other sects, then all are found to be empty and vain: thus philosophy consumes and destroys itself. Once Arcesilaus, who founded the Academy, grasped this, he collected the sects' objections against one another along with famous philosophers' admissions of ignorance, arming himself against every one of them—and in doing so founded a fresh philosophy built on refusing to philosophize. From him, then, as its author, two kinds of philosophy began to exist: the one old, which claims knowledge for itself; the other new and opposed to it, which takes knowledge away. In these two kinds I see a rift, something like civil war: wisdom itself cannot be split in two, so to which side do we assign it? Should the nature of things prove knowable, this whole troop of newcomers is doomed; should it prove unknowable, the old guard is finished; and should the two sides be evenly matched, philosophy, commander over them all, perishes just the same, split as it is: for nothing can be at odds with itself without perishing. But if, as I have shown, no man can have any inner and properly his own knowledge, since human weakness makes such knowledge impossible, then the argument tips in Arcesilaus's favor. Yet even he will not stand firm, since it is not possible that absolutely nothing can be known.
Nature itself, along with steady practice and life's own demands, forces us to know a great many things. And so one would have to perish, unless one knew what things are useful for life, so as to seek them, and what things are dangerous, so as to flee and avoid them. Besides this, there are many things that experience has discovered. For the varied courses and movements of the sun and moon and the paths of the stars, and the reckoning of the seasons, have been worked out; and physicians have learned the nature of bodies and the properties of herbs; and farmers the nature of the soils, and likewise the signs of coming rains and storms have been gathered. In short, there is no art that does not rest upon knowledge. Arcesilaus, then, if he had any wisdom, ought to have distinguished which things could be known and which could not. But if he had done so, he would have brought himself down to the level of the common crowd. For the common people are sometimes wiser, since they are wise only to the extent that is needed. If you should ask one of them whether he knows anything or nothing, he will say that he knows what he knows, and will admit that he does not know what he does not know. Arcesilaus was right, then, to dismantle other men's teachings, but wrong in setting up his own. Blanket ignorance cannot amount to wisdom, since knowing is precisely wisdom's task. So, having toppled the philosophers by showing that they knew nothing, he forfeited the title of philosopher himself, given that his own doctrine holds nothing can be known. For he who reproaches others because they do not know ought himself to be one who knows; but since he knows nothing, what perversity, what insolence is it, to set himself up as a philosopher on the very grounds on which he strips that title from everyone else! For they can answer him thus: 'If you prove that we know nothing, and that therefore we are not wise, because we know nothing, then you too are not wise, since you likewise confess that you know nothing: what, then, has Arcesilaus accomplished, except that, having finished off all the philosophers, he ran himself through with that same blade as well?'