Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I have said what I could, briefly, about philosophy in itself. Let us now turn toward the philosophers themselves — not to do battle with men already unable to stand, but to chase down those who flee before us, fallen upon our own ground. Of all the schools, that of Epicurus has always drawn the largest crowd, not because it holds anything true, but because the popular name of pleasure lures in so many. No one, after all, lacks some bent toward vice. Beyond that, to pull the crowd toward himself, Epicurus tailors his words to whatever character he is addressing. The idle man he excuses from ever learning his letters; the greedy man he releases from giving to the public; the cowardly he keeps away from politics, the lazy from labor, the fearful from war. To the irreligious he declares that the gods trouble themselves with nothing; the man who serves only his own comfort and cares nothing for others is told to give nothing away, on the ground that a wise man works purely for himself in everything. For one who shuns company, he praises solitude; to the miser he teaches that a person can survive well enough on plain water and porridge. The man who despises his wife is offered a long list of the joys of staying single; the man saddled with worthless children hears childlessness praised as a blessing; the man who mistreats his parents is assured that natural bonds are meaningless. To the soft man, unable to bear suffering, he calls pain the worst evil there is; to the brave one, he says a wise man remains happy even under torture. Whoever hungers for fame and influence is urged to curry favor with kings; whoever cannot stomach such trouble is urged to avoid the court altogether. In this way the clever fellow assembles a following out of the most contrary characters imaginable, and in trying to satisfy them all he ends up more divided against himself than they are against each other. Now it should be shown where this whole doctrine of his springs from, and what gave it birth. Epicurus noticed that hardship regularly falls upon good men — poverty, labor, exile, the loss of those they love — while the wicked prosper instead, gaining power and honor; he noticed that innocence offers little protection and crime often goes unpunished; he noticed death striking without regard to a person's character, and with no order or measure by age: some live to be old, some are snatched away as babies, some die already grown strong, some are cut down while still in the bloom of youth by an early grave, and in war it is frequently the finer men who are beaten and killed. What disturbed him most was that the especially devout were the ones hit hardest by misfortune, whereas those who ignored the gods entirely or worshipped without any reverence suffered lighter troubles, or none — and even temples themselves were often struck by lightning and burned. This is the very grievance Lucretius voices about god: "let him then hurl his bolts and wreck his own shrines, and, retreating into the wilderness, vent his rage there, wasting his weapon — one which so often misses the guilty and strikes down the innocent and undeserving instead." Yet had he managed to gather even a trace of the truth, he would never have claimed a god was wrecking his own shrines — since the shrines are struck precisely because they belong to no god. The Capitol, chief seat of Rome's city and its religion, has caught fire from lightning not merely once but repeatedly; and how clever men explained this can be seen from a remark of Cicero's, who claimed the flame arose by divine intent — not to destroy Jupiter's earthly house, but to demand something grander and loftier still. He said as much, in the same vein as Lucretius, in the books he wrote of his consulship: "for the father who thunders on high, seated upon starry Olympus, made straight for his own strongholds and glorious shrines, and hurled his fire down upon the Capitol's seat." Through this obstinate folly, then, men not only missed the true God's power and greatness, but doubled down on their impious error by fighting, against every principle, to rebuild a shrine heaven's judgment had condemned so many times already. While Epicurus was mulling all this over, driven — as he saw it — by the sheer unfairness of it (for that is how it looked to someone blind to the real cause), he concluded that providence did not exist. Having convinced himself of that, he then set out to defend the idea, and in doing so tangled himself in a knot of errors with no way out. If there truly is no providence, he must explain how the world turned out so orderly, so carefully arranged. There is no order, he answers: plenty of things were made worse than they should have been. And this godlike fellow proceeded to find fault with them one by one! Had I world enough to answer each complaint, it would be simple to prove the man neither wise nor sound of mind. Take another point: if providence is nothing, how do the bodies of living creatures come arranged with such foresight, each limb set in place by some remarkable design to serve its own purpose? None of providence's planning, he says, went into shaping living creatures. Eyes were not made in order to see, nor ears to hear, nor a tongue to speak, nor feet to walk — since these parts came into being before there was any seeing or hearing or speaking or walking to be done. So these organs were not created for a use; rather, the use grew up afterward out of them. If providence is nothing, why does rain fall, why do crops grow, why do the trees leaf out? These things do not happen, he says, for the benefit of living creatures, since providence gains nothing by them — everything simply happens on its own. So where, then, does everything that happens come from, or how does it come to be? None of it, he answers, is providence's doing: there are tiny seeds drifting through empty space, and wherever these happen to clump together by chance, everything is generated and takes shape. Why, then, do we neither feel nor see these particles? Because, he says, they have no color, no warmth of any kind, no smell at all. They lack taste and moisture too, and are so tiny that no blade could ever slice or split them. In this way, having started from a lie, he was driven by the logic of his own claim straight into nonsense. Where, after all, are these little bodies supposed to be, or where do they come from? Why did no one but Leucippus alone ever dream them up, from whom Democritus took the idea and passed this legacy of foolishness down to Epicurus? If these particles exist, and are solid as claimed, then surely they could be seen by someone looking closely enough. And if they all share one identical nature, how could they produce such different things? By varying their arrangement and position, he says, the way letters combine: though the alphabet has only so many letters, arranged variously they can spell out endless words. But letters, unlike these particles, come in distinct shapes to begin with. Even so, he insists, these first elements too are rough in some cases, hooked in others, smooth in still others. If something projects from them, then they can indeed be sliced and split apart. But if they are smooth and need hooks to join, they cannot stick together — so they must have hooks, in order to link with one another. Yet if they are said to be so tiny that no iron blade could ever cut through them, how could they possibly carry hooks or corners? Anything that projects, after all, could surely be broken off. And besides, by what pact, by what shared intention, do they come together so that something might be constructed out of them? Lacking any sense of their own, they cannot combine so purposefully either, since nothing but reason can accomplish anything reasonable. This foolishness could be exposed a hundred different ways — but my argument must press onward. This is the man who, as Lucretius sings, "surpassed the human race in wit and dimmed every other star, as the sun in the sky outshines them all." I can never read those lines without laughing. He was not even speaking of Socrates, or Plato — men regarded as kings among philosophers — but of a man such that no madman, however far gone, ever babbled more foolishly. So this emptiest of poets did not merely dress up a mouse in the praises fit for a lion — he crushed it flat beneath them. And this same man claims to free us from fear of dying, on which subject his exact words run: "while we exist, death is absent; once death arrives, we no longer exist. Death, therefore, means nothing to us." What a slippery trick this played on us! As though it were death once it has already happened that people dread — when by then all feeling has been stripped away — rather than the actual process of dying, which is what strips the feeling away in the first place. There is, in fact, some stretch of time in which we have already ceased to exist, yet death has not yet quite arrived, and this in-between moment seems the truly miserable part: that death is beginning just as we are ceasing. Nor was it said without reason: "death itself brings no misery; the approach toward death is what brings misery" — that is, wasting away from sickness, absorbing a blow, taking a blade into the flesh, burning in fire, being torn apart by teeth. These are the things people dread, and not because they lead to death, but because they carry with them terrible suffering. Go ahead, then, and try to argue that suffering is not an evil — yet he himself names it the single worst of all evils! How, then, could I possibly avoid fear, if whatever brings about death, or comes before it, is itself an evil? And there is this further problem: the whole argument collapses from the start, because souls do not perish at all. Not so, he insists — whatever comes into being together with the body must likewise perish together with the body. I have already noted earlier that I am setting this question aside for now, saving it for the final volume, where I intend to take apart this belief of Epicurus — whether it truly originated with him, or with Democritus, or with Dicaearchus — using both reasoned argument and testimony from scripture. But perhaps what he really offered his followers was a promise of impunity for their vices: he was, after all, an advocate of the most shameless pleasure, believing that man was born for no purpose but to seize it. Anyone hearing such a claim affirmed — what reason would he have left to hold back from wickedness or crime? If souls are simply going to vanish, then let us chase after riches so we can grab hold of every delight available. And if we lack the means, let us seize them secretly, by trickery, or by force, from whoever does have them — all the more so if no god at all takes any interest in human affairs: whenever the hope of getting away with it smiles on us, let us grab and let us kill. It is, after all, the mark of the wise man to do wrong whenever it is both useful and safe — since if any god does sit in heaven, he takes no anger out on anyone. By the same logic it is foolish to do good, since favor moves such a god no more than anger does. Let us, then, serve our pleasures however we are able, since before long we shall be nothing whatsoever. So let no day pass, not even a single moment, without some pleasure in it — lest, since we are ourselves destined one day to perish, this very life we are living should perish along with us before its time. He does not spell all this out in so many words, but his reasoning teaches it all the same. For when he argues that a wise man does everything purely for his own advantage, he is measuring every action by what it gains him. So whoever takes in these shameless lessons will conclude that no good deed is worth doing, since doing good serves someone else's interest, and that crime need not be avoided either, since plunder comes bundled together with wrongdoing. If some pirate captain, or the leader of a gang of bandits, wanted to rally his men toward robbery, what speech could he possibly give other than the very one Epicurus gives? That the gods care for nothing; that neither anger nor favor moves them; that the punishments of the underworld need not be feared, since souls die along with the body and no underworld exists at all; that pleasure is the highest good there is; that no true bond unites humanity; that each man should look out only for himself; that no one loves another except for his own benefit; that a brave man has nothing to fear from death, nor from any pain, since even under torture, even while burning, he can claim indifference to it all. Is there really any reason to take this for the voice of a wise man, when bandits could borrow it word for word and put it to just as good a use?
Others take the opposite view, arguing that souls live on after death — chiefly the Pythagoreans and the Stoics. They deserve some pardon, since they land on the true position, yet I cannot help finding fault with them, because they stumbled onto truth by luck rather than by understanding. And so, even in the very matter where their thinking was correct, they still went somewhat astray. Fearing the argument that concludes souls must necessarily die along with the body, since they are born along with it, they claimed instead that souls are not born at all, but are inserted into bodies from elsewhere, passing from one to another. They saw no other way for souls to outlast the body except by showing they had already existed before it. So the mistake on each side comes out roughly equal, though one errs about the past and the other about the future. No one, in fact, has ever grasped the truest position of all — that souls are indeed born, yet do not perish — because none of them understood why that should be so, or what the true nature of humankind actually was. Many of those who suspected souls were eternal, imagining they were bound for heaven, took their own lives — Cleanthes did, Chrysippus did, Zeno did, and Empedocles too, who leapt into the burning craters of Etna in the dead of night, hoping that his sudden disappearance would make people believe he had gone off to join the gods. Among the Romans there was Cato, who spent his whole life mimicking Stoic pretension. Democritus held a different theory altogether, yet he still handed his own head over to death by his own choice — an act than which nothing could be more wicked. If a murderer is guilty for destroying a man, then a man who kills himself bears that same guilt, since he too destroys a man. In fact this deed deserves to count as the graver crime, since only God has authority to punish it. Just as we did not choose to enter this life on our own, so too we may leave this dwelling of the body — a place entrusted to our keeping — only when its very owner commands it, the one who placed us here to live for exactly as long as he wills, until he gives the order for our release. And should some violence be forced upon us, we must bear it calmly, since the soul of an innocent person, once destroyed, cannot go without justice, and we have a great judge in whom vengeance always remains whole and reserved. All those philosophers, then, are murderers — Cato included, that very prince of Roman wisdom, who is said to have read straight through Plato's book on the immortality of souls before taking his own life, driven to that ultimate wrong by a philosopher's authority. Even so, he seems to have had some motive for dying: his hatred of servitude. But what of the man from Ambracia, who, after reading that same book, hurled himself to his death for no reason except that he believed what Plato wrote? Truly a cursed teaching, one to be fled from, if it drives people out of life itself! Yet if Plato had understood and taught by whom immortality is granted, and how, and to whom, and for what deeds, and at what point in time, he would never have pushed either Theombrotus or Cato toward a voluntary death — he would instead have guided them toward life and toward justice. To my mind, Cato sought a reason for dying less to escape Caesar than to fall in line with Stoic doctrine, which he followed, and to win fame for himself through some grand act; I cannot find what harm could possibly have come to him had he simply lived on. Gaius Caesar, merciful as he was, wanted nothing more, even amid the fiercest fighting of the civil war, than to be seen deserving well of the republic by sparing Rome's two finest citizens — Cicero and Cato both. But let us come back to those who praise death as something good. You complain about life as though you had truly lived it, or had ever once worked out why you were born at all. Would not our true and common father rightly rebuke you with that line from Terence — learn first what living really means, and only then, if life still displeases you, resort to that remedy? You resent being subject to misfortune, as if you deserved any good thing at all — you, who do not even know your own father, your master, your king, and who, though your eyes take in the brightest daylight, carry a mind still blind, buried deep in the darkness of ignorance. This same ignorance has led some to claim, shamelessly, that we were born for precisely this reason — to pay the penalty for crimes; I cannot imagine anything more deranged to say. Where, after all, or in what crimes, could we possibly have taken part, we who did not exist beforehand at all? Unless, perhaps, we are meant to believe that foolish old man who claimed, falsely, to have once lived as Euphorbus. I suppose, being of humble birth, he simply adopted a lineage for himself out of Homer's verses. What a marvel, this singular memory of Pythagoras — and what a pitiful lapse in the rest of us, none of whom recall who we were before! But maybe it was some accident, or some special grace, that let him alone avoid the waters of Lethe, never tasting the drink of forgetfulness. Clearly this vain old fellow, the way idle old women often do, spun stories as if for gullible children. But had he actually respected the people he told these tales to, had he regarded them as real men, he would never have granted himself such shameless license to lie. His vanity, though — the emptiest of men — earns nothing but mockery. And what should we make of Cicero? He claimed at the start of his Consolation that men are born to pay for crimes, then repeated the very same claim later, as though scolding anyone who failed to see life as a punishment. He was right, at least, to admit beforehand that he himself was held captive by error and by a miserable ignorance of the truth.