Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Those who argue that death is a good thing know nothing of the truth, and so they reason like this: should nothing follow death, death carries no evil, since with it all sense of evil vanishes; yet should souls persist, death counts as something good, because immortality then follows. Cicero explained this view in his Laws: let us congratulate ourselves, since death will bring us either a better condition than the one we have in life, or certainly not a worse one — for a soul thriving without a body is a divine life, and a soul without any perception at all suffers no evil whatsoever. This sounds clever, as such people imagine, as though nothing else were possible. Yet both halves of it are false. For the sacred writings teach that souls are not extinguished, but are either rewarded for righteousness or punished everlastingly for their crimes. It cannot be right that a man who lived wickedly and prospered should escape what he deserves, nor that a man who suffered greatly for the sake of justice should be cheated of his reward. This is so true that the same Cicero, in his Consolation, declared that the just and the unjust do not dwell in the same regions. For, he says, those wise men of old did not think the same path to heaven lay open to everyone; they taught that souls stained by vice and crime are dragged down into darkness and left lying in filth, whereas souls kept chaste, clean, whole, and uncorrupted, further polished by worthy pursuits and skills, rise on a swift, effortless flight toward the divine — toward a nature resembling their own. But this claim contradicts his earlier argument. That earlier position assumed, as if it were necessary, that every human being born is granted immortality. What then becomes of the distinction between virtue and crime, if it makes no difference whether one is an Aristides or a Phalaris, a Cato or a Catiline? But no one perceives this contradiction of facts and opinions except one who holds the truth. If someone were to press us on whether dying counts as good or bad, our answer would be that everything hinges on the manner in which the life before it was conducted. For just as life itself is good if lived with virtue, and evil if lived with crime, so death too must be weighed by the deeds of the life that preceded it. Thus it follows that if a life has been spent in devotion to God, death is not an evil, because it is a passage into immortality; but if otherwise, it must necessarily be an evil, since, as I said, it delivers the soul over to eternal punishment. So what conclusion remains, except that error grips anyone who craves dying as though it were a blessing, or shuns living as though it were a curse? Except that they are supremely unfair, who will not weigh a few troubles against many blessings. For though they spend their whole lives pursuing exquisite and varied pleasures, they long to die the moment any bitterness comes upon them, and they behave as though they had never known good fortune, simply because they have once known bad. So they condemn the whole of life and imagine it holds nothing but evils. From this arose that foolish saying, that what we call life is really death, and what we fear as death is really life; and that the first blessing is not to be born, and the second is to die as soon as possible. To lend this saying greater authority, it is attributed to Silenus. In his Consolation, Cicero claims that never entering existence ranks as the supreme good, sparing one these shoals of life altogether; failing that, the next best course, once born, is fleeing fortune's grip at the earliest chance, as one would flee a blaze. That he himself believed this utterly empty saying is plain from the fact that he added something of his own to embellish it. So I ask: best for whom, exactly, since not existing leaves absolutely nobody around to benefit — good and evil alike depend entirely on there being a perceiver. And further, why did he think all of life nothing but reefs and fire? As if it lay in our own power not to be born, or as if fortune, rather than God, granted us life, or as if the manner of living had anything resembling a fire. Plato's own saying is no better — that he used to thank nature on four counts: for making him human instead of some mute beast, male instead of female, Greek instead of foreign-born, and lastly an Athenian who happened to live when Socrates did. Ignorance of the truth spawns blindness of mind and multiplies errors on a scale words can hardly capture. I would flatly maintain that nothing more foolish has ever been said in human affairs — as if Plato, had he instead come into the world as a foreigner, or a female, or even a mule, would somehow still be that identical Plato rather than simply whatever creature he was born. But of course he had put his faith in Pythagoras, who, in order to stop men from eating animals, taught that souls pass out of one body and travel into the bodies of other animals. This is both an empty and an impossible notion. Empty, because there was no need to place old souls into new bodies, when the same craftsman who once made the first souls could just as easily go on making new ones forever; and impossible, since a rightly reasoning soul is no freer to alter its own essential condition than flame is free to burn downward, or fire to spill itself sideways against a river's current. This supposedly wise man therefore imagined it feasible for the very soul inhabiting Plato at that moment to become trapped within some mute beast's body, all while retaining human consciousness — capable of grasping, and lamenting, its confinement in flesh unsuited to it. How much more sensibly he would have spoken had he said he gave thanks for being born clever and teachable, and born into means that allowed him a liberal education! For as to his being born at Athens, what benefit was there in that? Have there not been very many men of outstanding talent and learning in other cities, each one better than all the Athenians put together? How many thousands of men, do we suppose, were born at Athens and in the time of Socrates and were nonetheless ignorant and stupid? Wisdom, after all, comes from nowhere near the bricks or the location of one's birthplace. And what good, really, was it to congratulate himself on being born in the time of Socrates? Could Socrates lend his own talent to those who studied under him? Plato somehow forgot that Alcibiades and Critias sat just as faithfully at that same Socrates's feet — one growing into his homeland's most savage enemy, the other into the harshest tyrant of them all.
Let us examine, then, exactly what greatness resided in Socrates that would make a supposedly wise man feel grateful for the timing of his own birth. I do not deny that he was somewhat more sensible than the rest, who supposed that the nature of things could be grasped by human intelligence — in which I judge them to have been not merely lacking in sense but downright impious, since they wanted to thrust their prying eyes into the hidden places of that heavenly providence. We know that at Rome, and in most cities, there are certain sacred rites which it is forbidden for men even to look upon. Those who may not defile them accordingly abstain from looking, and if by chance or accident some man does catch sight of them, the offense is expiated first by his punishment and then by the repetition of the sacrifice. What, then, should be done with those who wish to pry into things that are not permitted at all? Surely those who seek by impious disputations to profane the secrets of the universe and this heavenly temple are far more guilty than someone who merely entered the shrine of Vesta, or of the Good Goddess, or of Ceres. Those inner sanctuaries, though men are not allowed to enter them, were at least built by men. Yet such philosophers do more than dodge any charge of impiety — worse still, they actually gain a name for eloquence and acclaim for supposed brilliance. And what if they actually could discover something? As it is, they are as foolish in their assertions as they are shameless in their inquiries, since they can neither find anything nor defend it even if they did find it. For even if they should stumble by chance upon the truth — which happens often enough — it only gives others the chance to refute it as false. No one, after all, comes down from heaven to render a verdict on everyone's opinions. So no one could doubt that those who chase after such questions are foolish, absurd, and out of their minds. Socrates, then, had some measure of ordinary human sense, in that, recognizing such things could not be discovered, he kept himself away from questions of that kind — though I fear he showed that sense only in that one respect. Much about him deserves not only no praise but outright censure, and in this he was very much like his own countrymen. Let me pick out one example that everyone would agree on. Socrates left behind a well-known maxim — that whatever lies above us holds no relevance for us. Following that logic, we might as well crawl on all fours and repurpose the hands meant for noble labor as extra feet; let heaven, to whose contemplation we were raised up, mean nothing to us; let even the light itself be of no concern to us — though surely it does concern us, at least for the sake of getting our food. But if this is what he meant — that we ought not to discuss heavenly matters — then he could not even grasp the reasoning behind the things that lay right under his feet. What then? Did he simply misspeak? That hardly seems likely; rather, he plainly meant what he said — that religion deserves no serious attention at all — but if he had said so openly, no one would have tolerated it. For who does not sense that this world, put together with such wonderful design, is governed by some providence, since nothing can hold together at all without some guiding hand? A house crumbles the moment its resident departs; a rudderless ship sinks beneath the waves; a corpse deserted by its soul rots away — by that same logic, surely nothing so immense as this universe could have arisen without a maker, or endured so long without one steering it. Now if his aim was to overturn the official state religions, I would not object — I would even praise him, if he had found something better himself. But this very man used to swear by the dog and the goose. What a buffoon of a man, as Zeno the Epicurean called him — foolish, ruined, hopeless, if he meant it as mockery of religion; and mad, if he did it in earnest, treating so contemptible a creature as a god! Who, after this, would dare criticize the superstitions of the Egyptians, when it was those very superstitions that Socrates at Athens confirmed by his own authority? And was it not the height of foolishness that, before he died, he asked his friends to sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius which he had vowed to him? Apparently he was afraid that before Rhadamanthus the judge he might be charged with failing to pay his vow to Asclepius. I would think the man had lost his mind, had he died delirious from illness; but since he did this in full possession of his senses, it is he who is out of his mind, whoever thinks such a man was wise. Such, then, is the man in whose lifetime a so-called wise man congratulates himself on having been born!
Let us look nonetheless at what Socrates actually taught. Having rejected the whole of natural philosophy, he turned instead to inquiring about virtue and duty. It seems certain enough that he schooled his students thoroughly in what justice requires. Under Socrates's teaching, then, it did not escape Plato that the force of justice lies in equality, since all men are born under the same conditions. Therefore, he says, let them own nothing private or personal, but, so that they may be equal — as the principle of justice requires — let them hold everything in common. This can be tolerated, so long as it seems to be said only of money. How impossible and unjust this itself is I could show in many ways, but let us grant, all the same, that it could happen: everyone, after all, will be wise and will despise money. Where, then, did this notion of community lead him? Marriages too, he says, must be held in common — that is, many men are to flock to the same woman like dogs, and whichever wins by strength gets her, or else, if they are patient like philosophers, they wait and take their turns, as though visiting a brothel. Such is Plato's remarkable idea of fairness! What becomes, then, of chastity as a virtue? What becomes of faithfulness in marriage? Take these away, and all justice is taken away with them. Yet this same man said that states would be blessed if either philosophers ruled or rulers turned philosopher. Would you really hand power to a man so just, so fair, who would strip some of what is theirs and hand it to others, who would sell off women's honor to common use — an act that not even a tyrant, let alone a king, has ever committed? And what reasoning did he offer for this thoroughly shameful scheme? A state will be harmonious, he says, and bound by ties of mutual affection, if all belong to all — husbands, fathers, wives, and children alike. What a tangled mess this makes of humankind! And how could affection survive at all, when nothing fixed remains to be the object of it? Which man would love a woman, or which woman a man, unless the two had always shared a household, unless a devoted heart and mutually guarded trust had woven a bond exclusively their own? Such virtue has no place in that promiscuous indulgence. In the same way, with every child belonging to everyone, what father could cherish children as truly his, unable even to be certain which ones were? Who would honor anyone as a father, given that no one can trace his own parentage? The result is that he will treat a stranger as his father, and even his own father as a stranger. And besides, how can a wife be held in common but not a son — since a son, of necessity, can only be conceived by one father? So this very community collapses of itself, with nature itself protesting, for the sake of that one father. It remains only that he wanted wives held in common purely for the sake of harmony. But nothing is a more violent source of discord than the pursuit of one woman by many men. And if Plato could not have been warned off this by reasoning, he could certainly have been warned by examples — both of dumb animals, which for this very reason fight most fiercely of all, and of men, who for this same cause have always waged their bitterest wars against one another.
It remains, then, that this community of his amounts to nothing but adultery and lust — vices which virtue exists above all to root out utterly. And so he never found the harmony he was looking for, because he did not see where it actually comes from. For justice carries no weight in things external to us, not even in the body; it dwells wholly and entirely in the mind of man. Whoever, then, wishes to make men equal ought not to strip away their marriages or their possessions, but their arrogance, their pride, their swelling self-importance, so that the powerful and the exalted may know themselves the equals even of the most destitute beggars. Once arrogance and unfairness are stripped away from those who have wealth, whether some possess more money than others becomes entirely irrelevant, provided their minds stand on equal footing — and only devotion to God can accomplish that. So he thought he had discovered justice, when in fact he was utterly overturning it, because the community that matters must be one of minds, not of fragile possessions. For if justice is the mother of all the virtues, then when each of them is individually removed, justice itself is overturned. Now Plato, before anything else, did away with frugality — which surely cannot exist where nothing is one's own; he did away with self-restraint, since there is nothing left from which to restrain oneself, once nothing is another's; he did away with moderation; he did away with chastity — virtues which are of the greatest importance in both sexes; he did away with modesty, shame, and decency, if things usually judged disgraceful and shameful are now to begin being considered honorable and lawful. Thus, in wishing to grant virtue to everyone, he stripped it from everyone. For the ownership of property provides the very material out of which both vices and virtues arise, while community of possessions provides nothing but license for vice. Men who keep many women, after all, can be called nothing but debauched wastrels. Likewise, women shared among many men cannot properly be called adulteresses, since there is no fixed marriage to violate, but they must necessarily be called prostitutes and whores. So he has reduced human life to the level — I will not say of dumb beasts, but of cattle and wild animals. For nearly all birds form pairs and mate, and defend their nests, as though they were marriage beds, with a devoted and united spirit, and love their own young because they are certain those young are theirs, and drive away any strange young thrust upon them. But this so-called wise man, going against the custom of mankind and against nature itself, chose to imitate creatures more foolish than himself; and since he saw that among other animals the roles of male and female were not divided, he decided that women too ought to serve as soldiers, take part in public councils, hold office, and assume command. And so he assigned them arms and horses — from which it would logically follow that men should take up the wool and the loom and carry infants. He failed to see how impossible these proposals were, and the proof lies in the fact that, to this day, no nation on earth has ever been found, whether too foolish or too wise, that lived in any such way.