Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Why the philosophers managed neither to discover justice nor to defend it, I have already set out; my task now is to come back to what I originally intended. Carneades, seeing how shaky the philosophers' claims were, dared to attack them, sensing they could be knocked down. His argument, summed up, ran like this: men had fixed laws to suit their own convenience, laws differing by custom and often revised over time even among the same peoples, and no natural law existed at all; every creature, human or animal, is swept along by nature toward its own gain; hence justice either does not exist, or, if it does exist, amounts to sheer stupidity, since a man practicing it damages himself while tending to others' welfare. His examples ran along these lines: every nation that had grown powerful in empire, the Romans included, masters as they were of the whole earth, would have to crawl back into huts and settle into poverty and wretchedness were they truly to act justly - meaning, were they to hand back everything taken from others. Leaving these broad claims, he turned next to individual cases. Picture, he said, a decent man who owns a slave prone to running off, or a house riddled with disease and decay, flaws only he is aware of, and he decides to put it on the market: does he admit outright that the slave flees or the house is plague-ridden, or does he hide this from the buyer? Admitting it makes him honest, since he deceives no one, yet he will be branded a fool all the same, because his price will be low or there will be no sale whatsoever; hiding it makes him shrewd, since he protects his own gain, yet that same man is wicked, since he deceives. Or suppose, again, a buyer imagines he is purchasing brass while it is really gold, or lead while it is really silver - does the seller keep quiet to buy cheaply, or speak up and pay the higher price? Choosing to pay more looks like nothing but foolishness. Carneades meant, by this, for us to grasp that the man who is honest and upright is a fool, and the man who is clever is wicked, though poverty need not ruin a man's contentment. From there he climbed toward weightier matters, cases where staying just could cost a man his very life. Justice, he claimed, simply means never killing anyone and never laying a finger on what belongs to someone else. So what is the honest man supposed to do, then, if shipwrecked, when a feebler man has already claimed hold of a plank? Surely he shoves the man off so he can climb aboard and cling to it and reach safety, especially given that no one stands watching him out on the open water? A clever man does exactly that, since otherwise he himself would drown; but should he choose death over striking another, he remains honest, yet is a fool all the same, for failing to guard his own life even while guarding someone else's. Likewise, suppose his own army's line breaks and the enemy gives chase, and this honest man stumbles upon some injured soldier propped on a horse - does he spare him and get killed himself, or does he tip him off the horse to make his own getaway from the enemy? Doing so makes him clever, yet wicked all the same; refraining makes him honest, yet inevitably a fool. So, splitting justice into two categories - one civic, the other natural - Carneades demolished them both, arguing that the civic kind amounts to cleverness without being justice, while the natural kind amounts to justice without being cleverness. Sharp and toxic as these arguments plainly are, Marcus Tullius could not overturn them. For though he has Laelius speak in reply to Furius on justice's behalf, he stepped past these unanswered claims as one skirts a pitfall, leaving this same Laelius to have defended, not the natural justice already saddled with a reputation for stupidity, but rather the civic justice which Furius himself had already conceded to be cleverness - though unjust cleverness.
Concerning the argument at hand, I demonstrated how closely justice can resemble folly, so it should be clear enough that those who suppose our people foolish for their faith are deceived — though not without cause, given that we appear to do exactly what Carneades described. But now, I sense, something weightier is being asked of me - to explain why God chose to conceal justice from human eyes beneath a mask of folly. First, though, let me take up the case against Furius, since Laelius's reply fell short. Whatever his reputed wisdom, that man was never equipped to argue for true justice, since he never possessed its wellspring and origin. For us the task is far simpler: heaven's own favor has made justice something we grasp fully and know not merely by name but as a living reality. Plato and Aristotle, meaning well enough, tried to make the case for justice, and might have succeeded had their labor, their rhetorical skill, their intellectual power, been reinforced by knowledge of divine matters. Instead their efforts went nowhere and convinced no one to actually live by what they taught, since the doctrine had no anchor reaching down from heaven. What we offer stands on firmer ground, since God himself instructs us. They merely sketched justice in speech and pictured it in the mind, yet it never appeared before anyone's eyes, so they could point to no living case to back their claims. Their audience could always object that no such life was even possible, seeing that nobody had ever actually lived it. We, by contrast, back up our words with living proof drawn from actual experience. Carneades, for his part, did grasp what justice is, only he failed to see clearly enough that it was not folly - and I believe I understand his reason. He never truly believed the just man foolish; rather, knowing the man was not foolish yet unable to explain why he only seemed so, he wanted to demonstrate that truth stays hidden, thereby propping up his school's core teaching, that certain knowledge is impossible. Let us examine, then, whether folly and justice could ever really strike a bargain. According to him, the just man turns foolish the moment he refrains from grabbing the horse from a wounded rider or the plank from a drowning man to spare his own life. To begin with, I flatly deny that such a predicament could ever befall someone genuinely just, since the just man holds no hostility toward any living soul and covets not one thing belonging to another. What reason would he have to cross the sea, or to grasp after property on foreign shores, content as he is with what he owns? Why would he stir up war or entangle himself in others' madness, when his heart holds unbroken peace toward every man? Would he crave foreign goods, or human bloodshed - a man who does not even understand chasing profit, satisfied as he is with bare subsistence, who counts it a crime not merely to kill but even to stand by and witness the killing? Still, I set this point aside, granting that circumstances might drag him into such trials against his own will. Do you truly hold, Furius - or rather Carneades, since the argument is really his - that justice is so hollow, so worthless, so scorned even by God, that it can accomplish nothing and offers no shield of its own for its own defense? Naturally, those ignorant of man's sacred mystery, who therefore measure everything by this brief span of life, cannot fathom justice's real strength. Even when such men discuss virtue, granting that it is loaded with toil and hardship, they still insist it should be pursued purely for its own sake, since they have no glimpse whatsoever of its rewards, which last forever. So, judging everything by this present existence alone, they effectively reduce virtue to folly, since by their reckoning it shoulders such heavy burdens pointlessly, achieving nothing at all. But that is a matter for elsewhere; let us come back now to justice, our opening theme: so great is its power that when it turns its gaze heavenward, it merits every blessing from God. Horace, then, spoke truly when he said innocence is powerful enough to need no weapon and no strength to protect itself, no matter where its path may lead: the man clean of wrongdoing and free from crime has no need of Moorish spears, nor bow, nor quiver bristling with poisoned shafts, Fuscus, whether he crosses the scorching Syrtes, or the forbidding Caucasus, or the lands the storied Hydaspes bathes. It follows, then, that heaven's protection must shield the just man through every peril of storm and battle - that either wrongdoers too go unharmed when he sails even among murderers and thieves, purely so that one righteous and blameless life might be saved alongside theirs, or else that he alone survives while everyone else goes under. But suppose we grant that the philosopher's scenario could actually occur: what, then, is the just man to do, faced with a wounded rider on a horse or a drowning man clinging to a plank? I say without hesitation - he will choose death over killing. And justice, that singular good belonging to man, will not thereby earn the label of folly. For what could be finer, what dearer to a person, than innocence? And the further one carries it - clear to its final extremity, choosing death rather than letting anything chip away at that principle - the more perfect it necessarily becomes. Folly, Carneades claims, means sparing another's life while destroying one's own. Would you then call it foolish to die for the sake of friendship too? Why, then, do you praise those famous Pythagorean friends, one of whom pledged his life to a tyrant as security for the other's death, while the other returned just as the deadline arrived and his surety was already being led off, freeing him by his own arrival? Had folly been the verdict on these two men, no one would have celebrated them so highly for what they did - the first choosing death rather than abandon a friend, the second choosing it rather than break a promise. In fact, that very virtue moved the tyrant to spare them both in return, transforming even so cruel a nature. He is said to have even asked to join their friendship as a third member, hardly treating them as fools, but as men both good and wise. So I cannot see why, if dying for friendship or for one's word counts as supreme glory, it should not likewise be glorious to die for the sake of innocence. Hence the truly foolish ones are those who condemn us for being willing to die for God, all while praising to the skies a man willing to die for a fellow man. Finally, to close the matter, reason itself makes plain that no single person can be simultaneously just and foolish, nor simultaneously wise and unjust. The fool has no grasp of what is right and good, and so sins without fail. He is dragged along, captive to his own vices, powerless to resist, lacking the virtue he cannot even recognize. The just man, however, abstains from every sin - something achievable only through knowledge of right and wrong. And who but the wise can tell one from the other? So it follows that a fool can never be just, and an unjust man can never be wise. If this holds absolutely true, then clearly the man who refuses to take the plank from a drowning man or the horse from a wounded one is not a fool, since doing so would be sin, and the wise man avoids sin. Granted, he may look foolish to people who misjudge the true nature of things. This whole puzzle, then, gets settled less by argument than by simple definition. Folly, in fact, is error in action and speech born of not understanding what is right and good. Hence a man who will not spare even himself, in order to avoid inflicting harm - itself an evil - is no fool. That is exactly what reason and truth alike teach us. We can see in every animal, since none possess wisdom, that nature drives each to look after only itself. They harm others purely to gain for themselves, never grasping that causing harm is wrong. Man, though, knowing good from evil, refrains from harming others even at cost to himself - something no unreasoning animal could ever do - and this is precisely why innocence ranks among humanity's highest virtues. From this it follows that the truly wise man is the one who would rather perish than inflict harm, safeguarding thereby the very quality that sets him apart from mute beasts. As for the man who conceals a seller's error to buy gold on the cheap, or who hides that he is selling a runaway slave or a diseased house purely to protect his own gain - he is not wise, whatever Carneades wished to claim, but merely sly and deceitful. Slyness and deceit, though, exist even among mute animals - whether setting traps to catch others by trickery for food, or dodging the traps others have set - but wisdom belongs to man alone. Wisdom, after all, means understanding how to do what is good and right, or how to refrain from wicked deeds and words. The wise man never chases profit either, since he holds earthly goods in contempt, and he lets no one be deceived, because correcting people's mistakes and steering them back to the right path is a good man's duty - since man's nature is meant for fellowship and kindness, and this alone is what links him to God.
Now here is the actual reason someone might look foolish for choosing poverty, or even death, over harming or robbing another: people assume death wipes a man out entirely. Every mistake made by ordinary folk and philosophers alike traces back to that assumption. If nothing survives after death, then plainly the greatest foolishness would be neglecting this life, failing to stretch it out as long and as advantage-filled as one can manage - and anyone living that way inevitably strays from justice's path. But suppose something finer and longer awaits a man beyond this life - a conclusion supported both by the reasoning of eminent philosophers, by what oracles have revealed, and by the divinely inspired words of the prophets - then the wise course is plainly to hold this present life and its goods in low regard, since immortality more than makes up for whatever is lost. Cicero's Laelius, that same champion of justice, puts it this way: virtue seeks, one might almost say, nothing but honor, having no further reward. A reward does exist, though, one entirely worthy of virtue, which you, Laelius, could never have guessed at, ignorant as you were of sacred scripture. Still, he goes on, virtue accepts that reward gladly, without insisting on it. You are badly mistaken, though, if you imagine any human being could ever pay virtue's true reward - especially given your own words elsewhere: what wealth could you offer this man? What power? What kingdoms could compare? The man who reckons such things merely human judges his own goods divine. Who, then, would call you wise, Laelius, contradicting yourself as you do, later withdrawing from virtue the very claim you had granted it? No doubt, though, uncertainty about the truth leaves one's judgment shaky and inconsistent. What comes next in your argument? Suppose an ungrateful world at large, or a crowd of envious men, or powerful enemies, strip virtue of its rewards - what a feeble, hollow thing you have made virtue out to be, if its own reward can simply be stripped away! Yet if its goods truly are divine, as you claim, could men really be that thankless, that jealous, that mighty, capable of stripping away goods bestowed by divinity itself? Still, he says, virtue finds comfort in many things, relying above all on its own inherent beauty. What comfort, though? What beauty, when it so often stands accused, and that beauty itself becomes the very thing punished? What, then, if - as Furius put it - virtue is seized, tormented, exiled, reduced to poverty, its hands severed, its eyes torn out, condemned, shackled, burned, even executed by miserable means? Does virtue then forfeit its reward, or does it simply cease to exist? Neither - it will instead collect its reward before God as judge, living and flourishing without end. Strip that hope away, and nothing in human existence would look emptier or more foolish than virtue - yet virtue's own inherent goodness and dignity teach us that the soul does not perish, and that God has fixed a divine reward for it. God chose, however, to cloak virtue itself in the appearance of folly for a purpose: to keep hidden the truth's secret and the deeper meaning of his religion, to condemn as empty error those cults and that worldly wisdom which puff themselves up and revel in their own cleverness, and finally so that, once the difficulty was placed before us, a narrow road alone might carry us upward to immortality's lofty reward. I trust I have now shown why fools regard our people as fools. Choosing torment and death over lifting three fingers of incense onto the altar-fire strikes them as no less mad than valuing a stranger's life above one's own when death is on the line. What they fail to grasp, though, is the sheer wickedness of worshiping anything besides God - the one who built heaven and earth, shaped the human race, breathed life into it, and gave it light. Now, if the worst kind of slave is the one who flees his master, earning every whip, chain, treadmill, and cross going, and if a son counts equally as lost and godless for abandoning his father in disobedience, deserving disinheritance and the permanent erasure of his name from the family line - how much worse, then, is the man who abandons God, in whom master and father are united, each title owed equal reverence? Consider: a man who purchases a slave for money gives him nothing beyond food, and only for his own benefit besides. And a man who fathers a child controls neither the conceiving, the birth, nor the child's continued life - proving he is no true father at all, merely an instrument in the process of generation. What penalty, then, should await the one who deserts him who is genuinely both master and father, other than what God himself has already prepared - the everlasting fire readied for unjust souls, the very flame he warns of through his prophets against the wicked and rebellious?