Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We have discharged the obligation of the task undertaken, with the divine spirit guiding and truth herself standing surety; the duty of asserting and setting forth that truth was laid on me by learning, by faith, and by the Lord himself, apart from whom nothing whatsoever can be known or set out. Now I turn to what stands as the foremost and weightiest portion of this undertaking: teaching the rite and the sacrifice by which God should rightly be worshiped. This, indeed, is the very office belonging to man, and here alone rests the total reckoning of things and the entire design of a blessed existence — since it was for this very purpose that we were shaped and granted breath by him: not so that we would stare up at the heavens and at the sun, as Anaxagoras imagined, but so that with a mind clean and undivided we would honor the one who fashioned both sun and sky. Though in the books preceding this one I defended the truth as best my limited gift allowed, it can nonetheless emerge with the greatest clarity from the rite itself. That holy and singular majesty craves nothing from mankind except innocence alone; whoever brings this offering to God will have sacrificed with sufficient piety, with sufficient reverence. Yet humanity, having cast justice aside, though defiled by crimes and outrages of every description, counts itself devout merely for staining shrines and altars with the gore of slaughtered animals, or drenching hearths with the outpouring of fragrant, aged wine. They go so far as to lay out consecrated feasts and rich banquets, as though offering a portion of these to beings who might share in them. Whatever strikes the eye as rare, whatever costs dearly in craftsmanship or fragrance — this they decide will please their gods, not on any rational ground concerning divinity, of which they are ignorant, but purely out of their own appetites; nor do they grasp that God has no want of earthly riches. They savor nothing beyond the earth, and measure good and bad solely by bodily sense and pleasure. By that same yardstick they calculate religion, exactly as they arrange every act of their entire existence. And since they have once and for all turned from contemplating heaven and surrendered that heavenly faculty of theirs into bondage to the flesh, they loosen the reins on their appetites, as though hoping to carry pleasure off with them, racing to snatch it at every possible instant — though it is the soul that should command the body's service, not the body that should command the soul's. These very people reckon riches to be the supreme good; and when honest means fail to secure it, dishonest ones will. They defraud, they steal, they plunder, they set traps, they swear false oaths — in short, nothing restrains them and nothing troubles their conscience, so long as they glitter with gold, blaze with silver, gems, and fine garments, cram their insatiable stomachs with wealth, and parade about forever surrounded by throngs of household servants clearing a path through the crowd before them. Afflicted in this way, steeped in indulgence, they snuff out the mind's vitality, and while imagining themselves to be living at their fullest, they race toward death at the utmost speed. For as we explained in the second book, heaven's reckoning belongs to the soul, while earth's belongs to the body. Those who disregard what benefits the soul and chase after what benefits the body dwell amid darkness and death — the domain of earth and flesh — since life and light come down from heaven. And because they have become strangers to that light through their servitude to the flesh, they remain far removed from grasping anything of divine matters. That very blindness weighs down the wretched everywhere alike: just as they fail to recognize who the true God is, so too they fail to recognize what true worship is.
They slaughter, then, plump and richly fed victims for God as if he hungered, pour out wine as if he thirsted, kindle lamps as if he labored amid darkness. Yet if they could suspect or conceive in their minds the nature of those heavenly goods — whose vastness even we, still enveloped in earthly bodies, cannot grasp through the senses — they would at once recognize their own utter folly in these empty observances; or if they were willing to gaze upon that heavenly light we call the sun, they would immediately perceive how little that God — who himself granted so brilliant and so clear a light for human use — has any need of their small lamps. And yet, when within so tiny a disk (which, owing to its remoteness, appears no wider than a human head) there dwells such brilliance that no mortal eye can bear to look at it, and the merest attempt brings on a haze and darkness that dims the sight, what measure of light and radiance ought we then to imagine surrounds God himself, in whose presence no night ever falls? He has tempered this very light so that it would injure no living creature through excessive glare or fierce heat, granting it only as much of these qualities as mortal frames could bear or as ripening crops might demand. Can a man, then, be judged sound of mind who offers the giver and author of light a gift of candlelight or wax-taper flame? No — he asks something else of us entirely: not a smoky light but, in the poet's words, one clear and flowing — namely, the light of the mind, on whose account the poets call us 'the living' — a light no one can display except one who has come to recognize God. But the gods of the pagans, being earthly, require lamps so as not to be plunged into darkness; and their devotees, since they have no taste for anything heavenly, drag down even the rites meant to serve those gods to an earthly level, since on earth light truly is needed, given its dark and shadowed nature. So it is that they assign to their gods not a heavenly temperament but a human one, and thus believe that what is needed and pleasing to them matches what we ourselves need — food when hungry, drink when thirsty, clothing against the cold, and lamplight once the sun goes down, so that we can still see. There is, then, no proof more telling, no clearer indication, that these gods — whatever life they once may have had — are now dead, than the rite itself, which belongs entirely to the earth. What heavenly benefit, after all, can lie in the blood of cattle poured out to stain their altars? Unless, perhaps, they imagine that the gods dine on what men themselves scorn even to touch. And whoever supplies them with this rich fare — bandit, adulterer, poisoner, or murderer of kin though he be — will count as blessed and fortunate; such a man they cherish, such a man they shield, granting him whatever he has desired. Persius, therefore, rightly mocks superstitions of this sort in his characteristic way: 'At what price,' he asks, 'will you purchase the ears of the gods? With lungs and greasy entrails?' He understood well enough that it is not flesh that is required to satisfy heaven's majesty, but a mind made holy, a righteous soul, and a heart noble — as he himself puts it — through natural honor. This is heavenly devotion: not what consists of perishable things, but what consists of the virtues belonging to a soul whose origin is heaven above; here is genuine worship — where the worshiper's own mind offers itself to God, spotless, as the sacrificial victim. Yet how this goal is to be reached, how it is to be carried out, the discussion in this book will explain. For nothing could be more splendid or more suited to humanity than instructing people in righteousness. In Cicero's Hortensius, Catulus, ranking philosophy above everything else, declares he would rather own a single slim volume on duty than deliver a lengthy speech defending the rebellious Cornelius. This view, though credited to Catulus — who perhaps never actually voiced it — should really be attributed to Cicero, its author, who wrote it, I suspect, to promote the treatises on duties he was about to compose, in which he himself states that nothing within the whole of philosophy surpasses in value the giving of rules for how to live. But if those who never learned the truth do this much, how much more should we undertake it — we who, schooled and enlightened by God, are capable of teaching what is genuinely true! Even so, we shall not teach as though laying out the earliest rudiments of virtue, a task without end; instead, we shall proceed as though tasked with instructing someone who, among the pagans, already appears fully formed. For their teachings — the ones they customarily offer in favor of upright conduct — will remain standing, and upon them we shall build what they do not know, so as to bring justice, which they lack, to its full completion. Since I am resolved to expose and refute their errors, no one should think I have taken anything from men I mean to correct; for that reason whatever they already hold in common with us will simply be passed over here.
Two roads necessarily mark the course along which human life must travel — one climbing toward heaven, the other plunging down to the underworld; both the poets in their verses and the philosophers in their treatises have brought these roads into view. The philosophers, for their part, insisted that one road belongs to the virtues and the other to the vices; and the one allotted to virtue, they claim, is steep and broken at its first approach — yet whoever has overcome that difficulty and reached its peak finds thereafter a level path, a bright and welcoming plain, and gathers rich, delightful fruit from every labor undertaken; whereas those discouraged by the hardship of that first stretch slip and veer instead onto the road of vice, which appears pleasant and far more traveled at its entrance, but once they have advanced a little way along it, that pleasant appearance vanishes abruptly, giving way to a steep and treacherous track, at times rough with stones, at times choked with brambles, at times split by whirlpools or rushing with torrents, so that stumbling, slipping, and falling become unavoidable. All of this is presented to show that in the pursuit of virtue the labor is greatest, yet once virtue is gained the rewards are greatest too, and the pleasures solid and lasting — while vice lures the minds of men through certain natural enticements, and having ensnared them with the appearance of hollow delights, drags them onward into bitter sorrows and misfortunes. Had they actually grasped what shape the virtues take and where their proper boundaries lie, this reasoning would deserve real praise; but no such grasp was theirs — neither of the virtues' true nature nor of the reward God reserves for those who possess them, a subject the following two books will take up. These philosophers, uncertain or ignorant of whether human souls are immortal, measured both virtues and vices according to earthly honors and penalties instead. This entire discussion of the two roads, then, ultimately comes down to a contrast between restraint and excess. They say the course of a human life resembles the letter Y, since every person, upon reaching the threshold of early youth and arriving at the point where the path forks in two directions, stands hesitant and uncertain, unsure which branch to favor; should he happen upon a guide able to steer his faltering steps toward the better path — that is, should he acquire philosophy, or eloquence, or some other honorable skill leading to a worthy outcome, something unattainable without the greatest exertion — they hold that he will pass through a life both honorable and abundant; but should he fail to find a teacher of restraint, he tumbles onto the left-hand path, which falsely imitates the look of the better one — meaning he surrenders himself to idleness, sloth, and excess, options that seem agreeable for a time to someone unaware of the true good, but which later, once every shred of standing and property has been squandered, condemn him to live out his days steeped in wretchedness and disgrace. They confined the endpoints of these two roads, then, to the body and to this earthly existence we lead. The poets, perhaps, fared somewhat better, wishing to place this fork in the road within the underworld — though they too err in setting these paths before those already dead. Both groups, then, spoke truth in part, yet both got it wrong, since the roads themselves ought to have been tied to this life, and their destinations to death. We, accordingly, speak with greater accuracy and truth in calling these two roads those of heaven and of the underworld, since immortality awaits the just and eternal punishment the unjust. How these roads either lift one up to heaven or hurl one down to the underworld I shall now set out, disclosing what the virtues are — something the philosophers never knew — then showing what rewards attend them, and likewise what the vices are and what penalties belong to them. Someone might perhaps expect me to treat vices and virtues in separate discussions, yet in speaking of the good, its opposite can be understood at the same time. For whether you introduce the virtues, the vices will retreat of their own accord, or whether you banish the vices, the virtues will step forward unbidden; such is the fixed nature of good and evil, that they wage constant war against each other, each forever driving the other out. Hence it follows that vice cannot be uprooted apart from virtue, nor can virtue be planted without vice first being removed. We present these roads, then, in a manner far removed from how the philosophers customarily present them: first, because we hold that a guide stands over each road, both guides immortal, yet one honored — who presides over the virtues and the good things of life — the other condemned — who presides over the vices and the evils. They, however, station a guide only on the right-hand road, and not even a single lasting one, since they bring in whatever teacher of some worthy skill happens to be available, one who calls people back from idleness and trains them toward prudence. Nor do they permit anyone but boys and young men to set foot on that road, evidently because such skills are learned only at those ages. We, however, lead people of every sex, standing, and age onto this heavenly journey, since God — the guide of that road — denies immortality to no one who has been born. Nor is the shape of these roads as the philosophers supposed. For what use is there in the letter Y when the matters at hand are so contrary and so different from one another? Rather, the better road faces the rising sun, the worse one its setting, since whoever follows truth and justice will, having received the reward of immortality, possess unending light, while whoever, misled by that wicked guide, has chosen vice over virtue and falsehood over truth, must inevitably be carried down toward the setting sun and into eternal darkness. I shall therefore trace out each of these roads and set forth their features and their character.