Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I have already said, first, that mere knowledge of the good is not the same as virtue, and then explained what virtue is and where it is found. Next I must briefly show that these philosophers were equally in the dark about the good and the evil themselves, a point nearly settled in book three, where I treated the supreme good. Anyone ignorant of what the supreme good was could hardly avoid erring about lesser goods and evils too, for no one lacking hold of the source from which such things flow can weigh them by a true measure. That source, in the case of goods, is God; in the case of evils, it is that adversary forever hostile to the divine name, the one I have described more than once — from these two origins spring both good things and bad. What descends from God carries this property: it prepares one for immortality, the supreme good. What comes instead from that other power has this task: to pull a person away from heavenly concerns, sink him into earthly ones, and destroy him with punishment that never ends — the supreme evil. Can it be doubted, then, that every one of these thinkers failed to grasp good and evil, given that they recognized neither God nor his adversary? Consequently they anchored the goal of goods in the body and in this short span of life, a life bound to dissolve and die, and pushed their inquiry no further. Everything they teach and everything they call good stays rooted in the soil and lies flat upon the ground, since it perishes along with the body — which is itself earth. None of it serves to secure a truly human life; instead it serves the pursuit or growth of riches, honor, glory, and power, all of which are as mortal as the man who toiled to gain them. Hence the verse: virtue lies in knowing the goal and the limit of what one seeks. They teach the methods and skills for acquiring household wealth, since they notice how often it is pursued badly. But such virtue is not the kind proposed for a wise man — seeking riches is not virtue at all, for neither finding nor keeping them lies within our control. The wicked, in fact, manage both the search and the gain more easily than the good do. Virtue cannot, then, reside in the pursuit of things whose very rejection is what reveals virtue's strength and rationale; nor would virtue ever run over to the things a great and noble spirit is eager to trample and crush underfoot. It is not fitting either that a soul fixed on heavenly goods be pulled away from its imperishable wealth merely to gather fragile things for itself; rather, virtue's true accounting lies above all in securing what neither any man nor even death can take away. Given all this, the following line also holds true: virtue means being able to pay a price out of one's own riches. This verse says much the same as the first two. Yet neither the poet nor any philosopher after him could say what that price actually is, of what nature, or in what it consists. The poet, and everyone who followed him, supposed that using riches correctly meant living frugally — not staging lavish feasts, not giving away wealth carelessly, not pouring one's estate into worthless or disgraceful things. Someone might object: 'What, then — are you denying that this is virtue?' No, I do not deny it; to deny it would put me in the position of arguing the reverse. What I deny is that it is true virtue, since it is not heavenly at all but wholly of the earth, accomplishing nothing that does not stay behind on the earth. I will explain more fully, when I come to discuss the duty owed to piety, what using wealth rightly means and what benefit ought to be sought from riches. Everything that follows after this, though, is false in every respect. Declaring war on wrongdoers, or taking up the cause of the good, is something wicked men can do just as readily as good ones. Some, cloaking themselves in a false decency, carve out a path to power and perform many of the same acts good men perform — all the more eagerly, in fact, because deception is their motive. If only actually being good were as effortless as merely pretending to be! But once these men have gotten what they set their hearts and vows on and have climbed to the summit of power, they drop the mask and reveal their real character: they plunder everything, they abuse and torment, they hunt down the very good men whose cause they once claimed to champion, and they saw off the rungs by which they rose, so that nobody can climb after them the same way. Even granting, though, that defending the good belongs to good men alone as a duty — taking it up is simple, but carrying it through is not, because once you commit to the contest, the outcome rests with God's judgment, not your own, and the wicked, being generally stronger both in number and in collusion, mean that overcoming them takes good fortune as much as virtue. Does anyone doubt how often the better, more just side has gone down in defeat? That is the source of every harsh tyranny ever inflicted on citizens. Every history book overflows with such cases, but one will suffice for us here. Gnaeus Pompey set out to champion the good, taking up arms for the republic, the senate, and liberty; yet he lost, dying together with that very liberty, decapitated by Egyptian eunuchs and left unburied and discarded. Virtue, then, cannot consist in being either the foe of wrongdoers or the champion of the good, since virtue cannot be made hostage to the swings of fortune. Moreover, to rank a homeland's advantages first, once quarrels among men are set aside, amounts to nothing at all. What are a homeland's advantages, after all, but another people's or nation's losses — pushing borders outward by seizing them violently from others, expanding one's dominion, raising tribute? None of that counts as virtue; it is instead virtue's undoing. To begin with, the bond that holds human society together is torn apart, innocence is destroyed, respect for what belongs to another is destroyed, and finally justice itself is destroyed — justice, which cannot survive the splitting of the human race, and which must be driven out and exiled wherever weapons gleam. Cicero's remark holds true here: those who insist that consideration is owed to fellow citizens but not to foreigners rip apart the shared fellowship of humankind, and once that goes, kindness, generosity, decency, and justice collapse entirely. How, after all, can someone be just who injures, hates, robs, and kills? Yet these are exactly the acts of those who claim to serve their country's interests. They do not even grasp what serving it means, since they count nothing useful or worthwhile except what can be gripped in the hand — and that very thing cannot really be held onto, because it can always be torn away. So whoever amasses these so-called goods on behalf of the homeland — that is, whoever, once cities are toppled and peoples wiped out, fills the treasury with plunder, seizes territory, and enriches his fellow citizens — that man gets praised to the heavens, and people imagine the highest, most complete virtue resides in him. Such an error belongs not merely to ordinary, untaught people but to philosophers too, who supply rules even for injustice, so that folly and wickedness never lack their own teaching and authority. So when they debate the duties tied to military service, none of that reasoning applies to justice or genuine virtue at all — it applies instead to this present life and civic custom, which, as the facts themselves and Cicero's own words attest, is not the same as justice. 'But,' he says, 'we hold no solid, clearly outlined image of true right and authentic justice; we work only from shadow and likeness — would that we even kept faithfully to these! for they are drawn from nature's and truth's finest models.' What they took for justice, then, is only justice's shadow and reflection. And what of wisdom? Does he not likewise admit that none exists among the philosophers either? When Fabricius is called just, or Aristides, courage is sought as an example from the one, justice from the other, as though from a sage. Yet none of them was wise in the sense we mean by a wise man, nor were those regarded and named as such — Marcus Cato, Gaius Laelius — truly wise, nor even the famed Seven Sages; rather, through a steady run of middling conduct they bore a certain likeness and outward semblance of wisdom. If, then, wisdom is stripped from the philosophers by their own admission, and justice stripped from those thought just, then every one of those accounts of virtue must be false, since only a just and wise man can know what true virtue is — and no one is just and wise except the one instructed by God through heavenly commands.
For all those regarded as wise merely because others admit their own folly are led on by a semblance of virtue and grasp only shadows and images, nothing genuine. This happens because that deceptive road, the one running toward ruin, branches into many paths on account of how greatly people's pursuits and disciplines differ, since human lives vary and diverge so widely. For just as the path of wisdom carries a trace of folly — a point already established in the previous book — so this path, wholly composed of folly, carries a trace of wisdom that those who grasp common folly seize upon; and just as it displays open vices, it likewise carries something that looks like virtue; and just as it commits open crime, it also bears a certain semblance and look of justice. How else could that road's guide, whose entire strength and power rest on deception, lead everyone astray unless he displayed to men things resembling the truth? For God, so that His immortal mystery might stay concealed, set along His own road things that men would recoil from as wicked and shameful, so that, turned away from the wisdom and truth they sought without any guide, they would stumble into the very thing they meant to avoid and escape. And so he revealed that road of ruin and death as manifold, both because life takes many forms and because many gods are worshipped. Its guide, a treacherous deceiver, so that some distinction might seem to exist between false and true, evil and good, steers the self-indulgent one way and those called thrifty another, the untrained one way and the educated another, the idle one way and the vigorous another, fools one way and philosophers another — and not even by a single route for each. People untroubled by pleasure or riches he nudges only slightly off from this crowded public road; but those who wish to pursue virtue, or who profess contempt for worldly things, he drags along rough and broken cliffs. Still, every one of these routes that puts a good face on things is not truly a separate road, but a side-path or by-lane, seeming to branch rightward from that common way, yet all converging, in the end, on the very same destination. There that guide brings them all together, at the point where good had to be sorted from wicked, strong from weak, and wise from foolish — that is, in the matter of worshipping the gods, where, since all of them without exception were fools, he cuts every throat with one stroke and hurls them down into death. But this other road — the road of truth, wisdom, virtue, and life, of which all things there is one source, one force, one seat — is itself single, so that with like minds and complete harmony we may follow and worship the one God together; and it is narrow, since virtue has been granted to few; and it is steep, since the good, being highest and most exalted, can be reached only through the greatest difficulty and toil.
This is the road philosophers search for, yet fail to find, precisely because they hunt for it on earth, where it has no power to show itself. So they wander as if lost on a vast sea, unaware of where they are being swept, since they can neither make out the road nor follow any guide. By the same logic, this road of life must be sought the way ships seek their course on the open water: unless sailors watch some light in the sky, they drift on uncertain paths. So whoever strives to keep to the true course of life ought not to fix his gaze on the earth but on the heavens and, to put it more plainly, ought to follow not a man but God, serve not these earthly images but the God of the sky, refer everything not to the body but to the mind, and give his effort not to this present life but to the eternal one. Thus, if you keep your eyes always turned toward heaven and watch the sun where it rises, taking it as the guide of your life the way a helmsman takes a star, your feet will naturally be steered onto the road, and that heavenly light — far brighter to a sound mind than this sun we view with mortal eyes — will guide and steer you so surely that it brings you, without a single misstep, all the way to the harbor of wisdom and virtue. We must therefore take up God's law, the one meant to direct us on this path — that sacred, heavenly law which Marcus Tullius sketched in almost divine language in the third book of his work on the republic; I set down his own words below rather than saying more myself: 'True law is nothing other than right reason, matching nature, spread through every people, unchanging, eternal — a law that summons us to duty by its commands and turns us from wrongdoing by its prohibitions; yet it neither commands nor forbids upright men in vain, nor sways the wicked by ordering or forbidding them anything. Nothing may be added to this law, nor may any part of it be taken away, nor can the whole of it ever be repealed; no vote of a senate or an assembly can free us from its hold; no one needs to search out an expositor or interpreter such as Sextus Aelius; nor will a different law stand in Rome from the one at Athens, nor a different one now from what will hold later — a single law, everlasting and unalterable, will govern every nation for all time, and one figure alone will preside as shared master and governor of everyone, namely God; he is the one who devised, judges, and enacted this law, and whoever refuses to obey it is fleeing from his own self, and having rejected his own human nature, will for that very reason suffer the gravest penalties, even should he slip past every other punishment people imagine.' Who, possessing real knowledge of God's mystery, could have set out God's law as tellingly as this man did, for all that he stood far removed from any grasp of the truth? For my own part, I think that people who speak truths they do not themselves grasp should be regarded as though inspired by some prophetic spirit. And if he had likewise recognized and spelled out the very precepts that make up this sacred law, just as he perceived its force and rationale, he would have carried out not the role of a philosopher, but that of a prophet. Since he was incapable of doing so, the task falls to us, since it is to us that this same law has been entrusted by that single master and governor of all, God.