Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Knowing God, obeying him alone, and worshiping him alone — these together form the primary demand this law makes. A man who does not know God, the author of his own soul, cannot lay claim to reason at all; that ignorance is the height of impiety. It is this same ignorance that drives him to serve other gods, than which nothing more wicked can be committed. From it there follows an easy slide toward wrongdoing, through not knowing the true and singular good; for God, whom he refuses to know, is himself the source of goodness. Or if instead he chooses to pursue justice, being ignorant of the divine law he will embrace the statutes of his own people as though they were true justice — statutes which utility, not justice, devised. Why else have such varied and empty laws been established among every nation, if not because each people has ratified for itself whatever it judged useful to its own affairs? And how far utility departs from justice the Roman people themselves show, who by declaring wars through their fetial priests, by inflicting injuries under the cover of legality, and by continually seizing and plundering what belonged to others, gained possession of the whole world. Yet these same people think themselves just so long as they violate none of their own laws — a restraint that can equally be put down to fear, if it is the dread of present punishment that keeps them from crime. But let us grant, if you like, that they do by nature, or as the philosopher says by their own free choice, what the laws otherwise compel them to do. Will they therefore be just, simply because they obey the ordinances of men who might themselves have erred or been unjust — men like those who drew up the Twelve Tables, or who at any rate served the public advantage as the conditions of their time required? Civil law, then, which varies everywhere according to custom, is one thing; true justice, which God has set before all men, uniform and simple, is another. Whoever is ignorant of God must necessarily be ignorant of justice itself as well. But let us suppose it possible for someone, through a natural and inborn goodness, to attain the true virtues — as we are told Cimon of Athens did, who gave alms to the needy, invited the poor to his table, and clothed the naked. Even so, since the one thing that matters most is lacking — the recognition of God — all those good deeds become useless and empty, so that he has labored in vain to achieve them. All his righteousness will be like a human body without a head: though every limb keeps its place, its shape, its proper condition, yet because the part that governs everything is missing, the body has neither life nor any feeling at all. Those limbs have only the appearance of limbs; they serve no function — just as a head without a body serves none. The man who is like this is one who, though he does not fail to know God, lives unjustly; he possesses only the supreme part, but to no purpose, since he lacks the virtues that correspond to the limbs. So then, if a body is to live and feel, two things are required together — knowledge of God, functioning like a head, and the whole array of virtues, functioning like the limbs. Only so does a man become whole and living. Yet the sum of everything still lies in the head, which, though it cannot stand complete without all the limbs, can stand without some of them. Such a creature will indeed be flawed and weak, yet it goes on living — the same is true of a man who acknowledges God but still falls into sin here and there, since God is willing to forgive sins. Thus one can live without some limbs, but not at all without a head. This is why philosophers, even granting that they are naturally good, still know nothing and understand nothing. Everything they have learned and every virtue they possess is decapitated, since God — the true head governing both virtue and wisdom — remains unknown to them. Not recognizing him leaves a man effectively sightless whatever he looks at, effectively deaf to whatever reaches his ears, and mute no matter what words leave his mouth. Once, however, he comes to acknowledge the one who fashioned and fathers all things, sight, hearing, and speech are restored to him. A head has now grown upon him — the single organ where every sense converges: eyes, ears, tongue together. For truly it is the one who has gazed with the eyes of his heart upon truth, in which God resides, or upon God, in whom truth resides, who sees; it is the one who fastens the divine voice and its life-giving precepts to his own heart who hears; it is the one who, discoursing on heavenly things, proclaims the power and majesty of the one God. There is therefore no doubt that whoever fails to recognize God is impious, and that all the virtues he supposes himself to possess or to hold are to be found only on that death-dealing road that is wholly darkness. For this reason there is nothing anyone should congratulate himself on if he has gained these hollow virtues, since it is necessary that he be not merely wretched, for lacking the good things that are truly present, but also foolish, for undertaking the greatest labors of his life to no purpose. For once the hope of immortality is stripped away — the hope God promises to those devoted to his religion, for the sake of attaining which virtue is to be pursued and whatever evils occur are to be endured — it would surely be the height of folly to want to submit to virtues that bring a man calamities and hardships for nothing. For if virtue means bravely enduring and undergoing poverty, exile, pain, and death — things others fear — what good does it hold in itself, that philosophers should say it ought to be sought for its own sake? Clearly they take pleasure in pointless and empty sufferings, when they might live in peace instead. For if souls are mortal, if virtue will amount to nothing once the body dissolves, why do we flee the good things given to us, as though ungrateful or unworthy to enjoy divine gifts to the full? Yet to have those good things we would have to live wickedly and impiously, since poverty is virtue's — that is, justice's — companion. So no one is in his right mind who, with no greater hope set before him, prefers hardship, torment, and misery to the good things that others enjoy in life. But if virtue, as is most rightly said among us, is to be embraced because it is agreed that man is born for it, then some greater hope must underlie it, one that offers a great and splendid consolation for the evils and hardships that it belongs to virtue to bear. Nor, given how harsh virtue is on its own terms, can it count as good except by measuring its hardship against some greater good that outweighs it. Equally, one can abstain from these present goods only if there are other, greater goods for whose sake it is worth both foregoing pleasures and enduring every evil. And these, as I showed in the third book, are none other than the goods of eternal life. But who can guarantee this except God, who set virtue itself before us? Everything of consequence, therefore, turns on the recognition and worship of God: in this lies all of man's hope and salvation; this is the first step of wisdom, that we should know who our true father is and pay him alone the devotion that is his due, obey him, serve him with utmost devotion, and direct every act, every care, every labor toward earning his favor.
Having covered what is owed to God, I turn next to man's due — though whatever is given to man passes on to God as well, man being God's own image. Justice has two duties: union with God comes first, union with fellow man second. Religion names the former; the latter goes by mercy, or humanity. This virtue belongs properly to the just, to those who worship God, because it alone holds together the bond of common life. For God, who gave no wisdom to the other animals, made them safer instead through natural defenses against attack and danger; but man, because he fashioned him naked and frail so as to equip him instead with wisdom, gave him besides everything else this feeling of devotion, so that man might watch over man, love him, cherish him, and both receive and offer help against every danger. The greatest bond among men, then, is humanity itself; whoever breaks it must be judged wicked and a murderer of his own kin. For if we all descend from the one man whom God formed, we are certainly kindred, and so it must be counted the gravest crime to hate a fellow man, even one who has done us harm. For this reason God commanded that enmities are never to be started by us and must always be set aside, so that we might soften those who are hostile to us by reminding them of our common bond. Likewise, if we are all breathed into life and given soul by the one God, what else are we but brothers — and indeed more closely joined in soul than those united merely by blood? So Lucretius is not mistaken when he says: we are all sprung, in the end, from heavenly seed, and the same being is father to us all. Those, then, who harm their fellow man, who plunder, torture, kill, and drive out others in defiance of the law of humanity and every right, must be reckoned no better than savage beasts. Because of this kinship of common birth, God teaches us never to do evil and always to do good. And what doing good actually consists in he likewise prescribes: to bring help to the downtrodden and the struggling, to share food with those who have none. For since God is merciful, he willed us to be a social creature; and so we ought to see ourselves in other men. We do not deserve to be rescued in danger if we do not go to the aid of others; we do not deserve help if we refuse it. On this point the philosophers have handed down no teaching at all; caught up in the appearance of a false virtue, they have stripped mercy away from mankind, and in trying to cure it they have only corrupted it. And though they generally admit that the bond of human society must be preserved, by the very harshness of their so-called virtue, which is inhuman, they cut themselves loose from it. So this error of theirs, too, must be exposed here — the error of those who think nothing ought to be shared with anyone. They give more than one account of the origin and cause of the founding of cities. Some tell how the earth's earliest offspring, sprung directly from the ground, led a roaming existence through woods and fields, bound to one another by no tie of speech or law, using leaves and grass for beds and caves and dens for houses, fell prey to wild beasts and to stronger animals. Then those who had either escaped being torn apart, or had seen their neighbors torn apart, warned by their own peril, ran to other men, begged for protection, and first made their wishes known by gestures, then attempted the beginnings of speech, and by gradually attaching names to particular things worked out, little by little, a system of language. And when they saw that the group as a whole needed defending against the beasts, they began even to fortify towns, so as to secure themselves a safe night's rest, or to keep off the beasts' raids and attacks not by fighting them but by erecting ramparts against them. What minds unworthy of men, to have produced such nonsense — wretched and pitiable men, to have committed their own foolishness to writing and to memory! For though they could see that even dumb animals possess an innate capacity to gather together, or to seek one another out, or to flee danger, or to guard against harm, or to prepare for themselves beds and shelters, they nevertheless supposed that men themselves could learn only by being taught through such examples what to fear, what to guard against, what they ought to do — as though men would never have come together at all, or worked out a system of speech, if the beasts had not first devoured them. All this seemed, to others, delirious — and so it was — and they said that it was not the mauling of wild beasts that caused men to come together, but rather humanity itself; that men gathered because human nature shuns solitude and seeks fellowship and society. There is no great dispute between these two accounts, since though the causes given differ, the outcome described is the same. So either account is possible, since they do not contradict each other; and yet neither is true in any way, because men were not born from the earth across the whole world, sown like teeth from some dragon, as the poets tell it, but rather God shaped a single man, and out of him alone the entire globe came to be populated with humankind — precisely the same mechanism, in fact, that repopulated it after the flood, something they can hardly dispute. No such gathering, then, took place at the beginning, and anyone whose reason has not failed him will understand that there were never men on earth who, apart from infancy, could not speak. But let us grant, for argument's sake, that those tales the idle and foolish old men tell are true, so that we may refute them by their own reasoning and on their own terms. Suppose this was indeed why men banded together — to shore up their individual frailty through helping one another; it follows that anyone in need must receive that help. For since men entered into and ratified a society with other men for the sake of protection, that compact, safeguarded from its very origin among men, must be considered a supreme wrong either to violate or to fail to keep. For whoever withdraws himself from offering help must also be excluded from receiving it, since a man who denies his own effort to another supposes he needs no one else's. But such a man, who separates and cuts himself off from the body, must live not in the manner of a human being but in the manner of wild beasts. And if that cannot be done, then the bond of human society must be maintained by every means, because man simply cannot live without man. And the preservation of that society consists in mutual support — that is, in giving help so that we may in turn receive it. But if, as those others argue, the gathering of men came about for the sake of humanity itself, then surely man ought to recognize his fellow man. And if even those crude men, still half wild, did this before any system of speech had even been established, what obligation, then, falls on people who have since become cultivated and are linked to each other through shared speech and shared everything else — people so used to one another's company that solitude is unbearable to them?