Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The common experience of every living creature shows that these impulses are natural, not chosen, for all of them are shaken by the very same feelings. The Peripatetics, then, argue more soundly, for they deny that these can be uprooted altogether, since they are born together with us; and they attempt to demonstrate the providence and necessity behind God's - or nature's, as they call it - arming of us with these feelings, feelings that, since they often turn vicious in excess, a person can healthily temper through moderation, leaving to that person only what nature actually requires. This would not be a foolish argument, if, as I said, everything were not being referred to this present life alone. The Stoics, then, are simply mad, for they do not temper these feelings but cut them off, and in effect want to castrate a man of what nature has implanted in him. It is comparable to wishing to take fright away from deer, poison from snakes, ferocity from beasts of prey, or docility from herd animals. For whatever is given individually to dumb animals is given to man all at once, together. But suppose, as physicians claim, that joy has its seat in the spleen, anger in the bile, desire in the liver, and fear in the heart - killing the animal outright would then be simpler than extracting anything from its body, and wanting to do so is really wanting to alter the very nature of a living creature. But these clever men fail to see that when they remove the vices from a person they also remove virtue, for which alone they leave no room. For if virtue consists in restraining and checking oneself in the very grip of anger — which they cannot deny — then whoever lacks anger also lacks virtue. If virtue is to hold bodily desire in check, then whoever has no desire to temper necessarily lacks virtue. If virtue is to curb greed for another's goods, then surely no one can have virtue who lacks the very thing which the exercise of virtue is meant to restrain. So where there are no vices, there is no room for virtue either, just as there is no room for victory where there is no adversary. Thus it comes about that in this life good cannot exist without evil. Feeling, then, is like a natural fertility of the soul. For just as a field that is naturally fruitful runs wild if left fallow, so an untended soul becomes overgrown, as if with thorns, by vices that grow strong of their own accord. But once the true cultivator comes, the vices at once give way and the fruits of virtue spring up. So when God first formed man, in his wonderful providence he implanted in him beforehand these stirrings of the soul, so that man might be capable of receiving virtue as land receives cultivation, and he placed the material of the vices within the feelings, and the material of virtue within the vices. That virtue will either not exist at all, or will not be able to be exercised, if the things through which its power appears and is confirmed are absent. Let us now see what those same men who cut out the vices entirely have actually accomplished. Those four feelings, which they suppose arise from opinions about good and evil, and which they think must be torn out if the wise man's soul is to be healed — since they realize that these feelings are implanted by nature and that without them nothing can be advised or done — they substitute other things in their place and role. For desire they substitute will, as though it were not far better to desire the good than to will the bad; likewise for joy, gladness; for fear, caution. But in the fourth case their scheme for changing the name fails them. And so they have removed distress — that is, sadness and pain of soul — altogether, which simply cannot be done. For who could fail to grieve if plague has emptied his homeland, or an enemy has overturned it, or a tyrant has crushed it? Can anyone fail to grieve on seeing liberty taken away, on seeing his kinsmen, his friends, good men either driven into exile or butchered with the utmost cruelty? Unless his mind has grown so numb that all feeling has been torn from it. So either everything should have been removed outright, or their crippled, half-finished argument needed completing - meaning a replacement term was owed to distress too, since the pattern set by the earlier substitutions made this the necessary next step. For just as we rejoice at present goods, so we are pained and grieve at evils. So if joy was rebranded under a new label on the grounds that they judged it vicious, then by the same reasoning distress ought equally to have received a fresh name, since they hold it just as vicious. From this it is plain that what they lacked was not the thing but the word; and for want of that word they tried to remove that feeling entirely — indeed perhaps the greatest of all — contrary to what nature would allow. I could refute these changes of names at greater length and show either that many names have been imposed on the same things for the sake of adorning speech and enriching its resources, or at least that these feelings do not differ much among themselves. Desire, after all, has its origin in will; caution springs from fear; and joy amounts to nothing more than gladness made visible. But let us grant, as they themselves would have it, that these are distinct. Then surely they will say that desire is a persistent and continual willing, joy is gladness insolently displayed, and fear is caution exceeding and overstepping its bounds. So it turns out that they do not remove the things they judge ought to be removed, but merely temper them, since they only change the names while the things themselves remain. So these unwitting men roll back to the very point the Peripatetics reach by reasoning — namely, that since vices cannot be removed, they must be tempered in a middle course. They are wrong, then, because they fail to achieve what they intend, and after a long and rough detour they come back to the same road.
But I do not think even the Peripatetics have come close to the truth, for they grant that these are vices, only tempering them moderately. One must be free of vices even moderate ones. Rather, the first thing to establish should have been that there are no vices at all — for nothing that is born can be vicious in itself; vices arise only if we misuse our feelings, and virtues if we use them well. Next it should have been shown that it is not the feelings themselves that need moderating, but their causes. "One ought not," they say, "to be carried away by excessive joy, but to rejoice moderately and with restraint." But this is just like saying that one ought not run headlong but should walk calmly instead. Yet a man walking can go astray, and a man running can keep straight to the road. Well then — suppose I show you a case where not merely a moderate but even the slightest degree of joy is wicked, and, on the other hand, a case where even to leap for joy is not in the least blameworthy — what good will this notion of moderation do us? I ask this: in their view, should a man of wisdom feel joy on witnessing misfortune strike his enemy? Or ought he to hold his joy in check if, once the enemies are defeated or the tyrant crushed, liberty and safety have been won for the citizens? No one doubts that in the first case even a little joy is the gravest fault, and in the second even too little joy is the gravest fault. The same could be said of the other feelings. But, as I said, the exercise of wisdom does not lie in moderating these feelings themselves, but in dealing with their causes, since they are stirred by outward things; the reins should not, above all, be placed on the feelings themselves, since even small ones can carry the gravest guilt, and the greatest can be entirely without guilt. Rather, they needed to be assigned to fixed occasions, objects, and circumstances, so that they should not become vices where it is right to use them. For just as walking rightly is good and going astray is bad, so being moved by feeling toward what is right is good, and toward what is wrong is bad. If desire does not stray beyond the lawful marriage bed, then however intense it is, it remains blameless; but if it reaches after another's spouse, however mild it is, it is still the gravest vice. It is not, then, a sickness to grow angry, or to desire, or to be stirred by passion, but it is a sickness to be an angry man, a greedy man, a lustful man. For the angry man grows angry even at one he ought not, and when he ought not; the greedy man craves even what is not needed; the lustful man reaches even for what the laws forbid. So the whole of reason ought to have been directed to this: since the drive of these feelings can neither be, nor ought to be, suppressed, because it is necessarily implanted in us for guarding the duties of life, it should instead be steered onto the right road, where even its course can proceed free of stumbling and danger.
But I have been carried further than I intended by my zeal to refute them, when my purpose was to show that the things philosophers have judged to be vices are not only not vices but are actually great virtues. Of these, for the sake of instruction, I will take up the ones I think matter most to the subject. They count fear, or dread, among the worst of vices, and think it the height of weakness of soul, to which courage stands opposed; and if courage is present in a person, they say, there is no room left for fear. Does anyone then believe it possible that this very fear could be the height of courage? Certainly not. For nature does not seem able to admit that a thing should collapse into its own opposite. And yet I will show — not by some clever piece of reasoning, as Socrates does in Plato, forcing his opponents to admit what they had just denied, but simply and plainly — that the deepest fear is the highest virtue. No one doubts that it belongs to a timid and weak soul to fear pain, or poverty, or exile, or prison, or death; and whoever has not shuddered at any of these is judged the bravest of men. But whoever fears God fears none of these things at all. No argument is even needed to prove it: throughout the world, both now and in ages past, people have watched the torments imposed on those who worship God, torments for which fresh, previously unimagined tortures have been invented. The mind recoils even to recall the forms that death has taken, since the savagery of monstrous beasts has raged beyond death itself. Yet these unspeakable manglings of the body have been endured, by a happy and unconquered endurance, without a single groan. This virtue has offered to every people and province, and even to the torturers themselves, the greatest of marvels, as cruelty was overcome by patient endurance. And yet nothing produced this virtue except the fear of God. And so, as I was saying, fear should not be torn out, as the Stoics would have it, nor merely tempered, as the Peripatetics wish, but directed onto the true path; and fears must be taken away, but in such a way that this one alone is left — which, because it is lawful and true, alone brings it about that nothing else need be feared. Desire, too, is numbered among the vices; yet when its object is earthly, it is a vice, and when its object is heavenly, it turns into a virtue. For anyone who longs to reach righteousness, God, eternal life, everlasting light, and everything else God has promised humanity will look down on riches, honors, power, and even thrones. A Stoic will perhaps say that will, not desire, is needed to attain these things. But no — mere willing is not enough. Many indeed will something, but once pain touches their very depths, the will gives way while desire perseveres; and if such desire leads a person to hold in contempt everything else that others covet, then it stands as the greatest virtue of all, being the very parent from which self-restraint is born. And so we ought instead to see to it that we direct into the right course those very feelings which it is a vice to misuse. For these stirrings of the soul are like a chariot and its team: driving it well means, above everything else, that the charioteer must know the route; keeping to it lets him go as fast as he likes without disaster, whereas straying from it - even at a gentle, careful pace - will get him battered on rough terrain, sent over a cliff, or simply carried somewhere he never needed to go. So too that chariot of life, drawn by the feelings as if by swift horses, will do its duty if it holds the straight road. Fear and desire, then, if flung down toward the earth, become vices, but become virtues if directed toward things divine. They hold thrift, on the other hand, to be a virtue; but if it is merely the eagerness to possess, it cannot be a virtue, since it is wholly occupied with increasing or protecting earthly goods. We, however, do not measure the highest good by the body, but weigh every duty solely by the preservation of the soul. But if, as I taught above, one must not spare one's estate at all in order to hold fast to humanity and justice, then thrift is no virtue at all - a label that deceives, wearing virtue's mask to mislead. For frugality is indeed an abstaining from pleasures, but it becomes a vice precisely because it springs from a love of possessing, whereas one ought to abstain from pleasures while by no means being sparing with money. Being sparing with money - that is, spending it moderately - really amounts to a kind of meanness of soul, whether it stems from anxiety about future want, from despair of ever recovering what is spent, or from an inability to grasp contempt for earthly things. But they, in turn, call the man who does not spare his household wealth a spendthrift. For they distinguish the generous man from the spendthrift in this way: the generous man gives to those who deserve it, when it is fitting, and as much as is enough, while the spendthrift squanders on those who do not deserve it, when there is no need, and without regard for his household means. What then? Shall we call a man a spendthrift who gives sustenance to the needy out of pity? Yet it matters a great deal whether you lavish money on prostitutes for lust's sake or on the wretched out of humanity; whether pimps, gamblers, and procurers plunder your money, or you devote it to piety and to God; whether you stuff it into your belly and gluttony, or store it up in the treasury of justice. So just as it is a vice to pour out money for a bad purpose, so it is a virtue to do so for a good one. If it is a virtue not to spare resources that can be replaced, so as to sustain a human life that cannot be replaced, then thrift is a vice. So I would say nothing else but that they are mad, who strip man — a gentle and social creature — of what is properly his; who, having torn out the feelings on which all humanity rests, wish to reduce him to an unmoving numbness of mind, all the while striving, as they themselves say, to free the soul from disturbance and render it calm and tranquil. This cannot be done at all, since its very power and reason consist in motion; but it should not even be attempted, since just as water always standing still and quiet becomes unwholesome and in fact more turbid, so a soul that is unmoved and sluggish is useless even to itself, and will not be able to preserve life itself, since it will neither do nor think anything — thought itself being nothing other than the stirring of the mind. In short, those who claim this immobility of soul for themselves really wish to deprive the soul of life, since life is action, and death is stillness. Some things, too, they rightly hold to be virtues, but they do not keep to their proper measure. Constancy is a virtue — not in the sense that we should resist those who do us wrong (for to these one must yield; why this should be so I will explain shortly), but in the sense that, when commanded to act against the law of God and against justice, we should be terrified by no threats or torments into placing man's command above God's. It is likewise a virtue to look on death with contempt - though not by seeking it out and taking our own lives, a course that no small number of philosophers, even the most eminent, have frequently pursued, an act both wicked and abominable — but that, when forced to abandon God and betray our faith, we should prefer to accept death, and defend our freedom against the mad and senseless violence of tyrants, and with strength of soul face down all the threats and terrors of this age. Thus, with a mind lofty and unconquerable, we shall trample underfoot the pain and death that others fear. Herein lies virtue; herein lies genuine constancy, to be safeguarded and upheld in this single respect alone: that neither terror nor force can turn us away from God. Cicero's statement therefore holds true, where he asserts that justice is impossible for anyone who fears death, who fears pain, who fears exile, who fears poverty; likewise that of Seneca, in his books on moral philosophy, where he says: this is the truly honorable man — not marked out by the purple or the badge, not distinguished by the service of lictors, but inferior in nothing — who, when he sees death close at hand, is not thrown into confusion, as though he were looking at something novel; who, whether his whole body must undergo torment, or flame must be endured against his very face, or his arms stretched out upon the gallows, does not ask what he must suffer, but how well. And whoever worships God endures these things and does not fear them; therefore he is just. It follows from everything said that a person entirely cut off from devotion to the one God cannot possibly grasp or maintain the virtues, nor the exact limits within which the virtues operate.