Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But let us set the philosophers aside: some grasp nothing whatsoever yet parade that very blankness as if it were supreme learning, others fail to understand even the little they do know, and still others, imagining they know things they in fact do not, lapse into a witless and conceited delusion. Returning, then, to our theme, let us — the only ones to whom God has laid truth bare and sent wisdom down from the heavens — carry out what our God, the giver of light, commands. Let us bear with one another and carry the labors of this life through mutual help, yet without seeking glory for ourselves if we perform some good deed. For God warns that the worker of righteousness ought not to boast, lest he seem to have discharged an act of human kindness more out of a desire to please than out of obedience to heaven's commands, and so already hold the reward of glory he sought, and receive no share of that heavenly and divine wage. As for the rest that the worshiper of God must observe, once these virtues are grasped, the remainder is easy. Let him never lie, whether to deceive or to do harm. For it is wrong that one devoted to truth should be false in any matter and depart from the very truth he follows: on this path of justice and of every virtue, falsehood simply has no room to stand. And so the true and just traveler will not say that line of Lucilius's, that lying is not for him toward a friend or intimate — rather he will judge that lying is not for him even toward an enemy or a stranger, and he will never let his tongue, the interpreter of his mind, be at odds with his thought and feeling. If he has lent someone money, let him take no interest, yet let the kindness remain whole. Whatever meets someone's need he should give freely, keeping wholly clear of another's due. In this kind of service he ought to be content with his own, though elsewhere he need not even spare what is his, so as to do good; but to take back more than he gave is unjust. Whoever does that is, in a sense, laying a trap, so as to profit from another's need. But the just man will never fail to act with mercy, nor will he stain himself with such gain; rather he will see to it that what he lends is counted, without any loss to himself, among his good works. He should accept nothing offered by a needy man in return, so that whatever service he has rendered owes its worth entirely to being unpaid. Let him answer curses with blessing, and never himself curse, lest an evil word come from the mouth of one who reveres the good Word. Indeed let him take great care never through his own fault to make an enemy, and if someone should prove so insolent as to wrong a good and just man, let him bear it with gentleness and restraint and not take vengeance into his own hands, but leave it to God's judgment. Let him guard his innocence always and everywhere. This precept holds not only that he should not himself inflict harm, but that he should not avenge harm done to him. For the greatest and most just judge sits as watcher and witness of all things. Let him prefer this judge to any man, let him rather have this judge pronounce on his cause — one whose sentence no one can escape, by no one's defense nor by anyone's favor. And so it happens that the just man is held in contempt by all, and because he is thought unable to defend himself, he is counted as slack and idle. But whoever has taken revenge on an enemy is judged brave, is judged vigorous; everyone fears him, everyone respects him. As for the good man, even though he may be able to benefit many, people still look up more to one who can harm than to one who can benefit. Yet no depravity in other men has the power to twist the just man away from his effort to obey God; he would sooner be held in contempt, provided he keeps always to the part of the good and never falls into that of the wicked. Cicero, in that same treatise on duties, says: 'But if anyone wishes to unfold the intricate notion in his mind, let him teach himself at once that a good man is one who benefits whom he can and harms no one, unless provoked by injury.' What a plain, true statement — and he ruined it by tacking on a single pair of words! There was no reason at all to append "unless provoked by injury," as though he meant to hang a shameful little tail of vice onto the good man, stripping him of patience, greatest among every virtue there is. He claims the good man would do harm if provoked; yet by that very claim he forfeits the title good man, for the moment he does harm, the name is lost. For it is no less an evil to return an injury than to inflict one. For where do quarrels among men arise, where do fights and disputes come from, if not because impatience set against wickedness often stirs up great storms? But if you set patience — than which no truer, no more worthy-of-man virtue can be found — against wickedness, it is extinguished at once, as if you had poured water on fire. But if, on the other hand, that provoking wickedness finds impatience as its match, it will kindle so great a blaze, as though drenched in oil, that no river but only a flood of blood can put it out. Great, then, is the value of patience, which that wise man stripped from the good man. For it alone brings it about that no evil is done: if it were given to all, there would be no crime, no fraud in human affairs. What, then, could work more ruin and stand more opposed to a good man than loosening the reins on anger — a passion that robs him of the very title of man, let alone of good, given that (as Cicero himself so rightly puts it) doing harm to another runs against human nature altogether? For even cattle, if you provoke them, fight back with hoof or horn, and snakes and wild beasts cause no trouble unless you hunt them to kill; and, to return to examples among men, even the untaught and the foolish, when they suffer some wrong, are driven by a blind and irrational fury and try to pay back in kind those who harmed them. So where lies the line between a good, wise man and a wicked, foolish one, if not here: he possesses a patience nothing can conquer, absent in fools, and he knows how to master and quiet his own anger, which they, having no virtue, cannot hold back? But clearly this is where the matter deceived him: speaking of virtue, he thought that to win in any contest at all was a mark of virtue, and he could not see at all that a man who yields to grief and anger, indulging those feelings he ought rather to resist, and who rushes wherever wickedness provokes him, does not hold to the office of virtue. For whoever strives to return an injury is eager to imitate the very man by whom he was wronged. So one who imitates evil can in no way be good. In two words, then, he stripped from the good and wise man the two greatest virtues, innocence and patience. But because he himself practiced that dog-like eloquence, as Sallust reports Appius calling it, he wished man to live in dog-like fashion, snapping back when provoked. As for the destruction such tit-for-tat insult brings, and the slaughter it habitually produces, no fitter illustration exists than the grim collapse of that very teacher — a man who, striving to live by these philosophical maxims, brought about his own ruin. But if, when provoked by injury, he had held to patience, if he had learned that it belongs to a good man to overlook and to bear an insult, and had not, through impatience and rashness and something like madness, poured forth those famous speeches under another's name as their target, he would never have stained with his own head the rostra where he had once flourished, nor would that proscription have utterly wiped out the republic. A man who is wise and good, then, has no business wanting a fight or courting danger — winning lies outside our own control, and any contest can go either way; the wise and finest men instead refuse to eliminate an adversary — which cannot be done without crime and danger — but to remove the contest itself, which can be done both usefully and justly. Patience, then, must be held the highest virtue, and it was in order that the just man might attain it that God willed him, as was said above, to be despised as slack. For unless he suffers insults, no one will know how much fortitude he has in restraining himself. But if, provoked by injury, he begins to pursue the one who wronged him, he is defeated; whereas whoever checks that impulse by reason truly commands himself, truly can govern himself. This mastery of oneself is rightly called patience, and it is the one virtue set against all vices and passions. It calls the disturbed and wavering soul back to its own calm, it soothes, it restores a man to himself. Since, then, it is impossible and useless to fight against nature so as never to be moved at all, still, before that agitation leaps forth to do harm — which can be done fairly quickly — let it be put to rest. God commands that the sun not set upon our anger, lest it depart as witness to our fury. Finally, Marcus Tullius, contrary to his own precept which I mentioned a little earlier, praised forgetfulness of injuries most highly. 'I hope,' he says, 'that you, Caesar, who are accustomed to forget nothing except injuries...' If he could manage this — a man distant not merely from divine justice but from the ordinary justice of citizens and states — surely we owe it far more, standing as we do, so to speak, in line for immortality itself.
The Stoics try to root out the passions from man as if they were diseases; the Peripatetics oppose them and not only keep the passions but even defend them, saying that nothing in man exists that was not implanted by a great reason and providence. This would indeed be right, if they knew the true bounds of each thing. And so they name this anger itself a grindstone for virtue, as if bravery against a foe were unreachable without the spur of rage. In saying so they betray plainly that they grasp neither what virtue really is nor the purpose for which God gave man anger at all. For if anger was given to us so that we might use it to kill men, what is to be judged more monstrous than man, what more like the wild beasts, than that creature whom God made for fellowship and innocence? There are, then, three passions that drive men headlong into every crime: anger, desire, and lust. For this reason the poets said there were three Furies who harass the minds of men: anger craves vengeance, desire craves wealth, lust craves pleasures. But God set fixed limits to all of these; if men cross them and let these passions grow beyond measure, they must of necessity corrupt their own nature and turn into diseases and vices. What these limits are is not hard to show. Desire was given to us to acquire what is necessary for life, lust to propagate offspring, the passion of anger to check the wrongdoing of those under our authority — that is, so that under a stricter discipline the younger age may be shaped toward uprightness and justice; for unless held in check by fear, license will breed boldness, which will run into every kind of outrage and crime. And so, just as it is both right and necessary to use anger against those beneath us, so it is both destructive and impious to use it against our equals: impious, because humanity is violated; destructive, because when they resist, one side must either destroy or be destroyed. That this is the reason anger was given to man can be understood from the very precepts of God, who commands that we not be angry at those who curse and injure us, but that we always hold our hand raised over those beneath us — that is, that we correct their wrongdoing with steady discipline, lest through useless affection and excessive indulgence they be reared toward evil and nourished in vice. But men ignorant of these things and unaware of the true reasoning have driven the passions given to man for good uses beyond their proper bounds, and let them range more widely than reason demands. From this comes unjust and impious living. Men use anger against their equals: from this come divisions, expulsions, wars born against justice. They use desire to heap up wealth: from this come frauds, robberies, every kind of crime. They use lust only to seize pleasures: from this come debaucheries, adulteries, every kind of corruption. Whoever, then, keeps these passions within their proper bounds — which those who do not know God cannot do — that man is patient, that man is brave, that man is just.