Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
"It is well; the foundations have been laid," as the distinguished orator says. But we have not merely laid foundations sturdy and fit to bear the work — with great and solid masses we have carried the whole building almost to its summit. What remains, though much easier, is to roof and adorn it, without which the earlier labor is useless and unwelcome. For what good is it to be freed from false religions or to grasp the true one? What good to see through the emptiness of false wisdom or to recognize which wisdom is genuine? What good, I ask, to defend that heavenly justice? What good does it do to cling, through such great trials, to the worship of God — the highest of virtues — if no everlasting blessedness awaits as its divine reward? Of this we must now speak in this book, lest all that has gone before seem vain and fruitless if we leave uncertain the very purpose for which it was undertaken — lest anyone suppose such great labors are borne in vain, doubting the heavenly reward God has appointed for the one who has despised these sweet goods of earth for the sake of bare, unadorned virtue. Let us do this part justice too, with the testimonies of the sacred writings and with credible arguments as well, so that it may be equally plain that the future is to be preferred to the present, the divine to the earthly, and the eternal to the brief — since the rewards of vice are temporal, but those of virtue everlasting. I will set forth, then, an account of the world, so that both the moment and the purpose of its making by God become clear — a matter Plato, in his discourse on how the world came into being, was neither able to know nor to explain, since that heavenly mystery, learnable only from the prophets and God's own teaching, was hidden from him; and so he claimed it had been made to last forever. This is far from the truth, since whatever has a solid and heavy body must, having once had a beginning, likewise have an end. As for Aristotle, unable to see how so vast a mass of things could perish, and wishing to escape this conclusion, he claimed the world had always existed and always would — overlooking entirely that anything which exists had to begin at some point, and that nothing can exist unless it first came into being. For since we see earth, water, and fire perish, be consumed, and be extinguished — and these are certainly parts of the world — it follows that the whole, whose members are mortal, is itself mortal. Thus whatever can perish must have been born. And indeed everything that comes under the sight of the eyes is, as Plato himself says, corporeal, and therefore must be dissoluble. Epicurus alone, following Democritus, was truthful on this point, saying that the world both had a beginning at some time and would at some time perish. Yet he could give no account of it — for what reasons this great work would be dissolved, or at what time. We possess this knowledge because God himself has disclosed it to us, so that what we hold comes not from conjecture but from a tradition handed down from heaven; and I will lay it out with care, so that it may at last be plain to lovers of truth that the philosophers neither saw nor grasped the truth, but caught so faint a scent of it that they never perceived whence that sweet and pleasant fragrance of wisdom had breathed upon them. Meanwhile I think it necessary to warn my readers that these teachings of ours will either go entirely unrecognized by depraved and corrupted minds — for their sight is dulled by earthly desires, which weigh down and weaken every faculty of perception — or, even if they do recognize them, they will pretend otherwise and refuse to admit their truth, because they are dragged along by their vices and, knowing better, still favor their own wrongdoing, captivated by its sweetness, and forsake the path of virtue, offended by its harshness. For since men burn with greed and an insatiable thirst for wealth, unable to live modestly by selling or giving away what they love, they will surely prefer to think all this a fiction, since believing it would force them to renounce their desires. Likewise those driven by the goads of lust, who, as the poet says, rush headlong into madness and fire, will call what we bring incredible, because the precepts of self-restraint wound their ears — precepts that forbid them the pleasures to which they have surrendered their souls along with their bodies. And those puffed up with ambition or inflamed with love of power, who have devoted all their energy to gaining honors, will not, even if we held the sun itself out to them in our hands, give credence to a teaching that commands them, scorning all power and honor, to live humbly — and so humbly that they can endure injury without wishing to return it, should it come. These are the men who, with eyes shut, bark at the truth however they can. But those who are sound of mind — that is, not so submerged in vice as to be beyond cure — will believe these things and gladly embrace them, and whatever we say will appear to them open, plain, straightforward, and, most importantly, true and unassailable. No one favors virtue except one who is able to follow it, and following it is not easy for everyone: those are capable who have been schooled by poverty and want, which make them fit to receive virtue. For if virtue is the endurance of hardship, then those who have always lived in comfort cannot grasp virtue, since they have neither experienced hardship nor can bear it, being accustomed to and desirous only of good things, which alone they have known. So it happens that the poor and lowly, being unencumbered, believe God more readily than the rich, who are entangled in many burdens. Indeed, chained and shackled, they serve at the beck of their mistress, greed, who has ensnared them in inescapable bonds, and they cannot look toward heaven, since their minds are bent down and fixed to the earth. But the path of virtue does not admit those carrying heavy loads: the track by which justice leads a man to heaven is a narrow one indeed, and only one who is unburdened and stripped bare can hold to it. For these wealthy men, loaded with many and enormous packs, walk along the road of death, which is very broad, since ruin holds wide dominion there. To them, harsh and poisonous seem the things God commands for righteousness, and the things we discourse of concerning virtue and truth under God's instruction. If they dare oppose these things, they thereby admit themselves to be foes of both virtue and justice. Turning now to what remains, I will bring the work to its close; and what remains is that we discuss the judgment of God — which will take place when our Lord returns to earth, to render to each according to his merit either reward or punishment. And so, just as in the fourth book we spoke of his first coming, so in this book we shall report his second coming, which the Jews also confess and hope for, though in vain — since he must return to comfort those whom he had first come to summon. For those who wickedly did violence to him in his humility will find him a conqueror in power, and will suffer, by God's requital, all those things which they read but do not understand — since they, defiled by every sin and moreover stained with sacred blood, are destined for eternal punishment by the very one against whom they raised their impious hands. But we shall treat the Jews as a separate subject, in which we will convict them of both error and crime.
Now let us instruct those ignorant of the truth. By the disposition of the highest God it has been ordained thus: that this unjust age, once its span of time has run its course, will come to an end, and with all wickedness extinguished at once and the souls of the righteous recalled to a blessed life, a calm and untroubled age of peace will blossom under God's own rule — what the poets, for their part, have named the golden age. The first cause of all the philosophers' errors was this: they failed to grasp the plan of the world, which contains the whole of wisdom. This plan cannot be grasped by one's own sense or inner understanding alone — a thing they refused to accept, insisting on working it out by themselves without a teacher. And so they fell into various opinions, often contradicting one another, from which they found no way out, and, as the comic poet says, they floundered in the same mire — because their premises did not match up with reasoning, since although what they assumed was in some sense true, it could not be affirmed or proved without an understanding of truth and of matters divine — and such understanding, as I have often said, comes to no man except through what God himself has taught. For if a man could understand divine things, he could also do them, since to understand is, so to speak, to follow immediately in their tracks. But man, wrapped as he is in a mortal body, is incapable of doing what God does — and for that very reason he cannot grasp it either. Whether this is so, anyone can easily judge from the immensity of divine things and works. For if you are willing to contemplate the world together with all that is in it, you will surely understand how far God's work surpasses human works. And the wisdom of God must stand as far above that of man as God's works themselves outstrip what man can accomplish. For God, being incorruptible and immortal, is perfect precisely because his being has no end, and his wisdom is as flawless as he is, unhindered by anything, since nothing has power over him. Man, however, being subject to passion, has a wisdom likewise subject to error, and just as many things prevent a man's life from being everlasting, so many things must likewise prevent his wisdom from being perfect in fully perceiving the truth. Human wisdom, therefore, is nothing at all if it strives on its own toward the knowledge of truth, since the mind of man, bound to a fragile body and shut up in a dark dwelling, can neither range freely nor see the truth clearly — knowledge of which belongs to the divine condition. For to God alone are his own works known. Man, however, cannot attain it by thinking or by disputation, but only by learning and hearing it from the one who alone can know and teach it. That is why Marcus Tullius, rendering Socrates' words at his trial, where Socrates says the time has come for him to depart from life while those before whom he was pleading his case would go on living — asks which is better, and says: the immortal gods know, but I think no man knows. It is therefore necessary that all the schools of philosophy are strangers to the truth, because they were founded by men, and can have no foundation or firmness, since they are propped up by no divine oracles.
Turning now to the errors of the philosophers, we find the Stoics splitting nature into two components: an active force and a passive substance offered up as material for it to work upon; in the first they place the power of sensation, in the second, matter — and neither, they say, can exist without the other. But how could the agent doing the shaping and the stuff being shaped possibly be one and the same? Suppose a man claimed the potter and his clay were one and the same — would he not be judged plainly out of his mind? Yet these men, under the single name of "nature," lump together two utterly different things — God and the world, the craftsman and the work — and say that neither can exist without the other, as though nature were God mixed with the world. Sometimes indeed they so confuse the two that God himself becomes the mind of the world and the world the body of God — as if the world and God had begun to exist together, and as if God had not himself made the world! Yet this very thing they admit elsewhere, when they proclaim that it was fashioned for the sake of mankind, and that God could exist without the world if he wished, since God is a divine and eternal mind, released and free from body. Because they could not grasp his power and majesty, they mixed him into the world, that is, into his own handiwork. Hence that line of Virgil's: a mind infused through all the limbs stirs the whole mass, and mingles itself with the great body. Then where is that other claim of theirs, that the world was both made by divine providence and is also ruled by it? For if he made the world, then he once existed without it; and if he rules it, it is surely not as a mind rules a body, but as a master rules a household, a pilot a ship, a charioteer a chariot — and yet these are not mixed with the things they govern. For if everything visible to us counts as a limb of God, then those limbs — being without sensation themselves — leave God devoid of feeling, and, being mortal as limbs are, leave him subject to death as well. I could recount how often, shaken by sudden convulsions, lands have gaped open or sunk into an abyss; how often cities and islands, swallowed by the waves, have vanished into the deep; how fertile fields have been flooded into marshes, rivers and pools dried up, mountains collapsed in ruin or leveled flat with the plains; how a hidden, inward fire consumes the foundations of countless regions and many mountains. And it is little enough that God does not spare his own limbs, if man too is permitted to do something to the body of God: seas are walled in, mountains are cut away, and the earth's hidden depths are excavated in the hunt for riches. And what of the fact that even plowing cannot be done without tearing at the divine body? So we would already be criminal and impious, violating the limbs of God! Does God, then, allow his own body to be mangled, and either weaken himself or permit man to weaken him? Unless perhaps that divine sense, mixed with the world and all its parts, has abandoned the earth's surface and sunk down into its depths, so as to feel none of the pain from this constant tearing. But if this is absurd and empty, then these men themselves are as lacking in sense as the things they claim have sense — for they failed to see that, while the divine spirit is indeed spread everywhere and holds all things together by it, it does not follow that God himself, who is incorruptible, is mixed with heavy and corruptible elements. The view they borrowed from Plato comes closer to truth: that a divine maker fashioned the world and continues to guide it by his providence. It was incumbent, then, on Plato and those who held the same view, to teach and explain what reason lay behind so vast an undertaking, and for whom, or for what purpose, he brought it about. But these same Stoics claim mankind was the very reason the world came to be. I hear them. But Epicurus does not even know why, or who, made mankind itself. For Lucretius, holding that the world was not established by the gods, says: to say further that it was for man's sake they wished to prepare the splendid nature of the world is folly — for what benefit could our gratitude confer on beings immortal and blessed, that they should undertake anything for our sake? And rightly so — for they could give no reason why the human race should have been created or established by God at all. This is our task: to expound the sacred meaning of the world and of man, of which they, having no share in the sanctuary of truth, could neither touch nor see anything. So then, as I said a little earlier, though the premise they started from was sound enough — that God fashioned the world with mankind as its purpose — reason still failed them in what followed, and they could not defend what they had assumed. In the end Plato, so as not to make God's work feeble and prone to collapse, said it would remain forever. But supposing mankind was indeed its purpose, and supposing it was built to last forever, why then are the men it was built for not themselves immortal? If they are mortal, for whose sake it was made, then it too must be mortal and dissoluble — since it can be no more lasting than the very beings it was fashioned to serve. Had he reasoned consistently, he would have grasped that, being a made thing, it must likewise perish, and that only what lies beyond all touch can endure without end. As for the one who denies it was made for the sake of mankind, he holds no reasoning at all. For if he says the maker himself undertook so great a work for his own sake, then why were we born? What purpose is there in our enjoyment of the world itself? What is the point of the fashioning of the human race and all the other living creatures? Why do we lay claim to advantages belonging to others? And why, in short, do we grow, diminish, and perish? What reason is there in procreation itself? What in the unbroken succession of generations? No doubt God wished to look upon things and, like a craftsman with seals, fashion various images of himself in which to delight himself; and even so, he would nonetheless care for living creatures, and especially for man, to whose command he subjected everything. As for those who say the world has always existed — I set aside the problem that nothing can exist without first beginning to exist — a knot they cannot untie. Instead, consider this: were the world eternal and without origin, it could have no underlying reason at all. For what could reason have contrived in a thing that never had a starting point? Before anything is made or built, there must be a plan, so that how it is to be made can be arranged, and nothing can be begun at all without reason's forethought. Reason, then, precedes every work: what was not made has no reason behind it. But the world plainly has reason behind it, for it coheres and is governed — proof that it was made; and having been made, its dissolution must follow. Let them, if they are able, explain why it was made in the first place, or why it must one day come apart. Since Epicurus, or Democritus, could not teach this, he said it arose of its own accord, from seeds coming together here and there at random — seeds which, being dissolved again, would be followed by breakup and destruction. He thus corrupted what he had rightly seen, and through sheer ignorance of reason overturned all reasoning entirely, reducing the world and everything that happens in it to the likeness of some utterly empty dream, as though no reason at all could be found underlying human affairs. But when we see that a marvelous order governs the world and all its parts — the ordering of the sky and the steady course, amid all its variety, of the stars and heavenly lights, the seasons turning in their constant, marvelous order, the lands yielding their diverse abundance, the plains stretching level, the mountains standing as ramparts and defenses, the green abundance of the forests, the wholesome outpouring of springs, the timely flooding of rivers, the rich and abundant flow of the sea, the varied and useful breathing of the winds, and all the rest held together by supreme reason — what blindness would it take to imagine these things arose by chance, when the marvelous design of a supremely provident reason shines through them so plainly? If, then, absolutely nothing exists or comes to be without cause, and if the providence of the highest God is manifest from the ordering of things, his power from their greatness, and his authority from his governance of them, then dull and mad indeed are those who have said there is no providence. I would not find fault with them if they denied the existence of gods in order to affirm one God; but when they deny providence in order to affirm none at all, whoever does not think them raving is himself raving.