Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The philosophers failed to grasp this highest good, and could not grasp the truth either, although they did see and set forth, more or less, the elements of which that highest good consists. But they brought all these things forward separately and in different ways, joining to them neither the causes of things nor their consequences nor their reasons, so as to build and complete that sum which embraces the whole. It must be admitted, however, that almost the entire truth has been taught, though it lies scattered among the philosophers and their schools. We are not overturning philosophy the way the Academics are accustomed to do, whose settled purpose is to answer everything, which is more a matter of quibbling and mockery; rather, we teach that no school was so far astray, and no philosopher so empty, that he failed to see something of the truth. But because they raged with a passion for contradiction, and because they defended even their own falsehoods and undermined the truths of others, they not only let slip the truth they claimed to be seeking, but by their own fault destroyed it more than anyone. Yet had someone arisen able to collect the truth scattered among individuals and spread throughout the schools, gathering it into one body, such a person would surely share our view. Only a man skilled and knowing in the truth can do this, however, and no one can truly know the truth except one taught by God. For he cannot otherwise reject what is false and choose and approve what is true; but even if a man achieved this by chance, he would most certainly be a true philosopher, and although he could not defend it by divine testimonies, the truth itself would shine forth by its own light. Hence the error of those is incredible who, once they have approved some school and committed themselves to it, condemn all the others as false and empty, and arm themselves for battle without knowing what they ought to defend or what to refute, and attack indiscriminately everything that anyone who disagrees puts forward. Because of these most stubborn contentions of theirs, no philosophy arose that came closer to the truth; for the truth was grasped by them only in fragments. That the world was made by God, Plato said; the prophets say the same, and the same appears from the verses of the Sibyl. Those, then, are in error who said that all things sprang up of their own accord, or from tiny seeds massed together, since a thing so great, so adorned, so vast, could not have come into existence, nor been ordered and disposed, apart from some supremely wise maker, and the very reasoning by which all things are seen to cohere and be governed proclaims the artificer of a most skillful mind. That the world and everything in it was made for the sake of man, the Stoics say; the same the divine scriptures teach us. Democritus, then, erred, who thought that men, like worms, were poured forth from the earth with no author and no reason. For why man was formed is a divine mystery, and because he could not know it, he reduced human life to nothing. That men are born to attain virtue, Ariston taught; the same we are admonished and taught by the prophets. False, then, is Aristippus, who subjected man to pleasure — that is, to evil — like a beast of burden. That souls are immortal, Pherecydes and Plato argued; and this indeed is a teaching proper to our religion. Dicaearchus, then, erred along with Democritus, who argued that the soul perishes and is dissolved along with the body. That there is a lower world, Zeno the Stoic taught, and that the dwellings of the righteous are set apart from the wicked, and that the former inhabit peaceful and delightful regions while the latter pay penalties in dark places and in dreadful pits of filth; the prophets make the same plain to us. Epicurus, then, erred, who thought this was a fiction of the poets, and interpreted those punishments of the underworld as belonging to this present life. Thus the philosophers came into contact with the entire secret of divine religion and the whole of truth, yet since others refuted them, they proved unable to defend what they had found, for none of them individually had reasoning that held together, nor could they gather into one sum the things they had rightly perceived — as we have done above.
There is, then, one highest good: immortality, for the attaining of which we were formed from the beginning and born. Toward this we press, upon this human nature fixes its gaze, toward this virtue carries us forward. Since we have grasped what that good is, it remains for us to speak also of immortality itself. Plato's arguments, though they contribute much to the matter, nevertheless have too little firmness to prove and complete the truth, since he neither worked out the reasoning of this whole great mystery and gathered it into one, nor grasped the highest good. For although what he held about the soul's immortality was true, he did not discuss it as belonging to the highest good. We, then, can choose the truth by surer signs, since we do not gather it by uncertain conjecture but have learned it by divine tradition. Plato argued as follows: whatever both perceives of itself and is always in motion is immortal, for what has no beginning of motion will have no end either, since it cannot be abandoned by itself. This argument, however, would grant eternity even to dumb animals, had he not distinguished the case by adding intelligence. He added, then, in order to escape this common ground, that the human soul cannot fail to be immortal, given its astonishing skill at discovery, its speed of thought, the ease with which it perceives and takes in knowledge, its recollection of things past together with its anticipation of things to come, and its grasp of arts and matters beyond counting — none of which the other living creatures possess; all this appears divine and heavenly, because nowhere on this earth can be located the origin of a mind capable of holding and grasping so much, seeing that no trace of earthly matter is mixed within it. Rather, what is heavy and dissoluble in man must be resolved back into earth, while what is fine and subtle, being indivisible, is released from the body's dwelling as though from a prison and soars upward toward heaven, returning to its proper nature. Such, briefly summarized, is Plato's argument, though in his own text it unfolds at greater length and fullness. Pythagoras held the same view earlier, as did his teacher Pherecydes, whom Cicero records as the first to have discussed the eternity of souls. Yet although all these excelled in eloquence, in this particular dispute those who argued against this view had no less authority — Dicaearchus first, then Democritus, and finally Epicurus — so much so that the very matter over which they contended was thrown into doubt. In the end, after laying out what all these men had opined concerning death and the soul's immortality, Cicero admitted that he could not say where the truth lay. 'Which of these opinions is true,' he says, 'some god may know.' And again elsewhere: 'since each of these opinions has had the most learned men as its authors, and no one can divine what is certain.' Divination, however, is unnecessary for us, since the divine itself has revealed the truth to us.
By other arguments, then, which neither Plato nor anyone else discovered, the eternity of souls can be proved and clearly seen. These we shall gather briefly, since our discourse hurries on to describe God's greatest judgment, which will be held on earth as the end of the ages draws near. Before anything else: because man cannot see God, and lest this very fact lead anyone to conclude that God does not exist merely since mortal eyes fail to perceive him, he made, among the other wonders of his ordering, many things whose power is evident though their substance is not seen — such as voice, scent, and wind — so that these things, by their pattern and instance, let us perceive God as well, even though he does not come before our eyes, through his power, effect, and works. What is clearer than voice, or stronger than wind, or more forceful than scent? Yet although these travel through the air, reach our senses, and strike us with their force, our eyes do not see them — it is other bodily senses that register them. In the same way God cannot be grasped by sight or any other frail sense; he must instead be perceived through the mind's own vision, for his magnificent and astonishing works are visible to us. As for those who said there is no god at all, I would say they were not even men, let alone philosophers — men most like dumb beasts, made up of body alone, perceiving nothing with the mind and referring everything to bodily sense, who thought nothing existed except what they saw with their eyes. And seeing misfortune fall on good men and success on the wicked, they concluded that all things occur by chance, and that nature, not providence, had established the world. From this they slipped further into the absurdities that necessarily follow such a view. But if God exists, and is incorporeal, invisible, and eternal, then it is not credible that the soul perishes simply because it is not seen once it has departed from the body, since it is agreed that something which does not come under sight can still be sensing and alive. But someone may object that it is difficult to conceive how a soul could keep its capacity to sense apart from the bodily organs where that function normally resides. What, then, of God? Is it easy to grasp how he lives without a body? But if men believe in gods, and if these gods, being what they are, are certainly souls without bodies, then human souls must, by the same reasoning, likewise continue to exist, since from reason and intelligence itself it is understood that there is a certain likeness between man and God. Furthermore, that argument which even Marcus Tullius recognized is quite firm — that the soul's eternity can be discerned from the fact that no other animal has any knowledge of God, and that religion is almost the one thing that distinguishes man from the beasts. Since this belongs to man alone, it surely testifies that we aspire to that, desire that, and cultivate that which is akin to us and which is to be our future home. Consider the nature of the other living creatures, which the providence of the highest God bent low in body, casting them down and stretching them prostrate on the ground, so that this very fact would reveal they have no connection to the heavens above — can one, having weighed this, still miss that of all creatures man alone is a heavenly, divine animal? His body lifted up from the earth, his lofty face, his upright bearing, all seek out their own origin, and, as though scorning the lowliness of earth, strain upward, because he senses that the highest good must be sought by him above, and, mindful of his own condition, by which God made him excellent, he looks toward his own maker. This looking-toward, Trismegistus most rightly called theopteia — a beholding of God — which is found in no dumb animal. Wisdom itself, granted to man alone, amounts to nothing more than the knowledge of God, and from this it is evident that the soul neither perishes nor dissolves but abides forever, since nature itself compels it to seek and love the eternal God, aware either of its origin or of its destination. Furthermore, the fact that man alone draws on the heavenly element is no small proof of immortality. The nature of things, after all, is composed of two elements that oppose and resist each other, fire and water — one assigned to heaven, the other to earth. The other living creatures, being earthbound and mortal, rely on the heavy, earthly element; man alone employs fire, the light, lofty, heavenly element. Things that are heavy weigh down toward death, and things that are light lift up toward life, since life is at the summit and death at the bottom. And just as light cannot exist without fire, so life cannot exist without light. Fire, then, is the element of light and of life; from this it is clear that man, who makes use of it, has been allotted an immortal condition, since what is proper to him is what produces life. Virtue, likewise granted to man alone, offers a powerful argument that souls are immortal: were the soul to be extinguished, virtue could hardly align with nature, since it would then work against this present life. This earthly life, which we share with the dumb animals, seeks pleasure, in whose varied and sweet fruits it delights, and flees pain, whose harshness wounds the nature of living things with bitter sensations and strives to bring them to death, which dissolves the living creature. If, then, virtue keeps man away from the goods that nature makes desirable, while forcing him to bear the evils that nature makes avoidable, virtue would then be an evil, hostile to nature itself, and anyone who pursued it would have to be judged foolish, since he harms himself by fleeing present goods and equally pursuing evils, with no hope of a greater reward. For since we might enjoy the most pleasant delights, would we not seem to lack all sense, if we chose instead to live in lowliness, in poverty, in contempt, in disgrace, or not even to live at all, but to be racked with pain and die — gaining nothing further from these evils to compensate for the pleasure forgone? Yet virtue is no evil: it behaves honorably by spurning vicious, shameful pleasures, and bravely by fearing neither pain nor death for duty's sake — so it must be reaching toward some greater good than what it scorns. And once a man has passed through death, what remains to hope for, if not eternity itself?
Let us now turn, in turn, to those things that are opposed to virtue, so that from these too the immortality of the soul may be gathered. All vices are temporal, for they are stirred only for the present moment. The onrush of anger is quieted once vengeance is taken; the pleasure of lust ends with the body's satisfaction; desire is ended either by having enough of the things it craves or by the stirring of other passions; ambition, once it has attained the honors it wanted, grows stale. Likewise the other vices cannot stand firm or endure, but end with the very enjoyment they seek. They come, then, and they go. Virtue, however, is perpetual without any interruption, and cannot depart from the one who has once taken hold of it. For if it had intervals, if we could at times be without it, the vices, which are forever fighting against virtue, would return at once. Virtue, then, is not truly possessed if it deserts us, if it withdraws at times; but once it has established a stable dwelling in a person, it must be present in every act, and it cannot faithfully drive out and put to flight the vices unless it has fortified with a permanent garrison the heart in which it has settled. The very permanence of virtue, then, shows that the human soul, once it has taken hold of virtue, endures — since virtue is perpetual, and only the human soul is capable of virtue. Since, then, vices are contrary to virtue, their whole character must necessarily be different and opposite. Because vices are disturbances and agitations of the soul, virtue, by contrast, is the calm and tranquility of the soul; because vices are temporary and brief, virtue is perpetual, constant, and always the same; because the fruit of vices — that is, their pleasures — are equally brief and temporary, the fruit and reward of virtue must therefore be everlasting; because the advantage of vices lies in the present, the advantage of virtue lies in the future. And so it happens that in this present life there is no reward for virtue, because virtue itself is still in progress. For just as, when vices are completed in their act, pleasure and their rewards follow, so too, when virtue is completed, its recompense follows after. But virtue is never completed except by death, since even in undergoing death lies its highest duty. The reward of virtue, therefore, comes after death. In the end, Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, though hesitantly, nevertheless sensed that the highest good for man comes to pass only after death. 'With a confident spirit,' he says, 'if things should so require, a man will walk toward death, in which we know there is either the highest good or no evil at all.' Death, then, does not annihilate a man; rather it ushers him into virtue's reward. But whoever, as the same author says, has stained himself with vices and crimes and has been a slave to pleasure, being condemned, will pay an eternal penalty, which the divine scriptures call the second death — a death that is both perpetual and full of the gravest torments. For just as two lives confront man, one of the soul and one of the body, two deaths likewise confront him: the one touching the body, which everyone undergoes by nature; the other touching the soul, a fate earned through wickedness and escaped through virtue. And just as this present life, being bound to the body, is temporal and bounded by fixed limits, so this death too is temporal and reaches a fixed end, since it touches the body alone.