Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I have often noticed, Donatus, that a great many people suppose — as some philosophers have thought too — that God is never moved to anger, whether on the grounds that the divine nature is nothing but beneficent, and it would ill suit so lofty and consummate a power to injure anyone, or on the grounds that God troubles himself with nothing whatsoever, so that from his kindness no benefit reaches us, just as no harm comes from any malice in him. Because this mistaken notion of theirs is a grave one, tending as it does to topple the whole framework of human existence, we must set out to refute it, so that you yourself are not led astray by deference to men who fancy themselves wise. Yet we do not puff ourselves up as though truth were something our own minds had captured; instead, it is God's own instruction that we follow, since he alone has the capacity to know and to unveil what is hidden. Philosophers had no part in that instruction, imagining instead that guesswork could uncover the nature of things. Yet that is altogether impossible, since the human mind, walled in by the body's shadowy dwelling, is stationed at a great remove from any view of truth; and here is where divinity parts ways with humanity — the one is marked by ignorance, the other by knowledge. So it is that some light is required of us, to chase off the darkness enveloping human thought, seeing that, bound as we are within mortal flesh, our own faculties give us no power of divination. God, however, is that very light shining in the human mind, and whoever comes to recognize him and lets him into his breast will find his heart illumined and the mystery of truth made known to him. Set God and his heavenly instruction aside, though, and error fills everything. It was for good reason that Socrates — easily the most erudite of all the philosophers — nevertheless declared, in order to lay bare the ignorance of others who imagined they grasped something, that the sole thing he knew was that he knew nothing at all. He grasped, in other words, that such learning contained no certainty, no truth whatsoever within it; nor, as some have assumed, was his profession of ignorance merely a pose adopted to confound his opponents — rather, he had glimpsed truth in part, and he bore witness to this even at his own trial, as Plato has recorded, declaring that no human wisdom existed. Such was his contempt, his mockery, his rejection of the erudition in which the philosophers of his day took such pride, that he proclaimed the very summit of learning to be his own discovery that he knew nothing. If, then, no human wisdom exists, as both Socrates taught and Plato transmitted, it follows plainly that wisdom belongs to the divine realm, and that knowledge of truth is God's alone to possess. God, therefore, is the one who must be known: truth resides in him alone, he who fathered and fashioned all things, parent of the world, invisible to the eye and barely glimpsed even by the mind — one whose worship is routinely attacked, in countless ways, by those incapable of laying hold of genuine wisdom or of following the logic behind so vast and celestial a mystery.
A whole flight of steps leads upward to the dwelling place of truth, and climbing to the very top is no feat for just anybody. Those whose vision is overwhelmed by truth's brilliance, finding no sure footing, tumble back down to flat ground. On the first step one grasps that false religions deserve that name, and abandons the irreverent cult paid to objects shaped by human hands; on the second, one perceives with the mind that a single supreme God exists, that his might and forethought brought the world into being at the start and steers it ever since; on the third, one acknowledges the servant and envoy God dispatched to earth, through whose instruction we, once loosed from the confusion that had ensnared us, might be molded and might come to practice righteousness in worshipping the one true God. From every one of these steps, as I have noted, the descent into ruin is steep and comes all too readily unless one plants one's feet with unwavering firmness. Cast down from the first step, we find those who grasp what is false yet still fail to arrive at what is true — who, spurning frail earthly images, do not turn to worship the God unknown to them but instead gape in wonder at the world's elements, paying homage to sky, earth, sea, sun, and the remaining stars. Their ignorance, however, we have already laid bare in this work's second book. As for the second step, we say those fall from it who, while sensing that one supreme God exists, are nevertheless snared by philosophers and tangled in false reasoning, so that they form notions about that single majesty at odds with the truth — some claiming God has no shape whatsoever, others holding that no feeling moves him at all, since every feeling is a mark of weakness having no place in the divine. From the third step fall those who, knowing full well God's envoy and the one who founded his everlasting and sacred house, nonetheless either reject him outright or accept him in some manner faith does not sanction; we have already answered these in part in this collection's fourth book, and will do so again, more thoroughly, once we come to address every sect that has fractured and thereby forfeited the truth. Our present concern, however, is with those who, having slipped from the second step, hold mistaken opinions about the supreme God. Some claim he grants favor to no one and never grows angry, but rather passes his existence untroubled, savoring the blessings his own immortality affords. Others strip him of anger while letting him keep his favor, reasoning that a nature surpassing in the highest virtue must be as generous as it is powerless to cause harm. So the philosophers, though united on the question of anger, split over that of favor. To bring our discussion down, in orderly fashion, to the matter at hand, here is the fourfold division we must adopt: given that anger and favor are distinct and opposing things, God must either possess anger and lack favor, or lack both together, or lack anger while possessing favor, or possess both. Nature leaves no room beyond these four options, so whatever truth we are hunting for must lie in one of them. Let us weigh each possibility, that reason, proceeding in order, may guide us to where truth lies hidden.
As for the first possibility — that God only ever grows angry and is never once moved toward favor — no one has ever claimed this, for it would be improper for God to possess the capacity to harm and wound while lacking any capacity to help or do good. What reason, what hope of deliverance, would then remain for mankind, were God the source of evils and nothing besides? And were that so, his venerable majesty would cease to hold the office of a judge with power to save and to acquit, sinking instead into the role of a mere tormentor and executioner. Yet since human affairs plainly contain good as well as evil, if God were the source only of evils, some other being would have to exist, one opposed to God, supplying us with good things instead. And should such a being exist, what name would we give him? Why, indeed, would the one who inflicts harm be more familiar to us than the one who confers benefit? But because nothing whatsoever can exist apart from God, it is hollow and absurd to imagine that divine power — beyond which nothing is loftier or finer — could inflict harm yet be incapable of conferring benefit; hence no one has ever ventured to assert it, since reason offers it no support, nor can it be credited in any fashion. With that much settled, let us move on and pursue the truth elsewhere.
Next comes the Epicurean position: God has no anger, and, by the same token, no favor either. Epicurus judged it beneath God to inflict harm or injury — something typically arising from the feeling of anger — and so he stripped him of kindness too, having noticed the corollary that a God with anger must also have favor. Rather than concede him the flaw, then, he denied him the merit alongside it. 'This,' he writes, 'is exactly why he is blessed and beyond corruption: because he cares for nothing, bothers neither himself nor anyone else.' On such terms God simply does not exist, seeing that he would be neither moved, as living beings are, nor active beyond human measure, as befits divinity; he would have no will, no action, in short nothing resembling administration worthy of a god. Yet what administration could be grander or more fitting for God than steering the world, tending to living creatures, and, above the rest, to the human race, under whose dominion all earthly things fall? What kind of blessedness, then, could God possess if he lies eternally still, inert and numb, unhearing toward suppliants and unseeing toward worshippers? What quality suits God so well as providence does? Yet if he cares for nothing and provides for nothing, he has forfeited divinity altogether. So whoever strips God of every power and every substance is saying, in effect, simply that God does not exist. Marcus Tullius, in fact, records Posidonius's report that Epicurus believed there were no gods at all, and that his talk of gods was purely to escape popular resentment — leaving the gods standing in his words while, in substance, doing away with them, since he grants them neither motion nor function. But if that is the case, what could be more dishonest? Such conduct should have no place in a serious and thoughtful man. And if he genuinely believed one thing while saying another, what is he but a lying double-talker, and thus a fool? Yet Epicurus was not devious enough to say such things merely to deceive, given that he set them down in writing for posterity to read; rather, he strayed through simple ignorance of the truth. Having been led on from the start by one seemingly sound premise, he was then swept by sheer necessity toward everything that followed from it. His starting premise held that anger is unbecoming to God. Because this struck him as true and beyond challenge, he could not sever it from its consequences: once he had stripped away one feeling, necessity forced him to strip away the rest as well. Hence whoever lacks anger surely also lacks favor, its opposite; and lacking both anger and favor, he must likewise lack fear, joy, grief, and pity alike. All these feelings share one single root, one single motion, and none of it can touch God. Yet if God has no feeling at all — since anything capable of feeling is by nature weak — then neither does he have any care or any providence. At this point the wise man's reasoning halted; what should logically have followed he passed over quietly — namely that, lacking both care and providence, God would then have no thought, no perception whatever, from which it necessarily follows that he does not exist at all. So, descending rung by rung, Epicurus stopped short at the final one, having already caught sight of the abyss beyond it. Yet what did his silence gain him, hiding the peril as he did? Necessity dragged him down regardless, against his own wish; he ended up saying what he never meant to say, because he had built his argument so that it inevitably carried him to the very conclusion he was trying to dodge. See, then, where this road leads: anger discarded, God left with nothing at all. Few, in the end, if anyone, give credence to such a view — chiefly the wicked and depraved, hoping their own crimes will go unpunished. But since this too turns out false — that God has neither anger nor favor — let us turn to the third position.
The Stoics, along with certain others, are reckoned to hold a somewhat sounder view of the divine, crediting God with favor while denying him anger. It is a seductive, popular line of reasoning: such smallness of spirit ought not touch God; one immune to injury should not imagine himself wronged by any creature; so serene and sacred a majesty should not be roused, thrown into turmoil, and hurried into fury — a thing belonging to earthly frailty; for anger, on their account, is a disturbance and turbulence of the mind, something wholly alien to God. And if even in a man, so long as he is wise and sober, anger is a disgrace — since, once it seizes a mind, it whips up waves as fierce as a raging tempest, transforming one's whole state: eyes flash, lips quiver, the tongue stumbles, teeth grind, and the face flushes crimson one moment and turns ashen the next — how much less becoming would such a monstrous change be for God? And if a man wielding authority and power, driven by anger, does terrible harm — spilling blood, toppling cities, annihilating nations, laying whole provinces waste — how much more plausible is it, they contend, that God, who holds sway over the entire human race and the world itself, would have annihilated everything, had he been prone to anger? It follows, then, that so vast and ruinous an evil ought to have no place in him. And once anger and turmoil are removed from him — being both unfitting and destructive, apt to make him inflict harm on anyone — nothing is left for him to be but mild, tranquil, kind, generous, a preserver of things. Only on these terms, they say, can he rightly be styled the universal parent, supreme and unsurpassed, as the divine and celestial nature requires. For if, among men, conferring benefit rather than harm, granting life rather than taking it, saving rather than destroying, is reckoned praiseworthy, and innocence justly ranks among the virtues, and whoever practices such things wins love, esteem, honor, and is celebrated everywhere with praise and goodwill, being judged, on account of his merits and kindnesses, closest of all to God — how much more fitting that God himself, surpassing in flawless and divine virtues, untouched by any earthly taint, should draw the devotion of the whole human race through benefits both divine and celestial? Such claims, phrased attractively and pitched to popular taste, win over a great many believers; yet those who hold this view, though nearer the truth, still stumble in part, having reflected too little on the true nature of the matter. For if God feels no anger toward the wicked and unjust, then surely he feels no love toward the righteous and just either. The position of those who strip away both anger and favor together is thus, in fact, the more internally consistent one. With opposites of this kind, one must be moved toward either both or neither. So whoever loves what is good also hates what is wicked, and whoever fails to hate what is wicked likewise fails to love what is good, since love for the good is born of hatred for evil, just as hatred for the wicked flows from love of the good. No one loves life without also detesting death, and no one pursues light except one who is fleeing darkness — nature has bound these pairs together so tightly that neither member can stand without the other. Suppose a master keeps both a good slave and a bad one in his household: he will surely not hate both alike, nor treat both alike with honor and kindness — either course would be senseless and unjust — but he speaks gently to the good one, honoring him and placing him in charge of the household, the family, and all his affairs, while punishing the bad one with curses, blows, nakedness, hunger, thirst, and chains, so that one may stand as a warning against wrongdoing while the other becomes an incentive toward merit — fear restraining some, honor spurring on others. Such a master, then, loves precisely because he also hates, and hates precisely because he also loves; some deserve love, and others deserve hatred. And just as one who loves confers good things on those he loves, one who hates inflicts harm on those he hates; and being a sound argument, this cannot be undone by any means. Empty and mistaken, then, is the view of those who grant God one of the pair while denying him the other — no less so than the view of those who deny him both. Yet the latter group, as we have shown, are not entirely mistaken, since they preserve the sounder half of the pair; the former, however, though following the same reasoning and the same underlying truth, having arrived at an entirely false conclusion, fall into the deeper error. Their argument should not have run: God feels no anger, therefore he feels no favor either — but rather: God is moved by favor, therefore he is also moved by anger. Had it been settled beyond question that God feels no anger, the other conclusion would indeed have followed of necessity. But since anger remains the more doubtful point while favor is nearly self-evident, it is senseless to try to overturn a certainty by appeal to an uncertainty, when it is far simpler to establish an uncertainty by appeal to a certainty.
These are the opinions of the philosophers about God; beyond these, no one has said anything else. But if we find that what has been said is false, there remains that one final position — which alone can contain the truth, and which was never taken up nor ever defended by the philosophers — namely, that it follows that God grows angry, since he is moved by favor. This is the position we must uphold and assert; for on it turns the whole sum and hinge of religion and piety. For no honor at all can be owed to God if he grants nothing to the one who worships him, nor any fear, if he does not grow angry at the one who does not.