Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
There are those who deny that divine providence made the world; they claim instead that it was either compacted when first-elements happened to collide at random, or that it arose all at once out of nature — nature which, according to Strato, holds within itself a capacity to generate and to diminish, though it possesses no sensation and no form, so that, on this view, everything sprang into being spontaneously, without any maker or author standing behind it. Neither claim holds up; both are empty and impossible. Yet this is exactly what happens to those ignorant of the truth: they will dream up any notion whatever sooner than admit what reason itself demands. First of all, I want to know where those minute seeds came from, and from what source — the seeds whose random clustering, they claim, made the world cohere. Has anyone ever laid eyes on them? Has anyone sensed them, or heard of them at all? Or was Leucippus the only man ever given eyes — the only one given a mind? Surely he, of all men, was uniquely blind and senseless, uttering things that no man in fever could rave and no man asleep could dream. The philosophers of old had always taught that four elements compose everything. Not wanting to appear as though he were merely walking in someone else's footprints, Leucippus proposed instead that the elements themselves are built from still more basic beginnings — things incapable of being seen, of being touched, or of being felt by any bodily sense at all. "They are so tiny," he claims, "that no edge of iron is fine enough to cut or split them apart." From this he coined for them the name "atoms." Yet a problem occurred to him: if these all shared one identical nature, they could hardly produce the vast range of different outcomes we actually observe filling the world. So he declared that some are smooth, others rough, some round, some cornered, and some barbed. How much wiser silence would have been than putting a tongue to such wretched, empty purposes! Truly, I worry that anyone who thinks such claims deserve rebuttal might look just as unhinged as their author — still, let us reply to him as though he had actually said something worth answering. Supposing they are smooth and round: then plainly they cannot grip one another to build up any body, in the same way that a man trying to compress grains of millet into one solid clump would find the very slickness of the grains keeps them from fusing into a mass. But suppose instead they are rough, cornered, and barbed, allowing them to stick together — then they must be splittable and cuttable, since hooks and corners necessarily stick out in order to be capable of being sliced away. And whatever can be sliced away and torn off can equally be seen and touched. "These particles," he says, "flit restlessly through the void and are swept this way and that, the way we notice specks of dust hanging in a beam of sunlight when it pours its rays and glow through a window. Trees, plants, and every crop arise out of them; animals, water, fire, and everything else are likewise generated from them, and all things dissolve back again into these same particles." This much can be endured, so long as the subject is small things. "The world itself, too, was compacted out of these." At this point he had already reached the outer limit of sheer madness — one would think nothing further could be piled on — and yet he managed to find something to add. "Since the All is infinite," he says, "and nothing can stand empty, countless worlds must therefore exist." What conceivable power could atoms have had, that masses of such unimaginable scale could be gathered together out of things so tiny? And first I want to ask what the origin or the logic behind these seeds of his even is. If everything comes from them, then where, in turn, shall we say that they themselves came from? What nature could have supplied a stockpile vast enough to build even countless worlds? But let's excuse him, without penalty, for raving about other worlds, and turn instead to this world — the one we inhabit, the one before our eyes. He claims that everything arises out of indivisible little bodies. Were that so, nothing would ever require a seed proper to its own species: birds would hatch with no eggs at all, or eggs would appear with no bird ever laying them; every other living thing likewise would come to be without any mating, and trees and whatever springs up from the soil would carry no seeds of their own — yet these are exactly the seeds we handle and plant day after day. Why does a grain of wheat sprout into a stalk, and a stalk in turn yield grain again? Furthermore, if the clumping and gathering of atoms produced everything, then everything would coalesce right there in the air, since it is through the void that atoms are said to flit about. Why, then, can no blade of grass, no tree, no crop ever spring up or grow apart from earth, apart from roots, apart from moisture, apart from seed? This makes plain that nothing comes to be out of atoms, since every single thing possesses a nature proper and fixed to itself, a seed of its own, a law assigned to it from its very beginning. Indeed Lucretius, seemingly forgetting the very atoms he was defending, in his attempt to refute those who claim everything springs from nothing, used arguments that in fact undercut his own position. Here is what he wrote: if things arose out of nothing, every sort of thing could be born from anything whatsoever, and nothing would require a seed; and later he adds: nothing, then, must be thought capable of coming from nothing, since things need a seed from which each, once brought into being, may be carried forth into the gentle breezes of open air. Who could believe this man had any sense at all, saying such things without noticing he was contradicting himself? For this shows plainly that nothing arises through atoms, since the seed proper to each and every thing is fixed and definite — unless, that is, we are meant to believe that fire's own nature and water's own nature spring from atoms. And what of this: when substances of the hardest, most unyielding matter strike one another with enough force, fire is struck out? Surely atoms are not hiding concealed within iron or flint? Who locked them in there? Why don't they simply leap out on their own? Or how could seeds of fire possibly have kept surviving inside matter so intensely cold? I'll set aside flint and iron. Hold a glass globe filled with water up to the sun, and from the glare that bounces off the water, a flame is struck even in the bitterest cold. Are we meant to believe, then, that fire lurks inside water too? And yet without such a globe no fire can be kindled from the sun, even at the height of summer. Breathe upon wax, or let some faint vapor brush against a crust of marble or a sheet of metal, and little by little, through the tiniest droplets, water gathers and takes shape. In the same way mist rises from the breath of earth or sea: scattered, it dampens whatever it covers; or, gathered up and swept by wind toward the high mountains, it is packed together aloft into cloud and unleashes the heaviest downpours. So where, then, shall we locate the atoms of liquid — in the vapor, in the breath, in the wind? Yet nothing can exist within what can neither be touched nor seen. What, then, am I to say about living creatures, in whose bodies we see nothing shaped without reason, without arrangement, without purpose, without form — so much so that the exceedingly skillful and meticulous layout of every part and limb rules out mere chance and luck? But suppose we grant that limbs, bones, sinews, and blood really could be formed by atoms clumping together: what about sensation, thought, mind, memory, intellect — out of which seeds can those be assembled? "Out of the very smallest," he says. Then some must be larger than others — so how, in that case, can they be uncuttable? Moreover, if invisible things are what make up what cannot be seen, it follows that visible things must be what make up what can be seen. Why, then, does nobody see them? But whether you examine the invisible things inside a human being, or the tangible things that come before our eyes, who fails to see that both cases are built up according to a rational order? How, then, can things colliding without any reason at all produce something rational? For we observe that nothing in the entire universe lacks a supremely great and wondrous rational order within it — and since that order lies beyond human perception and intellect, to whom could it more rightly be assigned than to divine providence? Or do we imagine that while reason and craft shape a human likeness or statue, the man himself came about from fragments randomly crashing together? And what likeness to truth can any crafted object claim, when even the finest and most accomplished workmanship can copy nothing but a shadow, the mere outer contours of a body? Could human skill ever grant its own handiwork motion, or feeling? I will not even mention the faculty of sight, hearing, smell, and the astonishing functions of the other organs, both the visible and the hidden ones — what craftsman could ever construct a human heart, a voice, or wisdom itself? Is there, then, any sane person who imagines that what a human being cannot achieve through reason and deliberate planning could nonetheless be accomplished by atoms colliding and clumping haphazardly? See what absurdities they have tumbled into, all because they refuse to credit God with making and governing things. But let us grant them even this much — that earthly things arise from atoms: do heavenly things arise from them as well? They claim the gods are incorruptible, everlasting, and blessed, and reserve this exemption for the gods alone, so that the gods will not appear to have been compacted from a coming-together of atoms. For if the gods too had been formed out of atoms, they would be subject to dissolution, their component seeds someday breaking loose and reverting to their own nature. So then, if there is even one thing atoms did not produce, why not understand everything else the same way? But I ask: before these first-beginnings had ever generated the world, why didn't the gods build themselves someplace to live? It would seem that unless atoms had gathered and constructed the heavens, the gods would even now be dangling in the middle of empty space! By what plan, then, by what arrangement, did the atoms assemble themselves out of a chaotic heap, so that earth was gathered down below from some of them while the heavens were stretched out above, adorned with such variety of stars that nothing more magnificent could ever be dreamed up? Can anyone who beholds sights this vast, wonders like these, truly imagine that no plan, no providence, no divine reasoning produced them, but that such marvels were compacted out of fine, tiny crumbs? Isn't it practically a prodigy that a man was ever even born to say such things, or that anyone existed willing to believe him — men such as Democritus, his own student, or Epicurus, into whom this entire torrent of nonsense poured down from Leucippus's spring? But, as others claim, the world was made by nature — a nature devoid of both sensation and shape. This notion is far more absurd still. If nature made the world, it must necessarily have made it through design and reasoning, since whoever makes anything must have either the will to make it or the knowledge required to make it. If nature has no sensation and no shape, how could something possessing both sensation and shape ever arise from it? Unless, perhaps, one imagines that the exquisitely intricate, marvelous structure of living creatures could have been shaped and brought to life by something devoid of sensation — or that this entire arrangement of the sky, so providently calibrated to benefit living beings, simply sprang up all at once by some unknown accident, with no founder, no craftsman whatsoever behind it. If there exists anything, says Chrysippus, capable of producing what a human being — even one endowed with reason — cannot produce, that thing is certainly greater, stronger, and wiser than any human being. But a human being cannot fashion the heavens; therefore whatever produces, or has produced, such things exceeds humanity in skill, in design, in wisdom, and in power. Who, then, could this possibly be but God? As for nature itself, which some suppose to be, in effect, the parent of all things: if it has no mind, it will never achieve anything, never construct anything at all. For wherever there is no thought, there can be neither motion nor effective power. But if it relies on design to launch something, on reason to organize it, on skill to carry it out, on virtue to bring it to completion, and on power to rule and sustain it — why call it nature at all rather than God? Or if a coming-together of atoms, or a mindless nature, produced everything we see, then I want to know why it could construct the heavens yet could not build a city or a house, why it raised mountains out of marble yet failed to raise columns and statues. And surely the atoms ought to have assembled to produce these things too, given that they leave no possible arrangement untested! For it's no surprise that nature, lacking any mind, should have neglected to make such things. So what, then, is the truth? Surely it is this: when God set this work of the world in motion — a work than which nothing could be more orderly in arrangement, more fitting in usefulness, more magnificent in beauty, or greater in scale — he himself made whatever a human being could not have made, the human being himself included among them. Man, among them, received from him a fragment of his own wisdom, along with just enough reasoning power for earthly frailty to hold, so that he might see to his own needs by his own devices. But suppose that, within this commonwealth of the world, so to speak, no providence governs it, no god administers it, and no sense at all operates anywhere in this nature of things — then where, exactly, are we to imagine so skillful, so intelligent a thing as the human mind came from? For if the human body was molded out of clay — from which humus mankind took its very name — then the soul, which possesses wisdom, which commands the body, whose limbs obey it the way subjects obey a king and commander, and which can neither be seen nor grasped, could only have reached a human being by way of some wise nature. And just as mind and soul steer the entire body, so too does God steer the world. It hardly seems plausible that lesser, humbler things should have their own governance while the greater, highest things go ungoverned. Indeed Marcus Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations and in his Consolation, states that no earthly origin can be found for the soul: for there is nothing in souls that is composite or compacted, nothing that appears to have been born and shaped out of earth, nothing moist, nothing airy, nothing fiery about it at all. In these earthly natures there is nothing possessing the power of memory, of mind, of thought — capable of retaining the past, foreseeing the future, and grasping what is present — for such powers belong to divinity alone; nor indeed will it ever be discovered how they could have reached a human being except from God. Setting aside, then, two or three vain slanderers, since it stands established that divine providence governs the world just as it made the world, and since nobody would dare rank the view of Diagoras and Theodorus, or Leucippus's hollow invention, or the frivolity of Democritus and Epicurus, above the authority of those seven men of old called the wise, or of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the greatest philosophers, all of whom judged that providence exists — that other view, too, must be false: the one holding that the wise instituted religion out of fear and dread, so that uneducated men might be kept from wrongdoing by it. Were that true, then we have been made fools of by the ancient wise men. But if they invented religion to deceive us — indeed the whole human race — then they were not wise men at all, since falsehood never falls to a wise man. Yet suppose they really were wise: what extraordinary skill at deception would it take not merely to fool the unlearned, but to deceive Plato and Socrates too, along with Pythagoras, Zeno, and Aristotle — founders of the greatest philosophical schools — and dupe them all so effortlessly? Divine providence, then, does exist, exactly as all these men I have named perceived; by its power and might, everything we see has both been made and continues to be governed. For neither could such vastness of things, such arrangement, such consistency in preserving order and the seasons across so many ages, have ever arisen at all without a provident maker, nor could it have endured for so many ages without a powerful indwelling presence, nor be steered forever without a skilled, sentient ruler — as reason itself makes clear. Whatever possesses reason, after all, must necessarily have originated from reason. But reason belongs to a sentient, wise nature; and a wise, sentient nature can be nothing else but God. Since the world, then, possesses the reason by which it is both steered and held together, it must therefore have been made by God. And if God is the founder and ruler of the world, then religion has rightly and truly been established: for honor and reverence are owed to the author and shared parent of all things.