Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
They also complain that man is subject to sickness and to untimely death — indignant, evidently, that they were not born gods. 'No,' they say, 'but we show by this very fact that man was made with no providence at all, since he ought to have been made otherwise.' But what if I show that this very thing was provided for with great reason — that he should be liable to be assailed by sickness, and that his life should often be cut off in the middle of its course? For when God had determined that the living thing he had made should, of its own accord, pass over into death, so that it might be capable of death itself, which is the dissolution of its nature, he gave it a frailty by which death could find an entrance for dissolving the creature. For if it were made of such strength that sickness and disease could not approach it, then not even death could come near, since death is the sequel of sicknesses. And how could untimely death be kept away from a being for whom only a 'ripe' death had been fixed? For surely their wish is that no man should die before reaching the far end of a hundred years. How can their reasoning hold together amid such conflicting demands? For in order that no one could die before a hundred years, some strength that is immortal would have to be granted him; and once that is granted, the very condition of death is necessarily excluded. But what sort of thing could this be, that would make a man solid and unassailable against sickness and outward blows? He plainly consists of bones, sinews, organs, and blood — and none of these substances has the toughness to hold sickness and mortality permanently at bay. So then, if man is to be indissoluble up to the age they think proper to fix, from what material will they assign him a body? Everything that can be seen and touched is frail. It remains for them to fetch something from the sky, since on earth there is nothing that is not weak. Since, then, man had to be so fashioned by God that he would at some point be mortal, the very nature of the case demanded that he be formed of an earthly and frail body. It is therefore necessary that he receive death at some time or other, because he is a bodily thing; for any body whatever is dissoluble and mortal. Most foolish, then, are those who complain of untimely death, since the condition of his nature makes room for it. It follows in the same way that he must also be subject to sicknesses; for nature does not allow weakness to be absent from a body that is destined at some point to be dissolved. But let us suppose it could happen as they wish — that men should be born on the condition that no one be subject to sickness or death unless, having completed the span of his years, he has come to extreme old age. Do they not see, if it were established so, what would follow — namely that at every other time he could in no way die at all? But if he can be kept from food by someone else, he will be able to die. The logic of the matter, then, demands that a man who cannot die before a fixed day would have no need of nourishment from food, since food can be withheld. But if he has no need of food, he is no longer a man but has become a god. So, as I noted earlier, the real grievance beneath their complaint about human frailty is simply this — that men were not brought into being as deathless, eternal beings. 'No one ought to die except in old age.' And yet mortality cannot be joined together with immortality. For a being who dies in old age was never truly immortal in his youth; whoever is destined to die eventually cannot be a stranger to death's condition, and no immortality worth the name can have a boundary fixed upon it. The upshot: because everlasting life is barred to him altogether while a mortality bounded by time is granted instead, whatever his age, dying remains simply what he is. The necessity, then, fits together on every side — it neither ought to have happened otherwise, nor would it have been permissible. But these people do not see the logic of what follows, because they went wrong once at the very starting point: for once divine providence was excluded from human affairs, it necessarily followed that everything must have come into being of its own accord. From this they invented those swarms of tiny seeds and their chance collisions, because they could not see the true origin of things. Once they had backed themselves into that corner, necessity already compelled them to suppose that souls are born together with bodies and likewise perish together with bodies; for they had assumed from the start that nothing comes about by a divine mind. And this assumption itself they could prove no other way than by pointing to things in which the reasoning of providence might seem to limp. So they found fault precisely with those things in which providence expressed its own divinity most wonderfully — the very matters I have related concerning sicknesses and untimely death — when they ought instead to have considered what necessarily follows once those premises are granted. And what follows is what I have said: if man were not liable to sickness, he would need neither roofs nor clothing. For why would he fear winds or rains or cold, whose force lies in bringing on sicknesses? He received wisdom, in fact, precisely so that he might fortify his own frailty against harmful things. It follows of necessity that, since he takes on sicknesses for the sake of preserving reason, he must also always be capable of receiving death, because one whom death cannot reach must necessarily be unshakeable. But weakness carries within it the condition of death, whereas wherever there is unshakeable strength, neither old age nor the death that follows old age can find a place. Besides, if death were fixed to a certain age, man would become utterly insolent and would lack all humanity. For nearly all the bonds of humanity by which we hold together with one another arise out of fear and the awareness of our own frailty. This is why weaker, more fearful animals cluster together — lacking the strength to defend themselves alone, they rely instead on safety in numbers — while the stronger creatures live apart, confident in their own force. If man too had, in the same way, strength enough on hand to ward off dangers, and needed no other's help, what fellowship would there be, what mutual respect, what order, what reason, what humanity among men? Or what would be more loathsome than man, what more savage, what more monstrous? But because he is weak and cannot by himself live without other men, he seeks fellowship, so that life in common may become both more adorned and more secure. You see, then, that the whole rational structure of man rests above all on this: that he is born naked and frail, that he is afflicted with sicknesses, that he is struck down by untimely death. If these things were taken away from man, reason and wisdom too would necessarily be taken away. Yet I dwell too long on matters already obvious, given how clear it is that not one thing exists, nor could ever have come to exist, apart from providence. If I wished now to argue point by point about the whole of God's works, the material would be endless. But I set out to speak only of the single body of man, so as to show in it how great the power of divine providence has been — restricting myself, at least, to those matters that are graspable and open to view; for the things that belong to the soul cannot be submitted to the eyes or grasped. For now we are speaking of the very vessel of man that we see.
In the beginning, when God was fashioning living creatures, he did not wish to gather and roll them together into a round shape, so that they could move for walking and bend easily in any direction; instead, out of the top of the body itself he brought forth the head. Likewise he brought forth certain limbs at greater length, called feet, so that by alternating movements, fixed to the ground, they might carry the creature wherever its mind directed, or wherever the need of seeking food urged it on. And from the little vessel of the body itself he made four projections stand out: a pair behind, which in all creatures are the feet, and likewise a pair nearest the head and neck, which offer living things various uses. Among cattle and wild beasts, the forward limbs match the hind ones, whereas in man they take the form of hands — made not to bear weight in walking, but to grasp and to craft. A third arrangement also exists, where those same forward limbs become neither feet nor hands, but wings — rows of set feathers granting the power of flight. Thus one basic design serves different forms and uses. And in order to hold the very bulk of the body together firmly, he built, by linking larger, shorter bones to one another, something like a keel — what we call the spine — and did not wish to form it from one continuous bone, lest the creature lack the ability to walk and to bend itself. From roughly the middle of it he extended ribs on either side — that is, crosswise, flat bones — which, gently curved and drawn almost into a circle upon themselves, cover the inner organs, so that the parts which needed to be softer and less sturdy could be protected by the embrace of that solid framework. At the top of this structure, which we said resembles a ship's keel, he set the head, in which would reside the governance of the whole living creature; and it was given this name, as Varro writes to Cicero, because from it (caput) the senses and sinews take their beginning (capiunt). Now those limbs we said were put forth from the body for the sake of walking, doing, or flying, he wished to consist of few and large bones — neither too long, on account of quick mobility, nor too short, on account of firmness. A creature may have two such limbs, as man does, or four, as a four-footed animal does; yet none of them were made solid, lest sluggishness and heaviness slow down the walking, but hollow, and filled inside with marrow to preserve the vigor of the body. And these he did not finish off as an unbroken length, but gathered their extremities into thicker knots, so that they could be bound more easily by sinews and turned more safely — hence they are called joints (vertibula, from 'turning'). These knots, solidly fixed, he covered with a smooth kind of coating, called cartilage, so that they could be bent without friction and without any sensation of pain. Yet he did not shape them all in one single way. Some he made simple and rounded into a circle, precisely at those joints where the limbs needed to move in every direction, as at the shoulders, since it is necessary for the hands to be moved and turned in any direction whatever; but others he made broad and even and rounded toward one side only, precisely at those places where the limbs needed only to bend, as at the knees, the elbows, and the hands themselves. For just as it was both handsome and useful for the hands to be able to move in every direction from the point where they arise, so too, if the same freedom of movement had been given to the elbows, such motion would have been both useless and unseemly. For the hand, having lost the dignity it now has, would then, through excessive mobility, resemble a trunk, and man would plainly be a snake-handed creature — a form marvelously realized in that most monstrous beast, the elephant. For God, wishing to display his providence and power through the wondrous variety of many things, since he had not extended that animal's head far enough for its mouth to reach the ground — which would have been a horrible and hideous thing — and since he had armed that very mouth with so many projecting teeth that even if it could reach the ground, the teeth would still deprive it of the capacity to feed, brought forth between them, from the top of its brow, a soft and flexible limb by which it could grasp and hold whatever it wished, so that neither the projecting size of its teeth nor the shortness of its neck should hinder its ability to take in food.
At this point nothing holds me back from taking up, once again, a refutation of Epicurus's foolishness — since every raving word of Lucretius traces back to him. To show that living creatures were born not by any craft of the divine mind, but, as is his habit, by chance, his claim was that, at the world's outset, countless other creatures of strange form and enormous size once came into being, but that they could not survive, because either the capacity to take in food, or the means of mating and reproducing, had failed them. Plainly, in order to make room for his atoms, he wanted to exclude divine providence. But since he saw that in all things that breathe there is a wonderful rational design of providence at work, what folly — what madness! — was it to say that there had once been monstrous creatures in which reason was absent? Since, therefore, all the things we see were born together with reason — for the very act of being born cannot be brought about except by reason — it is plain that nothing at all devoid of reason could have been generated. For it was foreseen in advance, in fashioning each and every creature, how far they should use the service of their limbs for the necessities of life, and how far, once bodies were joined together, the offspring so produced should preserve every kind of living creature according to its species. For if a skilled architect, when he decides to build some great structure, first of all considers what the overall shape of the finished building will be, and measures out beforehand what place a light weight will occupy, where the mass bearing a great load should stand, what the intervals between the columns should be, and where and how the flow, exit, and catch-basins of falling water should be — all this, I say, he provides for in advance, so that whatever is necessary for the completed work may be laid out together with the very foundations — why should anyone think that God, in constructing living creatures, did not foresee beforehand what would be necessary for living, before he gave life itself? For life certainly could not hold together unless the things by which it holds together had already been made. Epicurus, then, saw the cleverness of divine reason at work in the bodies of living creatures, but in order to make good on what he had rashly assumed earlier, he added another piece of madness to match the first. For he said that eyes were not born for seeing, nor ears for hearing, nor feet for walking, since these limbs were born before there was any use of seeing, hearing, or walking, but that the functions of all these arose only after they were born. I fear that refuting such monstrous absurdities may seem no less absurd itself, but I am willing to play the fool, since I am dealing with a fool, lest he think himself too clever. What do you say, Epicurus? Were eyes not born for seeing? Then why do they see? 'Afterward,' he says, 'their use appeared.' Their birth, then, was for the purpose of seeing — since seeing is, in fact, the one thing they are capable of doing. Likewise, the very use of the other limbs shows for what purpose they were born — a use that could in no way exist unless all the limbs had been made so orderly, so providently, that they could have that use. For what if one were to say that birds were not born for flying, nor wild beasts for raging, nor fish for swimming, nor men for understanding, when it is plain that living creatures serve that very nature and function for which each was generated? But of course one who has lost hold of truth's very foundation must necessarily go astray forever. For if all things are born not by providence but by the chance collisions of atoms, why has it never once happened by chance that those first elements came together in such a way as to produce a creature that heard with its nostrils, smelled with its eyes, and saw with its ears? For if the first-beginnings leave no arrangement whatever untried, monstrosities of this sort ought to be generated every day, in which the order of the limbs would be reversed and their use utterly different. But since every kind of creature, and every limb within each kind, keeps its own laws and order and assigned uses, it is plain that nothing has come about by chance, since the ordering of divine reason is preserved without fail. But we shall refute Epicurus on other points elsewhere; for now let us continue, as we began, discussing providence.