Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
God, then, bound and fastened together with sinews the framework of the body—what we call the bones—joining them at nodes, so that the mind, whenever it wished to move forward or to hold back, might use them like reins, and with no labor and no exertion at all, but with the least effort, could govern and bend the mass of the whole body. These he then covered with flesh, as suited each region, so that whatever was solid should be enclosed and hidden. Likewise he wove veins through that same flesh, like streams branching through the entire body, through which moisture and blood running everywhere might irrigate all the limbs with the juices of life; and having shaped that flesh in the manner fitting to each kind and place, he covered it over with skin laid on top: which he adorned in some creatures with beauty alone, in others clothed with bristles, in others armored with scales, in others decked with splendid feathers. But here is God's wonderful device: that one basic plan and one bodily arrangement should present countless varieties of form. For in almost all things that breathe there is the same sequence and order of members: first the head, and joined to it the neck; then to the neck the chest is attached, and from it the arms project; the belly clings to the chest, and to the belly in turn the genitals are joined; last of all come the thighs and feet. Nor do only the limbs keep their order and placement the same in every creature, but the parts of the limbs as well. For in the head itself the ears hold a fixed place, the eyes a fixed place, likewise the nostrils, and the mouth too, and within it the teeth and the tongue. And though all these are the same in every living thing, still there is an endless and manifold variety of shapes, because the features I have named are drawn out longer or drawn in shorter, caught up in lines that differ in countless ways. And is this not divine as well: that among so vast a multitude of living things, each single animal is most beautiful in the form proper to its own kind, so that if any feature were exchanged from one to another, nothing could seem more useless for function or more unsightly to behold? Suppose you gave the elephant a long neck, or the camel a short one, or gave feet or hair to serpents—creatures whose stretched-out length required only that their backs, marked with spots and buoyed by the smoothness of scales, should glide along in slithering, winding coils. In four-footed animals, by contrast, the same craftsman drew the chain of the spine down from the top of the head, carried it on beyond the body, and tapered it into a tail—whether to cover the shameful parts of the body out of decency, or to guard them because of their tenderness, or so that certain small and harmful creatures might be driven off from the body by its motion. Take that member away, and the animal becomes incomplete and helpless. But where reason and hands exist, it is no more necessary than a covering of hair would be—so perfectly does each thing fit its own kind, that nothing could be imagined uglier than a four-footed beast without hair, or a man covered in it. Yet although man's very nakedness has a wondrous power toward beauty, this alone was not fitting for the head. So God covered the head with hair, and since it was to sit at the very top, he adorned it like the crowning roof of a building. And this adornment was not gathered into a perfect circle or shaped round like a cap, lest the bareness of certain areas make it unsightly, but let flow loosely in some places and drawn back in others, as suited the fittingness of each region. So the brow is fenced about, hair flows down from the temples in front of the ears, its topmost part is gathered as if into a crown, and the whole back of the head, being covered, presents a picture of wondrous grace. And as for the beard, it is scarcely believable how much it contributes—to signaling that a body has reached maturity, to telling male apart from female, to giving strength and manliness their proper dignity—so that the whole plan of the work would clearly have failed to hold together, had anything been made otherwise.
Now I shall set out the design of the whole human being, and explain the uses and arrangement of each limb, both those exposed and those hidden in the body. Since, then, God had decided to make man alone, of all living things, a creature of heaven, while making all the rest creatures of earth, he raised man upright for the contemplation of the sky and set him on two feet—clearly so that he might look toward the very source from which he came—while he bent the others down toward the earth, so that, since they have no expectation of immortality, their whole bodies might be cast down toward the ground and given over to the belly and to feeding. Man's upright bearing alone, then, and his lofty stance, and his face shared with and near to God the Father, testify to his origin and to his maker. His mind, all but divine, because it has been allotted mastery not only over the living things on earth but over his own body as well, is set at the very top of the head as in a lofty citadel, from which it surveys and beholds everything. God did not shape this dwelling of the mind stretched flat and elongated as in the dumb animals, but round and globe-like, because the roundness of a sphere belongs to reason and form in their perfection. So the mind, and that divine fire within it, are covered as if by a sky of their own. Having clothed its topmost summit with its natural garment, he furnished and adorned the front part, called the face, with the members it needed for its service. First, he enclosed the orbs of the eyes within hollow sockets—from which hollowing Varro thinks the forehead (frons) took its name—and he willed there to be neither fewer nor more than two, since for beauty no number is more perfect than two, as with the two ears also. The doubling of these is scarcely believable how much beauty it lends, both because each side is adorned to match the other, and so that sounds coming from either direction may more easily be gathered in. For the very shape of the ears is fashioned in a marvelous way, since God did not want their openings to be bare and unenclosed—which would have been both less becoming and less useful, since sound could slip past the narrow gap of a simple hollow unless it were caught within a curved recess and held back by an echo—the openings themselves resembling those small vessels used to fill jars with a narrow mouth. These ears, then—whose name is given from 'drawing in' voices, whence Virgil says he 'drew in the voice with these ears'; or because the Greeks call voice itself 'akoe' from hearing, and by a change of letter 'aures' are named as it were 'audes'—God the craftsman did not wish to form of soft skin, which would take away their beauty by hanging loose and flaccid, nor of hard, solid bone, lest they be unfit for use through being stiff and immovable; but he devised something between the two, so that a softer cartilage should bind them and give them a firmness at once supple and flexible. In these the sole function established is hearing, just as in the eyes it is seeing. Of these the subtlety is especially inexplicable and wondrous, because their orbs, bearing a likeness to gems, he covered on the side that needed to see with translucent membranes, so that the images of the things placed opposite might, gleaming as in a mirror, penetrate to the inner sense. Through these membranes, then, that faculty called the mind looks out upon what is outside—lest you suppose, perhaps, that we see by the impact of images striking us, as the philosophers argue, since the function of seeing ought to belong to that which sees, not to that which is seen; nor by a stretching of air joined to the ray of sight, nor by an outpouring of rays, since if that were so, we would see more slowly than we turn our eyes, until the stretched air together with the ray, or the poured-out rays, reached the thing to be seen. But since we see in the very same instant, and often, while our attention is elsewhere, we nonetheless still perceive all the things set before us, it is truer and more evident that it is the mind which looks through the eyes at what lies opposite, as through windows glazed with translucent glass or a transparent stone. And for this reason the mind and the will are often read in the eyes. To refute this, Lucretius used a most inept argument. For he says, if the mind sees through the eyes, it would see better with the eyes gouged out and dug away, since doors torn out along with their posts let in more light than when they are shut. Surely he himself—or rather Epicurus, who taught him this—must have had his own eyes dug out, not to see the gouged sockets, the torn fibers of the eyes, the blood flowing through the veins, the flesh growing over the wounds, and finally the scars closing over, capable of admitting no light at all—unless perhaps he wanted eyes to be born like ears, so that we would see not so much through eyes as through mere openings: than which nothing could be made uglier in appearance or less useful in function. For how little could we see, if the mind, from deep within the inner recesses of the head, were straining through the narrow chinks of small hollows! As if one wished to look through a reed pipe—one would surely perceive no more than the pipe's own narrow bore allows. And so, for the purpose of seeing, it was necessary rather that the members be gathered into a rounded form, so that sight might be cast widely, and that these should sit at the front of the face, left free to take in everything around them. And so the ineffable power of divine providence fashioned two closely matching orbs and bound them in such a way that, while they could not turn all the way around, they could still move and bend as needed. And these orbs he willed to be filled with a pure, clear fluid, in the middle part of which little sparks of light are held enclosed, which we call the pupils, in which, pure and fine as they are, the sense and faculty of seeing is contained. Through these orbs, then, the mind directs itself so as to see, and by a wonderful arrangement the sight of both eyes is mingled and joined into one.
Here I would like to expose the folly of those who, wishing to show that the senses are deceptive, gather up many instances in which the eyes are mistaken—among them this one, that to the mad and the drunk everything appears doubled, as though the cause of this error were obscure. The reason is simply this: eyes come in a pair. Now listen to how this actually works. Vision arises from the mind's focused attention. Given that the mind, as noted above, treats the eyes the way one treats windows, this condition affects not merely the drunk or the deranged, but sober, sane people just as much. For if you bring something too close, it will appear double: there is a fixed distance and space at which the lines of sight of the two eyes converge. Likewise, if you turn your attention backward, as if to think, and relax the mind's focus, then the sightline of each eye separates, and each begins to see on its own. If you focus your attention again and direct your gaze, whatever appeared double comes together into one. What wonder, then, if the mind, undone by the poison and power of wine, cannot direct the eyes to see properly—just as the feet, too, grow weak for walking when the sinews go numb—or if some violent fit of madness raging in the brain breaks apart the harmony of the eyes? And this is so true that it can never happen to those who are already one-eyed, even if they become insane or drunk, that they see anything doubled. Therefore, since the reason why the eyes are deceived is plain, it is clear that the senses themselves are not false: for either they are not deceived at all, if they are sound and whole, or if they are deceived, still the mind is not deceived, since it recognizes their error.