Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| We ought, then, to attempt what is possible and what lies within the reach of our nature. For the plausibility of the inquiries pursued in dialogues leads the greater part of us astray from the truth of things as they are, and this has indeed happened to many of the philosophers, who spend idle talk on arguments and on the examination of the nature of what exists. For whenever the magnitude of the subject overpowers their examination of it, they conceal the truth by certain crooked methods; and so it comes about that they hold contradictory opinions and fight against one another's doctrines, and this while claiming to be wise.
2| From this have come uprisings of the people and harsh judgments by those in power, who believed that the ancestral custom was being corrupted; and ruin has often followed for the philosophers themselves. Socrates, for instance, carried away by dialectic, making the worse arguments the better, and toying at every turn with arguments for and against, was put to death through the envy of his own kinsmen and fellow citizens. Pythagoras too, who claimed to practice self-control above all others, was caught in a lie about his silence; for the things the prophets had foretold long before, which he had learned while staying in Egypt, he proclaimed to the Greeks of Italy as though they had been revealed by God to him personally.
3| And Plato himself, the gentlest of them all, who first accustomed the minds of men to rise from the things of sense to the things of the intellect, which remain ever the same, and taught them to lift their eyes to things on high, set forth first a God who is above essence, and in this he did well. Beneath him he placed also a second, and he divided them into two essences in number, although the perfection of both is one, and the essence of the second God has its existence from the first. For the first is the Maker and governor of the universe, plainly transcending all things, while the one who comes after him, having served his commands, refers the cause of the constitution of all things back to him.
4| Strictly speaking, then, there would be one God, who takes care of all things and exercises providence over them, having set all things in order by his Word. And the Word, being himself God, is also the Son of God. For what other name could anyone give him besides the title of Son without falling into the gravest error? For surely the Father of all things would rightly be considered the Father of his own Word as well.
5| Up to this point, then, Plato kept his good sense; but in what follows he is found to miss the truth widely, bringing in a multitude of gods and assigning shapes to each. This in fact became a contributing cause of the greater error among the unthinking part of mankind, who do not look to the providence of the most high God but worship images of the gods fashioned in the forms of human beings and of other animals. So it has come about that a nature and learning of the greatest worth, deserving of high praise, being mixed with such stumbles, is left impure and unclear.
6| Yet he seems to me to catch himself and set the error right, where he plainly affirms that God breathed his own Word into us, clearly showing that the spirit of God is a rational soul. He divides all things into two kinds, the intelligible and the sensible: the one . . . , the other composed of a joining of body; the one grasped by the mind, the other conceived by opinion together with sense perception. Hence what partakes of the holy spirit, being uncompounded and indissoluble, is eternal and has been allotted everlasting life, while the sensible, being wholly dissolved according to the same principle by which it was put together, has no share in everlasting life.
7| Admirable too is his teaching in what follows: that those who have lived well, that is, the souls of holy and good men, are consecrated after their departure from the body in the fairest regions of heaven. It is also teaching that profits life; for who, trusting him and expecting this happiness, will not practice the best life, justice and self-control, and turn away from vice? In keeping with this he added that the souls of the wicked are swept along by the streams of Acheron and Pyriphlegethon like wreckage and wander there.
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