Against the Nations 2.28–2.49

arguments. But so that we may not go away not more fully instructed, and may not be laughed at by you, how do you say that souls, when they are wrapped in earthly bodies, have no recollection of former things, when, placed in those very bodies and made almost insensible by their mixture with them, they hold firmly and faithfully what they did, suffered, said, or heard many years before, eighty, if you like, or more? For if it is brought about by the obstruction of the body that they do not remember what they knew long before and before they became human, they ought rather to forget what they did while shut up in bodies than what they did when placed outside and not yet joined to human beings. For what takes away the recollection of former things from those who enter, ought also to destroy by unremembering obliteration what is done within. For one cause cannot produce two effects contrary to each other, putting to sleep the memory of some things and allowing others to come into the recollection of the doer. But if the souls, as you call them, are hindered by the obstacle of the limbs from recollecting their arts and ancient knowledge, how, placed in these very bodies, do they remember and know that they are souls and have no bodily substance, that they are honored with the condition of immortality, what rank they hold in the universe, in what order they have been set apart by God the Father, in what way they came to these lowest regions of the world, what qualities from what circles they drew to themselves while they slid down into these places? How, I say, do they know that they were most learned and have lost what they knew through the obstruction of bodies? For they ought not to know even this, if the joining with the body had brought any damage to them: for to know what you were and what you are not today is not a sign of lost memory but the proof and evidence of memory kept.

Since this is so, stop, I pray, stop valuing things small and of slight worth at huge prices; stop enrolling man in the first classes of citizens when he is a proletarian, and in the first orders when he is rated by head count only, since he is poor, of a poor hearth and a poor hut, and never deserved to be called by the distinction of a patrician. For when you, as men of right and teachers of integrity, ought to break the conceit and arrogance on whose wings we are all lifted up and puffed out with empty vanity, you not only do not think that these evils happen, but, what is much worse, you have added causes by which vices may grow and incurable wickedness remain. For who is there, even of a character that always shuns infamy and disgrace, who, when he hears it said, especially by wise men, that souls are immortal and not subject to the laws of the fates, would not rush headlong into every crime, would not undertake and set about unlawful things carefree and unafraid, would not finally grant to his desires all that uncontrolled lust commanded, protected besides by the freedom of impunity? For what will prevent him from doing these things? Fear of a higher power and divine judgment? And how can one be terrified by the horror of any fear, who has been persuaded that he is as immortal as the supreme God himself, and that nothing can be judged by him concerning himself, since there is one immortality in both, and neither can be troubled by the power of the other, because of the equality of their condition?

'But there are the punishments told of in the underworld, of many forms and kinds of torment.' And who will be so dull and ignorant of logical consequences as to believe that the darkness of Tartarus, or rivers of fire, or swamps with muddy whirlpools, or the turning of revolving wheels can harm incorruptible souls? For what cannot be touched and is removed from the laws of dissolution, even if it is surrounded by flaming rivers, rolled in the mud of rushing streams, and covered by the fall of overhanging rocks and the ruins of huge mountains, must remain unharmed and untouched and take on no sense of deadly suffering. What of this, that this persuasion not only incites to vice by the very freedom of sinning, but also removes the reason for philosophy itself, and declares that it is taken up in vain because of the difficulty of superfluous labor? For if it is true that souls share in no end and go on with all ages in everlastingness, what danger is there in despising and neglecting the virtues, by which life is more cramped and rougher, and in giving oneself to pleasures and spreading unbridled the heat of immense desire through every kind of lust? Lest it grow languid with luxuries and be corrupted by the softness of vices? And how can what is immortal, what always exists and is subject to no suffering, be corrupted? Lest it be soiled and polluted by the foulness of shameful actions? And how can what has no bodily substance be polluted, or where can pollution find a seat, where there is no space in which the mark of that pollution can fix itself? But again, if souls go to the gates of death, as the opinion of Epicurus defines it, even so there is no adequate reason why philosophy should be pursued, even if it is true that souls are cleansed by it and made pure from all vice. For if they perish in common, and their sense and vital power is lost and extinguished together with their bodies, it is not only the greatest error but stupid blindness to curb inborn appetites, to confine life in narrow bounds, to grant nothing to nature, not to do what desires have commanded and urged, since no rewards of so great a labor await you when the day of death comes and you are released from the bonds of the body.

So it is a certain middle state, the doubtful and ambiguous nature of souls, that gave philosophy its place and found a reason for pursuing it: while one person fears danger from wrongs committed, another conceives good hopes if he does no crime and passes his life in duty and justice. That is why there is dispute among learned men and those endowed with excellent minds about the quality of souls: some say they are of mortal nature and cannot sustain a divine substance, others that they are everlasting and cannot sink into mortal nature. That this happens is brought about by the law of their middle state: the former have arguments at hand by which souls are found to be capable of suffering and perishing, and the latter in turn do not lack arguments by which they are shown to be divine and immortal.

Since this is so, and we hold it handed down from the highest authority that souls are placed not far from the gaping jaws of death, but can nevertheless become long-lived by the gift and kindness of the supreme Ruler, if only they try and strive to know him (for knowledge of him is a kind of leaven of life and the glue of a thing otherwise liable to fall apart), and then, laying aside savagery and inhumanity, take on gentler dispositions, so that they may be ready for what will be given: why are we judged by you as brutish and stupid if, because of these fears, we have given and handed ourselves over to a Deliverer, to God? Against harmful stings and the venomous bites of snakes we often seek remedies and protect ourselves with amulets bought from the Psylli, the Marsi, and other peddlers and vagabonds; and so that cold and scorching suns may not trouble us, we prepare the protection of houses and clothing with anxious care.

When the fear of death, that is, of the destruction of souls, is set before us, do we not act from that sense of self-interest by which we all love ourselves, in holding fast and embracing the one who promises to free us from such danger, and setting him before our very souls, if the exchange is fair? You place the salvation of your souls in yourselves and trust that you become gods by your own inward effort; but we promise ourselves nothing from our weakness, seeing that our nature has no strength and is overcome by its own passions in every struggle. You think that as soon as you are released and depart from the knots of your limbs, wings will be ready for you, by which you can go to heaven and fly to the stars; we shrink from such boldness and do not think it lies in our power to seek the things above, since we are uncertain even of this, whether we deserve to receive life and to be taken away from the law of mortality. You take it for granted that you will return of your own accord, with no one hindering, to the Lord's court as to your own home; but we neither hope that this can happen without the Lord of things, nor think that so much power and freedom is granted to any human being.

Since this is so, what so great injustice is this, that we seem foolish to you for this belief, when we see that you both believe similar things and live in the same expectation? If we are thought worthy of mockery because we promise ourselves such a hope, the same mockery awaits you, who claim for yourselves the hope of immortality. If you hold and follow some reasoning, grant us too some share in that reasoning. If Plato in the Phaedrus, or another of that band, had promised us these joys, that is, a way of escaping death, and could provide it and bring his promises to fulfillment, it would have been fitting for us to take up the worship of the one from whom we expected so great a gift and bounty. Now, since Christ has not only promised it but also shown by such mighty works that it can be fulfilled, what strange thing are we doing, or on what grounds do we bear the charge of folly, if we bow before the name and majesty of him from whom we hope for both, to escape a tormenting death and to be granted eternal life?

'But if souls,' they say, 'are mortal and of a middle quality, how can they become immortal from middle qualities?' If we say that we do not know this, and have only believed it on hearing it from a more powerful one, where will our belief be seen to have gone wrong, if we have believed that nothing is difficult, nothing hard for the almighty King, and that what is impossible for us to do is possible for him and ready at the measure of obedience? For is there anything that can oppose his will? Or does it not necessarily follow that what he wills to be comes to be? Or shall we gather from our own distinctions what can or cannot happen, and not consider that our reasonings are as mortal as we ourselves are, and of no weight before the Ruler? And yet, you who do not believe that souls are of a middle quality and held on the middle border between life and destruction: are not absolutely all those whom opinion supposes to exist, gods, angels, demons, or whatever other name they have, themselves of a middle quality, and wavering in the condition of an uncertain lot? For if we all grant that there is one Father of things, alone immortal and unbegotten, and nothing at all bearing any name is found before him, it follows that all those whom the opinion of mortals believes to be gods were either begotten by him or brought forth at his command. If they were brought forth and begotten, they are later in order and time; if later in order and time, they must have a beginning and the start of birth and life; and what has an entrance and the start of a life that begins, necessarily must also have a setting.

'But the gods are said to be immortal.' Not by nature, then, but by the will and gift of God the Father. In the same way, then, as he has granted the gift of immortality to gods brought forth on a certain day, he will also deign to give souls immortality, though cruel death may seem able to extinguish them and to destroy them, reduced to nothing, in an annihilation from which there is no return. That divine Plato, thinking many things worthy of God and not common to the multitude, in the discourse and book which is entitled Timaeus, says that the gods and the world are by nature corruptible and by no means free from dissolution, but are held together in everlasting bonds by the will of God their King and Ruler. For what is rightly bound and tied with the most perfect knots is preserved by the goodness of God, and cannot be dissolved by any other than him who bound it, if the matter requires, and ... granted by his saving command. If then the matter is so, and it is not fitting to think or believe otherwise, why do you wonder that souls are said by us to be of a middle quality, when Plato says that the deities themselves have middle natures, but that a continuous and unending life is supplied to them by the Ruler's goodwill? For if perhaps you do not know it, and it was unknown to you before because of the newness of the matter, receive it late and learn it from him who knows and brought it into the open, Christ: that souls are not daughters of the supreme King, nor did they begin to know themselves and to be spoken of in the substance of their own name by being begotten by him, as is said; but they have some other begetter, separated from the Ruler by very many degrees of dignity and power, yet of his court and noble by the eminence of lofty birth.

But if souls, as rumor has it, were the Lord's offspring and the primary generation of his power, they would have lacked nothing for perfection, being produced by most perfect power; they would all have had one understanding and one agreement; they would always dwell in the royal court, and would not, leaving behind the seats of blessedness in which they had learned and retained the most august teachings, foolishly seek these earthly regions, to live wrapped in dark bodies among phlegm and blood, among these bags of dung and the filthiest jars of sacked-up fluid. 'But these parts too had to be inhabited, and therefore almighty God sent souls here as into some colonies.' And what use are human beings to the world, or for what purpose are they necessary, so that they may be believed to have had to live in this part not in vain and to be tenants of an earthly body? Do they contribute some part to completing the integrity of this mass, and unless they had been added, would the sum of the universe be imperfect and lame? What then, if there were no human beings, would the world cease from its functions, would the stars not complete their courses, would there be no summers and winters, would the blasts of the winds fall silent, and would rains not fall to the earth from gathered and hanging clouds to bring relief to droughts? Yet all things must go on their own courses and not depart from the continuity of their established order, even if no name of man were heard in the world and this globe fell silent in the stillness of empty solitude. How then is it boasted that an inhabitant had to be added to these regions, when it is clear that nothing comes back from man to the perfection of the world, and that all his efforts always look to private advantage and never depart from the limits of his own interest?

For what does it profit the world, to begin with serious things, that there are great kings here? What do tyrants and lords, and countless other very great powers? What do generals most experienced in military matters, skilled in taking cities, soldiers steadfast and unconquerable in cavalry battles or infantry fighting? What do orators, grammarians, poets? What do writers, logicians, musicians? What do pantomimes, farce actors, players, singers, those who blow the trumpet, the flute, and the reed pipe? What do runners, boxers, charioteers, trick riders, stilt walkers, rope dancers, jugglers? What do pickle sellers, salt makers, fishmongers, perfumers, goldsmiths, fowlers, weavers of winnowing fans and rush baskets? What do fullers, wool workers, embroiderers, cooks, confectioners, mule drivers, pimps, butchers, prostitutes? What do other kinds of peddlers, of professions and arts, for counting which every lifetime is too short, contribute to the plan and constitution of the world, so that it could not have been founded without human beings and would not attain its completeness unless the strife of a wretched and superfluous creature were joined to it?

Unless perhaps the Lord of things (which is the height of rashness to utter with a human mouth) sent souls begotten from himself here for this purpose: that those who had been goddesses with him, free from bodily contact and earthly bounds, should be plunged into human seed, spring from the genitals of women, utter and prolong the silliest wailing, suck at milky breasts, smear and soak themselves with their own filth, and then be brought to silence by the rocking of a frightened nurse and the sound of rattles? Did he send souls for this purpose: that those who had been simple and of a goodness until then harmless should learn among men to pretend, to dissemble, to lie, to cheat, to deceive, to entrap with flattering humility, to turn over one thing in the mind and promise another in the face, to ensnare, to trick the unsuspecting with wiles and ambushes, to seek out the poisons of malice through countless arts, and to be shaped by the fickleness of deceit to the use of the moment? Did he send souls for this purpose: that, living in peaceful and quiet tranquility, they should take from their bodies causes by which they would become wild and savage, should carry on feuds and enmities, wage wars with one another, storm and overthrow cities, oppress themselves and hand themselves over to the yoke of slavery, and finally become one the property of another, their condition of birth changed? Did he send souls for this purpose: that, made forgetful of the truth and having forgotten what God is, they should pray to lifeless images, address wood, bronze, and stones as divine powers, ask help with the blood of slaughtered animals, make no mention of him, and indeed that some of them should doubt that they themselves exist, or deny outright that any God exists? Did he send souls for this purpose: that those who in their own seats had been of one mind, equal in understanding and knowledge, after putting on mortal forms should disagree in the differences of their opinions; that one thing should seem just to some, another useful and right; that they should contend about what is to be sought and what avoided; that some should set one boundary of evils and goods, others another; that obscurity should confront those who desire to know the truth of things; and that, as though bereft of the light of their eyes, they should see nothing certain and be led astray on the doubtful paths of guesses?

Did he send souls for this purpose: that, while the other animals are fed on what grows of itself and is produced without sowing, and do not seek for themselves the protection or covering of houses or clothing, a pitiable necessity should be imposed on these, so that at the greatest expense and with unending sweat they should build themselves houses, make coverings for their limbs, gather various furniture for their daily need, borrow aids for their weakness from dumb animals, and do violence to the earth so that it should not produce its own grasses but raise crops it was ordered to; and when they had poured out all their blood in subduing the soil, should lose the hope of their labor through blight, hail, and drought, and finally, driven by famine, should fall upon human corpses and be separated and cut off from the form of human beings by wasting leanness? Did he send souls for this purpose: that those who, while they dwelt with him, had never had any love of possessions, should become most greedy here and burn for gain with an insatiable craving of the heart; should dig through high mountains and turn the unknown inward parts of the earth into materials of other name and use; should penetrate hidden nations at the risk of their lives and, by carrying goods from place to place, always look for high prices and low; should practice greedy and most unjust usury and increase their sleepless nights by counting thousands drawn from the blood of the wretched; should always extend the boundaries of their possessions, and, though they made whole provinces one farm, should wear out the forum with lawsuits over a single tree, over a furrow, and take up implacable feuds with friends and brothers?

Did he send souls for this purpose: that those who had once been gentle and did not know how to be moved by savage feelings should build themselves meat markets and amphitheaters, places of blood and public impiety: in the one to see men devoured and torn apart by the mangling of beasts, and others killing themselves for no fault of theirs but for the pleasure and enjoyment of the spectators, and to spend the very days on which such great wickedness was committed in common rejoicing and consecrate them with festive merriment; and in the other to tear apart the flesh of wretched animals, some snatching one portion and others another, as dogs and vultures do, to grind them with their teeth and give them to a most cruel belly; and, amid such savage and horrible customs, to weep for their lot, those whom the straits of poverty kept from such tables, as if those others lived blessed and happy? Were their mouths and faces to be polluted by such cruel fare? Did he send souls for this purpose: that, forgetful of divine weight and dignity, they should buy gems, pebbles, and pearls at the cost of chastity, seek paints for bodies meant to be looked at, wrap their necks in chains, pierce the lobes of their ears, narrow their foreheads with bands, darken their eyes with soot; and that, in the forms of men, they should not blush to wave their hair with curling irons, to make the skin of their bodies smooth, to walk about with bare knees, and by every other kind of adornment

to lay aside the vigor of manhood and grow soft into the dress and luxuries of women? Did he send souls for this purpose: that some should infest the roads, others cheat the unsuspecting, substitute forged wills, prepare poisoned drinks, break into houses by night, tamper with slaves, steal cattle, betray their trust and play traitor; that they should drive distaste for flavors from the palate, know how to keep in the fat that runs off when cooking fattened fowls, and make twisted cakes and sausages, forcemeats, rissoles, Lucanian sausages, sow's udder along with these, and savory mince in jelly? Did he send souls for this purpose: that beings of holy and most august name should practice here the arts of music and piping, puff out their cheeks in blowing flutes, lead off obscene songs, stir up rhythmic sounds with the clapping of foot-clappers, by which another wanton multitude of souls might be loosed into disorderly movements of their bodies, dance and sing, turn in dancers' circles, and finally, lifting their buttocks and hips, sway with the quivering of their loins? Did he send souls for this purpose: that among males they should become catamites, among females harlots, harp-girls, and lute-girls, that they should prostitute their bodies for sale, make their cheapness public to the people, ready in brothels, available in the arches, refusing to submit to nothing, and prepared to defile even their mouths for money? What do you say, you offspring and progeny of the first Deity?

Did those wise souls, then, brought forth from the first causes, know these kinds of disgrace, crimes, and wickedness, and were they ordered ... to dwell in these parts and be clothed with the covering of a human body so that they might practice, carry on, and celebrate these evils? And is there any mortal who has received the sense of any reason, who would think that the world was ordered for them, and not rather established as a seat and dwelling in which every wickedness might be committed daily, all misdeeds carried out, plots, frauds, tricks, greed, robberies, violence, crime, audacity, obscenity, disgrace, outrage, and all the other evils which human beings throughout the world bring forth with harmful minds and devise for each other's ruin? 'But they came of their own will,' you say, 'not by the King's sending.'

And where was the almighty Father, where the authority of royal majesty, to prevent them from departing and not allow them to slip into headlong pleasures? For if he knew that they would degenerate by change of place (and he must have known it, as the establisher of all causes), or that something would come to them from outside to make them forget their dignity and honor, then (I would beg him a thousand times to pardon me) no one other than he himself is the cause of all crimes: since he allowed them to have free right to wander, though he foresaw that they would not keep the state of their integrity. And so it turns out that it makes no difference at all whether they came of their own accord or obeyed his command, since by not forbidding what ought to have been forbidden he made the crime his own by his inaction, and by neglecting to restrain them he permitted it first.

But far be the monstrousness of so wicked an opinion as to believe that almighty God, the sower and founder, the begetter of great and invisible things, begot souls so fickle, of no weight, gravity, or constancy, liable to fall into vices, inclined to every kind of sin, and that, knowing them to be such and of this kind, he ordered them to go into bodies, so that, clothed in their prisons, they should be driven daily under the storms and tempests of fortune, now doing shameful things, now suffering obscene ones; that they should perish in shipwrecks, collapses, and conflagrations of fire; that poverty should press some, beggary others; that some should suffer the mangling of wild beasts, others die of the venom of flies; that some should walk lame, others lose their sight, others sit with their joints bound together; that finally they should be exposed to all the diseases which unhappy and pitiable mortality endures, torn by ... various punishments; and that then, forgetting that they are of one source, one parent and head, they should tear up and break the rights of kinship, overthrow their own cities, lay waste lands as enemies, make slaves of free people, assault virgins and other men's wives, hate one another, envy the joys and happiness of others, and then all curse, carp at, and tear one another with the bite of savage teeth.

But far be it, to say the same things again and more often, so monstrous and wicked a persuasion: that God, the salvation of things, the head of all virtues and the pillar of kindness, and, to extol him with human praises, most wise, just, making all things perfect and keeping the measures of his integrity, either made anything lame and falling short of right, or was the cause of miseries or dangers to anything, or ordained, commanded, and prescribed to flow from his own constitution the very acts by which human life is carried on and passed. These things are beneath him and destroy the power of his greatness; and so far is he from being believed the author of these things, that whoever has conceived that man was begotten by him falls into the charge of sacrilegious impiety: man, an unhappy and wretched thing, who grieves that he exists, who hates and mourns his condition, who understands that he was produced for no other reason than that evils should not lack material through which to spread, and that there should always be wretched beings, on whose torments some hidden power and cruelty hostile to humanity might feed.

'But if God is not the parent and begetter of souls,' you say, 'by what author were they begotten, and in what way were they brought forth?' If you want to hear it without disguise and not derived from any display of words, we confess again that we do not know this, we are ignorant of it; and we think that the knowledge of so great a matter surpasses not only our weakness and frailty but also that of all the powers in the world and of those who have usurped divinity in the opinions of mortals. 'But must we show whose they are, when we deny that they are God's?' That by no means necessarily follows. For if we deny that flies, beetles, and bugs, dormice, weevils, and moths are the work of the almighty King, it cannot therefore be demanded of us that we say who made and established them. For we can, without blame, not know who gave them their origin, and still maintain that things so superfluous, so vain, so irrelevant to any purpose, indeed sometimes even harmful and bringing damage to necessary things, were not produced by the supreme God.

So too here, when we deny that souls are the offspring of God the Ruler, it does not at once follow that we must explain from what parent they came forth and by what causes they were produced. For who forbids us either not to know from where they arose and came forth, or to know that they are not God's progeny? 'On what ground,' you say, 'in what way?' Because it is most true of all truths and most certain of all certainties that nothing is done, made, or established by the Ruler, as has often been said, except what ought and is fitting to be done, what is full and complete and finished in the perfection of its ... and integrity. Now we see that human beings, that is, souls themselves (for what are human beings but souls bound to bodies?), show by the perversity of countless vices that they are not of patrician race but born of middling families. For we see some who are savage, criminal, bold, rash, headlong, blind, false, dissemblers, liars, proud, arrogant, greedy, covetous, lustful, inconstant, weak, and unable to keep their own resolutions: which they surely would not be if a princely nobility claimed them, and they drew the honors of their birth from those descended from the Head of things.

'But there are also good men among human beings,' you will say, 'wise, just, of blameless and most correct character.' We raise no question whether there have ever been any such, in whom that very integrity of which you speak lacked nothing at all. Let them be most honorable and praiseworthy, let them have held the highest peak of perfection, and let their life never have limped in any slip: but we ask to hear how many they are or were in number, so that we may measure from the size of the multitude whether the opposition made is fair and balanced by an equal counterweight. One, two, three, four, ten, twenty, a hundred: certainly limited in number and perhaps confined within a list of names. But the human race ought to be judged and weighed not from a few good people but from all the rest. For the part is in the whole, not the whole in the part; and the whole ought to draw the portions to itself, not the whole be fitted to the portions. For what if you were to say that a man disabled in all his limbs and wailing from sharp torments is healthy because he suffers no pain in one little fingernail; or that the earth is golden because on the little wart of one hill there are tiny grains from which gold is produced when they are melted down and obtained by careful gathering? The whole of an element proves the quality of its matter, not grains of dust blown by the wind. Nor is the sea at once sweet if you add and pour in drops of milder water of some number: for that tiny amount is swallowed up in the immense; and what, spread through the whole, is lost and absorbed in the vastness of a great body must be counted not merely of little but of no weight.