Against the Nations 2.50–2.68

You may say that there are good men in the human race, who are perhaps believed to be so because of comparison with the very bad. Who are these? Tell us. The philosophers, I suppose, who claim that they alone are most wise and have raised their eyebrows on the strength of this name: those, that is, who fight daily with their desires and strive with the stubborn resistance of virtues to drive and thrust out the passions rooted in their minds; who, so that they may not be provoked to vices by the prompting of any opportunity, flee from inheritances and wealth and take away from themselves the causes of falling. When they do and attend to this, they show most plainly that souls are liable to fall and prone to vices through weakness. But in our opinion, what is good by nature neither asks to be amended nor corrected; indeed it ought not even to know what evil is, if the form of each kind means to remain in its integrity. For a contrary cannot be implanted in its contrary, nor can evenness be contained in unevenness or sweetness in bitterness. He, then, who struggles to correct the inborn depravities of souls shows most plainly that he is imperfect and not approvable, however much he contends the contrary with every effort and persistence.

But our answer makes you laugh, because while we deny that souls are royal offspring, we do not say in return from what causes and origins they were produced. For what kind of crime is it either to be ignorant of something, or to confess without any pretense that you do not know what you do not know? Or which seems more worthy of mockery to you: we, who claim no knowledge of some dark matter, or the one who thinks that he knows most plainly, of himself, what surpasses human understanding and is wrapped in blind obscurity? If the nature of each thing is examined thoroughly, you are in the same position that you blame in us. For when you say that souls come down from the King himself and pass into human forms, you do not say anything ascertained and placed in the light of most manifest truth. For you guess; you do not know. You suspect; you do not hold. For if knowing is holding in mind what you yourself have seen or learned, you cannot say that you have ever seen any of the things you assert, namely that souls come down from a seat and region above. So you use conjecture, not the credibility of explicit knowledge. And what is conjecture but an uncertain opinion about things, and a throwing of the mind into hidden things with nothing set before it? So he who conjectures does not hold, nor does he walk in the light of knowledge. And if this is true and fixed, among upright and most wise judges this conjecture of yours in which you trust must also be counted as ignorance.

And yet, so that you may not think that only you are allowed to use conjectures and guesses, we can do the same, since what you ask is a common question. 'Where do human beings come from,' you say, 'and what are the souls of human beings, and where do they come from?' Where do elephants, bulls, deer, mules, and asses come from? Where do lions, horses, dogs, wolves, panthers come from, and what are the souls of those that live, and where do they come from? For it is not credible that their souls came from that Platonic mixing bowl which Timaeus prepares and mixes, or that the locust, the mouse, the shrew, the cockroach, the frog, and the centipede are believed to be animated and alive from it, since their cause and origin of birth is from the elements themselves, if hidden and most obscure principles for begetting the creatures that live in each of them are present in them. For we see some of the wise saying that the earth is their mother, others water, others joining to them the spirit of the air, and some saying that the sun is their maker and that, animated from his fires, they are moved by his vital motion. What if it is none of these, and there is some other thing, another cause, another principle, finally another power of a name unheard of and unknown to us, which fashioned the race of human beings and joined it to the constitution of things? Can it not be that human beings arose in this way, and that the authorship of their birth is not referred to the first God? For what reason do we think that great Plato, wise with piety and holiness, had when he removed the fashioning of man from the greatest God and transferred it to some lesser ones, and would not have the mixtures from which the souls of the human race were made be of the same purity as that from which he had made the soul of this universe, but that he thought the building of man unworthy of God, and the fashioning of a feeble thing unfitting to his greatness and eminence?

Since this is so, we believe, not absurdly or idly, that the souls of human beings are of a middle quality, as produced by beings that are not primary, subject to the law of death, of small and failing strength; and that they are granted everlastingness if they place the hope of so great a gift in God the Ruler, who alone has the power to bestow such things with corruption excluded. 'But this is a foolish belief of yours.' What is that to you, most silly and foolish man? Where do we harm you, or what injury do we do or inflict on you, if we trust that almighty God will take account of us when we begin to depart from our bodies and, as the saying is, to be rescued from the jaws of Orcus?

'Can anything happen, then,' someone will say, 'without the will of God?' We must consider this carefully and examine it with no small attention, lest, while we think we honor God by such a question, we slip into the opposite wickedness and destroy the eminence of his majesty. In what way, for what reason? Because if all things are brought about by his will, and nothing can occur or befall in the world apart from his nod, it necessarily follows that all evils too must be understood to arise by his will. But if we wish to say the opposite, refusing to lay the causes of the worst things on him, that he is conscious of no evil and the begetter of none, it will begin to appear either that the worst things happen against his will, or, what would be monstrous to say, without his knowledge, unaware and ignorant. But again, if we wish to say that there are no evils, as we find some have thought and held, all tribes and all nations will cry out against us, showing us their torments and the many forms of danger by which the human race is burned and torn at every moment. Then they will ask us: 'If there are no evils, why do you abstain from certain works and crimes? Why do you not do everything that impatient desire has ordered and commanded? Why, finally, do you fix punishments for the guilty by terrible laws?' For what more monstrous stupidity can be found than to maintain that there are no evils and yet to destroy and condemn sinners as evil?

When, overcome, we have agreed that evils exist, and have admitted that human affairs swarm with them ..., it will follow that they ask: 'Why then does almighty God not take these evils away, but allows them to exist and go on in stubborn continuity through all ages?' If we have understanding of God the King and Ruler and do not want to wander through the impious madness of guesses, we must answer that we do not know these things, and have never sought or studied to learn what could not be grasped by any faculties; and you will think it better, indeed best, to remain within the bounds of unknowing and ignorance rather than to say that nothing happens except by the will of God, so that it would be understood at the same time that he gives causes to evils and is the founder of countless miseries. 'Where then,' you will say, 'do all these evils come from?' 'From the elements,' say the wise, 'and from their inequality.' But how it can be that things which have no sense or judgment are said to be malicious and harmful, or whether he is not rather malicious and harmful who took up things that would be most wicked and hurtful for the accomplishment of some work, is for those who assert it to see clearly. What then of us? Where do we stand? There is no need for an answer. For whether we can say it or are less able and cannot, both are of small account with us; we do not think it a matter of great weight either to be ignorant of this or to know it, content to have laid down one thing only: that nothing harmful and ruinous proceeds from God the Ruler. This we hold, this we know, in this one truth of knowledge and understanding we stand: that nothing is done by him except what is saving for all, what is sweet, what is full of love, joy, and gladness, what has infinite and incorruptible pleasures, what each one would seek with all his prayers to befall him, and would think everything outside these ruinous and deadly.

All the other things that usually come up in questions and controversies, from what begetters they arose or by what authors they are made, we neither strive to know nor care to inquire into or track down: we leave all things to their own causes, and do not judge them joined or attached to what we seek. For what is there that human minds do not dare to shake and dissolve out of zeal for contradiction, though what they try to weaken is pure and clear and fortified with the seal of truth? Or again, what can they not assert with plausible arguments, though it is most plainly false, an evident and manifest lie? For when someone has persuaded himself that something is or is not, he loves to assert what he thinks and to outdo others in sharpness, especially if the matter is remote, hidden, and wrapped in the mist of nature. Some of the wise judge that the world was neither born nor will perish at any time; some that it is immortal, though they write that it was born and begotten; while a third group is pleased to say that it was born and begotten and will perish by the necessity of order. And though of these three opinions one must be true, still none of them lacks arguments by which to confirm their own doctrines and undermine and shake the teachings of others. Some teach and declare that this same world consists of four elements, others of two, a third group of one; there are some who say it is of none of these, but that atoms are its matter and first origin. And though one of these opinions is true, yet none of them is certain; likewise here too arguments are at hand for all, by which they establish that what they say is true and refute the falsehoods found in the opinions of others. So too some deny that there are gods; others say they doubt whether there are any anywhere; others that they exist but do not care for human affairs; still others maintain that they both take part in the affairs of mortals and administer earthly concerns.

Since this is so, and it cannot be otherwise than that one of all these is true, still they all fight with arguments, and none lacks something to say plausibly, whether in asserting their own views or contradicting the opinions of others. In no other and no unlike way do they discuss the condition of souls. For one thinks they are everlasting and survive the death of mortal bodies; another does not believe they survive, but that they perish with the bodies themselves; while it is the opinion of a third that they do not suffer anything at once, but that after the man has been laid aside some time is given them for life, and then they pass under the laws of mortality. And though all cannot share in the truth, yet all argue with such strong and powerful proofs that you cannot find what seems false to you, though you see things said on every side that are different and clash with contradictions. This surely would not happen if human curiosity could hold anything certain, or if what seemed to have been found were confirmed by the assent of all others. It is therefore a most empty thing and a superfluous work to put forth something as though you knew it, or to strive to want to know what, even if it is true, you see can be destroyed, or to accept as true what perhaps is not and is put forward in the manner of people who are raving. And rightly is it so. For we weigh and conjecture divine things not by divine but by human reasons, and as we think something deserved to happen, so we maintain that it must be. What then?

Are we alone ignorant, do we alone not know who is the maker of souls, who established them, what cause fashioned man, from where evils burst forth, or why the supreme King allows them to exist and be done and does not drive them from human affairs? Do you have any of these things ascertained and known? If you are willing to set aside the boldness of guesses, can you explain and set out whether this world that holds us was not born, or was established at some time? If it was established and made, by what kind of work, or for the sake of what? Can you bring forward and set out the reason why it does not remain fixed and immovable but is always carried around in circular motion? Does it turn itself of its own accord and will, or is it turned by the impulses of some power? What is the place and space itself in which it is situated and revolves? Infinite or finite, empty or solid? Does an axis resting on its outer poles support it, or does it rather carry itself by its own force and hold itself up by an inner breath? Can you, when asked, make plain and show most knowingly what opens snow into feathery flakes? What reason and cause was there that the first day did not rise from the west and end its light in the east? How does the sun itself, by one and the same contact, produce such various, indeed contrary, effects? What is the moon? What are the stars? Why does the moon not remain in one appearance, or why was it necessary for these fiery fragments to come together and be fixed throughout the whole body of the world? Why are some of them small, others larger and greater, some of dull light, others of sharper and brilliant clearness?

If what you want to know is ready at hand, and the knowledge of things lies open, explain to us and tell us in what ways and for what reasons rains come about, so that water is held suspended in the upper regions and in this middle air, though by nature it is a slippery thing, always inclined to flow and run down? Explain, I say, and tell us what drives the hail, what makes rain fall drop by drop, what makes the shower pour down, what spreads snow into feathers and little leaves; where the wind arises from and what it is; why the changes of the seasons were established, when one could have been set up and the sky could have had one appearance, so that the wholeness of things would lack nothing? What is the cause, what the reason, that the seas are salt, or that some waters of the earth are sweet or warm, others bitter or cold? From what kind of matter were the inward parts of human bodies compacted and established, from what were the bones made solid, what made the intestines, what made the veins hollow like pipes and passable? Why, when it would have been more useful to light us with several eyes against the danger of blindness, were we confined to the narrow limit of two? For what purpose were such infinite and countless kinds of beasts and snakes formed and brought forth? What do horned owls, screech owls, and buzzards do in the world? What do birds of omen and the other winged creatures? What do the kinds of ants and worms, born for various harms and ruin? What do fleas, shameless flies, spiders, shrews, mice, leeches, water-skaters? What do thorns, brambles, wild oats, darnel, the seeds of herbs or shrubs either fragrant to the nostrils or unpleasant in smell? Indeed, if you think anything can be known or grasped, tell us what wheat is, spelt, barley, millet, chickpea, bean, lentil, melon, cumin, leek, garlic, onion. For even if they are fruits for you and placed among the common kinds of food, it is not easy or ready to know what each one is, why they were shaped in such forms, whether there was some necessity that each thing should have no other flavors, smells, and colors than those it has, or whether they could have taken others; and then what these things themselves are, flavor, I mean, and the rest; from what reasons they derive the differences of their qualities? 'From the elements,' you say, 'and from the first origins of things.' Are the elements bitter, then, or sweet, of some smell or color, so that we should believe that the qualities in growing things, by which pleasantness arises or offense is caused to the senses, were distributed from their combination?

Since, then, the origins, causes, and reasons of so many and such great things escape you too, and you can neither say nor explain what was made or why, or why it ought not to have been, you tear and mangle our modesty, who confess that we do not know what cannot be known, and do not care to seek out or investigate what it is most clear cannot be grasped, though human conjecture reach out and stretch itself through a thousand hearts. And therefore Christ, though you are unwilling, is God, God, I say, Christ (for this must often be said, so that the hearing of the unbelieving may split and burst), speaking in the form of a man by command of God the Ruler. Since he knew that the nature of mortals is blind and can grasp no truth even of things placed before its eyes, yet holds as ascertained and known whatever it has persuaded itself of, and, for the sake of its guesses, does not hesitate to sow and press contentious questions, he commanded us to leave and put aside all these things, and not to direct fruitless thoughts to things removed far from our knowledge, but, as far as possible, to set out toward the Lord of things with our whole mind and soul, to be raised from these places and to carry over to him the uplifted movements of our hearts, to keep perpetual memory of him, and, though he cannot be formed by any imagining, still to picture to ourselves some breaths of the contemplation of him. For of all the things which the obscurity of august divinity contains, he alone is beyond doubt, he alone true, and one about whom no one can be in doubt except a madman of insane despair; whom it is enough to know, even if you know nothing else, and you will have attained the true and greatest knowledge, fixed on the knowledge of God, the Head of things.

'What is it to you,' he says, 'to investigate and inquire who made man, what the origin of souls is, who devised the causes of evils, whether the sun is larger than the earth or measures a foot in width, whether the moon shines with borrowed light or with its own brightness?' Things which it is no gain to know and no loss not to know. Leave these things to God and grant that he knows what is, why, or from where; whether it ought to be or not; whether something is without beginning or has its first origins; whether it is fitting that it be abolished or preserved, burned up, dissolved, or renewed with its wholeness restored. Your reason is not free to entangle you in such things and to care uselessly about things so remote. Your affair is placed in danger, the salvation of your souls, I mean; and unless you attach yourselves to the knowledge of God the Ruler, when you are released from the bonds of the body a cruel death awaits you, bringing not sudden extinction but consuming you over a length of time in the bitterness of tormenting punishment.

And do not let yourselves be misled or flattered by an airy hope because of what is said by certain smatterers who claim very much for themselves: that they are born of God and not subject to the laws of fate; that if they live rather strictly, his court lies open to them, and after the end of human life they are carried back, with no one hindering, as though to their ancestral home. Nor by what the magi promise, that they have prayers of recommendation, by which I know not what powers are softened and offer easy ways to those striving to fly up to heaven; nor by what Etruria promises in the Acherontic books, that by the blood of certain animals given to certain deities souls become divine and are drawn out from the laws of mortality. These are empty flatteries and the kindling of vain wishes. No one but almighty God can save souls, and there is no one besides who can make them long-lived and supply the breath of everlastingness, except him who alone is immortal and everlasting and bounded by no limitation of time. For since all the gods, whether those who are true or those who are said by rumor and opinion to exist, are immortal and everlasting by his will and the gift of his kindness, how can it be that they are able to give others what they themselves are, since they have it as another's and lent by the power of a greater? Let Etruria slaughter as many victims as it likes, let the wise deny themselves everything human, let the magi soften and soothe all the powers: unless what ... reason requires is given to souls by the Lord of things, and given ... by his command, they will greatly regret afterward that they made it a thing to laugh at, when they begin to come near the sense of destruction.

'But if Christ,' they say, 'was sent by God for this purpose, to free unhappy souls from the ruin of destruction, what did the former ages deserve, which were consumed by the condition of mortality before his coming?' Can you know what was done with the souls of the ancient and earliest mortals, whether they too were helped, cared for, and provided for in some way? Can you know, I say, what could have been learned from Christ's teaching: whether the ages since the human race began to exist on earth are infinite or finite; when souls were first bound to bodies; who was the author of that binding, indeed who was the maker of man himself; where the souls of former people went; in what parts or regions of the world they were; whether they were corruptible or the opposite; whether they could have come to the danger of dying ..., if Christ had not come as a preserver at the needful time? Lay aside these anxieties and leave questions unknown to you: the royal mercy was shared with them too, and the divine benefits ran equally through all; they were preserved, they were set free, and they laid aside the lot and condition of mortality. 'In what way, which ones, when?' If arrogance, conceit, and pride were absent from you, you could long ago have known these things from Christ as your teacher.

'But if Christ came as the preserver of the human race,' you say, 'why does he not free all without exception with equal generosity?' Does he not free equally who calls all equally? Or does he repel or spurn anyone from the Ruler's kindness, who gives the high, the lowest, slaves, women, and children alike the power of coming to him? The fountain of life is open to all, and no one is kept from or driven away from the right to drink. If you are so fastidious as to spurn the benefit of the gift offered you, indeed if you so excel in wisdom that you call what is offered by Christ a joke and nonsense, what is expected of him who invites you, whose only part is to set out the fruit of his kindness under the judgment of your own will? 'God is not the cause,' says Plato, 'of anyone's choice of a lot in life'; nor can another's will rightly be ascribed to anyone, since the freedom of the will lies in the power of the one who wills. Or must you be begged to deign to accept from God the benefit of salvation, and must the grace of divine goodwill be poured into your lap while you spurn it and flee as far as you can? Will you take what is offered and turn it to your use? You will have provided for yourself. Do you spurn, scorn, and despise it? You will have deprived yourself of the advantage of the gift. God forces necessity on no one; he terrifies no one with commanding fear. For our salvation is not necessary to him, so that he should suffer any gain or loss whether he makes us gods or allows us to be reduced to nothing by the dissolution of corruption.

'Rather,' he says, 'if God is powerful, merciful, and a preserver, let him change our minds and make us believe his promises against our will.' That is force, then, not grace nor the generosity of God the Ruler, but a childish ... struggle of the mind in eagerness to win. For what is so unjust as to wrest the wills of those who resist and are unwilling into the contrary, to force on them what they do not want and what their minds shun, to harm before you help, and, taking away their former opinion, to lead them over into a disposition and belief not their own? You who want to be changed and to suffer force, so that you may do and seize under compulsion what you do not want, why do you refuse to take up willingly what you want to do when changed and transformed? 'I do not want it,' he says, 'and I have no will for it.' Why then do you accuse God, as though he failed to bring help to you when you desired it? You not only spurn and flee his gifts and bounties, but call them empty words and pursue them with jokes and jests. 'Then unless I become a Christian, I cannot have hope of salvation?' It is so, as you yourself propose. For the part of giving salvation and conferring on souls what is fitting to bestow and necessary to apply has been enjoined on and handed over to him alone by God the Father, for hidden and inward reasons that make it so. For as certain gods have with you certain charges, rights, and powers, and you do not ask of any of them what is not within his power and right, so it is the prerogative of Christ alone to give salvation to souls and to add the breath of everlastingness. For if you believe that Father Liber can give a vintage but not healing, Ceres crops, Aesculapius health, Neptune one thing and Juno another, and that Fortune, Mercury, and Vulcan are each the givers of certain particular things, you must also accept this from us: that souls can receive the power of life and safety from no one except him whom the supreme King has set over this gift and office. The almighty Ruler willed this to be the way of salvation, this the door of life, so to speak; through him alone is there entrance to the light, and it has not been granted to creep in or break in any other way, all other ways being shut and fortified by an impregnable citadel.

So even if you are pure and cleansed from every stain of vice, and have won over and swayed those powers not to shut the ways and block the passage for you as you return to heaven, you will not be able by any efforts to reach the reward of immortality unless you have received what makes immortality itself as Christ's gift and have been admitted to the true life. As for your habit of reproaching us that our religion is new and born almost a few days ago, and that we ought not to have left the ancient religion of our fathers and passed over to barbarous and foreign rites, this is urged without any reason. For what if in this way we wanted to lay blame on those earlier and most ancient ages because, when crops were discovered, they despised acorns and rejected arbutus berries; because they stopped covering themselves with bark and wrapping themselves in skins after woven clothing was devised, handier in use and convenience; or because, when houses were built and more elegant developments introduced, they did not cling to their old huts nor prefer to remain like beasts under rocks and in caves? It is common to all, and handed down almost from the cradle, to prefer good things to bad, to set useful things before useless, and to pursue and seek what has been found more precious and more pleasing, and to fix on it the hope of safety and of saving benefits.

So when you charge us with turning away from the religion of our ancestors, you should look at the cause, not the act, and not set against us what we have left, but consider above all what we have followed. For if it is a fault or a crime to change one's opinion and pass from old institutions to other new things and preferences, that charge concerns you too, who have so often changed your life and customs, who have passed over to other habits and rites, condemning those of your ancestors. Do you have the people divided into five classes, as your ancestors once had? Do you create magistrates through the people? Do you know what the military, urban, and common assemblies are? Do you watch the sky, or make public business void by announcing unfavorable omens? If you prepare wars, do you display the signal from the citadel? Or do you practice the fetial law? Do you demand back what was seized by a formal declaration? Or when entering on the hazard of Mars, do you take hope of battle from the auspices of spear-points? In seeking office, do you keep the laws of age? In gifts and presents, the Cincian laws? In restraining expenses, the sumptuary laws? Do you keep perpetual fires burning in your inner rooms and kitchens? Do you make tables sacred by setting salt-cellars and images of the gods on them? When you marry, do you spread the couches with a toga and invoke the genii of husbands? Do you comb the hair of brides with the celibate spear? Do you carry the girls' little togas to Fortuna Virginalis? Do your matrons work in the atria of their houses, bearing witness to their industry? Do they abstain from drinking wine? Do their in-laws and relatives have the right to kiss them, to prove that they are sober and abstinent?

In ancient times on the Alban Mount it was not lawful to sacrifice any bulls except those of snowy whiteness: did you not change this custom and religious rule, and was it not established by a decree of the senate that reddish ones might be offered? When, under the reigns of Romulus and Pompilius, the entrails were burned for the gods thoroughly cooked and soft, did you not begin under King Tullus to offer them half-raw and barely warmed, despising the old observance? Before Hercules came into Italy, when by Apollo's advice Father Dis and Saturn were propitiated with human heads, did you not likewise change this custom by a clever trick and an ambiguity of words? Since, then, you yourselves have followed now those customs and now other laws, and have rejected and despised many things, either on recognizing your errors or on observing better ones, what have we done against common sense and judgment if we have chosen greater and surer things and have not allowed ourselves to be held by the religions of false beings?