City of God 19.2–19.6

Chapter 2. How, having removed all the distinctions which are not sects but questions, Varro arrives at a threefold definition of the supreme good, of which one is nevertheless to be chosen.

In those three kinds of life also, namely one leisured, not slothfully but in the contemplation or investigation of truth, another busy in conducting human affairs, the third tempered from both kinds, when it is asked which of these should rather be chosen, it is not the end of good that is in dispute; what is at issue in that question is which of these three brings difficulty or ease in attaining or keeping the end of good. For the end of good, when anyone has reached it, at once makes him happy; but in learned leisure, or in public business, or when both are done in turn, no one is at once happy. For many can live in any of these three and err in seeking the end of good by which a man becomes happy. The question, then, about the ends of goods and evils, which makes each sect of philosophers, is one thing, and the questions about social life, about the hesitation of the Academics, about the dress and food of the Cynics, and about the three kinds of life, leisured, active, and tempered from both, are others; none of which is one in which the ends of goods and evils are discussed.

Accordingly, since Marcus Varro, by applying these four distinctions, namely from social life, from the New Academics, from the Cynics, and from this threefold kind of life, arrived at two hundred and eighty-eight sects, and any others that can be added similarly, he removes all of them, since they raise no question about the pursuit of the supreme good and therefore neither are sects nor are to be called sects, and returns to those twelve in which it is asked what the good of man is, by attaining which he becomes happy, in order to show that one of them is true and the rest false. For when that threefold kind of life is removed, two thirds of this number are taken away and ninety-six sects remain. When the distinction added from the Cynics is removed, they are reduced to half and become forty-eight. Let us also take away what was applied from the New Academics: again half remains, that is, twenty-four. Let what had been added about social life be likewise taken away: twelve remain, which that distinction had doubled to make twenty-four. Of these twelve, then, no reason can be given why they should not be held to be sects. For nothing else is sought in them than the ends of goods and evils. And when the ends of goods have been found, those of evils are surely their contraries. For these to become twelve sects, those four are tripled: pleasure, repose, both, and the primary things of nature, which Varro calls primigenia. For while these four, one by one, are sometimes subordinated to virtue, so that they seem to be sought not for their own sake but for the duty of virtue; sometimes preferred, so that virtue is thought necessary not for its own sake but for obtaining or keeping these; sometimes joined, so that both virtue and these are believed to be sought for their own sake: they make the number four threefold and arrive at twelve sects.

But of those four things Varro takes away three, namely pleasure, repose, and both; not because he disapproves of them, but because those primary things of nature contain in themselves both pleasure and repose. What need, then, is there to make three things out of these two, two when pleasure or repose is sought singly, and a third when both together, since the primary things of nature contain both them and many other things besides? Of three sects, then, he thinks it must be diligently treated which should rather be chosen. For true reason does not allow more than one to be true, whether it is among these three or somewhere else, as we shall see later. Meanwhile let us discuss, as briefly and plainly as we can, how Varro chooses one of these three. These three sects, then, arise when either the primary things of nature are to be sought for the sake of virtue, or virtue for the sake of the primary things of nature, or both, that is, both virtue and the primary things of nature, for their own sake.

Chapter 3. Which of the three sects seeking the supreme good of man Varro decides is to be chosen, following the opinion of the Old Academy on the authority of Antiochus.

Which of these three, then, is true and to be followed, he tries to persuade us in this way. First, since in philosophy the supreme good sought is not that of a tree, nor of a beast, nor of God, but of man, he thinks we must ask what man himself is. He perceives that in his nature there are two things, body and soul. And of these two he does not doubt at all that the soul is the better and far more excellent; but whether the soul alone is the man, so that the body is to it as the horse to the horseman (for the horseman is not man and horse, but the man alone, and yet he is called a horseman because he is in some relation to the horse); or whether the body alone is the man, in some relation to the soul, as the cup to the drink (for it is not the vessel and the drink which the vessel contains together that is called the cup, but the vessel alone; yet it is so called because it is fitted to contain the drink); or whether neither the soul alone nor the body alone, but both together, is the man, of whom one part is either the soul or the body, while he as a whole consists of both so as to be a man (as we call two horses yoked together a pair, of which whether the right or the left is a part of the pair, yet we do not call one of them, however it is related to the other, a pair, but both together). Of these three he chose the third, and thinks that man is neither the soul alone nor the body alone, but soul and body together. Accordingly he says that the supreme good of man, by which he becomes happy, consists of the goods of both, namely of the soul and of the body.

And therefore he thinks that those primary things of nature are to be sought for their own sake, and virtue itself too, which instruction implants as the art of living, and which is the most excellent good among the goods of the soul. Therefore this same virtue, that is, the art of conducting life, when it has received the primary things of nature, which existed without it, and existed even when instruction was still lacking to them, seeks all things for their own sake and at the same time itself too, and uses all of them together and itself, with this end, that it may delight in and enjoy them all, more or less as each is greater or less than the others, yet rejoicing in all, and despising some lesser things, if necessity demands, for the sake of obtaining or keeping greater ones. But of all goods, whether of mind or body, virtue sets nothing at all above itself. For it uses well both itself and the other goods which make man happy. But where it is not present, however many goods there are, they are not for the good of him whose they are, and therefore are no longer even to be called his goods, since they cannot be useful to him who uses them badly. This life of man, then, which enjoys virtue and the other goods of mind and body without which virtue cannot exist, is called happy; if it enjoys also any or several of the others without which virtue can exist, happier; but if absolutely all, so that no good at all of mind or body is lacking, most happy. For life is not the same as virtue, since not every life, but only wise life, is virtue; and yet life of some sort can exist without any virtue, but virtue cannot exist without any life. I would say this of memory and reason too, and of anything else of the kind in man. For these exist even before instruction, and without them there can be no instruction, and therefore no virtue either, which is certainly learned. But to run well, to be beautiful in body, to excel in great strength, and other things of this kind are such that virtue can exist without them and they without virtue; yet they are goods, and according to these men virtue loves them too for their own sake, and uses and enjoys them as befits virtue.

They say that this happy life is also social, loving the goods of friends for their own sake as its own and willing for them, for their sake, what it wills for itself; whether they are in the household, such as wife and children and all members of the household; or in the place where one's house is, such as a city, as are those who are called citizens; or in the whole world, as are the nations which human society joins to him; or in the universe itself, which is reckoned under the name of heaven and earth, as they say the gods are, whom they will have to be friends to the wise man, and whom we more familiarly call angels. About the ends of goods and, on the contrary, of evils, they deny that there is to be any doubt at all, and they affirm that this is the difference between themselves and the New Academics; nor does it matter to them at all whether anyone philosophizes, within these ends which they think true, in the Cynic or any other dress and manner of life. Of those three kinds of life, the leisured, the active, and that which is composed of both, they assert that the third pleases them. Varro asserts that the Old Academics held and taught these things, on the authority of Antiochus, the teacher of Cicero and of himself, whom Cicero indeed will have to seem in more points a Stoic than an Old Academic. But what is that to us, who ought rather to judge of the things themselves than to count it a great matter to know what each man thought about them?

Chapter 4. What the Christians think about the supreme good and the supreme evil, against the philosophers who have said that the supreme good is in themselves.

If, then, we are asked what the city of God answers when questioned about each of these, and first what it thinks about the ends of goods and evils, it will answer that eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death the supreme evil, and that therefore we must live rightly in order to obtain the one and avoid the other. For this reason it is written: “The righteous lives by faith”; since we do not yet see our good, and so must seek it by believing; nor is living rightly itself from ourselves, unless he who has given us the very faith by which we believe that we must be helped by him helps us as we believe and pray. But those who have thought that the ends of goods and evils are in this life, placing the supreme good either in the body or in the soul or in both, or, to put it more fully, either in pleasure or in virtue or in both; either in repose or in virtue or in both; either in pleasure and repose together or in virtue or in both; either in the primary things of nature or in virtue or in both, have wished with marvellous vanity to be happy here and to be made happy by themselves. The Truth has mocked them through the prophet, saying: “The Lord knows the thoughts of men,” or, as the apostle Paul set down this testimony: “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.”

For who is able, with any flood of eloquence whatever, to set out the miseries of this life? Cicero lamented it, as well as he could, in the Consolation on the death of his daughter; but how much is it that he could do? For those things that are called the primary things of nature, when, where, how can they be so well off in this life that they do not waver under uncertain chances? For what pain contrary to pleasure, what disquiet contrary to repose, cannot befall the body of the wise man? Certainly the amputation or crippling of limbs overthrows a man's soundness, deformity his beauty, weakness his health, weariness his strength, numbness or slowness his agility; and which of these cannot fall upon the flesh of the wise man? The posture of the body too and its movement, when they are seemly and fitting, are numbered among the primary things of nature; but what if some illness shakes the limbs with trembling? What if the spine is bent until the hands are put on the ground and makes the man in a way four-footed? Will it not pervert all the beauty and grace of standing and moving the body? What of the so-called primary goods of the mind itself, where they put first sense and understanding for the grasping and perceiving of truth? But what sense remains, and how much, if, to say nothing of other things, a man becomes deaf and blind? And where will reason and intelligence retreat, where will they be put to sleep, if he is made insane by some disease? When the frenzied say or do many absurd things, for the most part foreign to their own good purpose and character, indeed contrary to their good purpose and character, whether we think of them or see them, if we consider them worthily, we can scarcely hold back our tears, or perhaps we cannot. What shall I say of those who suffer the assaults of demons? Where do they have their intelligence hidden or buried, when the malignant spirit uses both their soul and their body according to his will? And who is confident that this evil cannot befall the wise man in this life? Then, what is the perception of truth in this flesh, and how great, when, as we read in the truthful book of Wisdom, “the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things”? Further, the impulse or appetite for action, if that is the right Latin name for what the Greeks call hormē, since they reckon it too among the primary goods of nature, is it not that by which are carried out even those pitiable movements and deeds of the insane which we shudder at, when sense is perverted and reason put to sleep?

Further, virtue itself, which is not among the primary things of nature, since it comes upon them later when instruction introduces it, though it claims for itself the summit of human goods, what does it do here but wage perpetual wars with vices, not outside ones but inside, not other people's but plainly our own and proper to us; above all that virtue which in Greek is called sōphrosynē and in Latin temperance, by which the lusts of the flesh are bridled, lest they drag the consenting mind into all manner of shameful deeds? For there is no lack of vice when, as the apostle says, “the flesh lusts against the spirit”; to which vice the contrary virtue exists when, as he also says, “the spirit lusts against the flesh.” “For these,” he says, “are opposed to one another, so that you do not do what you will.” But what do we will to do, when we will to be perfected by the end of the supreme good, except that the flesh should not lust against the spirit, and that there should not be in us this vice against which the spirit lusts? Since in this life, though we will it, we are not able to do it, we do at least this with the help of God: that we do not yield to the flesh lusting against the spirit by the spirit's giving way, and are not dragged to committing sin by our consent. Far be it, then, that as long as we are in this civil war we should believe that we have already attained the happiness which we wish to reach by conquering. And who is so wise as to have no conflict at all against lusts?

What of that virtue which is called prudence? Does it not with all its vigilance distinguish goods from evils, so that no error may creep in in seeking the former and avoiding the latter, and thereby itself testify that we are in evils or that evils are in us? For it teaches that it is evil to consent to sin and good not to consent to lust in order to sin. Yet that evil to which prudence teaches us not to consent, and temperance brings it about that we do not, neither prudence nor temperance removes from this life. What of justice, whose task is to give to each his own (whence there arises in man himself a certain just order of nature, that the soul should be subject to God and the flesh to the soul, and thus both soul and flesh to God)? Does it not show that it is still labouring at this work rather than already resting at the end of it? For the soul is the less subject to God the less it conceives of God in its very thoughts; and the flesh is the less subject to the soul the more it lusts against the spirit. As long, then, as this weakness, this plague, this sickness is in us, how shall we dare to say that we are already saved, and if not yet saved, how already happy with that final happiness? Now that virtue whose name is fortitude, in whatever wisdom, is the most evident witness of human evils, which it is compelled to bear with patience.

I wonder with what face the Stoic philosophers contend that these evils are not evils, when they admit that if they are so great that the wise man either cannot or ought not to bear them, he is compelled to inflict death on himself and depart from this life. But so great is the stupidity of pride in these men, who think that they have the end of good here and are made happy by themselves, that their wise man, that is, such as they describe with marvellous vanity, even if he is blinded, deafened, struck dumb, crippled in his limbs, tortured with pains, and if any other such evil that can be spoken or thought of falls upon him, by which he is forced to inflict death on himself, is not ashamed to call this life, set among these evils, happy. O happy life, which seeks the help of death to be ended! If it is happy, let him remain in it. How are those things not evils which conquer the good of fortitude, and compel that same fortitude not only to yield to them but even to rave, so that it both calls that same life happy and persuades him that it is to be fled? Who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be something to flee? But with an open voice of weakness they confess that it is to be fled. What reason is there, then, why they should not also, the neck of their pride broken, confess it to be wretched? Did that famous Cato, I ask, kill himself from patience or rather from impatience? For he would not have done it if he had not borne Caesar's victory impatiently. Where is fortitude? It yielded, of course; it gave way; it was so far overcome that it abandoned, deserted, fled a happy life. Or was it no longer happy? Then it was wretched. How, then, were those things not evils which made life wretched and something to be fled?

Therefore even those who have admitted that these things are evils, like the Peripatetics, like the Old Academics, whose sect Varro defends, speak more tolerably indeed; but their error too is remarkable, in that they contend that in these evils, even if they are so grave that they must be fled by a death inflicted by the sufferer on himself, life is nevertheless happy. “Tortures and torments of the body are evils,” he says, “and the worse the greater they can be; to be free of them one must flee from this life.” From what life, I ask? “From this one,” he says, “which is weighed down with such great evils.” Then surely it is happy amid those very evils on account of which you say it is to be fled? Or do you call it happy because you are allowed to depart from these evils by death? What, then, if by some divine judgment you were held in them and not allowed to die, nor ever permitted to be without them? Then at least you would call such a life wretched. It is not, then, therefore not wretched because it is quickly left. For if it were everlasting, it would be judged wretched even by yourself; so it should not seem to be no misery because it is brief, or, what is more absurd, be called happiness because it is brief misery. There is great power in those evils which compel a man, according to them even a wise man, to take away from himself that he is a man; though they say, and say truly, that this is in a way the first and greatest voice of nature, that a man should be reconciled to himself and therefore naturally flee death, being so much his own friend that he wishes and seeks vehemently to be a living creature and to live in this union of body and soul. There is great power in those evils by which this sense of nature is conquered, by which death is avoided in every way with all one's strength and efforts, and so conquered that what was avoided is wished for and sought, and, if it cannot come from elsewhere, is inflicted by the man himself on himself. There is great power in those evils which make fortitude a murderer; if indeed it is still to be called fortitude which is so conquered by these evils that the man whom it undertook as a virtue to rule and protect it not only cannot guard by patience, but is itself compelled besides to kill. The wise man ought indeed to bear even death patiently, but death that comes from elsewhere. But if, according to them, he is compelled to inflict it on himself, surely it must be admitted by them that those things are not only evils but even intolerable evils which compel him to do this.

The life, then, which is either pressed down by the burdens or lies exposed to the chances of such great and grievous evils would in no way be called happy, if the men who say this, just as, when they bring death on themselves, they yield to unhappiness conquered by increasing evils, so, when they seek the happy life, would deign to yield to the truth, conquered by sure reasons, and would not think that in this mortality they are to enjoy the end of the supreme good; where the virtues themselves, than which certainly nothing better or more useful is found in man here, are the more faithful testimonies of miseries, the greater the aids they are against the force of dangers, labours, and pains. For if they are true virtues, which cannot exist except in those in whom there is true piety, they do not profess to be able to bring it about that the men in whom they are suffer no miseries (for true virtues are not liars, to profess this), but that human life, which is compelled by so many and great evils of this world to be wretched, may be happy in the hope of the world to come, as it is also saved in hope. For how is that life happy which is not yet saved? Hence the apostle Paul too, speaking not of imprudent, impatient, intemperate, and unjust men, but of those who lived according to true piety and therefore had true virtues, says: “For in hope we have been saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” As, then, we have been saved in hope, so we have been made happy in hope; and as we do not yet hold salvation as present, so neither happiness, but we await it as future, and this with patience; because we are among evils which we must bear patiently until we come to those goods where there will be everything in which we may delight unspeakably, and there will be nothing which we must still bear. Such salvation, which will be in the world to come, will itself also be the final happiness. This happiness these philosophers, because they do not see it and will not believe it, try to fabricate for themselves here, a most false one, with a virtue as much the more deceitful as it is the more proud.

Chapter 5. On social life, which, though it is most to be desired, is often overthrown by many offences.

That they will have the life of the wise man to be social, we approve much more fully. For how would this city of God, of which we are now handling the nineteenth book of this work, either have begun at its rise, or progressed in its course, or reach its due ends, if the life of the saints were not social? But in the hardship of this mortality, who could count with how many and how great evils human society abounds? Who could reckon them? Let them hear a man in their comic poets saying, with the feeling and agreement of all men: “I married a wife; what misery I saw there! Sons were born; another care.” What of those faults in love which the same Terence recounts: “Wrongs, suspicions, enmities, war, peace again”? Have they not filled human affairs everywhere? Do they not happen for the most part even in the honourable loves of friends? Are not human affairs full of them everywhere, where we feel wrongs, suspicions, enmities, war as certain evils, but peace as an uncertain good, since we do not know the hearts of those with whom we wish to keep it, and even if we could know them today, we would certainly not know what they would be tomorrow? Who, moreover, are, or ought to be, more friendly to one another than those who are contained even in one house? And yet who is secure from that quarter, when such great evils have often arisen from their hidden plots, the more bitter the sweeter was the peace, which was thought true when it was most cunningly feigned? For this reason what Tullius says touches the hearts of all so as to force a groan: “There are no plots more hidden than those that lie concealed under the pretence of duty or under some name of kinship. For the man who is openly an adversary you can easily avoid by being on guard; but this hidden, internal, and domestic evil not only arises but even overwhelms you before you have been able to foresee and examine it.” For this reason too that divine voice, “And a man's enemies are those of his own household,” is heard with great pain of heart; because, even if one is so strong as to bear with an even mind, or so watchful as to guard with provident counsel against, what feigned friendship plots against him, yet he must necessarily be grievously tormented, if he himself is good, by the evil of those faithless men, when he finds them to be very bad, whether they were always bad and feigned themselves good, or were changed from goodness into this malice. If, then, the home, the common refuge in these evils of the human race, is not safe, what of the city, whose forum, the greater it is, is the fuller of lawsuits both civil and criminal, even if not only turbulent but, more often, bloody seditions and civil wars are quiet, from whose occurrence cities are sometimes free, but from whose dangers never?

Chapter 6. On the error of human judgments when the truth is hidden.

What of the very judgments of men on men, which cannot be lacking in cities, however much peace they enjoy? What do we think them to be like, how wretched, how lamentable? Since those judge who cannot see the consciences of those whom they judge. Hence they are often compelled to seek the truth by torturing innocent witnesses in a case that concerns another. What of when a man is tortured in his own case, and, while it is asked whether he is guilty, he is tormented, and, innocent, pays most certain penalties for an uncertain crime, not because it is discovered that he committed it, but because it is not known that he did not? And so the ignorance of the judge is often the calamity of the innocent. And what is more intolerable and more to be lamented, and watered, if it were possible, with fountains of tears: when the judge tortures the accused so as not to kill an innocent man unknowingly, it happens through the misery of ignorance that he kills, tortured and innocent, the man whom he had tortured so as not to kill an innocent man. For if, according to the wisdom of these philosophers, he has chosen to flee from this life rather than bear those tortures longer, he says that he committed what he did not commit. When he has been condemned and killed, the judge still does not know whether he has killed a guilty or an innocent man, whom he tortured so as not unknowingly to kill an innocent man; and so he both tortured an innocent man in order to know, and killed him while not knowing.

In these darknesses of social life will that wise judge sit, or will he not dare? He will sit, plainly. For human society, which he thinks it wicked to desert, binds him and draws him to this office. For he does not think it wicked that innocent witnesses are tortured in the cases of others; that those who are accused, often overcome by the force of pain and having confessed falsehoods about themselves, are even punished when innocent, after they have already been tortured when innocent; that, even if they are not punished with death, they often die in the tortures themselves or from them; that sometimes those who accuse, wishing perhaps to benefit human society so that crimes may not go unpunished, and unable to prove what they charge, because the witnesses lie and the accused himself holds out monstrously against the tortures and does not confess, are condemned by the unknowing judge, though what they charged was true. These so many and great evils he does not count as sins; for the wise judge does not do these things with the will to harm, but from the necessity of not knowing, and yet, because human society compels, from the necessity of judging too. This, then, is what we call certainly the misery of man, even if not the malice of the wise man. Or does he, from the necessity of not knowing and of judging, torture the innocent, punish the innocent, and is it not enough for him that he is not guilty, unless he is also happy besides? How much more considerately and worthily of a man does he recognize misery in this necessity, and hate it in himself, and, if he is piously wise, cry to God: “From my necessities deliver me!”