Against the Academics 3.37–3.45

"Why, then, did such great men choose to carry on perpetual and stubborn contentions so that knowledge of truth should seem to befall no one? Hear now a little more attentively, not what I know, but what I think; for I was keeping this for the end, to explain, if I could, what the whole plan of the Academics seems to me to have been. Plato, the wisest and most learned man of his time, who spoke in such a way that whatever he said became great, and said such things that, however he said them, they did not become small, is said after the death of Socrates his master, whom he had loved singularly, to have learned much also from the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras, not content with Greek philosophy, which was then either almost nothing or certainly very hidden, after he had been moved by the disputations of a certain Pherecydes of Syros to believe that the mind is immortal, had heard many wise men, traveling far and wide. So Plato, adding to the Socratic charm and subtlety which he had in morals the knowledge of natural and divine things which he had carefully received from those I have mentioned, and joining to them dialectic as the shaper and judge of those parts, which either is wisdom itself or without which wisdom cannot exist at all, is said to have composed the perfect discipline of philosophy, about which there is no time to discourse now. It is enough for my purpose that Plato held that there are two worlds: one intelligible, in which truth itself dwells, and this sensible one, which it is clear we perceive by sight and touch; so that the former is true, the latter like the true and made in its image; and therefore truth concerning the former is, as it were, polished and made clear in the soul that knows itself, while concerning the latter not knowledge but opinion can be produced in the minds of fools; and that whatever was done in this world by those virtues which he called civic, similar to other, true virtues which were unknown except to a few wise men, could be called only truthlike."

"These and other things of this kind seem to me to have been preserved, as far as they could be, among his successors and guarded as mysteries. For these things are not easily perceived except by those who, cleansing themselves from all vices, have claimed for themselves a different way of life, more than human; and whoever, knowing them, should want to teach them to any men at all sins gravely. So I suspect that Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, when he had come, after hearing and believing certain things, to the school left by Plato, which Polemo then held, was regarded with suspicion and did not seem one to whom those Platonic and as it were sacrosanct doctrines should easily be revealed and entrusted until he had unlearned what he had received from others and brought into that school. Polemo dies; Arcesilas succeeds him, a fellow pupil of Zeno, but under Polemo's teaching. Therefore, since Zeno was delighted with a certain opinion of his own about the world and above all about the soul, for whose sake true philosophy keeps watch, saying that it is mortal and that there is nothing beyond this sensible world and nothing is done in it except by body (for he thought even God himself was fire), it seems to me that Arcesilas, when that evil was spreading widely, most wisely and usefully hid the opinion of the Academy completely and buried it like gold to be found by posterity at some time. So, since the crowd is more inclined to rush into false opinions, and, from familiarity with bodies, it is very easily but harmfully believed that everything is bodily, this very sharp and very humane man undertook rather to unteach those whom he suffered to have been badly taught than to teach those whom he did not think teachable. From this were born all the things attributed to the New Academy, because the ancients had no need of them."

"But if Zeno had at some time woken up and seen both that nothing can be grasped except such as he himself defined and that nothing of that kind can be found in bodies, to which he attributed everything, this kind of disputation, which had blazed up from great necessity, would long ago have been entirely extinguished. But Zeno, deceived by an image of constancy, as it seemed to the Academics themselves and as it also seems to me, was stubborn, and that pernicious belief in bodies lived on in whatever way it could down to Chrysippus, who (for he was very able) gave it great strength to spread more widely, had not Carneades, sharper and more watchful than the others before him, resisted on that side so well that I wonder that opinion had any strength even afterward. For Carneades first laid aside that shamelessness, as it were, of quibbling, by which he saw Arcesilas had been not a little discredited, so as not to seem to want to speak against everything for show; instead he proposed to himself specifically to tear down and overthrow the Stoics and Chrysippus."

"Then, when he was pressed on every side with the charge that if he assented to nothing the wise man would do nothing (O wonderful man, and yet not wonderful, for he flowed from the very springs of Plato!), he wisely noted what sort of actions they approved, and, seeing them to be like some true ones, he called what one should follow in action in this world the truthlike. For he knew skillfully, and hid prudently, what it was like; and he also called it the probable. For whoever looks at the original approves well of the image. For how does the wise man approve, or how does he follow what is like the truth, when he does not know what the truth itself is? So they knew and approved false things, in which they noticed a praiseworthy imitation of true things. But since it was neither lawful nor easy to show this to the profane, as it were, they left to posterity, and to those they could at that time, a kind of sign of their opinion; while those good dialecticians, mocking and laughing, they forbade to raise a question about words. For these reasons Carneades is also said to have been the founder and author of the Third Academy."

"Then this conflict lasted down to our Tully, already plainly wounded and about to breathe its last breath into Latin literature. For nothing seems to me more inflated than to say so many things so copiously and ornately while not thinking so. Yet by these winds that straw Platonist Antiochus was, as it seems to me, sufficiently scattered and dispersed. For the herds of the Epicureans set up their sunny stables in the minds of pleasure-loving peoples. Antiochus was a hearer of Philo, a man, as I think, most circumspect, who had already begun as it were to open the gates to the retreating enemy and to call the Academy back to the authority and laws of Plato (although Metrodorus too had tried to do this earlier, who is said to have been the first to admit that the Academics did not hold directly that nothing can be grasped, but had necessarily taken up such weapons against the Stoics). So Antiochus, as I had begun to say, having heard Philo the Academic and Mnesarchus the Stoic, had crept into the Old Academy, as though it were empty of defenders and secure with no enemy, like an ally and citizen, bringing in some evil from the ashes of the Stoics that would violate the sanctuaries of Plato. But Philo, taking up those weapons again, resisted him until he died, and our Tully crushed all his remnants, unable while he lived to bear that anything he had loved should be shaken or contaminated. So, not long after those times, when all obstinacy and stubbornness had died away, that face of Plato, which is the most purified and bright in philosophy, shone out, the clouds of error being parted, above all in Plotinus, a Platonist philosopher judged so like him that one would think they had lived together, but there is so much time between them that one must think Plato lived again in him."

"So now we see hardly any philosophers but Cynics, Peripatetics, or Platonists; the Cynics because a certain freedom and license of life delights them. But as to learning and doctrine and the morals by which the soul is cared for, since there have not been lacking very sharp and skillful men who taught in their disputations that Aristotle and Plato agree with each other in such a way that they seem to disagree only to the unskilled and less attentive, there has been distilled, I think, over many centuries and many contentions, one discipline of the truest philosophy. For this is not the philosophy of this world, which our sacred rites most rightly detest, but of another, intelligible world. To it this most subtle reasoning would never call back souls blinded by the manifold darkness of error and smeared with the deepest filth from the body, had not the most high God, out of a certain clemency toward the people, bent and lowered the authority of the divine intellect even to a human body itself; roused not only by its precepts but also by its deeds, souls have been able to return to themselves and to recover their homeland even without the contest of disputations."

"This is what I have meanwhile persuaded myself, probably, as I could, about the Academics. If it is false, it is nothing to me, for whom it is enough that I no longer think that truth cannot be found by man. But whoever thinks the Academics held this, let him hear Cicero himself. For he says that they had the custom of hiding their opinion and of revealing it to no one except those who had lived with them right up to old age. What it was, God knows; but I think it was Plato's. But that you may grasp briefly my whole purpose: whatever human wisdom may be, I see that I have not yet perceived it. But since I am in my thirty-third year, I do not think I should despair of attaining it someday. Despising all the other things that mortals think good, I have resolved to devote myself to searching for it. And since the reasonings of the Academics deterred me not lightly from this task, I am, I think, sufficiently fortified against them by this discussion. Now no one doubts that we are impelled to learn by a twofold weight, of authority and of reason. For me, then, it is certain that I will never depart at all from the authority of Christ; for I find none stronger. But as for what must be pursued by the most subtle reason (for I am now so disposed that I long impatiently to grasp what truth is not only by believing but also by understanding), I trust that I shall meanwhile find among the Platonists what is not opposed to our sacred teaching."

When they saw that I had finished speaking, although it was already night and something had even been written after a lamp was brought in, those young men still waited most intently to see whether Alypius would promise to answer, even on another day. Then he said: "I am ready to affirm that nothing has ever turned out so much to my liking as that I leave today's discussion defeated. Nor do I think this joy should be mine alone. So I will share it with you, my fellow contestants, or rather our judges, since perhaps the Academics themselves also wished to be defeated by their posterity in this way. For what could be seen or shown more delightful to us than this charm of speech, more weighed than this seriousness of thought, more ready than this goodwill, more skilled than this learning? I can by no means worthily admire how wittily harsh things, how bravely desperate things, how moderately things proved, how lucidly obscure things have been treated. So now, my companions, turn your expectation, by which you were challenging me to answer, with a surer hope to learning with me. We have a leader who will lead us, God now showing the way, into the very secrets of truth."

Here, as they showed by their faces, with a kind of boyish eagerness, that they felt cheated because Alypius did not seem about to answer, I said with a smile: "Do you begrudge me my praises? But since I am now secure about Alypius's constancy and fear nothing from him, so that you too may thank me, I equip you against him who has disappointed the great intensity of your expectation. Read the Academics, and when you find there Cicero, victor (what could be easier?) in these trifles, let him be compelled by you to defend this conversation of ours against those invincible arguments. This hard reward, Alypius, I give you in return for your false praise of me." When they had laughed at this, we brought to an end so great a contest (whether most firmly I do not know), but more modestly and more quickly than I had hoped.