Letters 118.16–118.34

Among those who say that our one and highest good is to enjoy God, by whom both we and all things were made, the Platonists stood out, who not undeservedly thought it part of their task to resist the Stoics and Epicureans above all and almost alone. For the Academics are the same as the Platonists, as the very succession of pupils shows. For Arcesilaus, who first, concealing his own opinion, resolved to do nothing but refute those men: ask whom he succeeded, and you will find Polemo; ask whom Polemo succeeded: Xenocrates; and to Xenocrates, his pupil, Plato left the Academy, his school. As far, then, as concerns the question of the highest good of man, remove the persons of the men and set up the debate itself: you will surely find two errors clashing head-on with each other, one placing the highest good in the body, the other placing it in the mind; while the reasoning of truth, by which God is understood to be our highest good, resists both, but does not teach the truth before it unteaches what is perverse. Set up the same thing again with the persons added: you will find the Epicureans and the Stoics fighting most fiercely with each other, and the Platonists, trying to settle their dispute, concealing the doctrine of truth while convicting and refuting the others' vain confidence in falsehood.

But the Platonists could not play the part of true reason as those others played the part of their errors. For they all lacked the example of divine humility, which was made manifest at the most opportune time through our Lord Jesus Christ; to that one example all pride yields, and is broken and dies, in the mind of anyone, however fiercely arrogant. And so they were not able by authority to lead to faith in invisible things the crowds blinded by love of earthly things. They saw these crowds stirred, chiefly by the arguments of the Epicureans, not only to drink in bodily pleasure, toward which they were carried of their own accord, but even to defend it, so that the highest good of man was placed in it; and they saw that those who were moved against this pleasure by the praise of virtue found it less difficult to contemplate the good in men's minds, from which good deeds proceeded, of which they could judge after a fashion. At the same time they saw that, if they tried to instill into them the notion of something divine and unchangeable above all things, reached by no sense of the body but understood by the mind alone, yet surpassing the nature of the mind itself, and taught that this is God, set before the human mind to be enjoyed once it has been purified from every stain of human desires, in whom alone every craving for happiness would rest and in whom alone we would have the end of all goods, they would not understand, and would much more readily give the palm to the Epicureans or Stoics opposing them than to themselves; so that the true and wholesome doctrine would be made contemptible by the derision of ignorant peoples, which is the most ruinous thing for the human race. So much for ethics.

In questions of natural philosophy, if these men said that the maker of all natures is incorporeal wisdom, while the others never departed from the body, some giving atoms and others the four elements, among which fire prevailed for making all things, as the principles of things, who would not see to whose support the abundance of fools devoted to the body would rather be carried off, since it was quite unable to contemplate an incorporeal power as the creator of things?

There remained the part concerned with questions of reasoning. For you know that whatever is investigated for the attainment of wisdom concerns either conduct or nature or reason. Since, then, the Epicureans said that the senses of the body are never deceived, while the Stoics granted that they are sometimes deceived, but both placed the rule for grasping truth in the senses, who would listen to the Platonists contradicting them? Who would think them worth counting not merely among the wise but among men at all, if they readily said not only that there is something which can be perceived neither by bodily touch nor by smell or taste nor by these ears or eyes, nor even thought of by any imagining of the things so perceived, but that this alone truly is and this alone can be perceived, because it is unchangeable and eternal; and that it is perceived by the understanding alone, by which alone truth, so far as it can be reached, is reached?

Since, then, the Platonists held such views, which they could neither teach to men devoted to the flesh nor had such authority among the peoples as to persuade them to believe until the mind should be brought to the condition in which these things are grasped, they chose to conceal their opinion and to argue against those who boasted that they had found the truth, while they placed the very finding of truth in the senses of the flesh. And what sort of plan theirs was, why need we ask? It was certainly not divine or endowed with any divine authority. Only note this: Plato is shown by Cicero in many ways most plainly to have placed the end of good, the causes of things, and confidence in reasoning in a wisdom not human but plainly divine, from which human wisdom is in a way kindled; in that wisdom, surely, wholly unchangeable, and in the truth that is always the same. And those who placed the end of good, the causes of things, and confidence in reasoning in the nature of the body or of the mind were attacked by the Platonists under the names of Epicureans and Stoics. And the matter came down through the succession of the ages to the point that, at the very beginning of the Christian age, when faith in invisible and eternal things was being preached for their salvation, through visible miracles, to men who could neither see nor think of anything but bodies, these same Epicureans and Stoics are found in the Acts of the Apostles contradicting the blessed apostle Paul, who was sowing that same faith ahead among the Gentiles.

In this matter it seems to me sufficiently shown that the errors of the Gentiles, whether about conduct or about the nature of things or about the method of investigating truth, which, though many and manifold, were most prominent in these two sects, lasted on into Christian times, although learned men attacked them and overturned them with great subtlety and fullness of argument. Now, in our own age, we see that they have certainly fallen so silent that it is scarcely even mentioned any longer in the schools of the rhetoricians what their opinions were, and their contests have been rooted out and suppressed even from the most talkative gymnasia of the Greeks; so that, if any sect of error now rises up against the truth, that is, against the church of Christ, it does not dare to leap out to fight unless it is covered with the Christian name. From this it is understood that the philosophers of the Platonic race too, with a few things changed which Christian teaching disapproves, ought to bow their pious necks to the one most invincible King, Christ, and to understand the Word of God clothed with a man, who gave the command, and what they were afraid even to utter was believed.

To him, my Dioscorus, I would have you submit yourself with complete piety, and build for yourself no other road for grasping and holding the truth than the one built by him who, being God, saw the weakness of our steps. And that road is, first, humility; second, humility; third, humility; and as often as you asked, I would say this. Not that there are no other precepts to be stated; but unless humility precedes, accompanies, and follows whatever we do well, and is set before us to look at, set beside us to cling to, and set upon us to restrain us, pride wrenches everything out of our hands while we are already rejoicing over some good deed. For other vices are to be feared in sins, but pride is to be feared even in right actions, lest what has been done laudably be lost through desire for the praise itself. And so, just as that most famous orator, when asked what seemed to him the first thing to be observed among the precepts of eloquence, is said to have answered “delivery,” and when asked what was second, “delivery” again, and what third, nothing but “delivery”; so if you asked, and as often as you asked, about the precepts of the Christian religion, I would choose to answer nothing but “humility,” even if necessity perhaps compelled me to speak of other things.

This most wholesome humility, which our Lord Jesus Christ was humbled in order to teach, this, I say, is most opposed by a certain, so to speak, most ignorant knowledge, when we rejoice to know what Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, and Democritus thought, and other things of this kind, so that we may seem learned and erudite, whereas this is far from true learning and erudition. For one who has learned that God is not stretched out or spread through places, whether finite or infinite, as though he were greater in one part and smaller in another, but is present everywhere whole, like truth, of which no sober person says that part is in this place and part in that (since truth, of course, is God), will not at all be moved by what was thought, by whoever thought it, about infinite air being itself God. What is it to him if he does not know what shape of body those men speak of (for they speak of one bounded on every side), and whether Cicero, as an Academic, objected to Anaximenes, to refute him, that God must have shape and beauty, thinking as it were of a bodily appearance because Anaximenes had said that God was corporeal (for air is a body); or whether Cicero himself thought that there is an incorporeal shape and beauty in truth, by which the mind itself is formed and through which we judge all the deeds of the wise man to be beautiful, so that he said, not only for the sake of refutation but most truly, that it befits God to be of the most beautiful form, because nothing is more beautiful than intelligible and unchangeable truth itself? And that Anaximenes said that air is begotten, though he held it to be God, does not move such a man at all, for he understands that the Word of God, God with God, was not begotten as air is begotten, that is, made to exist by some cause, since air is not God at all, but in a far different way, which no one will understand unless God himself inspires him. And who would not see that Anaximenes is foolish even about bodies, since he says that air is begotten and wants it to be God, but does not call that by which air is begotten God (for it cannot be begotten by nothing)? And when it is said that air is always in motion, this will in no way disturb a man so as to make him think it God for that reason, if he knows that every motion of a body is lower than the motion of a mind, and that the motion of a mind is far slower than the motion of the supreme and unchangeable wisdom.

Likewise, if Anaxagoras or anyone else calls truth and wisdom itself “Mind,” why should I quarrel with a man over a word? For it is manifest that the ordering and measure of all things are made by it, and that it is not unfittingly called infinite, not through spaces of place but through power, which cannot be comprehended by human thought; nor is wisdom itself something formless, for it is a property of bodies that whatever is infinite is also formless. But Cicero, out of zeal for refutation, it seems, and because of opponents who thought in bodily terms, denies that anything could be joined to the infinite, because in bodies there must be some boundary at the side where anything is joined. Therefore he says that Anaxagoras did not see that there can be no motion joined to sense and “continuous” (that is, adhering by a continuous connection) “with the infinite” (that is, with an infinite thing), as if he were dealing with bodies, to which nothing can be joined except through the boundaries of places. And he added: “Nor any sense at all, unless the whole of nature, being struck, felt it,” as if Anaxagoras had said that the Mind which orders and governs all things has sense such as the soul has through the body. For it is manifest that the whole soul feels when it feels something through the body; for whatever is felt is certainly not hidden from the whole soul. But Cicero said that the whole nature feels in order to take away, as it were, what Anaxagoras said, that Mind is infinite. For how does the whole feel, if it is infinite? For the sense of the body begins from some place and does not run through the whole unless it reaches its boundary, which cannot be said of the infinite. But Anaxagoras had said nothing about bodily sense; and that which is incorporeal is called a whole in another way, because it is understood without boundaries of place, so that it can be called both whole and infinite: whole because of its integrity, infinite because it is not encompassed by boundaries of place.

“Then,” he says, “if he meant Mind itself to be a kind of living being, there will be something more inward from which that living being gets its name,” so that this mind is like a body and has a soul within, from which it is called a living being. See how he speaks according to bodily habit, in the way living beings are usually seen, because, I think, of the gross perception of those against whom he is arguing; and yet he said something that would sufficiently warn them, if they could wake up: that everything which presents itself to the mind like a living body ought rather to be thought to have a soul and to be a living being than to be a soul. For this is what he says: “There will be something more inward from which that living being gets its name.” But he adds: “But what is more inward than mind?” Therefore mind cannot have a soul more inward than itself so as to be a living being, since it is itself the inward thing. So let it have a body outside, to which it is inward, so that it may be a living being! For this is what he says: “Let it then be enclosed by an external body”; as if Anaxagoras had said that mind could not exist unless it belonged to some living being, though he held that Mind itself is the supreme wisdom, which belongs properly to no animate being, because truth is present in common to all souls that are able to enjoy it. And so see how wittily he concludes: “Since this does not please,” he says (that is, it does not please Anaxagoras that the Mind he calls God be enclosed by an external body by which it could be a living being), “a mind open and simple, joined to nothing by which it could feel” (that is, joined to no body through which it could feel), “seems to escape the force and notion of our understanding.”

Nothing is truer than that this escapes the force and notion of the understanding of the Stoics and Epicureans, who cannot think of anything but bodily things. By saying “our” he meant human understanding; and he rightly does not say “escapes” but “seems to escape,” for to them it seems that no one can understand this, and so they think there is nothing of the kind. But it does not escape the understanding of some, so far as is granted to man, that there is an open and simple wisdom and truth, which belongs properly to no animate being, but by which every soul capable of it is made wise and truthful in common. If Anaxagoras perceived that this exists and saw that it is God and called it Mind, not only does the name of Anaxagoras, which all the petty letter-men, to speak in soldiers' slang, gladly puff up because of its literary antiquity, not make us learned and wise, but not even his knowledge itself does, by which he knew this to be true. For truth ought not to be dear to me because it was not hidden from Anaxagoras, but because it is the truth, even if none of them had known it.

If, then, not even the knowledge of a man who perhaps saw the truth ought to puff us up, so that by it we may seem learned, but the knowledge of the truth itself ought to make us solid, by which we can be truly learned, how much less can the names and doctrines of men who held false views help our learning and make hidden things known! If we are men, it would befit us rather to be saddened by the errors of so many and such celebrated men, if we happen to hear of them, than to seek these things out eagerly so as to be blown about with the emptiest boasting among those who do not know them. For how much better had I never even heard the name of Democritus than to think with sorrow that someone thought great in his own time held that the gods are images which flow from solid bodies and are not themselves solid, and that by going round here and there by their own motion and gliding into the minds of men they cause the divine power to be thought of; when certainly the body from which the image flows would be judged more excellent the more solid it is! And so his opinion, as these men say, fluctuated and wavered, so that at times he said that a certain nature from which images flow is God, which yet could not be thought of except through the images it pours out and sends forth, that is, images which are carried from that nature (which he thinks is I know not what corporeal and everlasting thing, and therefore also divine) by a continuous emanation, like vapor, and come and enter our minds so that we can think of God or gods. For these men suppose no other cause of any thought of ours than that images come from the bodies we think of and enter our minds; as if many, almost innumerable things were not thought of incorporeally and intelligibly by those who know how to think of such things, such as wisdom and truth itself. If these men do not think of it, I wonder how they dispute about it at all; but if they do think of it, I wish they would tell me from what body, or of what kind, the image of truth comes into their minds.

Democritus is also said to differ from Epicurus in questions of natural philosophy in this, that he holds that there is in the concourse of atoms a certain animate and breathing force; by this force, I believe, he says both that the “images” themselves “are endowed with divinity” (not all images of all things, but those of the gods), and that the principles of mind are “in the universe,” to which he attributes divinity, and that there are living images which are wont either to benefit or to harm us. But Epicurus places nothing among the principles of things except atoms, that is, certain little bodies so minute that they can no longer be divided, nor perceived by sight or touch. By the chance concourse of these little bodies he says that innumerable worlds and living beings and souls themselves come to be, and gods, whom he places in human form, not in any world, but outside the worlds and between the worlds; and he will not think of anything at all except bodies. Yet in order to think of them, he says that images flow down from the things themselves, which he thinks are formed by atoms, and enter the mind, images subtler than those that come to the eyes (for he says that this is the cause of seeing too), and some enormous images, so large that they embrace the whole world from outside. For you understand now, I think, what images these men suppose.

I wonder that Democritus was not warned that what he says is false, if only by this: that images so large, coming into our mind, which is so small, cannot touch it as wholes if, being corporeal, as they hold, it is enclosed in so small a body. For when a small body is touched by a large body, it can by no means be touched by the whole of it at once. How then are the images thought of as wholes at once, if they are thought of in so far as, coming and entering, they touch the mind, when they can neither enter whole through so small a body nor touch so small a mind as wholes? Remember that I say these things according to their view, for I do not hold such a view of the mind. Or, if Democritus thinks the mind incorporeal, then Epicurus alone can be pressed by this argument; but why did not Democritus too see that there is no need, and that it is impossible, for an incorporeal mind to think through the arrival and contact of corporeal images? On the sight of the eyes, certainly, both are refuted alike; for the bodies of the images, being so great, can in no way touch as wholes eyes that are so small.

But when they are asked why a single image is seen of a body from which images flow innumerably, they answer that by the very fact that the images flow and pass so frequently, a kind of crowding and density of them causes one to be seen out of many. Cicero refutes this vanity by denying, on that very ground, that their god can be thought of as eternal, since he is thought of through images flowing and gliding innumerably. And since they say that the forms of the gods are made everlasting by the supply furnished by the innumerable atoms, as some little bodies depart from the divine body in such a way that others take their place and by this same succession do not allow that nature to be dissolved: “All things, then,” he says, “would be eternal,” because no thing lacks this innumerable supply of atoms to repair its perpetual ruins time and again. Then, how would this god not fear perishing, since he is struck and shaken without any intermission by the everlasting onrush of atoms? For he says that the body is “struck” because it is hit by the atoms rushing in, and “shaken” because it is penetrated. Then, “since images,” about which enough has now been said, “are always flowing out from him, how can he be confident of immortality?”

In all these ravings of those who hold such opinions, this is especially to be lamented: that it is not enough merely to state them for them to be rejected without anyone needing to argue against them, but the minds of the sharpest men have even undertaken the task of refuting at length things that ought to have been laughed at and thrown out by the slowest as soon as they were said. For if you grant that there are atoms, if you grant also that they strike and shake one another by chance concourse, is it right to grant them this too, that atoms meeting each other by chance should so put a thing together as to give it measure by form, define it by shape, polish it by evenness, brighten it by color, and quicken it by a soul? Whoever loves to see with the mind rather than with the eyes, and seeks this from him by whom he was made, sees that all these things can in no way come about except by the art of divine providence. Indeed, it must not be granted at all that atoms exist; and, setting aside the subtle arguments handed down by the learned about the division of bodies, see how easily this can be shown according to their own opinion. For they certainly say that whatever natures there are, are nothing but bodies and void and the things that happen to these, by which I believe they mean motion and impact and the forms that follow. Let them say, then, in what class they put the images which they think flow from more solid bodies while being themselves by no means solid, so that they cannot be sensed except by the touch of the eyes when we see and of the mind when we think, if they too are bodies. For they hold that they are, so that they may be able to go out from a body and come to the eyes or to the mind, which they nonetheless say is corporeal. I ask whether images also flow from the atoms themselves. If they do, how then are they atoms, if some bodies are separated from them? If they do not, then either something can be thought of without images, which they strongly deny, or how did they come to know the atoms, which they could not think of? But I am now ashamed to refute these things, since they were not ashamed to hold them; and when they dared even to defend them, I am ashamed no longer of them but of the human race itself, whose ears could bear these things.

Since, then, there is such blindness of minds through the gluttony of sins and the love of the flesh that even these monstrous opinions could consume the leisure of the learned in disputation, will you doubt, Dioscorus, or will anyone endowed with a wakeful mind doubt, that no better provision could have been made for the human race to follow the truth than that a man, taken up ineffably and wonderfully by Truth itself and bearing its person on earth, should by enjoining right things and doing divine things persuade men, for their salvation, to believe what could not yet be wisely understood? It is his glory we serve; it is in him we exhort you to believe, immovably and constantly, through whom it has come about that not a few, but whole peoples, who cannot judge these things by reason, laugh at them by faith, until, supported by his saving precepts, they escape from these perplexities into the air of the purest and most sincere truth. To his authority we ought to submit all the more devoutly, the more we see that no error now dares to raise itself up to gather crowds of the unskilled without seeking the cloak of the Christian name, and that, among the ancient groups apart from the Christian name, only those persist somewhat more widely in their gatherings who hold the Scriptures through which the Lord Jesus Christ himself was announced, though they pretend not to understand and see this. Further, those who glory in the Christian name although they are not in Catholic unity and communion are compelled to oppose believers, and dare to lead the unskilled astray as if by reason, whereas the Lord came above all with this medicine, to command faith of the peoples. But they are compelled to do this, as I said, because they feel that they lie utterly prostrate if their authority is compared with Catholic authority. So they try to overcome the most stable authority of the most firmly founded church by the name and promise of reason, as it were. For this rashness is, so to speak, the rule of all heretics. But that most merciful emperor of faith has both fortified his church with the citadel of authority, through the most crowded assemblies of peoples and nations and the very sees of the apostles, and through fewer men, piously learned and truly spiritual, has armed it with the most abundant equipment of most invincible reason too. But the most correct discipline is that the weak be received as far as possible into the citadel of faith, so that, once they are placed there in full safety, the battle may be fought for them with the strongest reason.

But the Platonists, who at that time, with the errors of false philosophers barking all round them and having no divine person by whom to command faith, preferred to hide their opinion to be sought out rather than bring it forward to be defiled, began to emerge to bring forward and disclose what Plato had thought when the name of Christ was already spreading, while earthly kingdoms marveled and were troubled. Then the school of Plotinus flourished at Rome and had as fellow pupils many very acute and skillful men. But some of them were corrupted by curiosity about the magical arts; others, recognizing that the Lord Jesus Christ bore the person of that very truth and unchangeable wisdom which they were trying to reach, passed over into his service. And so the whole summit of authority and the light of reason for re-creating and reforming the human race have been placed in that one saving name and in his one church.

I do not at all regret having spoken to you at such length about these things in this letter, even if you would perhaps have preferred other things. For you will approve of them the more, the more you advance in the truth; and then you will approve my counsel, which you now think pays too little regard to the usefulness of your studies. And yet I have also answered those questions of yours, not only some in this letter but also almost all the rest, by brief notes, as best I could, on the very parchments on which you sent them. If you think I have done too little in them, or done something other than you wished, you are not thinking rightly, my Dioscorus, about whom you have asked these things of. But I have passed over all the questions on the Orator and the books On the Orator. For I would have seemed to myself a kind of trifler if I had gone on to expound them. On the other matters I could fittingly be questioned, if anyone put the matters themselves before me, not out of Cicero's books, but to be treated and resolved on their own terms; but in those books the subjects themselves are now ill suited to our profession. And I would not have done even all this had I not, after the illness I was suffering when your man came, withdrawn some distance from Hippo. In those same days I was again attacked by a disturbance of health and by fevers. Hence it came about that these things were sent to you later than they could have been. I insist that you write back and tell me how you have received them.