On Order 2.7–2.23

Considering this view of his with admiration, I remembered that I had once said this very thing briefly in his hearing. Then, smiling, I said: "Give thanks, Licentius, to this slave of yours; if he had not supplied you with something from his own property, you would perhaps now have nothing to bring out. For if memory pertains to that part which yields itself like a maidservant to be ruled by the good mind, it is by her help, believe me, that you have just said this. So, before I return to that order, does it not seem to you that the wise man needs memory at least for such things, that is, for honorable and necessary disciplines?" "Why does he need memory," he said, "when he has and holds all his possessions present? For not even in sense itself do we call memory to help with what is before our eyes. So for the wise man, who has all things before those inner eyes of the intellect, that is, who gazes fixedly and immovably on God himself, with whom are all things that the intellect sees and possesses, what need, I ask, is there of memory? But I, needing it to retain these things I had heard from you, am not yet master of that servant; now I serve him, now I fight so as not to serve him, and I dare, as it were, to claim my freedom; and if perhaps I sometimes command and he obeys me and often makes me think I have won, in other matters he rises up again so that I lie wretched under his feet. So when we inquire about the wise man, I do not want you to name me." "Nor me," I said. "But can that wise man desert his own, or in any way, while he lives in this body in which he holds that servant bound by his law, abandon the duty of conferring benefits on those he can, and especially, what is most urgently demanded of him, of teaching wisdom itself? When he does this, in order to teach fittingly and be less awkward, he often prepares something to say and argue in an orderly way, which must perish unless he commits it to memory. So either you will deny that duties of benevolence belong to the wise man, or you will admit that some things of the wise man are kept by memory. Or perhaps he entrusts something of his own, not for his own sake but for the sake of his own people, yet necessary to himself, to be kept by that servant, so that he, as sober and trained by his master's excellent discipline, keeps only what his master has ordered him to keep for the sake of leading fools to wisdom?" "I do not think," he said, "that anything at all is entrusted to him by the wise man, since the wise man is always fixed on God, whether silent or speaking with men; but that servant, now well trained, diligently keeps what he may sometimes suggest to his master when he is disputing, and so does his duty gratefully to him as to a most just master, under whose power he sees himself living; and he does this not as if by reasoning but at the bidding of that highest law and highest order." "I do not resist your reasons now," I said, "so that what we undertook may rather be carried through. But how this matter stands (for it is no small thing or content with so short a conversation) we will see another time, when God himself, by order, gives the opportunity."

"It has been defined, then, what it is to be with God; and when I said that whatever understands God is with God, you added more, that the things understood by the wise man are also there. In this I am much troubled how you have suddenly placed folly with God. For if whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly unless he understands it, that plague too will be with God, which it is impious to say." When they, troubled by this conclusion, had kept silent for a while, Trygetius said: "Let him answer too, whose most timely arrival for this discussion we did not, I think, welcome rashly." Then Alypius said: "God forbid! Was so great a silence of mine being prepared for this at last? But my quiet has now been broken. Still, I will now try to satisfy this question somehow, provided I first foresee what is coming and obtain from you that you demand nothing more of me beyond this answer." "It is in no way in keeping with your goodwill and humanity, Alypius," I said, "to deny your voice to our conversation, which even desires it. But go on now and do what you have begun; the rest will come as that order holds." "I too must hope for better things from order," he said, "in whose defense you have meanwhile chosen to substitute me. But, unless I am mistaken, you thought folly was joined to God by them, through that conclusion of yours, because they said that everything the wise man understands is with God. How far that is to be accepted I leave aside now; but note your reasoning a little. For you said: 'If whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly unless he understands it': as though it were obscure that before anyone avoids folly he is not to be counted under the name of wise man! And it was said that what is understood by the wise man is with God. So when anyone understands folly in order to avoid it, he is not yet wise; and when he is, folly is not to be counted among the things he understands. Therefore, since the things the wise man already understands are joined to God, folly will rightly be separated from God."

"You have answered sharply, Alypius, as usual," I said, "but as one pushed into another's narrows. Still, since, as I think, you deign to be a fool with me still, what shall we do if we come upon some wise man who will gladly free us from so great an evil by teaching and arguing? For I shall ask nothing of him before this, I think: that he show me what folly is, what it is like, and of what sort it altogether is. About you I would not readily affirm; but it holds me as much and as long as it is not understood by me. So he will say, on your authority: 'You should have come to me to teach you this when I was a fool; now you can be your own teachers, for I no longer understand folly.' If I heard this from him, I would not hesitate to advise the man to become our companion, and we would look for another teacher together. For although I do not fully understand folly, I see that nothing is more foolish than this answer. But perhaps he will be ashamed either to leave us or to follow us so. So he will dispute and exaggerate most copiously the evils of folly. And we, providing well for ourselves, will either listen attentively to a man who does not know what he is saying, or believe that he knows what he does not understand; or else, by the reasoning of your clients, folly is still joined to God. But none of the former can, I see, be defended; so the last, which you do not want, remains." "I had never found you envious," he said. "For if I had received any fee from these clients of yours, as is customary, I would now be compelled to return it to them, since you hold so tightly to this reasoning. So let them either be content with this, that by my laboring with you I have given them not a little time to think, or, if defeated advocates, through no fault of their own, gladly listen to counsel, let them yield to you in this and be more cautious in the rest."

"I will not ignore," I said, "what Trygetius, somewhat noisily, wanted to say in your defense, and I will do it with your kind permission; for perhaps you are not well prepared, having come only recently upon this business, so that, setting aside the advocacy, I may listen patiently to them pleading their own case, as I had begun." Then Trygetius, Licentius being quite absent in mind, said: "Take it as you like, and laugh at my folly. It seems to me that that should not be called understanding by which folly itself is understood, since folly is either the only or the greatest cause of not understanding." "I do not readily refuse to accept that," I said. "For although I am much moved by what Alypius thinks, how anyone can rightly teach what sort of thing that is which he does not understand, and how great a harm it brings to the mind, which he does not see with the mind (for attending to exactly what you said, he was afraid to say it, though that view is known to him even from the books of the learned), yet, considering the very sense of the body (for the soul also uses that, and it is the only comparison of any kind it has with the intellect), I am led to say that no one can see darkness. So, if understanding is to the mind what seeing is to the sense, and although someone may have eyes open, sound, and clear, he still cannot see darkness, it is not absurdly said that folly cannot be understood; for we call nothing else the darkness of the mind. Nor will this now trouble us, how folly can be avoided without being understood. For as we avoid darkness with our eyes by the very fact that we do not want not to see, so whoever wants to avoid folly should not try to understand it, but should grieve that through it he does not understand the things that can be understood, and should perceive that it is present to him not because he understands it more but because he understands other things less."

"But let us return to order, so that Licentius may be given back to us at some point. For I now ask of you whether whatever a fool does seems to you to be done by order. For see what snares the question has. If you say 'by order,' where will that definition be, 'order is that by which God does all things that exist,' if even the fool does what he does by order? But if there is no order in the things done by a fool, there will be something that order does not hold; and you want neither. See, please, that you do not throw everything into confusion by your very defense of order." Here again Trygetius (for the other was still wholly absent) said: "It is easy to answer this dilemma of yours, but at present a comparison fails me by which I see my opinion ought to be supported and illustrated. Still, I will say what I think; for you will do what you did a little while ago. For that mention of darkness brought us not a little light on what I had left wrapped up. For the whole life of fools, although by themselves it is most inconstant and most disordered, is still, by divine providence, necessarily included in the order of things, and, as if places had been arranged by that ineffable and eternal law, it is in no way allowed to be where it ought not to be. So it happens that one who considers it alone, with a narrow mind, turns away as if struck back by a great ugliness. But if, lifting and spreading the eyes of the mind, he surveys all things together, he will find nothing not ordered and always distinguished and arranged, as it were, in its own seats."

"How great, how wonderful," I said, "are the answers which that God, and, as I am more and more led to believe, some hidden order of things itself, gives me through you! For you say things which I do not understand how they could be said without being seen, nor how you see them; so I suspect they are both true and deep. You were perhaps looking for one comparison for this view. But countless ones now occur to me that draw me entirely to agree. For what is more horrible than an executioner? What more savage and dreadful than his mind? Yet he holds a necessary place among the very laws and is inserted into the order of a well-governed city; he is harmful in his own mind, but in another's order he is the punishment of the harmful. What can be called more sordid, more empty, more full of shame and baseness than prostitutes, pimps, and other plagues of this kind? Take away prostitutes from human affairs, and you will throw everything into confusion with lusts; put them in the place of matrons, and you will dishonor them with stain and disgrace. So this kind of person is most impure in life through their own morals, and most base in condition through the laws of order. Are there not certain members in the bodies of animals which, if you attend to them alone, you could not bear to look at? Yet the order of nature neither willed them to be lacking, because they are necessary, nor allowed them to be prominent, because they are unseemly. And these unsightly things, by keeping their places, have yielded the better place to the better. What was more pleasant to us, what spectacle more fitting to a farm and country house, than that fight and conflict of cocks which we mentioned in the previous book? Yet what did we see more abject than the ugliness of the defeated one? And yet through it the more perfect beauty of that same contest had come about."

"All things, I believe, are like this, but they require eyes. Poets have loved what are called solecisms and barbarisms; they prefer to call them figures and metaplasms, changing the names, rather than avoid manifest faults. Yet take these away from poems, and we will miss the sweetest seasonings. Heap many into one place, and I will be disgusted by the whole as sour, rotten, and rancid. Transfer them to free and forensic speech, and who will not bid it flee and hide itself in the theaters? So order, governing and controlling them, will allow them to be neither excessive in their own place nor foreign anywhere. A low style, very like an unpolished one, placing itself in between, sets off the very leaps and charming passages; if it is alone, you throw it away as worthless; but if it is lacking, those beautiful things do not stand out, do not rule in their own regions, as it were, and possessions, but obstruct themselves with their own light and confuse the whole. Here too great thanks are owed to order. Who does not fear, who does not hate, lying arguments that creep little by little, by subtracting or adding, into assent to falsehood? Yet often in disputations, placed in fixed positions and their own seats, they have such force that somehow even the deception becomes sweet through them. Will not order itself be praised here too?"

"Now in music, in geometry, in the movements of the stars, in the necessities of numbers, order so rules that if anyone wants to see as it were its source and its very sanctuary, he either finds it in these or is led there through them without any error. For such learning, if one uses it in moderation (for nothing in it is to be feared but excess), nourishes such a soldier of philosophy, or even a leader, that he flies up and arrives where he wills at that highest measure, beyond which he neither can nor should nor desires to seek anything, and leads many there; from which, while he is still held by human affairs themselves, he so looks down on them and discerns all things that he is in no way troubled why one wishes to have children and has none, another is tormented by his wife's excessive fertility; why one who is ready to give much generously lacks money, while a lean and scabby moneylender broods over his buried hoard; why luxury scatters and squanders ample patrimonies, while a beggar weeping all day barely obtains a coin; why honor exalts one who is unworthy, while shining morals are hidden in the crowd."

"These and other things in human life generally compel men to believe impiously that we are not governed by any order of divine providence; but others, pious and good and endowed with splendid talent, who cannot bring themselves to think that we are deserted by the highest God, and yet, troubled by such darkness, as it were, and confusion of things, see no order, and, wanting the most hidden causes to be laid bare to them, often lament their errors even in poems. If they ask only this, why the Italians always pray for clear winters and likewise our wretched Gaetulia is always thirsty, who will easily answer them? Or where among us will any trace of that order be tracked down? But if I can advise my own people at all, as far as it appears to me and as far as I perceive, I judge that they should be educated in all the disciplines. Otherwise these things can in no way be understood so as to be clearer than light. But if they are too slow, or occupied with other business, or already too hard to learn, let them prepare for themselves the defenses of faith, by which chain he may draw them to himself and free them from these horrible and most tangled evils who allows no one to perish who believes in him well through the mysteries."

"For the way we follow when the obscurity of things troubles us is twofold: reason or, at least, authority. Philosophy promises reason and frees hardly a very few. Yet it compels them not only not to despise those mysteries but to understand them alone as they are to be understood; and the true and, so to speak, genuine philosophy has no other business than to teach what is the beginning of all things without beginning, and how great an intellect remains in it, and what has flowed from it for our salvation without any degeneration: the one almighty God, and with him, threefold in power, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, whom the venerable mysteries, which free peoples by sincere and unshaken faith, proclaim neither confusedly, as some do, nor insultingly, as many do. And how great a thing it is that so great a God deigned to take on and bear even this body of our kind for our sake: the cheaper it seems, the fuller it is of mercy, and the further and more deeply removed from a certain pride of clever men."

"But where the soul takes its origin, what it does here, how far it is distant from God, what it has of its own, what makes it alternate between the two natures, how far it dies and how it is proved immortal: how great an order do you think is needed for these things to be learned? Great indeed, and fixed, about which we will speak briefly later, if there is time. Now I want you to accept this from me: if anyone dares to rush into the knowledge of these things rashly and without the order of the disciplines, he becomes, instead of studious, curious; instead of learned, credulous; instead of cautious, incredulous. So I both wonder where your answers to my questions just now, so good and apt, come from, and am compelled to acknowledge it. Yet let us see how far your hidden intent can advance. Now let words be given back to us from Licentius too, who has been so long occupied with I know not what care and absent from this conversation that I believe he will read these things just like our friends who are not present. But come back to us, please, Licentius, and make sure you are wholly here; for I am speaking to you. For you approved my definition, in which it was said what it is to be with God, with whom you wanted to teach that the mind of the wise man remains unmoved, as far as I can follow."

"But this troubles me: since it is not denied that this wise man, as long as he lives among men, is in a body, how does it happen that while his body wanders here and there his mind remains unmoved? For in that way you could say that when a ship is moved, the men who are in it are not moved, although we admit that it is possessed and steered by them. For even if they ruled it by thought alone and made it go where they wished, still, since it is moved, those placed in it cannot fail to be moved." "The mind," said Licentius, "is not in the body in such a way that the body commands the mind." "Nor do I say that," I said; "but neither is a rider on a horse in such a way that the horse commands him, and yet, although he drives the horse where he wills, when the horse is moved he must be moved." "He can sit unmoved himself," he said. "You force us," I said, "to define what it is to be moved; if you can, I want you to do it." "Please," he said, "let your favor stand; for my request stands, and so that you need not ask me at all whether I want to define, I will declare it myself when I can do it." When this had been said, a boy from the house, to whom we had given this task, ran to us and announced that it was time for lunch. Then I said: "This boy forces us not to define but to show with our very eyes what it is to be moved. So let us go and pass from this place to another; for that, unless I am mistaken, is nothing else than to be moved." When they had laughed at this, we left.

But when we had refreshed our bodies, since clouds had covered the sky, we sat down in the usual place in the baths. And I said: "Do you grant, then, Licentius, that motion is nothing but passing from place to place?" "I grant it," he said. "Do you grant, then," I said, "that no one is in a place where he had not been without having been moved?" "I do not understand," he said. "If something was in one place a while ago and is now in another," I said, "do you grant that it has been moved?" He agreed. "Then," I said, "could the living body of some wise man be here with us now while his mind was absent from here?" "It could," he said. "Even," I said, "if he were conversing with us and teaching us something?" "Even if he were teaching us wisdom itself," he said, "I would say that he was not with us but with himself." "Then not in the body?" I said. "No," he said. I said to him: "Do you not admit that a body lacking a mind is dead, whereas I proposed a living one?" "I do not know how to explain it," he said. "For I see both that a man's body cannot be alive if the mind is not in it, and I cannot say that, wherever the wise man's body is, his mind is not with God." "I will make you able to explain it," I said. "For perhaps, since God is everywhere, wherever the wise man goes he finds God, with whom he can be. So it comes about that we can both not deny that he passes from place to place, which is to be moved, and yet say that he is always with God." "I admit," he said, "that that body makes the passage from place to place, but I deny it of the mind itself, to which the name of wise man has been given."

"For now I yield to you," I said, "so that a very obscure matter, which must be treated longer and more carefully, may not hinder our present purpose. But let us see, since we have defined what it is to be with God, whether we can also know what it is to be without God, although I think it is already clear. For I believe it seems to you that those who are not with God are without God." "If words could come to me," he said, "I would say something that would perhaps not displease you. But I ask you to bear with my lack of speech and, as befits you, to seize the things themselves with your quick mind. For these people seem to me neither to be with God and yet to be held by God; so I cannot say that those whom God holds are without God. Nor do I say they are with God, because they themselves do not hold God; for we agreed among ourselves some time ago, in that most delightful conversation we had on your birthday, that to have God is nothing else than to enjoy God. But I confess I dread these contraries, how someone can be neither without God nor with God."

"Do not let these things trouble you," I said. "For when there is agreement on the thing, who does not despise words? So let us at last return to that definition of order. For you said that order is that by which God does all things. But there is nothing, as I see, that God does not do; for from this it seemed to you that nothing can be found outside order." "My opinion stands," he said; "but I already see what you are going to say: whether God does the things that we admit are not done well." "Excellent," I said; "you have certainly cast your eye into my mind. But as you saw what I was going to say, so I ask you to see what should be answered." And he, shaking his head and shoulders, said: "We are confused." And by chance our mother had come upon this question. And he, after some silence, asked that I put this very question to him again; he had not noticed at all that Trygetius had answered it earlier. Then I said: "What, or why, should I repeat for you? 'Do not do what is done,' they say. So I advise you rather to take care to read what was said above, if you could not hear it. I have not been annoyed at this absence of your mind from our conversation, and I have long put up with it, so that I neither hindered what you were doing intently by yourself, removed from us, nor failed to pursue what this pen would not let you lose."

"Now I ask about something we have not yet tried to examine with careful reasoning. For when some order or other first brought forth this question of order for us, I remember that you said that this is the justice of God, by which he separates good and evil and gives each his own. For there is, as far as I can see, no clearer definition of justice. So I would like you to answer whether it seems to you that God was ever not just." "Never," he said. "If, then, God is always just," I said, "good and evil have always existed." "Certainly," said our mother, "I see nothing else that follows. For there was no judgment of God when there was no evil; and if he did not at some time give good and evil their own, he cannot seem to have been just." Licentius said to her: "So you think we must say that evil always existed?" "I do not dare say that," she said. "What then shall we say?" I said. "If God is just because he judges between good and evil, when there was no evil he was not just." Here, as they were silent, I noticed that Trygetius wanted to answer, and I allowed him. And he said: "Certainly God was just. For he could distinguish good and evil if evil had existed, and from the very fact that he could, he was just. For when we say that Cicero prudently investigated the conspiracy of Catiline, acted with temperance, was corrupted by no reward to spare the wicked, justly put them to the supreme penalty by the authority of the senate, and bravely sustained all the weapons of his enemies and, as he himself said, the mass of ill will, those virtues would not have failed to be in him if Catiline had not prepared so great a ruin for the state. For virtue is to be considered by itself, not by some work of this kind, even in man, how much more in God, if indeed in the narrows of things and words we are allowed to compare these in any way. For let us understand that God was always just, and that when evil arose which he might separate from good, he did not delay at all in giving each his own; for then he did not have to learn justice, but to use the justice he always had."

When both Licentius and our mother had approved this, compelled by its force, I said: "What do you say, Licentius? Where is what you so strongly asserted, that nothing happens outside order? For what happened so that evil was born was certainly not done by God's order, but when it had been born, it was included in God's order." And he, wondering and annoyed that so good a case had so suddenly slipped from his hands, said: "I say, of course, that order began from the time evil began to exist." "Then," I said, "that evil itself should exist was not done by order, if order began to exist after evil arose." "Somehow," he said, "the opinion I now reject escaped me; for I should not have said that order began after evil was born, but that, like that justice which Trygetius discussed, order too was with God, but did not come into use until evils began to exist." "You slip back into the same place," I said; "for what you least want remains unshaken. For whether order was with God or began to exist from the same time as evil, still that evil was born outside order. If you grant this, you admit that something can happen outside order, which weakens and maims your case; but if you do not grant it, evil begins to seem born by God's order, and you will confess God to be the author of evils, a sacrilege than which nothing more detestable occurs to me." When I had turned this over and over again for him, whether he did not understand or pretended not to have understood, he had nothing else to say and fell silent. Then our mother said: "I do not think that anything could have happened outside God's order, because the evil itself that was born was in no way born by God's order; but that justice did not allow it to be disordered, and brought it back and compelled it into the order it deserved."