The World Held Together

Everything discussed in the previous book had to do with the world and the way it is arranged. It now seems right to go back over a few points about the world itself: its beginning and its end; the ways God’s providence has ordered matters between the beginning and the end; and whatever is supposed to have happened before the world was made, or to be coming after its end. [a]

The first thing that plainly appears in this inquiry is that the world, in all its varied and shifting conditions, is made up not only of reasoning beings and of natures more divine than ours, and of bodies of many kinds, but also of animals without speech, wild and tame, and of birds, and of everything that lives in the waters. And second, it is made up of places: of heaven, or the heavens; of earth and of water; of the air that lies between, which they call aether; and of everything that comes out of the earth or is born in it.

Since, then, there is such variety in the world, and such difference among reasoning beings themselves — the difference from which every other variety and difference is thought to have arisen — what cause besides this ought we to assign for the world’s existence? That is all the more so if we keep in view the end by which, as the previous book showed, all things are to be restored to their first condition. And if that is soundly argued, then what other cause, as we have said already, are we to imagine for so great a diversity in the world, except the diversity and variety in the movements and the swervings of those who fell away from that original unity and harmony in which God first created them? Driven out of that good state, and pulled in different directions by the wearing pressure of one motive and desire after another, they turned the single, undivided goodness of their nature into minds of many different kinds.

But God, by the skill of his wisdom, which no words can reach, transforms and restores all things — however they came to be — to some useful aim and to the common good of all. He calls back those very creatures, which had grown so unlike one another in the cast of their minds, into one agreement of work and purpose, so that although they are moved by different motives they still fill out and complete one world, and the very variety of their minds tends toward one end, which is perfection. For it is one power that grips and holds together all the diversity of the world and leads its different movements toward one work, so that an undertaking as immense as the world is not broken apart by the quarrels of souls. [d]

This is why we hold that God, the Father of all, in order to secure the salvation of all his creatures through the plan of his Word and wisdom — a plan beyond our words — so arranged each of them that no spirit, whether you call it a soul or a reasoning being or anything else, would be driven by force, against the freedom of its own will, to any course other than the one its own mind moved it toward. Had he done that, the power of free choice would look as though it had been taken away, and that would certainly change the very nature of the creature. He arranged, too, that the differing purposes of these beings should be fitted usefully and well into the harmony of one world: some of them needing help, others able to give it, and others again providing the struggle and the contest for those who are making progress — so that among these last the effort they put in counts for more, and the rank they win back after the victory is held all the more securely, since it was established through the hardships of the fight.

Although the whole world is arranged into duties of many different kinds, its condition is not to be thought of as one of internal disagreement and discord. Our one body has many parts and is held together by one soul; and in the same way, I think, the whole world ought to be regarded as some huge and immeasurable living creature, held together by the power and reason of God as by one soul. This, I think, is what holy Scripture points to as well, in the prophet’s declaration, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord”; and again, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”; and in the Savior’s words, when he tells us to swear “neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool.” The words of Paul in his address to the Athenians come to the same thing, when he says, “In him we live and move and have our being.” [f]

For how do we live and move and have our being in God, unless it is by his power that he comprehends and holds together the whole world? And how is heaven God’s throne and the earth his footstool, as the Savior himself declares, unless it is by his power filling all things in heaven and on earth, as the Lord’s own words say? That God, the Father of all, fills the world and holds it together with the fullness of his power, according to the passages we have quoted, no one, I think, will find any difficulty in granting.

And now, since the course of the discussion so far has shown that the different movements of reasoning beings, and their differing judgments, brought about the diversity there is in the world, we must consider whether it may not be fitting for this world to have an ending like its beginning. For there is no doubt that its end must be looked for amid much diversity and variety; and that variety, found at the world’s ending, will in turn supply the ground and the occasion for the diversities of the other world that is to follow this one.

If our discussion has now established that these things are so, the next thing to consider seems to be the nature of bodily being, since the diversity in the world cannot exist without bodies. It is clear from the nature of things themselves that bodily nature admits of difference and variety of change, so that it can undergo any transformation at all: wood turns into fire, fire into smoke, smoke into air, oil into fire. Does not food itself, whether a person’s or an animal’s, show the same ground of change? Whatever we take as food is turned into the substance of our body. How water is changed into earth or into air, and air in turn into fire, or fire into air, or air into water, would not be hard to explain; but for the present it is enough merely to mention them, since what we set out to discuss is the nature of bodily matter. [g]

By matter, then, we mean what underlies bodies — that by which bodies exist, once qualities have been given and set into it. And we name four qualities: hot, cold, dry, and wet. When these four are set into the hylē, the matter (for matter, taken in its own nature, is found to exist without the qualities just named), they produce the different kinds of bodies. And although this matter is, as we said above, in its own proper nature without qualities, it is never found existing without a quality.

I cannot understand how so many distinguished men have held that this matter — so vast, and with properties that make it sufficient for all the bodies in the world that God willed to exist, and make it the Creator’s attendant and slave for whatever forms and kinds he wanted in anything, taking into itself whatever qualities he wished to give it — was uncreated: that is, that it was not formed by God himself, who is the Creator of all things, but that its nature and its power were the result of chance. And I am astonished that these same men find fault with those who deny either God’s power to create or his providential government of the world, and charge them with impiety for thinking that a work as great as the world could exist without an architect or a caretaker, while they lay themselves open to the very same charge of impiety by saying that matter is uncreated and coeternal with the uncreated God.

On their view, then, suppose for the sake of argument that matter did not exist — for they maintain that God could not create anything when nothing existed — he would beyond doubt have been idle, having no matter to work on. And this matter, they say, was supplied to him not by his own arranging but by accident; and they think that a thing come upon by chance was able to be enough for him for an undertaking of such vast extent, enough for the display of his mighty power, and that by taking in the plan of all his wisdom it could be sorted out and shaped into a world. Now this appears to me thoroughly absurd, the opinion of men who know nothing at all of the power and the intelligence of the uncreated nature.

But to see the nature of things a little more clearly, let it be granted for a moment that matter did not exist, and that God, when nothing had existed before, brought into being the things he wanted. Why should we suppose that God would create matter better, or greater, or of some other kind than the matter he did in fact bring forth out of his own power and wisdom, so that what did not exist before might exist? Would he create a worse and poorer matter, or the very same as the one they call uncreated? I think anyone will see easily enough that neither a better nor a poorer matter could have taken on the forms and kinds of the world unless it were just such as the matter that actually did take them on. And does it not then look like impiety to call uncreated the very thing which, if it were believed to have been formed by God, would beyond doubt turn out to be exactly like what they call uncreated?

But so that we may believe on the authority of holy Scripture that this is how things stand, listen to how the truth of it is confirmed in the book of Maccabees, where the mother of the seven martyrs urges her son to hold out under torture. She says, “I ask you, my son, to look at heaven and earth and everything in them, and, seeing these, to know that God made them all when they did not exist.” In the book of the Shepherd, too, in the first commandment, he speaks as follows: “First of all, believe that there is one God, who created all things and set them in order, and made all things come into existence out of a state of nothing.” Perhaps the words in the Psalms have to do with this as well: “He spoke, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created.” For “he spoke, and they were made” appears to point to the substance of the things that exist, while “he commanded, and they were created” seems to be said of the qualities by which that substance has been shaped. [i]