Higher Than Fate

Men of Greece, do not be so hostile toward the barbarians, and do not resent their teachings. Which of your own practices did not get its start from barbarians? The most respected men of Telmessus invented divination by dreams; the Carians, forecasting by the stars; the Phrygians and the oldest of the Isaurians, reading the flight of birds; the Cyprians, reading a sacrificed animal. Astronomy you owe to the Babylonians, magic to the Persians, geometry to the Egyptians, and learning by way of the alphabet to the Phoenicians. So stop calling your imitations inventions of your own. [a]

Orpheus taught you to practice poetry and to sing, and the same man taught you to be initiated into the mysteries. The Tuscans taught you modeling in clay; the Egyptian records of the years taught you to write history. You carried flute-playing off from Marsyas and Olympus — both of them Phrygians, and both countrymen, who put together the music of the shepherd’s pipe. The Tyrrhenians gave you the trumpet, the Cyclopes metalworking, and a woman who once ruled the Persians gave you the composing of letters, as Hellanicus tells it. Her name was Atossa.

So put down this conceit of yours, and stop parading your fine phrasing. You praise yourselves, and the advocates you have are your own household. A man with sense waits for other people to testify about him — and waits to be in agreement with them, right down to how he pronounces his words. As it is, you alone have managed not to speak alike even in ordinary conversation. The Dorians do not use the same words as the people of Attica, and the Aeolians do not sound like the Ionians. Since there is so much division where there ought to be none, I am at a loss to know whom I should call a Greek. And here is the strangest thing of all: you hold in honor ways of speaking that are not your own, and by working foreign words in among your own you have made your language a jumble.

That is why we have turned our backs on your wisdom, even where a man was held to be very distinguished in it. As the comic poet says:

The men who chase after it strain their throats and let out a crow’s croak. You put rhetoric together to serve injustice and false accusation, selling the freedom of your own words for a fee, and often presenting the same thing as right one moment and not good the next. And poetry you use to compose battles, and the love affairs of the gods, and the ruin of the soul.

What impressive thing have you produced by pursuing philosophy? Which of your most serious men has kept clear of boasting? Diogenes made a great show of his self-sufficiency with his jar, and then ate a raw octopus, was seized with a blockage of the bowels, and died of his own lack of self-control. Aristippus walked about in a purple robe and lived a wastrel’s life — convincingly enough. Plato, philosopher though he was, got himself sold by Dionysius over his appetite. [f]

And Aristotle, who ignorantly set a boundary to providence and drew the limits of happiness around the things he happened to enjoy, flattered Alexander like a man with no education at all, forgetting he was dealing with a boy. Alexander proved a good pupil. Because his friend would not bow down to him, he locked the man up and carried him about like a bear or a leopard. He kept his teacher’s lessons strictly: displaying courage and virtue at drinking parties, running his own dearest friend through with a spear, and then weeping and starving himself on the pretext of grief, so that his household would not hate him.

I could laugh at the men who are still using his doctrines today. They say that everything below the moon lies outside providence’s care — and then, being closer to the earth than the moon is and beneath her course, they take care of what is supposedly uncared for. And where there is no beauty, no wealth, no bodily strength, no good birth, there is no happiness, according to Aristotle. Let men like that be philosophers, then.

I cannot accept Heraclitus, who said “I searched myself out,” since he was self-taught and arrogant. Nor can I praise him for hiding his poem in the temple of Artemis so that its publication later on would be a kind of mystery. People who take an interest in such things say that Euripides the tragedian went down there and read it, and gradually learned it by heart, and so carefully handed the darkness of Heraclitus on to later ages. His death exposed the man’s ignorance. He swelled up with dropsy, and since he had taken up medicine along with philosophy, he plastered himself over with cow dung; and when the dung hardened it drew his whole body up tight, and he died in convulsions. [h]

Zeno is not to be listened to either. He declares that at the great burning the same people will rise again to do the same things — Anytus and Meletus to bring their charge, Busiris to kill his guests, Heracles to repeat his labors. In this account of the burning he brings back more wicked men than just ones: one Socrates, one Heracles, and a few others of that sort, not many; for the bad will turn out to be far more numerous than the good. And on his showing God will plainly be the maker of evils, spending his time in drains and worms and in people who do unspeakable things.

The eruptions of fire in Sicily exposed the boasting of Empedocles: he was no god, and he all but lied himself into being one. I laugh at Pherecydes’ old wives’ tales as well, and at the doctrine Pythagoras inherited from him, and at Plato’s copy of it, whatever some people may wish. And who would give his approval to Crates’ dog-marriage, instead of dismissing the conceited word-madness of men like him and turning to look into what genuinely deserves attention?

So do not let yourselves be swept along by the festival gatherings of philosophers who are not philosophers. They lay down doctrines that contradict each other, each one blurting out whatever has just occurred to him. They are forever colliding among themselves. One hates the other; they hold opposing opinions; and their boasting has them picking out the front seats. It would suit them better not to court kings for a fee paid in advance, and not to flatter men in office, but to wait until the great ones come to them.

Men of Greece, why do you want to set the governments against us as though this were a boxing match? And if I am not willing to go along with some people’s customs, why am I hated as though I were the filthiest of men? Does the emperor order taxes paid? I am ready to pay them. Does the master order me to serve as a slave and wait on him? I acknowledge the slavery. A human being is to be honored in a human way; God alone is to be feared — and he is not visible to human eyes, nor can any craft take hold of him. Only when I am ordered to deny him will I refuse to obey. I would rather die than be shown up as a liar and an ingrate. [k]

Our God has no coming-to-be in time. He alone is without a beginning, and he himself is the beginning of all things. God is spirit — not spread through matter, but the maker of material spirits and of the shapes that are in matter. He is invisible and cannot be touched, and he himself has become the Father of what the senses perceive and of what is unseen. We know him from what he has made, and we grasp the unseen part of his power from his works.

I refuse to bow down to the handiwork he made for our sake. The sun and the moon came into being for us; so how am I to bow down to my own servants? How am I to declare wood and stone to be gods? The spirit that spreads through matter is a lesser thing than the more divine spirit, and even where it has been made like a soul it is not to be honored on a level with the perfect God. Nor is the God who has no name to be bribed with gifts: he who lacks nothing is not to be slandered by us as though he were in need. But let me set out what we hold more plainly.

God was in the beginning; and the beginning, we have been taught, is the power of the Word. For the Master of all things, being himself the ground of everything that is, was alone as far as the creation went, since it had not yet come to be; but insofar as he was all power, and was himself the ground of things seen and unseen, all things were with him. With him, by the power of reason, the Word himself, who was in him, took his stand. [m]

By the will of his simplicity the Word leaps out, and the Word, not going out into emptiness, becomes the firstborn work of the Father. Him we know to be the beginning of the world. He came to be by being shared out, not by being cut off. What is cut off is separated from the first thing; but what is shared out takes on a task of its own, and does not leave the one it was taken from any the poorer. Just as many fires are lit from a single torch, and the light of the first torch is not made less by the lighting of the many, so the Word, coming out from the power of the Father, has not left the one who begot him without the Word.

Take my own case. I speak and you hear, and surely I who am talking with you do not become empty of speech by handing speech over; by putting out my voice I mean to set in order the unordered matter in your minds. And just as the Word, begotten in the beginning, begot our creation in his turn, having first made for himself the matter he needed, so I too, born again in imitation of the Word and having laid hold of the truth, am reshaping the confusion of the matter that is kin to me. For matter is not without a beginning, as God is; nor, having no beginning, is it equal in power to God. It is begotten. It was not made by anyone else: the Maker of all things alone threw it forth.

And this is why we have come to believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the completion of all things. Not the way the Stoics teach it, in certain repeating cycles, with the same things coming into being and passing away over and over to no useful end — but once, and once only, when our ages have run out, and then for good. The whole arrangement stands for the sake of human beings alone, and it stands for the sake of judgment. [p]

The ones passing sentence on us are not Minos and Rhadamanthus, before whose own deaths not a single soul was judged, if the stories are to be believed. The one who examines us is God himself, our Maker. And if you think us babblers picking up scraps of talk, it does not trouble us, since we have put our trust in this teaching.

Consider: before I was born I did not exist, and I did not know who I was; I was only there in the underlying stuff of fleshly matter. Once born, I who had not been came, by my birth, to be sure that I exist. In the same way, having been born, and then through death no longer existing and no longer seen, I will exist again — just as I did not exist before, and then was born. Even if fire wipes out this bit of flesh of mine, the world has taken in the matter that went up as vapor. Even if I am used up in rivers or in the sea, or torn apart by wild animals, I am stored away in the treasuries of a rich Master. The poor man, the godless man, does not know what is stored there; but God who reigns will, when he pleases, restore to its original state the substance that is visible to him alone.

The heavenly Word, who came to be spirit from the Father and word from the power of reason, made man an image of immortality, imitating the Father who begot him — so that as incorruption is with God, in the same way man might share in a portion of God and have the immortal along with it. Now the Word became the maker of angels before men were built. And each of these two kinds of creature was made free to act on its own, not having the nature of the good, which again belongs to God alone, but brought to completion by human beings through freedom of choice. That way the worthless man is justly punished, since he became bad through himself, while the just man is deservedly praised for his brave and good deeds, since in acting freely he did not step across God’s will. That is how things stand with angels and with men. [r]

The power of the Word had within itself foreknowledge of what was going to happen — not by fate, but by the judgment of free agents making their choices — and so from time to time it foretold how things to come would turn out. It became a preventer of wickedness by way of prohibitions, and a praiser of those who stayed good.

And when men attached themselves to one who was cleverer than the rest — on the strength of his being firstborn — and declared him a god, the very one who was rising up against the law of God, then the power of the Word shut the one who began the madness, and those who followed him, out of living with him. So the man who had come to be in the image of God becomes mortal, since the more powerful spirit has been separated from him; and the firstborn, through his transgression and his ignorance, is shown to be a demon; and those who imitated him, that is, his phantoms, have become an army of demons, and through their freedom of choice they were handed over to their stupidity.

Human beings become the raw material of their revolt. They showed men a diagram of the placing of the stars, like dice players, and introduced Fate — a thoroughly unjust thing. For the judge and the judged came to be so by Fate; murderers and murdered, the rich and the poor, are all the offspring of the same Fate; and every birth put on a kind of theater show for the beings of whom Homer says: [s]

Beings who watch men fight to the death and back one against the other; who marry, and molest boys, and commit adultery; who laugh and lose their tempers, who run away and get wounded — how will such a one not be reckoned mortal? By the very acts through which they showed men what sort of beings they are, they urged their hearers on to do the same. And have not the demons themselves, with Zeus at their head, fallen under Fate, gripped by the same passions as men?

In any case, how is one to honor beings who hold so many contradictory opinions? Rhea — whom the people of the Phrygian mountains call Cybele — laid it down as a law that men cut off their genitals, on account of Attis, whom she loved; while Aphrodite enjoys the tangles of marriage. Artemis is a sorcerer; Apollo cures diseases. After the beheading of the Gorgon, Poseidon’s beloved, from whom the horse Pegasus and Chrysaor sprang, Athena and Asclepius divided the drops of blood between them: he used them to save lives, and she, from the same gore, became a killer of men and a starter of wars.

It seems to me the Athenians did not want to slander her, and so attached the child born of her intercourse with Hephaestus to the earth instead, so that Athena would not be thought to have been robbed of her manhood by Hephaestus the way Atalanta was by Meleager. For the lame smith — likely enough, being a maker of brooches and curled earrings — cheated the motherless orphan girl with the trinkets girls wear.

Poseidon goes sailing; Ares takes his pleasure in wars; Apollo is a lyre player; Dionysus is tyrant over the Thebans; Kronos kills tyrants; Zeus sleeps with his own daughter, and the daughter is pregnant by him. Eleusis will bear me witness now, and the mystic serpent, and Orpheus, who says:

Aidoneus carries off Kore, and his deeds have become mysteries. Demeter weeps for her daughter, and some people are taken in on the Athenians’ account. Inside the precinct of Leto’s son there is a thing called the Omphalos; but the Omphalos is the tomb of Dionysus.

Daphne, I praise you now. By defeating Apollo’s lack of self-control you exposed his prophesying, since he did not foresee what would happen to you and got no good out of his art. And let the far-shooter tell me how Zephyrus made away with Hyacinthus. Zephyrus beat him; and, as the tragic poet says:

Beaten by a slight breeze, Apollo lost the boy he loved.

That is the kind of thing the demons are: these are the ones who fixed the boundaries of Fate. Their first lesson was the making of animals into stars. The things that creep on the earth, and the things that swim in the water, and the four-footed animals on the mountains — the creatures they lived among after they were thrown out of living in heaven — these they judged worthy of heavenly honor, so that they themselves might be thought to be spending their time in heaven, and so that by the placing of the stars they might make the irrational way of life on earth look rational. So the hot-tempered man and the drudge, the self-controlled and the uncontrolled, the beggar and the rich man, all come from these lawgivers of birth. [w]

For the drawing of the zodiac circle is the gods’ own work. When the light of one of them prevails, so they say, it cheats the rest out of the prize; and the one that is beaten now is used to prevailing next time. The seven planets keep them well pleased, the way men are pleased with counters on a game board. But we are higher than Fate. In place of wandering demons we have come to know one Master who does not wander; and since we are not led along by Fate, we have dismissed its lawgivers.

Tell me, in God’s name: did Triptolemus sow the wheat, and only after the mourning become the Athenians’ benefactor? And why was Demeter not a benefactor to human beings before her daughter was lost? Erigone’s Dog is on show in the heavens, and the Scorpion who helped Artemis, and Chiron the Centaur, and the Argo cut in half, and Callisto’s Bear. So how was the sky unadorned before these did the deeds just listed?

And who will not find it ridiculous that the Deltoton is set among the stars — on some accounts because of Sicily, on others because it is the first letter of the name of Zeus? Why are Sardinia and Cyprus not honored in heaven too? And why have the letter-shapes of the names of Zeus’ brothers, who shared the kingdoms out with him, not been fixed up there as well? How is Kronos, who was put in chains and thrown out of his kingdom, appointed the steward of Fate? How can a man who no longer reigns hand out kingdoms? So throw this nonsense down, and do not become lawbreakers by hating us unjustly.