The House of the World

And so Octavius began. I will speak as well as I am able, and you must help me dilute this very sour stream of accusations in a river of truthful words. Let me not hide, at the outset, that the opinion of my friend Natalis has swung back and forth so erratically, so vaguely, so slipperily, that we are forced to wonder whether your information was muddled or whether it simply wavered by mistake. For one moment he leaned toward believing in the gods, and the next toward hesitating about them — so that the aim of my reply was fixed all the less certainly, because his own position was so unfixed. But in my friend Natalis I will not allow, and do not believe in, any sharp practice; sly trickery is far from his straightforwardness. [a]

What of it, then? A man who does not know the right road, when one road happens to divide into many, stays where he is in his anxiety, because he does not know the way; he dares neither pick out particular roads nor try them all. In the same way, if a man has no settled judgment about the truth, then just as his unbelieving suspicion is scattered, so his doubting opinion is unsettled. It is no wonder, then, that Caecilius is thrown about by the same tide, and tossed this way and that among things that contradict and fight each other. So that this may go no further, I will take up everything that has been said, however varied, and refute it, establishing and approving the truth alone; and from now on he must neither doubt nor waver.

And since my brother burst out in such terms as these — that he was pained, that he was annoyed, that he was indignant, that he was sorry that unlettered, poor, unskilled people should argue about heavenly things — let him know that everyone is born alike, with the capacity and the ability to reason and to feel, with no preference for age or sex or rank. They do not come by wisdom through good fortune; it is planted in them by nature. What is more, the philosophers themselves, and anyone else who has gone out into fame as the discoverer of some art, were reckoned common, untaught and half-naked before their skill of mind won them a famous name.

So it happens that rich men, tied to their money, have grown used to staring at their gold rather than at heaven, while our sort of people, poor as we are, have both found wisdom and handed on our teaching to others. From which it appears that intelligence is not issued along with wealth, nor got by study, but is born with the very forming of the mind. There is nothing, then, to be angry about or grieved about if a man asks questions, and thinks, and says what he thinks about divine things — since what is wanted is not the standing of the one arguing but the truth of the argument itself. Indeed, the less polished the speech, the plainer the reasoning, because it is not colored over with the show and charm of eloquence; it stands as it is, held up by the rule of what is right.

Nor do I refuse to grant what Caecilius pressed hardest among his main points: that a man ought to know himself, and to look around and see what he is, where he comes from, why he is here — whether he is gathered together out of the elements, or harmoniously formed of atoms, or rather made and shaped and given life by God. And this is the very thing we cannot search out and investigate without inquiring into the universe, since things hang together so closely, are so linked and joined to one another, that unless you carefully examine the nature of the divine you must be ignorant of the nature of humanity. Nor can you properly do your duty to your fellow human beings unless you know that fellowship of the world which belongs to everyone alike. This is especially so because it is here that we differ from the wild animals. They lie face down, tending toward the earth, born to look at nothing but their food; but our faces are upright, our gaze is turned toward heaven, and so are our speech and our reason, by which we recognize God, and feel him, and imitate him. We have neither the right nor any reason to be ignorant of the glory of heaven, which presses itself upon our eyes and senses. For it is as bad as the grossest sacrilege to look for on the ground what you ought to find on high. [c]

All the more, then, do those who deny that this furniture of the whole world was finished by divine reason, and claim instead that it was piled together out of certain fragments sticking to one another by chance, seem to me to have neither mind nor sense — nor, for that matter, eyesight itself. For when you lift your eyes to heaven and look at the things below and around you, what could possibly be so obvious, so admitted, so evident, as that there is some divine being of surpassing intelligence, by whom all nature is breathed into, moved, nourished, governed? Look at heaven itself: how widely it is spread out, how rapidly it is whirled around — picked out at night by its stars, or lit by day by the sun — and you will know at once what a marvelous and divine balance of the supreme Governor is at work in it. Look at the year, how it is made by the sun’s circuit; and look at the month, how the moon drives it around in her increase, her decline, her dying away. What shall I say about the returning changes of darkness and light, which provide us with work and rest by turns? A longer discussion of the stars must be left to astronomers: how they govern the course of a ship, or bring on the season for plowing or for reaping. Not one of these things merely needed a supreme Artist and a perfect intelligence to create it, build it and arrange it; they cannot even be felt, perceived and understood without the highest intelligence and reason.

And when the order of the seasons and of the harvests is marked out by a steady variation, does it not testify to its Author and Parent? Spring with its flowers is needed, and summer with its grain, and the welcome ripeness of autumn, and the winter olive harvest; and this order would easily be disturbed if it were not fixed by the highest intelligence. And how much foresight is needed to prevent there being nothing but winter to kill with its frost, or nothing but summer to scorch with its heat — foresight to set the moderate temperature of autumn and spring in between, so that the year, returning on its own footsteps, may slip past in changes that are unseen and do no harm!

Look carefully at the sea: it is bound by the law of its own shore. Look wherever there are trees, and see how they are given life out of the depths of the earth. Consider the ocean: it ebbs and flows with alternating tides. Look at the springs, how they gush in unbroken streams; gaze at the rivers, always rolling on in their regular courses. Why should I speak of the well-set peaks of the mountains, the slopes of the hills, the spread of the plains? Why should I speak of all the different ways living creatures are protected against one another — some armed with horns, some fenced with teeth, or shod with claws, or barbed with stings, or given their freedom by swift feet or by the power of flight that wings supply? The very beauty of our own shape above all confesses God to be its craftsman: our upright stature, our upward-looking faces, our eyes set at the top as a lookout, and all the rest of our senses arranged as if in a citadel.

It would take a long time to go through the details. There is no part of the human body that is not made both for what is needed and for what is beautiful; and, more wonderful still, we all have the same form, yet in each of us certain features are altered, so that each of us is found to be unlike everyone else, while we all look alike in general. What is the reason for our being born at all? What does the desire to have children mean? Is it not given by God — and that the breasts should fill with milk as the offspring grows, and that the tender young should grow up on the nourishment that abundance of milky moisture supplies? And God does not care for the universe as a whole alone, but for its parts as well. Britain is short of sunshine, but it is warmed by the sea that flows around it. The river Nile tempers the dryness of Egypt; the Euphrates tills Mesopotamia; the river Indus makes up for the lack of rain, and is said both to sow and to water the East. [d]

Now if you were to walk into a house and see everything refined, well arranged and beautiful, you would certainly believe that a master presided over it, and that he himself was far better than all those excellent things. So in this house of the world, when you look at the heaven and the earth, at its providence, its ordering, its law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe far more glorious than the stars themselves and than the parts of the whole world.

Unless perhaps — since there is no doubt that providence exists — you think it is still an open question whether the heavenly kingdom is governed by the power of one or by the rule of many. That matter does not take much trouble to open out, for anyone who considers earthly empires, whose patterns are certainly taken from heaven. When was there ever a partnership in royal power that either began in good faith or ended without bloodshed? I pass over the Persians, who took the omen for their chieftainship from the neighing of horses; and I do not bring up that thoroughly dead fable of the Theban brothers. The story of the twins — a rule over shepherds, and a hut — is well known enough. The wars of the son-in-law and the father-in-law were scattered over the whole world, and the fortune of so great an empire could not take two rulers.

Look at other things. The bees have one king; the flocks one leader; among the herds there is one ruler. Can you believe that in heaven the supreme power is divided, and that the whole authority of that true and divine empire is broken apart — when it is plain that God, the Parent of all, has neither beginning nor end; that he who gives birth to everything gives everlastingness to himself; that he who existed before the world was, to himself, in place of the world? He orders everything, whatever it is, by a word; he arranges it by his wisdom; he completes it by his power. He cannot be seen — he is brighter than light. He cannot be grasped — he is purer than touch. He cannot be measured — he is greater than all our perceptions: infinite, immense, and how great he is, is known to himself alone. But our heart is too small to understand him, and so we are estimating him worthily only when we say that he is beyond estimation. I will say plainly what I feel. The man who thinks he knows the size of God is making it smaller; the man who does not want to make it smaller does not know it.

Nor must you ask for a name for God. God is his name. We need names when a crowd has to be separated into individuals by the special marks that names give; but to God, who is alone, the name God is the whole of it. If I called him Father, you would judge him to be earthly; if a King, you would suspect him of being flesh and blood; if a Lord, you would certainly take him to be mortal. Take away the added names and you will see his glory. And is it not true that in this I have the agreement of everyone? I hear ordinary people, when they lift their hands to heaven, say nothing else but “O God,” and “God is great,” and “God is true,” and “if God allows.” Is that the natural speech of ordinary people, or the prayer of a Christian confessing his faith? And those who speak of Jupiter as the chief god are mistaken in the name, but they are agreed about the oneness of the power.

I hear the poets too announcing “the one Father of gods and men,” and saying that the mind of mortal men is such as the Parent of all has appointed for their day. And what does Maro of Mantua say? Is he not even plainer, more fitting, more true? “In the beginning,” he says, “the spirit within nourishes, and the infused mind stirs the heaven and the earth” — and the other parts “of the world. From this comes the race of men and of cattle,” and every other kind of living creature. The same poet in another place calls that mind and spirit God. For these are his words: “For God moves through all the lands, and the tracts of the sea, and the deep heaven; from him come men and cattle, from him rain and fire.” And what else do we ourselves declare God to be, if not mind and reason and spirit? [f]

Let us review, if you like, the teaching of the philosophers. Their kinds of argument vary, but in these matters you will find them concurring and agreeing in this one opinion. I pass over those untrained early men who earned the name of wise for their sayings. Let Thales of Miletus be first of all, for he was the first of all to argue about heavenly things. That same Thales of Miletus said that water was the beginning of things, but that God was the mind which formed all things out of water. Ah — a higher and nobler account of water and spirit than a man could ever have discovered! It was handed to him by God. You see that the opinion of this earliest philosopher agrees with ours exactly.

Afterward Anaximenes, and then Diogenes of Apollonia, decide that the air, infinite and unmeasured, is God; and their agreement about the Divinity is like ours too. But the account Anaxagoras gives is that God is said to be the motion of an infinite mind; and the God of Pythagoras is the soul, passing to and fro and stretched taut throughout the whole nature of things, from which the life of every living creature is received as well. It is a known fact that Xenophanes taught that God is the whole of infinity together with a mind; and that Antisthenes taught that there are many gods of the common people, but that one God of Nature is the chief of them all; and that Xeuxippus acknowledged as God a natural animal force by which all things are governed. What does Democritus say? Although he was the first discoverer of atoms, does he not especially speak of nature — which is the basis of forms — and of intelligence, as God? Strato too says himself that God is nature. Even Epicurus, the man who invents gods that are either idle or nonexistent, still puts Nature above everything. Aristotle varies, but nevertheless assigns a unity of power: at one time he says that Mind is God, at another the World, and at another time he sets God above the world. Heraclides of Pontus also ascribes a divine mind to God, though in various ways.

Theophrastus and Zeno and Chrysippus and Cleanthes hold many different opinions themselves, but they are all brought back to the one fact of the unity of providence. For Cleanthes discoursed of God now as a mind, now as a soul, now as air, but for the most part as reason. Zeno, his teacher, will have the law of nature and of God — and sometimes the air, and sometimes reason — to be the beginning of all things. What is more, by interpreting Juno as the air, Jupiter as the heaven, Neptune as the sea and Vulcan as fire, and in the same way by showing the other gods of the common people to be elements, he forcibly denounces and overcomes the public error. Chrysippus says almost the same. He believes that a divine force, a rational nature, and sometimes the world, and a necessity of fate, is God; and he follows Zeno’s example in his physical interpretation of the poems of Hesiod, of Homer and of Orpheus. And the teaching of Diogenes of Babylon is to expound and argue that the birth of Jupiter, and the origin of Minerva, and things of that kind, are names for other things and not for gods.

Xenophon the follower of Socrates says that the form of the true God cannot be seen, and therefore ought not to be inquired after. Aristo the Stoic says that he cannot be comprehended at all. Both of them felt the majesty of God, while they despaired of understanding him. Plato’s discourse about God is clearer, both in the matters themselves and in the names he gives them; and his discourse would be altogether heavenly if it were not fouled here and there by a mixture of ordinary civic religion. So in his Timaeus Plato’s God is, by his very name, the parent of the world, the craftsman of the soul, the maker of things in heaven and on earth — whom, he declares, it is hard to discover on account of his excessive and unbelievable power, and, once you have discovered him, impossible to speak of in public. These are almost the same opinions as ours. For we both know and speak of a God who is the parent of all, and we never speak of him in public unless we are asked.