Tried Like Gold

And no one should take comfort in fate, or use it as an excuse for what has happened. Grant that what happens to a man is fortune’s doing — his mind is still free, and so it is a man’s doing that is judged, not his standing. For what is fate, except what God has said about each one of us? Since he can see in advance what we are made of, he settles our fates too, according to what each person deserves and what each person is like. So it is not the star we were born under that is punished; it is the bent of our own character that is blamed. That is enough about fate — or if, considering the hour, it is too little, we will take the question up another time at greater length and more fully. [a]

As for the fact that many of us are called poor — that is not our disgrace but our glory. Luxury slackens the mind; plain living braces it. And who can really be poor, if he wants for nothing, if he does not crave what belongs to someone else, if he is rich toward God? The poor man is the one who has a great deal and wants more. Still, I will say what I actually think. No one can be as poor as he was on the day he was born. Birds live without inheriting anything, and the cattle are fed day by day — and these creatures were made for us. We own all of it, so long as we do not hunger after it. Just as a man on the road is happier the lighter he travels, so on this journey of life the happier man is the one who carries himself along in poverty and is not breathing hard under a load of riches.

Even so, if we thought wealth would do us good, we would ask God for it. Everything is his, so he could certainly spare us some. But we would rather think little of riches than have them. What we want is innocence; what we ask for is patience; we would rather be good than be lavish. And when we feel and endure the ordinary human troubles of the body, that is no punishment. It is a campaign. Courage is toughened by weakness, and disaster is very often the training ground of virtue; besides, strength of mind and of body alike goes slack without the exercise of hard work. That is why every one of your own great men, the ones you hold up as examples, became famous through what he suffered. So God is not unable to help us, and he does not think little of us: he rules everyone, and he loves his own. In hard times he examines each of us and searches us out; he weighs a man’s character in danger, right down to death itself; he looks into what a man wills, certain that nothing can be lost to him. So, the way gold is proved by fire, we are shown for what we are by the moments that test us.

What a beautiful show it is to God when a Christian goes into combat with pain — when he is drawn up in line against threats and punishments and tortures; when he laughs at the din of death and tramples down the horror of the executioner; when he lifts up his freedom in the face of kings and rulers and gives way to God alone, whose he is; when, in triumph and victory, he treads on the very man who has passed sentence against him! For the winner is the man who has got what he was fighting for. What soldier would not court danger more boldly under his general’s eye? No one is given the prize before the test — and even then a general cannot give what he does not have. He cannot keep a man alive; he can only make his service glorious. But God’s soldier is not abandoned in his pain, and death does not finish him. [e]

So a Christian may look wretched; he cannot actually be found to be. You yourselves praise unlucky men to the skies — Mucius Scaevola, for one, whose attempt on the king failed, and who would have died among the enemy if he had not sacrificed his right hand. And how many of our people have let not the right hand only but the whole body be burned — burned up without a cry of pain, when it was in their own power to be let go! Do I set our men beside Mucius, or Aquilius, or Regulus? And yet boys and young women among us think nothing of crosses and tortures, wild beasts, and the whole array of bogeymen used for punishment, with a God-given endurance under suffering. Do you not see, you poor men, that nobody is willing to undergo punishment for no reason, and that nobody can bear torture without God?

Unless perhaps you have been taken in by this: that the people who do not know God are the ones loaded with money, thick with honors, high in power. Poor wretches! In that very way they are raised the higher only so that the fall may be longer. They are being fattened like animals for the penalty; they are garlanded like sacrifices for the knife. That is why some are lifted up to empires and lordships: so that with power unchecked they may put their own minds up for sale to the unbridled license of a ruined soul. For apart from the knowledge of God, what solid happiness can there be, when death has to come? Happiness slips away like a dream before you can take hold of it.

Are you a king? Then you are as afraid as you are feared, and however large the crowd around you, in the moment of danger you are alone. Are you rich? Fortune is badly trusted, and a large baggage train does not equip the short journey of life; it weighs it down. Do you boast of the rods and the robes of office? It is a man’s empty mistake, an empty worship of rank, to glitter in purple and be filthy in mind. Are you lifted up by noble birth? Do you make much of your parents? We are all born to one lot; it is only by virtue that we are told apart.

So we, who are measured by our character and our restraint, have good reason to keep away from your wicked pleasures, from your processions and your shows. We know where they came from — they began as rites for the gods — and we condemn what they lure people into. At the chariot races, who does not shudder at the madness of a crowd brawling with itself? Or at the lessons in murder given at the gladiator shows? At the theater the madness is no less; the filth just lasts longer. One moment a mime is expounding adulteries or acting them out; the next an actor with all the manhood drained out of him fakes lust and so puts it into people’s heads. The same actor disgraces your gods by handing them adulteries and groans and hatreds. The same actor draws your tears with sufferings he does not feel, with empty gestures and empty faces. So you call for real murder, and weep over the fake.

As for our refusing the leavings of sacrifices, and the cups that drink offerings have been poured from — that is not an admission of fear. It is a claim to real freedom. Nothing that comes into being as God’s own unspoiled gift is ruined by anything done to it. All the same, we keep clear, so that no one can think either that we are giving in to the demons the offering was poured for, or that we are ashamed of our religion. [l]

But who could doubt that we enjoy the flowers of spring? We gather the spring rose and the lily and whatever else among the flowers has a pleasant color and scent. We use them loose and scattered, and we twine them into garlands for our necks. Forgive us, then, for not crowning our heads: we are used to taking in the scent of a sweet flower through the nose, not breathing it through the back of the head or through the hair. And we do not crown the dead. On that point I wonder at you all the more — the way you bring a torch to a lifeless man if he can still feel, and a garland if he cannot, when either he is blessed and does not want flowers, or he is wretched and takes no pleasure in them. We still dress our funerals with the same calm we live by. We do not tie on a garland that withers; we wear one alive with everlasting flowers from God, since we are both restrained and secure in our God’s open-handedness, and the certainty of his greatness now brings us alive to the hope of happiness to come. So we both rise again in blessedness, and are already living in the sight of what is coming.

Let Socrates then, the Athenian clown, look to himself — admitting he knew nothing, and boasting all the while of the word of a thoroughly deceitful demon. Let Arcesilaus too, and Carneades and Pyrrho and the whole crowd of the Academy, go on deliberating. Let Simonides put off his verdict forever. We think nothing of the philosophers’ knitted brows. We know them for corrupters and adulterers and tyrants, always eloquent against the very vices they practice. We carry our wisdom in the mind, not in the clothes. We do not talk great things; we live them. We boast that we have reached what they hunted for with all their eagerness and were never able to find. Why should we be ungrateful? Why grudge it, if the truth about God has come ripe in our own age? Let us enjoy what we have been given, and keep our judgments straight and measured. Let superstition be held down, godlessness atoned for, true religion kept safe.

When Octavius had brought his speech to a close, we sat struck silent for some time, our faces still fixed in attention. For my own part I was lost in the size of my admiration. He had dressed out with arguments and examples and authorities drawn from his reading things that are easier to feel than to say; he had driven off the spiteful objectors with the philosophers’ own weapons, the very ones they arm themselves with; and he had shown the truth to be not only easy but agreeable.

So while I was silently turning all this over in my own mind, Caecilius burst out: “I congratulate my friend Octavius, and myself as well, as warmly as I can, on the peace we live in — and I am not going to wait for a verdict. Even as things stand we have both won, and I am not wrong to claim the victory for myself. He is my conqueror, and I am the conqueror of error. So on the substance of the question: I acknowledge providence, I give way to God, and I agree about the honesty of the way of life that is now my own. Some things do still stay in my mind — not as resistance to the truth, but as things needed for a complete training. The sun is already sloping toward its setting, so tomorrow we will look into them at length, when the time is better and we are readier.” [p]

“And for my part,” I said, “I am gladder still, on behalf of all of us; because Octavius has won for me as well, in taking off me the very great ill will that comes with judging. Nor can I repay by any praise of mine what his words deserve: the testimony of a man — and of one man only — is weak. He has a splendid reward from God: God breathed into him the case he argued, and God’s help won it.”

After that we left, glad and cheerful: Caecilius rejoicing that he had come to believe, Octavius that he had carried his case, and I that the one had believed and the other had won.