The Poets and the Philosophers

What follows is a long appeal to Greek readers to leave their poets and philosophers and learn the true religion from Moses and the prophets.

As I begin this appeal to you, men of Greece, I pray to God that I may know what I ought to say to you — and that you, shaking off your old love of arguing and set free from your fathers’ mistake, may now choose what is good for you. Do not imagine you are wronging your ancestors if things you once thought worthless now strike you as useful. Careful investigation, putting the truth to a harder test, often shows that what has passed for excellent is nothing of the kind. [b]

Since we mean to speak about true religion, I think it best to begin by examining the teachers of religion on both sides, ours and yours — who they were, how great they were, and in what times they lived. Nothing, I think, is counted more valuable than true religion by people who want to get through life without danger, because of the judgment that comes after this life ends. And that judgment is announced not only by our own forefathers in God, the prophets and lawgivers, but also by men who have been counted wise among you — not poets only, but philosophers, men who claimed among you to have reached true and divine knowledge. My aim is that people who received a false religion from their fathers may see it now and be pulled free of that long‑settled mistake, and that we may show clearly and plainly that we are the ones following the religion of our own forefathers in God.

So whom, men of Greece, do you call your teachers of religion? The poets? It will do your case no good to say so to men who know the poets. They know what a ridiculous genealogy of the gods the poets have put together — as we can learn from Homer, your most distinguished poet and the prince of them all. He says, first, that in the beginning the gods were generated out of water. This is what he wrote: [c]

Then we must also remind you of what he says further about the one you take to be first among the gods, the one he often calls “the father of gods and men.” He said:

In fact he says Zeus was not only the one who dealt out war to the army, but also the cause of the Trojans’ broken oath, by means of his daughter. Homer brings him on in love, complaining bitterly, weeping over himself, and plotted against by the other gods — at one moment crying out about his own son:

and at another about Hector:

As for the conspiracy of the other gods against Zeus, anyone who reads these words knows it: “when the other Olympians — Hera, Poseidon, and Athena — wanted to bind him.” And if the blessed gods had not been afraid of the one whom gods call Briareus, Zeus would have been tied up by them. And what Homer says about his uncontrolled love affairs we must remind you of in the very words he used. He has Zeus say this to Hera:

It is right to mention now what one can learn from Homer’s work about the other gods, and what they suffered at human hands. He says that Ares and Aphrodite were wounded by Diomedes, and he tells of the sufferings of many other gods besides. We can gather it from the case of Dione comforting her daughter. She said to her:

But if it is right to remind you of the battle of the gods drawn up against one another, your own poet will recount it himself. He says:

These and things like them are what Homer taught you — and not Homer only, but Hesiod too. So if you believe your most distinguished poets, the men who gave the family trees of your gods, you must either suppose that the gods are beings of this sort, or believe that there are no gods at all.

And if you refuse to be held to the poets, on the ground that poets are allowed to make up stories and to tell all sorts of untrue things about the gods in the manner of myth — then do you suppose you have some other teachers of religion? Or how do you say that those teachers themselves learned this religion of yours? It is impossible for anyone to know matters so great and divine who has not first learned them from people who knew them. [k]

You will no doubt say: the sages and the philosophers. That is the fortified wall you always run to when someone quotes what your poets say about the gods. So, since it is right to start with the oldest and the earliest, I will begin there and set out what each of them held — and it is far more ridiculous than the poets’ account of the gods.

Thales of Miletus, who took the lead in the study of nature, declared that water is the first principle of all things: from water, he says, all things come, and into water all things are dissolved. After him Anaximander, who came from the same Miletus, said that the infinite is the first principle of all things, since from it all things are produced and into it all things decay. Third, Anaximenes — he was from Miletus too — says that air is the first principle of all things, since from air all things are produced and into air all are dissolved. Heraclitus, and Hippasus of Metapontum, say that fire is the first principle of all things, since all things proceed out of fire and all things end in fire. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae said that the first principles of all things are the parts that are alike in kind. Archelaus the Athenian, son of Apollodorus, says that the first principle of all things is infinite air together with its thickening and thinning. All of these, forming a line of succession from Thales, followed the philosophy they themselves called the study of nature.

Then, starting from a different beginning and in a line of his own, Pythagoras of Samos, son of Mnesarchus, calls numbers the first principles — numbers with their ratios and harmonies, and the elements built out of both — and he also includes the one and the indefinite two. [m]

Epicurus the Athenian, son of Neocles, says that the first principles of the things that exist are bodies that only reason can grasp, bodies with no share of empty space in them, never generated and never destroyed, which cannot be broken apart, and whose parts cannot be given any new arrangement or altered in any way — which is exactly why only reason can grasp them.

Empedocles of Acragas, son of Meton, held that there are four elements — fire, air, water, earth — and two elemental powers, love and hate, the first a power that joins and the second a power that separates.

So you see the confusion among the men you consider to have been wise, the men you claim as your teachers of religion. One declares that water is the first principle of all things; another, air; another, fire; another, some other one of the elements just named. Every one of them uses persuasive arguments to establish his own errors, and tries to prove that his own private doctrine is the most valuable. That is what they said. So how, men of Greece, can it be safe for people who want to be saved to imagine that they can learn true religion from these philosophers? They could not even convince themselves well enough to keep from squabbling in rival schools, or to keep from standing in flat opposition to one another’s opinions.

But perhaps those who are unwilling to give up an old, settled mistake will say that they received the teaching of their religion not from the men just mentioned, but from the ones they consider their most renowned and most finished philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. These men, they say, learned the perfect and true religion. [p]

I would be glad to ask them, first of all, from whom they say these two learned that knowledge. Men who have not learned matters so great and divine from someone who knew them cannot know them themselves, and cannot teach them correctly to anyone else. And second, I think we ought to examine what these sages actually held. We will see whether each of them does not plainly contradict the other. And if we find that even they do not agree with each other, I think it is easy to see clearly that they too are ignorant.

Plato, with the air of a man who has come down from above and has looked at everything in heaven and got it exactly right, says that the most high God exists in a fiery substance. But Aristotle, in a book addressed to Alexander of Macedon that gives a short account of his own philosophy, clearly and openly overturns Plato’s opinion. God does not exist in a fiery substance, he says. Instead he invents a fifth substance, a kind of ethereal and unchangeable body, and says that God exists in that. At any rate this is what he wrote:

“Not, as some of those who have gone wrong about the Deity say, that God exists in a fiery substance.”

Then, as if that insult to Plato were not enough for him, he goes further. To prove what he says about the ethereal body, he calls as his witness the very man Plato had thrown out of his republic as a liar and a copier of the images of truth at three removes — for that is what Plato calls Homer. Aristotle wrote that this, at least, is how Homer put it:

He wanted his own opinion to look more credible on Homer’s testimony. He did not notice that if he used Homer as a witness to prove he was telling the truth, a great many of his own positions would be proved untrue. For Thales of Miletus, who founded philosophy among them, took his cue from the same poet, and will contradict Aristotle’s first opinions about first principles.

Aristotle himself said that God and matter are the first principles of all things. But Thales, the oldest of all their sages, says that water is the first principle of the things that exist: everything is from water, he says, and everything is dissolved back into water. He infers this first from the fact that the seed of every living creature, which is its first principle, is wet; and second, because every plant grows and bears fruit in moisture, and withers when the moisture is taken away. Then, as though his own inferences were not enough, he cites Homer as a completely trustworthy witness, who speaks like this:

So may not Thales quite fairly say to him:

“What is the reason, Aristotle, that you pay attention to Homer as if he were telling the truth when you want to demolish Plato’s opinions — but when you put forward an opinion contrary to ours, you count Homer a liar?”

And that these very remarkable sages of yours do not agree in other matters either can easily be learned from this. Plato says that there are three first principles of all things: God, matter, and form. God is the maker of all. Matter is what underlies the first production of everything that is produced, and gives God the material for his workmanship. Form is the pattern of each of the things produced. Aristotle makes no mention of form as a first principle at all, but says there are two, God and matter. [s]

Again, Plato says that the highest God and the ideas exist in the first place of the highest heavens, in the fixed sphere; Aristotle says that next after the most high God there are not ideas but certain gods that the mind can grasp. That is how they differ about things in heaven. So you can see that they are not only unable to understand our earthly matters — they are at odds with each other about those too, and so they will look unworthy of belief when they treat of things in heaven.

And their teaching about the human soul as it now is does not harmonize either, as what each of them said about it makes plain. Plato says the soul is in three parts, having the faculty of reason, the faculty of spirit, and the faculty of appetite. Aristotle says the soul does not reach so far as to include perishable parts as well, but is reason only. Plato insists loudly that “the whole soul is immortal.” Aristotle, naming it “the actuality,” would have it be mortal, not immortal. And Plato says it is always in motion; Aristotle says it is unmoved, since it must itself come before all motion.

But in these matters they are convicted of thinking in contradiction to each other. And if anyone will criticize their writings accurately, they have chosen not to stay in harmony even with their own opinions. Plato, at any rate, at one point says there are three first principles of the universe — God, matter, and form — and at another four, since he adds the soul of the universe. Again, having already said that matter is eternal, he afterward says that it is produced. Having first given form its own rank as a first principle and claimed that it subsists on its own, he afterward says that this same thing is among the things grasped by the understanding. And having first declared that everything that is made is mortal, he afterward states that some of the things that are made are indestructible and immortal. [u]

What, then, is the reason that men esteemed as wise among you disagree not only with one another but with themselves as well? Plainly this: they were unwilling to learn from those who knew, and they wanted to reach exact knowledge of things in heaven by their own overreaching human wisdom, when they were not able to understand even earthly matters.

Certainly some of your philosophers say that the human soul is in us; others, that it is around us. Not even here would they choose to agree with one another. They parcelled ignorance out among themselves in different shapes, and thought it right to squabble and dispute even about the soul. Some of them say the soul is fire; some, that it is air; others, mind; others, motion; others, an exhalation; certain others say it is a power flowing from the stars; others, a number capable of motion; others, a water that generates. A thoroughly confused and discordant opinion has prevailed among them — praiseworthy, to anyone who can judge rightly, in this one respect only, that they have been eager to convict one another of error and falsehood.

Since, then, it is impossible to learn anything true about religion from your teachers, who by disagreeing with each other have given you proof enough of their own ignorance, I consider it reasonable to go back to our own forefathers. In point of time they come a long way before your teachers. They taught us nothing out of their own private imagining; they did not differ with one another, or try to overturn one another’s positions. Without squabbling and without contention they received knowledge from God, and that is what they taught us. [v]

For men cannot know things so great and divine by nature or by human reasoning. They know them by the gift that came down from above at that time upon holy men — men who had no need of the art of words, and no need to say anything in a contentious or quarrelsome way, but only to present themselves clean to the working of the Divine Spirit, so that the divine plectrum itself, coming down from heaven and using righteous men as its instrument, like a harp or a lyre, might uncover for us the knowledge of things divine and heavenly.

That is why, as though with one mouth and one tongue, they have taught us in succession and in harmony with one another: about God, and the creation of the world, and the forming of man, and the immortality of the human soul, and the judgment that comes after this life, and everything else we need to know. So at many different times and in many different places they have given us the divine teaching.