Wisdom and True Religion

Men of great and outstanding ability, once they had given themselves entirely to learning, held every other pursuit in contempt, public and private alike, and spent on the search for truth whatever effort could be spent on it. They thought it far better to search out and understand how things human and divine work than to be taken up with piling up money or collecting honors. Nothing of that kind can make a person better or more just, since such things are fragile and earthbound, and dress up the body and nothing more.

Those men certainly deserved to find the truth they wanted so badly to know that they put it ahead of everything else. Some of them, plainly, gave away their property and gave up the pursuit of pleasure altogether, so that with nothing to hold them back they could follow the plain truth, and it alone. The name and authority of truth counted for so much with them that they declared the highest good of all was contained in it. But they never got what they wanted, and they lost their labor and their industry along the way. For the truth — the secret of the Most High God, who made all things — cannot be reached by our own ability and perception. If it could, there would be no difference between God and man, since human thought would reach the plans and arrangements of that eternal majesty.

And because it was impossible for a man to come to know God’s way of working by his own efforts, God did not let him go on straying in search of the light of wisdom, wandering through a darkness with no way out and nothing to show for the labor. At last he opened man’s eyes. He made the discovery of truth his own gift, so that he might show how little human wisdom amounts to, and point out to man, lost in error, the road to immortality.

But few make any use of this gift from heaven, because the truth lies hidden, wrapped in obscurity. The learned despise it, since it has no defenders worthy of it; the unlearned hate it, since it is severe by nature, and human nature, leaning toward vice, cannot bear that. Virtue comes mixed with bitterness, while vice is seasoned with pleasure; so people are offended by the one and soothed by the other, and they are swept along, taken in by the look of good things, and take up evils in place of goods.

So I have come to believe that these errors have to be met head on, and that the learned should be directed to true wisdom and the unlearned to true religion. This calling is a far better one than my old profession, more useful and more honorable than public speaking, at which I spent years training young men not in virtue but in sheer clever wrongdoing. Surely it is far more fitting for me now to discuss the teachings of heaven, by which I can train men’s minds to worship the true majesty. A man who passes on the art of speaking well does not deserve as well of the human race as a man who teaches people to live in reverence and innocence. That is why philosophers stood in higher honor among the Greeks than orators did: the philosophers were reckoned teachers of right living, which is far the greater thing, since speaking well belongs only to a few, but living well belongs to everyone.

Still, that practice in made-up lawsuits has done me real good, so that I can now plead the case of the truth more fully and more capably. Truth can be defended without eloquence — many have defended it that way — but it needs to be set out and argued through with clarity and grace, so that it may pour with greater force into people’s minds, armed with its own strength and dressed in the brightness of speech.

So I take up the subject of religion and the things of God. Some of the greatest orators, veterans of the profession, gave themselves over to philosophy once their years of pleading in court were finished, and counted that the fairest rest from their labors — even though they racked their minds over questions that could not be settled, so that what they found looks less like leisure than a second occupation, and one far more troublesome than the first. If that was worth doing, how much better a right have I to make for the safest harbor of all: that reverent, true and divine wisdom, in which everything is ready to be spoken, pleasant to hear, easy to understand, and worth undertaking. [b]

And if skilled men, arbiters of justice, have composed and published Institutes of civil law to quiet the quarrels and lawsuits of citizens at odds, how much better and more rightly shall we set down in writing the divine Institutes? In them we will not be talking about water dripping off a roof, or the diverting of a channel, or the pressing of a claim. We will be talking about hope, about life, about salvation, about immortality, and about God — so as to put an end to deadly superstitions and the most shameful errors.

And I begin this work under the auspices of your name, mighty Emperor Constantine — the first of Rome’s rulers to throw off error, and to acknowledge and honor the majesty of the one and only true God. For when that happiest of days dawned on the world, the day the Most High God raised you to the height of power, you entered on a reign that was good and welcome for everyone; and your beginning was an excellent one, since you restored justice, which had been overturned and taken away, and made amends for the most shameful deed of others. God will repay you for that action with happiness, with strength of character, and with length of days, so that as an old man you may govern the state by the same justice with which you began as a young one, and may hand on to your children the guardianship of the Roman name, as you received it yourself from your father.

As for the wicked, who in other parts of the world still rage against the righteous, the Almighty will repay their wickedness too — and the longer the payment is delayed, the heavier it will fall. He is the most indulgent of fathers toward those who revere him, and the most upright of judges against those who do not. And since I want to defend his religion and his worship, to whom should I appeal, whom should I address, if not the man through whom justice and wisdom have been given back to the affairs of men?

So let us leave behind the authors of this earthly philosophy, who put forward nothing certain, and take the straight road. If I thought them fit enough guides to a good life, I would follow them myself and urge others to follow them. But they disagree with one another fiercely, and are usually at odds with themselves as well; so it is plain that their road is anything but straight. Each of them has marked out his own path as he pleased, and they have left great confusion behind for anyone who is looking for the truth.

The truth, though, has been revealed from heaven to us who have received the mystery of the true religion; and since we follow God, the teacher of wisdom and the guide to truth, we call everyone together, without distinction of sex or age, to a heavenly pasture. There is no more pleasant food for the soul than the knowledge of truth. To holding it and explaining it I have set aside seven books, though the subject is nearly boundless and the labor beyond measure. Anyone who wanted to spread these matters out and follow them to their full extent would have such an overflowing supply of subjects that his books would find no limit and his speech no end. But I will put it all together briefly — because what I am about to bring forward is so plain and clear that it seems more astonishing that the truth should look so obscure to men, and above all to the men commonly reckoned wise; or else because all that people need is to be trained by me, that is, called back from the error they are tangled in to a better way of living.

And if I reach that goal, as I hope I shall, I will send them on to the very fountain of learning, which is rich and abundant, where deep drafts will settle the thirst they have felt inside and cool their burning. Everything will be easy for them, ready to hand and clear, if only they are not put off by the patience that reading or listening requires for taking in the discipline of wisdom.

For many hold stubbornly to empty superstitions and harden themselves against a truth in plain view. They do less good to the religions they wrongly maintain than they do harm to themselves. They have a straight path, and they go looking for crooked turns; they leave level ground so that they can slide over a cliff; they leave the daylight so that they can lie blind and helpless in the dark. We must see to it that they stop fighting against themselves, and that they become willing at last to be freed from errors long settled in them. And they certainly will, if they ever come to see what they were born for. That is the root of their perversity: they do not know themselves. Anyone who has gained knowledge of the truth and shaken off that ignorance will know what his life is to be aimed at and how it is to be spent. And I define the sum of that knowledge briefly, this way: no religion is to be taken up without wisdom, and no wisdom is to be approved without religion.

So, having taken on the task of explaining the truth, I did not think it necessary to begin from the inquiry that naturally seems the first one — whether there is a providence that looks after all things, or whether everything was either made or is governed by chance. That second view was introduced by Democritus and confirmed by Epicurus. But before them, what did Protagoras achieve when he raised doubts about the gods, or Diagoras after him when he ruled them out, along with certain others who did not hold that gods exist — except that there was supposed to be no providence? [g]

These men, however, were vigorously opposed by the other philosophers, and especially by the Stoics, who taught that the universe could not have been made without divine intelligence, and could not go on existing unless the highest intelligence governed it. Even Cicero, though he was a defender of the Academic system, discussed the providence that governs affairs at length and on many occasions, confirming the arguments of the Stoics and adding many new ones of his own. He does this all through his own philosophical books, and above all in the ones that treat of the nature of the gods.

It was no hard task, in fact, to refute the falsehoods of a few men with warped opinions by appealing to the testimony of whole communities and nations, which on this one point had no disagreement. There is no one so uncivilized, so rough in disposition, that when he raises his eyes to the sky — even though he does not know by which God’s providence all this visible universe is governed — he does not understand from the sheer size of the objects, from their motion, their arrangement, their constancy, their usefulness, their beauty and their balance, that there is some providence at work, and that whatever exists with such wonderful method must have been prepared by some greater intelligence.

And for my part it would be very easy to follow this line as fully as I please. But the subject has been thoroughly worked over among the philosophers; those who do away with providence seem to have been answered well enough by men of insight and eloquence; and it will be necessary to speak about the skill of the divine providence at various points throughout the work I have undertaken. So let us set this inquiry aside for now. It is so closely bound up with all the other questions that there seems to be no subject we can discuss without discussing providence at the same time.