What Cicero Would Not Say

But what good does it do to talk this way to ordinary, uneducated people, when we can see that learned and careful men — men who understand perfectly well how empty these ceremonies are — still, out of some strange stubbornness, go on worshipping the very things they condemn? Cicero knew quite well that the gods people worshipped were not real. After saying a great deal that tore religious ceremony to pieces, he added that such matters ought not to be argued in front of the crowd, in case the discussion put out the state religion altogether. [a]

What can you do with a man like that? He sees that he is on the wrong road, and then of his own accord smashes himself against the stones so that everyone else will trip over him. He tears out his own eyes so that everyone else will go blind. He does no good to others, since he leaves them in their error, and none to himself, since he leans toward other people’s mistakes and makes no use of the advantage of his own good sense — he never carries through in action what his mind has already worked out. Knowingly, with his eyes open, he pushes his foot into the trap, so that he may be caught along with the rest: the very people he should have pulled free, being the wiser man. No — if you have any courage in you, Cicero, work to make the people wise. There is a subject worthy of you, one on which you could spend every power of your eloquence. There is no danger of your running short of words in so good a cause, when you have often defended bad ones at length and with spirit. But the truth is that you are afraid of Socrates' prison, and that is why you do not dare take up the case for truth. A wise man ought to have despised death. And it would have been far more glorious to die for saying good things than for saying abusive ones. The fame of your Philippics would not have done you more good than scattering the errors of the human race and arguing men’s minds back into health.

But let us make allowance for timidity, though it has no business in a wise man. Then why are you caught in the same error yourself? I see you worshipping things of earth made by hand. You understand that they are empty, and you still do exactly what those men do whom you yourself call the greatest fools. What good did it do you to see the truth, when you meant neither to defend it nor to follow it? If even the men who realize they are wrong go wrong willingly, how much more the uneducated crowd, who love the empty processions and gape at everything with the minds of small boys? Trifles delight them; the shape of a statue takes them prisoner. They cannot weigh a thing in their own minds and see that nothing looked at by mortal eyes deserves worship, since whatever is seen must itself be mortal. And it is no surprise that they do not see God, when they do not even see the man they think they are looking at. What falls under the eye is not the man; it is the container the man is kept in. Its quality and its shape are not to be read off the outline of the vessel that holds them, but off a person’s actions and character. So people who worship images are bodies with no man inside, because they have handed themselves over to bodily things and see nothing with the mind that they do not also see with the body — when the soul’s whole business is to make out clearly what the body’s eye cannot see at all. That philosopher and poet accuses such men harshly, as low and grovelling, for throwing themselves down to worship earthly things against the whole design of their nature. He says:

When he said this his meaning was different, of course — that nothing at all should be worshipped, because the gods take no interest in human affairs. Elsewhere, though, he admits outright that the ceremonies and worship of the gods are a useless business:

And surely, if these things are useless, it is wrong for high and lofty souls to be called down and pressed to the earth. They ought to be thinking only of what is heavenly.

So false religions have been attacked by the sharper minds, because they could see the falsehood; but the true religion was never brought in, because they did not know what it was or where it was. They treated it as though it did not exist, since they could not find it in its true form. And in this way they fell into a far worse error than the men who held a religion that was false. Those worshippers of breakable images, foolish as they may be — putting heavenly things into things that are earthly and perishable — still keep something of wisdom and can be pardoned, because they hold on to the chief duty of a human being, if not in fact then at least in intention. Religion is, if not the only difference between men and animals, certainly the greatest one. But the other sort, exactly in proportion to their superior wisdom in seeing through false religion, made themselves the greater fools, because it never occurred to them that some religion might be true. And since it is easier to judge other people’s business than your own, they watched others fall and never noticed what lay in front of their own feet. On both sides you find the greatest folly, and a faint scent of wisdom as well, so that you may well doubt which deserves to be called the more foolish — the men who take up a false religion, or the men who take up none. But, as I said, pardon can be granted to the ignorant, who make no claim to be wise; it cannot be extended to men who advertise their wisdom and put folly on display instead. I am not so unfair as to imagine they could have prophesied and found the truth by themselves; I admit that is impossible. What I do require of them is what reason by itself could have managed. They would have acted more sensibly if they had grasped both that some form of religion is true, and, while they were demolishing the false ones, had said openly that men were not yet in possession of the true one.

Perhaps this is what weighed with them: that if there were any true religion, it would exert itself and assert its authority, and would not put up with anything set against it. They had no way of seeing at all why, or by whom, or in what manner the true religion was being held down — a thing that has a share in a divine mystery and a heavenly secret. And no one can know this by any means unless he is taught. Here is the sum of it. The uneducated and the foolish take false religions for true, because they neither know the true one nor understand the false. The sharper minds, being ignorant of the true one, either stay with religions they know to be false so as to appear to have something, or else worship nothing at all so as not to fall into error — and that itself is a large part of error: to keep the outward figure of a man and imitate the life of cattle. To recognize what is false is genuinely a piece of wisdom, but of human wisdom. A man cannot get past that step, and so many of the philosophers, as I have pointed out, have done away with religious institutions altogether. But to know the truth belongs to divine wisdom, and a man cannot reach it by himself unless God teaches him. So the philosophers climbed to the top of human wisdom, far enough to understand what is not; they never gained the power to say what is. There is a well-known line of Cicero’s: “I wish I could find out the truth as easily as I can refute what is false.” And because that is beyond the reach of man’s condition, the capacity for this task has been assigned to us, to whom God has handed over the knowledge of the truth. The last four books will be spent explaining it. For now, let us go on bringing false things to light, as we have begun.