The Stars Are Not Gods

How much better it is, then, to leave these empty and senseless things behind and turn our eyes toward the place where the true God has his seat and his dwelling — the God who hung the earth on a firm foundation, who spangled the sky with shining stars, who lit the sun, the brightest and most matchless light there is for human affairs, as proof of his own single majesty, who belted the earth with seas and ordered the rivers to run without ever stopping. [a]

None of this was really the work of Jupiter, who was born seventeen hundred years ago. It was the work of the one the same poet calls “that maker of things, the beginning of a better world” — the one who is called God, whose own beginning cannot be grasped and ought not to be asked after. For a man’s wisdom to be full and complete, it is enough that he understand that God exists. And the whole force and sum of that understanding is this: that he look up to and honor the shared Parent of the human race and the Maker of wonderful things.

That is how some people, dull and blunt of mind, came to adore the elements as gods — things that are themselves made, and have no feeling at all. They admired the works of God, that is, the sky with its various lights, the earth with its plains and mountains, the seas with their rivers and lakes and springs; and, struck with wonder at these, they forgot the Maker himself, whom they could not see, and began to adore and worship what he had made. They were not able at all to understand how much greater and more wonderful the one who made these things out of nothing must be. And when they see that these things serve human use and human interest by an unbroken necessity, obeying divine laws, they still take them for gods. They are ungrateful to God’s generosity, preferring his works to their most indulgent God and Father.

But why be surprised that uncivilized or ignorant people go astray, when even philosophers of the Stoic school hold the same opinion, and judge that every heavenly body that moves is to be counted among the gods? Lucilius the Stoic says exactly this in Cicero: “This regularity in the stars, then, this great agreement of the seasons through such varied courses and through all eternity — I cannot make sense of it without mind and reason and design. And when we see these things in the constellations, we cannot help placing those very bodies among the gods.” And a little before that he says: “What is left is that the motion of the stars is voluntary; and anyone who sees this would be acting not only ignorantly but irreverently if he denied it.”

We do in fact deny it flatly. And we can prove that you philosophers are not only ignorant and irreverent but blind, foolish and senseless, and that you have outdone the ignorance of the uneducated in sheer shallowness. They count only the sun and the moon as gods; you count the stars as well.

Make known to us, then, the sacred rites of the stars, so that we can raise altars and temples to each of them, and know with what ceremonies and on what day each one is to be worshipped, by what names and with what prayers we should call on them — unless perhaps we are to worship gods beyond counting without telling one from another, gods so tiny, taken by the heap.

And why mention that the argument by which they conclude that all the heavenly bodies are gods leads to the opposite conclusion? They imagine the stars are gods because their courses are fixed and run according to reason. They are wrong. That is exactly what shows they are not gods: they are not permitted to stray from the orbits laid down for them. If they were gods, they would be carried this way and that in every direction with nothing compelling them, like living creatures on the earth, which wander wherever they please, because nothing holds their will in check and each is carried wherever its inclination has taken it. So the movement of the stars is not voluntary but necessary, because they are bound in service to the laws appointed for them.

But when Lucilius was arguing about the courses of the stars, he understood from the very harmony of things and seasons that they were not by chance, and so he judged that they were voluntary — as though they could not be moved in such order and arrangement unless they carried inside them a mind that knew its own duty. How hard truth is for those who do not know it, and how easy for those who do! If the movements of the stars are not by chance, he says, then nothing is left but that they are voluntary. On the contrary: just as it is plain that they are not by chance, so it is clear that they are not voluntary.

Why, then, do they keep to their regular pattern as they finish their courses? Beyond doubt because God, the framer of the universe, so arranged and contrived them that they would run their laps through the sky in a divine and wonderful order, to bring about the turning of one season into the next. Archimedes of Sicily was able to contrive a likeness and model of the universe in hollow bronze. In it he so arranged the sun and the moon that day by day they made unequal movements, copying the turning of the heavens; and that sphere, as it revolved, showed not only the sun’s approach and withdrawal and the waxing and waning of the moon, but also the uneven courses of the stars, the fixed ones and the wandering ones alike. Was it then beyond God to plan and create the originals, when human skill was able to represent them by imitation? Would the Stoic, if he had seen the figures of the stars painted and shaped in that bronze, say that they moved by their own design and not by the genius of the craftsman?

So there is design in the stars, fitted to the completing of their courses — but it is the design of God, who both made and governs all things, and not the design of the stars, which are the things being moved. If it had been his will that the sun should stand still, plainly there would be perpetual day; and if the stars had no movements, who doubts there would have been endless night? But so that there might be an exchange of day and night, it was his will that the stars should move, and move with such variety that there would be not only alternations of light and darkness, by which the turns of work and rest are marked off, but alternations of cold and heat as well, so that the force of each season might be fitted either to the growing of the crops or to their ripening.

And because philosophers did not see this skill of divine power in contriving the movements of the stars, they supposed the stars were alive, as if they moved on feet and of their own accord and not by the divine intelligence. But who does not understand why God contrived them? Surely it was so that, when the sun’s light was withdrawn, a night of too much darkness would not press down with its ugly and dreadful gloom and do harm to the living. So he both spangled the sky with wonderful variety and tempered the darkness itself with many small lights. How much more wisely Naso judges, then, than the men who think they are devoting themselves to the pursuit of wisdom — for he thought those lights were appointed by God to take away the gloom of darkness. He closes the book in which he briefly sums up the workings of nature with these three lines:

But if it is impossible for the stars to be gods, it follows that the sun and the moon cannot be gods either, since they differ from the light of the stars only in size and not in their purpose. And if these are not gods, neither is the sky, which contains them all.

In the same way, if the ground we tread on, and break up and farm for our food, is not a god, then the plains and the mountains will not be gods either; and if they are not, it follows that the earth as a whole cannot be taken for God. In the same way, if water — which serves the needs of living creatures for drinking and for washing — is not a god, then neither are the springs the water flows from. And if the springs are not gods, neither are the rivers, which are gathered out of the springs. And if the rivers are not gods either, it follows that the sea, which is made up of rivers, cannot be reckoned God. But if neither the sky nor the earth nor the sea, which are the parts of the world, can be gods, it follows that the world as a whole is not God. [k]

Yet these same Stoics insist that the world is both alive and wise, and therefore God. And here they are so inconsistent that nothing is said by them which they do not also pull down. This is how they argue. It is impossible that something which produces beings with sensation out of itself should itself be without sensation. But the world produces man, who has sensation; therefore the world must have sensation too. They argue as well: a thing cannot be without sensation when a part of it has sensation; therefore, since man has sensation, the world, of which man is a part, has sensation too.

The propositions themselves are true — that whatever produces a being endowed with sense has sense itself, and that a thing has sense when a part of it is endowed with sense. But the assumptions from which they draw their conclusions are false. The world does not produce man, and man is not a part of the world. The same God who created the world also created man at the beginning; and man is not a part of the world in the way a limb is a part of a body, since it is possible for the world to be without man, as it is for a city or a house. Now, as a house is one man’s dwelling and a city one people’s, so the world is the home of the whole human race; and what is lived in is one thing, and what lives in it is another.

But in their eagerness to prove what they had falsely assumed — that the world has sensation and is God — these men did not notice where their own arguments led. For if man is a part of the world, and the world is endowed with sensation because man has sensation, then it follows that, because man is mortal, the world too must of necessity be mortal; and not only mortal, but liable to every kind of disease and suffering. And on the other side: if the world is God, then its parts are plainly immortal, and so man is God too, because he is, as you say, a part of the world. And if man is, then so are pack animals and cattle, and the other kinds of beasts and birds and fish, since these also have sensation in the same way and are parts of the world. But that much can be borne, for the Egyptians actually worship even these. What it really comes down to, though, is this: that frogs and gnats and ants turn out to be gods, since they too have sensation and are parts of the world. So arguments drawn from a false source always end in foolish and absurd conclusions.

And why mention that these same philosophers assert that the world was constructed as a shared dwelling for gods and men? Then the world is neither a god nor alive, if it was made; for a living creature is not made but born, and if it was built, it was built as a house or a ship is built. So there is a builder of the world, namely God, and the world that was made is a different thing from the one who made it.

Now, how inconsistent and absurd it is that men who declare the heavenly fires and the other elements of the world to be gods should also say that the world itself is God! How is it possible for one God to be made up out of a great heap of gods? If the stars are gods, it follows that the world is not God but the dwelling-place of gods. But if the world is God, it follows that all the things in it are not gods but limbs of God, which plainly cannot take the name of God on their own.

For no one can rightly say that the limbs of one man are many men. But in any case there is no such comparison to be made between a living being and the world. Because a living being is endowed with sensation, its limbs have sensation too, and they do not go dumb and senseless unless they are cut off from the body. What likeness to this does the world present? They tell us themselves, since they do not deny that it was made, that it was made to be a kind of shared home for gods and men. If, then, it was constructed as a dwelling, neither it nor the elements that are its parts are God, because a house cannot rule over itself, and neither can the parts a house is made of. So they are refuted not only by the truth but by their own words as well. For just as a house, made for the purpose of being lived in, has no sensation of its own and is under the master who built it or lives in it, so the world, having no sensation of its own, is under God its Maker, who made it for his own use.