Out of Nothing

So I will set out how all of this works, so that subjects that are difficult and obscure may be easier to follow. I will bring into the open every one of the conjuring tricks of this pretended divinity — the tricks that have carried men a very long way off the road of truth. But I will go a long way back, to the source. Then if anyone picks up this book knowing nothing of the truth, he can be taught. He can understand what really is “the source and origin of these evils,” and, once he has been given light, can see his own mistakes and the mistakes of the whole human race. [a]

God has the greatest foresight for planning and the greatest skill for carrying a plan out. Before he began this business of the world — since the fountain of full and complete goodness was in him, as it always is — he wanted that goodness to spring out of him like a stream and run far and wide. So he brought forth a spirit like himself, one who would have in him the excellences of God the Father. How he willed this, I will try to show in the fourth book. Then he made another being, in whom the character of his divine origin did not stay. This one was poisoned by his own envy and crossed over from good to evil. By his own choice — a freedom God had given him — he took for himself a name that meant the opposite of what he had been. From this it is plain that envy is the source of all evils. He envied the one made before him, who by holding steady stayed acceptable and dear to God the Father. This being, who by his own act turned from good to evil, is called by the Greeks diabolos. We call him the accuser, because the faults he lures us into are the very ones he reports to God. So when God began the fabric of the world, he set that first and greatest Son over the whole work and used him at once as adviser and as craftsman in the planning, the arranging and the finishing — since the Son is complete in foresight, in judgment and in power. I speak of him sparingly here, because his excellence, his name and his nature have to be set out in another place. And let no one ask what materials God used to make works so great and so wonderful. He made everything out of nothing.

The poets are not to be listened to, who say that in the beginning there was a chaos — that is, a confusion of matter and of the elements — and that God afterwards divided that whole mass, sorted each thing out of the jumbled heap, arranged them in order, and so built the world and furnished it. It is easy to answer people like this, who do not understand what God can do. They believe he can produce nothing except out of stuff that already exists and lies ready to hand, and philosophers fell into the same mistake. Cicero, discussing the nature of the gods, puts it this way: “First of all, then, it is not probable that the matter out of which everything arose was made by divine providence. It has, and always has had, a force and a nature of its own. A builder about to put up a building does not make his own materials; he uses what is already prepared, and the modeler does the same with his wax. In the same way divine providence ought to have had materials at hand — not of its own making, but already prepared for use. But if matter was not made by God, then neither earth nor water nor air nor fire was made by God.”

How many faults there are in those ten lines! First this. A man who in almost all his other arguments and books defended divine providence, and used very sharp arguments against those who denied there is any providence, now turns traitor or deserter and sets out to abolish providence himself. Against a man in that position you need neither thought nor effort. It is enough to remind him of his own words. Nobody will ever refute Cicero more forcefully than Cicero. But let us grant this much to the habit and practice of the Academics: that a man is allowed to speak with great freedom and hold whatever opinions he likes. Let us look at the opinions themselves. It is not probable, he says, that matter was made by God. What arguments do you offer for that? You gave no reason at all why it should be improbable. To me, on the contrary, it looks extremely probable — and not without reason, when I consider that there is more in God than you allow. You reduce him to human weakness, leaving him nothing but the workman’s labor. In what respect, then, will divine power differ from human, if God, like a man, needs somebody else’s help? And he does need it, if he can build nothing unless another supplies him with materials. But if that is so, his power is plainly imperfect, and the one who prepared the material must be reckoned the more powerful. What name, then, are we to give the being who beats God in power? — since to make what is your own is a greater thing than to arrange what belongs to someone else. But if nothing can possibly be more powerful than God, who must of necessity be perfect in strength, in power and in intelligence, it follows that the one who made the things composed of matter made matter as well. For it was neither possible nor fitting that anything should exist without God’s power at work in it, or against his will. But it is probable, he says, that matter has a force and a nature of its own, and always has had. What force could it have if nobody gave it any? What nature, if nobody produced it? If it had force, it took that force from someone. And from whom could it take it, if not from God? And if it had a nature — a word that plainly comes from being born — then it must have been produced. And by whom could it have been brought into existence, except God? For nature, which you say everything came from, can make nothing if it has no understanding. But if it has the power to produce and to make, then it has understanding, and must be God. There is no other name for a force in which there is both the foresight to plan and the skill and power to carry the plan out. Seneca, the most intelligent of all the Stoics, put it better. He saw that nature is nothing else but God. And so he asks: “Shall we not praise God, who has his excellence by nature?” For he learned it from no one. Yes, truly, we will praise him. Although it is natural to him, he gave it to himself, since God himself is nature. So when you assign the origin of everything to nature and take it away from God, you land in the same difficulty:

Simply by changing the name, you plainly admit that it was made by the very one you say did not make it.

Then comes a comparison with no sense in it at all. “A builder about to put up a building does not make his own materials, but uses what is already prepared, and the modeler does the same with wax; so divine providence ought to have had materials at hand, not of its own making but already prepared for use.” On the contrary, it ought not. God will have less power, not more, if he works from materials already provided, which is the human way of working. A builder will put up nothing without timber, since he cannot make the timber himself; and not being able to do that is part of human weakness. But God makes his own materials for himself, because he has the power to. Having the power is exactly what belongs to God: if he cannot, he is not God. A man produces his works out of what already exists, because being mortal he is weak, and being weak his power is limited and middling. God produces his works out of what has no existence, because being eternal he is strong, and being strong his power is immeasurable, with no end and no limit — like the life of the Maker himself. What is surprising, then, in this: that God, when he was about to make the world, first prepared the material to make it from, and prepared that material out of what had no existence? It is impossible for God to borrow anything from any other source, since all things are in him and from him. If anything exists before him, and if anything has been made but not by him, then he loses both the power and the name of God.

But it may be said that matter was never made — that it is like God in this, the God who made this world out of matter. In that case two eternal first principles are set up, and two opposed to each other, which cannot happen without conflict and destruction. Things with a contrary force and a contrary method must of necessity collide. On those terms it is impossible that both should be eternal, since one must overpower the other. So the nature of what is eternal cannot be anything but single, everything else coming down from that source as from a spring. Therefore either God came from matter, or matter from God. Which of the two is nearer the truth is easy to see. Of these two, one has sensation and the other has none. The power of making anything can only exist where there is sensation, intelligence, reflection and the power to move. Nothing can be begun, or made, or finished unless reason has foreseen how it is to be made before it exists, and how it is to keep its footing once it has been made. In short, the only one who makes anything is the one who has the will to make it and the hands to finish what he has willed. But what has no sensation lies always idle and numb. Nothing can originate where there is no voluntary motion. If every animal has reason in it, then certainly it cannot have been produced out of what has no reason: what is not present at the source cannot be got from anywhere else. And do not let anyone be troubled that certain animals seem to be born out of the earth. The earth does not give birth to them of itself; it is the Spirit of God, without which nothing is produced. So God did not arise out of matter, because a being with sensation can never spring from one without it — nor a wise being from an irrational one, nor a being incapable of suffering from one that can suffer, nor a bodiless being from one with a body. Matter, rather, comes from God. Whatever consists of a body that is solid and can be handled will admit an outside force. What admits force can be broken up; what is broken up perishes; what perishes must have had an origin; what had an origin had a spring it came from — that is, some maker, and one who is intelligent, foreseeing and skilled at making. There is such a one, assuredly, and no other than God. And since he has sensation, intelligence, providence, power and vigor, he is able to create and make things living and lifeless alike, because he has the means of making everything.

Matter, moreover, cannot always have existed. If it had, it would be incapable of change: what always was does not stop always being, and what had no beginning must of necessity have no end. Besides, it is easier for what had a beginning to be without an end than for what had no beginning to have one. So if matter was not made, nothing can be made out of it. And if nothing can be made out of it, matter itself cannot exist at all — since matter is precisely what a thing is made out of. But everything a thing is made out of is pulled to pieces once the craftsman’s hand is on it, and begins to be something else. So since matter had an end, at the moment the world was made out of it, it had a beginning too. What is pulled down was previously built up; what is untied was previously tied; what is brought to an end was begun. If, then, from its change and its end we conclude that matter had a beginning, from whom could that beginning have come, except from God? God, therefore, is the only being who was not made, and so he can destroy other things while he himself cannot be destroyed. What was in him will always remain, because he has not been produced and has not sprung from any other source; nor does his being depend on anything else that might be changed and so bring about his dissolution. He is of himself, as we said in the first book. And therefore he is exactly what he willed himself to be: incapable of suffering, unchangeable, incorruptible, blessed and eternal.

But the conclusion Cicero rounded the thought off with is far more absurd. “But if matter was not made by God, then neither earth nor water nor air nor fire was made by God.” How neatly he dodged the danger! He stated the first point as if it needed no proof, when it was far more doubtful than the point it was brought in to prove. If matter was not made by God, he says, the world was not made by God. He preferred to draw a false conclusion from something false rather than a true one from something true. Uncertain things ought to be proved from certain ones; he took his proof from an uncertainty in order to knock down what was certain. That the world was made by divine providence, almost all the philosophers agree — leaving aside Trismegistus, who declares it; leaving aside the verses of the Sibyls, who announce the same; leaving aside the prophets, who with one impulse and one matching voice testify that the world was made, and that it was God’s own workmanship. It is the opinion of the Pythagoreans, the Stoics and the Peripatetics, the leading schools of all. From those first seven wise men down to Socrates and Plato it was held as a settled and undoubted fact, until, many ages later, the crazy Epicurus appeared — the one man who dared deny what is most obvious, no doubt out of a hunger for novelty, so that he might found a school under his own name. And because he could find nothing new, and still wanted to look as though he disagreed with the rest, he chose to overturn the old opinions. On this point, though, all the philosophers who snarled around him refuted him. It is more certain, then, that the world was arranged by providence than that matter was gathered together by providence. He ought not to have concluded that the world was not made by divine providence because its matter was not. He ought rather to have concluded, since the world was made by divine providence, that matter was made by God as well. It is more believable that matter was made by God, because he is all-powerful, than that the world was not made by God, since nothing can be made without mind, intelligence and design. But this is not Cicero’s fault; it is his school’s. He had taken up an argument meant to do away with the nature of the gods that philosophers chattered about, and, not knowing the truth, he supposed that God had to be done away with altogether. He was able to abolish the gods, because they did not exist. But when he tried to overthrow divine providence, which belongs to the one God, his arguments failed, because he had begun to fight against the truth; and he necessarily fell into this pit, out of which he could not climb. Here, then, I hold him firmly fixed. I hold him nailed to the spot, since Lucilius, who argued the other side, said nothing. Here is the hinge; everything turns on it. Let Cotta get himself out of this abyss if he can. Let him bring forward arguments to prove that matter has always existed and that no providence made it. Let him show how anything heavy and weighty could either exist without an author or be changed; and how what always was ceased to be, so that what never was could begin to be. If he proves that, then — and only then — I will grant that the world itself was not established by divine providence. And even in granting it I will hold him fast in another snare. He will turn round again to the same point he does not want to return to, and say that both the matter the world is made of and the world made of that matter exist by nature — while I maintain that nature itself is God. For no one can make wonderful things, that is, things standing in the greatest order, except one who has intelligence, foresight and power. And so it will come to be seen that God made everything, and that nothing at all can exist that did not take its origin from God.

But the same man, whenever he plays the Epicurean and refuses to admit that the world was made by God, likes to ask by what hands, by what machines, by what levers, by what contrivance God made a work of that size. He could have seen, if he had been able to live at the time when God made it. But God did not want man looking into God’s own works, and so was unwilling to bring him into this world until everything was finished. And in fact he could not have been brought in. How could he have existed while the heaven overhead was being built and the foundations of the earth below were being laid — when wet things, perhaps, were either stiffening with cold into ice or boiling with fiery heat and hardening into solid? How could he have lived when the sun was not yet in place and neither grain nor animals had been produced? So man had to be made last, when the finishing hand had already been laid on the world and on everything else in it. The sacred writings, in the end, teach that man was God’s last work, and that he was brought into this world as into a house already prepared and made ready; for everything was made on his account. The poets admit as much. Ovid, after describing the completion of the world and the making of the other animals, added:

So it must be a wicked thing to go searching into what God wished kept secret! But Cicero’s questions were not asked out of any wish to hear or to learn. They were asked in order to refute, since he was confident that nobody could answer them. As though we ought to suppose that these things were not made by God simply because it cannot plainly be seen how they were made! If you had been brought up in a well-built and decorated house and had never seen a workshop, would you have supposed that the house was not built by a man, because you did not know how it was built? You would certainly ask the same question about the house that you now ask about the world: by what hands, with what tools, did men contrive such great works? And especially if you saw big stones, huge rough blocks from the quarry, enormous columns, the whole structure high and lifted up — would not all that seem to you beyond the measure of human strength, because you did not know that such things are made not so much by strength as by skill and ingenuity?

But if man, in whom nothing is perfect, still achieves more by skill than his feeble strength would allow, what reason is there to find it unbelievable when it is said that the world was made by God — in whom, since he is perfect, wisdom can have no limit and strength no measure? His works are seen with the eyes; but how he made them is not seen even by the mind. As Hermes says, the mortal cannot draw near to the immortal — that is, cannot come closer and follow it up with the understanding — nor the temporal to the eternal, nor the corruptible to the incorruptible. And that is why the earthly animal is still incapable of looking into heavenly things. It is shut in and held as though in custody by the body, so that it cannot make everything out with free and unhindered perception. Let him understand, then, how foolishly he acts who inquires into things that cannot be described. That is to pass the limits of one’s own condition, and to fail to understand how far a man is permitted to come. In short, when God revealed the truth to man, he wanted us to know only the things it concerned man to know for the gaining of life. About the things that belong to a profane and greedy curiosity he said nothing, so that they might stay secret. Why, then, do you inquire into things you cannot know — and would be no happier for knowing? It is perfect wisdom in a man if he knows that there is one God, and that all things were made by him.