The First Man and the Flood

They say that at certain shifts of the sky and movements of the stars there came a kind of ripeness for the producing of living creatures; and that the new earth, holding on to the seed of life, brought forth out of itself certain sacs shaped like wombs. Lucretius says of them: [a]

These, he says, when they had ripened, were split open by the force of nature and produced tender young animals; and afterwards the earth itself ran with a kind of moisture like milk, and the animals were fed on it. How, then, were they able to bear the force of cold or heat, or to get away from it, or to be born at all, when the sun would scorch them and the cold would shrivel them? But at the beginning of the world, they say, there was no winter and no summer — only a perpetual spring of even temperature. Why, then, do we see none of this happening now? Because, they say, it had to happen once, so that animals could be born; but after they existed and had been given the power of reproducing, the earth stopped bringing them forth, and the seasons were changed.

How easy it is to refute a falsehood! In the first place, nothing can exist in this world that does not go on as it began. The sun and the moon and the stars were not then uncreated; nor, once created, were they without their motions; nor did that divine government which manages and rules their courses put off beginning its work along with them. In the next place, if things are as they say, then there has to be a providence, and they fall into the very thing they are most anxious to avoid. For while the animals were still unborn, plainly someone provided that they should be born, so that the world would not look shaggy with waste and emptiness. And that they should be produced from the earth without the office of parents took great judgment to arrange; and next, that moisture drawn together out of the earth should be shaped into the various figures of bodies; and also that, receiving from the sacs that covered them the power of life and feeling, they should be poured out, as it were, from the womb of a mother — that is a wonderful provision, and one you cannot untangle. But let us grant that this too happened by chance. What comes next certainly cannot be chance: that the earth should flow with milk at that very moment, and that the temperature of the air should be even. And if these things really did happen so that the newborn animals would have food and be out of danger, then someone must have provided them by some divine plan.

But who is able to make such provision except God? Let us see, however, whether the thing they assert could have taken place at all — that men should be born out of the earth. Anyone who considers how long an infant is reared, and in what way, will understand at once that those earth-born children could not possibly have been reared without someone to bring them up. They would have had to lie for months where they were dropped, until their sinews grew strong enough for them to move and change position, which hardly happens inside a year. Now ask whether an infant could have lain for months in the same way and in the same place where it was dropped without dying — swamped and rotted by that same moisture of the earth which was supplied to feed it, and by its own filth mixed in with it. So it is impossible that it was not reared by someone; unless of course all animals are born grown up rather than helpless — and it never came into their heads to say that.

The whole of that method, then, is impossible and empty — if you can call it a method, when the point of it is that there should be no method at all. A man who says that everything is produced of its own accord, and assigns nothing to divine providence, is not asserting method; he is overthrowing it. But if nothing can be done or produced without design, plainly there is a divine providence, and design belongs to it as its own. So God, the Contriver of all things, made man. Even Cicero saw this, ignorant as he was of the sacred writings. In the first book of his treatise On the Laws he handed down the same thing the prophets did, and I add his words: “This animal — foreseeing, shrewd, many-sided, sharp, gifted with memory, full of method and design, which we call man — was brought into being by the supreme God on remarkable terms. Of all the many kinds and natures of living things, this one alone has a share in judgment and reflection, when all the others are without them.”

Do you see that this man, far as he was from any knowledge of the truth, still understood — since he held the image of wisdom — that man could not be produced except by God? But there is need of divine testimony as well, in case a man’s should not be enough. The Sibyl testifies that man is the work of God:

The sacred writings say the same. God, then, discharged the office of a true father. He himself formed the body; he himself poured in the soul we breathe with. Whatever we are, we are altogether his work. He would have taught us in what manner he did it, if it were right for us to know — as he taught us the other things, which have brought us the knowledge both of the old error and of the true light.

So when he had first formed the male in his own likeness, he then fashioned the woman after the image of the man himself, so that the two, joined together, could carry on their kind and fill the whole earth with their numbers. But in the making of man himself he brought together and completed the natures of those two materials we have spoken of as opposite to each other, fire and water. For when he had made the body, he breathed into it a soul out of the living spring of his own Spirit, which lasts forever, so that man might carry the likeness of the world itself, which is put together out of opposing elements. Man consists of soul and body — that is, as it were, of heaven and of earth: the soul we live by has its origin, so to speak, out of heaven from God, and the body out of the earth, from the dust of which we have said it was formed. [h]

Empedocles — and you cannot tell whether to count him among the poets or the philosophers, since he wrote about the nature of things in verse, as Lucretius and Varro did among the Romans — decided that there were four elements: fire, air, water and earth. Perhaps he was following Trismegistus, who said that our bodies were put together out of these four by God; for he said they contained in themselves something of fire, something of air, something of water and something of earth, and yet were neither fire nor air nor water nor earth. And these things are not false: the nature of earth is in the flesh, the nature of moisture in the blood, of air in the breath, of fire in the body’s heat. But the blood cannot be separated from the body the way moisture is from the earth, nor the body’s heat from the breath the way fire is from the air. So of all these, only two elements are found, and the whole nature of them is taken up into the making of our body.

Man, then, was made out of different and opposite substances, as the world itself was made out of light and darkness, out of life and death; and he has warned us that these two things fight against each other in man. If the soul, which has its origin from God, gains the mastery, it is immortal and lives in perpetual light; but if the body overpowers the soul and puts it under its rule, the soul is in everlasting darkness and death. And the force of this is not that it wipes out the souls of the unrighteous altogether, but that it puts them under everlasting punishment.

We call that punishment the second death, and it is itself perpetual, as immortality is. We define the first death this way: death is the dissolution of the nature of living things; or this way: death is the separation of body and soul. But the second we define this way: death is the suffering of everlasting pain; or this way: death is the sentencing of souls, according to what they deserve, to everlasting punishments. This does not reach the dumb cattle, whose spirits are not made out of God but out of the common air, and are dissolved at death.

So in this union of heaven and earth, whose image is worked out in man, the things that belong to God hold the higher part — that is, the soul, which has rule over the body — while the things that belong to the devil hold the lower part, plainly the body. For the body, being earthly, ought to be subject to the soul, as the earth is to heaven. It is, so to speak, a vessel which this heavenly spirit may use as a temporary dwelling. The duties of the two are these: the one that is from heaven and from God is to command, and the one that is from the earth and from the devil is to obey. And this did not escape even a dissolute man, Sallust, who says: “But all our power lies in the soul and the body; we use the soul rather to command, the body rather to obey.” It would have been well if he had lived in accordance with his words. He was a slave to the most degrading pleasures, and he destroyed the force of his own sentence by the corruption of his life.

But if the soul is fire, as we have shown, it ought to climb to heaven as fire does, so that it may not be put out; that is, it ought to rise to the immortality that is in heaven. And as fire cannot burn and stay alive unless it is kept up by some rich fuel to feed on, so the fuel and food of the soul is righteousness alone, and on that it is fed for life. After these things, God, having made man in the way I have pointed out, placed him in paradise — that is, in a garden most fruitful and pleasant, which he planted in the regions of the East with every kind of wood and tree, so that man might be fed by their various fruits; and, free from all hard labor, might give himself entirely to the service of God his Father.

Then he gave him fixed commands, by keeping which he might remain immortal, or, if he broke them, be punished with death. He was told not to taste of one tree only, the one in the middle of the garden, in which God had placed the knowledge of good and evil. Then the accuser, envying the works of God, brought all his tricks and devices to bear on beguiling the man, to rob him of immortality. First he enticed the woman by fraud into taking the forbidden fruit, and through her he talked the man himself into breaking the law of God. So, having obtained the knowledge of good and evil, the man began to be ashamed of his nakedness, and hid himself from the face of God, which he had not been in the habit of doing before.

Then God drove the man out of the garden, having passed sentence on the sinner, that he should seek his own support by labor. And he walled the garden itself round with fire, to keep the man from coming near it until he should carry out the last judgment on the earth and — death being taken away — call back the righteous, his worshippers, to that same place. So the sacred writers teach, and so does the Erythraean Sibyl when she says:

But since these are the last things, we will treat of them in the last part of this work. Now let us explain the things that come first. Death, then, followed man, according to the sentence of God — which the Sibyl also teaches in her verse, when she says:

So the life of man became limited in length — long, though, since it stretched to a thousand years. Varro was not ignorant of this, handed down as it is in the sacred writings and spread abroad in everyone’s knowledge, and he tried to give reasons why the ancients were supposed to have lived a thousand years. He says that among the Egyptians months are counted as years: so that a year is not made by the circuit of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac, but by the moon, which travels that sign-bearing circle in the space of thirty days. The argument is plainly false. No one then went past his thousandth year; but people who reach the hundredth year, which happens often enough, have undoubtedly lived a thousand two hundred months. And competent authorities report that men do reach a hundred and twenty years. But because Varro did not know why or when the life of man was shortened, he shortened it himself, since he knew that it was possible for a man to live a thousand four hundred months.

But afterwards, when God saw the earth filled with wickedness and crimes, he determined to destroy the human race with a flood. For renewing their numbers, however, he chose one man who, when all the rest were corrupt, stood out as a remarkable example of righteousness. At six hundred years old he built an ark, as God had commanded him, and in it he himself was saved, together with his wife and three sons and as many daughters-in-law, when the water had covered the highest mountains. Then, when the earth was dry, God, cursing the wickedness of the age before, gradually cut down the age of man in each generation that followed, so that the length of life might not again give men time to plot evils; and he set the limit at a hundred and twenty years, which no one was allowed to pass. [v]

But Noah, when he went out of the ark, as the sacred writings tell us, worked the ground carefully and planted a vineyard with his own hand. That refutes the people who make Bacchus the inventor of wine: Noah came before Bacchus, and before Saturn and Uranus too, by many generations. And when he had first taken the fruit from the vineyard, he grew merry, drank until he was drunk, and lay naked. When one of his sons, whose name was Ham, saw this, he did not cover his father’s nakedness, but went out and told his brothers as well. But they took a garment, went in with their faces turned away, and covered their father. And when their father became aware of what had been done, he disowned his son and sent him away. He went into exile and settled in a part of that land which is now called Arabia; and that land was called Canaan after him, and his descendants Canaanites. This was the first nation that did not know God, since its prince and founder, cursed by his father, did not receive from him the worship of God; and so he left his descendants ignorant of the divine nature.

From this nation all the nearest peoples flowed, as their numbers grew. But the descendants of his father were called Hebrews, and among them the religion of the true God settled. Later, when even these had multiplied enormously and the small extent of their settlements could not hold them, young men — some sent by their parents, some going of their own accord under the pressure of poverty — left their own lands to look for new settlements, were scattered in every direction, and filled all the islands and the whole earth. And so, torn away from the stem of their sacred root, they set up new customs and institutions for themselves at their own discretion.

But those who took Egypt were the first of all to begin looking up to the heavenly bodies and adoring them. Because the quality of the air did not drive them to shelter in houses, and because the sky in that country is not overspread with clouds, they observed the courses of the stars and their eclipses, and in their frequent acts of adoration they gazed at them more carefully and more freely. Then afterwards, moved by certain portents, they invented monstrous figures of animals to worship; who invented these we will disclose shortly.

But the others, scattered over the earth, admiring the elements of the world, began to worship the sky, the sun, the earth, the sea, without any images and temples, and offered sacrifices to them in the open air, until in the course of time they put up temples and statues to the most powerful kings and started the practice of honoring them with victims and incense. And so, wandering away from the knowledge of God, they began to be Gentiles. They are wrong, then, who insist that the worship of the gods existed from the beginning of the world, and that the religion of the nations came before the religion of God: they suppose that this last was discovered afterwards, because they do not know the source and origin of the truth. Now let us return to the beginning of the world.