We Do Not Sell Water

A few words about philosophy in general are still owed, so that we may finish with our case made. The greatest imitator of Plato among our own writers thought that philosophy was not for ordinary people, since nobody but the learned could reach it. “Philosophy is content with a few judges, and of its own accord deliberately keeps away from the crowd.” Then it is not wisdom, if it runs away from where people gather. If wisdom is given to a human being, it is given to everyone alike, with no distinction drawn; there is no one at all who cannot acquire it. But these men take hold of virtue — which was given to the whole human race — in such a way that they alone of all men seem to want the enjoyment of what belongs to the public. They are as grudging as if they wanted other people’s eyes tied shut or torn out so that they could not see the sun. For what else is it to refuse men wisdom, than to take the true and divine light away from their minds? If human nature is capable of wisdom, then workmen and country people and women — everyone, in short, who wears the human shape — ought to be taught to be wise, and the people ought to be brought together out of every language and rank and sex and age. So here is a very strong argument that philosophy neither leads to wisdom nor is wisdom itself: its secret is made known by nothing but the philosopher’s beard and cloak. The Stoics saw this too, and said that philosophy was to be studied by slaves and by women. So did Epicurus, who invites people with no letters at all to take it up; and so did Plato, who wanted to build a state made of wise men. [a]

They did try to do what the truth required, but they could get no further than words. In the first place, training in many subjects is needed before a man can take up philosophy. Ordinary schooling has to be got first, for practice in reading, because in so wide a variety of subjects it is impossible to learn everything by ear or to hold it in the memory. Then a good deal of attention has to be given to the grammarians, so that you know the right way to speak, and that takes many years. You cannot be ignorant of rhetoric either, if you are to state and set out the things you have learned. Geometry, music and astronomy are needed as well, because these arts have some connection with philosophy. And the whole of this cannot be learned by women, who have to spend the years of their maturity learning the household duties that will be of use to them later; nor by servants, who have to be in service during exactly the years when they are able to learn; nor by the poor, or laborers, or country people, who have to earn their daily bread by work. That is why Cicero says philosophy turns away from the crowd. And yet Epicurus will take in the unlearned. How, then, are they to understand what is said about the first beginnings of things, when the tangles and knots of that subject are barely reached by trained minds?

In subjects wrapped in obscurity, muddled by a variety of clever men, and dressed up in the studied language of eloquent ones, what room is there for the unskilled and the ignorant? And in the end they never taught a single woman philosophy, except Themiste alone, in the whole memory of the human race; nor a single slave, except Phaedo alone, who is said to have been ransomed and taught by Cebes while he was living in harsh slavery. They also count Plato and Diogenes. But these were not slaves, though they had fallen into servitude, for they had been taken as prisoners. A man named Aniceris is said to have ransomed Plato for eight sesterces, and Seneca sharply rebuked the man who paid it, because he set so low a price on Plato. He was out of his mind, it seems to me, to be angry with a man for not throwing away a great deal of money. No doubt he should have weighed out gold as if he were ransoming the corpse of Hector, or insisted on paying more than the seller was asking. As for foreigners, they taught none of them, with the single exception of Anacharsis the Scythian — and he would never have dreamed of philosophy if he had not first learned the language and the literature.

So the thing they saw that nature justly demanded, but could not do themselves, and saw that the philosophers could not bring about — that is accomplished by divine instruction alone, for that alone is wisdom. No doubt men who cannot convince even themselves of anything were in a position to convince somebody else! No doubt they will crush another man’s desires, cool his anger and hold down his lusts — men who give in to vices themselves, and admit that nature has the better of them! But what the commands of God do to the souls of men, by their plainness and their truth, is shown by proofs that turn up every day. Give me a man who is hot-tempered, foul-mouthed and out of control: with a very few words of God, “I will make him as gentle as a sheep.” Give me a grasping, greedy, tight-fisted man: I will hand him back to you generous, giving out his money with both hands full. Give me a man afraid of pain and death: he will soon think nothing of crosses and fires and the bull of Phalaris. Give me a man ruled by lust, an adulterer, a glutton: you will soon see him sober, chaste and self-controlled. Give me a cruel and bloodthirsty man: that rage will turn into real gentleness. Give me an unjust man, a fool, a criminal: he will be just at once, and wise, and harmless — for by a single washing all his wickedness is taken away. [i]

So great is the power of divine wisdom that, once poured into a man’s heart, it drives out folly, the mother of all faults, at one stroke and for good. And to get that done there is no need of money, or of books, or of studying by night. These results come free, easily and fast, if only the ears are open and the heart is thirsty for wisdom. Let no one be afraid: we are not selling water, and we do not charge a fee for the sun. The spring of God is open to everybody, and it is deep and full; and this light from heaven rises for all — for as many as have eyes. Did any of the philosophers ever bring such things about, or can he if he wants to? They spend their whole lives on the study of philosophy, and they cannot make any other man better, nor themselves either, if nature has put any obstacle in the way. Their wisdom, at the very best it can do, does not root vices out; it hides them. But a few commands of God change the whole man so completely — the old man taken off, and a new one put on — that you would not recognize him as the same person.

What then? Do they lay down no commands like these? Yes, they do, a great many, and they often come close to the truth. But those commands carry no weight, because they are human, and lack the greater authority, the divine one. So no one believes them: the hearer supposes that the man giving the orders is a man just like himself. Besides, there is no certainty in them, nothing that comes out of knowledge. Everything is done by guesswork, and a great many different and conflicting things are put forward. So it is the mark of a complete fool to be willing to obey their commands, when it is an open question whether they are true or false; and that is why no one obeys them. No one wants to work hard for something uncertain. The Stoics say that virtue by itself can produce a happy life. Nothing truer could be said. But what if the man is tortured, or racked with pain? Can anybody be happy in the executioner’s hands? But pain inflicted on the body, they answer, is the raw material of virtue, and so he is not wretched even under torture. Epicurus puts it far more strongly. The wise man, he says, is always happy, and even when he is shut inside the bull of Phalaris he will make this speech: “It is pleasant, and I do not care about it.” Who would not laugh at him? — and especially because a man devoted to pleasure has taken on the part of a man of courage, and overdone it. It is impossible for anyone to reckon the torture of his body as a pleasure, since it is quite enough for doing virtue’s work that a man holds up under it and endures it. [n]

What do you say, Stoics? What do you say, Epicurus? The wise man is happy even while he is being tortured. If it is on account of the glory of his endurance, he will get no enjoyment out of it, since he may well die under the torture. If it is on account of remembering what he did, then either he will not be aware of it, if souls perish; or, if he is aware of it, he will gain nothing by it. What other benefit is there in virtue, then? What happiness of life? Is it that a man may die with an even mind? You are offering me the advantage of a single hour — a moment, perhaps — and for the sake of that it may not be worth being worn down by hardship and toil for a whole lifetime. And how much time does dying take? Once it has come, it makes no difference any more whether you went through it with an even mind or not. So it turns out that nothing is looked for from virtue except glory. And glory is either useless and short-lived, or it will not come at all, given how warped men’s judgments are. So there is no fruit in virtue, where virtue is subject to death and decay.

The men who said these things saw a kind of shadow of virtue; they did not see virtue herself. Their eyes were fixed on the ground, and they never lifted their faces to look up at her, “as she showed herself from the regions of heaven.” This is why no one obeys their commands. Either they train men to vices, when they defend pleasure; or, when they uphold virtue, they threaten sin with no punishment except disgrace, and promise virtue no reward except honor and praise, since they say that virtue is to be sought for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. So the wise man is happy under torture — but when he suffers torture for his faith, for justice, or for God, then that endurance of pain will make him happiest of all. For God alone can pay virtue its honor, and the reward of virtue is immortality and nothing else.

Men who do not look for that, and who have no religion — the thing eternal life is bound up with — certainly do not know what virtue can do, because they do not know its reward. They are not looking toward heaven either, as they imagine they are, when they investigate subjects that admit of no investigation. There is no other reason for looking toward heaven than to take up the worship of God, or to believe that one’s own soul does not die. If a man understands that God is to be worshipped, or has the hope of immortality set before him, his mind is in heaven; and though he may not see it with his eyes, he does see it with the eye of his soul. But men who do not take up religion belong to the earth, since religion comes from heaven; and men who think the soul dies along with the body are looking down at the ground just as much, for beyond the body, which is earth, they see nothing further that is immortal. It is no use at all that a man is made the way he is, standing upright and facing the sky, unless he lifts his mind up and makes out God, and turns all his thinking on the hope of everlasting life.

So there is nothing else in life that our purpose and our condition can rest on except knowing the God who made us, and worshipping him with reverence and devotion. And since the philosophers strayed away from this, it is plain that they were not wise. They did look for wisdom; but because they did not look for it the right way, they sank further off, and fell into errors so large that they did not even keep hold of ordinary common sense. They were not merely unwilling to keep religion; they did away with it, drawn on by the look of a false virtue, trying to free the mind from every fear. And this overthrow of religion goes by the name of nature. Either they did not know who made the world, or they wanted to persuade men that nothing had been finished off by a divine intelligence; so they said that nature was the mother of all things — as if they were saying that everything came into being of its own accord. With that one word they confess outright how much they do not know. For apart from divine providence and power, nature is precisely nothing. And if they call God nature, how twisted it is to use the name of nature rather than the name of God! But if nature is the plan, or the necessity, or the terms on which things are born, then by itself it has no power of perception; there must necessarily be a divine mind, which by its foresight supplies to all things the beginning of their existence. Or if nature is heaven and earth and everything that has been made, then nature is not God, but the work of God. [t]

By much the same mistake they believe there is such a thing as Fortune, a goddess who makes a mockery of men’s affairs with one accident after another — because they do not know where the good and the bad that happen to them come from. They imagine they have been matched against her in the ring, and they never say by whom, or for what reason, the match was made. All they do is boast that they are fighting Fortune to the death every moment of their lives. And whenever any of them have consoled someone over the death and loss of friends, they have attacked the name of Fortune with the harshest charges; there is not one of their discussions of virtue in which Fortune does not get roughly handled. Cicero, in his Consolation, says that he has always fought against Fortune, and that she was always beaten by him when he bravely drove back the attacks of his enemies; that he was not defeated by her even when he was driven from his house and lost his country; but then, when he lost the daughter he loved most, he shamefully admits that Fortune has beaten him. “I give in,” he says, “and I raise my hand.” What is more pitiable than a man lying flat like that? He is behaving foolishly, he says himself — but this is a man who professes to be wise. What, then, does taking that name amount to? What is that contempt for things which is claimed in such grand language? What is that dress of theirs, so unlike everyone else’s? Or why give out rules of wisdom at all, if no wise man has yet been found?

And does anyone resent us for denying that the philosophers are wise, when they admit themselves that they have neither knowledge nor wisdom? For whenever they have come off so badly that they cannot even keep up a pretense — which is their usual practice elsewhere — then they really are reminded of their ignorance, and they jump up as if in a fit of madness and cry out that they are blind and stupid. Anaxagoras declares that everything is covered over in darkness. Empedocles complains that the paths of the senses are narrow, as though he needed a four-horse chariot for his thinking. Democritus says that the truth lies sunk in a well so deep that it has no bottom — foolishly, of course, as he says other things too. For the truth is not sunk in a well, which he was at least free to climb down into, or even to fall into; it is set on the very top of a high mountain, or else in heaven, which is truest of all. What reason had he to say that it lies below rather than that it is lifted up high? Unless perhaps he preferred to put the mind in the feet as well, or in the bottoms of the heels, rather than in the chest or the head.

They were so far removed from the truth itself that not even the posture of their own bodies warned them that the truth has to be looked for up above. Out of this despair came the famous confession of Socrates, in which he said that he knew nothing except this one thing alone, that he knew nothing. Out of it flowed the system of the Academy — if a thing in which ignorance is both learned and taught can be called a system. But not even the men who claimed knowledge for themselves were able to defend consistently the very thing they thought they knew. Their accounts did not square with one another, and through their ignorance of divine things they were so unsteady and so uncertain, and so often asserted things that contradicted each other, that you cannot settle and decide what they meant. So why fight against men who die on their own swords? Why work at refuting men whom their own words refute and press hard? Aristotle, Cicero says, accuses the older philosophers of being either the greatest of fools or the greatest of boasters, because they thought that philosophy had been brought to completion by their own talents; but Aristotle saw that, since a great deal had been added in a few years, philosophy would be finished in a short time. What time was that, then? In what way, and when, and by whom, was philosophy finished? What he said is true — that they were the greatest of fools for supposing that philosophy had been perfected by their talents. But he did not speak carefully enough himself, in thinking that philosophy had either been begun by the ancients, or added to by more recent men, or would shortly be brought to perfection by men later still. For a thing can never be found out that is not looked for by its own road.