One Road and One Law

I have made the first point, that knowing what is good is not itself virtue; and second, I have shown what virtue is and what it consists in. It follows that I should show this as well — that the philosophers did not know what good and evil are. I can be brief about it, since it was made almost entirely plain in the third book, where I was discussing the chief good. And because they did not know what the chief good was, they were bound to go wrong about the other goods and evils that are not the chief one; for no one can weigh those with a true judgment who does not possess the spring itself from which they flow. Now the source of good things is God, and the source of evils is the one who is always the enemy of the divine name, of whom we have often spoken. From these two sources good things and evil things take their beginning. The ones that come from God have this object: to procure immortality, which is the greatest good. The ones that come from the other have this business: to call a man away from heavenly things and sink him in earthly ones, and so hand him over to the punishment of everlasting death, which is the greatest evil. Can it be in doubt, then, that all those men were ignorant of what is good and evil, who knew neither God nor God’s adversary? [a]

So they set the end of good things in the body and in this short life, which has to be dissolved and to perish; they got no further. All their rules, and everything they bring forward as good, clings to the earth and lies on the ground, since it dies along with the body, which is earth. Their rules do not aim at getting a man life; they aim at gaining riches, honor, glory, and power, or at increasing them — all of them altogether mortal things, as mortal as the man who worked to get them. Hence that line of theirs:

For they lay down by what methods and by what practices property is to be sought, since they see that it is often sought unjustly. But virtue of that kind is not what is set before a wise man. Seeking riches is not virtue: neither the finding of them nor the keeping of them is in our power, and that is why they are easier for bad men to get and to hold on to than for good ones. Virtue, then, cannot consist in seeking the very things in the despising of which the force and the meaning of virtue show themselves. Nor will it fall back on the very things that, with its great and lofty mind, it means to trample and crush underfoot. Nor is a soul set hard on the goods of heaven free to be called away from its undying pursuits in order to get itself these brittle ones. Rather, the method of virtue consists above all in acquiring the things that no man, and not death itself, can take away from us. That being so, the line that comes next is true:

That verse means almost the same as the first two. But neither the poet nor any of the philosophers was able to know what that value itself is — of what kind, or what it amounts to. The poet, and everyone he was following, took it to mean making right use of riches: that is, living moderately, not putting on expensive dinners, not throwing money away carelessly, not spending on things that are unnecessary or disgraceful.

Perhaps someone will say: “What are you saying? Do you deny that this is virtue?” I do not deny it. If I denied it, I would look as though I were arguing for the opposite. But I do deny that it is true virtue, because it is not that heavenly thing; it is altogether of the earth, since it produces nothing except what stays on the earth. What making a right use of wealth is, and what advantage is to be looked for from riches, I will set out more openly when I come to speak of the duty of piety.

The other lines that follow are not true at all. Declaring yourself an enemy of the wicked, or taking up the defense of the good, is something a bad man may do as well as a good one. Some men prepare their own road to power by a pretense of goodness. They do many of the things good men usually do, and do them the more readily because they are doing them in order to deceive; and I only wish goodness were as easy to carry out in action as it is to counterfeit. But once they have begun to reach their aim and their wish, standing on the highest step of power, then they lay the pretense aside and show what they are. They seize everything, they use violence, they lay waste. They bear down on the good men themselves, whose cause they had taken up. And they cut away the steps they climbed by, so that no one can use them against them in turn. Still, let us grant that this duty of defending the good belongs to the good man alone. Undertaking it is easy; carrying it through is hard. For once you have committed yourself to a contest and an encounter, the victory lies at God’s disposal and not in your own power. And for the most part the wicked are stronger than the good, both in numbers and in the way they band together, so that overcoming them takes not so much virtue as good luck. Is there anyone who does not know how often the better and juster side has been beaten? That is where harsh tyrannies against the citizens have always broken out. History is full of examples, but we will be content with one. Gnaeus Pompey wanted to be the defender of the good, since he took up arms for the commonwealth, for the senate, and for liberty; and that same man was beaten and perished together with liberty itself, and was mutilated by Egyptian eunuchs and thrown out unburied. So it is not virtue either to be the enemy of bad men or the defender of good ones, because virtue cannot be at the mercy of uncertain chances.

Next:

Once agreement between men is taken away, virtue does not exist at all. For what are your country’s interests but another state’s or another nation’s harm? They mean pushing out the borders that are taken from others by force, increasing the power of the state, improving the revenues — and these are not virtues but the overthrow of virtues. First, the bond of human society is taken away; innocence is taken away; keeping your hands off what belongs to another is taken away; and last of all justice itself is taken away, since justice cannot bear the tearing apart of the human race, and wherever weapons have flashed it has to be driven out and wiped away from that place. This saying of Cicero’s is true: “But those who say that regard is to be paid to fellow citizens and not to foreigners break up the common society of the human race; and when that is gone, generosity, open-handedness, kindness, and justice are destroyed root and branch.” For how can a man be just who harms, who hates, who plunders, who kills? And the men who work hard at being of service to their country do all these things. They do not know what this being of service is, since they think nothing useful and nothing to their advantage except what can be held in the hand — and that is the one thing that cannot be held, because it can be snatched away.

So whoever has won for his country these goods — as they themselves call them — that is, whoever by the overthrow of cities and the destruction of nations has filled the treasury with money, has seized lands and made his countrymen rich, is praised to the skies. In him, they say, is the greatest and most complete virtue. And this is the mistake not only of ordinary people and the uneducated, but of philosophers too, who even lay down rules for injustice, so that folly and wickedness should not go short of a training and an authority. So when they speak of the duties that belong to warfare, that whole discussion is fitted neither to justice nor to true virtue, but to this life and to the settled custom of the state. That this is not justice, the thing itself declares, and Cicero has borne witness to it. “But we,” he says, “have no solid, lifelike figure of true law and genuine justice; we have nothing but a shadow and outline sketches. And I wish we followed even those, since they are drawn from the excellent originals made by nature and truth.” So it was a shadow and an outline that they took for justice. And what of wisdom? Does not the same man admit that it does not exist in the philosophers at all? He says: “Nor, when Fabricius or Aristides is called just, is an example of justice looked for in them as in a wise man; for none of them is wise in the sense in which we want the truly wise man to be understood. Nor were the men who were reckoned and called wise, Marcus Cato and Gaius Laelius, actually wise, nor those famous seven either; it was from their steady practice of the middle duties that they carried a certain likeness and appearance of wise men.” So if wisdom is taken away from the philosophers by their own admission, and justice is taken away from the men who pass for just, it follows that all those accounts of virtue must be false, since no one can know what true virtue is except the man who is just and wise. And no one is just and wise except the man God has taught with heavenly commands.

For all those men who are thought wise because the folly of others is plain to see are dressed in the appearance of virtue, and they take hold of shadows and outlines, but of nothing true. This happens because that deceiving road which slopes toward the west has many paths, answering to the variety of pursuits and systems that are so unlike one another in human life. For just as that way of wisdom contains something that resembles folly, as we showed in the previous book, so this way, which belongs altogether to folly, contains something that resembles wisdom; and the men who see through the folly of people in general fasten on that. As it has its vices out in the open, so it has something that seems to resemble virtue; as it has its wickedness plain, so it has a likeness and an appearance of justice. For how could the scout of that road, whose whole strength and power lie in deceit, lead men all the way into fraud unless he showed them some things that had the look of truth? For, so that his own immortal secret might stay hidden, God placed in the road things that men would look down on as evil and disgraceful — so that, turning away from wisdom and truth, which they were hunting for without any guide, they might fall into the very thing they wanted to avoid and run from. And so he points out that road of ruin and death, the one with many windings: either because there are many kinds of life, or because there are many gods that people worship. [o]

The double-dealing and treacherous guide of this road — so that there may seem to be some distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil — leads the self-indulgent one way and the men called thrifty another; the ignorant one way and the learned another; the lazy one way and the energetic another; the foolish one way and the philosophers another, and even the philosophers not all along one path. Those who do not steer clear of pleasures or riches he draws only a little way off this public and crowded road; but those who either want to follow virtue or make a profession of despising things, he hauls out over certain rough cliffs. But for all that, the paths that show some appearance of what is honorable are not different roads. They are turnoffs and bypaths, which look as though they were separated from the common road and branched off to the right, and yet they come back to it, and at the very end they all lead to one outcome. For that guide brings them all together at the point where the good ought to have been separated from the bad, the strong from the idle, the wise from the foolish — namely, in the worship of the gods. There he kills them all with one sword, because without any distinction they were all fools, and plunges them into death. But this road — the road of truth and wisdom and virtue and justice, all of which have one spring, one source of strength, one home — is single, because with minds alike and in the fullest agreement we follow and worship one God; and it is narrow, because virtue is given to the few; and it is steep, because goodness, which stands very high and lofty, cannot be reached without the greatest difficulty and labor.

This is the road the philosophers are looking for, and the reason they do not find it is that they would rather look for it on the earth, where it cannot appear. So they wander, as it were, on the open sea, and they do not understand where they are being carried, because they neither make out the road nor follow any guide. For this road of life ought to be sought in the same way ships seek their course over deep water: unless they watch some light in the sky, they wander with no sure course. But whoever is trying to hold the right course of life ought not to look to the earth but to the sky — or, to say it more plainly, he ought not to follow man but God; not to serve these earthly images but the God of heaven; not to measure everything by what it does for the body but by what it does for the soul; not to attend to this life but to the everlasting one. So if you always turn your eyes toward heaven and watch the sun where it rises, and take that for the guide of your life, as you would on a voyage, your feet will find their own way into the road. And that heavenly light, which is a far brighter sun to sound minds than the one we look at in mortal flesh, will so rule and govern you as to lead you without a single mistake to the finest harbor of wisdom and virtue. [t]

So the law of God must be taken up, the law that can set us on this path: that sacred, that heavenly law which Marcus Tullius, in the third book of his Republic, described almost with the voice of God. Rather than speak at greater length myself, I have set down his words: “There is indeed a true law: right reason, agreeing with nature, spread through all men, unchanging, everlasting. It calls to duty by commanding and turns men from wrong by forbidding; and it does not command or forbid the good in vain, nor does it move the wicked by commanding or forbidding. It is not permitted to alter the provisions of this law, nor may we cut anything away from it, nor can it be repealed altogether. We cannot be released from this law by the senate or by the people, and no one else is to be sought out to explain it or interpret it. There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one law now and another later; but one law, everlasting and unchangeable, will bind all nations at all times. And there will be one common Master and Ruler of all, God: the framer of this law, its arbiter, and the one who proposed it. Whoever does not obey it will be running away from himself, and in despising the nature of a man he will suffer the heaviest punishments by that very fact, even if he has escaped the other punishments that are supposed to exist.” Who that knows the mystery of God could relate the law of God as tellingly as this man set that law out — a man who stood far off from the knowledge of the truth? For my part I think that men who say true things without knowing it are to be taken as though they were prophesying under the influence of some spirit. But if he had also known, and explained, what commands the law itself consists of, as clearly as he saw the force and the meaning of the divine law, he would have been doing the work not of a philosopher but of a prophet. And because he was unable to do that, it has to be done by us, to whom the law itself has been handed over by the one great Master and Ruler of all, God.