Virtue Without a Head

The first point of this law is to know God himself, to obey him alone, to worship him alone. A man who does not know God, the parent of his own soul, cannot keep hold of what it is to be a man — and that is the greatest impiety of all. For it is this ignorance that makes him serve other gods, and no worse crime than that can be committed. From there the step into wickedness is easy, because he does not know the truth or the highest good; since God, whom he shrinks from knowing, is himself the spring of all goodness. Or suppose he does want to follow God’s justice. Not knowing the divine law, he takes up the laws of his own country as though they were true justice, though they were plainly framed not by justice but by convenience. Why else are there different and varying laws among every people, except that each nation has enacted for itself whatever it judged useful for its own affairs? But how far convenience stands from justice the Roman people themselves teach: by declaring war through the fetial priests, by inflicting injuries in due legal form, by always coveting and carrying off other people’s property, they have won for themselves the possession of the whole world. [a]

These men think themselves just if they do nothing against their own laws. But that may be nothing more than fear, if they keep off crimes only because they dread the punishment standing in front of them. Still, let us grant that they do naturally, or, as the philosopher says, of their own accord, what the laws compel them to do. Will they be just, then, because they obey arrangements made by men — men who may themselves have gone wrong, or been unjust? So it was with the framers of the Twelve Tables, who certainly served the public advantage as the times allowed. Civil law is one thing, and it varies everywhere with local custom. Justice is another, which God has set out for everyone as one and the same and simple. And a man who does not know God must be ignorant of justice as well.

But let us suppose it possible that someone, by natural and inborn goodness, should arrive at true virtues — a man such as we are told Cimon was at Athens, who gave to the needy, took in the poor, and clothed the naked. Even so, when the one thing that matters most is missing, the acknowledgment of God, then all those good things are pointless and empty, and in pursuing them he has worked for nothing. All his justice will be like a human body with no head. Every limb is in its right place, with its proper shape and proportion; and yet, because the chief thing of all is missing, the body has neither life nor any sensation. Those limbs have the shape of limbs and no use at all, exactly as a head without a body has none. And a man is like that head who is not without the knowledge of God and yet lives unjustly. He has only what matters most, and he has it to no purpose, since he is missing the virtues, which are the limbs.

So for the body to be alive and able to feel, both are needed: the knowledge of God, as the head, and all the virtues, as the body. Then you will have a complete and living man. Still, the whole substance is in the head; and while the head cannot exist if every limb is gone, it can exist with some of them gone. Such a creature will be imperfect and defective, but it will be alive — like a man who knows God and yet goes wrong in some respect. For God pardons sins. So it is possible to live without some of the limbs, but in no way possible to live without a head.

This is why the philosophers, however naturally good they may be, have no knowledge and no understanding. All their learning and virtue is headless, because they do not know God, who is the Head of virtue and of knowledge. A man who does not know him is blind though he can see, deaf though he can hear, dumb though he can speak. But when he comes to know the Creator and Parent of all things, then he will see and hear and speak, for he begins to have a head, where all the senses are placed — the eyes, the ears, the tongue. A man truly sees who has looked with the eyes of his mind at the truth in which God is, or at God in whom the truth is. He hears who stamps on his heart the divine words and the commands that give life. He speaks who, in discussing heavenly things, tells out the power and majesty of the God who is above all.

So the man who does not acknowledge God is beyond question impious, and all the virtues he thinks he has or holds are found on that deadly road which belongs wholly to darkness. There is no reason, then, for anyone to congratulate himself on having gained these empty virtues. He is not only wretched, being without the goods that are here; he must also be a fool, since he takes on the greatest labors of his life to no purpose. For take away the hope of immortality, which God promises to those who hold on in his religion — the hope for whose sake virtue is to be sought and whatever evils come are to be endured — and it will certainly be the height of folly to want to comply with virtues that bring a man nothing but disasters and hard work. If virtue means bearing and going through, with courage, the poverty, exile, pain, and death that others are afraid of, then what good, I ask, does it have in itself, that philosophers should say it is to be sought for its own sake? They are simply delighted with superfluous and useless punishments, when they might have lived in peace.

For if our souls are mortal, if virtue will not exist after the body dissolves, why do we turn away from the goods handed to us, as though we were ungrateful, or unworthy to enjoy the gifts of God? Because to enjoy those blessings we would have to live in wickedness and impiety — since virtue, that is, justice, is followed by poverty. So a man is not in his right mind who, with no greater hope set before him, prefers labors and tortures and miseries to the goods that others enjoy in life.

But if virtue is to be taken up, as these men most rightly say, because it is clear that a man is born for it, then it ought to hold some greater hope, one that can bring a great and shining comfort for the evils and labors it is virtue’s part to endure. Virtue is hard in itself, and it cannot be counted a good in any other way than by having its hardship paid for by the greatest good. There is no other way we can hold off from these present goods, unless there are other and greater goods for whose sake it is worth leaving the pursuit of pleasures and enduring every evil. And those goods are nothing other, as I showed in the third book, than the goods of everlasting life. Now who can give these except God, who set virtue itself before us? So the sum and substance of everything is held in acknowledging and worshipping God. All a man’s hope and safety turns on this. This is the first step of wisdom: to know who our true Father is, and to worship him alone with the reverence owed him, to obey him, to give ourselves over to his service with the utmost devotion. Let all our doing, and care, and attention be spent on winning his favor.

I have said what is owed to God. Now I will say what must be given to man — though this very thing you give to man is given to God, since man is the image of God. Still, the first duty of justice is to be joined to God, the second to man. The first is called religion; the second is named mercy, or human kindness. That virtue belongs to the just and to the worshippers of God, because it alone holds within it the principle of a shared life. [h]

For God gave no wisdom to the other animals, and so made them safer from harm by natural defenses. But because he made man naked and frail, meaning to furnish him with wisdom instead, he gave him, along with everything else, this instinct of dutiful affection: that man should protect man, love him, cherish him, and both receive help against every danger and give it. Human kindness, then, is the greatest bond of human society, and whoever has broken it must be counted impious and a murderer of his own kin. For if we all take our origin from one man, whom God created, then we are plainly of one blood; and so it must be counted the greatest wickedness to hate a man, even a guilty one.

That is why God has laid it down that we are never to take up feuds, but always to put them away, soothing those who are our enemies by reminding them of our kinship. In the same way, if we are all breathed into and made alive by one God, what are we but brothers — and all the more closely joined, because we are joined in soul rather than in body? So Lucretius is not wrong when he says:

So men who injure a man are to be reckoned savage beasts: men who, against every law and right of human nature, plunder, torture, kill, and drive into exile.

Because of this brotherly kinship, God teaches us never to do evil but always good. And he lays down what doing good consists in: bringing help to those who are oppressed and in difficulty, and giving food to those who have nothing. For God, being kind himself, wanted us to be a social animal. So in another man’s case we ought to be thinking of ourselves. We do not deserve to be set free in our own dangers if we do not come to the aid of others; we do not deserve help if we refuse to give it.

There are no rules of the philosophers to this effect. They have been captivated by the appearance of a false virtue, and have taken mercy away from man; in wanting to heal, they have spoiled. And though they generally admit that a mutual sharing in human society ought to be kept up, they cut themselves off from it entirely by the harshness of their inhuman virtue.

So this error too must be refuted, the error of those who think nothing should be given to anyone. They have brought in more than one account of the origin and cause of city-building. Some tell it this way. The men who were first born out of the earth passed a wandering life among the woods and open country, bound together by no shared speech or justice; they had leaves and grass for beds, caves and hollows for houses, and they were prey to wild beasts and stronger animals. Then those who had escaped after being mauled, or who had watched a neighbor mauled, took warning of their own danger and had recourse to other men, begging protection. At first they made their wishes known by nodding; then they tried the beginnings of talk, and by attaching names to each thing they gradually completed a system of speech. But when they saw that numbers alone were not safe against the beasts, they began to build towns as well, either to make their night’s rest secure or to keep off the raids and attacks of animals — not by fighting them, but by throwing up barriers in the way.

Minds unworthy of men, that produced this foolish nonsense! Wretched and pitiable men, who committed to writing and handed on to memory the record of their own folly! They could see that the plan of gathering together, of dealing with one another, of avoiding danger, of guarding against harm, of getting themselves sleeping places and dens, comes naturally even to dumb animals. And yet they thought that men could never have been warned, or have learned what to fear and what to avoid and what to do, except by examples — or that they would never have come together, or found out the method of speech, if wild beasts had not been eating them.

Others thought all this senseless, as it really was. They said the cause of men’s coming together was not the mauling of wild beasts but the very feeling of humanity itself: that men gathered because human nature shrinks from being alone and wants company and society. The difference between the two accounts is not great; the causes differ, but the fact is the same. Either might have been true, since there is no direct opposition between them.

But in fact neither of them is true at all. Men were not born out of the ground all over the world, as though sprung from the teeth of some dragon, the way the poets tell it. One man was formed by God, and from that one man the whole earth was filled with the human race — just as happened again after the flood, which they certainly cannot deny. So no coming-together of that kind happened at the beginning; and anyone with sense will understand that there were never men on the earth who could not speak, apart from infants. Let us suppose, though, that these things are true which idle and foolish old men say to no purpose, so that we may refute them out of their own feelings and arguments.

If men were gathered together for this reason, to protect their weakness by helping one another, then we must help the man who needs help. Since men entered into and contracted a fellowship with men for the sake of protection, to violate that compact — or simply not to keep it, a compact entered into among men from the very beginning of their kind — must be counted the greatest impiety.

For a man who withdraws from giving help must also, of necessity, withdraw from receiving it; a man who refuses his aid to another has decided that he needs no one’s aid himself. But a man who pulls out and separates himself from the body must live not by the custom of men but in the manner of wild beasts. And since that cannot be done, the bond of human society must certainly be kept, because man cannot live at all without man. And keeping society alive means a mutual exchange of kind services: giving help so that we may be able to receive it.

But if, as those others claim, men were brought together on account of humanity itself, then a man ought without question to recognize a man. And if those ignorant and still uncivilized men did it, when the practice of speaking was not yet established, what ought we to think should be done by men who are polished, joined together by the exchange of conversation and of every kind of business, and who, being used to human company, cannot bear to be alone?