The World Had a Beginning

It is well: the foundations are laid, as the famous orator says. But we have not only laid foundations firm enough and suitable to carry the weight of the work; we have raised the whole building too, with great strong walls, almost to the top. What is left is much easier — to roof it, or to decorate it. And yet without that, everything already done is both useless and unpleasant to look at. [a]

For what good is it to be set free from false religions, or to understand the true one? What good is it to see the emptiness of false wisdom, or to know what is true? What good is it, I say, to defend that heavenly justice? What good is it to hold on to the worship of God through great difficulties — which is the greatest virtue there is — unless the divine reward of everlasting happiness goes with it? That is what I must speak about in this book, or else everything that has gone before will look empty and unprofitable: if I left the very thing for whose sake it was all undertaken hanging in doubt, someone might well think that such great labors are undertaken for nothing, while he distrusts the heavenly reward God has appointed for the man who has looked down on the sweet enjoyments of this present earth in exchange for bare, unrewarded virtue.

So let me satisfy this part of the subject too, both by the testimony of the sacred writings and by arguments from likelihood, so that it may be equally plain that things to come are to be preferred to things present, heavenly things to earthly things, and eternal things to things that last only a while — since the rewards of vices are for a time, and the rewards of virtues are forever.

I will therefore set out the system of the world, so that it may easily be understood both when and how God made it. Plato, who discussed the making of the world, could neither know this nor explain it, since he did not know the heavenly mystery, which is learned only by the teaching of the prophets and of God; and so he said the world was created to last forever. The case is far otherwise. Whatever is a solid and heavy body must come to an end at some point, exactly as it received a beginning at some point.

Aristotle could not see how so great a mass of things could perish, and, wanting to head off that objection, he said that the world had always existed and always would. What he entirely failed to see is that whatever material thing exists must at some time have had a beginning, and that nothing can exist at all unless it had a beginning. When we see earth and water and fire perish — used up, put out — and these are plainly parts of the world, we understand that a thing whose limbs are mortal is itself mortal through and through. So it comes to this: whatever can be destroyed must once have been produced. And everything that comes within sight of the eyes has to be material, and able to be broken up.

Epicurus alone, then, following the authority of Democritus, spoke truly on this point: he said the world had a beginning at some time and would perish at some time. Even so, he was unable to give any reason — through what causes, or at what time, a work of this size would be destroyed. But since God has revealed it to us, and we do not arrive at it by guesswork but by instruction from heaven, I will teach it carefully, so that at last it may be clear to those who want the truth that the philosophers neither saw the truth nor grasped it. They had caught so faint a scent of it that they had no idea at all where that fragrance of wisdom, so pleasant and agreeable, was blowing from.

In the meantime I think I ought to warn those who are about to read this. Warped and vicious minds — whose sharpness has been blunted by earthly passions, which weigh down all the perceptions and leave them weak — will either fail entirely to understand what I am relating, or, even if they do understand it, will pretend otherwise and be unwilling for it to be true. They are dragged off by their vices. They knowingly take the side of their own evils, whose pleasantness has captured them, and they abandon the road of virtue because its bitterness offends them.

Men on fire with greed and a certain unquenchable thirst for riches cannot live in a plain style once they have sold off or squandered the things they take pleasure in; so they can hardly welcome a teaching that would force them to renounce their eager cravings. And those driven on by the goads of lust, who, as the poet says, “rush into madness and fire,” say that what I bring forward is plainly unbelievable, because rules about self-restraint wound their ears — rules that hold them back from the pleasures to which they have signed over their soul along with their body.

And those who are swollen with ambition, or on fire with the love of power, and have spent every effort on getting honors, will not believe a teaching that orders them to look down on all power and honor and to live in humility — and in such humility that they are able to take an injury, and, having taken one, be unwilling to pay it back. Not even if I were to carry the sun itself in my hands would they believe it. These are the men who bark against the truth any way they can, with their eyes shut.

But those who are of sound mind, or will be — that is, not sunk so far in vices as to be past curing — will both believe these things and come to them readily. Whatever I say will strike them as open, plain and simple, and, what matters most, true and impossible to attack.

No one favors virtue except the man who is able to follow it, and it is not easy for everyone to follow it. Those can who have been put through their paces by poverty and want, and so made capable of virtue. For if virtue is the enduring of evils, it follows that men who have always lived in the enjoyment of good things are not capable of virtue: they have never had any experience of evils, and cannot bear them, because of their long habit of good things and their longing for them — the only things they know.

So it comes about that the poor and the lowly, who carry nothing, believe God more readily than the rich, who are tangled up in a great deal of baggage. Or rather, the rich are slaves in chains and shackles at the beck of their mistress, craving, who has caught them in knots that cannot be untied; and they cannot look up at the sky, because their mind is bent down toward the earth and fixed on the ground.

The road of virtue does not admit men carrying heavy packs. The path by which justice leads a man to heaven is very narrow, and no one can keep to it unless he is unencumbered and traveling light. Those wealthy men, loaded down with many great burdens, are going along the road of death, which is very wide, since destruction rules there with a broad sway. To such men the rules God gives for justice, and the things I bring forward under God’s teaching about virtue and the truth, are bitter, and work on them like poison. And if they dare to fight against these things, they have to admit that they are the enemies of virtue and of justice.

I will now come to the remaining part of the subject, so that an end may be put to the work. What remains is that I should treat of the judgment of God, which will be set up when our Lord returns to the earth to give each person either a reward or a punishment, according to what he deserves. So, just as I spoke in the fourth book about his first coming, in this book I will tell of his second coming — which the Jews too acknowledge and hope for, but in vain, since he must return to the confusion of the very people for whose calling he had come the first time. For those who treated him with irreverent violence in his humiliation will meet him in his power as a conqueror; and, as God repays them, they will suffer all the things they read about and do not understand, since, polluted with every sin and sprinkled besides with the blood of the Holy One, they were handed over to eternal punishment by the very One on whom they laid wicked hands. But I shall have a separate work against the Jews, in which I will convict them of their error and their guilt.

Now let me instruct those who do not know the truth. It has been settled by the arrangement of God Most High that this unrighteous age, once it has run out the course of its appointed times, should come to an end; that all wickedness should be put out at once; that the souls of the righteous should be called back to a happy life; and that a quiet, calm, peaceful age — in short, a golden age, as the poets call it — should flourish under the rule of God himself. [r]

This above all was the cause of every error the philosophers made: they did not grasp the system of the world, which takes in the whole of wisdom. And it cannot be grasped by our own perception and native intelligence, which is what they wanted to do by themselves, with no teacher. So they fell into a range of opinions, often contradicting one another, and out of them they had no way of escape. They stayed stuck in the same mud, as the comic playwright says, since their conclusion does not match what they had assumed: they had assumed things to be true that could not be stated or proved without knowing the truth and heavenly things.

And this knowledge, as I have often said already, cannot exist in a man unless it comes from the teaching of God. For if a man is able to understand divine things, he will be able to do them as well; to understand a thing is, so to speak, to follow along in its tracks. But he is not able to do what God does, because he is clothed in a mortal body; and so he cannot even understand what God does. Whether this is possible at all is easy for anyone to measure, from the sheer size of God’s actions and works. If you will look closely at the world, with everything in it, you will certainly understand how far the work of God goes beyond the works of men. So, as great as the difference is between divine works and human ones, that is how great the distance must be between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man.

Because God is free from decay and immortal, and therefore perfect — perfect because he is everlasting — his wisdom is perfect too, as he himself is; and nothing can stand against it, because God himself is subject to nothing.

But because man is subject to passion, his wisdom is subject to error as well. And just as many things get in the way of a man’s life, so that it cannot go on forever, so his wisdom too must be blocked by many things, so that it is not perfect at perceiving the truth entirely. There is, then, no such thing as human wisdom, if it strives by itself to reach the conception and the knowledge of the truth: the mind of a man, tied up with a frail body and shut inside a dark house, is neither free to roam nor able to see the truth clearly, since the knowledge of it belongs to the divine nature. God’s works are known to God alone. A man cannot arrive at this knowledge by thinking it over or by arguing, but by learning it and hearing it from the one who alone is able to know it and to teach it.

And so Cicero, borrowing from Plato the saying of Socrates — who said that the hour had come for him to depart from life, but that the men before whom he was pleading his case were still to go on living — says: “Which of the two is better is known to the immortal gods; but I think that no man knows.” So all the schools of the philosophers must be far removed from the truth, because the men who established them were men; and things that no divine voice has spoken can have no foundation and no firmness.