Made for Immortality

Now let us mark out the whole argument in a short summary. The world was made for this purpose: that we might be born. We are born for this end: that we might come to know the Maker of the world and of ourselves — God. We come to know him for this end: that we might worship him. We worship him for this end: that we might receive immortality as the reward of our labor, since the worship of God consists of the greatest labors. And we are rewarded with immortality for this end: that, made like the angels, we may serve the Supreme Father and Lord forever, and be a kingdom to God for all eternity. This is the sum of all things, this the secret of God, this the mystery of the world. Estranged from it are the people who chase after present gratification and have given themselves over to earthly and fragile goods, and by deadly pleasures have sunk their souls in mire and mud — souls that were born for the pursuits of heaven. [a]

Next, let us ask whether there is anything reasonable in the worship of these gods. Suppose they are many. Suppose people worship them for one thing only — that they may hand out riches, victories, honors, and everything else that is of no use except in the present. Suppose we are produced for no cause. Suppose no providence is at work in the making of human beings, that we are thrown up by chance, for ourselves and for our own pleasure, and that we are nothing after death. Then what could be so pointless, so empty, so useless as human affairs, and as the world itself? For the world is of unbelievable size and built with wonderful arrangement, and yet on that reckoning it is taken up with trivialities.

Why should the breathing of the winds set the clouds moving? Why should lightning flash, thunder roar, showers fall, so that the earth may bring forth its increase and feed everything that grows on it? Why, in short, should the whole of nature labor so that nothing is missing of the things that keep human life going — if all of it is empty, if we perish utterly, if there is nothing in us of any greater use to God? But if it cannot lawfully be said, and is not even to be thought possible, that what you can see to be most reasonable was set up without some important reason behind it, then what reason can there be in these errors of corrupt religions, and in this conviction of the philosophers, who imagine that souls perish? There is certainly none.

For what can they say as to why the gods so regularly supply people with everything in its season? Is it so that we may present them with grain and wine, the smell of incense and the blood of cattle? Those things cannot be acceptable to immortals, because they are perishable; and they can be of no use to beings that have no bodies, because they were given for the use of beings that do have bodies. Besides, if the gods needed such things, they could supply them to themselves whenever they wanted.

So whether souls perish or last forever, what principle is at work in the worship of the gods, or by whom was the world established? Why, or when, or for how long, or to what extent were human beings produced, and on what account? Why do they arise, die, follow one another, and get renewed? What do the gods gain from being worshipped by people who after death are going to have no existence at all? What do they do, what do they promise, what do they threaten, that is worthy either of men or of gods? Or if souls do remain after death, what are the gods doing about them, or what are they going to do? What need do they have of a storehouse for souls? Where do the souls themselves come from? How, or why, or from where are there so many of them? So it turns out that if you depart from that sum of things we set out above, every system falls apart, and everything rolls back into nothing.

Because the philosophers never grasped this main point, they were not able to grasp the truth either — though for the most part they both saw and explained the things the main point is made of. Different men brought forward all these pieces, and in different ways, without connecting the causes of things, or their consequences, or their reasons, so as to fit them together and complete the one point that takes in the whole. But it is easy to show that almost the whole truth has been parceled out among the philosophers and their schools. [e]

We are not out to overthrow philosophy, the way the Academics used to, whose plan was to answer everything — which is really slander and mockery. What we are showing is that no school went so far astray, and no philosopher was so empty, as not to see something of the truth. But while they are wild with the desire to contradict, while they defend their own arguments even when false and demolish other men's even when true, not only has the truth escaped them, which they claimed to be looking for, but they themselves lost it, and mainly by their own fault.

If there had been anyone to gather up the truth that lay scattered among individuals and spread out among the schools, and to reduce it to one body, he certainly would not disagree with us. But no one can do that unless he has experience and knowledge of the truth. And knowing the truth belongs only to a man who has been taught by God. There is no other way he can reject what is false, or choose and approve what is true. If he did manage it even by chance, he would beyond question be playing the philosopher; and though he could not defend those things by divine testimony, still the truth would explain itself by its own light. So the error of those men is past belief who, once they have approved of some school and given themselves to it, condemn all the rest as false and empty, and arm themselves for battle — neither knowing what they ought to defend nor what to refute — and attack everything, without distinction, that is brought forward by anyone who disagrees with them.

Because of these most stubborn quarrels of theirs, no philosophy came any nearer to the truth, since the whole truth was held by them only in separate pieces. Plato said that the world was made by God; the prophets say the same, and the same appears from the verses of the Sibyl. So those are in error who have said either that everything was produced of its own accord or out of a mass of atoms. So great a world, so beautifully ordered and of such size, could not have been made or arranged and set in order without some most skillful author; and the very arrangement by which everything is seen to be held together and governed declares a craftsman with a most skillful mind.

The Stoics say that the world and everything in it were made for the sake of human beings; the sacred writings teach us the same thing. So Democritus was in error, who thought men were poured out of the earth like worms, with no author and no plan. For the reason of man's creation belongs to a divine mystery, and because he could not know it, he dragged human life down to nothing. Aristo maintained that men were born for the practice of virtue; the prophets remind us of the same thing and teach it. So Aristippus is deceived, who put man under the rule of pleasure — that is, of evil — as though he were an animal. Pherecydes and Plato contended that souls are immortal; but this is a teaching that belongs properly to our religion. So Dicaearchus was mistaken, and Democritus with him, who argued that souls perished along with the body and were dissolved.

Zeno the Stoic taught that there are regions below, and that the dwellings of the good are kept apart from the wicked — the good enjoying peaceful and delightful country, the wicked punished in dark places and in dreadful pits of mire. The prophets show the same. So Epicurus was mistaken, who thought that this was an invention of the poets, and explained those punishments below that people speak of as things that happen in this life. So the philosophers touched on the whole truth, and on every secret of our holy religion; but when others denied it, they could not defend what they had found, because their reasoning did not square with the separate pieces, nor could they reduce to a summary the things they had rightly seen, as we have done above.

The one highest good, then, is immortality, and we were formed and born in the first place to receive it. This is where we are steering; this is what human nature has in view; this is what virtue lifts us to. And now that we have found what that good is, it remains to speak of immortality itself. Plato's arguments, though they contribute much to the subject, have little force to prove the truth and fill it out, since he had neither summed up and gathered into one the plan of this whole great mystery, nor grasped what the highest good is. He did perceive the truth about the immortality of the soul, but he did not speak of it as the highest good. We, then, are able to bring out the truth by surer signs, because we have not put it together from doubtful guesswork; we have known it by divine instruction. [j]

Now Plato reasoned like this: whatever has perception in itself and is always in motion is immortal, since what has no beginning of motion is not going to have an end of it either, because it cannot be abandoned by itself. But that argument would give everlasting existence even to animals, unless he had drawn a distinction by adding wisdom. So, to escape lumping them together, he added that the soul of man cannot be anything but immortal. Its remarkable inventiveness, its quickness in thought, its readiness in perceiving and learning, its memory of the past and its foresight of the future, its knowledge of countless arts and subjects that other living creatures do not have — all this appears divine and heavenly, because for a soul that conceives such great things and contains such great things, no origin can be found on earth, since it has nothing of earthly mixture joined to it. But what is heavy in a man, and liable to fall apart, must be resolved into earth; whereas what is slight and fine cannot be divided, and when it is freed from the house of the body, as from a prison, it flies to heaven and to its own nature. This is a brief summary of Plato's views, which are set out widely and at length in his own writings.

Pythagoras held the same opinions before him, and so did Pythagoras' own teacher Pherecydes, whom Cicero reported to have been the first to discuss the immortality of the soul. And although all of these excelled in eloquence, still in this contest at least the men who argued against the opinion had no less authority — Dicaearchus first, then Democritus, and last of all Epicurus — so that the very matter they were contending about was called into doubt. In the end Cicero too, having set out everyone's opinions about immortality and death, declared that he did not know what the truth was. “Which of these opinions is true, some god may see.” And again he says in another place: “Since each of these opinions had most learned men to defend it, there is no divining which is certain.” But we have no need of divining, since the divinity itself has laid the truth open to us.

By these arguments, then — which neither Plato nor anyone else invented — the immortality of souls can be proved and perceived. we will gather them up briefly, since my account is hurrying on to relate the great judgment of God, which will be held on the earth at the approaching end of the world. [m]

Before anything else: God cannot be seen by man. So that no one should imagine from this that God does not exist, because he was not seen by mortal eyes, he made — among his other wonderful arrangements — many things whose power is plain but whose substance is not seen: the voice, smell, the wind. By the token and example of these we might perceive God from his power and working and works, even though he did not fall under the notice of our eyes. What is clearer than a voice, or stronger than the wind, or more forceful than a smell? Yet when these are carried through the air and come to our senses and strike them by their force, they are not picked out by the eyesight; they are perceived by other parts of the body. In the same way God is not to be perceived by us through sight or any other frail sense, but is to be beheld by the eyes of the mind, since we see his splendid and wonderful works.

As for the men who have denied outright that God exists, I would not only refuse to call them philosophers; I would deny them even the name of men. They were closely like animals, made of body only, discerning nothing with the mind, referring everything to the senses of the body, thinking that nothing existed except what they looked at with their eyes. And because they saw hard times fall on the wicked, or good fortune come to the good, they believed that everything was carried on by chance, and that the world was established by nature and not by providence.

From there they fell at once into the ravings that necessarily follow such a view. But if there is a God who has no body, who is invisible and eternal, then it is believable that the soul, since it too is unseen, does not perish once it has left the body; for plainly something exists that perceives and is vigorous, and yet does not come into sight. But, it is said, it is hard to grasp with the mind how the soul can keep its perception without those parts of the body that house the work of perceiving. What about God, then? Is it easy to grasp how he is vigorous without a body? But if they believe in the existence of gods who, if they exist, are plainly without bodies, then human souls must exist in the same way, since reason itself and discernment show that there is a certain likeness between man and God.

Finally, the proof that even Cicero saw is of sufficient strength: that the immortality of the soul may be discerned from the fact that no other animal has any knowledge of God, and that religion is almost the only thing that separates man from the beasts. And since this falls to man alone, it certainly testifies that we may aim at, long for, and cultivate something that is going to be familiar and very near.

Consider the nature of the other animals, which the providence of the Supreme God has made lowly, with bodies bent down and stretched toward the ground, so that it may be understood from this that they have no dealings with heaven. Can anyone consider that and fail to understand that man alone of all animals is heavenly and divine? His body is raised from the ground, his face lifted, his stance upright; he goes in search of his origin, and, despising as it were the lowness of the earth, reaches out toward what is on high, because he perceives that the highest good is to be sought by him in the highest place; and mindful of the condition in which God made him distinguished, he looks toward his Maker. And Hermes Trismegistus quite rightly called this looking a beholding of God, a thing that has no existence in the animals.

Since, then, wisdom, which is given to man alone, is nothing other than the knowledge of God, it is evident that the soul does not perish and does not undergo dissolution, but remains forever, because it seeks after and loves God, who is everlasting — perceiving, by the impulse of its very nature, either the source it sprang from or the thing it is going back to.

It is also no slight proof of immortality that man alone makes use of the heavenly element. For since the nature of the world consists of two elements opposed to one another — fire and water — of which the one is assigned to heaven and the other to earth, the other living creatures, because they are of the earth and mortal, use the element that is earthly and heavy; man alone uses fire, an element that is light, rising upward, and heavenly. But things that are weighty press down toward death, and things that are light lift up toward life, because life is on high and death below. And as there cannot be light without fire, so there cannot be life without light. Fire, then, is the element of light and of life — from which it is evident that the man who uses it shares in an immortal condition, because what causes life is at home with him.

The gift of virtue to man alone is also a great proof that souls are immortal. For this will not be in accordance with nature if the soul is snuffed out, since virtue does damage to this present life. That earthly life, which we lead in common with the animals, both seeks pleasure — and is delighted by its varied and agreeable fruits — and avoids pain, whose harshness, by the unpleasant sensations it brings, damages the nature of living things and tries to lead them to death, which breaks the living creature up.

If, then, virtue both forbids a man the goods that are naturally wanted and drives him to endure the evils that are naturally avoided, it follows that virtue is an evil and against nature; and the man who pursues it must necessarily be judged a fool, since he injures himself both by avoiding present goods and by seeking out evils just the same, with no hope of any greater advantage. For when we are allowed to enjoy the sweetest pleasures, would we not appear to be without sense if we preferred to live in lowliness, in want, in contempt and disgrace, or not to live at all, but to be tormented with pain and to die — when out of these evils we would gain nothing to make up for the pleasure we had given up? But if virtue is not an evil, and acts honorably in despising vicious and shameful pleasures, and bravely in fearing neither pain nor death so that it may discharge its duty, then it must obtain some greater good than the things it despises. And when death has been undergone, what further good can be hoped for except immortality?