Wise Religion, Religious Wisdom

So what good will justice and virtue do, if all they ever get in this life is trouble? But if virtue — which looks down on everything the earth has to offer, and most wisely endures every evil, and endures death itself in the doing of its duty — cannot be without a reward, what is left but that immortality alone is its reward? For if a happy life is what falls to a human being — as the philosophers insist, and this is the one point on which they do not disagree — then immortality falls to him too. Only what cannot decay is happy, and only what is eternal cannot decay. So immortality is the chief good, because it belongs at once to man, and to the soul, and to virtue. This is the one thing we are pointed toward; this is what we were born to reach. That is why God sets virtue and justice before us: so that we may win that eternal reward for our labors. But immortality itself I will speak of in its proper place. [a]

That leaves the philosophy of logic, which contributes nothing to a happy life. For wisdom does not consist in the arrangement of speech, but in the heart and the feelings. But if natural philosophy is beside the point, and this branch of logic as well, and the philosophers went wrong in moral philosophy — the only branch that is necessary — because they were unable by any means to find out what the chief good is, then all philosophy turns out to be empty and useless. It could not take in what a human being is, or carry out its own duty and office.

Now that I have spoken briefly about philosophy, I will say a few things about the philosophers as well. This above all is the doctrine of Epicurus: that there is no providence. And at the same time he does not deny that gods exist. On both counts he acts against reason. For if there are gods, it follows that there is providence; otherwise we can form no intelligible idea of God at all, since foreseeing is the very thing that belongs to him. But Epicurus says God takes no care about anything. So he disregards not only the affairs of men but the things of heaven too. On what ground, then, and out of what, do you claim that he exists? Once you have taken away divine providence and care, the natural next step would be to deny outright that God exists. As it is, you have left him his name and taken away the reality. [d]

And where did the world get its beginning, if God takes care of nothing? There are tiny atoms, he says, which can be neither seen nor touched, and from the chance meeting of these all things arose and are still arising. If they are neither seen nor perceived by any part of the body, how could you know they exist? Next, if they do exist, with what mind do they come together to bring anything about? If they are smooth, they cannot hold together; if they are hooked and angular, then they can be divided, since hooks and angles stick out and can be cut off. These notions are senseless and get us nowhere. And why should I mention that he also makes souls capable of being extinguished? He is refuted not only by all the philosophers and by what people generally believe, but by the answers of the bards, by the predictions of the Sibyls, and last of all by the divine voices of the prophets themselves. It is astonishing that Epicurus alone should ever have existed to set the condition of a human being on a level with flocks and wild animals.

And what of Pythagoras, the first man to be called a philosopher? He judged that souls are indeed immortal, but that they pass into other bodies — of cattle, or of birds, or of wild animals. Would it not have been better for them to be destroyed along with their bodies than to be sentenced to pass into the bodies of other animals? Would it not be better not to exist at all than, after having had the shape of a man, to live as a pig or a dog? And to win credit for his claim, the fool said that he himself had been Euphorbus in the Trojan war; that when he was killed he passed into other animal shapes; and that at last he became Pythagoras. What a fortunate man — the only one ever given so great a memory! Or rather, what an unfortunate one, who when he was turned into a sheep was not allowed to be ignorant of what he was. And if only he had been the only one so senseless! He found people to believe him as well — and some of them among the learned, who inherited his folly.

After him Socrates held first place in philosophy. Even the oracle pronounced him the wisest of men, because he admitted that he knew one thing only — that he knew nothing. On the strength of that oracle the natural philosophers ought to have held themselves in check, and neither inquired into things they could not know nor supposed they knew things they did not. But let us see whether Socrates really was the wisest, as the Pythian god proclaimed. He often used this saying: that whatever is above us has nothing to do with us. With that he has already stepped past the boundary of his own opinion. The man who said he knew one thing only found something else to talk about, as though he knew it — and it was for nothing. For God, who is plainly above us, is the one to be sought, and religion is the thing to be taken up, since religion alone separates us from the animals. Socrates not only threw religion out; he laughed at it, swearing by a goose and by a dog — as though he could not have sworn by Asclepius, to whom he had vowed a cock. Look at a wise man’s sacrifice! And because he could not offer it in person, being at the point of death, he begged his friends to pay the vow after he was gone, for fear he would be held as a debtor down below. He certainly did declare that he knew nothing, and he certainly made his statement good. [g]

His pupil Plato — whom Cicero calls the god of the philosophers — studied philosophy in such a way, alone of them all, that he came nearer to the truth than any. And yet, because he did not know God, he went wrong on so many points that no one fell into worse errors; above all because in his books about the state he wanted everything to be held in common by everyone. Where property is concerned this can be borne, though it is unjust. It ought not to hurt a man to own more than another through his own hard work, or profit him to own less through his own fault. Still, as I said, that can somehow be put up with. But is there to be a community of wives as well, and of children? Is there to be no distinction of blood, no certainty about anyone’s descent? No families, no relationships, no ties by marriage, but everything jumbled together without distinction, as in herds of cattle? Is there to be no self-restraint in men, no chastity in women? What married love can there be between two people who on neither side have a love that is sure and their own? Who will act dutifully toward a father when he does not know who fathered him? Who will love a son he cannot reckon as his own? On top of that, Plato unbarred the senate house to women and handed over to them warfare, public office, and military command. But how great a disaster that city will be, in which women do the work of men! Of this, though, more fully another time. [i]

Zeno, the master of the Stoics, praises virtue — and then judges that pity, which is a very great virtue, should be cut away as if it were a disease of the mind, when in fact it is at once dear to God and necessary for human beings. Who is there that, when some evil has come on him, would be unwilling to be pitied, and would not want the help of people who might come to his aid? And that help is not called out so as to be given except by the feeling of pity. Zeno calls it humanity and piety instead, but he changes only the name, not the thing itself. This is the feeling that has been given to human beings alone, so that by helping one another we might ease our own weakness; and the man who takes that feeling away brings us down to the life of the beasts.

His claim that all faults are equal comes out of the same inhumanity with which he attacks pity as a disease. For a man who makes no distinction between faults either thinks that light offenses ought to be punished severely, which belongs to a cruel judge, or that grave offenses ought to be punished lightly, which belongs to a worthless one. Either way the state is harmed. If the greatest crimes are punished lightly, the boldness of the wicked will grow and go on to worse daring; and if too heavy a punishment is inflicted for slight offenses — since no one can be free of fault — many citizens will be put in danger who might have been made better by correction.

These things, it is true, are small matters, but they come out of the same falsehood. Xenophanes said that the disc of the moon is eighteen times larger than this earth of ours, and that inside its circuit another earth is contained, inhabited by men and by animals of every kind. As for the antipodes, one can neither hear about them nor speak of them without laughing. It is put forward as something serious that we should believe there are people whose feet are opposite to ours. The ravings of Anaxagoras are easier to bear; he said that snow is black. [m]

And it is not only the sayings of some of them that are ridiculous, but their doings. Democritus let the land his father left him go to waste and allowed it to become common pasture. Diogenes, with his pack of dogs, who professes that great and perfect virtue lies in despising everything, chose to beg for his keep rather than earn it by honest work or own anything at all. Surely a wise man’s life ought to be an example of living to everyone else. If everyone imitated the wisdom of these men, how would states survive? But perhaps the same Cynics were able to give us an example of modesty — they who lived with their wives in public. I do not know how men could defend virtue when they had done away with modesty.

Nor was Aristippus any better than these. He set up the Cyrenaic system, I believe, in order to please his mistress Lais: he placed the goal of the chief good in bodily pleasure, so that his faults should not lack authority nor his vices lack learning. And are we to think better of those men, as having greater courage, who died by their own hand so that they might be said to have despised death? Zeno, Empedocles, Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Democritus, and Cato in imitation of them, did not know that a man who puts himself to death is guilty of murder by divine right and law. It was God who placed us in this dwelling of flesh; it was he who gave us the body as a lodging for a time, so that we should live in it as long as he pleased. So it must be counted an outrage against God to want to leave it without God’s order. Force must not be used on nature. He knows how to unfasten his own work. And if anyone lays wicked hands on that work and tears apart the bonds of the divine craftsmanship, he is trying to run away from God, whose sentence no one will be able to escape, alive or dead. So the men I named above are accursed and godless — men who even taught what the fitting reasons are for a voluntary death, as though it were not guilt enough to be self-murderers unless they trained others in the same wickedness as well.

There are countless sayings and doings of the philosophers by which their foolishness may be shown. Since we cannot list them all, a few will be enough. It is enough that this be understood: the philosophers were teachers neither of justice, which they knew nothing about, nor of virtue, which they falsely boast of. What can men teach who often confess their own ignorance? I pass over Socrates, whose opinion is well known. Anaxagoras announces that everything is covered over with darkness. Empedocles says that the paths by which the senses find out the truth are narrow. Democritus insists that truth lies sunk in a deep well. And because they find it nowhere, they conclude that no wise man has existed yet. So then, since human wisdom does not exist — as Socrates says in Plato’s writings — let us follow what is divine. Let us give thanks to God, who has revealed it and handed it over to us; and let us congratulate ourselves that by God’s generosity we hold the truth and the wisdom that philosophy could not discover, though so many minds sought it through so many ages. [p]

Now that we have refuted false religion, which lies in the worship of the gods, and false wisdom, which lies with the philosophers, let us come to true religion and true wisdom. And we must speak of the two together, because they are tied to each other. For to worship the true God — that, and nothing else, is wisdom. The God who is supreme and the Maker of all things, who made man as the image of himself, granted reason to him alone of all living creatures for this purpose: that he might pay back honor to God as his Father and his Lord, and by practicing that devotion and obedience might win the reward of immortality. This is the true and divine mystery. But among those others, because they are not true, there is no agreement. No sacred rites are performed in philosophy, and philosophy is not handled in the sacred rites. That is why their religion is false — it does not have wisdom in it; and why their wisdom is false — it does not have religion in it. But where the two are joined together, there the truth must be. So if anyone asks what truth itself is, it may rightly be called either wise religion or religious wisdom. [r]

Now I will say what wise religion, or religious wisdom, is. In the beginning, before he made the world, God — out of the spring of his own eternity, and out of the divine and everlasting Spirit — begot for himself a Son who cannot decay, faithful, answering to his Father’s excellence and majesty. He is virtue, he is reason, he is the word of God, he is wisdom. With him as craftsman, as Hermes says, and as counselor, as the Sibyl says, God contrived the excellent and wonderful structure of this world. In short, of all the angels whom the same God formed out of his own breath, he alone was admitted to a share in God’s supreme power; he alone was called God. For all things were through him, and nothing was without him. [s]

So it was not altogether as a philosopher but as a seer that Plato spoke of a first and a second God — perhaps following Trismegistus in this, whose words I have translated from the Greek and set down here: “The Lord and Maker of all things, whom we have thought fit to call God, made a second God, who is visible and perceptible. By perceptible I do not mean that he himself receives sensation, but that he causes sensation and sight. So when he had made this one — the first, and single, and only one — he appeared to him most excellent, and full of every good thing.” The Sibyl too says that God, the guide of all, was made by God; and another says: “God the Son of God must be known,” as the examples I have brought forward in my books declare.

The prophets, filled with the inspiration of the divine Spirit, proclaimed him — and among them especially Solomon in the book of Wisdom, and his father as well, the writer of the divine hymns. Both were most famous kings, and they came a hundred and eighty years before the time of the Trojan war. They testify that he was born of God. His name is known to no one but himself and the Father, as John teaches in the Revelation; and Hermes says that his name cannot be uttered by a mortal mouth. Yet by men he is called by two names — Jesus, which is Savior, and Christ, which is King. He is called Savior for this reason: because he is the health and safety of all who believe in God through him. He is called Christ for this reason: because he himself will come from heaven at the end of this age to judge the world, and, having raised the dead, to set up for himself a kingdom that lasts forever.