The Patience of God

What need is there of anger, they say, since faults can be corrected without this feeling? But there is no one who can watch someone commit an offense and stay calm. Perhaps a man who presides over the laws can, because the deed is not done in front of him: it is brought to him from somewhere else as a doubtful matter. And no wickedness can be so obvious that there is no room left for a defense, so it is possible for a judge not to be moved against a man who may yet turn out to be innocent; and once the crime that has been uncovered comes to light, he is no longer using his own opinion but the law’s. Grant, then, that he does what he does without anger — he has something to follow. But we, at home, when someone in our household commits an offense, whether we see it or find it out, cannot help being indignant. The very sight of a sin is unfitting. A man who is not moved at all either approves of the faults, which is more shameful and more unjust, or else shirks the trouble of reproving them — trouble that a placid spirit and a quiet mind look down on and refuse, unless anger has roused and stirred them. But when a man is moved and yet, through leniency out of season, pardons more often than he needs to, or pardons every time, he plainly ruins the lives of those whose boldness he is nursing up toward greater crimes, and he supplies himself with a permanent source of trouble. So holding back your anger where sins are concerned is a fault. [a]

Archytas of Tarentum is praised for this. When he had found everything on his estate ruined, he rebuked his bailiff’s fault by saying:

“You wretch, I would have flogged you to death if I were not angry.”

People take this for a singular example of patience; but, swayed by his reputation, they do not see how foolishly he spoke and acted. For if, as Plato says, no sensible man punishes because an offense has been committed, but so that no offense will be committed, it is obvious what an evil example this wise man set. If slaves see that their master uses violence when he is not angry and spares them when he is angry, clearly they will not commit small offenses, for fear of a beating; they will commit the largest ones, so as to rouse the perverse man’s anger and get off free. I would praise him if, when he was enraged, he had given his anger room, so that the excitement in his mind could settle with the passing of time and his punishing could be kept within measure. Because the anger was great, the punishment ought not to have been inflicted, but delayed — in case it burned into the offender a pain greater than was just, or set off an outburst of fury in the man doing the punishing. But how is it fair, or wise, that a man should be punished for a small offense and go unpunished for a very great one? If Archytas had learned the nature and the causes of things, he would never have professed a patience so out of place that a wicked slave could be glad his master had been angry with him. For just as God has fitted out the human body with many different senses that the business of living requires, so he has assigned the soul its various feelings, by which the course of life is to be kept in order; and just as he gave desire for the sake of producing children, so he gave anger for the sake of restraining faults.

But people who do not know the ends of good things and evil ones use anger and passion for inflicting injury, in the same way that they use sensual desire for corruption and pleasure: they are angry with whomever they look on with hatred. So they are angry even with people who have committed no offense, even with their equals, even with their superiors. That is why they rush every day into monstrous deeds; that is where tragedies so often begin. So Archytas would deserve praise if he had curbed himself when he was enraged at some fellow citizen or equal who had injured him, and had softened the violence of his fury by patience. That kind of self-control is a fine thing, since it holds back a great evil that is about to fall. But it is a fault not to check the faults of slaves and of children, for by getting off without punishment they will go on to worse. Here anger is not to be restrained; even if it is lying still, it must be roused. And what we say about man we say about God too, who made man like himself. I say nothing about the form of God, because the Stoics say that God has no form, and refuting them would open up another large subject. I speak only of the soul. If it belongs to God to think, to be wise, to understand, to look ahead, to excel — and of all animals only man has these qualities — then it follows that man was made in the likeness of God. But this is why he still goes off into vice: because he is mixed with a frailty drawn from earth, and cannot keep what he received from God pure and uncontaminated unless the same God steeps him in the rules of justice.

But since man is made up, as I have said, of two parts, soul and body, the virtues are contained in the one and the vices in the other, and the two are set against each other. The good qualities of the soul, which consist in holding down lusts, run counter to the body; and the good qualities of the body, which consist in pleasure of every kind, are hostile to the soul. But if the soul’s virtue resists the desires and puts them down, a man will be truly like God. From this it is plain that the soul of man, which is capable of divine virtue, is not mortal. There is this difference, though: virtue comes with bitterness, and the pull of pleasure is sweet, so great numbers are beaten and drawn aside to what is pleasant. Those who have given themselves over to the body and to earthly things are pressed down to the earth and cannot reach the favor of the divine bounty, because they have fouled themselves with the filth of vices. But those who follow God and obey him, who have looked down on the desires of the body and preferred virtue to pleasures and so have kept innocence and righteousness — these God recognizes as like himself. [g]

Since, then, he has laid down a most holy law and wants all men to be innocent and to do good, is it possible that he is not angry when he sees his law despised, virtue thrown over, and pleasure made the thing men chase? If he is the governor of the world, as he ought to be, he surely does not overlook the very thing that matters most in the whole world. If he has foresight, as it is fitting that God should, then plainly he looks after the interests of the human race, so that our life may be better supplied, better in itself, and safer. If he is the Father and God of all, then he is certainly delighted by men’s virtues and provoked by their vices. So he loves the just and hates the wicked.

There is no need of hatred, someone says; once and for all he has fixed a reward for the good and a punishment for the wicked. But suppose a man lives justly and innocently and at the same time neither worships God nor pays him any regard — Aristides, say, or Timon, and others among the philosophers. Will he get off free, on the grounds that although he obeyed the law of God he despised God himself? There is therefore something for which God may be angry with a man who rebels against him, relying, as it were, on his own uprightness. And if God can be angry with this man for his pride, why not more so with the sinner, who has despised the law and the Lawgiver together? A judge cannot pardon offenses, because he is subject to someone else’s will. But God can pardon, because he is himself the arbiter and the judge of his own law; and when he laid that law down he certainly did not strip himself of all power, but keeps the liberty of granting pardon.

If he is able to pardon, then he is also able to be angry. Why then, someone will say, does it so often happen that the people who sin do well and the people who live devoutly are miserable? Because runaways and disinherited sons live without any restraint, while those under the discipline of a father or a master live more strictly and with less. Virtue is tested and made solid by hardships, and vices by pleasure. Still, no one who sins should hope to escape forever, since there is no happiness that lasts forever. [i]

as the not inelegant poet says. It is the end that proves happiness, and no one can escape the judgment of God, whether alive or after death. He has the power both to throw down the living from their height and to punish the dead with everlasting torments.

But, he says, if God is angry, he ought to have taken vengeance at once and punished each man as he deserved. If he had done that, no one would still be alive. There is no one who does not offend in some respect, and there are many things that push a man into sin: his age, his lack of self-control, poverty, opportunity, a reward. The frailty of the flesh we are clothed in is so open to sin that if God were not indulgent to this necessity, perhaps too few would be left alive. That is why he is exceedingly patient and holds his anger back. Since there is perfect virtue in him, it follows of necessity that his patience is also perfect — and patience is itself a virtue. How many men who were sinners have afterwards become righteous! How many who did harm have become good, how many who were wicked have become self-controlled! How many who were disgraceful in their early years, and condemned in everyone’s judgment, have turned out afterwards to be worth praising? Plainly none of this could happen if punishment followed every offense.

The public laws condemn men who are plainly guilty. But there are great numbers whose offenses stay hidden, great numbers who hold off the accuser by pleading or by paying, great numbers who slip out of justice through favor or influence. If the divine judgment condemned everyone who escapes punishment from men, there would be few men left on earth, or none at all. In fact even one reason on its own might have been just cause for destroying the human race: that men despise the living God and pay divine honors to earthly, breakable images as though they came from heaven, worshiping works made by human hands. God who created them gave them a lifted face and an upright frame and raised them to the contemplation of the sky and the knowledge of God — and they have chosen instead to bend down to the earth like cattle. For a man is low and curved and bent downward when he turns away from the sight of heaven and of God his Father and worships things of the earth, which he ought to have been treading on: things made and shaped out of earth. And so, in the middle of such great godlessness and such great sins of men, this is what God’s patience accomplishes — that men condemn the errors of their past life and correct themselves. In fact there are many who are just and good, and these, having laid aside the worship of earthly things, acknowledge the majesty of the one and only God. But although God’s patience is very great and very useful, still, late though it be, he punishes the guilty, and does not let them go any further, once he sees that they cannot be corrected.

One question is left, and it is the last. Someone will perhaps say that God is so far from being angry that in his own commands he even forbids man to be angry. I could answer that a man’s anger has to be curbed, because he is often angry unjustly, and because his emotion works on the instant, since he is himself a creature of time. So, to keep him from doing what low men and men of middling rank and great kings alike do in their anger, his rage should have been kept in check and put down, in case, not being master of his own mind, he committed some crime that could never be atoned for. But God is not angry for the moment, because he is eternal and of perfect virtue, and he is never angry except deservedly. [m]

But in fact the case does not stand that way. For if he prohibited anger altogether, he would to some degree be finding fault with his own handiwork, since from the beginning he had put anger in the liver of man — the cause of this emotion being believed to lie in the fluid of the gall. So he does not prohibit anger altogether, because that feeling is necessarily given us; he forbids us to persist in anger. A mortal’s anger ought to be mortal, for if it lasts, hostility hardens into lasting ruin. Again, when he commanded us to be angry and yet not to sin, plainly he did not tear anger up by the roots but held it in, so that in every correction we might keep both moderation and justice. So the one who commands us to be angry is plainly angry himself; the one who tells us to be quickly appeased is plainly easy to appease himself — for what he has laid down is just, and useful for our common life.

But because I had said that God’s anger is not for a time only, as a man’s is — a man catches fire with an excitement that works at once, and because of his frailty cannot easily govern himself — we ought to understand that since God is eternal, his anger also remains to eternity; but that, on the other hand, since he possesses the greatest excellence, he controls his anger and is not ruled by it, but manages it as he wills. And plainly this does not contradict what I have just said. For if his anger were altogether undying, there would be no room after a fault for making amends or for kind feeling, and yet he himself commands men to be reconciled before the sun goes down. But the divine anger does remain forever against those who go on sinning forever. So God is appeased not by incense or a sacrificial animal, not by costly offerings, all of which decay, but by a change of conduct; and the man who stops sinning makes the anger of God mortal. This is why he does not punish every guilty man on the spot: so that a man may have room to come to his senses and correct himself.

This, my dearest Donatus, is what I had to say about the anger of God, so that you would know how to answer those who present God as unmoved. It only remains, following Cicero’s practice, to use an epilogue by way of a closing appeal. He did this in the Tusculan Disputations when he was discussing death; and so in this work we ought to bring forward divine testimonies that can be believed, to refute the conviction of men who, by believing that God has no anger, destroy religion altogether — and without religion, as I have shown, we are either the equals of wild beasts in savagery or of cattle in stupidity. For wisdom consists in religion alone, that is, in the knowledge of the Supreme God. All the prophets, filled with the Divine Spirit, speak of nothing else than God’s favor toward the righteous and his anger against the godless. Their testimony is quite enough for us; but since it is not believed by men who put their wisdom on display in their hair and their clothes, they had to be refuted by reason and argument. They go about it so backwards that human things give authority to divine things, when divine things ought rather to give authority to human ones. But let us leave all this now, or we shall have no effect on them and the subject will be drawn out without end. Let us look instead for the testimonies they can either believe or at any rate not argue against. [r]

Authors of great number and great weight have made mention of the Sibyls: among the Greeks, Aristo of Chios and Apollodorus of Erythrae; among our own writers, Varro and Fenestella. All of them report that the Erythraean Sibyl was distinguished and noble beyond the rest, and Apollodorus indeed boasts of her as a fellow citizen and countrywoman of his own. Fenestella also reports that ambassadors were sent by the senate to Erythrae so that this Sibyl’s verses could be brought to Rome, and that the consuls Curio and Octavius were to see that they were placed in the Capitol, which had at that time been restored under the charge of Quintus Catulus. In her writings verses of this kind are found about the Supreme God, the Maker of the world:

And again in another place, listing the deeds that most move God to anger, she brought in these lines:

So he is angry with sinners.