Naked and Armed with Reason

You will be able to judge from this little book how hard-pressed I am, and how deep in difficulties, Demetrianus. I have written it for you in almost unadorned words, as far as my modest talent allowed, so that you may know what I spend my days on, and so that I may not fail you — still your teacher, but now on a more honorable subject and in a better course of study. If you made yourself a ready listener in literature, which did nothing but shape your style, how much more teachable you ought to be in these true studies, which have a bearing on life itself. [a]

And I promise you now that no pressure of circumstance or time keeps me from writing something that may leave the philosophers of our own school — the school we stand by — better taught and more learned in the future. They are badly spoken of at present, and people commonly find fault with them for living otherwise than suits wise men, and for hiding their faults under the cover of a name. They ought either to have cured those faults or kept clear of them altogether, so that the name of wisdom might be a happy and uncorrupted thing, their lives agreeing with what they teach. For my own part I refuse no labor, if by it I can instruct ourselves and others at once. I cannot forget myself — least of all now, when remembering matters most — and neither, I hope and wish, do you forget yourself. Public business may pull you aside from true and upright work, but it is impossible for a mind that knows it is in the right not to look up to heaven from time to time.

I am glad that everything counted a blessing is turning out well for you — but only on this condition, that none of it changes your state of mind. What I am afraid of is that habit and the pleasantness of these things may creep into your mind by degrees, as usually happens. So I advise you, and, “repeating it, will advise you again and again,” not to believe that you hold these enjoyments of the earth as great or true blessings. They are not only deceptive, because they are uncertain, but treacherous as well, because they are pleasant. You know how cunning that wrestler and opponent of ours is, and how often violent too, as we see he is now. He uses everything that can attract us as a snare, and so subtly that the snares escape the eyes of the mind and cannot be avoided by any human foresight. So the highest prudence is to go forward step by step, since he holds the passes on both sides and lays hidden obstacles under our feet.

My advice, then, is this: either think nothing of the prosperity you live in, if your character is strong enough for that, or at least do not admire it much. Remember your true father, and the city whose roll you put your name on, and the rank you have held there. You certainly understand what I mean. I am not charging you with pride; there is not even a suspicion of it in your case. But what I am saying is to be applied to the mind, not to the body — and the body’s whole arrangement was set up for this, that it should be subject to the soul as to a master and be governed by the soul’s will. The body is a kind of clay jar with the soul inside it, that is, with the real man himself inside it; and that jar was not made by Prometheus, as the poets say, but by the supreme Maker and Craftsman of the world, God, whose divine providence and utterly perfect excellence no perception can take in and no words can express.

Since the body and the soul have come up, I will try to explain the nature of each, as far as my weak understanding can see into it. I think the task especially worth taking on because Marcus Tullius, a man of remarkable talent, attempted it in the fourth book of his Republic and shut a very wide subject inside narrow limits, lightly picking out the main points. And so that no one could excuse him for not following the subject up, he made it clear that he had lacked neither the inclination nor the attention. In the first book of his Laws, summing the same matter up briefly, he says: Scipio, it seems to me, has set this out well enough in the books you have read. Later, though, in the second book of On the Nature of the Gods, he tried to work the same subject out at greater length. But since he did not set it out well enough even there, I will take the job on, and will be bold enough to explain what a man of the greatest eloquence left almost untouched.

Perhaps you will find fault with me for undertaking to discuss anything in an obscure field, when you can see that there have been men reckless enough — the men people commonly call philosophers — to pry into what God meant to be hidden and out of reach, and to investigate the nature of things in the sky and on the earth, things far removed from us that cannot be gone over with the eye, or touched with the hand, or taken in by the senses. And still they argue about the nature of these things in a way that expects what they bring forward to look proved and known. So tell me: what reason is there for anyone to grudge it to us if we want to look into the arrangement of our own body and think it over? It is not altogether obscure. From the very jobs the limbs do, and the uses of the several parts, we are allowed to understand with how great a power of providence each part was made.

For our Maker and Father, God, gave man perception and reason, so that it would be clear from them that we come from him — since he is himself intelligence, he is himself perception and reason. He did not give that power of reason to the other animals, and so he made provision beforehand for keeping their life safer. He clothed them all with hair of their own growing, so that they could bear hard frost and cold more easily. He also assigned every kind its own particular defense for beating off attacks from outside. Some meet the stronger animals with natural weapons; the weaker ones take themselves out of danger by running fast; and those that need strength and speed at once protect themselves by cunning, or keep themselves safe in hiding places. So some hold themselves up in the air on light feathers, some are carried on hoofs, some are fitted out with horns; some carry their weapons in their mouth — their teeth — or hooked claws on their feet. Not one of them is left without a defense of its own. [i]

And if any of them fall as prey to the larger animals, then, so that their kind should not die out altogether, they have either been put away in country where the larger ones cannot live, or they have been given a more abundant fertility in breeding — so that food may be supplied from them to the beasts that feed on blood, while their sheer numbers outlast the slaughter done to them, and the kind is kept alive.

But man he made without the things given to the other animals, granting him reason instead, and the power of perceiving and of speech, because wisdom was able to supply whatever his natural condition had denied him. He made him naked and unarmed, because he could be armed by his own ingenuity and clothed by his reason. And it cannot be said how wonderfully the absence of the things given to the brutes adds to the beauty of a human being. If God had given man the teeth of wild animals, or horns, or claws, or hoofs, or a tail, or hair of assorted colors, who cannot see what a misshapen creature he would be — just as the dumb animals would be, if they were made naked and unarmed? Take from them the natural clothing of their bodies, or the things they are armed with by nature, and they can be neither beautiful nor safe. So they turn out wonderfully equipped if you are thinking of usefulness, and wonderfully adorned if you are thinking of looks: that is how remarkably usefulness and beauty are joined together.

But in the case of man, whom he formed to be an everlasting and undying creature, he armed him not on the outside, as he did the rest, but on the inside; he put his protection not in the body but in the soul. Once he had given man the thing of greatest value, it would have been pointless to cover him over with bodily defenses, especially when those defenses got in the way of the beauty of the human body. That is why I regularly wonder at the senselessness of the philosophers who follow Epicurus. They find fault with the works of nature in order to show that the world is neither arranged nor governed by any providence, and they trace the origin of everything to indivisible solid bodies, from whose chance collisions, they say, all things come and have come to be. I pass over the complaints they make about the work of creation itself, on which they are ridiculously out of their minds; I take up only what belongs to the subject we are dealing with now.

Their complaint is that man is born in a feebler and frailer condition than the other animals. Those, they say, get up on their feet as soon as they are brought out of the womb, show their delight by running about, and are fit at once to take the open air, since they came out into the light protected by natural coverings. Man, on the other hand, is poured out naked and defenseless, driven as if from a shipwreck into the miseries of this life. He cannot move himself from the place where he was born, or go looking for the nourishment of milk, or bear the rough weather. So they say that Nature is not the mother of the human race but a stepmother — so generous to the dumb creation, and yet bringing man forth with no resources, no strength, and no help of any kind, able to do nothing but forecast the state of his own frailty by wailing and crying: [l]

When they say this they are taken for very wise men, because everyone is dissatisfied with his own condition without thinking about it. But I maintain that they are never more foolish than when they say it. For when I take the state of things into account, I understand that nothing ought to have been other than it is — I will not say could have been other than it is, since God is able to do all things. But it must be that that most provident majesty made what was better and more right.

So I would like to ask these critics of the divine works what they think man lacks on account of being born in a feebler condition. Do they think men are worse brought up for it? Or that they come on less well to the full strength of their years? Or that weakness gets in the way of their growth or their safety, when reason pays out what is missing? But bringing a human being up, they say, costs the greatest labor: the condition of the brute creation really is better, since all of them, once they have given birth, have no care but their own food. Their teats fill of themselves, so the nourishment of milk is supplied to their young, and the young go after that nourishment because nature drives them to, with no trouble on the mothers’ part.

How is it with birds, whose nature is different? Do they not go through the greatest labors bringing up their young — so much so that they sometimes look as though they had something of human intelligence? They build their nests out of mud, or put them together with twigs and leaves; they sit on the eggs without taking food; and since it was not given to them to feed their young out of their own bodies, they carry food to them and spend whole days going back and forth this way, while at night they defend them, keep them warm, and protect them. What more can human beings do? — except this one thing only, that they do not drive their young away when they are grown, but keep them held by a lifelong kinship and the bond of affection.

And why should I go on to say that the offspring of birds is far frailer than a human child? They do not bring the living creature itself out of the mother’s body, but something which, warmed by the nourishment and the heat of the mother’s body, then produces the creature; and even when that has been given breath, it is unfledged and tender, unable not only to fly but even to walk. Would a man not be utterly senseless, then, if he thought nature had dealt badly with birds — first because they are born twice, and then because they are so weak that they have to be fed on food their parents work to find? But these critics pick out the stronger animals and pass over the feebler ones.

So I ask the people who prefer the animals’ condition to their own what they would choose if God gave them the choice: man’s wisdom along with his weakness, or the beasts’ strength along with the beasts’ nature? The truth is that they are not so much like animals as to fail to prefer a far frailer condition, provided it is a human one, to that strength of theirs with no reason attached. But sensible men want neither man’s reason together with frailty nor the dumb animals’ strength without reason. And there is nothing so opposed or contradictory in that, since of necessity either reason or the condition of nature must equip each animal. If a creature is furnished with natural protection, reason is superfluous. What would it think out? What would it do? What would it plan? Where would it show that light of the intellect, when nature grants of its own accord the very things reason could have produced? But if a creature is endowed with reason, what need is there of defenses for the body, when reason, once given, is able to do nature’s work? And reason has such power to adorn and protect a human being that nothing greater or better could be given by God.

In the end, though man has a body that is not large, and slight strength, and unsteady health, still, because he received the thing of greater value, he is better equipped than the other animals and better adorned. Though he is born frail and feeble, he is safe from all the dumb animals; and all the animals that are born with greater strength, though they can bear rough weather patiently, are unable to be safe from man. So it turns out that reason bestows more on man than nature does on the dumb animals, since in their case neither great strength nor a solid body can keep them from being overpowered by us and brought under our control.

Can anyone, then, who sees that even elephants, for all their huge bodies and strength, are at man’s service, complain about God, the Maker of all things, because he himself received only moderate strength and a small body — and not value the divine gifts to him as they deserve? That is the part of an ungrateful man, or, to speak more truly, of a madman. Plato, I think, was answering ungrateful men like these when he gave thanks to nature that he had been born a human being. How much better and more soundly he acted, seeing that man’s condition was the better one, than those who would have preferred to be born beasts! For if God did happen to change them into the animals whose condition they prefer to their own, they would want their old state back at once, and would be loudly demanding their former condition. Strength and a solid body are not worth so much that you should do without the use of the tongue, nor is a bird’s free run through the air worth doing without hands. Hands do more for you than the lightness and use of wings; the tongue does more for you than the strength of the whole body. What madness, then, to prefer things you would refuse to accept if they were offered!