Made Frail on Purpose

They complain, too, that human beings are open to disease and to untimely death. Apparently they are indignant at not having been born gods. Not at all, they say; we are only pointing out from this that man was made without any foresight, when he ought to have been made otherwise. But what if I can show that this very thing was foreseen, and foreseen with excellent reason — that he should be able to be worn down by disease, and that his life should often be cut off in the middle of its course? For God knew that the living creature he had made was passing of its own accord toward death. So, in order that it might actually be able to receive death — which is the coming apart of a nature — he gave it frailty, and frailty is what opens a way in for death, so that the creature can come apart. [a]

For if it had been made so strong that disease and sickness could not get at it, death could not have got at it either, since death is what disease leads to. And how could an early death be kept away from a creature for whom a death in due time had been appointed? What they want, of course, is that no one should die until he has completed his hundredth year. How can they keep that consistent, when the conditions pull so hard against each other? For a man to be incapable of dying before a hundred years, he would have to be given some of the strength that belongs to what is immortal; and once that is granted, the condition of dying has to be shut out altogether. And what could that strength be, that would make a man solid and unassailable against disease and against blows from outside? He is put together out of bone and sinew and flesh and blood. Which of these is firm enough to hold off frailty and death? If a man is not to be liable to come apart before the time they think should have been set for him, what material are they going to build his body out of? Everything that can be seen and touched is frail. They will have to go looking for something from heaven, since there is nothing on earth that is not weak.

So then: since man had to be formed by God in such a way that he would at some point be mortal, the case itself required that he be made with a frail, earthly body. He must therefore receive death at some point, because he has a body; and every body is liable to come apart and to die. Those who complain about early death are being very foolish, since the terms of nature themselves make room for it. It follows in the same way that he is subject to disease; nature does not allow weakness to be absent from a body that is one day going to come apart.

But let us grant them what they want, and suppose it possible for a man to be born on terms that leave him open to disease or death only after he has run out his course and reached the far end of old age. They do not see what would follow if it were arranged so that dying at any other time were plainly impossible. If a man can be deprived of food by someone else, then he can die after all. So the case requires that a man who cannot die before an appointed day should have no need of the nourishment of food at all, since food can be taken away from him. But if he needs no food, he is no longer a man; he has become a god. So, as I have already said, people who complain about human frailty are really complaining about one thing: that they were not born immortal and everlasting. No one ought to die, they say, unless he is old. In truth he ought to die for this reason: because he is not God. Mortal and immortal cannot be joined together. If a man is mortal in old age, he cannot be immortal in youth. The condition of death is not foreign to someone who is going to die at some point, and there is no such thing as an immortality with a term set to it. So this is how it comes out: immortality is shut out for good, mortality is taken on for a time, and that leaves man in a condition in which he is at some point mortal.

The necessity, then, squares at every point: he ought not to have been otherwise than he is, and could not have been. But they do not see how the consequences run, because they went wrong once, at the main point itself. Once divine providence had been shut out of human affairs, it necessarily followed that everything came about of its own accord. That is why they invented those collisions and chance meetings of minute seeds — because they could not see where things come from. And once they had got themselves into that corner, necessity forced them to hold that souls are born along with bodies and are snuffed out along with bodies; for they had already assumed that nothing was made by the divine mind. The only way they could prove it was by pointing to places where the working of providence seemed to limp.

So they found fault with the very things in which providence has expressed its own divinity most wonderfully — the things I have been describing about disease and early death. What they should have done instead is grant those things and then work out what would necessarily follow if man were not liable to disease and needed neither a house nor clothing. What I have been saying is that consequence. For why would he fear wind or rain or cold, whose whole power lies in this, that they bring on disease? It is for this that he has been given wisdom: to guard his frailty against the things that would harm him. And the necessary consequence is that since he is liable to disease so that he may keep his wisdom, he must be liable to death as well — because anyone death cannot reach would have to be solid through and through. Weakness carries the condition of death in itself; and where there is that solidity, there is no room for old age either, nor for the death that comes after old age.

Besides, if death were fixed to a set age, man would grow enormously arrogant and would be stripped of all human feeling. For nearly all the claims of human fellowship, the ones that bind us to one another, arise out of fear and out of knowing that we are frail. Notice that all the weaker and more timid animals herd together, so that what they cannot defend by strength they may defend by numbers, while the stronger animals look for solitude, because they trust their own force and power. If man in the same way had strength enough to beat off every danger and needed no one else’s help, what society would there be? What ordered life? What human feeling? What would be harsher than man, more brutal, more savage? But since he is weak and cannot live by himself apart from other people, he wants society, so that his life, lived among others, may be both better furnished and safer.

So you see that the whole account of man turns above all on this: that he is born naked and fragile, that disease assails him, that early death punishes him. Take these away from him, and reason and wisdom must go with them. But I am spending too long on what is obvious, since it is clear that nothing ever was made, or could have been made, without providence. If I wanted now to go through all its works in order, the subject would have no end. I have set out to speak only about the body of man, and only so far as to show in it the power of divine providence — how great it has been in the things that are easy to grasp and open to view; for what belongs to the soul can neither be set before the eyes nor taken in. So now we are speaking about the vessel of man itself, the thing we can see.

In the beginning, when God was forming the animals, he did not choose to ball them up and gather them into a round shape, so that they might easily set themselves moving for walking and turn in any direction. Instead, from the topmost part of the body he drew out the head. He also drew certain limbs out to a greater length, the ones we call feet, so that, planted on the ground and moving by turns, they might carry the animal forward wherever its inclination had taken it or the need to find food had called it. And he made four limbs standing out from the vessel of the body itself: two at the back, which every animal has — the feet — and two more up close to the head and the neck, which serve animals in various ways. In cattle and wild animals they are feet like the back pair; in man they are hands, made not for walking but for doing and for handling. There is a third class as well, in which that front pair is neither feet nor hands but wings, which, with their feathers set in order, serve for flying. [h]

So one and the same construction takes different shapes and different uses. And to hold the very mass of the body firmly together, binding large bones and small ones, he put together a kind of keel, which we call the spine. He did not see fit to make it out of one unbroken bone, or the animal would have lost the power of walking and of bending itself. From about its middle he has run out crosswise, in another direction, flat bones which, curving slightly and nearly drawn together on themselves into a ring, cover the inner organs, so that the parts that had to be soft and less strong might be protected by a solid framework closing around them. And at the end of that joining which we said is like the keel of a ship, he set the head, where the government of the whole living creature would sit. It was given that name, as Varro writes to Cicero, because from it the senses and the sinews take their beginning.

As for the parts we said were drawn out from the body, whether for walking or for doing or for flying, he willed that they should be made of bones neither too long, for the sake of quick movement, nor too short, for the sake of strength, but of a few bones, and those large. For these limbs are either two, as in man, or four, as in a four-footed animal. And he did not make the bones solid, in case heaviness and dead weight should slow the walking; he made them hollow and full of marrow inside, to keep the body’s vigor. Nor did he make them of even thickness all the way to the end. He balled up their ends into rough knobs, so that they could be bound more easily with sinews and turned more easily — which is why they are called joints. These knobs he made thoroughly solid, and covered them with a soft kind of covering called cartilage, so that they could be bent without chafing or any feeling of pain.

He did not shape them all one way, though. Some he made plain and rounded into a ball, at least in those joints where it was fitting that the limb should move in every direction — the shoulders, for instance, since the hands have to move and be twisted around in any direction at all. Others he made broad and even, and rounded on one side only, and that plainly in the places where the limb needed nothing but to bend: the knees, the elbows, and the hands themselves. It is at once pleasant to look at and useful that the hands should move in every direction from the point where they spring; but if the same thing were true of the elbows, that kind of motion would be both unnecessary and unbecoming. The hand would lose the dignity it now has, and out of sheer excess of movement would look like the trunk of an elephant. A man would be altogether snake-handed — a thing that has been wonderfully brought off in that monstrous beast.

For God wanted to display his providence and his power in a wonderful variety of things. He had not drawn out that animal’s head far enough for it to touch the ground with its mouth, which would have been horrible and hideous to see; and he had so armed the mouth itself with tusks that stick out that even if the animal did touch the ground, the tusks would still take away its power of feeding. So between them, from the top of the forehead, he drew out a soft and flexible limb, with which it could grasp anything and take hold of it, so that neither the jutting size of the tusks nor the shortness of the neck should get in the way of the arrangement for taking food.

I cannot let myself be kept from showing up the folly of Epicurus here once again. All of Lucretius’ ravings belong to him. In order to show that animals are not produced by any contrivance of the divine mind but, as he likes to say, by chance, he said that at the beginning of the world countless other animals of astonishing shape and size were produced, but that they could not last, because either the power of taking food or the means of mating and reproducing had failed them. Plainly, in order to make room for his atoms flying about through the boundless empty space, he wanted to shut out divine providence. But when he had seen that a wonderful working of providence is contained in everything that breathes, what emptiness it was — you mischief-maker! — to say that there had been animals of immense size in which the working of production broke down. [n]

Since, then, everything we see is produced with reference to a plan — for nothing but a plan can bring about this very condition of being born — it is plain that nothing could have been born without a plan. In the forming of each thing it was foreseen beforehand how it would put its limbs to work for the necessities of life, and how the offspring, coming from the union of bodies, would keep every kind of living creature going in its own species.

Think of a skilled architect. When he sets out to put up some great building, the first thing he considers is the sum of the finished work, and he works out beforehand, by measurement, what position suits a light load and where a massive part of the structure will stand, what the spacing between the columns will be, and what the falls and outlets for the rainwater and the cisterns will be, and where. He foresees all this first, so that from the foundations up he can begin whatever the work will need once it is finished. Why then should anyone suppose that in the contriving of animals God did not foresee what things were necessary for living before he gave life itself? For plainly life could not exist unless the things by which it exists had been arranged in advance.

So Epicurus did see in the bodies of animals the craft of a divine plan; but in order to carry through what he had rashly assumed earlier, he added a second absurdity to match the first. He said that the eyes were not produced for seeing, nor the ears for hearing, nor the feet for walking, since these parts were produced before there was any seeing, hearing or walking to be done, and that all the offices of these parts arose out of them after they had been produced. I am afraid that refuting such extravagant and ridiculous stories may look no less foolish than telling them; but I am content to be foolish, since we are dealing with a foolish man, so that he does not think himself too clever. What do you say, Epicurus? Were the eyes not produced for seeing? Then why do they see? Their use showed itself afterward. Then they were produced for the sake of seeing, since they can do nothing else but see. It is the same with the other limbs: the use itself shows what they were produced for. And plainly that use could not exist at all unless every limb had been made with such arrangement and such foresight that it could have its use.

What if you went on to say that birds were not made to fly, or wild animals to rage, or fish to swim, or men to be wise, when it is obvious that living creatures are bound to the natural bent and the office each one was created for? But clearly a man who has lost the main point of the truth itself is bound to go wrong at every turn. For if all things are produced not by providence but by a chance meeting of atoms, why does it never happen by chance that those first bodies come together in such a way as to make an animal of the sort that hears with its nostrils, smells with its eyes, and makes things out with its ears? If those first bodies leave no possible arrangement untried, monstrosities of this kind ought to have been brought forth every day, with the ordering of the limbs set back to front and their use nothing like the one that actually holds. But since every race of animals, and every limb, keeps to its own laws and arrangements and to the uses assigned to them, it is plain that nothing is made by chance, since a settled arrangement of the divine plan is preserved throughout. But we will refute Epicurus another time. For now, let us take up the subject of providence, as we began.