Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 23/87

That the sacrament of Christ's redemption was lacking in no times of the past, and has always been proclaimed under diverse significations. This mystery of eternal life, from the very beginning of the human race, was proclaimed through angels by means of certain signs and sacraments suited to the times, as was fitting. Then the Hebrew people was gathered into a certain commonwealth, which should enact this sacrament, where, through some who knew and some who did not know, it might be foretold that what is being done from the coming of Christ until now and thereafter was to come; afterward also that same nation was scattered among the nations, for the testimony of the Scriptures, in which it was foretold that eternal salvation in Christ was to come.

For all things—not only the prophecies which are in words, nor only the precepts of life which shape morals and piety and are contained in those writings, but also the holy rites, the priesthoods, the tabernacle or temple, the altars, the sacrifices, the ceremonies, the festal days, and whatever else pertains to that service which is owed to God and is in Greek properly called latreia—all these were signs and foretellings of those things which, on account of the eternal life of the faithful in Christ, we believe both to have been fulfilled, and discern to be fulfilled, and trust to be yet to be fulfilled. CHAPTER XXXIII. That through the Christian religion alone could the deceit of the malignant spirits be made manifest, who rejoice in the error of men.

Through this one and true religion, then, it could be made plain that the gods of the nations are most unclean demons, who, under the occasions of the souls of the dead or under the appearance of worldly creatures, desire to be thought gods, and who, with proud impurity, exult as it were in divine honors and in those same wicked and foul matters, and who begrudge to human souls their conversion to the true God. From whose most monstrous and most impious domination man is set free when he believes in Him who, for rising up, set forth an example of as great humility as that pride by which they fell.

Hence are not only those of whom we have already said much, and others and yet others like them among the rest of the nations and lands, but also these of whom we are now treating, as it were chosen into a senate of the gods; but plainly chosen for the nobility of their crimes, not for the dignity of their virtues. While Varro tries to refer their rites, as it were, to natural reasons, seeking to make honorable things that are base, he cannot find how these may square and harmonize with them, since those are not the causes of those rites which he thinks, or rather wishes to be thought.

For if not only those very causes, but any others whatever of this kind existed, even though they pertained nothing to the true God and to eternal life, which is to be sought in religion, yet by some explanation of the nature of things being given they would somewhat mitigate the offense which some seeming foulness or absurdity, not understood, had caused in the rites; just as he tried to do in certain fables of the theaters or mysteries of the shrines, where he did not acquit the theaters by the likeness of the shrines, but rather condemned the shrines by the likeness of the theaters; yet in whatever way he tried, that the sense, offended by horrible things, might be soothed by an explanation of natural causes being rendered. CHAPTER XXXIV.

On the books of Numa Pompilius, which the senate ordered to be burned, lest the causes of the rites, such as were contained in them, should become known. But on the contrary we find, as that most learned man himself reported, that the causes of the rites set forth from the books of Numa Pompilius could in no way be tolerated, nor were they deemed worthy that they should not only, when read, become known to the religious, but should not even, when written, be stored away in darkness. For I shall now say what in the third book of this work I promised that I would say in its own place.

For, as is read in that same Varro in the book on the worship of the gods: 'A certain Terentius, who had a farm near the Janiculum, when his plowman, driving the plow near the tomb of Numa Pompilius, had dug up out of the ground Numa's books, in which the causes of the instituted rites were written, carried them into the City to the praetor. But he, when he had inspected the opening pages, brought so great a matter to the senate. And there, when the leading men had read certain of the causes why each thing in the rites had been instituted, the senate assented to the dead Numa, and those reverend senators—as religious men—decreed that the praetor should burn those books.' Let each man believe what he thinks;

nay rather, let any distinguished champion of so great an impiety say whatever frenzied contentiousness may suggest should be said. Let it suffice me to point out that the causes of the rites, written down by King Pompilius, the founder of the Roman rites, ought to have become known neither to the people, nor to the senate, nor even to the priests themselves; and that Numa Pompilius himself, by an illicit curiosity, came upon those secrets of the demons, which indeed he wrote down, that he might have whence to be reminded by reading; yet these, though he was king who feared no one in the least, he dared neither to teach to anyone, nor to destroy by erasing or consuming in any way whatever.

Thus that which he wished no one to know, lest he should teach men wicked things, but which he feared to violate, lest he should make the demons angry, he buried where he thought it safe, not believing that a plow could draw near to his tomb. But the senate, since it dreaded to condemn the religious practices of its ancestors and was therefore compelled to assent to Numa, nevertheless judged those books to be so pernicious that it did not order them to be buried again, lest human curiosity should seek much more vehemently the matter now disclosed, but ordered the abominable records to be abolished by flames—so that, since they now thought it necessary to perform those rites, men might err more tolerably with the causes of them unknown, than that the city should be disturbed with them known. CHAPTER XXXV. On the hydromancy by which Numa was deluded by certain images of demons seen.

For Numa himself, to whom no prophet of God, no holy angel was sent, was driven to practice hydromancy, that he might see in the water images of gods, or rather the delusions of demons, from whom he might hear what he ought to institute and observe in the rites. Which kind of divination Varro says was brought from the Persians, and records that Numa himself, and afterward the philosopher Pythagoras, made use of it; where, blood also being applied, he asserts that even the dead below are consulted, and says it is called in Greek necromancy; which, whether it be called hydromancy or necromancy, is that very thing wherein the dead seem to divine. By what arts these things are done, let them see to it themselves.

For I do not wish to say that these arts, even before the coming of our Savior, were wont to be prohibited by the very laws of the states of the nations, and to be punished with the severest penalty. I do not wish, I say, to say this; for perhaps such things were then permitted. Yet by these arts Pompilius learned those rites, the performance of which he made public, but whose causes he buried (so greatly did he himself fear what he had learned); and the books of those causes, when disclosed, the senate burned. Why, then, does Varro interpret for me certain other I-know-not-what causes, as it were physical, of those rites? If those books had contained such causes, they would surely not have been burned; or else the senators would likewise have burned these of Varro's, written and published to Caesar the pontiff.

Because, therefore, Numa Pompilius drew off water, that is, carried it out, in order that he might thereby practise hydromancy, he is on that account said to have had the nymph Egeria as his wife, just as is set forth in the aforementioned book of Varro. For thus are real deeds wont to be turned into fables by a sprinkling of falsehoods. In that hydromancy, then, that most inquisitive Roman king both learned the sacred rites which the pontiffs were to keep in their books, and also their reasons, which he willed no one but himself to know. And so he caused them, written down separately, in a manner to die with him, when he thus took care that they should be withdrawn from the knowledge of men and buried.

Either, then, the so filthy and noxious lusts of demons were there set down in writing, so that from these the whole of that civil theology would appear execrable even among such men, who had taken up so many shameful things in their very sacred rites; or else all those beings were betrayed to be nothing other than dead men, whom, through so long an antiquity of time, almost all the peoples of the nations had believed to be immortal gods—seeing that those very demons took delight in such rites as well, demons who, by certain attestations of deceitful miracles, set themselves up to be worshipped in place of the very dead men whom they had caused to be reckoned as gods.

But by the hidden providence of the true God it came about that, though they were reconciled to Pompilius his friend by those arts whereby the hydromancy could be performed, they were permitted to confess all those things, and yet were not permitted to warn him, who was about to die, rather to burn them than to bury them; and that they might not become known, they were able to resist neither the plough by which they were dug up, nor the pen of Varro, by which the things that were done in this matter have come down to our remembrance. For they cannot effect what they are not allowed to do; and they are allowed it by the deep and just judgment of the most high God, according to the merits of those whom it is just to be by them either only afflicted, or even subjected and deceived.

But how pernicious those writings were judged to be, or how alien from the worship of true divinity, can be understood from this: that the senate preferred to burn those things which Pompilius had hidden, rather than to fear what he feared, who had not dared to do this. Whoever, then, is unwilling even now to have a pious life, let him seek an eternal life by such sacred rites; but whoever is unwilling to have fellowship with malignant demons, let him not dread the noxious superstition by which they are worshipped, but let him acknowledge the true religion by which they are exposed and overcome. BOOK VIII. CHAPTER I. On the question of natural theology, to be discussed with philosophers of more excellent knowledge.

Now we have need of a mind far more intent than was required in the solution of the foregoing questions and the unfolding of the books. For concerning the theology which they call natural, our discussion is to be held, not with any men whatsoever (for it is not the fabulous nor the civil—that is, neither the theatrical nor the urban; of which the one parades the crimes of the gods, the other discloses the still more criminal desires of the gods, and through this belongs rather to malignant demons than to gods), but with the philosophers; whose very name, if we interpret it in Latin, professes a love of wisdom. Further, if wisdom is God, through whom all things were made, as the divine authority and truth has shown, then the true philosopher is a lover of God.

But because the thing itself, of which this is the name, is not in all who glory in this name (for not all who are called philosophers are forthwith lovers of true wisdom): assuredly out of all those whose opinions we have been able to know from their writings, we must choose those with whom this question may not unworthily be treated. For I have not undertaken in this work to refute all the vain opinions of all philosophers, but only those which pertain to theology—by which Greek word we understand to be signified a reasoning or discourse concerning divinity;

nor those of all, but only of those who, while agreeing both that divinity exists and that it cares for human affairs, nevertheless think that the worship of the one unchangeable God does not suffice for attaining a life blessed even after death, but suppose that many, founded indeed and established by that one, are for that reason to be worshipped. These already, by their nearness to truth, surpass even the opinion of Varro; for whereas he was able to extend the whole of natural theology only as far as this world or its soul, these confess God to be above the whole nature of the soul—God who made not only this visible world, which is often called by the name of heaven and earth, but also every soul whatsoever, and who, by participation of His unchangeable and incorporeal light, makes blessed the rational and intellectual soul,

of which kind is the human soul. That these philosophers were called Platonists, the name being derived from Plato their teacher, no one who has heard even slightly of these matters is ignorant. Concerning this Plato, therefore, I shall briefly touch upon what I deem necessary to the present question, first making mention of those who, in the same kind of literature, preceded him in time. CHAPTER II. On the two kinds of philosophers, that is, the Italic and the Ionic, and their founders. For as far as concerns Greek letters—which language is held more illustrious among the rest of the nations—two kinds of philosophers are handed down: one Italic, from that part of Italy which was once called Magna Graecia;

the other Ionic, in those lands where even now it is called Greece. The Italic kind had as its founder Pythagoras of Samos, from whom they say the very name of philosophy arose. For whereas formerly those were called wise men who seemed by a certain manner of praiseworthy life to excel others, when he was asked what he professed, he answered that he was a philosopher, that is, a zealot or lover of wisdom; since to profess oneself wise seemed most arrogant. But the chief of the Ionic kind was Thales of Miletus, one of those seven who were called the wise men. But those six were distinguished by their manner of life and by certain precepts adapted to living well;

but Thales, in order also to propagate successors, having investigated the nature of things and committed his disputations to writing, became eminent and proved most admirable, in that, having grasped the calculations of astronomy, he was even able to foretell eclipses of the sun and moon. He thought, however, that water was the principle of things, and that from it all the elements of the world, and the world itself, and whatever is generated in it, came into being. But he set nothing from a divine mind over this work, which we behold so marvellous when the world is considered. To him succeeded Anaximander, his hearer, who changed the opinion concerning the nature of things. For he thought that the several things were born not from one thing, as Thales from moisture, but from their own proper principles.

These principles of the several things he believed to be infinite, and to generate innumerable worlds and whatever arises in them; and those worlds he reckoned to be now dissolved, now again generated, according to the length of time each could endure; nor did he himself attribute anything to a divine mind in these works of things. He left Anaximenes as his disciple and successor, who assigned all the causes of things to infinite air, and neither denied nor passed over the gods in silence; yet he believed that the air was not made by them, but that they themselves arose from the air.

But Anaxagoras, his hearer, perceived and declared that a divine mind was the maker of all these things which we see, out of an infinite matter consisting of dissimilar particles of all things, the several things being made each out of its own like and proper particles, but with the divine mind acting. Diogenes too, another hearer of Anaximenes, said indeed that air was the matter of things, out of which all came to be; but that it was possessed of divine reason, without which nothing could be made from it. To Anaxagoras succeeded his hearer Archelaus.

He too thought that all things were composed of particles like one another, out of which each several thing was made, yet in such a way that he said there was also a mind present, which by joining together and dispersing those eternal bodies, that is, those particles, governed all things. Socrates is reported to have been his disciple, the teacher of Plato, on whose account I have briefly reviewed all these matters. CHAPTER III. On the Socratic discipline. Socrates, then, is recorded to have been the first to turn the whole of philosophy toward the correcting and ordering of morals, whereas before him all bestowed their greatest labour rather on investigating physical, that is, natural, matters.

But it does not seem to me that it can be gathered with clarity whether Socrates, in order to do this, directed his mind toward discovering something open and certain, out of weariness with obscure and uncertain matters—something that would be necessary to the blessed life, for the sake of which alone the diligence of all philosophers seems to have kept watch and laboured; or rather, as some more benevolently suspect of him, he was unwilling that minds unclean with earthly lusts should strain themselves to attempt divine things. Since indeed he saw that the causes of things were being inquired into by them—causes which he believed to be first and highest in nothing other than the will of the one and supreme God; whence he thought they could not be comprehended save by a purified mind;

and therefore he judged that one must press on toward the purging of life by good morals, so that the mind, unburdened of the depressing lusts, might by its natural vigour raise itself into eternal things, and behold, by the purity of its understanding, the nature of the incorporeal and unchangeable light, where the causes of all created natures abide steadfastly in being. Yet it is established that, even in those very moral questions, to which he seemed to have directed his whole mind, he so dealt with and worked over the folly of the unlearned who supposed they knew something—whether by his confessed ignorance of his own, or by his dissembled knowledge—with a marvellous charm of discoursing and a most keen urbanity. Whence, enmities being stirred up against him, he was condemned by a slanderous accusation and punished with death.

But afterward the city of the Athenians publicly mourned that very thing which it had publicly condemned, the people's indignation being turned upon his two accusers to such a degree that one of them, overwhelmed by the violence of the multitude, perished, while the other escaped a like penalty by voluntary and perpetual exile. With so illustrious a fame, then, both of his life and of his death, Socrates left very many followers of his philosophy, whose zeal it was, vying with one another, to occupy themselves in the discussion of moral questions, wherein it is treated of the supreme good, by which a man can be made blessed. And because in the disputations of Socrates—while he moves, asserts, and demolishes all things—this did not evidently appear, each took from it what pleased him, and where it seemed good to each, there they set the end of good.

Now the end of good is so called, to which when anyone has attained, he is blessed. But the Socratics held opinions concerning this end so diverse among themselves that (what is scarcely credible the followers of one master could have done) some said that the supreme good was pleasure, as Aristippus; others, virtue, as Antisthenes. Thus one after another opined this thing and that, whom it would be tedious to mention. CHAPTER IV. On Plato, foremost among Socrates' disciples, who divided all philosophy into a threefold partition. But among the disciples of Socrates, not undeservedly, Plato shone with a most excellent glory, by which he wholly eclipsed the rest.

Since he was an Athenian, born in an honourable station among his own people, and by his marvellous genius far outstripped his fellow disciples, yet thinking that he himself and the Socratic discipline were too little to suffice for perfecting philosophy, he travelled far and wide, in whatever direction the report of any renowned knowledge to be acquired hurried him. And so both in Egypt he learned whatever great things were there held and taught, and thence, coming into those parts of Italy where the fame of the Pythagoreans was celebrated, he most readily grasped whatever of Italic philosophy then flourished, having heard the more eminent teachers in it.

And because he singularly loved his master Socrates, making him speak in nearly all his dialogues, he tempered even those things which he had either learned from others, or himself perceived with as much understanding as he could, with that man's charm and moral disputations. And so, since the pursuit of wisdom is occupied in action and in contemplation—whence one part of it may be called active, the other contemplative (of which the active pertains to the conduct of life, that is, to the forming of morals, but the contemplative to the beholding of the causes of nature and of the purest truth)—Socrates is recorded to have excelled in the active, but Pythagoras rather to have devoted himself to the contemplative, with what powers of understanding he could.

Accordingly Plato is praised for having perfected philosophy by joining both together, which he distributed into three parts: one moral, which is chiefly occupied in action; another natural, which is assigned to contemplation; the third rational, by which the true is marked off from the false. And although this last is necessary to both, that is, to action and to contemplation, yet it is especially contemplation that claims for itself the discernment of truth. Therefore this tripartite division is not contrary to that distinction by which it is understood that the whole pursuit of wisdom consists in action and in contemplation.

But what Plato felt in these, or concerning each of these parts—that is, where he recognized or believed the end of all actions to be, where the cause of all natures, where the light of all reasonings—I judge it both tedious to explain by discoursing, and I judge it must not be rashly affirmed. For since he affects to preserve the well-known custom of his master Socrates, whom he makes disputing in his volumes, of dissembling his knowledge or his opinion—because that custom pleased him as well—it has come about that even Plato's own opinions concerning great matters cannot easily be discerned.

Nevertheless, out of those things which are read in him, whether what he himself said, or what he related and wrote down as said by others, such as seemed pleasing to him, certain matters ought to be mentioned by us and inserted into this work, either where he supports the true religion which our faith receives and defends, or where he seems to be contrary to it, so far as pertains to that question concerning the one God and the many—on account of the life that is to be after death, truly blessed.

For perhaps those who are praised, with a more celebrated fame, for having understood Plato—far and rightly preferred to the rest of the philosophers of the nations—more keenly and more truly, and for having followed him, feel something of this kind concerning God: that in Him is found both the cause of subsisting, and the reason of understanding, and the order of living; of which three, the one is understood to pertain to the natural part, the second to the rational, the third to the moral. For if man has been so created that, through that which excels in him, he attains to that which excels all things—that is, the one true and best God, without whom no nature subsists, no doctrine instructs, no practice profits—then let Him be sought, where all things are serious to us; let Him be discerned, where all things are certain to us;

let Him be loved, where all things are right to us. CHAPTER V. That theology is to be disputed chiefly with the Platonists, to whose opinion the dogmas of all philosophers are to be postponed. If, then, Plato said that the wise man is the imitator, the knower, the lover of this God, by participation of whom he is blessed, what need is there to examine the rest? None have approached nearer to us than these.

Let there yield to them, therefore, not only that fabulous theology, delighting the minds of the impious with the crimes of the gods, nor only that civil theology too, wherein impure demons, seducing under the name of gods the peoples given over to earthly joys, willed to have human errors as their own divine honours—exciting their worshippers, by most filthy zeal, to the watching of plays of their crimes, as it were to their own worship, and exhibiting to themselves plays more delightful out of the very spectators (where, if anything seemingly honourable is performed in the temples, it is befouled by the obscenity of the theatres joined to it, and whatever shameful things are performed in the theatres are praised by the foulness of the temples compared with them)—and also those things which Varro interpreted out of these sacred rites as referring, so to speak, to heaven and earth and the seeds and acts of mortal things (because not even those things are signified by those rites which he himself attempts to insinuate, and therefore the truth does not follow him as he attempts;

and even if those things were so, yet to the rational soul, those things which by the natural order are established beneath it ought not to be worshipped as its god, nor ought it to set before itself, as gods, those things above which the true God set the soul itself)—and also those things which Numa Pompilius, since they truly pertained to sacred rites of that kind, took care to hide by burying them with himself, and which, dug up by the plough, the senate commanded to be burned.

(Of that kind are also those things—so that we may suspect something milder concerning Numa—which Alexander of Macedon writes were disclosed to him in a letter to his mother by a certain Leon, a high priest of the Egyptian sacred rites; where not Picus and Faunus and Aeneas and Romulus, or even Hercules and Aesculapius, and Liber the son of Semele, and the brothers, the sons of Tyndareus, and any others whom they hold as gods out of mortals, but those very gods of the greater nations, whom Cicero in the Tusculans seems to touch upon under silent names—Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta, and very many others, whom Varro attempts to transfer to the parts or elements of the world—are betrayed to have been men.

For he too, fearing, as though seeking pardon for mysteries revealed, admonishes Alexander that, when he has communicated these things written down to his mother, he should command them to be consumed by the flames.) Not only, therefore, let those things which the two theologies—the fabulous and the civil—contain yield to the Platonist philosophers, who said that the true God is both the author of things, and the illuminator of truth, and the bestower of blessedness;

but let also those other philosophers, who with minds given over to the body supposed corporeal principles of nature, yield to these so great men, knowers of so great a God—as Thales in moisture, Anaximenes in air, the Stoics in fire, Epicurus in atoms, that is, the most minute little bodies which can neither be divided nor perceived, and whatever others (in whose enumeration it is not necessary to linger) said that bodies—whether simple or compound, whether lacking life or living, but bodies nonetheless—were the cause and principle of things. For some of them believed that living things could be made from things not living, as the Epicureans; but others believed that from a living thing came both living and non-living things, yet from a body bodies.

For the Stoics thought that fire—that is, one body out of those four elements of which this visible world consists—was both living and wise, and the fabricator of the world itself and of all things that are in it, and that this fire was altogether God. These, and others like them, were able to think only that which their hearts, bound to the senses of the flesh, had fabricated together with them. For they had within themselves what they did not see, and imagined within themselves what they had seen without, even when they did not see it but only thought of it. But this, in the sight of such a thought, is now not a body, but the likeness of a body; while that whereby this likeness of a body is seen in the mind is neither a body nor the likeness of a body;