City of God 7.34–8.7

Chapter 34. On the books of Numa Pompilius, which the senate ordered to be burned, so that the causes of the rites, as they were given in them, might not become known.

But on the contrary we find, as this most learned man himself reported, that the causes of the rites given in the books of Numa Pompilius could in no way be tolerated, and were not thought worthy not only to be read and become known to the religious, but even to be kept hidden in darkness in writing. For now I shall tell what I promised in the third book of this work to tell in its place. For, as we read in the same Varro in his book on the worship of the gods: “A certain Terentius had a farm near the Janiculum; and his ploughman, driving the plough near the tomb of Numa Pompilius, turned up from the earth Numa's books, in which were written the causes of the rites he had instituted. Terentius brought them to the city to the praetor. He, having looked at the beginnings, referred so grave a matter to the senate. There, when the leading men had read some of the causes why each thing had been instituted in the rites, the senate agreed with the dead Numa, and the conscript fathers, as religious men, decreed that the praetor should burn those books.” Let each believe what he thinks; indeed, let any distinguished defender of such great impiety say what mad contentiousness suggests to him. It is enough for me to point out that the causes of the rites written by King Pompilius, the founder of the Roman rites, ought not to have become known to the people or to the senate or even to the priests themselves; and that Numa Pompilius himself, by unlawful curiosity, arrived at those secrets of demons, which he wrote down so that he might have something to remind him by reading. Yet, though he was a king who feared no one, he dared neither to teach them to anyone nor to destroy them by deleting or consuming them in any way. So, what he wanted no one to know, lest he teach men wicked things, and yet feared to violate, lest he have the demons angry with him, he buried where he thought it safe, not believing that a plough could come near his tomb. But the senate, fearing to condemn the religion of their ancestors and therefore compelled to agree with Numa, still judged those books so pernicious that it did not order them to be buried again, lest human curiosity should seek the matter, now disclosed, much more vehemently, but ordered the wicked records to be destroyed by fire; so that, since they thought it necessary to go on performing those rites, it would be more tolerable to err in ignorance of their causes than for the city to be thrown into turmoil by knowing them.

Chapter 35. On hydromancy, by which Numa was deluded by seeing certain images of demons.

For Numa himself, to whom no prophet of God, no holy angel was sent, was driven to practice hydromancy, so as to see in water images of the gods, or rather the delusions of demons, from whom he might hear what he ought to establish and observe in the rites. Varro says that this kind of divination was brought from the Persians, and records that Numa himself, and later the philosopher Pythagoras, used it; and he says that when blood is applied the dead too are consulted, and that in Greek this is called nekyomanteia; call it necromancy if you will, it is the same thing, in which the dead are seen to divine. By what arts these things are done, let them see to it. For I will not say that these arts, even before the coming of our Savior, were usually forbidden by law in the very cities of the gentiles and punished with the most severe penalty. I will not say this, I repeat; for perhaps such things were then permitted. Yet by these arts Pompilius learned those rites, whose performance he published but whose causes he buried (so much did he himself fear what he had learned); and the senate burned the books of those causes when they were disclosed. Why, then, does Varro offer me some other so-called physical causes of those rites? If those books had contained such causes, they would certainly not have been burned; or else the conscript fathers would likewise have burned these books of Varro, written and published for Caesar the pontiff. And because Numa Pompilius drew out (egesserit), that is, carried away, water with which to practice hydromancy, he is said to have had the nymph Egeria as his wife, as is explained in the aforesaid book of Varro. For so deeds done are commonly turned into fables by a sprinkling of lies. In that hydromancy, then, that most curious Roman king learned both the rites which the pontiffs were to have in their books and their causes, which he wished no one but himself to know. And so he wrote them down separately and made them in a way die with him, when he took care to withdraw them from the knowledge of men and bury them. Either, then, the desires of the demons written there were so filthy and harmful that the whole civil theology would have appeared execrable from them even to such men as had adopted so many shameful things in the rites themselves; or else all those gods were revealed to be nothing but dead men, whom almost all the peoples of the nations, over so long a stretch of time, had believed to be immortal gods — while the same demons also took delight in such rites, substituting themselves to be worshipped in place of those dead men, whom they had caused to be thought gods, by the testimony of certain deceitful wonders. But by the hidden providence of the true God it came about that the demons, won over to their friend Pompilius by the arts by which hydromancy could be done, were permitted to confess all those things to him, and yet were not permitted to warn him to burn them rather than bury them when he was about to die; and they could not prevent them from becoming known, either by resisting the plough by which they were dug up, or the pen of Varro, by which what happened in this matter has come down to our memory. For they cannot do what they are not allowed; and they are allowed by the deep and just judgment of the most high God, according to the deserts of those whom it is just that they should only afflict, or even subjugate and deceive. How pernicious those writings were judged to be, or how foreign to the worship of the true divinity, may be understood from this: the senate preferred to burn what Pompilius had hidden rather than to fear what he feared, who could not dare to do this. Let him, then, who does not want to have a devout life even now seek eternal life by such rites; but let him who does not want to have fellowship with malignant demons not dread the harmful superstition by which they are worshipped, but acknowledge the true religion by which they are exposed and overcome.

Chapter 1. That the question of natural theology is to be discussed with philosophers of more excellent knowledge.

Now we need a much more attentive mind than was required in solving the earlier questions and unfolding the earlier books. For concerning the theology which they call natural, the discussion is to be held not with just any men — for it is not fabulous or civil, that is, theatrical or urban theology, of which the one flaunts the crimes of the gods and the other reveals their still more criminal desires, and therefore those of malignant demons rather than of gods — but with philosophers, whose very name, if we translate it into Latin, professes the love of wisdom. Now if wisdom is God, through whom all things were made, as divine authority and truth have shown, then the true philosopher is a lover of God. But since the thing itself to which this name belongs is not in all who glory in the name (for not everyone who is called a philosopher is at once a lover of true wisdom), we must certainly choose, out of all those whose opinions we have been able to know from their writings, those with whom this question may be discussed not unworthily. For in this work I have not undertaken to refute all the vain opinions of all the philosophers, but only those that pertain to theology — by which Greek word we understand an account or discourse about the divinity — and not those of all, but only of those who, while agreeing that there is a divinity and that it cares for human affairs, nevertheless think that the worship of the one unchangeable God is not sufficient for obtaining a life that is happy even after death, but that many gods, created indeed and established by that one God, are to be worshipped for that purpose. These men already surpass even Varro's opinion by their nearness to the truth. For he could extend the whole of natural theology only as far as this world or its soul; but they acknowledge a God above every nature of soul, who made not only this visible world, which is often called by the name of heaven and earth, but also every soul whatever, and who makes the rational and intellectual soul, of which kind the human soul is, happy by participation in his unchangeable and incorporeal light. No one who has heard even a little of these things is unaware that these philosophers are called Platonists, a name derived from their teacher Plato. Of this Plato, then, I shall briefly touch on what I think necessary for the present question, first mentioning those who preceded him in time in the same kind of writing.

Chapter 2. On the two kinds of philosophers, the Italian and the Ionian, and their founders.

As far as Greek literature is concerned, whose language is held to be more illustrious than the others of the nations, two kinds of philosophers are recorded: one the Italian, from that part of Italy once called Magna Graecia; the other the Ionian, in the lands which are still called Greece. The Italian school had as its founder Pythagoras of Samos, from whom, they say, the very name of philosophy arose. For whereas those who seemed to excel others by a certain praiseworthy manner of life had formerly been called wise men (sapientes), he, when asked what he professed, answered that he was a philosopher, that is, a student or lover of wisdom, since to profess to be wise seemed most arrogant. The founder of the Ionian school was Thales of Miletus, one of those seven who were called the Wise. But the other six were distinguished by their manner of life and by certain precepts suited to living well; this Thales, however, in order to leave successors as well, investigated the nature of things and committed his discussions to writing, and so became eminent. He was especially admired because, having mastered the calculations of astronomy, he could even predict eclipses of the sun and moon. Yet he thought water was the first principle of things, and that from it all the elements of the world, and the world itself, and the things produced in it, came into being. But he set nothing from a divine mind over this work, which we behold as so wonderful when we consider the world. He was succeeded by Anaximander, his pupil, who changed the opinion about the nature of things. For he thought that each thing is born not from one thing, as Thales held from moisture, but from its own principles. He believed these principles of individual things to be infinite, and that they give birth to innumerable worlds and whatever arises in them; and he thought that these worlds are now dissolved and now born again, according to how long each could last in its own age; nor did he himself attribute anything to a divine mind in these works of nature. He left as his pupil and successor Anaximenes, who assigned all the causes of things to infinite air; he did not deny the gods or pass them over in silence, yet he believed not that the air was made by them, but that they arose from the air. Anaxagoras, his pupil, held that a divine mind was the maker of all these things which we see, and said that from an infinite matter, consisting of particles of all things unlike one another, each thing is made from particles like itself and proper to it, but by the action of a divine mind. Diogenes too, another pupil of Anaximenes, said that air was the matter of things, from which all things came to be, but that it shared in a divine reason, without which nothing could be made from it. Anaxagoras was succeeded by his pupil Archelaus. He too thought that all things consist of particles like one another, from which each thing is made, but said that there was also a mind within, which did everything by joining and separating the eternal bodies, that is, those particles. Socrates is said to have been his disciple, the teacher of Plato, for whose sake I have briefly recalled all these.

Chapter 3. On the Socratic teaching.

Socrates, then, is recorded to have been the first to turn the whole of philosophy to the correction and ordering of morals, whereas before him all had spent their greatest effort on investigating physical, that is, natural, things. It does not seem to me possible to determine clearly whether Socrates did this because, weary of obscure and uncertain things, he turned his mind to finding something plain and certain that was necessary for the happy life — for the sake of which alone the industry of all philosophers seems to have kept watch and labored — or whether, as some more kindly suppose of him, he did not wish minds unclean with earthly desires to try to extend themselves to divine things. For he saw that they were inquiring into the causes of things, which he believed, the first and highest of them, to be nowhere but in the will of the one supreme God; and so he thought they could not be grasped except by a cleansed mind. Therefore he judged that one must press on to purify one's life by good morals, so that the mind, relieved of the weight of the lusts that press it down, might rise by its natural vigor to eternal things and behold with the purity of understanding the nature of the incorporeal and unchangeable light, where the causes of all created natures live stably. Yet it is well known that, even in those moral questions to which he seemed to have turned his whole mind, he harried and tossed about the foolishness of the ignorant who thought they knew something, either by confessing his own ignorance or by concealing his knowledge, with a wonderful charm of discussion and a most acute wit. Hence, enmities being stirred up, he was condemned on a slanderous charge and punished with death. But afterwards the very city of the Athenians which had publicly condemned him publicly mourned him, the indignation of the people turning so far against his two accusers that one of them was crushed by the crowd and perished, while the other escaped a like punishment only by voluntary and perpetual exile. Socrates, then, leaving so illustrious a reputation in life and in death, left very many followers of his philosophy, who vied with one another in engaging in the discussion of moral questions, where the question is of the supreme good, by which a man can become happy. Since this did not clearly appear in the discussions of Socrates, as he raised, asserted, and demolished everything, each took from them what pleased him, and each placed the final good where it seemed good to him. The final good is so called because whoever reaches it is happy. And the Socratics held such different opinions among themselves about this end that (what is hardly credible of the followers of one master) some said that the supreme good was pleasure, like Aristippus, and others virtue, like Antisthenes. So others and others held this and that opinion, and it would take long to mention them.

Chapter 4. On Plato, the foremost of the disciples of Socrates, who divided all philosophy into three parts.

But among the disciples of Socrates, not undeservedly, Plato shone with a glory so excellent that he quite eclipsed the rest. He was an Athenian, born of an honorable family among his people, and far surpassed his fellow pupils in wonderful talent; yet, thinking that he himself and the Socratic teaching were not enough to perfect philosophy, he travelled as far and wide as he could, wherever the fame of some celebrated knowledge to be gained drew him. So he learned in Egypt whatever great things were held and taught there; and coming from there to those parts of Italy where the fame of the Pythagoreans was celebrated, he most easily mastered whatever of Italian philosophy was then flourishing, by hearing its more eminent teachers. And because he loved his master Socrates in a singular way, he made him the speaker in almost all his dialogues, and blended with Socrates' charm and moral discussions even the things he had learned from others or had seen for himself with all the intelligence he could. Now the pursuit of wisdom consists in action and contemplation, so that one part of it may be called active and the other contemplative (the active pertaining to the conduct of life, that is, to the forming of morals; the contemplative to beholding the causes of nature and the purest truth). Socrates is recorded to have excelled in the active part, while Pythagoras applied himself rather to the contemplative, with all the powers of intelligence he could. Accordingly Plato is praised for having perfected philosophy by joining the two; and he divided it into three parts: one moral, which is chiefly concerned with action; another natural, which is assigned to contemplation; the third rational, by which the true is distinguished from the false. Though this is necessary to both, that is, to action and contemplation, it is contemplation above all that claims for itself the insight into truth. Therefore this threefold division is not contrary to the distinction by which all pursuit of wisdom is understood to consist in action and contemplation. But what Plato thought in or about each of these parts — that is, where he knew or believed the end of all actions, the cause of all natures, and the light of all reasonings to be — I think it would take long to explain by discussion, and I think it ought not to be rashly affirmed. For since he aims to keep the well-known habit of his master Socrates, whom he makes the speaker in his volumes, of concealing his knowledge or his opinion — because this habit pleased him too — it has come about that Plato's own opinions on great matters cannot easily be discerned. Yet from what is read in him, whether he said it himself or recorded and wrote it as said by others and seeming acceptable to him, some things must be mentioned by us and inserted into this work, either where he supports the true religion which our faith has taken up and defends, or where he seems opposed to it, as far as concerns this question of the one God and the many, for the sake of the life after death that is truly happy. For perhaps those who are praised with the greater fame for having understood and followed Plato more acutely and more truly — Plato who has been rightly and far preferred to the other philosophers of the nations — think something like this of God: that in him are found the cause of existing, the reason of understanding, and the order of living; of which three, the first is understood to pertain to the natural part, the second to the rational, the third to the moral. For if man was so created that through what is most excellent in him he may attain to what excels all things, that is, the one true and supremely good God, without whom no nature subsists, no teaching instructs, no practice profits — then let him be sought, in whom all things are secure for us; let him be seen, in whom all things are certain for us; let him be loved, in whom all things are right for us.

Chapter 5. That theology is to be discussed chiefly with the Platonists, to whose opinion the doctrines of all the other philosophers are to be subordinated.

If, then, Plato said that the wise man is an imitator, knower, and lover of this God, by participation in whom he is happy, what need is there to examine the others? None have come nearer to us than these. Let there yield to them, therefore, not only that fabulous theology which delights the minds of the impious with the crimes of the gods; and not only also that civil theology, in which impure demons, seducing under the name of gods peoples given over to earthly joys, wished to have human errors as their own divine honors, stirring up their worshippers with most unclean zeal to watch the plays of their crimes as if for their own worship, and exhibiting to themselves even more delightful plays from the spectators themselves (where, if anything apparently respectable is done in the temples, it is disgraced by its union with the obscenity of the theaters, and whatever shameful things are done in the theaters are praised in comparison with the foulness of the temples); and those things which Varro interpreted from these rites as though referring to heaven and earth and the seeds and acts of mortal things (for neither are these what those rites signify, which he tries to insinuate, and therefore the truth does not follow his attempt; and even if they were, still the things placed below the rational soul in the natural order would not be worshipped by it as its god, nor ought it to prefer to itself, as gods, the things to which the true God preferred it); and those things which Numa Pompilius, pertaining in truth to rites of that kind, took care to hide by burying them with himself, and which, when turned up by the plough, the senate ordered burned. (To this kind belong also — that we may think somewhat more mildly of Numa — the things which Alexander of Macedon writes to his mother were disclosed to him by a certain Leo, a great high priest of the Egyptian rites. There not only Picus and Faunus and Aeneas and Romulus, or even Hercules and Aesculapius and Liber the son of Semele and the Tyndarid brothers and any other mortals whom they hold as gods, but even the gods of the greater families themselves, whom Cicero in the Tusculans seems to touch on without naming them — Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta, and very many others whom Varro tries to transfer to the parts or elements of the world — are revealed to have been men. For he too, fearing, and as if asking about revealed mysteries, warns Alexander that when he has conveyed them in writing to his mother he should order them burned in the fire.) Let not only these things, then, which the two theologies, the fabulous and the civil, contain, yield to the Platonic philosophers, who said that the true God is the author of things, the illuminator of truth, and the bestower of happiness; but let the other philosophers too, who with minds given over to the body supposed the principles of nature to be bodily, yield to these great men, knowers of so great a God. Such are Thales with moisture, Anaximenes with air, the Stoics with fire, Epicurus with atoms, that is, the tiniest particles, which can be neither divided nor perceived, and any others, whom there is no need to dwell on by listing them, who said that bodies, whether simple or compound, whether lifeless or living, but still bodies, were the cause and principle of things. For some of them, like the Epicureans, believed that living things could be made from non-living things; others, that both living and non-living things are made from something living, but still bodies from a body. For the Stoics thought that fire, that is, one body of these four elements of which this visible world consists, was both living and wise and the maker of the world itself and of all things in it, and that this fire was altogether God. These and others like them could think only what their hearts, bound by the senses of the flesh, fabled with them. For they had within themselves what they did not see, and pictured to themselves inwardly what they had seen outside, even when they were not seeing it but only thinking of it. But what is before the gaze of such thinking is no longer a body but the likeness of a body; and that by which this likeness of a body is seen in the mind is neither a body nor the likeness of a body; and that by which it is seen, and judged whether it is beautiful or ugly, is certainly better than the thing judged. This is the mind of man and the nature of the rational soul, which is certainly not a body, if even that likeness of a body, when it is seen and judged in the mind of the thinker, is not itself a body. It is not, then, earth or water, air or fire, the four bodies called the four elements, of which we see the bodily world compacted. And if our mind is not a body, how is God, the creator of the mind, a body? Let these too, then, as has been said, yield to the Platonists; let those also yield who were indeed ashamed to say that God is a body, but thought that our minds are of the same nature as he is — so little did the great changeableness of the soul move them, which it is wicked to attribute to the nature of God. But they say: “The nature of the soul is changed by the body; for in itself it is unchangeable.” They might as well say: “The flesh is wounded by some body; for in itself it is invulnerable.” Plainly, what cannot be changed cannot be changed by anything; and therefore what can be changed by the body can be changed by something, and so cannot rightly be called unchangeable.

Chapter 6. On the view of the Platonists in that part of philosophy which is called physics.

These philosophers, then, whom we see not undeservedly preferred to the rest in fame and glory, saw that no body is God, and therefore they passed beyond all bodies in seeking God. They saw that whatever is changeable is not the supreme God, and therefore they passed beyond every soul and all changeable spirits in seeking the supreme God. Then they saw that every form in any changeable thing, by which it is whatever it is, in whatever way and of whatever nature it is, can exist only from him who truly is, because he is unchangeably. And so, whether the body of the whole world, its shapes, qualities, and ordered motion, and the elements arranged from heaven to earth and whatever bodies are in them; or all life, whether that which nourishes and holds together, such as is in trees, or that which has this and also feels, such as is in cattle, or that which has these and also understands, such as is in men, or that which needs no nourishing support but only holds together, feels, and understands, such as is in angels — all these can exist only from him who simply is. For to him it is not one thing to be and another to live, as though he could be without living; nor is it one thing to him to live and another to understand, as though he could live without understanding; nor is it one thing to him to understand and another to be happy, as though he could understand without being happy; but what is to him to live, to understand, to be happy, this is to him to be. Because of this unchangeableness and simplicity they understood that he made all these things and could himself be made by none. For they considered that whatever is, is either body or life, and that life is something better than body, and that the form of body is sensible, the form of life intelligible. Accordingly they preferred the intelligible form to the sensible. We call sensible those things that can be perceived by the sight and touch of the body; intelligible, those that can be understood by the gaze of the mind. For there is no bodily beauty, whether in the state of a body, like shape, or in its motion, like a melody, of which the mind does not judge. This it certainly could not do unless this form were in it in a better way, without the bulk of mass, without the noise of voice, without extension of place or time. But even there, unless it were changeable, one would not judge better than another of sensible form: the more gifted better than the slower, the more skilled better than the less skilled, the more practiced better than the less practiced, and the same one person, as he makes progress, certainly better later than before. But what admits of more and less is without doubt changeable. Hence gifted and learned men, practiced in these things, easily concluded that the first form is not in those things in which it is shown to be changeable. Since, then, in their sight both body and mind were more or less beautiful, and if they could lack all form they would be nothing at all, they saw that there is something in which the first form is unchangeable, and therefore beyond comparison; and there they most rightly believed the first principle of things to be, which was not made and from which all things were made. Thus what can be known of God he himself manifested to them, when his invisible things were understood and seen by them through the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity — he by whom also all visible and temporal things were created. Let this be said of that part which they call physics, that is, natural philosophy.

Chapter 7. How far the Platonists are to be held superior to the rest in logic, that is, rational philosophy.

As for the teaching with which the other part is concerned, which they call logic, that is, rational philosophy: far be it from us to think that those should be compared with them who placed the criterion of truth in the senses of the body and judged that everything that is learned must be measured by their untrustworthy and deceptive rules — such as the Epicureans and any others like them, and even the Stoics themselves. The Stoics, though they greatly loved the skill of arguing which they call dialectic, thought that it must be derived from the bodily senses, asserting that from them the mind conceives the notions which they call ennoiai, namely of the things they explain by defining them, and that from them the whole method of learning and teaching is propagated and connected. Here I am often much amazed, since they say that none are beautiful but the wise, by what bodily senses they saw that beauty, with what eyes of the flesh they beheld the form and grace of wisdom. But these whom we rightly place before the rest distinguished what is seen by the mind from what is reached by the senses, neither taking away from the senses what they can do nor giving them more than they can do. And they said that the light of minds for learning all things is that very God by whom all things were made.