On Christian Doctrine 2.15–2.27

Among the translations themselves, let the Itala be preferred to the others; for it keeps more closely to the words while being clear in meaning. And for correcting any Latin versions, let the Greek be used, among which the authority of the Seventy translators is preeminent as far as the Old Testament is concerned. These are now said, throughout all the more learned churches, to have translated with such a presence of the Holy Spirit that so many men had one mouth. If, as is reported and as many not unworthy of belief declare, they translated each separated in a separate cell, and nothing was found in anyone's manuscript that was not found in the same words and the same order of words in the others, who would dare to compare anything with this authority, let alone prefer it? And if they conferred so that one voice came out of the common discussion and judgment of all, not even so is it right or fitting for any one man, however skilled, to aspire to correct the agreement of so many elders and learned men. Therefore, even if something is found in the Hebrew copies different from what they set down, I think we must yield to the divine dispensation that was carried out through them, so that the books which the Jewish nation was unwilling to hand over to other peoples, whether from religious scruple or from jealousy, were handed over so long beforehand, by the power of King Ptolemy as its servant, to the nations who were to believe through the Lord. So it may be that they translated in the way that the Holy Spirit, who was guiding them and had given them all one mouth, judged fitting for the nations. Yet, as I said above, comparison with those translators also who kept more closely to the words is not useless for often explaining the meaning. The Latin manuscripts of the Old Testament, then, as I had begun to say, are to be corrected, if necessary, by the authority of the Greek, and above all of those who, though they were seventy, are reported to have translated with one mouth. As for the books of the New Testament, if anything wavers among the Latin variants, there is no doubt that they must yield to the Greek, and especially to those found among the more learned and careful churches.

With figurative signs, if any unknown ones force the reader to halt, they are to be investigated partly by knowledge of languages and partly by knowledge of things. For the pool of Siloam, where the man whose eyes the Lord had anointed with clay made from spittle was told to wash his face, has some force as a comparison and without doubt conveys something hidden; yet so great a meaning would have stayed hidden, since the name belongs to an unknown language, if the Evangelist had not translated it. So too there is no doubt that many Hebrew names which the authors of those books did not translate have no small force and help for solving the enigmas of the Scriptures, if anyone can translate them. Some men skilled in that language have conferred no small benefit on posterity by translating all these words separately from the Scriptures: what Adam means, what Eve, what Abraham, what Moses; or the names of places, what Jerusalem means, or Zion, or Jericho, or Sinai, or Lebanon, or Jordan, or any other names in that language unknown to us. When these are opened up and translated, many figurative expressions in the Scriptures become clear.

Ignorance of things, on the other hand, makes figurative expressions obscure when we do not know the natures of animals, or stones, or plants, or other things which are often put in the Scriptures for the sake of some comparison. For what is known about the serpent, that it offers its whole body to those who strike it in place of its head, how much light it throws on the saying in which the Lord bids us be wise as serpents; namely, that for our head, which is Christ, we should rather offer our body to persecutors, lest the Christian faith be killed in us, as it were, if to spare the body we deny God! Or that which is said of it, that, squeezing through the narrows of a hole, it lays aside its old skin and gains new strength: how well it fits with imitating that very wisdom of the serpent, and putting off the old man, as the Apostle says, to put on the new; and putting it off through narrow places, as the Lord says, “Enter by the narrow gate”! As, then, knowledge of the nature of the serpent throws light on many comparisons which Scripture habitually draws from this animal, so ignorance of some animals, which it mentions no less in comparisons, greatly hinders one who seeks to understand. So with stones, so with plants or whatever is held by roots. For knowledge of the carbuncle, that it shines in the dark, also throws light on many obscure places in the books wherever it is put for comparison; and ignorance of the beryl or the diamond often shuts the doors of understanding. Nor is it easy for any other reason to understand that perpetual peace is signified by the olive twig which the dove brought back when it returned to the ark, except that we know both that the gentle touch of oil is not easily spoiled by a foreign liquid and that the tree itself is evergreen. And many, through ignorance of hyssop, not knowing what power it has, whether to cleanse the lungs or, as is said, to penetrate rocks with its roots, though it is a small and lowly plant, cannot find at all why it is said, “You will sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.”

Ignorance of numbers too causes many things put figuratively and mystically in the Scriptures not to be understood. A mind that is, so to speak, of good breeding cannot fail to be moved to ask what it means that Moses, Elijah, and the Lord himself fasted forty days. The figurative knot of this action is not untied except by knowing and considering this number. For it contains ten four times, as the knowledge of all things woven into times. For both the daily and the yearly courses are completed in the number four: the daily by the morning, midday, evening, and night hours; the yearly by the spring, summer, autumn, and winter months. And while we live in times, we must abstain and fast from delight in times for the sake of eternity, in which we wish to live; although by the very courses of time the teaching of despising times and seeking eternal things is conveyed to us. Further, the number ten signifies the knowledge of the Creator and the creature: for the Trinity belongs to the Creator, while the number seven indicates the creature, because of life and body. For in life there are three, which is why God is to be loved with all the heart, all the soul, all the mind; and in the body the four elements of which it consists appear very plainly. In this ten, then, when it is conveyed to us in time, that is, multiplied by four, we are admonished to live chastely and continently, apart from delight in times, that is, to fast forty days. This the Law, whose person is in Moses, admonishes; this Prophecy, whose person Elijah bears; this the Lord himself admonishes, who, as if having the testimony of the Law and the Prophets, shone forth between them on the mountain while three disciples watched in amazement. Then it is asked how the number fifty arises from the number forty, which is hallowed in no ordinary way in our religion because of Pentecost; and how, multiplied by three because of the three times, before the Law, under the Law, and under grace, or because of the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, with the Trinity itself added more eminently, it is referred to the mystery of the most purified Church, and arrives at the hundred and fifty-three fish which the nets, cast on the right side after the Lord's resurrection, caught. So in many other forms of numbers certain secrets of comparisons are set in the holy books which are closed to readers through ignorance of numbers.

Ignorance of some matters of music also closes and veils not a few things. For someone has not unaptly disclosed some figures of things from the difference between the psaltery and the lyre; and it is not unfittingly asked among the learned whether the psaltery of ten strings has some musical law that requires so many strings; or whether, if it has none, the number itself should be taken all the more as sacred, either because of the Decalogue of the Law (and if this number in turn is asked about, it is to be referred only to the Creator and the creature) or because of the number ten itself expounded above. And that number of the building of the temple which is mentioned in the Gospel, namely forty-six years, has a certain musical sound; and, referred to the structure of the Lord's body, for the sake of which the temple was mentioned, it compels some heretics to confess that the Son of God was clothed not with a false but with a true and human body. And indeed we find both number and music placed with honor in many places in the holy Scriptures.

For we must not listen to the errors of pagan superstition, which pretended that the nine Muses were daughters of Jupiter and Memory. Varro refutes them, and I do not know whether anyone among them could be more learned or more inquisitive in such matters. For he says that a certain city (I do not remember its name) contracted with three artists for three statues each of the Muses, to place as a gift in the temple of Apollo, so that whichever artist made the more beautiful ones, it would choose and buy his above all. And it happened that those artists produced their works equally beautiful, and the city liked all nine, and all were bought to be dedicated in the temple of Apollo; and afterwards, he says, the poet Hesiod gave them their names. So Jupiter did not beget nine Muses, but three craftsmen created three each. And the city had contracted for three not because it had seen them in dreams, or because that many had shown themselves to the eyes of any of its citizens, but because it was easy to notice that all sound, which is the material of songs, is by nature threefold. For it is produced either by the voice, as with those who sing with their throats without an instrument; or by breath, as with trumpets and flutes; or by striking, as with lyres and drums and any other instruments that are made to sound by being struck.

But whether what Varro reported is so or not, we ought not to flee music because of the superstition of the profane, if we can snatch from it anything useful for understanding the holy Scriptures; nor are we turning to their theatrical trifles if we discuss something about lyres and instruments that helps in grasping spiritual things. For we ought not to have refused to learn letters because they say Mercury was their inventor; nor, because they dedicated temples to Justice and Virtue and preferred to worship in stones what ought to be carried in the heart, must we on that account flee justice and virtue. No, rather, let every good and true Christian understand that truth belongs to his Lord wherever he finds it; and confessing and acknowledging it, let him reject superstitious fictions even in sacred writings, and let him grieve over and beware of those who, “knowing God, did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; for professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of serpents.”

But to explain this whole topic more carefully, for it is very necessary: there are two kinds of learning practiced even in pagan society. One concerns things which human beings have instituted; the other, things which they have observed as already accomplished or instituted by God. That which is according to human institutions is partly superstitious and partly not.

Whatever has been instituted by human beings for making and worshiping idols is superstitious; or for worshiping as God a creature or any part of a creature; or for consultations and certain agreements about signs arranged and covenanted with demons, such as the undertakings of the magic arts, which the poets are accustomed to mention rather than teach. Of this kind, though with a more licentious vanity, are the books of soothsayers and augurs. To this kind belong also all amulets and cures, which even the science of physicians condemns, whether in incantations or in certain marks which they call characters, or in things to be hung up and tied on, or even fitted on in some way, not for tempering the body but for certain significations, either hidden or even open; which they call by the milder name of physical remedies, so that they may seem not to entangle in superstition but to do good by nature: such as earrings on the top of each ear, or rings of ostrich bone on the fingers, or when you are told, when you have hiccups, to hold your left thumb with your right hand.

To these are added thousands of the emptiest observances: if a limb twitches; if, when friends are walking side by side, a stone, or a dog, or a boy comes between them. And treading on the stone as the divider of friendship is less offensive than striking an innocent boy with the fist if he runs between people walking together. But it is pleasant that boys are sometimes avenged by dogs; for some are often so superstitious that they dare to strike even a dog that comes between them, not with impunity; for from a vain remedy the dog sometimes quickly sends its striker to a real physician. From the same source come these: to tread on the threshold when one passes in front of one's house; to go back to bed if anyone sneezes while putting on his shoes; to go back home if one stumbles on setting out; when clothing is gnawed by mice, to tremble more at the suspicion of a future evil than to grieve over the present loss. Hence that elegant saying of Cato, who, when consulted by someone who said that mice had gnawed his boots, answered that this was not a portent, but that it would truly have been a portent if the mice had been gnawed by the boots.

Nor are those to be separated from this kind of pernicious superstition who are called genethliaci because of their study of birthdays, but are now commonly called mathematici. For even if they seek out, and sometimes even trace, the true position of the stars when someone is born, still in trying to predict from it either our actions or the outcomes of our actions they err greatly and sell to ignorant people a miserable slavery. For anyone who enters free into the presence of such an astrologer gives money so as to come out the slave of Mars or of Venus, or rather of all the stars; on which those who first went astray, and passed their error on to posterity, imposed names either of beasts, because of likeness, or of human beings, to honor those very human beings. Nor is this surprising, since even in nearer and more recent times they tried to dedicate the star we call Lucifer to the honor and name of Caesar. And perhaps it would have been done and passed into antiquity, had not his ancestress Venus already taken possession of this estate of a name; nor could she by any right transfer to her heirs what she had never possessed while alive or sought to possess. For where the place was vacant and not held in honor of any of the earlier dead, there happened what usually happens in such matters. For instead of the months Quintilis and Sextilis we say July and August, named in honor of the men Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar; so that anyone who wishes can easily understand that those stars too wandered in the sky before without these names; but when those men died whose memory people were either compelled by royal power or pleased by human vanity to honor, by giving their names to the stars they seemed to themselves to raise those dead men to heaven. But whatever they are called by human beings, they are stars, which God established and ordered as he willed; and their motion is fixed, by which the seasons are distinguished and varied. To note how this motion stands when anyone is born is easy, through the rules discovered and written down by those whom holy Scripture condemns, saying, “For if they were able to know so much that they could estimate the world, how did they not more easily find its Lord?”

But to wish to predict from that observation the characters, actions, and fortunes of those being born is a great error and great madness. And among those who have learned such things only to unlearn them, this superstition is refuted without any doubt. For what they call constellations are a notation of the stars as they stood when the person was born about whom these wretches are consulted by those more wretched. Now it can happen that some twins come out of the womb so closely one after the other that no interval of time between them can be grasped and recorded in the numbers of the constellations. Hence it must be that some twins have the same constellations, though they do not have equal fortunes in what they do or suffer, but often so unequal that one lives most happily and the other most unhappily: as we have learned that Esau and Jacob were born twins, so that Jacob, who was born second, was found holding with his hand the heel of his brother who came first. Certainly the day and hour of their birth could not be noted otherwise than so that the constellation of both was one; but how great a difference there was between their characters, deeds, labors, and successes, Scripture is witness, now spread abroad in the mouths of all nations. Nor is it to the point that they say that the very least and narrowest moment of time which separates the birth of twins has great force in nature and in the most rapid speed of the heavenly bodies. For even if I grant that it has very great force, it cannot be found by the astrologer in the constellations, by examining which he professes to tell fates. So what he does not find in the constellations, which he must examine as one and the same whether he is consulted about Jacob or about his brother, what does it profit him if there is a difference in the sky, which he rashly and confidently slanders, and no difference on the chart, which he anxiously and in vain examines? Therefore these opinions too, based on certain signs of things instituted by human presumption, are to be referred to those same agreements and covenants, as it were, with demons.

For from this it comes about that by a certain hidden judgment of God, people who desire evil things are handed over to be mocked and deceived as the merits of their wills deserve, mocked and deceived by the fallen angels, to whom this lowest part of the world is subject by the law of divine providence, according to the most beautiful order of things. Through these mockeries and deceptions it happens that by these superstitious and pernicious kinds of divination many things past and future are told and turn out no differently than they are told; and many things happen to observers according to their observations, so that, entangled in them, they become more curious and involve themselves more and more in the manifold snares of a most pernicious error. Divine Scripture has wholesomely not kept silent about this kind of fornication of the soul; nor has it deterred the soul from it by denying that such things should be followed because what their professors say is false, but it says, “Even if they tell you, and it comes to pass, do not believe them.” For it is not because the image of the dead Samuel foretold true things to King Saul that such sacrileges, by which that image was presented, are any less to be abhorred; or because in the Acts of the Apostles a woman with a spirit of divination bore true witness to the apostles of the Lord, did the apostle Paul therefore spare that spirit, and not rather cleanse the woman by rebuking and casting out that demon.

All arts of this kind, then, whether of trifling or of harmful superstition, established out of a certain pestilent fellowship of human beings and demons, like covenants of an unfaithful and deceitful friendship, are to be utterly rejected and shunned by a Christian. “Not that an idol is anything,” says the Apostle, “but that what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become partners with demons.” What the Apostle said about idols and the sacrifices offered in their honor must be held about all imaginary signs which draw people either to the worship of idols, or to worship a creature or its parts as God, or which belong to the concern with cures and other observances; which have not been established by God publicly, as it were, for the love of God and neighbor, but scatter the hearts of the wretched through private desires for temporal things. In all these kinds of learning, then, fellowship with demons is to be feared and avoided, who with their prince the devil try nothing but to shut and bar our return. And just as human and deceptive conjectures have been instituted by human beings about the stars which God created and ordered, so too about things that are born or in any way come about by the administration of divine providence, many people have committed many things to writing from human guesses, as if conjectured by rule, if they happen unusually: as if a mule gives birth, or something is struck by lightning.

All these things have force only so far as they have been covenanted with demons by the presumption of minds, as through a kind of common language. Yet they are all full of pestilent curiosity, tormenting anxiety, and deadly slavery. For they were not noticed because they had force, but by noticing and marking them it came about that they had force. And so they turn out differently for different people according to their thoughts and presumptions. For those spirits who wish to deceive procure for each person such things as they see him entangled in through his suspicions and assent. For just as, for example, the single shape of the letter X, which is marked crosswise, has one value among the Greeks and another among the Latins, not by nature but by agreement and consent to signify; and so one who knows both languages, if he wishes to signify something in writing to a Greek, does not put this letter in the meaning in which he puts it when he writes to a Latin; and beta, with one and the same sound, is the name of a letter among the Greeks and of a vegetable among the Latins; and when I say lege, a Greek understands one thing by these two syllables and a Latin another: just as, then, all these significations move minds according to the agreement of each society, and move them differently because the agreement is different; and people did not agree on them because they already had force to signify, but they have force because people agreed on them: so too those signs by which the pernicious fellowship of demons is obtained have force according to each person's observances. This is shown most plainly by the rite of the augurs, who both before they observe and after they have taken note of the observed signs take care not to see the flight or hear the cries of birds; because none of these are signs unless the consent of the observer is added.

When these have been cut off and rooted out of the Christian mind, we must next consider the human institutions that are not superstitious, that is, instituted not with demons but with human beings themselves. For all things that have force among human beings because it has pleased them that they should have force are human institutions; of these, some are superfluous and luxurious institutions, others convenient and necessary. For if the signs which actors make in dancing had force by nature and not by the institution and agreement of human beings, then in former times, when a pantomime danced, a herald would not have announced to the people of Carthage what the dancer meant to be understood. Many old men still remember this, from whose report we often hear of it. And it is to be believed, because even now, if anyone unacquainted with such trifles enters the theater, unless someone else tells him what those movements signify, he gives his whole attention in vain. Yet all aim at a certain likeness in signifying, so that the signs themselves, as far as they can, are like the things signified. But because something can be like something else in many ways, such signs are not fixed among human beings unless agreement is added.

But in pictures and statues, and other imitative works of this kind, especially those of skilled artists, no one who sees the likenesses fails to recognize what things they are like. And this whole kind is to be counted among the superfluous institutions of human beings, except when it matters which of them is made, for what reason, where, when, and by whose authority. Finally, the thousands of invented fables and falsehoods in whose lies people delight are human institutions. And nothing is to be thought more properly human, as having from themselves, than whatever is false and lying. But convenient and necessary institutions of human beings with human beings are whatever differences in dress and adornment of the body it has been agreed should distinguish sexes or ranks; and innumerable kinds of signification without which human society cannot be carried on at all, or less conveniently; and the weights and measures, and stamps and values of coins, that are proper to each city and people; and other things of this kind, which, if they were not human institutions, would not vary among different peoples, nor be changed within single peoples at the will of their rulers. But this whole part of human institutions, which serves the necessary use of life, is by no means to be shunned by a Christian; rather, it should be attended to as far as is sufficient and kept in memory.

For some human institutions are, as it were, sketches somewhat resembling natural things. Of these, those which belong, as has been said, to fellowship with demons are to be utterly rejected and abhorred; but those which human beings have with human beings are to be adopted, insofar as they are not luxurious and superfluous; and especially the shapes of letters, without which we cannot read, and the variety of languages as far as is sufficient, which we discussed above. Of this kind also are the shorthand signs, those who have learned which are now properly called notaries. These things are useful, are not learned unlawfully, do not entangle in superstition, and do not enervate with luxury, if they occupy us only so far as not to be a hindrance to the greater things they ought to serve in obtaining.

Now those things which human beings have made known not by instituting them but by investigating them, whether they happened in time or were instituted by God, are not to be considered human institutions wherever they are learned. Of these, some belong to the bodily senses, others to the reason of the mind. Those that are reached by the bodily senses we either believe when they are narrated, or perceive when they are demonstrated, or infer when we have experienced them.