§ 1. Although the wise man of this age, whose teaching in many matters approached very near to the truth, rightly said that “the human race has always deserved badly of God,” he himself thought badly and foolishly concerning God. Nevertheless, there are implanted in minds ἀντιλήψεις, preconceptions, and certain sparks of that great light which shone in the purity of primeval grace, flashing among clouds of the thickest darkness. These direct the mind besieged by its own darkness, and often enamored of its own ignorance, toward its end, or at least do not permit it to sleep idly and securely upon its vices and grow torpid in a heavy lethargy.
In these matters the world of the impious generally agrees with the best men, although afterward there is a great difference of judging and acting in the choice made. Sudden and great dangers strike religion into the faithful and turn them toward piety, prayer, and detestation of sins; they inflame superstition in the impious and drive them to atrocious crimes. The Ninevites and Bethulians fast and pray when destruction is before their eyes. But the king of the Moabites sacrifices his firstborn upon the walls and is delivered more miserably than he would have been conquered. Curtius casts himself down for the danger of the legions. The Romans bury a Greek man and Greek woman, a Gallic man and Gallic woman. The Carthaginians burn patrician boys of select beauty and character as a whole burnt offering to Satan.
All naturally perceive that some divine power—ἀποτρόπαιον—is fit and beneficent for averting calamities and diminishing evils; all trust that, by propitiating it, they shall possess it as an ally; all acknowledge that they and their affairs depend upon another. They err only in identifying it. “If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise over the fields,
if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if there is famine, if pestilence—the cry immediately is: ‘The Christians to the lion!’” Tertullian, Apology, chapter 40. Thus the most guilty cried out for innocent blood, either because they thought or pretended that Christians were the causes of every public disaster and every popular misfortune.
This, therefore, ought especially to strike our age’s secret apostates and perfidious dissemblers: among the impieties of the gentiles, their atheism was exceedingly rare. I am not unaware that very many things are excellently said by them, yet true things are mingled with errors and falsehoods, as in Plato, Laws, Book IV: “Ὡς θεὸς μὲν πάντα, καὶ μετὰ θεὸν τύχη, καὶ καιρός τ᾽ ἀνθρώπινα διακυβερνῶσι ξύμπαντα.” “God, and with God fortune and occasion, govern all things.”
Why does he thrust upon God fortune—which is nothing, or, if it is anything, is rash, blind, and subject to God—συμβασιλεύουσαν, and add it, as it were? Why does he thrust upon him καιρόν, occasion, as a partner in his kingdom, when every opportunity is from God? Nevertheless, even the authority of those who err ought to prevail against our pseudo-statesmen when they speak true things, because their understanding is not so far removed from the truth that all but the very few wandered into such great impiety.
Tertullian certainly teaches in the Apology that the Platonists located God within the world and seated him within that which he governs after the example of a shipmaster. Nor did the great admirer of Plato—who is as a certain god to Cicero—himself depart from Plato. For thus he speaks in Book I of On the Nature of the Gods: “There is some God within the world who governs it.” The same man, in On the Laws: “There is no nation so savage or so iron-hearted that, even if it is ignorant what sort of God it ought to have, it nevertheless does not know that it ought to have one.” And in Book II he demonstrates “that the world and all its parts were constituted by the providence of God from the beginning, are administered at every time, and that provision is made by God for individual things.”
§ 2. He received these things from Plato, Laws, Book I, where Plato asserts that a commonwealth cannot be governed without the assistance of the divine power. For just as beasts and living creatures devoid of reason cannot take care of themselves or govern themselves by themselves, but require the command of a human being to govern them, so human beings cannot be led to happiness unless God himself governs and leads them by the hand. It is assuredly so, for our acts of providence are timid and uncertain.
§ 3. Aristotle himself, Metaphysics, Book XI, chapter 10, teaches that there is one God, the administrator of all things. And in On the World: “What a pilot is in a ship, a driver in a chariot, a precentor in a chorus, a law in a city, and finally a commander in an army—this God is in the world.” Altogether true: “Ἐστὶν γὰρ ἡ πρόνοια ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ, καὶ πανταχῇ.” Divine providence is discerned in private and public affairs, everywhere among the nations.
Philo appears to have borrowed this from Aristotle: “It must be believed that, just as a charioteer stands over a chariot or a pilot over a ship, so in all affairs there stands over them the one who presides over bodies, souls, living creatures, minds, angels, and all natures contained by earth, air, or heaven, both visible and invisible. For he governs the whole world as it depends upon himself.”
Seneca says most rightly in On Providence, chapter 1: “For who would believe that so great a work stands without a guardian, and that this course and recourse of the stars are chance impulses?” Indeed, even those who perish are a care to him: “μέλει μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ—they are a care to God, although they perish.” Plato in the Epinomis asserts that the gods care for great and small things, and that things which happen suddenly are not unforeseen by them. For an eclipse is produced by a sudden obscuration of the light and yet many centuries beforehand is marked out for a certain hour and moment of the hour.
§ 4. Beautiful and plainly royal is the speech which Cambyses delivered to his son when he was about to depart among the Medes: “I commend this one thing above all, and I desire it to be stored in your memory as a precious treasure given by your father. Be a friend to God and pious toward him, and undertake nothing unless the divine power has been invoked. For the nature of mortals is weak and dull; but nothing escapes the wisdom of God, and all things fall according to the desire of those to whom it is present.”
He himself, unmoved and always like himself, moves all these things, and principally moves them through his deputies. Lipsius excellently expounded this in the preface to his book On the Roman Military: “Just as in the world above there is one God who governs and regulates this entire structure, so upon earth he has appointed certain men as his administrators and deputies, to guard and administer it in its parts. He has willed that certain of these grow into great resources, forces, and works. What else does he do but show in an image that heavenly power, without end and measure, which he himself possesses and channels through those streams and conduits? Therefore, just as when we gaze upon the heaven and those flashing stars we are led from them to a certain pure, first, and inaccessible light, so from this human greatness we are led to its author and fountain, God.”
And Seneca: “God is near; he is with you; he is within you. Thus I say, Lucilius: a sacred Spirit sits within us, observer and guardian of our good and evil deeds.”
§ 5. Distinguished indeed is the preamble of the Locrian laws enacted by Zaleucus—if only it spoke about one God—which Stobaeus reports in Discourse 42: “All who inhabit the world or a region ought to be persuaded that gods exist, because this becomes manifest from an inspection of heaven and the entire world and from the most beautiful disposition and order of the things within them.” “For providence is the maker and governor of all matter,” says Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Book III—“of all things, for not only of great things but also of the smallest.”
§ 6. Epictetus transmitted to us the distinction among human beings emerging from error and darkness toward the light of truth: “As regards the gods, there are those who deny that any divine power exists. There are those who grant that one exists but say that it is inactive, careless, and provides for nothing. There are third men who say that it both exists and provides, but only for great and heavenly things and for none of the earthly. Fourth men say that it provides for both heavenly and earthly things, but only universally, not for individuals and each one separately. But the fifth, in whose party are Ulysses and Socrates, assert and establish this: ‘O God, I DO NOT LIE HIDDEN FROM OR DECEIVE YOU EVEN IN MY SMALLEST MOVEMENT.’”
Accordingly, Cicero in Book IV of the Academica neither justly nor truly blames the Stoics because they bring down God’s majesty to the perfection of bees and ants. For God does not make these things while solicitous, anxious, and busied, or drawn away from greater affairs, but without labor or care and, as Clement of Alexandria says, “οὐ μεριζόμενος, οὐκ ἀποτεμνόμενος, οὐ μεταβαίνων ἐκ τόπου εἰς τόπον, πάντῃ δὲ ὢν πάντοτε, καὶ μηδαμῇ περιεχόμενος, ὅλος νοῦς, ὅλος φῶς, ὅλος ὀφθαλμός, πάντα ὁρῶν, πάντα ἀκούων, πάντα εἰδώς”—“not divided, not cut apart, not passing from place to place, but existing everywhere always and circumscribed nowhere; wholly mind, wholly light, wholly eye; seeing all things, hearing all things, knowing all things.”
He who acknowledges him and conducts all things in his sight can readily give good counsels and expect that the great παντοκράτωρ, the “Almighty,” will confirm them and grant success.