§ 1. Until now I have brought forward the testimonies of others. I shall now confront atheists, Epicureans, and followers of Diagoras in their own home and pursue their conscience until I extort either a confession of truth or assent.
I prefer to introduce the first argument in the words of an excellent philosopher rather than my own. Seneca, On Providence:
It is superfluous at present to show that so great a work does not stand without some guardian; that this fixed coursing of the stars is not the product of chance impulses; that things which chance sets in motion are often disturbed and quickly collide, whereas this unobstructed velocity proceeds at the command of an eternal law, carrying so many things by land and sea and so many exceedingly bright lights shining according to their appointed arrangement; that this order does not belong to wandering matter; and that things which came together rashly would not hang with such great art that the earth’s exceedingly heavy weight should sit unmoved and watch the flight of the heaven hastening around it; that the seas poured into the valleys should soften the lands and perceive no increase from the rivers; and that immense things should be born from the smallest seeds.
Not even those things which appear confused and uncertain—I mean rains and clouds, the blows of crashing thunderbolts, fires poured out when the summits of mountains are broken, tremors of the quaking ground, and the other things which the tumultuous part of nature sets in motion around the earth—occur without reason, although they are sudden. They too possess their own causes no less than things which, seen in foreign places, are marvels, such as warm waters amid the waves and new expanses of islands springing up in the vast sea.
Now, if anyone observes shores laid bare when the sea withdraws into itself and covered again within a short time, he will believe that by some blind rolling the waves are now contracted and driven inward, now break forth and return to their station at a great course; although meanwhile they increase by portions and approach greater or smaller at their appointed hour and day, according as the lunar star has drawn them forth, at whose discretion the ocean overflows.
What cause shall we assign to all changes unless they begin from some one thing and tend altogether toward one end? The stars and their spheres are swept along at a most rapid speed which we can attain by no understanding; yet by that motion they receive no good proper to themselves, but minister to the lower world and to human beings—not by their own will or knowledge, but by the force and decree of a certain supreme intelligence and power.
§ 2. The metaphysicians and theologians explain another argument to us. For the whole universe and the aggregate of all the things within it cannot be from itself, nor did individual things create themselves by their own power; rather, they began to exist from another, and therefore are preserved and directed toward their end by another. The actions and concurrence of so many causes are needed for the particular production, preservation, and increase of things. How, therefore, could they exist from themselves? Or how could they fail if they exist from themselves—that is, through their own essence? That which is from itself does not need another’s assistance in order to continue to exist. If, therefore, all things have their origins from another—that is, from God—it is necessary that they exist, be preserved, ruled, and governed by God. No one can deny this right to a δημιουργῷ—to a craftsman—over his own works. That things are not from chance I have already taught by the first argument.
§ 3. If kingdoms are not administered by divine power and providence, they cannot even be ruled in this way. For if God exists, he necessarily exists, and the stability and vicissitude of all human affairs depend upon his nod. If God does not exist, he necessarily does not exist; for God’s coming into being belongs among those things which cannot occur.
Since, therefore, nature has given a certain general conception of God, implanted in everyone—for every soul is naturally Christian and, when adversities press or dangers threaten, invokes God and expects help from God—that sense born within every soul and implanted by nature is not so deceived that it pursues ἀδύνατα, things which cannot exist in the nature of things. For if God does not exist, nothing so foreign to reason, so absurd to thought, and so contradictory can be imagined as that God exists. But an opinion that so entangles and overturns itself cannot be natural to everyone.
The most wicked human beings furnish proof. When they see Nemesis and the approaching company of deserved punishments, they understand that such great evils are being prepared for them by God. See the noble Antiochus, now too late displaying a shadow of piety through servile fear. Hear the tyrant of the Romans complaining that he is daily destroyed by the gods, even worse than he feels. See another fleeing every peal of thunder and terrified at every flash of lightning, badly sheltering himself beneath underground vaults and a sealskin.
Why, therefore, can there not be some mind, mistress of all things, uncreated and creative, when the mind of the impious disputes so acutely against its own maker? From where do you possess that force by which you comprehend hidden things, store them in memory, and gather one thing after another by reasoning? No one will pronounce that a mind so capacious, so noble, penetrating all things by understanding, desiring some things and most freely rejecting others, has its origin from anything other than a certain most excellent mind and intelligence. For how will a brutish thing devoid of reason be able to produce and order such great skill in understanding and perceiving and such swift movements of desire?
§ 4. Our most learned Lessius, in On Providence, argument 12, teaches that very many absurdities follow if we deny that God exists. These are his words:
If there is no divine power and no providence by which human affairs are governed, many absurdities assuredly follow, foreign to every reason and sound judgment, which clearly prove that this can in no way be established.
For first it follows that the first and supreme truth concerning divine power and providence opens the door to mortals for every impurity of life, every iniquity and injustice, every pride, arrogance, and tyranny, and finally for perfidy, perjuries, sacrileges, and every class of crimes. For nothing is so monstrous, unjust, or impious that, when fear of the divine power has been removed, the human mind will not dare to undertake and accomplish it, according to that saying of the Psalmist: “The fool has said in his heart: There is no God. They are corrupted and have become abominable in their iniquities,” and so forth. Behold the fruit of that teaching and persuasion: the foulness and abominable enormity of every crime.
That this follows is manifest. For just as, if there is some divine power, the first and supreme truth is that there is a God who governs the world, so, if there is no divine power, the first and supreme truth will be that there is no God who governs the world. For it will be the truth concerning that which is apprehended by all as the supreme and first principle of all things. But this truth will extinguish in human minds every fear and reverence of the divine power; and when fear has been removed, the way lies open to every crime. But what more absurd thing can be said or thought than that the first and highest truth and the greatest secret of divinity, when known or apprehended by human beings, should open the way to every wickedness and shameful deed and make them the most criminal and impure?
Secondly, it follows that that which is false and impossible and a mere chimera is the cause of all religion, piety, justice, temperance, modesty, benevolence, patience, and finally of every virtue and moral goodness—as well as of peace and tranquility in the commonwealth and every good in the human race. For persuasion concerning the divine power, and love and fear of it, produce all these goods; and the greater and more vehement these have been, the greater the goods that arise from them in human minds and in the political condition. Hence there has never existed a well-constituted commonwealth in which religion and persuasion concerning the providence of the divine power did not flourish; and privately, the more reverent and religious each person was toward the divine power, the more distinguished he was in probity and innocence of life. On the contrary, the less anyone esteemed the divine power, the more criminal he was, as is evident from both profane and sacred history.
But to what madness does it belong to believe that a false and impossible fiction possesses such great force toward every virtue, while solid truth possesses such great enticement toward every shameful deed and destruction?
Thirdly, it follows that true and highest wisdom extinguishes every virtue and makes human beings the worst, whereas the highest error and madness arouses them toward every virtue and makes them the best. For if there is no divine power, it is the highest error and madness to believe certainly that there is a divine power and providence, while it is the highest wisdom to believe that these are nothing except human fictions and chimeras. Likewise it follows that truth and wisdom are exceedingly pernicious to a human being and the commonwealth, but error exceedingly salutary; that truth and wisdom must be concealed as much as possible, as the poison of minds and every commonwealth, but error promoted by every means, as the fountain of every good; that the highest light of the intellect brings the greatest darkness upon minds, and the greatest intellectual darkness produces the light and beauty of minds. All these things are full of frenzy and madness.
Fourthly, it follows that all those who were ever most distinguished for wisdom, holiness of life, miracles, and the prophetic spirit were deceived in the greatest matter and were unable to attain the truth concerning the nature of the divine power. For all these men acknowledged and supremely venerated divinity and providence. But those who were infamous for impiety, foulness of life, and every enormity of crimes alone grasped this secret, for all who despised the divine power were such men. The worst of all mortals, therefore, were the wisest, but the best of all were the most foolish and enveloped in the greatest darkness of ignorance and errors.
Fifthly, it follows that to love God, fear vengeance, offer sacrifices, pray to the divine power, celebrate it with hymns and praises, and keep an oath are not good things, but empty, foolish, impious things contrary to right reason, no differently than loving, fearing, worshiping, and praising a chimera or another fiction of the human mind. For if divinity is a fiction like a chimera, it is manifest that no more should be rendered to it than to a chimera.
Sixthly, it follows that to be impious, sacrilegious, blasphemous, and a despiser of the divine power is not evil or contrary to right reason, but that these things are good and worthy of praise, since they are consonant with true teaching about the divine power. For if there is no divine power, all those acts by which it is despised and afflicted with ignominy are good: both because they are certain declarations of a secret truth and because they are effective for removing from human beings a false persuasion concerning providence and the divine power—just as insults against the idols of the gentiles are praiseworthy because by them we testify that no divinity inheres in the idols. Nothing is more contemptible than that which neither exists nor can exist.
Seventhly, it follows that the world is like a ship tossed upon the sea, destitute of helm and helmsman; likewise, like the greatest commonwealth composed of every class of human beings, in which there are no laws, no judge, no ruler, and no guardian of tranquility and the public good. If it is so, how can the world continue to exist, especially since it consists of things so unlike, contrary, and contending? For just as a ship without a pilot is tossed here and there by chance impulses until it is dashed upon rocks, strikes shoals, or is swallowed by the waves, and as a commonwealth without a ruler consumes itself with slaughters and seditions, so the world will necessarily be borne along in the most disordered manner and dissolved by the conflict of contraries if there is no ruler who directs it and causes contending things to conspire in concord.
Eighthly, it follows that this universe and the formation and arrangement of its parts arose by chance and coalesced into this form and appearance. For if there is no mind that formed its individual parts and arranged and composed them into this structure which we see, it must necessarily be confessed that the whole happened by chance, according to the opinion of Democritus, who established that all things were formed from the chance impulse and concurrence of atoms. But what else is this than sheer folly and want of reason? Someone sees a most splendid palace perfected with the highest art, whose structure all architects marvel at. He asks what craftsman constructed it. He is answered that it was constructed by no craftsman, but that once a mountain planted with trees existed in the same place; when it collapsed through an earthquake, its parts leapt apart, and by this fall and collision the individual parts were so formed that they suddenly coalesced, in place of a shapeless heap, into this appearance of a substructure and the form of a palace. Who will be so witless as to believe this?
These and many other things manifestly follow when that principle has been established. Everyone sees how foreign all of them are to every appearance of truth, how opposed to the light of reason, and how horrible to utter. Therefore that principle too, which is the fountain of such streams, must be most foreign to truth.
Someone will say that false persuasion in religions often possesses the greatest force for deterring human minds from crimes and impelling them toward probity and justice. For the gentiles, who established several gods according to the multitude and diversity of human affairs and thought that human affairs were conducted by their providence and that rewards or punishments were decreed for mortals according to their merits—although all these things were false and impossible—nevertheless, from this conception of mind, abstained from many injuries and crimes by which they believed those divine powers were offended, lest they incur their wrath and pay penalties either in this life or in the future. Accordingly, the argument which we brought forward above in the second place, number 141, could appear to someone by no means firm.
I answer: the persuasion of the gentiles was indeed false in particular—insofar as they thought that these or those beings were divine powers and cared for human affairs—but not in general, insofar as they thought that there was some divine power to which human affairs were a care and which required an account of deeds. Hence, when either through fear of offending the divine power or through desire to please it they abstained from evil or did some good, they were impelled not by the force of the persuasion insofar as it was false concerning such a particular divine power, but insofar as it was true in general. For they erred only in the subject to which they attributed the nature of divinity and providence, attributing it to those to whom it ought by no means to have been attributed and venerating it in them. Accordingly, they did not abolish the very formal nature of divinity and providence, but established it; and therefore they retained in some manner the true foundation of political justice.
But if there is no divine power and no providence, the very foundation in general is altogether false and fictitious, and therefore it cannot happen that it should possess any force toward probity of life. Or if it possesses any force—as experience establishes that it possesses the greatest—it is evident that it is not a fictitious but a true thing.
I wished to report these things in the words of the supreme theologian because I judge that they can be stated neither more briefly, nor more vigorously and clearly.
§ 5. These things are so self-consistent that everyone renders testimony to God in the tribunal of his own mind. “I summon a new testimony,” says Tertullian in his book On the Testimony of the Soul,
indeed, one better known than all literature, more debated than every doctrine, more commonly published than every publication, greater than the whole human being—that is, the whole of that which belongs to the human being.
What, therefore, does he demand from the soul?
If we do not please you when we proclaim the Lord—under this single name, the one from whom are all things and under whom is the universe—speak your testimony, if you know it thus. For we hear you too, openly and with a complete liberty that is not permitted to us, pronounce thus at home and abroad: “What God shall have given”; and “If God shall will.” By that expression you both signify that some one exists and confess all power to him whose will you look toward. At the same time you deny that the others are gods when you call them by their proper names—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. For you confirm that he alone is God whom you name only “God,” so that even when you sometimes call those others gods, you appear to use a name belonging to another and, as it were, on loan.
Nor are you ignorant of the nature of God which we proclaim. “God is good”; “God does good”: these are your expressions.
And afterward:
Hence, O soul, from consciousness you have it ready at home and abroad, with no one mocking or forbidding you, to proclaim: “God sees all things”; “I commend it to God”; “God will repay”; and “God will judge between us.” From where is this in you, O soul that is not Christian?
Tertullian marvels that even in the temples of demons they implore God as judge, and therefore exclaims: “O testimony of truth, which among the demons themselves makes a witness of the Christians!”
These testimonies of the soul are as simple as they are true; as ordinary as they are simple; as common as they are ordinary; as natural as they are common; as divine as they are natural. I do not think they can appear frivolous and cold to anyone if he considers the majesty of nature, from which the authority of the soul is assessed. As much as you grant to the teacher, so much will you adjudge to the pupil: nature is the teacher, the soul the pupil. Whatever the former taught or the latter learned was delivered by God, the teacher, namely, of the teacher herself.
It is for you to judge what the soul can presume concerning her principal instructor from her who is within you. Perceive her who causes you to perceive. Consider her as a prophet in presentiments, an augur in all things, and one who foresees among events. Is it marvelous if, given by God to the human being, she knows how to divine? It is equally marvelous if she knows him by whom she was given. Even when circumvented by the adversary, she remembers her author, his goodness, his decree, her own end, and the adversary himself. Is it thus marvelous if, given by God, she proclaims those same things which God gave his own people to know?
But he who has not judged outbursts of this kind from the soul to be the teaching of nature and the tacit trusts of an inborn and innate consciousness will say rather that the habit of speaking in this manner has been strengthened from opinions circulated among the people and from the use of published writings, as though into a fault.
Finally:
“Human being” is one name belonging to all nations, and there is one soul; the voice varies, but there is one spirit; the sound varies; each nation has its own language, but the subject matter of language is common. God is everywhere, and God’s goodness everywhere; the demon is everywhere, and the curse of the demon everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment everywhere; death everywhere and consciousness of death everywhere; and testimony everywhere. Every soul by its own right proclaims things concerning which we are not permitted even to mutter. Therefore every soul is deservedly both accused and a witness: as much accused of error as it is a witness of truth. And it shall stand before the courts of God on the day of judgment, having nothing to say. You used to proclaim God and did not seek him; you abominated demons and adored them.
§ 6. Finally, all things tending in a most orderly manner toward their ends show that God is the maker and ruler of all dominions, and therefore of the whole world. For what art, what intelligence, can order actions, instruments, times, place, circumstances, and connected things so fittingly and without error? Yet the things themselves recognize none of these; they are produced and produce through a certain instinct and impulse of nature, ignorant of their own undertaking.
Consider a grain of mustard. It is small among seeds, and yet its smallest portion is alive and, by a rich and oily moisture, is to emerge into a tree. But within the smallest particle of the smallest seed there is the greatest variety of parts. One part is strengthened into the trunk and, as it were, wood; another softens into pith; another is stretched into bark; another unfolds itself into a leaf; another into a flower; another lowers itself downward into the earth to draw up juices. Nor is it divided only into these parts, but also into particles of the parts; for trunk, bark, leaves, and flowers possess their own flesh, bones, veins, and coverings, so far that there is no tree which you could not readily divide into hundreds of heterogeneous parts.
How, therefore, is there so great a power in so slight a little body, parts so distinct, and such marvelous efficacy in them that they distribute the raw humors of the earth, toward such various ends, into things so diverse? For one part they thicken and harden into wood, another into bark, another into flower, another into leaves. What works these things except distinguished wisdom, the architect of all things? And it directs all these things toward one end, namely the utility of human beings.
For whose sake, therefore, will anyone say the world was made? For the sake, namely, of those living beings that employ reason: these are gods and human beings, than whom assuredly nothing is better. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Book II; and Lactantius, On the Anger of God, chapter 13. True is the opinion of the Stoics, who say that the world was constructed for our sake. For all things of which it consists and which the world generates from itself have been accommodated to the utility of the human being. Seneca says exceedingly well in On Benefits, Book VI, chapter 23, if only he acknowledged one GOD:
Add now that external things do not compel the gods, but their own eternal will is a law to them. They established things which they would not change. Accordingly, they cannot appear about to do something although unwilling, because they willed to persevere in whatever cannot cease; nor do the gods ever repent of their first counsel. Without doubt, it is not permitted for them to stop and depart in the contrary direction. But they remain in their purpose not because their own force holds them there through weakness, but because it is not permitted to depart from the best things, and it was thus decreed to proceed.
In that first constitution, when they disposed all things, they also saw our affairs and took account of the human being. Accordingly, they cannot appear to run their course and unfold their work for their own sake alone, because we too are a part of the work. We therefore owe a benefit both to the sun and moon and to the other heavenly bodies, because although the things for which they arise are more important than they are, they nevertheless assist us, who are going toward greater things.
Add that they assist by design, and we are therefore placed under obligation: we did not fall ignorantly into their benefit, but they knew that we would receive these things which we receive. And although a greater thing was proposed to them, and the fruit of their activity was greater than the preservation of mortal beings, nevertheless their mind was also directed toward our advantages from the beginning of things, and that order was given to the world so that it may appear that care of us was not held among the last things.
We owe dutiful affection to our parents, and many did not come together in order to beget us. The gods cannot appear not to have known what they were about to produce, since they immediately provided nourishment and assistance for all; nor did they beget through negligence those for whom they had generated so many things. For nature considered us before it made us, nor are we so slight a work that we could have fallen from its attention.
Would he not appear altogether Christian if he attributed these things to the one true God?
If, therefore, so great a mass turns for our sake; if things so small are composed with such great artistry and providence that within almost a single grain there is no less material for wonder than within the most immense spheres of the heavens, certainly the same God governs the society of human beings, the alternating turns of commanding and obeying, and all rewards and punishments.
How could he neglect the government of the most excellent creature, when he equipped the commonwealth of vegetables, so to speak, with laws so harmonious and so full for being born, growing, flowering, bearing fruit, and producing seed,
and did so for this end, that they should serve the human being? If, therefore, he judged brute servants, estates, and beasts of burden worthy of such care, who would marvel that he judged us worthy to be ruled, he who governs all our possessions? For he does not imitate foolish parents who prepare fields, money, houses, and a household for their children, but neglect the children themselves.