§ 1. There are many things which atheists seriously, and the weak and inexperienced for the sake of learning, are accustomed to object against providence and the government of God. For since the world is, as Eusebius defines it in book [reading uncertain], “Σύστημα δὲ οὐρανοῦ, καὶ ἀέρος, καὶ γῆς καὶ θαλάττης, καὶ τῶν ἐν τούτοις φύσεων,” a system or structure composed of heaven, air, earth, water, and the natures which are in these; since it is the common city of human beings and angels, so that one commonwealth is formed from the whole world—so much so that the Stoics say that heaven is properly a city, while they affirm that those which we inhabit are indeed called cities but are not cities—if, therefore, this commonwealth is governed by the best, most provident, and wisest prince, God, it is necessary that it also be ruled in the best and most tranquil manner, and that it be well with the good and ill with the wicked. Rewards should have been established for the well-deserving, punishments for the impious.
But in that commonwealth of the world, they say, in that vast city, the felicity of the wicked is often greater; and that weapon not only strikes lowly souls ignorant of heavenly things, but is also fixed in strong and fortified breasts. Why, therefore, do adverse things happen to good men and prosperous things to the wicked? This man plundered a province, drinks into the daylight, and, as the poet says, enjoys himself while the gods are angry.
Licinus lies in a marble tomb, but Cato in a small one, Pompey in none: do we believe that there are gods?
Thus in David, Psalm 72:9: “They have set their mouth against heaven, and their tongue has passed through the earth. And they said: How does God know? And is there knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these themselves are sinners, and, abounding in the world, they have obtained riches. And I said: Therefore I have justified my heart without cause, and I have washed my hands among the innocent. I thought that I might know this: it is labor before me, until I enter into the sanctuary of God and understand concerning their last things.”
This, then, is an ancient complaint:
Τολμῶ κατειπεῖν, μήποτ᾽ οὐκ εἰσὶν θεοί· Κακοὶ γὰρ εὐτυχοῦντες ἐκπλήσσουσί με. I dare to say: are there gods? For prosperous wicked men render me astonished.
The second argument is that results generally correspond to industry, labor, counsels, cunning, and human providence; therefore human minds ought not to be turned toward other things, but each man ought to trust in his own ability
and providence. Hence the Spartans warned that fortune must be invoked with the hand set to work, and the Attic people said, “Σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει,” “With Pallas, move your hand as well.” These do not yet wander far astray; worse is this saying:
Divine power is not yet absent, if prudence is present.
For it sets human—that is, most wretched—prudence in the place of divine power. And others say: Why was God so inequitable in the distribution of fate that he prescribed poverty, wounds, and bitter funerals for good men? And so, if God does not bring it about, error, imprudence, or sloth brings it about. The Romans subdued the world, but by labor, boldness, endurance, the appearance of justice, and prudence. The Laconians held the sovereignty of Greece, but by their own industry. If in every matter you employ stratagem, there is no reason for you to seek another God.
Hence come words impious and hostile to God. “That wise man, full of joy, cheerful and calm, unshaken, lives with the gods on equal terms,” says Seneca, Epistle 59. And not merely on equal terms, but not needing God: the same author, Epistle 31, says, “This is the supreme good; if you attain it, you begin to be an associate of the gods, not a suppliant.” But, that you may behold the highest summit of madness, hear Sextius in Seneca, Epistle 73: “Sextius used to say that Jupiter can do no more than a good man. Jupiter has more things which he may bestow upon human beings; but between two good men the richer is not the better, any more than, between two men who possess equal skill in directing a helm, you would call him the better whose ship is larger and more splendid.” And Seneca in that place: “In what does Jupiter surpass a good man? He is good for a longer time.” These are their words, and they exclaim:
By this way one goes to the stars.
Here they make human beings equal to God not only in wisdom but also in felicity, so much so that someone spoke less wickedly when he said:
My right hand is a god to me, and the missile weapon which I brandish.
The third argument: it is unworthy of divine majesty to summon it down to all things, even the vilest—to the offspring of worms and ants, and to the works of human beings, very many of which either are vicious or are joined with vices.
The fourth argument is this: Nature performs all things by the same course; the circuits of the heavens are fixed; the changes of the lower world are likewise, in their own fashion, not very different; the perpetual alternations in the birth and death of animals and plants, and also infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old age succeeding in the same manner in all human beings, show that nature suffices for itself and that all these things occur by a certain natural law and necessity, and not by some other mind which exercises dominion over nature itself.
The fifth argument: Monsters are born; therefore that most wise mind errs and fails in its work. Hence come two-headed, three-bodied, hundred-handed, and six-fingered creatures; and, by an opposite error, one-eyed and one-handed creatures; indeed, by an unsociable conjunction of natures, men who are half oxen or oxen that are half human, fetuses with a dog’s face, an ape’s hand, or goats’ feet. Error occurs in other ways too: by distortion of limbs and by the magnitude of certain limbs or of the whole body. And so the weary or exuberant workwoman often produces Longhands, giants, and dwarfs. To what end are there so many poisons of serpents and plants, so many terrors of wild beasts, and so many annoyances of insects, if provision has been made for us by God? Hence also arise the very many complaints of very many men against the works of God.
Hence it is that Cotta the Academic, in the third book On the Nature of the Gods, denies everything to God or attributes all evils to him, even crimes themselves. “For if,” he says, “the gods gave reason to human beings, they also gave malice. For malice is a crafty and deceitful method of doing harm.” From these things they conclude that fortune, prudence, cunning, successful crimes, human life, and all affairs rule events, and that no account is to be taken of a more divine providence.
§ 2. These are ancient objections proposed not by one man alone; nevertheless, a true and solid answer has customarily been given not only by the holy prophets and Fathers, but also by the most excellent of the philosophers.
§ 3. The first argument has always moved very many. The philosophers themselves in Cicero, and Cicero himself in the fifth book On the Nature of the Gods, can scarcely defend the gods. I shall set forth the complaints in Cicero’s words and shall answer them.
“Telamon,” he says, “indeed concludes the whole question in one verse: whether the gods neglect human beings.
For if they cared, it would be well with the good and ill with the wicked; which is now far from the case.
They certainly ought to have made all men good, if indeed they took counsel for the human race. But if that was too little, they ought at least to have taken counsel for the good. Why, therefore, did the Carthaginian crush the two Scipios, most valiant and excellent men, in Spain? Why did Maximus carry out the funeral of his consular son? Why did Hannibal kill Marcellus? Why did Cannae take Paulus away? Why was the body of Regulus handed over to the cruelty of the Carthaginians? Why did the walls of his own home not protect Africanus? But these things are ancient, as are very many others. Let us see things nearer to us. Why is my maternal uncle, the most innocent and likewise most learned P. Rutilius, in exile? Why was my companion Drusus killed in his own home? Why was Q. Scaevola, high priest, a model of moderation and prudence, slaughtered before the image of Vesta? Why also were so many leading men of the state killed by Cinna? Why could Gaius Marius, the most faithless of all men, order Q. Catulus, a man of the most eminent dignity, to die?
“The day would fail me if I wished to enumerate the good to whom things turned out badly; and no less if I were to commemorate the wicked for whom they turned out excellently. For why did Marius, after becoming consul for the seventh time, die so prosperously as an old man in his own home? Why did Cinna, the most cruel of all men, reign for so long? But he paid the penalty. It would have been better for him to have been restrained and prevented from killing so many eminent men than for him to pay the penalty himself at some later time. Q. Varius, a most savage man, perished with the greatest torment and punishment; but because he had taken away Drusus by the sword and Metellus by poison, it would have been better for them to be preserved than for Varius to pay the penalties of his crime.
“Dionysius was tyrant of a most opulent and most prosperous city for thirty-eight years. How many punishments before him did Pisistratus, Phalaris, and Apollodorus endure in the very flower of Greece, although they first tortured and killed many! And many robbers often pay the penalty; nevertheless, we cannot say that more captives have not been cruelly killed than robbers. We have learned that Anaxarchus, the Democritean, was tortured to death by the Cypriot tyrant, and Zeno of Elea killed under torture. What shall I say of Socrates? I am accustomed to shed tears at his death when reading Plato. Do you see, therefore, that in the judgment of the gods—if they see human affairs—the distinction has been removed? Diogenes the Cynic indeed used to say that Harpalus, who in those times was regarded as a prosperous robber, bore testimony against the gods, because he lived so long amid that fortune.
“Dionysius, of whom I spoke before, after he had pillaged the sanctuary of Proserpina at Locri, was sailing to Syracuse. And when he was holding a most favorable course, he said, ‘Do you see, friends, what good navigation is given by the immortal gods to sacrilegious men?’ And the clever man, when he had perceived it clearly and well, persisted in the same opinion. When he had brought his fleet to the Peloponnese and entered the sanctuary of Olympian Jupiter, he stripped from him a golden cloak of great weight, with which Gelo the tyrant had adorned Jupiter from the spoils of the Carthaginians. And in this too he jested that a golden cloak was burdensome in summer and cold in winter; and he threw a woolen mantle over him, saying that it was suitable for every season of the year.
“The same man ordered the golden beard of Aesculapius at Epidaurus to be removed [the transcription is defective here], for it was not fitting, he said, for the son to be bearded when the father was beardless in all his sanctuaries. He then ordered the silver tables to be removed from all the shrines
on which, according to the custom of ancient Greece, the words ‘Of the Good Gods’ were inscribed, saying that he wished to make use of their goodness. The same man without hesitation took away the little golden Victories, bowls, and crowns which were supported by the outstretched hands of the images; and he said that he was receiving, not removing, them, for it was folly to be unwilling to take from those from whom we prayed for good things when they were offering and giving them.
“They say that this same man carried the things which, as I have said, had been taken from the sanctuaries into the forum and sold them through a herald; and, when the money had been exacted, he decreed that whatever each man possessed from the sacred things should be returned by each man to its own sanctuary before a fixed day. Thus he joined injury toward human beings to impiety toward the gods. Therefore neither did Olympian Jupiter strike him with a thunderbolt, nor did Aesculapius destroy him by making him waste away with a wretched and lingering disease. He died in his own bed and was carried to the pyre of Tympanis; and the power which he himself had obtained through crime he handed down to his son in place of an inheritance, as if it were just and legitimate.”
He concludes at last in this fashion: “Therefore the prosperities and favorable affairs of wicked men refute—as Diogenes used to say—the force and power of all the gods.”
§ 4. First, indeed, I answer that human judgment is deceived in the case of many human beings. For it is evident that those whom Cicero calls the best and holiest were entangled in many crimes and deserved to undergo punishments. Scaevola, Catulus, Drusus, Metellus, and the others whom he deplores as most holy men slaughtered with torment by the most savage men seem to me not to have been much better than their enemies—nor indeed Socrates, the most shameful teacher of crimes and every outrage. Who, however, will call the Romans innocent if he considers that, as they sat daily at the spectacles of the arena, they ordered the deaths of guilty and innocent alike? “Burn, scourge, cut, kill!” These were the customary words of the entire amphitheater. What greater thing did Phalaris do? Or Pisistratus? They killed fewer for their own protection than those most excellent Roman men killed for pleasure.
Second: human goods are not of such a kind as to contribute any weight toward felicity, nor are human evils such as can make men wretched. For how are poverty and exile burdensome except by estimation alone? Was Fabricius wretched when, beside the hearth, he dined upon the very roots which, as an old triumphator, he had pulled up while clearing his field? Or, to come to our own people, was the patriarch Jacob wretched when by night he placed a stone under his head? Or Paul and Antony, eating bread beside a spring? It is an error to judge that men are not happy unless they heap into their belly fish from a distant shore and fowl from beyond the seas, unless with exotic seasonings they rouse the sluggishness of a nauseated stomach, so that by a novel pleasure they may pile up dishes that will do them harm.
A good man is not rich; a wicked man abounds. What follows? The former will live frugally, the latter disgracefully. Tiberius Caesar sold a mullet of four and a half pounds; Apicius and P. Octavius bid for it. Octavius bought it for five thousand sesterces, that is, one hundred and twenty-five Philippics. Seneca, Epistle 95. Were those gluttons who bought the delicacy which Caesar sold happy? Or was the good man wretched if he could not buy what Caesar did not desire?
Caligula dined for ten million sesterces, and the ingenuity of all men was required so that the revenue of a middling province might become the cost of one dinner. Its price in our coinage is two hundred and fifty thousand Philippics. Let us hear even the pagans themselves, and rich men. Seneca, Consolation to Helvia: “Why do you seek so many things? Evidently our ancestors, whose virtue even now sustains our vices, were unhappy: they prepared food for themselves with their own hand; the earth was their bed; their roofs did not yet gleam with gold; their temples did not yet shine with gems. And so at that time oaths were sworn religiously by gods of earthenware. Those who had invoked them returned to die before the enemy lest they deceive them.
“Evidently our dictator lived less happily: while he heard the ambassadors of the Samnites, he himself turned the cheapest food on the hearth with his own hand—that hand with which he had already often struck the enemy and had deposited his laurel in the lap of Capitoline Jupiter—than Apicius lived within our memory. In that city from which philosophers had once been ordered to depart as corrupters of the young, he professed the science of the cookshop and infected the age with his discipline. It is worthwhile to know his end. When he had poured one hundred million sesterces into his kitchen, when he had swallowed up so many imperial gifts and the enormous revenue of the Capitol in individual revels, burdened by debt he was then compelled for the first time to inspect his accounts. He calculated that ten million sesterces would remain to him; and, as if he would live in the extremity of famine if he lived on ten million sesterces, he ended his life with poison. How great was the luxury for which ten million sesterces was poverty! Go now, and suppose that the measure of money pertains to the matter, not the mind. Someone feared ten million sesterces and fled by poison from that for which others pray in their vows.”
God’s judgment, therefore, must not be censured in these matters, since that man is happy who desires less, and that man is unhappy whose appetite is immeasurable and incomprehensible, whose desire finds nothing sufficient.
§ 5. But many of the good pass their life amid hunger, thirst, prison, slavery, and torments, while in the meantime the wicked overflow with every pleasure. Their condition is harsher, I confess; nevertheless, this too confirms divine providence for us more than it overthrows it. Even for the public there is great utility in such examples. Reason taught unbelievers what faith taught Christians: we call them trials, they exercises. A wise man regards all adversities as exercises. Virtue withers without an adversary; endurance shows what it can do.
Seneca, On Providence, chapter 2: “Do you not see how differently fathers and mothers show indulgence? Fathers order their children to be roused early to undertake their studies; they do not permit them to be idle even on holidays, and they draw sweat from them, and sometimes tears. But mothers wish to cherish them in their bosom and keep them in the shade: they wish them never to weep, never to be sad, never to labor. God has a father’s disposition toward good men, and loves them stoutly. ‘Let them,’ he says, ‘be agitated by works, pains, and losses, that they may gather true strength.’ Things fattened through inactivity languish; they fail not only through labor, but through bulk and their very burden. Untouched felicity does not endure any blow; but when it has had a continual struggle with its own inconveniences, it acquires a callus through injuries and yields to no evil; but even if it has fallen, it fights from its knee.” These are the words of the Roman wise man.
§ 6. Next, adversities are medicines and means of calling men away from vices; they benefit those very men who suffer them. Hear Jerome on Ezekiel: “What is thought to be punishment is medicine.” But because my business is with atheists, let them hear those whom reason led to the point from which they, falling away from faith, have fallen headlong.
Seneca says in On Providence, chapter 3: “Is it for their benefit to be cast into exile, to be led into poverty, to carry out the funerals of children and wife, to be affected by disgrace, to be disabled? If you marvel that this is for someone’s benefit, you will marvel that some are cured by iron and fire, and no less by hunger and thirst. But if you consider within yourself that, for the sake of a remedy, some men have their bones scraped and picked out, their veins extracted, and certain limbs amputated which could not remain attached without the destruction of the whole body, you will allow this too to be proved to you: certain inconveniences are for the benefit of those to whom they happen, just as, by Hercules, certain things which are praised and sought are against those whom they have delighted—things very similar to indigestion, drunkenness, and the rest which kill through pleasure.”
And a little later: “Let us come to Regulus. How did fortune
harm him by making him an example of fidelity, an example of endurance? Nails pierce him, and wherever he has rested his exhausted body he lies upon a wound, and his eyes are suspended in perpetual wakefulness. The more torment, the more glory there will be. Do you wish to know how little he repents of valuing virtue at this price? Restore him and send him into the senate: he will express the same opinion.
“Do you therefore think Maecenas happier? Anxious because of his amours, and weeping over the daily repudiations of his peevish wife, he seeks sleep through the music of harmonies sounding softly from afar. Though he drug himself with unmixed wine, divert himself with the noise of waters, and beguile his anxious mind with a thousand pleasures, he will be as wakeful upon feathers as the other man upon the cross.
“Calamity is the opportunity of virtue. And so God tests, hardens, recognizes, and exercises those whom he loves. Those toward whom he seems indulgent, whom he seems to spare, he preserves soft for evils to come. For you err if you judge anyone exempt: his portion will come to the man who has long been prosperous. Whoever seems to have been dismissed has been deferred. Why does God afflict every excellent man either with ill health or with other inconveniences? Why also are dangerous tasks commanded to the bravest men in camps? A commander sends the choicest men to attack enemies in ambushes by night, or to explore a route, or to drive a garrison from a position. No one of those who go out says, ‘The commander has deserved ill of me,’ but, ‘He has judged well.’ Let all who are commanded to suffer things lamentable to the fearful and slothful say the same. We have seemed worthy to God that he should test in us how much human nature could endure.
“Flee pleasures; flee enervated felicity, through which minds grow sodden and, unless something intervenes to remind them of the human lot, are stupefied as if by perpetual drunkenness. A man whom windowpanes have always protected from a draft, whose feet have grown warm among fomentations repeatedly changed, whose dining rooms have been tempered by heat introduced beneath and poured around their walls—a light breeze will not chill this man without danger. Since all things which have exceeded measure do harm, the intemperance of felicity is most dangerous. It disturbs the brain, summons the mind into empty images, and pours a great quantity of intervening darkness between falsehood and truth. Why should it not be better to sustain perpetual unhappiness, which summons one to virtue, than to burst under infinite and immoderate goods? Death is lighter for the fasting; men burst from indigestion.
“And so the gods follow this method with good men which teachers follow with their pupils: they demand more labor from those in whom there is more certain hope. Surely you do not believe that the Spartans hate their own children, whose character they test publicly by applying blows? The fathers themselves exhort them to endure bravely the strokes of the lash and, when they are lacerated and half-dead, ask them to persevere in offering wounds to wounds. What wonder is it if God harshly tests generous spirits? An example of virtue is never soft. Does fortune scourge and lacerate us? Let us endure it. It is not cruelty; it is a contest. The more often we enter it, the stronger we shall be. The most solid part of the body is that which frequent use has exercised. We must offer ourselves to fortune so that by fortune itself we may be hardened against it. Gradually it will make us equal to itself; frequency of undergoing danger will give contempt of dangers.
“Thus the bodies of sailors are hardened by enduring the sea; the hands of farmers are calloused; soldiers’ arms have strength for hurling missiles; the limbs of runners are nimble. In each person that which he has exercised is most solid. Through endurance the mind arrives at contempt for the power of evils. You will know what endurance can accomplish in us if you consider how much labor supplies to peoples who are unclothed and stronger through poverty.
“Why, however, does God allow any evil to happen to good men?” Seneca, On Providence, chapter 6. “In truth, he does not allow it. He has removed all evils from them: crimes and shameful deeds, wicked thoughts, greedy counsels, blind lust, and avarice threatening the possessions of another. He protects and vindicates the men themselves. Does someone also demand this of God, that he preserve even the baggage of good men? They themselves release God from this care: they despise external things. Democritus threw away his riches, judging them a burden upon a good mind. Why, therefore, do you marvel if God allows to happen to a good man what a good man sometimes wishes to happen to himself? Good men lose their sons: why should they not, when sometimes they themselves kill them? They are sent into exile: why should they not, when sometimes they themselves abandon their country, never to return to it? They are killed: why should they not, when sometimes they lay hands upon themselves? Why do they suffer certain harsh things? That they may teach others also to suffer: they were born as an example.”
§ 7. But are the wicked happy? See the same wise man: “Those whom you regard as happy, if you see them not where they meet your view but where they lie hidden, are wretched, filthy, and shameful, ornamented on the outside after the likeness of their walls. That is not solid and genuine felicity; it is a crust, and indeed a thin one. And so, while they are permitted to stand and be displayed according to their will, they shine and deceive; when something occurs which disturbs and uncovers them, then it appears how much deep and true foulness another’s splendor has concealed.”
If you are pleased to hear pious and sound teachers, they will teach us the rationale of providence more rightly and clearly. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, book 11: “Why also does God permit this—to be tempted? Is it because virtue is proved and exercised, and the palm is more glorious for one who, though tempted, has not consented than for one who could not be tempted? Since even those who, after deserting the Creator, go after the tempter, increasingly tempt those who remain in the word of God, furnish them an example for avoiding desire, and strike a pious fear into them against pride? Hence the Apostle says: ‘Considering yourself, lest you also be tempted.’
“For it is remarkable how greatly that humility by which we are subjected to the Creator—lest, as if not needing his aid, we presume upon our own powers—is commended to everyone throughout all the divine Scriptures with continual care. Since, therefore, the just make progress even through the unjust, and the pious through the impious, it is said in vain: ‘God should not have created those whom he foreknew would become wicked.’ For why should he not create those whom he foreknew would profit the good, so that they might both be born useful for exercising and admonishing their wills and be justly punished for their own will?”
§ 8. Do you envy the prosperity of the wicked, or even shed tears over it? What is the cause of such great disturbances? Are not gladiators also distended with fattening so that they may perish more splendidly? Do not those condemned to fight wild beasts eat a final public meal? David resolves the question, but in the sanctuary of God and in their last things. For when the wicked are deferred here, they are reserved for punishments without end; and when the good labor here, they are exercised so that at the end they may obtain the inheritance.
The majesty of so great a reward is so arduous, its sweetness so pure and honorable, its eternity so secure and unchanging, that one must strive toward it through the most freely undertaken labors of doing and suffering, not through pleasures and earthly rewards. This whole thing which is called the human race, this whole mass of mortality, will come to examination, will come to the scales; all the works of human beings will be weighed there. For the present a cloud enfolds them, but the merits of each are known to God.
God did not wish to reward justice with gold. For what sort of justice is that which is maintained for the sake of gold? As though gold were more precious than justice itself, or, when someone denies another man his possessions, the man to whom he denies them suffers a greater loss than the man who denies them: the one loses his garment, the other his fidelity.
§ 9. It pertains especially to providence that God should leave the causes which he created with their own properties and powers, and that he should permit freedom in acting to those which he made free. Hence each person ought to impute his own failure to himself, not to God. For there is no praise of virtue unless labor is undertaken voluntarily and for an honorable end, nor any glory in avoiding a crime
unless its enticements have been voluntarily despised. He who is innocent through fear is not innocent; much less does one who is wicked or good by necessity merit praise for virtue or vice.
§ 10. Nevertheless, the sole cause of this blasphemy—why they say that God turns his eyes away from the works of the faithful but attends the wicked with benevolence—is that they judge that all things are ended by death and that no life of the soul survives after death, either for the rewards of merits or for the punishments of transgressions. But this is itself a principal judgment in favor of eternity: by it we recognize that all the deeds of human beings, which here are assessed with such unequal punishment and reward, are at last made equal. You marvel that Nero is not killed immediately, that the Sicilian tyrant rages for forty years. Judge him most wretched for whom so many years have turned into greater torments.
Slow vengeance takes away excuse from the impious and gives the penitent time to amend. You would wish punishment to be made present as soon as someone has committed a crime; therefore, lest only a few live for a long time, fear that swift vengeance ought also to have taken you away.
§ 11. Finally, God wished certain evils to be common and certain favorable things to be available to all. Tertullian, in the Apology, chapter 41: “For he who once appointed eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation—which is the condition of judgment—before the end of the age. Meanwhile he is equal over the whole human race, both indulging and rebuking. He wished both benefits to be common to the profane and inconveniences to his own, so that by equal participation we might all experience both his gentleness and his severity. We who have learned equity in his presence love his gentleness and fear his severity; you, on the contrary, despise both. And it follows that all the blows of the age, if perhaps they come from God for our admonition, come for your chastisement.
“Yet we are harmed in no way: first, because nothing concerns us in this age except how quickly we may depart from it; next, because if anything adverse is inflicted, it is assigned to your merits. But even if some things strike us too because we adhere to you, we rejoice rather at the recognition of divine predictions, which plainly strengthens the confidence and faith of our hope. But if all evils come to you from those whom you worship because of us, why do you persist in worshiping those so ungrateful and unjust, who ought rather to have assisted and vindicated you in the distress of the Christians—whom they ought to separate from the merits of the Christians?”
§ 12. It very often seems marvelous to me that the wicked, who will pay such great penalties, generally live anxiously even in this age, struggle with the most grievous calamities, and indeed obtain horrible ends. Yet even in this respect the severity of divine justice shines forth. For it will not permit sinners to pass their lives secure in present goods, since fear of future things would restrain many too little, and certain impunity would furnish the greatest enticement to crime.
§ 13. The second argument, in which the subtlety of human prudence marvelously pleases itself, was drawn from the result of industry. For good counsels ordinarily have fortunate outcomes, but foolish counsels calamitous ones; therefore there is no other providence which governs or corrects human counsels. But this reasoning also deceives by the appearance of truth. For not all things well deliberated have fallen out fortunately, so that a man deservedly lacks success if he judges that the soundness of counsels ought to be estimated from the outcome.
Nevertheless, even if everything which is conducted by counsel and reason in administering the commonwealth were prudently instituted and were always led to the desired ends, and no rash undertakings ever turned to good, God’s part in the government of the city would not on that account have to be taken away from him. Experience of each is manifest, as is the reason. The smallest thing often disturbs counsels that have been most excellently instituted and renders them not only useless but even destructive. First Corinthians 1:19: “For it is written: I will destroy wisdom, and I will reject the prudence of the prudent. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the investigator of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this world?”
Egypt possessed a great reputation for wisdom. Instructed by Joseph, it cultivated Greece—for which of the wise did not deal with the Egyptians? Yet what did God say? Isaiah 8:10: “Enter upon a counsel, and it shall be dissipated.” And 19:11: “The wise counselors of Pharaoh have given foolish counsel. How do you say to Pharaoh, ‘I am a son of the wise, a son of ancient kings’? Where are your wise men now? Let them announce to you and indicate what the Lord of hosts has thought concerning Egypt.” Why, indeed, was it foolish? Because, as he says in verse three, “I will cast down its counsel.”
But because atheists have no faith in the sacred writings, they must be refuted by their own wisdom. With how great wisdom did many lawgivers found and adorn a commonwealth, and yet in those very laws how wretchedly did they compel the city to labor and the citizens to collide with one another? Indeed, these instances are so numerous that the patriarch of false politicians, in book 2, discourse 29, says that Fortune casts darkness before the minds of human beings lest they break the force of her onset. He speaks impiously, indeed, since he ascribes to fortune the divine vengeance by which God denies them wisdom; yet he speaks suitably for the purpose, so that we may recognize that the outcomes of human counsels are never not in doubt.
For many things intervene which cut through anxious cares and deceitful hopes. The fraud of Mettius was cunning, but Tullus made it ineffectual with a single word, when he falsely declared that it had been done by his command. A wolf reduced Dionysius from the scepter to the schoolmaster’s rod, for it intercepted the letters, together with flesh, from the bag of the sleeping letter-carrier. A soldier dragged Claudius forth and by chance made him emperor. The death of Commodus was hastened because Philocommodus childishly carried out the paper on which the names of those marked for death had been written. How many battles, how many armies, has one utterance ruined and reduced all counsels to nothing?
§ 14. The cause of the blasphemous error is that we see the beginnings, transformations, and destructions of empires occur through intermediate causes highly suited to those ends. Hence they attribute the entire event to the causes which appear and do not know the eternal cause which governs even the intermediate causes. When the vast bodies of kingdoms tend toward their setting and, as it were, their death, many signs and criteria appear beforehand to prudent men, by which they prophesy the future ruin with certain foreknowledge.
When the Persian empire was already standing on a slippery place, monstrous luxury, sloth, the abandonment of military discipline, commanders inexperienced and slothful in war—with no one whom one could trust unless he came from Greece—avarice, outrages against subjects, ambition, and consequently discord among counsels and the alienation of peoples hastened every evil. Divine justice withdrew the gifts of courage and prudence from men so criminal and so arrogant.
§ 15. What was advanced in the third place—that infinite majesty ought not to be present to the smallest things—can move no one who has learned that the divine power is a mind of infinite efficacy, which has all the sands of the sea and all the particles of the universe numbered; that God is one who does nothing anxiously, nothing while distracted; who is not called away from the protection of individual things by the knowledge and government of all things;
to whom all the hairs of our head are numbered; from whose care nothing can be exempted, just as it cannot exist without him. There were not lacking among the ancients those who considered care of the smallest things foreign to God. Pliny, book 2, chapter 7: “It is ridiculous that that supreme being, whatever it is, should exercise care over human affairs. Are we to believe, or doubt, that it is not polluted by so manifold a ministry?” Far better is Epictetus: “You, God, I do not deceive even in the smallest thing.”
The reasoning is firm. For if God administers the greater things, his power must also be in the minute things, and therefore his providence too; for the greatest things consist of those minute things. God could not create the world such as we see it unless he had first known it completely. He could not know the whole unless he examined the individual parts. For how could he create an animal if he did not hold its veins, arteries, fibers, pores, and the instruments of all its actions perceived and comprehended in his mind?
It would therefore be unworthy of that majesty to be ignorant of even the smallest thing, not always to behold the smallest thing in the clearest light, or for anything to escape his awareness and knowledge even for a moment. For if we establish that some things can lie hidden from God, and lie hidden for a brief time, there is no reason why we should not say that very many things lie hidden for the longest time—indeed, that all things always lie hidden. For why should he know those things but not know these?
I shall state the most impious doctrine of all which follows from this reasoning: namely, if God is ignorant of certain things and is deceived, since he is immutable, he cannot ever learn those things either. And therefore that God from whose majesty they consider the care of small things foreign is not even God, but a block of wood which is ignorant of all things. You say that the majesty of God is polluted by contact with filthy things, yet you cannot deny that the rays of the sun shine upon every sewer and pestilential pool without contaminating themselves. Saint Augustine excellently says in book 9 of The City of God: “God, who is assuredly incapable of contamination—far be it that he should fear contamination from the man whom he put on, or from the human beings among whom he lived in a man.”
§ 16. The fourth argument most strongly asserts the government of God. For the fixed order of all motions, the conflicts of the elements, and a certain equality among them are not preserved except by incredible wisdom. For how, by fortune or chance, are the same things always born or destroyed according to the same plan? And why do those who gather from the features of bodies that the soul is mortal not rather conclude, from the soul’s perspicacity, agility, and marvelous nature of thinking and reasoning, that so spiritual and divine a power is not corporeal and cannot be corrupted by the death of the body?
§ 17. The fifth argument concerned the errors of nature, or monsters; for these appear unable to exist if this universe is administered by God, since it is necessary that he be free of every error.
I answer that the wandering of nature in its parts does nothing against the common providence of God. “It is God,” says Saint Augustine, book 16 of The City of God, chapter 8, “who himself knows where and when anything ought, or ought to have been, created.” He intimates the cause: “Knowing the beauty of the universe, by either the similarity or the diversity of which parts he should weave it together. But he who cannot behold the whole is offended as if by the deformity of a part, because he does not know with what it agrees and to what it is referred.”
God therefore has his own reason why he permits these defects in created things; for all those things which occur from the hidden causes of the world have been placed beneath that providence. Fabulous histories of monstrous human beings relate that some are one-eyed; others have feet turned backward behind their legs; others are Sciopods, Pygmies, Astomi, Onophthalmi, Cynocephali, and others marvelous by their very rarity. I am not led to believe that these exist or have existed. Rather, those historians, glorying in their curiosity, seem to have lied with unpunished vanity. If, nevertheless, such things existed, and if they were human beings, the judgment of Saint Augustine concerning them in book 16 of The City of God, chapter 8, pleases me: “But if they are human beings, concerning whom those marvels have been written, what if God wished to create certain nations thus for this reason: lest, in the case of those monsters which are known among us to be born from human beings, we should think that his wisdom, which fashions human nature, had erred, as though it were the art of some less perfect craftsman? Accordingly, it ought not to seem absurd to us that, just as there are certain monstrous human beings in individual nations, so in the whole human race there are certain monstrous nations.”
Nor did Aristotle think otherwise: “ἔστι γὰρ τὸ τέρας παρὰ φύσιν τι, παρὰ φύσιν δ᾽ οὐ πᾶσαν, ἀλλὰ τὴν ὡς ἐπὶ πολύ· παρὰ γὰρ τὴν ἀεὶ καὶ τὴν ἐξ ἀνάγκης οὐδὲν γίνεται παρὰ φύσιν. A monster is something contrary to nature, but not to every nature; rather, to that nature which is customary for the most part. For nothing ever occurs contrary to the nature which is eternal and which exists by necessity.” Accordingly, when something monstrous is born, God himself does not err; rather, secondary causes, because of a defect, excess, or intemperance of matter and the violence of surrounding impediments, produce something new or rare which adorns the variety of the universe, although it possesses deformity within its own kind.
The works of God should no more be blamed on account of these than on account of the magnitude, smallness, and form of bodies which is found among all human beings. For whom has he fashioned so exactly proportioned in every limb that he does not possess something which is more becoming in another? Therefore, just as amid so great a dissimilarity of faces we admire divine workmanship, so we by no means say that his industry has failed when he willed certain persons to be deformed. He directed natural causes in such a manner that, according to the powers implanted within them, they should effect that which God wills.
Small things teach how great the workmanship is. Shave an eyebrow: how much beauty is taken away from the body! Turn an eye aside a little: the most beautiful face will be deformed. These things, therefore, just as they occur from the hidden causes of those who generate, are likewise governed by hidden divine providence.
Saint Augustine speaks most excellently in book 11 of The City of God, chapter 22: “Nevertheless, this cause—that is, the goodness of God for creating good things—this cause, I say, so just and suitable, when diligently considered and piously pondered, terminates all the controversies of those who inquire into the origin of the world. Certain heretics did not see it, because many things which do not agree with this needy and fragile mortality of the flesh, now coming from a just punishment, offend it: such as fire, cold, a wild beast, or something of this kind. Nor do they attend to how those things thrive in their own places and natures, and are disposed in beautiful order; how much beauty they contribute, according to their portions, to the universe of things as if to a commonwealth; or how much convenience they furnish to us ourselves, if we use them fittingly and knowingly.
“Thus even poisons which through unsuitability are destructive are, when suitably applied, turned into salutary medicines; and, on the contrary, even these things in which men delight, such as food, drink, and this light, are perceived as harmful through immoderate and untimely use. Hence divine providence admonishes us not to censure things foolishly, but diligently to inquire into the utility of things; and where our ability or weakness fails, to believe that utility to be hidden, just as certain things were hidden which we have scarcely been able to discover. For even the concealment of utility is either an exercise of humility or a wearing down of pride, since no nature at all is evil, and this name signifies nothing except the privation of good. But from earthly things all the way to heavenly things, and from visible things all the way to invisible things, some goods are better than other goods; yet they are unequal so that all things may exist.
“God, however, is so great a craftsman in great things that he is not lesser in small things. Those small things must not be measured by their own greatness—for they have none—but by the wisdom of the craftsman. Thus, in the visible form of a human being, if one eyebrow is shaved away, how nearly nothing is taken from the body, and yet how much is taken from its beauty, because beauty consists not in bulk but in the equality and proportion of the members.”
§ 18. I shall conclude this disputation concerning God as governor of the commonwealth with a distinguished discourse of Saint Augustine. Although this matter has also been treated above, it nevertheless seems to me to be expounded more vigorously by that most ingenious of all men.
In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, book 5, chapter 22, he argues thus: “And surely, if those who deny this and do not acquiesce in sacred utterances of such great authority saw in this part of the world—which they suppose to be disturbed by fortuitous motions rather than ruled by the wisdom of the divine supremacy, and, as if to prove this, misuse a twofold argument, either the one recalled above concerning the inconstancy of weather or the one concerning the felicities and infelicities of human beings, because these do not occur in accordance with the merits of their lives—if they saw as great an order as appears in the members of the flesh of any living creature, I do not say to physicians, who because of the necessity of their art have diligently laid open, counted, and investigated these things, but to any human being of moderate sense and consideration, would they not cry out that God, from whom comes every measure of dimensions, every equality of numbers, and every order of weights, does not cease from its government even for a point of time?
“What, therefore, can be thought more absurd or more foolish than that the whole should be empty of the direction and rule of providence when you see its outermost and smallest parts formed with so great an arrangement that, when considered somewhat more attentively, they strike one with an ineffable awe of admiration? And since the nature of the soul excels the nature of the body, what is more demented than to think that there is no judgment of divine providence concerning the morals of human beings, when in their flesh such great indications of its skill shine and are demonstrated?
“But because these smallest things are at hand for our senses and we easily investigate them, the order of things shines forth in them. But those who think that nothing exists except what they can see—or, if they think that something else exists, think it to be such a thing as they are accustomed to see—judge those things whose order they cannot see to be disordered.
“We, however, whose steps the same divine providence directs through Holy Scripture lest we fall into that perversity, let us attempt, with its assistance, to investigate from the works of God themselves where he created these things simultaneously, when he rested from his completed works, the forms of which he works through the order of times even until now. Let us therefore consider the beauty of any tree in its trunk, branches, leaves, and fruits. This form did not spring forth suddenly, so great and such as it is, but in an order which we also know. For it rose from the root which the shoot first fixed in the earth, and from there all those things, formed and distinguished, grew. Furthermore, that shoot came from the seed. Therefore all those things were originally in the seed, not in the bulk of corporeal magnitude, but in causal force and power. For that magnitude was gathered from the abundance of the earth’s moisture. But in that tiny grain there is a more marvelous and excellent force, by which the adjacent moisture, mixed with the earth as though it were material, had power to be turned into the quality of that wood, into the spreading of its branches, into the greenness and form of its leaves, into the forms and abundance of its fruits, and into the most orderly distinction of all its parts. For what rises or hangs from that tree which has not been drawn and brought forth from a certain hidden treasury of that seed?
“But that seed comes from a tree, although not that tree but another, and that tree in turn from another seed. Sometimes, however, a tree also comes from a tree, when a shoot is removed and planted. Therefore seed comes from tree, tree from seed, and tree from tree. But seed in no way comes from seed unless a tree first intervenes. A tree, however, comes from a tree even if seed does not intervene. Thus, in alternate successions, the one comes from the other, but each comes from the earth, and the earth from neither of them. Therefore the earth is their prior parent. So also with animals, it can be uncertain whether seeds come from them or they from seeds. Whichever of these is prior, it is nevertheless most certain that it came from the earth.
“But just as in the grain itself all the things which would rise into the tree through the course of time were invisibly present together, so also the world itself must be conceived, when God created all things simultaneously, to have possessed together all the things which were made in it and with it when the day was made: not only heaven with the sun, moon, and stars, whose form remains in revolving motion, and the earth and the abyss, which undergo movements that are, as it were, inconstant and, joined beneath, supply the other part to the world; but also those things which water and earth produced potentially and causally before, through the delays of time, they arose in the manner now known to us among those works which God performs even until now.”