Preface concerning the whole argument
Having long ago proposed, at the beginning of the Preparation for the Gospel, to refute the polytheistic error of all the nations, in support and defense of our withdrawal from them, which we have made with good reason, I first of all examined in the first three books not only the myths which the children of their theologians and poets have told in comic fashion about their own gods, but also their solemn and secret physical interpretations of them, transferred by noble philosophy up somewhere into heaven and the parts of the world; although their theologians themselves declared that there was nothing in them to speak of solemnly. It must be observed, at any rate, that the most ancient of their theologians are shown to have known nothing more than history and to have given themselves only to myths; which is why, reasonably, in all cities and villages, rites and mysteries of the gods have been handed down in accordance with the narratives of the ancients and agreeing with the mythical stories of their predecessors, so that even now they receive the marriages and begettings of the gods, their laments and drunkenness, the wanderings of some, the loves of others, the angers of others, and the other misfortunes and circumstances of every kind of others, following what is recorded by the most ancient, in their rites and hymns and in the songs composed for the gods themselves. Nevertheless I brought to light, more than was needed, the tragic boasts of these in physical explanations and the sophistries of the sophists and philosophers; and moreover I stripped bare with clear refutations, in the three books following the first, the account of the celebrated oracles and the false opinion about fate so widely spread among the many, using not only arguments of my own but especially the very words of the philosophers among the Greeks for their refutation. Then passing from there to the oracles of the Hebrews, I set out in an equal number of books with what reasonings we have accepted the doctrinal theology contained in them, and their whole history, which is attested even by the Greeks themselves. Then next, having refuted the Greek manner, how they had profited from the barbarians in everything and bring no solemn learning from their own resources, and having brought to light the comparison of the times in which the celebrated Greeks and the prophets of the Hebrews lived, I again showed through the three books after these the agreement of the reputable philosophers among the Greeks with the opinions of the Hebrews, making the men’s own words witnesses again. Moreover, I exposed in the preceding book those philosophers among the Greeks who differ from us as in disagreement not only with us but also with their own people, and overturned by their own disciples; showing to readers through all these the impartial judgment of our decision, and providing by deeds, so to speak, and by the facts themselves the proofs that we have chosen, not aimlessly but with discerning and sober reasoning, the ancient and true philosophy and godliness of the Hebrews in preference to that of the Greeks; which has been established by setting out the Greek writers’ own words. Of this work we now hold the last book, the fifteenth of the treatise in hand, and we shall render what remains to what has been gone through, still drawing to light the solemn teachings of the noble philosophy of the Greeks, and stripping bare before the eyes of all the uselessness of their learning; and before all, showing that it is not through ignorance of what is admired among them, but through contempt for their unprofitable study, that we have cared least for them, having devoted our souls to the practice of better things. When this, then, has been sealed for us with God’s help through the truth, the Preparation will be concluded by me here; and passing over to the more complete subject of the Demonstration of the Gospel, I shall join the beginning of the second treatise to the question that remains of the charge against us. The charge against us was this: that, having preferred the oracles of the Hebrews to our ancestral ones, we have not chosen to emulate the same way of life as the Jews; this I shall try to meet, with God’s help, after completing the present book. For in this way I think that the second part, woven together with the first as by one bond, will complete the one general design of the whole work. As for the present: since it has been shown in the preceding books that the philosophy of Plato at times agrees with the words of the Hebrews and at times differs from them, in which it has been shown to disagree even with its own tenets; and that the views of the others, the so-called natural philosophers, of the succession of Plato, of Xenophanes and Parmenides and further of Pyrrho and those who introduced suspension of judgment, and all the others in turn, whose opinions the preceding book refuted, stand opposed alike to the doctrines of the Hebrews and of Plato and to the truth itself, and have moreover received their refutation by their own weapons, it is time to look down, as from a stage, on the other vanity of the followers of Aristotle and of the Stoic philosophers, and to survey all the remaining physical philosophy of those who raise their eyebrows, so that we may learn both what is solemnly taught by these and what is said against them in turn by their own people. For so our decision to withdraw from these too would be cleared of every plausible accusation, since it is not through ignorance of their solemn teachings, but with an examined and tested judgment, that we have preferred the truth and godliness found among those considered barbarians to all things Greek. I shall begin with Aristotle. Others have slandered the man’s life, and these too were philosophers, and otherwise not obscure. But it is not my liking to bear even hearing the man spoken ill of by his own people. Therefore I shall rather set out the defenses on his behalf from Aristocles the Peripatetic, who writes this about him in the seventh book On Philosophy:
On the philosophy of Aristotle, and his personal history. From Aristocles the Peripatetic
“For how is it possible, as Epicurus says in his letter On Pursuits, that when young he squandered his father’s property, then rushed into soldiering, and, faring badly in this, came to selling drugs, and then, when Plato’s walk was opened to all, presented himself there? Or how could anyone accept Timaeus of Tauromenium, who says in his Histories that late in life he shut the doors of an obscure and ordinary surgery? And who would believe what Aristoxenus the musician says in his Life of Plato? For he says that while Plato was wandering and abroad, some who were strangers rose up against him and built a Peripatos in rivalry. Some think he says this of Aristotle, though Aristoxenus always speaks well of Aristotle. One might reasonably call ridiculous the Memoirs of Alexinus the eristic too. For he makes Alexander as a boy converse with his father Philip, spitting on Aristotle’s arguments and accepting Nicagoras, who was surnamed Hermes. And Eubulides clearly lies in his book against him, first bringing forward frigid poems, as if others had written about his marriage and his relationship with Hermias; then saying that he offended Philip, and was not present at Plato’s death, and destroyed his books. As for the accusation of Demochares against the philosophers, what need to speak of it? For he spoke ill not of Aristotle alone but of the others too. And looking at the slanders themselves, one would say he talks nonsense. For he says that letters of Aristotle against the city of the Athenians were caught, and that he betrayed his native Stagira to the Macedonians; and further that, when Olynthus was razed, he pointed out to Philip at the sale of captured goods the richest of the Olynthians. Cephisodorus, the pupil of Isocrates, also slandered him foolishly, saying that he was luxurious and a glutton and other such things. But what was said by Lycon, who said he was a Pythagorean, surpasses all in folly. For he says that Aristotle offered to his dead wife a sacrifice such as the Athenians offer to Demeter, and that he bathed in warm oil and then sold it; and that when he went away to Chalcis, the customs officers found in his boat seventy-four bronze dishes. And these, more or less, were the first to slander Aristotle; some lived at the same time, others a little later; all were sophists, eristics, and orators, whose names and books have died sooner than their bodies. Those who came later, then, and repeat what these said, we must dismiss altogether, especially those who have not even read their books but improvise, such as those who say he had three hundred dishes. For no one of the men of that time would be found to have said any such thing about him except Lycon. And he, as I said, said that seventy-five dishes were found. One might infer that all that is said is false not only from the times and from the slanderers, but also from the fact that they do not all make the same charges, but each says something of his own; if any one of these were true, he would surely have been ruined by the men of that time not once but many times. It is clear, then, that, as happened to many others, so it happened to Aristotle to be envied by the sophists of that time because of his friendships with kings and his superiority in argument. But those of sound mind must look not only to the slanderers, but also to those who praise and emulate him; for these would be found far more numerous and better. The other things, then, are plainly fabricated; but two things seem to be believed, for which some blame him: one, that he married Pythias, the sister by birth and adopted daughter of Hermias, to flatter him (Theocritus of Chios, at least, made such an epigram: ‘This empty tomb of Hermias the eunuch and slave of Eubulus, empty-minded Aristotle set up, who, because of the incontinent nature of his belly, chose to dwell at the mouths of the Borborus instead of the Academy’); the other, that he was ungrateful to Plato. About Hermias and Aristotle’s friendship with him, many others have written, and Apellicon in particular; whoever reads his books will stop blaspheming them. About the marriage with Pythias he himself has made a sufficient defense in his letters to Antipater. For when Hermias had died, he married her because of his goodwill toward him, she being otherwise modest and good, but unfortunate because of the disasters that had overtaken her brother.” Then next: “After the death of Pythias, Hermias’ sister, Aristotle married Herpyllis of Stagira, from whom his son Nicomachus was born. They say that he was brought up an orphan by Theophrastus and died in war while still a youth.” But let these things from the work of Aristocles mentioned be set out; it is now time to view the doctrinal philosophy of Aristotle.
On the doctrines of Aristotle, who was at variance with the Hebrews and Plato concerning the final good
Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews having laid down that the end of the blessed life is the knowledge and friendship of the God of the universe, accomplished through godliness, and having taught that true godliness is pleasing God through all virtue (for this is the cause of goods, since all things depend on God alone and all things are supplied by him to those dear to God); and Plato defining what agrees with these and declaring virtue the end of happiness; Aristotle, taking the other road, says that no one will be happy otherwise than also through the well-being of the body and an abundance of external goods, without which not even virtue benefits. How the disciples of Plato opposed him, refuting his supposition as false, may be learned from the following:
Atticus the Platonist against Aristotle, as at variance with Moses and Plato; in the discourse On the end
“For while all philosophy in common promises, for those who philosophize, human happiness, and is divided into three according to the productive distribution of the universe, the Peripatetic will be seen so far from teaching anything of Plato in these, that, though there are many who differ from Plato, he will appear most of all opposed to him. And first he made his departure from Plato on the common and greatest and most sovereign point, not keeping the measure of happiness, nor allowing virtue to be sufficient for it, but slipping from the power of virtue, and thinking that it needs in addition the gifts of fortune, so as with them to attain happiness; but if taken by itself, finding fault with it as unable to reach happiness. The ignobleness and error of his view in this and in other matters it is not the present occasion to show; but this I think is plain, that since the goal and happiness are not equal or the same according to Plato and according to Aristotle, the one always crying out and proclaiming that the most just is the happiest, the other not allowing happiness to follow virtue unless one is fortunate also in birth and beauty, and in gold too, ‘who went to war with gold, like a girl,’ the philosophy leading to the end must necessarily differ according to the difference of the end. For one walking on one road, which naturally leads to something small and lowly, cannot come to the greater things that lie on high. ‘Do you see where that high crag is, rough and hostile? On it he sits, making light of your attack.’ Onto this high crag that sharp and cunning beast cannot climb; and for the fox to come together with the eagle’s young, either they must by some evil fortune fall to the ground, their own having perished, or she must grow what she is not born to grow, swift wings to wheel, and so, lifted from the earth, fly up to the high crag. As long as each stays in its own station, there is no fellowship between the creatures of the earth and those of heaven.” And after other things he adds: “This being so, and Plato trying to draw the souls of the young upward somewhere to the divine, and in this way to make them at home with virtue and the noble, persuading them to despise all else, tell us, Peripatetic, how will you teach these things? How will you lead the lovers of Plato to them? Where in your school is such a height of words as to gain the spirit of the Aloadae and seek the road to heaven, which they thought could be made by piling up mountains, but which in fact comes about by the removal of human pursuits, as Plato says? What help, then, have you for the young toward these things? And from where is the argument that fights alongside virtue? From what writings of Aristotle? Of which of his followers? From what books? For I grant you even to lie if you like, provided it is something vigorous. But you have nothing to say, nor would any of the leaders of the school allow you. Aristotle’s treatises on these matters, at any rate, entitled Eudemian and Nicomachean and Great Ethics, think something small and lowly and vulgar about virtue, and only as much as an ordinary person, uneducated, a youth, or a woman might think. For the diadem, so to speak, and the royal scepter, which virtue received from Zeus as something that cannot be taken away (‘for it is not revocable, whatever he nods to with his head’), this they dare to take away from her. For they do not allow it to make people happy, but make it like wealth and fame and birth and health and beauty and all other things shared with vice. For as none of these, being present without virtue, is sufficient to make its possessor happy, so likewise virtue without these is not sufficient to make the one who has it happy. How, then, has the dignity of virtue not been brought down and thrown down? Yes, they say, but virtue far exceeds the other goods. What of that? So does health exceed wealth; but not sufficing for happiness apart from one another is common to all. Whenever, then, someone from these doctrines and this school teaches one who seeks the whole human good in the soul itself, he says that a happy man does not go up on the wheel, nor could one caught in the fortunes of Priam be happy and blessed. And it is not unlikely that one who has virtue falls into such things. It follows from these that happiness does not in every way follow those who have virtue, nor, if it comes, remain always. ‘Leaves the wind scatters on the ground, and the flourishing wood puts forth others; so the generation of men, one grows, another ceases.’ Your example is still small and timid, poet: ‘and the season of spring comes on.’ The time between is long, and in it nothing grows. If you want to compare exactly the perishable and rotten state of the human race, set beside it Aristotle’s happiness. This grows and fails more easily than leaves, not waiting for the year to come round, not within the year, not within the month, but on the same day, in the same hour, comes and perishes. Many are the things that destroy it, and all from fortune: for the afflictions of the body, and these are countless, and poverty and dishonor and the like; and against nothing are the resources of dear virtue sufficient for help; for it is too weak to keep off unhappiness or preserve happiness. One brought up on these and pleased with these arguments, then, how will he ever agree with Plato’s, or strengthen others toward them? For there is no way that one setting out from these could accept those Herculean and divine doctrines, that virtue is a strong and all-noble thing, never lacking for happiness nor ever deprived of it; but even if poverty, if disease, if disgrace, if tortures, if pitch and the cross, if all the evils of tragedy flood in together, still the just man is happy and blessed. With the loudest herald he proclaims, like a victorious athlete, the most just man, that he is the happiest, he who plucks the fruit of happiness from justice itself. Divide, then, if you like, and embroider, distinguishing goods into three and four and many kinds; for this is nothing to the purpose. You will never bring us to Plato through them. For what if of goods, as you say, some are honored, like the gods, others praiseworthy, like the virtues, others powers, like wealth and strength, others beneficial, like treatments? What if, distinguishing them by a smaller division, you say that some goods are ends and others not ends, calling ends those for whose sake the others exist, and not ends those taken for the sake of others? What if one should learn that some are good absolutely and others not for all? Or that some are goods of the soul, others of the body, others external? Or again that of goods some are powers, others dispositions and states, others activities, others ends, others materials, others instruments? Even if one learns from you to divide the good tenfold by the ten categories, what have these teachings to do with Plato’s view? For as long as you, speaking of goods equivocally or however you like, take in certain things other than those of virtue as necessary for happiness, taking away the sufficiency of virtue, while Plato inquires about the others as a bonus, having from virtue itself abundance for happiness, there could be nothing in common between you on this point; you need other arguments, and Plato’s followers others. For as ‘there are no faithful oaths between lions and men, nor do wolves and lambs have a like mind,’ so there is no friendship between Plato and Aristotle concerning the chief and most sovereign doctrine of happiness. For throughout, if they do not think evil of one another, they are seen at least to say opposite things about what bears on this.”
The same against the same, as at variance with Moses and Plato; in the discourse On Providence
Again, though Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews, and Plato too in agreement with them, have set out clearly the account of providence over the universe, Aristotle, stopping the divine at the moon, excludes the other parts of the world from God’s government. For this he is refuted by the writer mentioned, who goes through it somewhat thus: “Since the most important and sovereign of the things contributing to happiness is the conviction about providence, which most of all sets human life right, if we are not to be ignorant whether ‘by justice the race of men on earth climbs the higher wall, or by crooked deceits,’ Plato attaches all things to God and derives them from God. For he says that he, holding the beginning and middle and end of all things, accomplishes them going straight round. And again he says that he is good, and in the good no envy ever arises about anything. Being free of this, he makes all things as good as possible, bringing them into order from disorder; and caring for all things and ordering all things as far as possible, he has taken thought for men as well.” And a little after: “And Plato thus. But he who removes this daimonic nature out of the way, and cuts off the soul’s hope of hereafter, and takes away reverence in the present toward the higher beings, what fellowship does he have with Plato? Or how could he urge to what Plato wishes and confirm what was said? On the contrary, he would appear a fellow worker and fellow fighter of those who wish to do wrong. For every human being, held by human desires, if he despises the gods and thinks they are nothing to him, as being far removed from them while he lives, and, when dead, no longer existing, would be ready to gratify his desires. For it is not impossible to gain assurance of escaping notice in doing wrong, if it is men one must escape; and it is not even necessary to seek by all means to escape notice, where one is able to overpower those who have detected him. So despair of providence is a ready thing for injustice. For that man is very good indeed who, holding out pleasure to us as the good and providing freedom from fear of the gods, still thinks he provides a device for not doing wrong, doing something like a physician who neglects help while the patient is alive, and after death tries to weave some devices for the saving of the dead man. And the Peripatetic is very like him. For zeal for pleasure does not so strengthen injustice as disbelief that the divine cares. What then, one might say, do you put Aristotle and Epicurus in the same rank? Certainly, as regards the matter in hand. For what difference does it make to us whether one banishes the divine from the world and leaves us no fellowship with it, or shuts the gods up in the world and removes them from affairs on earth? For with both alike there is the gods’ neglect of men, and equal for the wrongdoers is the impunity from the gods. That while they remain in heaven we too enjoy some good is common above all to irrational and soulless things; and in this way, even according to Epicurus, benefit comes to men from the gods. They say, at least, that their better emanations become joint causes of great goods for those who share in them. But it is not right to count either this one or that one in the account of providence. For if according to Epicurus providence is gone, although according to him the gods bring all care to the preservation of their own goods, so also according to Aristotle providence would be gone, even if the things in heaven are governed in some order and arrangement. For we seek a providence that concerns us, in which he has no share who has allowed neither daimones nor heroes nor that souls can survive at all. That, in my judgment, Epicurus seems to have done more modestly; for as if despairing that the gods, if they came together with men, could refrain from caring for them, he removed them as into a foreign land and settled them somewhere outside the world, excusing their inhumanity by their withdrawal and lack of fellowship with everything. But this extraordinary discoverer of nature of ours and exact judge of divine things, placing human affairs under the very eyes of the gods, left them unattended and uncared for, governed by nature and not by God’s reason. Hence he too would reasonably not escape the charge some divine against Epicurus, that it was not by conviction but through fear of men that he assigned the gods a place in the universe, like a seat in a theater. They take as evidence of the man’s view that he took away their activity toward us, from which alone the existence of the gods would have had just credence. For Aristotle does this very thing. For having removed them and handed over belief to sight alone, a faculty weak to judge things at such a distance, he might seem to say out of shame that there are gods there. For not leaving anything outside the world, nor bringing the gods near to things on earth, he was compelled either to admit that he was altogether an atheist or, to preserve the appearance of not having abandoned the gods, to settle the gods somewhere there. But Epicurus, by excusing the higher beings from strict care through their separation, seems to disbelieve in the gods decently.” So Atticus against Aristotle, who cheats the account of providence. And the same adds this too to what has been said, addressing the same man, who would not have the world to be generated:
The same against the same, as at variance with Moses and Plato; in the discourse denying that the world was created
Again, while Moses determined that the world came into being, and set God over the universe as Maker and Creator, and Plato taught the same as Moses, Aristotle, taking the opposite road in this too, is refuted by the writer mentioned, who writes thus word for word: “First, then, examining the origin of the world, and considering it necessary to seek every means to secure this great and most beneficial doctrine of providence, and reckoning that what did not come into being has no need of any maker or any guardian to come into being well, so as not to deprive the world of providence he took away its being ungenerated. We ask now that those from the same hearth not stand in our way, who hold that according to Plato too the world is ungenerated. For they ought in fairness to pardon us if, about Plato’s views, we believe what he himself, a Greek speaking to us Greeks, has said with clear and distinct mouth. “For God,” he says, “taking over all that was visible, which was not at rest but moving discordantly and without order, brought it into order from disorder, thinking this in every way better than that.” And still more, that he did not accept generation in riddles or for the sake of clarity, he shows by what the Father of all says to him about this after the making of the universe. “For since you have come into being,” he says (he speaks to the gods), “you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble, yet you shall not be dissolved, having obtained my will.” But, as I said, with those who speak under their breath among us, being friends, we might settle the matter in a friendly way and quietly by gentle refutations. For Aristotle seems to have changed these too, since they were unable to withstand the accusation against the doctrine, and did not wish to attribute to Plato an opinion shown to be false. But according to what we have heard, since Plato holds that the world came into being, the finest work of the finest of craftsmen, and attributes to the Maker of the universe a power by which he both made the world, which did not exist before, and, having made it, will preserve it safe forever if he wishes, and so the world is supposed by him to be generated and imperishable, which of the Peripatetics confirms this for us?” “One must encourage the one who fights alongside these views, that it is not at all necessary that if something has come into being it must perish, nor again that if something will not perish it must be ungenerated. For we must not grant that the imperishable has only one cause, that of being ungenerated, nor leave what has come into being helpless against change into destruction. From where in Aristotle’s writings, then, should we take help for this, from a man who does not complete his account of these things casually or by himself, but sets himself directly against Plato, and brings what has come to be under the necessity of perishing, and says that what does not perish has its imperishability secured only by not having come to be, and does not even leave a power to God by which he might make anything good? For what has not come into being before, he says, could not come into being. He is so far from helping Plato’s doctrine by these that he has already frightened some of Plato’s devotees with what he said and turned them away from the doctrine, since they could not see that according to the nature of things themselves, without God’s will and power, it was not possible to conceive either what had come into being as imperishable or what would not perish as generated. But when one sets the best cause, that from God, he must take it as leader of all things and show it no worse than any of the other causes. For it is ridiculous that because something has come into being it should perish, even if God wills that it not perish; and that because something is ungenerated it should have the strength not to perish, while the will of God should fall short of keeping imperishable anything that has come into being. And the builder is able to construct a house that did not exist, and someone is able to make a statue that did not exist before, and another, having fashioned a ship out of idle material, provides it to those who need it; and each of the other craftsmen, all who practice the productive arts, have this power of bringing something that does not exist into being. Shall the King of all and best of craftsmen not share even as much power as a human craftsman, and be for us without part in any coming-into-being? No, if we are able to take even a little consideration of divine causation. But is he able to make and to will what is good (for he is good, and in the good there is no envy about anything), but unable to keep and preserve what has come into being? And yet the other craftsmen are able to do both. The builder and the shipwright, at any rate, not only construct new ships and houses, but are able to help those damaged by time, putting other worked pieces in their place. So this much at least must be granted to God too. For how could one who can make the whole be unable to make it in part? Something new must come into being, then, if one is to be a maker at all, and the fine work must be preserved for all time; for to wish to undo what has come into being well belongs to the wicked. There is no greater bond for the preservation of what has come into being than the will of God. Or do many things that have received human effort and will, nations and cities and works, remain an immense time after they have come into being when he who willed them no longer exists, while the things that have received God’s purpose and came into being through him and by him will pass away and not remain while their Maker is present? By what cause forcing God’s purpose? By the necessity from the things that came into being themselves? But this, by accepting being ordered, has already admitted its defeat by God. Or by some cause from outside contending with God? But there is none, nor is it right, in the things God has already mastered and ordered, to make him inferior to anything, unless we are altogether unaware of ourselves in discussing the greatest and most divine power. But we seem to be carried away by eagerness into the account of the truth. What we proposed is clear: those who do not even grant the world a beginning of generation could not be teachers about the world’s generation.” And moreover about the fifth substance of bodies, which Aristotle introduced, this must be set out:
The same against the same, as assuming a fifth corporeal essence, which neither Moses nor Plato recognized
“About the so-called elements, at any rate, from which bodies are first composed, Plato, following the evidence about them, as those before him did, said that they are four, as is agreed, fire and earth and air and water, and that all the rest are generated from these by their combination; but Aristotle, hoping, it seems, to appear more extraordinary in wisdom if he added some body extraordinarily, counted in with the four visible bodies the fifth substance, using nature very splendidly and generously, not seeing that one who studies nature must not legislate but relate what belongs to nature itself. To the proof that the first natures of bodies are four, which the Platonists need, the Peripatetic would not only contribute nothing, but would be almost alone in opposing it. When we say, at any rate, that every body is hot or cold, wet or dry, soft or hard, light or heavy, rare or dense, and find that there could be nothing else sharing in any of these besides the four (for if hot, fire or air; if cold, water or earth; and if dry, fire or earth; if wet, water or air; and if soft, air or fire; if hard, water or earth; and light and rare, such as fire and air; heavy and dense, water and earth); and when from all the other simple powers we perceive that there could be no other body besides these, he alone resists, saying that there can be a body without share in these; a body neither heavy nor light, neither soft nor hard, neither wet nor dry, all but saying a body that is not a body. For he has left it the name, but taken away all the powers by which a body naturally comes to be. Either, then, he will persuade us of what he says and take us away from Plato’s view, or, confirming Plato’s, he will abandon his own; so that he is in no way useful for Plato’s teaching. Further, Plato holds that all bodies, being considered as on one like matter, turn and change into one another; but he thinks that the substance of the heavenly bodies, unlike the others, is impassible and imperishable and altogether unchangeable, so that he may not seem to be the begetter of some contemptible thing, saying nothing extraordinary or his own at all, but transferring what Plato saw well in other matters to things where it does not belong, like some sculptors who came later. For they, copying the head of this man, the chest of another, and the waist of another, and putting together into one things sometimes not fitting one another, persuaded themselves that they had made something of their own; and in fact the whole, which one might blame as disproportioned, is theirs, but the parts collected into it and having some beauty are not theirs. So too Aristotle, hearing Plato say that there is an intelligible substance by itself, incorporeal and colorless and intangible, neither coming to be nor perishing nor turning nor changing, but always the same and in the same state; and again hearing about the heavenly things, that they are divine and imperishable and impassible bodies, put together and glued from both things that do not agree; taking from the one being a body and from the other being impassible, he contrived an impassible body. With statues, even if what is made from different things is not beautiful, it is not impossible to make. Homer teaches such things, at least: “in eyes and head,” he says, “like Zeus who delights in thunder, in waist like Ares, in chest like Poseidon.” But an impassible body could never come into being. For bound to a passible and changeable nature, it must suffer along with that to which it is yoked. And if anything were impassible, it must be released and free from what suffers; so it would be apart from matter, and, being separate from it, would necessarily be admitted to be incorporeal.” Let us attend also to the other matters in which he shows Aristotle to differ from Plato:
The same against the same, as at variance with Plato also in his theories as to the heaven: matters about which Moses does not concern himself
“Then there are many points following these on which they differ. For the one says that the heavenly bodies have their form mostly from fire, the other that the heavenly bodies have no share of fire at all. And the one says that God kindled a light in the second circuit from the earth, so that it might shine as much as possible over the whole heaven, declaring this of the sun; but the other, not wishing the sun to be fire, and knowing that light is pure fire or something of fire, does not allow light to have been kindled around it. Further, the one, while giving imperishability in form to all the heavenly bodies, says that certain proportionate departures and approaches take place in them; what compels him to say this is, for the separations, the rays and heats of the sun coming about by outflow from it; for the additions, the apparent equality of its size; for it would not appear equal if it received nothing in return for what it gives off. But Aristotle wants them to remain entirely in the same substance, nothing departing from them or coming to them. Further, the one, besides the common motion of the stars, by which all the stars, fixed and wandering, bound in their spheres are moved, gives them another motion too, which happens also to be the finest and proper to the nature of their body (for being spherical, each would reasonably move with a spherical motion, whirling round); but the other takes from them this motion too, by which they move as having souls, and leaves only that which happens to them from the other bodies that contain them, as if they were soulless. And indeed he says that the appearance we have of the stars as moving is an affection of our sight, which is weak and as it were shaken, but not the truth; as if Plato took his belief about their motion from this, and not from the argument that teaches that each of these, being a living being and having soul and body, must move with its own motion (for every body that is moved from outside is soulless, but that moved from within and from itself is ensouled); and moving, being divine, it moves with the finest motion; and since the finest motion is that in a circle, it moves in this. Perception would bear witness to what comes from reason as truthful, but it did not itself supply the belief in the motion. About the motion of the universe, he could not contradict Plato by saying that it does not take place in a circle, being overcome by the evidence; but here too this fine discovery of the body gave him a difference from him. For Plato, since there are four bodies and all move by nature in a simple and straight motion, fire outward, earth to the middle, and the others to the space between, assigned circular motion to the soul; but he, as he gave a different motion to a different body, so also gave circular motion, as if some bodily motion, to the fifth body, easily deceiving himself in everything. For to those moving in a straight line weights and lightnesses supplied the beginning of motion; but the fifth body, having no share of weight or lightness, would be a cause rather of immobility. and not of motion in a circle. For if for those moving in a straight line it is not their shape that is the cause of their motion, but their inclination, a body not only placed in the middle of something like itself will not have a direction to incline, but placed round in a circle of whatever kind will have no cause of inclining to anything, whether “they go to the right, toward the dawn and the sun, or to the left,” whether forward or backward. Further, for the other bodies, when pushed out of their proper places, their relation to these supplies the motion back of themselves; but for that fifth body, which never leaves its own places, it would be fitting to remain still. And about the other bodies too, the fifth being set aside, Aristotle evidently strives not to say the same as Plato. For when Plato inquired whether there is a body heavy by nature or light by nature, and, since these were seen to be spoken of according to relation to up and down, examined whether there is anything up and down by nature or not, and showed precisely that according to the affinities of bodies to places, down for each would be said to be that to which they are carried, and up for each the alien place from which they withdraw, and divided heavy and light according to the same relation, and besides this showed that it is not reasonable to call either the middle or the circumference of them up or down; he opposes this, thinking he must tear down Plato’s views on every side, and forces himself to call what moves to the middle heavy and what moves to the circumference light, and says the place in the middle is down and that at the circumference up.” So far, then, the two stand apart from each other concerning the world, and what it consists of, and the heavenly bodies. So these men. But Moses and the oracles of the Hebrews concern themselves with none of these things; and reasonably, since it was not thought to profit those occupied with them for the right ordering of life.
The same against the same, as at variance with Plato and the Hebrew Scriptures also on the subject of the immortality of the soul
“And what could we say about the soul? For this is plain not only to philosophers but now to almost all ordinary people too, that Plato leaves the soul immortal and has made many arguments about this, showing in various and manifold ways that the soul is immortal. And there has been great zeal among those devoted to Plato, contending for both the doctrine and Plato. For this is almost what holds the man’s whole system together. For the foundation of the ethical doctrines followed on the soul’s immortality, virtue being able to preserve its greatness and splendor and vigor because of the divinity of the soul; and all the things of nature came to be well governed according to the soul’s government. “For all soul,” he says, “cares for all that is soulless, and goes about the whole heaven, coming to be now in one form, now in another.” And indeed for Plato the things of knowledge and wisdom are attached to the soul’s immortality. For all learning is recollection, and he thinks that inquiry and learning, from which knowledge comes, could not otherwise be preserved. But if the soul is not immortal, there is no recollection either; and if not this, no learning either. Since all Plato’s doctrines, then, simply hang and depend on the divinity and immortality of the soul, he who does not grant this overturns the whole philosophy of Plato. Who, then, was the first who undertook to set himself against the proofs, and to take from the soul its immortality and all its other power? Who other than Aristotle? For of the others, some granted that it survives, others, if not this, at least assigned to the soul power in the body and some motion and works and actions; but he, as much as Plato exalted the soul, declaring it the principle of generation and a pupil of God and the ruler of all things, so much he strove to pull it down and dishonor it and make the soul almost nothing. For it is neither breath nor fire nor body at all, nor incorporeal such as to exist by itself and move, but not even, as far as concerns the body, unmoved and, so to speak, soulless. What did he dare, or was he compelled to, so as to take from the soul even its primary motions, deliberating, thinking, expecting, remembering, reasoning? For the secretary of nature, as they call him, says that these are not motions of the soul. Very trustworthy, then, is he to understand anything of external things, who has so far mistaken his own soul as not to follow even that it thinks. For it is not the soul, he says, but the man who performs each of these, and the soul is unmoved. Following him, then, Dicaearchus, being able to see the consequence, did away with the whole existence of the soul. For that the soul is something invisible and unseen is clear, so that we could not grant that there is a soul because of the activity from the senses; but its motions, though it is unseen, seem to compel us to admit that the soul is something. For everyone seems to understand that these belong to the soul: deliberating, considering, and thinking in whatever way. For when we see the body and its powers, and consider such activities as not of the body, we grant that there is something else in us that deliberates, and that this is the soul. For from where else did we believe about the soul? If, then, one takes away these things, from which above all the soul appears, and attaches them to something else, he has left neither the ground from which it shows itself to exist, nor in what way it might seem useful. What help, then, has one who wants the soul immortal from him who kills the soul? And what teaching on the manner of motion, by which we say it is self-moved, from those who allow it no motion at all? Yes, one might say, but in the immortality of the mind he shares with Plato. For even if he does not want the whole soul to be immortal, he admits that the mind is divine and imperishable. What the mind is in substance and nature, from where it comes, and from where it enters men, and where it departs again, he himself would know; if indeed he understands anything of what he says about the mind, and does not wrap the difficulty of the matter in the obscurity of his speech and so escape refutation, procuring, like the cuttlefish, the difficulty of being caught from the darkness. In any case he differs from Plato in this too. For the one says that mind cannot subsist without soul, the other separates mind from soul. And immortality the one gives it with the soul, since it is not otherwise possible; the other says it belongs to it only when separated from the soul. And he did not see fit that the soul should leave the body, because Plato held this, but forced mind to be torn from the soul, because Plato knew such a thing to be impossible.” So much from Atticus. I shall join to them also the words of Plotinus, which run thus:
Plotinus, from the second Book On the immortality of the soul, against Aristotle's assertion that the soul is an ' actuality' ( εντελέχεια )
“How ‘entelechy’ is said of the soul one might examine thus. They say that the soul holds the rank of form in the compound, in relation to the ensouled body as matter; and that it is the form not of every body, nor of body as body, but of a natural body, furnished with organs, having life potentially. If, then, it is like that with which it is compared, as the shape of a statue to the bronze, then when the body is divided the soul would be divided with it, and when any part is cut off there would be a portion of soul with the part cut off; and the soul’s withdrawal in sleep would not happen, if the entelechy must be grown into that of which it is the entelechy; though in truth sleep would not even happen. And indeed, if it were an entelechy, there would be no opposition of reason to desires, but the whole would be affected in one and the same way throughout, not disagreeing with itself. Perceptions alone might perhaps come about, but thoughts could not. That is why they themselves bring in mind as another soul, which they make immortal. The reasoning soul, then, must be an entelechy in some other way than this, if one must use this name. Nor will the perceiving soul, since it too holds the impressions of perceived things when they are absent, hold them with the body; otherwise they will be in it as shapes and images; but it would be impossible to receive them otherwise, if they were in it so. So it is not an inseparable entelechy. Nor indeed is the desiring part, which desires not food or drink but other things beyond those of the body, itself an inseparable entelechy. What remains would be the vegetative part, which might seem to admit of dispute, whether it is not an inseparable entelechy in this way. But this does not appear to be so either. For if the principle of every plant is about the root, and while the rest of the body is growing the soul is about the root and the lower parts in many plants, the soul has clearly left the other parts and been drawn together into one place; so it was not in the whole as an inseparable entelechy. And again, before the plant grows, it is in the small mass. If, then, it both comes into a little from a larger plant and from a little to the whole, what prevents it from being wholly separated? And how could it, being partless, become a divided entelechy of a divided body? And the same soul passes from one animal into another; how then would the soul of the former become that of the next, if it were the entelechy of one? This is evident from the animals that change into other animals. So it does not have its being by being the form of something, but is a substance, not receiving its being from being seated in a body, but existing before it came to belong to this, for example, to a living being; the body will not generate the soul. What, then, is its substance? If it is neither body nor an affection of body, but action and making, and many things are both in it and from it, being a substance besides bodies, what kind is it? Is it not clear that it is what we say is truly substance? For all that is bodily might be said to be becoming, but not substance, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being, preserved by participation in being, so far as it participates in it.” And since we have gone through the words of Plotinus too, it is not out of place to look also at what was said by Porphyry in his books against Boethus On the Soul:
Porphyry on the same, from the answer to Boëthus On the soul
“To him who called the soul an entelechy and supposed that, being wholly unmoved, it moves, we must say: from where come the inspirations of the living being, when it understands nothing of what it sees and says, while the soul sees what is to come and is not present and is moved accordingly; and from where, in the constitution of the living being, come the counsels and considerations and wishes of the soul as of a living being, which are inclinations of the soul and not of the body?” Then next he adds: “To compare the soul to weight, or to uniform and unmoved bodily qualities, by which the subject is either moved or qualified, belongs to one who has utterly fallen away, willingly or unwillingly, from the dignity of the soul, and has in no way seen that by the presence of the soul the body of the living being has become living, as by the presence of fire the water placed beside it becomes hot, being cold in itself, and by the sun’s rising the air is lit, being dark without its shining. But neither was the heat of the water the heat of the fire, nor the fire itself, nor the light in the air the light innate in the sun; and likewise neither is the animation of the body, which is like weight and the quality of a body, the soul that is set down in the body, through which the body has shared in a certain breath of life.” Then after other things he adds: “The other things that others have said about it bring us shame. For how is the account not shameful that makes the soul the entelechy of a natural body furnished with organs? And how is that not full of shame which makes it breath in a certain state, or intelligent fire, kindled or tempered by the chilling and, as it were, dipping in the air, or which makes it a gathering of atoms, or declares that it is generated from body at all? This account he declared in the Laws to be the impious account of the impious. All these accounts, then, are full of shame. But at the one who calls it a self-moved substance, he says, no one would be ashamed.”
Against the same, as at variance with Plato in the argument Concerning the universal soul. From the same
“Further, when Plato says that soul orders all things, pervading all things, and that this is the one by which the others too would admit each thing is governed, and that nature is nothing else than soul, and clearly a soul not irrational, and concludes from this that all things come about by providence, if indeed by nature; Aristotle agrees with us on none of these. For he says nature is not soul, and that the things about the earth are governed by nature. For there are different causes for each kind of thing: he supposes fate as cause of the heavenly things, nature of those below the moon, and wisdom and providence and soul of human things; offering elegance in such divisions, but not seeing what is necessary. For if there were not one ensouled power pervading the universe and binding and holding all things together, the universe could not be governed reasonably or well. It would be of the same blindness to hope that a city could ever be well conducted without unity, and to think that this all-beautiful universe would preserve its order as it appears, without binding and fitting it together by fellowship in some one like thing. And he says that the thing that governs each is such as to be a principle of motion, but he will not have this be soul; though Plato himself shows that soul is the principle and source of motion for all things that move. And what would be the work of a rational and wise soul, to make nothing in vain, this he assigns to nature, but does not give it the name of soul, as though things were understood from names and not from powers.”
Against, the same ; for ridiculing the Platonic Ideas, of which the Hebrew Scriptures also have already been shown not to be ignorant
“The head and authority of Plato’s school, the ordering of the intelligible things, has been dishonored and trampled in the mud and insulted in every way, as far as lay in Aristotle. For not being able to conceive that the great and divine and extraordinary things need some similar power for their knowledge, but trusting his own fine and lowly sharpness, which could penetrate the things on earth and see the truth in them, but could not survey the plain of true truth, using himself as rule and judge of things above him, he denied that there are any such natures as Plato knew, and dared to call the highest of beings nonsense and twitterings and babble. The summit and last of Plato’s philosophical teachings concerns this intelligible and eternal substance of the Ideas, where the last toil and contest is set before the soul. For he who shares in it and reaches it is wholly happy, while he who is left behind and unable to become its beholder is left wholly without share in happiness. And for this reason Plato contends everywhere, showing the strength of these natures; for he says that it is not possible to give a good account of anything at all unless it partakes of these, nor any knowledge of anything true except by reference to them, nor will any share in reason unless they admit their being. And those who have resolved to establish Plato’s teachings place the greatest contest of their arguments in this, quite necessarily. For nothing Platonic remains if one does not grant them, on Plato’s behalf, these first and most principal natures. For it is by these above all that he excels the others. For having conceived God in relation to them as the Father and Maker and Master and Guardian of all things, and knowing from works that the craftsman first conceives what he is going to make, and then afterward brings the likeness of what he has conceived to the things; so in the same way, the thoughts of God are older than the things, the patterns of what has come to be, incorporeal and intelligible, always the same and in the same state, being above all and first themselves, and joint causes for the others of each being such as it is, by likeness to them. Plato, seeing that they are not very easily seen nor able to be shown clearly by speech, worked himself to speak and think about them as far as possible and to prepare those who would follow, and ordering his whole philosophy to this end, says that wisdom and knowledge concern these and the understanding of them, through which man’s end and the blessed life come about.” So much Atticus. One could set out still more than these from the man’s work mentioned; but contenting ourselves with what has been set out, we shall pass on to the school of the Stoics. Antisthenes, then, became a hearer of Socrates, a man of Heraclean spirit, who said that it is better to be mad than to feel pleasure; that is why he advised his pupils never to stretch out a finger for the sake of pleasure. Diogenes the Dog was his hearer, who, seeming himself to think most like a beast, drew many after him. Crates succeeded him; and Zeno of Citium was Crates’ pupil, who became the founder of the school of the Stoic philosophers. Cleanthes succeeded Zeno, Chrysippus Cleanthes, and the other Zeno him, and the others in turn. All of these are said to have cared especially for a hard life and for dialectic. The doctrines of their philosophy run somewhat thus:
On the Stoic philosophy, and the account of First Principles as rendered by Zeno. From the seventh Book of Aristocles On philosophy
“They say that the element of existing things is fire, as Heraclitus did, and its principles matter and God, as Plato did. But he says both are bodies, both the active and the passive, while Plato says that the first active cause is incorporeal. Then also that at certain fated times the whole world is set on fire, and then ordered again. The first fire is like a seed, holding the principles of all things and the causes of what has been and is and will be; and their interweaving and sequence is fate and knowledge and truth and a law of existing things, inescapable and unavoidable. By this all things in the world are governed exceedingly well, as in a most well-ordered city.”
What kind of opinion the Stoics profess concerning God, and concerning the constitution of the universe. From Arius Didymus.
“They call the whole world with its own parts God; and they say it is one only, and limited, and a living being, and everlasting, and God. For in it all bodies are contained, and there is no void in it. For what is qualified from the whole substance is so called, that which has such an arrangement according to the ordering. That is why according to the former sense they say the world is everlasting, but according to the ordering it is generated and changeable in endless periods that have been and will be. And the world qualified from the whole substance is everlasting and God; and the system of heaven and air and earth and sea and the natures in them is called the world; and the dwelling of gods and men and of what came to be for their sake is also called the world. For as a city is spoken of in two ways, the dwelling and the system of the inhabitants with the citizens, so the world too is as it were a city made up of gods and men, the gods having the leadership and men being subject. There is fellowship between them through sharing in reason, which is law by nature; and all the other things came to be for their sake. In accordance with which one must hold that the God who governs the universe takes forethought for men, being beneficent and kind and loving to man, just and having all the virtues. That is why the world is also called Zeus, since it is the cause of our living (zēn). And inasmuch as it governs all things inviolably from eternity by a linked reason, it is called Fate (Heimarmenē); Adrasteia, because there is no escaping it; Providence, because it manages each thing for advantage. Cleanthes held that the ruling part of the world is the sun, because it is the greatest of the stars and contributes most to the government of the universe, making day and year and the other seasons. Some of the school thought the earth the ruling part of the world; but Chrysippus the purest and most unmixed ether, as being the most mobile of all and carrying round the whole motion of the world.” Let these things from the Epitome of Arius Didymus be set out; and against the Stoics’ opinion about God it suffices to set out the words of Porphyry in what he wrote in reply to Boethus On the Soul, which run thus:
Porphyry, against the opinion of the Stoics concerning God, from the answer to Boëthus On the soul.
“They do not hesitate, calling God intelligent fire, to leave him everlasting, and to say that he destroys and consumes all things, as being such a fire as the one known to us; and to contradict Aristotle, who declines to say that the ether is made of such a fire. And when asked how such fire endures, they do not say it is a different fire, but having said it is such and having thought it right to be believed when they say so, they add to this irrational belief that it is also everlasting fire, while holding that even the ethereal fire is in part quenched and kindled. But why should one go on at length about their blindness to their own views and their carelessness and contempt for those of the ancients?”
That true Being cannot be body, as the Stoics teach. From the first Book of Numenius On the good
“But what then is being? Is it these four elements, earth and fire and the two other natures between? Are these, then, the things that are, either all together or at least each of them singly? And how, when they are both generated and recurrent, if indeed one can see them coming to be from one another and changing places, and being neither elements nor syllables? Body, then, in this way would not be being. But perhaps not these, but matter can be being? But this too is wholly impossible, because of its weakness in remaining. For matter is a river, flowing and swift-rushing, indefinite and endless in depth and breadth and length.” And a little after he adds: “So that the argument has spoken well, saying that if matter is infinite it is indefinite; if indefinite, irrational; if irrational, unknowable. And being unknowable, it must be disordered; for ordered things would surely be very easy to know; and the disordered does not stand still; and what does not stand still could not be being. This was what we agreed among ourselves before, that it is not lawful for all these to be brought together with being. Let it seem so above all to everyone, but if not, then to me. I say, then, that neither matter itself nor bodies are being. What then? Do we have something else besides these in the nature of the universe? Yes; and this is nothing intricate to say, if first we try it out at the same time in ourselves by discussion. Since bodies are by nature dead and lifeless and carried about and not remaining in the same state, do they not need something to hold them together? Above all. And if they did not meet with this, would they remain? Least of all. What, then, is that which will hold them? If this too were body, it seems to me it would itself need Zeus the Savior, being loosened and scattered. But if it must be free from the affections of bodies, so that it can ward off destruction from those that have been conceived and hold them, it seems to me that it is nothing else than the incorporeal alone. For this alone of all natures stands still, and is fixed, and is in no way bodily. It neither comes to be nor grows nor moves with any other motion; and for these reasons it rightly appeared just to honor the incorporeal first.”
What the Stoics think concerning the conflagration of the universe
“The oldest of this school hold that all things become ether, all things being dissolved, at certain very long periods, into ethereal fire.” And next he adds: “From this it is clear that Chrysippus did not take, in the case of substance, this confusion, for it is impossible, but the one spoken of in place of change. For those who teach the dissolution of the universe into fire, which they call conflagration, do not use “destruction” properly of the world’s destruction that happens in the greatest periods, but use the name of destruction in place of change according to nature. For the Stoic philosophers hold that the whole substance changes into fire, as into a seed, and again from this the ordering is completed such as it was before. And this doctrine was accepted by the first and oldest of the school, Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus. For Zeno, his pupil and successor in the school, they say suspended judgment about the conflagration of the universe.”
What the Stoics think concerning the regeneration of the universe
“The common reason having advanced so far, and the common nature having become greater and fuller, having at last dried up all things and taken them up into itself, it comes to be in the whole substance, having returned to the first-mentioned account and to that resurrection that makes the greatest year, in which the restoration takes place from itself alone back into itself. Having returned through order, from such an arrangement as it began to order things in the same way, it again makes the same course according to reason, such periods taking place from eternity without ceasing. For it is not possible for there to be a cause of the beginning and for all things, nor of what governs them. For a substance must underlie the things that come to be, of a nature to receive all the changes, and that which fashions from it. For as in us there is a certain fashioning nature, so of necessity there is something of the kind in the world too, ungenerated; for there cannot be a beginning of generation in the case of this nature. And as it is ungenerated, so it is impossible for it to be destroyed, either by itself or by anything outside destroying it.”
What the same sect think concerning the soul
“The seed, Zeno says, which a man emits is breath with moisture, a part and fragment of soul, and a blend and mixture of the seed of the ancestors, come together from the parts of the soul. For having the same principles as the whole, when it is released into the womb, it is caught by another breath, becoming a part of the soul of the female and grown together with it, and hidden, it grows, being moved and fanned by it, always taking in more moisture and increasing of itself.” And a little after he adds: “About the soul, Cleanthes, setting out the doctrines of Zeno for comparison with the other natural philosophers, says that Zeno calls the soul a perceptive exhalation, as Heraclitus does. For wishing to show that souls, being exhaled, always become intelligent, he likened them to rivers, saying thus: ‘On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow; and souls too are exhaled from what is moist.’ Zeno, then, declares the soul an exhalation, as Heraclitus does, and he says it is perceptive for this reason, that its ruling part can be impressed by the things that are and exist through the organs of sense and receive the impressions. For these are properties of the soul.” And after other things: “They say there is a soul in the whole, which they call ether, and air around the earth and sea, and exhalations from these; and that the other souls are joined to this, both those in living beings and those in the surrounding air; for the souls of the dead remain. Some say that the soul of the whole is everlasting, while the others are mingled with it at their end. And every soul has some ruling part in itself, which is life and perception and impulse.” And again a little after: “They say that the soul is generated and perishable; but it does not perish at once on being released from the body, but remains for some times by itself; that of the good until the dissolution of all things into fire, that of the foolish for certain periods. And they speak of souls remaining in this sense: that we remain, becoming souls, when the body is separated and we change into the lesser substance of the soul. But the souls of the foolish and of irrational animals perish with their bodies.” Such are the doctrines of the Stoic philosophy, collected from the Epitomes of Arius Didymus. Against the men’s absurd opinion about the soul, the brief refutations by Longinus, of our own time, suffice, in these words:
The disputation of Longinus against the opinion of the Stoics concerning the soul
“To speak briefly, all those in succession who have declared the soul to be a body seem to me to have strayed far from reasoning as one should. For how is it at all possible to make what belongs to it similar to any of the elements? And where could one refer it to blends and mixtures? These, coming about in many ways, are of a nature to beget the forms of countless other bodies, in which, if not continuously, yet at a distance one can see the cause in the elements and the starting point of the first toward the second and third. But of the things of the soul no trace or sign is found in bodies, even if one were eager, like Epicurus and Chrysippus, to move every stone and search every power of body for the origin of the acts of the soul. For what would the fineness of breath contribute for us to impressions and reasonings? And what? Has the shape of atoms so much power beyond the others, and such turning, as to beget wisdom when mixed into the molding of another body? I think that not even if one should happen to be one of the tripods and handmaids of Hephaestus (of whom Homer says that the former went of themselves to the assembly, and the latter worked with their master, and lacked none of the advantages the living have), still less one of the particles of chance, which are like the stones on the beaches, would it be able to do anything more extraordinary for perception. One might justly be indignant with Zeno and Cleanthes for speaking so very insolently about it, both saying that the soul is an exhalation of the solid body. For what, by the gods, has exhalation in common with soul at all? And how is it possible, thinking that our substance and that of the other animals is like this, that it can preserve lasting impressions and memories, and impulses and wishes for things profitable to understanding? Shall we then put the gods too, and him who pervades all things alike, earthly and heavenly, down as exhalation and smoke and such nonsense, and not even be ashamed before the poets, who, though they have no exact understanding of the gods, yet, partly from the common notion of men, partly from the inspiration of the Muses, which naturally moves them to these things, have said more solemn things about them, and not exhalations or airs or breaths and nonsense?” So much for you from Longinus. Hear also these words of Plotinus, addressed to the same men:
In answer to the Stoics, that the soul cannot possibly be corporeal From Plotinus On the soul, Book I
“Whether each of us is immortal, or perishes wholly, or some parts of him depart into scattering and destruction while others remain forever, which are himself, one might learn thus, examining according to nature. Man would not be something simple, but there is a soul in him, and he has a body as well, whether as our instrument or attached in some other way; at any rate let him be divided thus, and let the nature and substance of each be examined. The body, being itself composite, cannot by reason remain; and perception sees it dissolving and wasting away and receiving every kind of destruction, each of the things in it moving to its own, one destroying another, changing into another and ruining it, especially when the soul that makes them friends is not present to the masses. And even if each is isolated as it comes to be, it is not one, admitting dissolution into shape and matter, of which even the simple bodies must have their constitution. And having magnitude, being bodies, being cut and broken into small pieces, in this way too they would undergo destruction. So if this is part of us, we are not wholly immortal; and if it is an instrument, it had to be of such a nature as given for a certain time. But the most sovereign part, the man himself, would be either as form in relation to the body as matter, or as user in relation to an instrument. In either case the soul is the man himself.” “What nature, then, does this have? If it is a body, it must be analyzed altogether, for every body is composite; but if it is not a body but of another nature, that too must be examined either in the same way or in another. First we must examine into what this body, which they call soul, must be analyzed. For since life is necessarily present to soul, this body, the soul, if it is made of two or more bodies, must have either both of them, or each, possess innate life; or one have it and the other not, or neither have it. If life belongs to one of them, that one would be the soul. What body, then, would have life from itself? For fire and air and water and earth are soulless of themselves; and whatever of these has soul present uses an imported life; and there are no other bodies besides these. Those who think there are elements other than these said they were bodies, not souls, nor having life. And if, none of them having life, their coming together has made life, that is absurd. And if each has life, one suffices; or rather it is impossible for a heaping together of bodies to produce life, and for mindless things to beget mind. And indeed they will not say that these came about mixed in any random way. There must, then, be that which orders and causes the mixture; so that this would hold the rank of soul. For not only a composite body, but not even a simple body would exist among the things that are, if there were no soul in the universe, if indeed it is a rational principle coming to matter that makes body, and a rational principle could come from nowhere but from soul.” “But if someone says not so, but that atoms or partless things coming together make the soul, he would be refuted by its unity and sympathy, and by their juxtaposition: for one thing does not come to be from them, not being through and through, nor a sympathetic thing from impassible ones and bodies unable to be united; but the soul is in sympathy with itself; and from partless things neither a body nor magnitude could come to be. And indeed, if the body is simple, they will not say that its material part has life of itself (for matter is without quality), but that what is ordered according to the form brings life. If they say this form is a substance, not the compound, the soul will be one of these; and it is no longer body, for it too is not of matter, or else we shall analyze it again in the same way. But if they say it is an affection of matter and not a substance, they must say from where the affection and the life came into matter. For matter does not shape itself, nor put soul into itself. There must, then, be something that supplies life, whether the supply is to matter or to any of the bodies, being outside and beyond bodily nature; since there would not be any body if there were no psychic power. For it flows, and its nature is in motion, and it would perish very quickly if all things were bodies, even if one gave the name soul to one of them. For it would suffer the same as the other bodies, having one matter with them. Or rather it would not even come to be, but all things would stop in matter, there being nothing to shape it. And perhaps matter would not exist at all. And this universe too will be dissolved, if one entrusts it to the cohesion of a body, giving it the rank of soul in name only, to air and breath, most easily scattered, and having its unity not from itself. For how, when all bodies are divisible, will one who ascribes this universe to any one of them not make it mindless and carried at random? For what order is there in breath, which needs order from soul, or reason, or mind? But if there is soul, all these serve it for the constitution of the universe and of each living being, one power contributing from one thing and another from another to the whole; but if it were not present in the universe, these would be nothing, let alone in order.” “They themselves too, led by the truth, bear witness that there must be before bodies something better than them, a form of soul, when they posit breath as intelligent and fire as intellectual; as if the better part could not exist among the things that are without fire or breath, but seeks a place to be seated in; whereas they should seek where they will seat bodies, since these must be seated in the powers of soul. And if they posit life and soul as nothing besides breath, what about their much-talked-of “in a certain state,” to which they flee when forced to posit another active nature besides bodies? If, then, not all breath is soul, since there are countless soulless breaths, but they will say it is breath in a certain state: this “in a certain state” and this condition they will say is either something of the things that are, or nothing. But if nothing, it would be only breath, and “in a certain state” a name; and so it will follow for them to say that nothing else exists but matter, and soul and God and all things are names, and that alone exists. But if the condition is among the things that are, and something besides the substrate and matter, in matter but itself immaterial by not again being composed of matter, it would be a rational principle, and not body, and another nature. Further, from the following it appears no less impossible that the soul is any body. For it is either hot or cold, or hard or soft, wet or solid, black or white, and all the qualities of bodies, different in different ones. And if it is hot, it will only heat; if cold, it will only cool; and the light, being added and present, will make things light, and the heavy heavy, and the black black, and the white will make white. For it does not belong to fire to cool, nor to the cold to make warm. But the soul produces some things in some living beings and others in others, and opposites in the same one, solidifying some things and liquefying others, making some dense and others rare, black, white, light, heavy; and yet it should make one thing, according to the body’s quality and color; but as it is, it makes many.” “And how are the motions different, and not one, when the motion of every body is one? If they say some come from choice, others from principles, well; but choice does not belong to body, nor do the principles, which are different, when the body is one and simple, and has no share of such a principle except as much as was given it by him who made it to be hot or cold. And growing at times, and up to such a measure, from where could this come to the body itself? To it belongs to be increased, but itself to have no share in causing increase, except as much as it might be taken up in the mass of matter, serving what produces growth through it. And if the soul, being a body, caused growth, it must itself grow too, clearly by addition of a like body, if it is to keep pace with what is grown by it. And what is added will be either soul or soulless body. And if soul, from where and how does it enter and how is it added? But if what is added is soulless, how will this be ensouled and agree with what was before and become one and share the same opinions as the first? Will not this soul, like a stranger, be ignorant of what the other knows? And, like the rest of our bulk, will not something flow away from it and something come to it, and nothing be the same? How, then, do we have memories? How the recognition of familiar things, never using the same soul? And indeed if it is a body, and it is the nature of a body to be divided into several parts, each of the parts will not be the same as the whole; if the soul is of such a size, what is smaller will not be soul, just as every quantity by subtraction changes from what it was before. But if something having magnitude, reduced in bulk, remained the same in quality, as body and as quantity it is different, but by quality, which is other than quantity, it can preserve its sameness. What, then, will those say who call the soul a body? First, about each part of the soul in the same body: is each a soul, such as the whole is? And again the part of the part? Then magnitude contributed nothing to its substance (though it should have, if it were a quantity); and it is whole in many places, which cannot belong to a body, that the same whole be in many, and the part be what the whole is. But if they say each of the parts is not soul, soul will come to them from soulless things. And besides, if the magnitude of each soul is defined in either direction, whether smaller or larger, it will not be soul. When, then, from one union and one seed twin offspring come to be, or even, as in other animals, very many, the seed being divided into many places, each of which is whole, how does this not teach those willing to learn that where the part is the same as the whole, this has in its own substance transcended being a quantity, and must be without quantity? For so it would remain the same while quantity is stolen from it, since quantity and bulk are no concern of it, its substance being something other. The soul, then, and the rational principles are without quantity.” “That if the soul were a body there would be neither perceiving nor thinking nor knowing, nor virtues nor anything noble, is clear from the following. If anything is to perceive something, it must itself be one and grasp everything by the same thing; and this whether many things enter through many organs of sense, or many qualities about one thing, or a varied thing through one, like a face. For it is not one thing for the nose and another for the eye, but the same of all together. And if one thing comes through the eyes and another through hearing, there must be one thing into which both come; or how could it say that these are different, if the perceptions did not come together into the same? This must be like a center, and the perceptions from every side must end at it like lines meeting from the circumference of a circle; and what grasps them must be such, truly one. But if this were extended, and the perceptions struck as it were at both ends of a line, either they will run together again into one and the same, like the middle, or else each will have a perception of each, as if I perceived one thing and you another. And if the object perceived is one, like a face, it will be gathered into one, as indeed appears; for it is gathered even in the pupils themselves (or how could the greatest things be seen through them?); so that, going still more to the ruling part, they become like partless thoughts. And this will be partless; or, being a magnitude, it would be divided with it, so that different ones would grasp different parts, and none of us would have the perception of the whole object. But the whole is one; for how could it be divided? For equal will not fit equal, since the ruling part is not equal to every object perceived. Into how many parts, then, the division? Will it be divided into as many as the number of the variety the entering perception has? And then each of those parts of the soul will perceive with its own portions too. Or will the parts of the portions be without perception? But that is impossible. And if any part whatever perceives the whole, since magnitude is by nature divisible to infinity, it will follow that infinite perceptions arise in each for each object perceived, as it were infinite images of the same thing in our ruling part. And indeed, if what perceives is a body, perceiving could come about in no other way than as seals from rings impressed on wax, the perceptions being impressed either on blood or on air. If, then, as in moist bodies, which is reasonable, as in water, they will be confused, and there will be no memory. But if the impressions remain, either others cannot be impressed while those occupy the place, so that there will be no other perceptions, or, when others come, those before will be destroyed, so that there will be no remembering. But if there is remembering and perceiving one thing after another without the earlier hindering, it is impossible for the soul to be a body.” “One might see the same thing also from the perception of pain. When a man is said to have a pain in his finger, the pain is about the finger, surely, but they will admit that the perception of the pain comes about at the ruling part. The part in pain being different, the ruling part of the breath perceives, and the whole soul has the same experience. How, then, does this happen? By transmission, they will say: the psychic breath about the finger being affected first, and passing it to the next, and this to another, until it reaches the ruling part. It is necessary, then, if the first part perceived the pain, that the perception of the second be different, and, if the perception comes by transmission, that of the third too be different, and that there be many and infinite perceptions of one pain, and that the ruling part perceive after all these, and its own besides these. But the truth is that each of those perceives not the pain in the finger, but the one next to itself, and that the ruling part knows only this, and lets the others go, not knowing that the finger is in pain. If, then, perception cannot come by transmission, nor, there being a bulk, can one part be affected and another know (for in every magnitude one part is one thing and another another), what perceives must be posited as such as to be everywhere the same with itself. To do this belongs to some other of the things that are rather than to body.” “That it is not possible to think either, if the soul were any body, must be shown from this. If perceiving is the soul grasping perceptible things by using the body, thinking would not also be apprehending through the body, or it will be the same as perceiving. If, then, thinking is apprehending without the body, much more must what thinks be something other than a body, since perception is of perceptible things and thinking of intelligible things. And if they do not wish this, still there will be thoughts of some intelligible things and apprehensions of things without magnitude. How, then, will what is a magnitude think what is not a magnitude, and think the undivided with the divided? Or with some partless part of itself? If so, what thinks will not be a body. For there is no need of the whole to touch; one thing is enough. If, then, they grant that the first thoughts, which is true, are of things altogether purest of body, each itself by itself, what thinks must also know being pure of body or becoming so. But if they say the thoughts are of the forms in matter, still they come about when the forms are separated from the bodies, the mind separating them. For the separation of a circle and triangle and line and point is surely not made with flesh, or matter at all. The soul, then, must separate itself from body in such a case. It must, then, not itself be a body. Beauty and justice, I think, are without magnitude, and so is the thought of them. So that when they approach, it will receive them with its partless part, and they will lie in it as partless.” “And how, if the soul were a body, would its virtues be, temperance and justice, courage and the others? For temperance or justice or courage would be some breath or some blood; unless perhaps courage were the breath’s resistance to being affected, and temperance its good blending, and beauty a certain shapeliness in the impressions, according to which we call people, on seeing them, handsome and beautiful in body. It would befit breath, then, to be strong and beautiful in its impressions; but what need has breath to be temperate? Rather the opposite: to be well affected in embraces and touches, where it will be warmed, or long for moderate cool, or come near soft and simple and smooth things. But what would it care about distributing according to merit? Does the soul lay hold of the objects of virtue’s contemplation and the other intelligibles as everlasting, or does virtue come to someone and benefit him and perish again? But who makes it, and from where? For so that would remain again. It must, then, be of everlasting and abiding things, like those in geometry. And if of everlasting and abiding things, not of bodies. And that in which it will be must also be such; so it must not be a body. For the whole nature of body does not abide, but flows.” “But if, seeing the actions of bodies heating and cooling and pushing and weighing down, they place the soul here, as if seating it in an active place, first they do not know that these bodies too do this by the incorporeal powers in them; and second, that it is not these powers we think belong to the soul, but thinking, perceiving, reasoning, desiring, caring wisely and well for all things, which seeks another substance. So, transferring the powers of incorporeal things to bodies, they leave none to them. That bodies too can do what they do by incorporeal powers is clear from the following. They will admit that quality and quantity are different, and that every body is a quantity, and further that not every body is a quality, as matter is not. Admitting these things, they will admit that quality, being other than quantity, is other than body. For how will it be a body, not being a quantity, if every body is a quantity? And indeed, as was said somewhere above, if every body when divided also loses what it was, while the body being cut into pieces the same whole quality remains in each part, as the sweetness of honey is no less sweetness in each, sweetness would not be a body. Likewise the others. Then, if the powers were bodies, the strong powers would necessarily be great bulks, and those able to do little small bulks. But if great bulks have small powers, and the smallest bulks have the greatest powers, the acting must be attributed to something other than magnitude; therefore to the magnitudeless. And that matter is the same, being body, as they say, but makes different things when it has taken on qualities, how does it not make clear that what is added are rational principles and incorporeal? Let them not say that animals die when breath or blood departs. For it is not possible to be without these, nor without many other things, without which the soul would not be either. And yet neither breath nor blood pervades all things, but the soul does.” “Further, if the soul, being a body, passed through everything, it would be mixed, in the way mixture occurs with other bodies. And if the mixture of bodies allows none of those mixed to be in actuality, the soul too would no longer be in the bodies in actuality, but only potentially, having lost being soul; as when sweet and bitter are mixed, the sweet is not. So we have no soul. And that a body should be mixed with a body whole through whole, so that wherever one is the other is, the bulk of both being equal, both occupying the whole, and no increase having come from the addition of the other, will leave nothing it does not cut. For the mixture is not by large parts side by side (for so, they say, there would be juxtaposition); but what is added has passed through the whole, even to the smaller (which is impossible, the smaller becoming equal to the greater); but having passed through, it cuts everything at every point. It is necessary, then, if at any point whatever, and there is no body in between that has not been cut, that the division of the body has been into points, which is impossible. And the cutting being to infinity (for whatever body you take is divisible), the infinites will be not only potential but actual. So a body cannot pass whole through whole; but the soul passes through wholes; therefore it is incorporeal.” “And to say that the same breath is first nature, and becomes soul when it comes into the cold and is tempered, being made finer in the cold, this too is absurd; for many animals are born in heat and have a soul that has not been cooled. But they say that nature is prior to soul, coming about by external chances. It follows for them to make the worse first, and before this another lesser, which they call disposition. And mind is last, clearly coming from the soul; or if mind is before all, they should next have made soul, then nature; and always the later is worse, if indeed it is so by nature. If, then, God too, for them, according to mind, is later and generated and has thinking imported, it would be possible that there be neither soul nor mind nor God; if what is potential, there being nothing actual and mind before, should come to be, it will not come to actuality. For what will bring it, there being nothing else prior besides it? And if it brings itself into actuality, which is absurd, it will at least bring itself looking to something that will be actual rather than potential. And yet, if what always remains the same holds the potential, it will come into actuality of itself, and this will be better than what is potential, as being its object of desire. The better, then, is prior, having a nature other than body and being always in actuality; so mind and soul are prior to nature. So the soul is not as breath, nor as body. But that it is not body could be said, and has been said by others in other ways; but these too are enough.” “Since it is of another nature, we must seek what this is. Is it other than body, but something of body, like a harmony? For, since the followers of Pythagoras spoke of harmony in another sense, they thought it to be something such as the harmony of strings. For as there, when the strings are stretched, something like an affection supervenes on them, which is called harmony, in the same way, our body coming about in a mixture of unlike things, the particular mixture produces life and soul, being the affection consequent on the mixture. That this is impossible, much has already been said against this opinion. For that the soul is prior, and the harmony later; and that the one rules and presides over the body and fights it in many ways, while being a harmony it could not do this; and that the one is a substance and harmony not a substance; and that the mixture of the bodies of which we consist, being in proportion, would be health; and that each part, mixed differently, would be a different soul, so that there would be many; and, greatest, that there must be before this soul another soul that makes this harmony, as with instruments the musician, who puts harmony into the strings, having in himself the principle by which he will tune them. For neither there will the strings, nor here the bodies, be able to bring themselves into harmony of themselves. And in general these too make the ensouled from the soulless, and things ordered by chance from disordered things, and they hold that the order does not come from the soul, but that the soul has taken its existence from spontaneous order. But this cannot come about either in particular things or in others. So the soul is not a harmony.” These things from Plotinus against the opinion of the Stoics about the soul, who say that it is bodily. But since I have sufficiently set out, as in an epitome, what is said against Aristotle and the Peripatos and against the school of the Stoics, it is time to go back and examine the wonderful physical theories of all the noble philosophers together, especially since all the Greeks in common thought the visible gods, sun and moon and the other stars and the other parts of the world, to be gods and worshipped them, and transferred their mythical and nonsensical narratives about polytheistic error to the elements and the parts of the whole world by more solemn and physical interpretations. Therefore it seems to me necessary to gather the opinions about these together, and to view their disagreements and the vanity of their conceit. I shall set these out too from the work of Plutarch, in which, having gathered together the opinions of all, old and young, about all these, he writes in this way: “On the sun.
Opinions of the physical philosophers concerning the sun; from Plutarch
Anaximander: that it is a circle twenty-eight times the size of the earth, like a chariot wheel, having its rim hollow, full of fire, which shows the fire at one place through an opening, as through the nozzle of a bellows; and that this is the sun. Xenophanes: that it is from little sparks, which appear gathered from the moist exhalation and which gather the sun together out of clouds set on fire. The Stoics: an intelligent kindling from the sea. Plato: from very much fire. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus: a red-hot mass of metal or a fiery stone. Aristotle: a sphere of the fifth body. Philolaus the Pythagorean: a glassy disk, receiving the reflection of the fire in the world and filtering the light through to us; so that the fiery thing in heaven is like the sun, being like the gleam scattered toward us from the mirror by reflection; for this too we call the sun, as it were an image of an image. Empedocles: two suns: one the archetype, fire in the other hemisphere of the world, filling the hemisphere, always opposite its own reflection; and the one that appears is a reflection in the other hemisphere, which is filled with air mixed with heat, coming about by reflection from the round earth onto the crystalline sun and drawn round with the motion of the fiery one. To put it briefly in summary, the sun is a reflection of the fire around the earth. Epicurus: an earthy condensation, like pumice and sponge in its perforations, kindled by fire.”
On the magnitude of the sun
“On the size of the sun. Anaximander: that the sun is equal to the earth, but the circle from which it has its breathing-hole, and by which it is carried, is twenty-seven times the size of the earth. Anaxagoras: many times larger than the Peloponnese. Heraclitus: the width of a human foot. Epicurus again says that all the possibilities already mentioned are possible; or that it is as large as it appears, or a little larger, or smaller.”
On the figure of the sun
“On the shape of the sun. Anaximenes: flat like a leaf. Heraclitus: boat-shaped, somewhat curved. The Stoics: spherical, like the world and the stars. Epicurus: that all the possibilities already mentioned are possible.” Such, for them, is the great god among the things that appear in heaven, the sun. But Moses and the oracles of the Hebrews concern themselves with none of these things.
On the moon
“On the moon. Anaximander: that it is a circle nineteen times the size of the earth, as in the case of the sun, full of fire, and that it is eclipsed according to the turnings of the wheel. It is like a chariot wheel, having its rim hollow and full of fire, with one breathing-hole. Xenophanes: that it is a compressed cloud. The Stoics: mixed of fire and air. Plato: of a greater share of the earthy. Anaxagoras, Democritus: a fiery solid, having in itself plains and mountains and ravines. Heraclitus: earth surrounded by mist. Pythagoras: according to the fiery body.
On the magnitude of the moon
“On the size of the moon. The Stoics declare it larger than the earth, as they do the sun. Parmenides: equal to the sun; for it is lit by it.”
On the figure of the moon
“On the shape of the moon. The Stoics: that it is spherical, like the sun. Heraclitus: boat-shaped. Empedocles: disk-shaped. Others: cylinder-shaped.”
On the illumination of the moon
“On the illumination of the moon. Anaximander: that it has its own light, but somewhat thinner. Antiphon: that the moon shines with its own light; and that what is hidden about it is dimmed by the impact of the sun, the stronger fire naturally dimming the weaker, which happens also with the other stars. Thales and his followers: that the moon is lit by the sun. Heraclitus: that the sun and the moon are affected in the same way; for the stars, being boat-shaped in form and receiving the exhalations from the moist, are lit so as to appear; the sun more brightly, for it is carried in purer air, and the moon in turbid air, and for this reason it appears dimmer.”
What is the substance of the planets and fixed stars
“What is the substance of the planets and fixed stars. Thales: that the stars are earthy, but fiery. Empedocles: fiery, from the fiery element which the air, holding it within itself, squeezed out at the first separation. Anaxagoras: that the surrounding air is fiery in substance, and that, by the force of its whirling, having snatched up stones from the earth and set them on fire, it made them stars. Diogenes thinks the stars are like pumice, the breathing-holes of the world. Again the same says there are invisible stones, which often fall on the earth and are quenched, like the stony star that came down in fiery form at Aegospotami. Empedocles: that the fixed stars are bound to the crystal, while the planets are free. Plato: for the most part fiery, but sharing also in the others, like glue. Xenophanes: from clouds set on fire, which are quenched each day and rekindled by night, like coals; for their risings and settings are kindlings and quenchings. Heraclides and the Pythagoreans: that each of the stars is a world, containing earth and air and ether in the infinite. These doctrines are carried in the Orphic poems; for they make a world of each of the stars. Epicurus rejects none of these, holding to what is possible.”
On the shapes of the stars
“On the shape of the stars. The Stoics: that the stars are spherical, like the world and the sun and moon. Cleanthes: cone-shaped. Anaximenes: like nails fixed into the crystalline sphere. Some say they are fiery leaves, like paintings.” Such are the discoveries of the wonderful philosophers about those whom they call visible gods. And what they have decided about the universe learn from the same words of Plutarch:
How the world was constituted
“How the world was constituted. The world, then, was shaped in a rounded form in this way. The atomic bodies, having an unforeseeing and chance motion, moving continually and very swiftly, many bodies gathered into the same place, and for this reason having a variety of shapes and sizes. As these gathered in the same place, those that were larger and heaviest of all settled below, while those that were small and round and smooth and slippery were squeezed out in the meeting of the bodies and carried up aloft. When, then, the striking force that lifted them failed, and the blow no longer carried them aloft, and they were prevented from being carried down, they were pressed toward the places able to receive them. These were the ones around. And the multitude of bodies was bent round toward these; and, being interwoven with one another in the bending round, they produced the heaven. And the atoms holding to the same nature, being various, as has been said, being pushed out aloft, produced the nature of the stars. And the multitude of the bodies exhaled struck the air and squeezed it out. This, becoming wind through the motion and taking hold of the stars, carried them round with it and kept their present revolution aloft. And then from those that settled below the earth came to be, and from those lifted aloft the heaven, fire, air. And much matter still being held in the earth, and this being condensed by the blows of the winds and the breezes from the stars, all its fine-grained formation was squeezed out and produced the moist nature. And this, being in a flowing state, was carried down to the hollow places able to hold and contain it; or the water, settling by itself, hollowed out the places beneath.” Such is their wonderful cosmogony too. And joined to these is much other wrangling over words, as they raised questions about all kinds of propositions: whether one should think the universe one or many; whether the world is one or more; whether it is ensouled and governed by God’s providence, or the opposite; whether imperishable or perishable; from where it is nourished; from what God began to make the world; about the order of the world; what is the cause of its inclination; about what is outside the circumference of the world; which are the right and left parts of the world; about heaven; and besides all these about daimones and heroes; about matter and about ideas; about the order of the universe; further about the course and motion of the stars; and besides these from where the stars are lit; and about the so-called Dioscuri; about eclipses of sun and moon; and about its appearance; and why it appears earthy; and about its distances; and further about years. Since Plutarch, cutting short all these, which had been elaborated in countless ways by those concerned, gathered them in a few words, bringing together their declarations and their disagreements, I think they will also be useful to us, set out for a reasonable refusal of them. For since they themselves stood diametrically opposed to one another, and kindled battles and wars, and nothing more, against themselves, each refuting his neighbors’ views out of rivalry in argument, how would not anyone at all admit that it has reasonably become a safe course for us to suspend judgment about these things? I shall add next to what has been said all that they raised about things nearer the earth: about the shape of the earth, and its position and inclination; and further about the sea; so that you may know that the noble gentlemen disagreed not only about lofty and celestial things, but also differed about things around the earth. And so that you may admire the wisdom of the wise still more, I shall add also what they fought over concerning the soul and its ruling part, unable even to know what nature they themselves were of. But let us go back to the first of the things mentioned.
Whether the All is one
“Whether the universe is one. Those from the Stoa declared one world, which they also said is the universe and bodily things. Empedocles: one world, but that the world is not the universe, but a small part of the universe, and the rest idle matter. Plato infers his view, that the world is one and the universe one, from three things: from its not being complete unless it contains everything; from its not being like the pattern unless it is only-begotten; from its not being imperishable if anything is outside it. Against Plato it must be said that the world is not complete, for it does not contain everything; for man too is complete, but does not contain everything; and there are many patterns, as with statues and houses and paintings. And how is it complete, if something can revolve round it? And it is not imperishable, nor can it be, being generated. Metrodorus says it is absurd for one ear of grain to be produced in a great plain, and one world in the infinite. And that they are infinite in number is clear from the causes being infinite. For if the world is limited, while all the causes from which the world came to be are infinite, the worlds must be infinite. For where all the causes have come together, there are the effects too. And the causes are either the atoms or the elements.”
Whether the world has a soul, and is administered by Providence
“Whether the world is ensouled and governed by providence. Democritus and Epicurus, who introduce atoms and the void: that it is neither ensouled nor governed by providence, but by an irrational nature. Aristotle: that it is neither ensouled through and through, nor perceptive, nor rational, nor intellectual, nor governed by providence. For the heavenly things share in all these, since they contain ensouled and living spheres; but the things around the earth in none of them; and they share in good order by accident, not primarily.
Whether the world is imperishable
“Whether the world is imperishable. Pythagoras and Plato and the Stoics: that the world was generated by God; and perishable, as far as its nature goes (for it is perceptible, because bodily), but not going to perish, by the providence and sustaining power of God. Epicurus: perishable, because generated, like an animal, like a plant. Xenophanes: the world is ungenerated and everlasting and imperishable. Aristotle: the part of the world below the moon is subject to affection, in which the things about the earth also die away.”
From what source the world is sustained
“From where the world is nourished. Aristotle: if the world is nourished, it will also perish; but it needs no food; for this reason it is also everlasting. Plato: that the world itself provides its own nourishment to itself by change from what wastes away. Philolaus: that destruction is twofold, at one time from fire flowing from heaven, at another from water of the moon poured out by the turning of the air; and that the exhalations of these are the nourishment of the world.”
From what God first began to create the world
“From what first God began to make the world. The natural philosophers say that the generation of the world began from earth, as from a center; for the center is the beginning of a sphere. Pythagoras: from fire and the fifth element. Empedocles: that the ether was first separated, second the fire, after which the earth, from which, being excessively compressed by the rush of the revolution, water gushed up, from which air was exhaled; and that the heaven came to be from the ether, the sun from the fire, and the things about the earth were compacted from the others. Plato: that the visible world came to be after the pattern of the intelligible world; and of the visible, the soul first, and after it the bodily, first from fire and earth, and second from water and air. Pythagoras: there being five solid figures, which are also called mathematical, he says that earth came from the cube, fire from the pyramid, air from the octahedron, water from the icosahedron, and the sphere of the universe from the dodecahedron. And Plato follows Pythagoras in these things too.”
On the order of the world
“On the order of the world. Parmenides: that there are crowns intertwined with one another, one of the rare, the other of the dense; and others mixed of light and darkness between these; and that which surrounds them all is solid like a wall. Leucippus and Democritus stretch a tunic and membrane round the world. Epicurus: of some worlds the boundary is rare, of others dense; and of these some move, others are unmoved. Plato: fire first, then ether, after which air, after which water, and earth last; and sometimes he joins ether with fire. Aristotle: first the impassible ether, a fifth body; after which the passible ones, fire, air, water, and earth last. Of these the circular motion was assigned to the heavenly ones; and of those ranged below, the upward to the light ones and the downward to the heavy. Empedocles: that the places of the elements are not altogether fixed nor defined, but that all in some way take part in one another.”
What is the cause of the cosmical obliquity
“What is the cause of the world’s inclination. Diogenes, Anaxagoras: that after the world was constituted and brought forth the living things from the earth, the world was somehow inclined of itself toward its southern part, perhaps by providence, so that some parts of the world might become uninhabitable and others habitable, by cold and burning heat and temperate climate. Empedocles: that when the air gave way to the rush of the sun, the Bears were inclined and the northern parts raised and the southern lowered, and so the whole world.”
Concerning the outside of the world, whether it is a vacuum
“On what is outside the world, whether it is void. Those from Pythagoras: that outside the world there is a void, into which and out of which the world breathes. The Stoics: an infinite void, into which it is also dissolved in the conflagration. Posidonius: not infinite, but as much as suffices for the dissolution, in the first book On the Void. Plato, Aristotle: that there is no void either outside or inside the world.”
Which is the right and which the left side of the world
“Which are the right and which the left parts of the world. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle: the right parts of the world are the eastern, from which the motion begins, and the left the western. Empedocles: the right are those toward the summer tropic, the left those toward the winter.
Of the heaven, what is its substance
“On heaven, what its substance is. Anaximenes: that it is the revolution of the outermost zone. Empedocles: that heaven is solid, made of air compacted by fire into crystal, containing the fiery and airy in each of the hemispheres. Aristotle: from the fifth body, or from a mixture of hot and cold.”
Of demons and heroes
“On daimones and heroes. Next to the account about gods we must relate that about daimones and heroes. Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics: that daimones are psychic substances; and that heroes are souls separated from bodies; good ones the good souls, bad ones the wicked. Epicurus admits none of these.”
Of matter
“On matter. Matter is that which underlies generation and destruction and the other changes. The followers of Thales and Pythagoras, and the Stoics: that matter is changeable and alterable and flowing, wholly through and through. The followers of Democritus: that the first things are impassible, the atom and the void and the incorporeal. Aristotle and Plato: that matter is bodily, shapeless, formless, figureless, without quality as far as its own nature goes, but the receptacle of forms, as it were a nurse and impression-stuff and mother. Those who say that matter is water, fire, or air, or earth, no longer call it shapeless, but body; those who say the partless things and the atoms, shapeless.”
Of form
“On the idea. An idea is an incorporeal substance, subsisting itself and by itself, imaging the shapeless matters and becoming the cause of their showing. Socrates and Plato suppose the ideas to be substances separate from matter, subsisting in the thoughts and imaginations of God, that is, of mind. Aristotle left forms and ideas, but not separate from matter, being outside the view that they are made by God. The Stoics of Zeno’s school: the ideas are our own concepts.”
Of the order of the stars
“On the order of the stars. Xenocrates thinks the stars move on one surface. The other Stoics: some before others, in height and depth. Democritus: the fixed stars first, after these the planets, after which the sun, the Morning Star, the moon. Plato: after the position of the fixed stars, first the one called Phaenon, that of Cronus; second Phaethon, that of Zeus; third Pyroeis, that of Ares; fourth Heosphorus, that of Aphrodite; fifth Stilbon, that of Hermes; sixth the sun; seventh the moon. Of the mathematicians, some as Plato does, others put the sun in the middle of all. Anaximander and Metrodorus of Chios and Crates: that the sun is placed highest of all; after it the moon; and under them the fixed stars and the planets.”
Of the course and motion of the heavenly bodies
“On the course and motion of the stars. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Cleanthes: that all the stars are carried from east to west. Alcmaeon and the mathematicians: that the planets move contrary to the fixed stars; for they are carried in the opposite direction from west to east. Anaximander: that they are carried by the circles and spheres on which each is set. Anaximenes: that the stars turn around the earth rather than under it. Plato and the mathematicians: that the sun, the Morning Star, and Stilbon run an equal course.
Where the stars get their light
“From where the stars are lit. Metrodorus: that all the fixed stars are lit by the sun. Heraclitus and the Stoics: that the stars are nourished from the exhalation from the earth. Aristotle: that the heavenly bodies need no nourishment; for they are not perishable but everlasting. Plato: that the whole world and the stars are nourished in common from itself.”
Of the so-called Dioscuri
“On the so-called Dioscuri. Xenophanes: that the things like stars that appear on ships are little clouds, shining by a certain kind of motion. Metrodorus: that they are flashes of the eyes of those who see them with fear and amazement.”
Of an eclipse of the sun
“On the eclipse of the sun. Thales first said that the sun is eclipsed when the moon passes under it perpendicularly, being earthy in nature; and that this is seen as in a mirror, the moon being placed under the disk. Anaximander: when the opening of the fire’s breathing-hole is closed. Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl, so that the hollow comes to be upward and the convex downward toward our sight. Xenophanes: by quenching, and another comes to be again at the risings. He has also recorded an eclipse of the sun lasting a whole month, and again a total eclipse, so that the day appeared as night. Some: a condensation of invisible clouds coming over the disk. Aristarchus places the sun with the fixed stars, and moves the moon around the solar circle, and the disk is shadowed according to its inclinations. Xenophanes: that there are many suns and moons, according to the regions of the earth and its sections and zones; and at a certain time the disk falls into some section of the earth not inhabited by us, and so, as if stepping into the void, shows an eclipse. The same says that the sun goes forward to infinity, but seems to go in a circle because of the distance.”
Of an eclipse of the moon
“On the eclipse of the moon. Anaximander: when the opening around the wheel is blocked. Berossus: by the turning toward us of the unlit part. Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl. Some of the Pythagoreans: by reflection and the blocking of the earth, or of the counter-earth; the younger ones: by the spreading of a flame kindled little by little in order until it gives the complete full moon, and again diminishing proportionally until the conjunction, when it is completely quenched. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the mathematicians agree that the monthly disappearances happen when it travels with the sun and is outshone with it; but the eclipses when it falls into the shadow of the earth, the earth coming between the two stars, or rather the moon being blocked off.”
Of the appearance of the moon, and why it appears earthy
“On its appearance, and why it appears earthy. The Pythagoreans: that the moon appears earthy because it is inhabited all around, like the earth with us, by larger living things and finer plants. For the living things on it are fifteen times as large, giving off no bodily excretion; and the day is so much longer. Anaxagoras: unevenness of the compound, because it is at once cold-like and earthy; for the dark is mixed with the fiery; which is why the star is called falsely shining. The Stoics: because of the air-mixed nature of its substance, its compound is not pure.”
Of its distances
“On its distances. Empedocles: that the moon is twice as far from the sun as from the earth. Those of the mathematicians: eighteen times. Eratosthenes: that the sun is four million eighty thousand stades distant from the earth, and the moon seventy-eight myriads of stades from the earth.”
Of years
“On years. The year of Cronus is a period of 30 years; that of Zeus, twelve; that of Ares, two; that of the sun, 12 months; and the same for Hermes and Aphrodite, for they run an equal course; and that of the moon, 30 days, for this is the complete month from first appearance to conjunction. The great year some place in the eight-year cycle, others in the nineteen-year cycle, others in the sixty years less one. Heraclitus: of eighteen thousand solar years. Diogenes: of three hundred and sixty-five years of the length that a year has according to Heraclitus; others, of 777.” So much, then, on things in heaven and on high have the persons we have shown been at odds with one another. Now look also at their views about the earth.
Of the earth
“On the earth. Thales and his followers: that the earth is one. Hicetas the Pythagorean: two, this one and the counter-earth. The Stoics: that the earth is one and finite. Xenophanes: that from its lower part it is rooted into the infinite, and that it was compacted out of air and fire. Metrodorus: that the earth is the sediment and dregs of water, and the sun of air.”
Of the figure of the earth
“On the shape of the earth. Thales and the Stoics: that the earth is spherical. Anaximander: that it is like a stone column, as to its flat surfaces. Anaximenes: shaped like a table. Leucippus: shaped like a drum. Democritus: disk-shaped in breadth, but hollow in the middle.”
Of the position of the earth
“On the position of the earth. The followers of Thales: that the earth is in the middle. Xenophanes: that it is first, for it is rooted into the infinite. Philolaus the Pythagorean: fire in the middle, for this is the hearth of the universe; second the counter-earth; third the earth we inhabit, lying opposite the counter-earth and carried around opposite it; and for this reason those on that one are not seen by those on this one. Parmenides first marked off the inhabited regions of the earth beneath the two tropical zones.”
Of the earth's motion
“On the motion of the earth. The others: that the earth stays at rest. But Philolaus the Pythagorean: that it is carried around the fire in an oblique circle, in the same manner as the sun and the moon. Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean move the earth, yet not from place to place but by turning, revolving like a wheel on an axle, from west to east, around its own center. Democritus: that in the beginning the earth wandered because of its smallness and lightness, but that, made dense and heavy with time, it came to rest.” Since the noble men have disagreed about the earth too, hear also their views about the sea.
Of the sea, how it was formed, and why it is salt
“On the sea, how it was formed and how it is bitter. Anaximander says that the sea is the remnant of the first moisture, of which fire dried up the greater part, and the rest was changed by the burning. Anaxagoras: when the moisture that at first lay as a pool had been burned around by the sun's revolution, and the oily part had evaporated, the rest settled into saltiness and bitterness. Empedocles: sweat of the earth, burned by the sun, because of its increased compression. Antiphon: sweat of the hot, from which the moisture enclosed in it was separated, which turned salty through being boiled down, as happens with all sweat. Metrodorus: because it is strained through the earth, it has taken on some of the thickness around it, like things filtered through ashes. The followers of Plato: of the elemental water, the part formed from air by chilling becomes sweet, while the part exhaled from earth by burning and firing becomes salty.” So much, then, on the sea. But how those who professed to give an account of nature about the whole world, things heavenly and ethereal, and the grasp of the universe, did not know even what concerned themselves, you may learn from the way they have disagreed on these matters too.
Of the parts of the soul
“On the parts of the soul. Pythagoras, Plato: by the highest account the soul has two parts, for it has one part rational and one irrational; but by the closer and more exact account, three parts, for they divide the irrational into the spirited and the desiring. The Stoics: that it is composed of eight parts: five of the senses, seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching; a sixth, the vocal; a seventh, the seminal; and an eighth, the ruling part itself, from which all these are extended through their own organs, like the tentacles of an octopus. Democritus, Epicurus: the soul has two parts, the rational part being seated in the chest, the irrational spread through the whole composition of the body. But Democritus: that all things by nature share in some kind of soul, even dead bodies; because each invisibly shares in something warm and capable of sensation, though the greater part is breathed away.
Of the ruling part
“On the ruling part. Plato, Democritus: in the whole head. Strato: between the eyebrows. Erasistratus: around the membrane of the brain, which he calls the epikranis. Herophilus: in the cavity of the brain, which is also its base. Parmenides: in the whole chest. Epicurus and all the Stoics: in the whole heart. Diogenes: in the arterial cavity of the heart, which is full of breath. Empedocles: in the composition of the blood. Some: in the membrane around the heart; others: in the diaphragm. Some of the more recent: that it extends from the head to the diaphragm. Pythagoras: the life-giving part around the heart, the rational and intellectual around the head.” So much, then, on these matters too. Do we not seem to you, then, to have withdrawn justly, with judgment and reasoning, from the useless, many-wandering, vain toil of all these men, and not to busy ourselves at all with what has been described (for we do not see in it what is profitable and bears directly on benefit and the acquiring of good for human beings), but to hold only to piety toward God, the maker of all things, and to strive, by a self-controlled life and every other God-loving way of living by virtue, to live in a way that pleases the God of all? But if you too, from spite and envy, are reluctant to accept our true testimony, Socrates, the wisest of all the Greeks, will once again have been before you, having cast his votes on our side in love of truth. At any rate he showed those talkers about things on high to be fools and said they differed in nothing from madmen, refuting them outright not only as reaching for the unattainable but also as wearing themselves out over things useless and unprofitable for life. Xenophon, cited earlier, the best known of Socrates' companions, will bear witness to this for you, writing somewhat as follows in the Memoirs:
That even Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, used to declare that those who boasted greatly of the natural science of the matters already mentioned were silly, because they wasted time on things useless to life and impossible to understand
“No one ever saw Socrates do, or heard him say, anything impious or unholy. For he did not discuss the nature of all things, as most did, or other such matters, inquiring how what the sophists call the cosmos is constituted and by what necessities each of the heavenly things comes to be; rather, he showed that those who busied themselves with such things were fools. And first he would ask about them whether they come to think about such things because they believe they already know human affairs well enough, or whether they think they are doing what is fitting by leaving human affairs aside and inquiring into divine ones. And he wondered that it was not plain to them that these things cannot be found out by human beings, since even those who pride themselves most on speaking about them do not hold the same opinions as one another, but are disposed toward one another like madmen. For among madmen, some do not fear even what is dreadful, while others fear even what is not frightening; to some it seems not shameful to say or do anything at all even in a crowd, while to others it seems one should not even go out among people; some honor neither temple nor altar nor anything else divine, while others revere sticks and stones of any kind, and beasts. So too among those who concern themselves with the nature of all things, to some it seems that what is is only one, to others that it is infinite in number; to some that all things are always in motion, to others that nothing could ever be moved; to some that all things come to be and perish, to others that nothing could ever come to be or perish. He also asked this about them: just as those who learn human matters believe that whatever they learn they will put into practice for themselves and for any others they wish, do those who search into divine things likewise think that, once they know by what necessities each thing comes to be, they will make winds and waters and seasons, and whatever else of the kind they need, whenever they wish? Or do they hope for nothing of the sort, and is it enough for them merely to know how each of these things comes to be? This is what he said about those who occupied themselves with these things; but he himself always discussed human matters, examining what is pious and what impious, what noble and what shameful, what just and what unjust, what self-control and what madness.” So Socrates. After him the school of Aristippus of Cyrene, and later the school of Ariston of Chios, tried to argue that one ought to pursue only ethics in philosophy; for this is possible and useful, but accounts of nature are the very opposite, neither graspable nor, even if they were seen, of any use. For we would gain nothing, not even if, raised higher than Perseus, "over the sea's flood and over the Pleiad," we were to look with our own eyes on the whole world and the nature of things, whatever it may be. For not on that account shall we be wiser or more just or braver or more self-controlled, nor indeed strong or handsome or rich, without which it is not possible to be happy. Hence Socrates rightly said that of the things that are, some are above us and some are nothing to us: things of nature are above us, things after death nothing to us, and only human things concern us. And in this way, he said, he said goodbye to the natural philosophy of Anaxagoras and Archelaus, to seek "whatever ill and good is done in your halls." And besides, accounts of nature are not only hard and impossible but also impious and contrary to the laws. For some hold that there are no gods at all, others that the infinite, or being, or the one is god, and anything rather than the gods traditionally believed in. And again, their disagreement is very great: some declare the universe infinite, others limited; and some hold that all things move, others that nothing at all does. And indeed, best of all, it seems to me, Timon of Phlius has said this about these very men in his Silloi: "Who set these men to fight in ruinous strife? Echo's thronging crowd. For he, angered at the silent, roused against men a chattering plague, and many perished." Do you see how the noble men already mock one another? At any rate, the man just mentioned sketches, besides what has been said, their rivalry with one another, their battles and their factions, in this way: "Strife, ruin of mortals, goes about, shrieking emptily, sister and helper of man-slaying Quarrel; she rolls blindly about everything, and then sets her head among mortals and throws them into hope." But now that the faction and fighting of these men among themselves has been shown, and all the rest of their education and learning, which does not concern us, is superfluous besides and cannot be known, and in which the sons of the philosophers still take pride, has been refuted not by our proofs but by their own; and since, moreover, the reason has been made plain why we turned away from their teachings and preferred the oracles of the Hebrews, let our Preparation for the Gospel be brought to its close here. The more complete undertaking, the Demonstration of the Gospel, must now be taken up from another starting point of discussion, the one that remains to the question, for those who will give the teaching. What remains, then, is to answer those of the circumcision who find fault with us: why, being of another race and another stock, we make use of their books, which, as they would say, do not belong to us at all; or why, if we welcome the oracles they have, we do not also lead a life in keeping with the law they have.
Connections in Preparation for the Gospel, Book 15
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