Praeparatio Evangelica 13 part 4/6

And tragedy too accords with these things, through the following verses: 'For there will be, there will be, that time of the age, when the golden-gleaming aether shall unloose its fire-laden treasury; and the flame, once fed, in its madness, will set ablaze all things upon the earth and aloft.' And a little further he adds again: '...and when the universe shall come to its end, the whole depth of the waves will vanish, and the earth, stripped bare of all her yield, scorched through, will no longer even bring forth the winged tribes; and then it shall restore all that it had before destroyed.'

Similar things we shall find written also in the Orphic writings, somewhat as follows: 'For having concealed all things, he brought them forth again into abundant, joyous light out of his sacred heart, working wondrous deeds.' 'And if we live piously and righteously, we are blessed here, and yet more blessed after our departure hence, possessing happiness not for some limited time, but able to find rest in eternity, sharing the hearth with the other immortals, seated at their own table, exempt from the sorrows of mortal men, unwearied' — so speaks the philosophical poetry of Empedocles. 'No one, even among the Greeks, will be so great as to stand above Justice, nor so small as to escape her notice.'

The same Orpheus also says the following: 'But looking to the divine Word, attend upon it, directing the intellectual vessel of your heart; walk well upon the path, and look to none but the immortal king of the universe.' And again, concerning God, calling him invisible, he says that he was known to one alone of the Chaldean race — whether by this he means Abraham himself, or his son — in these words: '...except one only-begotten scion sprung of old from the Chaldean stock; for he was skilled in the courses of the stars, and how the sphere's motion turns about the earth in a circle, evenly, each about its own axis, and how he drives with his breath around both the air and the flowing deep.'

Then, as though paraphrasing 'Heaven is my throne, and earth the footstool of my feet,' he adds: 'He himself in turn is fixed upon the great heaven, upon a golden throne, and the earth is set beneath his feet. He has stretched out his right hand to the bounds of Ocean; the mountains' foundation trembles within its very frame, nor can it bear his mighty power. He is wholly celestial, and all things on earth find their end in him, he himself holding the beginning and the middle and the end. It is not lawful for me to speak otherwise; my limbs tremble at the very thought. He rules from on high' — and so on. For through these words he has made manifest all those prophetic sayings: 'If he should open the heaven, trembling will seize them, and the mountains will melt away before you, as wax melts before the face of fire'; and the words through Isaiah: 'Who has measured the heaven with a span, and all the earth with the hollow of his hand?'

Again, when he says: 'O ruler of aether and of Hades, of sea and earth, you who shake with your thunders the mighty house of Olympus, whom the daimons dread, and before whom the whole company of gods stands in fear; whom the Fates, relentless though they be, obey; imperishable one, Mother-Father, by whose will all things are stirred, who set the winds in motion and cover all things with clouds, cleaving the broad aether with your thunderbolts. Your order runs among the stars in unchanging courses; and beside your fiery throne stand the toil-laden angels, whose charge it is that all things be accomplished for mortals. Your spring shines forth new with crimson flowers; your winter comes on with cold clouds; your autumn-fruits Bromius once distributed to the revelers.'

Then he adds, expressly naming God 'Almighty': 'Imperishable, immortal, utterable only among the immortals. Come, greatest of all gods, with mighty power, dreadful, unconquered, great, imperishable, whom the aether crowns.' Now by the term 'Mother-Father' he has signified not only the coming-into-being of all things out of what was not, but has also perhaps given occasion to those who introduce the theory of emanations to conceive of a consort of God as well. And he paraphrases those prophetic scriptures — the one through Hosea: 'Behold, I am he who establishes the thunder, creates the wind, whose hands founded the host of heaven'; and the one through Moses: 'See, see, that I am he, and there is no other god besides me. I will kill, and I will make alive; I will strike, and I will heal; and there is none who can deliver out of my hands.' 'He himself out of good plants evil for mortals, and chilling war' — so says Orpheus.

Such things also Archilochus of Paros says: 'O Zeus, yours is the dominion of heaven, and you behold the deeds of men, both lawless and unlawful.' Again let Orpheus sing to us: 'And he has stretched forth his right hand on every side to the bound of Ocean, and the earth is set beneath his feet.' These things have manifestly been taken from that source: 'The Lord will save those who dwell in the world, and will grasp the whole inhabited world in his hand as a nest — the Lord who made the earth by his strength,' as Jeremiah says, 'and set the world aright by his wisdom.' Further, besides these, Phocylides, calling the angels 'daimons,' shows through the following that some of them are good and others base — since we too have received the tradition of certain apostate angels: 'But indeed there are daimons over men, now one, now another; some to deliver a man when evil comes upon him...'

Well then, Philemon the comic poet also cuts down idolatry through these words: 'There is for us no such god as Fortune — there is not; rather, that which happens of itself to each, as chance would have it, is called Fortune.' And Sophocles the tragedian says: 'Not even for the gods are all things self-determined, apart from Zeus; for he holds both the end and the beginning.' And Orpheus says: 'The power is one; one deity came to be — the great, blazing heaven; and in it all things have been fashioned, in which all these things revolve: fire and water and earth' — and what follows.

And Pindar the lyric poet breaks into ecstatic utterance, as it were, saying outright: 'What is god? He is the whole.' And again: 'God is he who fashions all things for mortals.' And when he says: 'Why do you hope that a man has wisdom a little beyond another man? To search out the counsels of the gods with a mortal mind is a hard thing; for he was born of a mortal mother' — from that source he has drawn his thought: 'Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become his counselor?'

But Hesiod also, through what he writes, agrees with what has been said above: 'There is no seer among men who dwell on earth that could know the mind of Zeus who bears the aegis.' Fittingly, then, Solon the Athenian, in his elegies, himself too following Hesiod, writes: 'The mind of the immortals is altogether unseen by men.'

Again, since Moses prophesied that, on account of the transgression, the woman would bring forth children in toil and pain, a certain poet of no small repute writes: 'Never by day will they cease from toil and misery, nor by night from being worn down; for the gods will give them grievous cares.'

Furthermore, Homer, when he said, 'And the Father himself stretched out his golden scales,' indicates that God is just. And Menander the comic poet, interpreting God as good, says: 'A daimon stands beside every man as soon as he is born, a good guide-initiate of his life; for one must not suppose there is an evil daimon that harms a good life.' Then he adds: 'God is good in all things' — either meaning that every god is good, or rather, and more likely, that God is good in every respect.

Again, Aeschylus the tragedian, in setting forth the power of God, does not hesitate to call him also 'Most High,' through these words: 'Distinguish God from mortals, and do not suppose that he exists as one of flesh, like yourself. You do not know him: at times he appears as fire, irresistible in his onrush; at times as water, at times as darkness; and he himself becomes like the beasts, and like the wind, and cloud, and lightning, thunder, and rain. The sea serves him, and the rocks, and every spring and gathering of waters; the mountains tremble, and the earth, and the monstrous depth of the sea, and the great height of the mountains, whenever the Master's terrible eye looks upon them; for the glory of the Most High God is mighty over all.' Does it not seem to you that he is here paraphrasing that saying: 'The earth trembles before the face of the Lord'?

In addition to these, Apollo, most skilled of all in prophecy, bearing witness to the glory of God, is compelled to say concerning Athena — at the time when the Medes were marching against Greece — how she besought and entreated Zeus on behalf of Attica. The oracle runs thus: 'Pallas cannot propitiate Olympian Zeus, though she implore him with many words and with shrewd counsel. Many temples of the immortals will he give to devouring fire — temples which even now stand dripping with sweat, quaking with dread' — and what follows.

And Thearidas, in his work On Nature, writes: 'The origin of existing things — the truly real origin — is one. For that which exists in the beginning is one and alone.' 'Nor is there any other, apart from the great King,' says Orpheus; and following him, the comic poet Diphilus most fittingly speaks of 'the Father who is over all,' ... 'Honor him to the end, the sole discoverer and founder of so many blessings.'

Fittingly, then, Plato trains the best natures to arrive at the study which we said before was the greatest — to see the Good and to accomplish that ascent. This, it seems, would not be a mere turning of a potsherd, but a conversion of the soul, a return out of a sort of nocturnal day into the true ascent to reality — which indeed we shall call true philosophy; and he judges those who partake of it to belong to the golden race, saying: 'You are indeed all brothers'; but those of the golden race most exactly so, and altogether so...

Of the Father, therefore, and Maker of all things, all beings by nature and without instruction lay hold, in every way, from every quarter — inanimate things sympathizing with him, and among living, ensouled creatures, some already immortal, others toiling day by day; and among mortal beings, some apprehending him even in fear while still being carried in the womb through their mother, others by self-determined reason. And among men, all alike — both Greeks and barbarians — no race anywhere, whether of farmers or of nomads, nor even of city-dwellers, is able to live without having first been possessed by faith in the Superior Being. Wherefore every nation of the East, and every one that touches the western shores, the northern peoples and all those toward the south, hold one and the same preconception concerning him who has established this sovereignty — since indeed the most universal of his workings have been diffused equally among all.

But much more, the inquisitive philosophers among the Greeks, taking their start from barbarian philosophy, assigned the preeminence to that Being who is invisible, and alone, and most powerful, and most skillful, and most responsible for all the other most beautiful things — yet without knowing what follows from this unless they were instructed by us, nor even how God is by nature to be rightly conceived, but only, as we have already often said, by way of a true circumlocution.

So much, then, says Clement also. But since, at some length, the philosophy according to Plato has been shown to us to be, in very many respects, in harmony with the doctrines of the Hebrews (for which reason, among others, we admire the man's genuine fair-mindedness), it is time to examine also what those points are concerning which we are no longer so favorably disposed toward him, and in which we prefer the philosophy accounted 'barbarian' to his.

The oracles of the Hebrews, containing divine pronouncements and oracles of a power beyond the human, ascribed to God himself as their author, and confirming their promise both through the foretelling of things to come and through the outcomes that agree with these declarations, are said to be entirely free from any deceptive intent. At any rate, it is said of the divine oracles that they are 'pure, and like silver refined by fire, tried in the earth, purified seven times.'

But not so the writings of Plato, nor indeed of any other of the wise men among mankind, who, with the eyes of a mortal understanding, by precarious conjectures and guesswork — arriving, as it were in a dream and not in waking reality, at a mere semblance of the nature of things — mixed in a great admixture of falsehood together with the truth of nature, so that no teaching free of deception can be found among them.

For example, if you would only be willing to set aside a little of your self-regard, and to look with the power of rational thought upon that very light, you would come to recognize that this admirable lover of wisdom — who alone of all the Greeks touched the very threshold of truth — nevertheless disgraces the very name of the gods with corruptible matter and with graven images wrought by artisans' hands into human form; and that, after the great height of that lofty eloquence by which he strove to know the Father and Maker of this universe, he is found — from somewhere on high, from vaults beyond the world — thrust down together with the populace of Athens into the very lowest depth of God-hated idolatry: so much so that Socrates was not ashamed to say that he went down to the Piraeus to pray to the goddess, and to watch the citizens celebrating for the first time that foreign festival; and he is on record as bidding that a cock be sacrificed to Asclepius; and he treated as divine the ancestral interpreter of the Greeks, the spirit that sits enthroned at Delphi.

Wherefore he might justly be charged as bearing responsibility for the superstitious error of the unphilosophical multitude. Take up the argument, then, a little from the beginning, and observe how this all-wise man, after treating of the incorporeal and incorruptible Forms, and after the first and second causal God, and after the intellectual and immortal essences, legislated concerning the belief held by the common people, saying:

Concerning the other daemons, to speak and to know their origin is beyond us. But we must believe those who spoke of them before, since they were, as they themselves said, offspring of gods, and clearly knew their own ancestors well enough. It is therefore impossible to disbelieve the children of gods, even though they speak without plausible or necessary proofs; but since they declare things proper to their own household, we must, in obedience to custom, believe them. Let the genealogy concerning these gods, then, stand and be told among us according to them thus: of Earth and Heaven were born Oceanus and Tethys; of these, Phorcys, Cronos and Rhea, and all who were with them; and of Cronos and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all whom we know to be called their brothers, and further the other offspring of these.

For these reasons the philosopher must be abandoned by us, since here he acts not as a philosopher, nor consistently with himself, having play-acted the mythical genealogies of the poets. For one could hear him himself saying in the Republic as follows: 'Among the greater myths,' said I, 'we shall also see the lesser ones. For the same pattern must hold, and the greater and the lesser must have the same power; or do you not think so?' 'I do,' he said; 'but I do not even understand which ones you call the greater.' 'Those,' I said, 'which Hesiod and Homer told us, and the other poets. For these, composing false myths for men, told them, and still tell them' — the very things stated a little before.

Again there were also his words, in which he said: 'We shall erase, then,' said I, 'beginning from this very verse, all such things as: "I would rather be a serf on the land, hired out to another man," and what follows'; and thereupon he adds this.

Again we shall ask Homer and the other poets not to make Achilles, the son of a goddess, portrayed now lying on his side, now again on his back, and what follows in accord with these. To which he adds:

Or [not to portray] Zeus, while the other gods and men slept, as being the only one awake, easily forgetting all that he had planned because of desire for the pleasures of love, and being so struck at the sight of Hera that he did not even wish to go to the bedchamber, but wanted to lie with her right there on the ground, in the manner of a lark; and saying that he was so possessed by desire as he had not been even when they first used to come together, escaping the notice of their dear parents; nor [to mention] the binding of Ares and Aphrodite by Hephaestus for other such reasons.

These things having been said in this manner, what then does the statement made afterward mean for him — calling the poets sons of the gods, and declaring it impossible to disbelieve them, even though without plausible or necessary proofs they themselves attest that they fashioned the myths about the gods?

But what does this irrational credence intend, put forward out of fear of the penalty of the laws? And how are Heaven and Earth the first of the gods, and then their offspring, Oceanus and Tethys, Cronos and all those mythologized by Homer and Hesiod as children and brothers and descendants of these — when by his own words he was overturning these very things?

'This,' said I, 'is what must be blamed first and most of all: whenever someone tells a falsehood badly.' 'What do you mean?' 'Whenever someone represents in speech, badly, what gods and heroes are like, just as a painter who paints something in no way resembling what he intended to make like.' And again: 'First,' said I, 'the greatest lie, and about the greatest matters, was not told well by the one who said that Heaven did the things Hesiod says he did, and that Cronos in turn took vengeance on him,' and what follows these things.

But how could the poets, now judged false and untrue, again be called the very offspring of the gods? But indeed, for these reasons this man must be abandoned by us — one who play-acted for fear of death before the Athenian people; whereas Moses is to be honored, along with the oracles of the Hebrews, which cling wholly to pure, sole, true, and unerring piety. Behold also another matter.

The Hebrews say that the middle nature of rational beings is created, but not uncreated. And dividing this in thought into intellectual essences, they call them spirits and powers and ministers of God — angels and archangels; and from the falling away and turning aside of these they account for the race of daemons and every form of the opposite and evil activity.

Wherefore they do not allow us to consider as gods those who do not bring with them the good and the beautiful as inseparable from their nature, but whose very being also is not from themselves, but has been brought to them from the cause of all things — as well as their well-being, and virtue, and immortality itself — neither in the same manner as the God over all, nor as him through whom all things came to be.

Plato, for his part, posits for the Hebrews that rational natures are incorporeal and intelligible essences, but he falls short of consistency: first saying that they are uncreated, as also every soul is, and then saying that they came to be from an outflow of the first cause. For he is not willing to grant that they came into being out of that which is not.

Wherefore he also supposes there to be a race of many gods, positing in his account certain outflows and projections of the first and second cause; and [saying] that they are good by nature, in no way capable of departing from their proper virtue — whence he also considers them to be gods.

But he considers the tribe of daemons to be distinct from these, being receptive of baseness and wickedness and of the turning to the worse; of whom some are good, and others are — and are called — base. But having assumed these things in this manner, contrary to what the Hebrews hold, he does not render an account of whence it is reasonable to say the daemons have come into being.

For no one with any sense would say they come from the matter of bodies; for this is irrational, and rational beings could never be begotten from the irrational, yet the daemons are rational. But if these come from an outflow of the superior beings, how are they not themselves also gods, equal to those who begot them? And how, the source being good, are not the things from it likewise good? Whence did the shoot of vice spring up among the secondary beings, from a root that comes from above, out of good things and through good things?

How could bitter come to be from sweet? But if the race of wicked daemons is more grievous than all darkness and all bitterness, how could it be said to come from an outflow of the nature of the superior beings? But if it were from this, it would not have departed from its proper allotment; but if it has been altered, then it was not from the beginning impassible in nature; but if it was not such [impassible], how then could they be gods, seeing they are capable of partaking of a base lot?

But if they were neither from an outflow of the superior beings nor again from the matter of bodies, it is time either to say they are uncreated, and to array, alongside the uncreated matter of bodies, a third host of uncreated rational beings arrayed against God, and no longer render God the maker and craftsman of all things and of the universe; or, admitting this [that God made them], to agree, in harmony with the words of the Hebrews, that he makes the things that are not [to be].

But what do these [the Hebrews] teach concerning these matters? They say that the middle nature of rational beings subsists neither from the matter of bodies nor from an outflow of the uncreated essence, ever remaining the same and in like manner; but that, not existing beforehand, it came to be by the active power of the cause of all things.

And thus they are not gods, nor are they worthy to be properly styled by this title, because their nature is not made equal to their Maker, nor do they draw to themselves the good as inseparable in the same way as does God; and that which is opposed to the beautiful is also something they might admit, through neglect of the attentiveness devoted to what is better — which each has himself brought about, being by nature lord of his own impulse and judgment. So much, then, concerning these matters. Let us proceed also to other things.

Having supposed, like the Hebrews, that the soul is immortal, and having said that it is like God, he no longer speaks consistently with them, saying at one time that its essence is composite, as though it brought with it, on the one hand, a portion of the indivisible cause that is ever in the same state, and on the other, a divisible nature belonging to bodies.

He says, then, in these very words in the Timaeus: 'But he composed soul, prior to body and older in both origin and excellence, to be its mistress and ruler, as of a thing ruled, out of the following elements and in the following manner: out of the indivisible essence that is ever in the same state, and again out of that which becomes divisible in respect of bodies, he blended a third, intermediate form of essence, compounded of the nature of the Same and of the Other; and in like manner he set it in the middle between the indivisible part of them and the part divisible in respect of bodies. And taking the three — being three — he blended them all into one form, forcibly fitting together the nature of the Other, which is hard to mix, into the Same.'

Hence it naturally follows for him that the passible element also, according to this account, is joined to soul's essence. But whereas at one time he thus defined the essence of the soul, at another time he attaches to it another, worse absurdity, saying that that divine and heavenly soul — the incorporeal and rational soul, the one like God, which through the greatness of its virtue surpasses the vaults of heaven — descends from somewhere above, out of the supracosmic realms, into donkeys and wolves and ants and bees, and urges us to believe this account without any proof.

He says, then, in the Phaedo, as follows: 'And they wander thus, until through desire for the corporeal element that accompanies them, they are again bound into a body. And they are bound, as is likely, into such characters as they happen to have practiced in life.'

'What sort of characters do you mean by these, O Socrates?' 'For instance, those who have practiced gluttony and wantonness and love of drink, and have not been on their guard, are likely to put on the forms of donkeys and such beasts; or do you not think so?' 'You speak quite likely.'

'And those who have honored injustice and tyrannies and plunder [go] into the races of wolves and hawks and kites; or where else would we say such [souls] go?' 'Surely,' said Cebes, 'into such [creatures].' 'Is it not then clear also concerning the rest, how each would go according to their likenesses of practice?'

'Clear indeed,' he said; 'how could it not be?' 'Are not, then, the happiest of these, and those who go to the best place, those who have practiced the popular and civic virtue — which they call temperance and justice, and which arises from habit and practice, without philosophy or reason?' 'Why are these the happiest?' 'Because it is likely that these will arrive again at such a civic and gentle race — perhaps of bees or wasps or ants, or even again at the human race itself.'

And listen also to what he relates in the Phaedrus: 'For the soul does not arrive at that same place from which it came in ten thousand years; for it does not grow wings before so long a time, except the soul of one who has philosophized without guile, or loved a boy together with philosophy. These souls, in the third revolving period of a thousand years, if they choose this life three times in succession, thus winged, depart in the three-thousandth year. But the others, when they have finished their first life, receive judgment; and having been judged, some go to the places of punishment beneath the earth and pay the penalty, while others, lifted up by justice to some place in heaven, live a life worthy of that which they lived in the form of man. And in the thousandth year, both kinds, arriving at the allotment and choice of a second life, choose whichever life each wishes. There indeed a human soul may pass into the life of a beast, and one that was once human, out of a beast, again into a human.'

These things, then, are in the Phaedrus; but hear also what he writes in the Republic: 'For he said he saw the soul that had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, out of hatred for the female race because of his death at their hands, unwilling to be conceived and born of a woman. And he saw the soul of Thamyras choosing that of a nightingale; and he saw a swan changing to the choice of a human life, and likewise other musical creatures, as is to be expected.'

'And the soul that obtained the next lot chose the life of a lion — this was the soul of Ajax, son of Telamon, avoiding becoming a man again, remembering the judgment concerning the arms. And the next after this, that of Agamemnon — likewise hostile to the human race because of its sufferings — exchanged it for the life of an eagle. And among the middle lots, the soul of Atalanta, having beheld the great honors of an athlete, was unable to pass them by, but took them up. And after her he saw the soul of Epeius, son of Panopeus, passing into the nature of a skilled craftswoman; and far off, among the last, he saw the soul of Thersites the buffoon putting on [the form of] a monkey.'

'And by chance the soul of Odysseus obtained the very last lot of all, to go and choose; and remembering its former toils, having ceased from ambition, it went about seeking for a long time the life of a private, unambitious man, and with difficulty found one lying somewhere, neglected by the others; and upon seeing it, it said it would have done the same even had it obtained the first lot, and gladly chose it. And likewise, out of the other beasts, [souls] passed into human beings and into one another — the unjust changing into the wild, the just into the tame — and every kind of mixture occurred.'

Having said so much concerning the soul, Plato is clearly Egyptianizing in his doctrine; for the account is not that of the Hebrews, since it is not even a friend to truth. But this is not the occasion to refute it, since he himself did not undertake the problem by way of proofs. Yet this much one might reasonably point out: that it was not consistent for the same man to say, on the one hand, that at the very moment of death the souls of the impious depart from here and pay penalty in Hades for what they did, and are punished there without limit; and, on the other hand, again to say that they choose their lives here according to their own judgment.

For he says that they are bound into a body through desire for the corporeal; and that those reared in wantonness and gluttony become donkeys, and put on the bodies of other beasts as well, choosing these by their own judgment, but not by justice; while the unjust and rapacious become wolves and kites, having come willingly to this. Then he says that the soul of Orpheus wished to become a swan; that of Thamyras, a nightingale; and that Thersites chose the life of a monkey.