Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
easy to her, that she has made, does make, and will make innumerable
worlds. But, because you do not conceive that nature is able to produce
such effects without some rational aid, you are forced, like the tragic
poets, when you cannot wind up your argument in any other way, to have
recourse to a Deity, whose assistance you would not seek, if you could
view that vast and unbounded magnitude of regions in all parts; where
the mind, extending and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that
it can find no end, no extremity to stop at. In this immensity of
breadth, length, and height, a most boundless company of innumerable
atoms are fluttering about, which, notwithstanding the interposition of
a void space, meet and cohere, and continue clinging to one another;
and by this union these modifications and forms of things arise, which,
in your opinions, could not possibly be made without the help of
bellows and anvils. Thus you have imposed on us an eternal master, whom
we must dread day and night. For who can be free from fear of a Deity
who foresees, regards, and takes notice of everything; one who thinks
all things his own; a curious, ever-busy God?
Hence first arose your [Greek: Heimarmene], as you call it, your fatal
necessity; so that, whatever happens, you affirm that it flows from an
eternal chain and continuance of causes. Of what value is this
philosophy, which, like old women and illiterate men, attributes
everything to fate? Then follows your [Greek: mantike], in Latin called
_divinatio_, divination; which, if we would listen to you, would plunge
us into such superstition that we should fall down and worship your
inspectors into sacrifices, your augurs, your soothsayers, your
prophets, and your fortune-tellers.
Epicurus having freed us from these terrors and restored us to liberty,
we have no dread of those beings whom we have reason to think entirely
free from all trouble themselves, and who do not impose any on others.
We pay our adoration, indeed, with piety and reverence to that essence
which is above all excellence and perfection. But I fear my zeal for
this doctrine has made me too prolix. However, I could not easily leave
so eminent and important a subject unfinished, though I must confess I
should rather endeavor to hear than speak so long.
XXI. Cotta, with his usual courtesy, then began. Velleius, says he,
were it not for something which you have advanced, I should have
remained silent; for I have often observed, as I did just now upon
hearing you, that I cannot so easily conceive why a proposition is true
as why it is false. Should you ask me what I take the nature of the
Gods to be, I should perhaps make no answer. But if you should ask
whether I think it to be of that nature which you have described, I
should answer that I was as far as possible from agreeing with you.
However, before I enter on the subject of your discourse and what you
have advanced upon it, I will give you my opinion of yourself. Your
intimate friend, L. Crassus, has been often heard by me to say that you
were beyond all question superior to all our learned Romans; and that
few Epicureans in Greece were to be compared to you. But as I knew what
a wonderful esteem he had for you, I imagined that might make him the
more lavish in commendation of you. Now, however, though I do not
choose to praise any one when present, yet I must confess that I think
you have delivered your thoughts clearly on an obscure and very
intricate subject; that you are not only copious in your sentiments,
but more elegant in your language than your sect generally are. When I
was at Athens, I went often to hear Zeno, by the advice of Philo, who
used to call him the chief of the Epicureans; partly, probably, in
order to judge more easily how completely those principles could be
refuted after I had heard them stated by the most learned of the
Epicureans. And, indeed, he did not speak in any ordinary manner; but,
like you, with clearness, gravity, and elegance; yet what frequently
gave me great uneasiness when I heard him, as it did while I attended
to you, was to see so excellent a genius falling into such frivolous
(excuse my freedom), not to say foolish, doctrines. However, I shall
not at present offer anything better; for, as I said before, we can in
most subjects, especially in physics, sooner discover what is not true
than what is.
XXII. If you should ask me what God is, or what his character and
nature are, I should follow the example of Simonides, who, when Hiero
the tyrant proposed the same question to him, desired a day to consider
of it. When he required his answer the next day, Simonides begged two
days more; and as he kept constantly desiring double the number which
he had required before instead of giving his answer, Hiero, with
surprise, asked him his meaning in doing so: "Because," says he, "the
longer I meditate on it, the more obscure it appears to me." Simonides,
who was not only a delightful poet, but reputed a wise and learned man
in other branches of knowledge, found, I suppose, so many acute and
refined arguments occurring to him, that he was doubtful which was the
truest, and therefore despaired of discovering any truth.
But does your Epicurus (for I had rather contend with him than with
you) say anything that is worthy the name of philosophy, or even of
common-sense?
In the question concerning the nature of the Gods, his first inquiry
is, whether there are Gods or not. It would be dangerous, I believe, to
take the negative side before a public auditory; but it is very safe in
a discourse of this kind, and in this company. I, who am a priest, and
who think that religions and ceremonies ought sacredly to be
maintained, am certainly desirous to have the existence of the Gods,
which is the principal point in debate, not only fixed in opinion, but
proved to a demonstration; for many notions flow into and disturb the
mind which sometimes seem to convince us that there are none. But see
how candidly I will behave to you: as I shall not touch upon those
tenets you hold in common with other philosophers, consequently I shall
not dispute the existence of the Gods, for that doctrine is agreeable
to almost all men, and to myself in particular; but I am still at
liberty to find fault with the reasons you give for it, which I think
are very insufficient.
XXIII. You have said that the general assent of men of all nations and
all degrees is an argument strong enough to induce us to acknowledge
the being of the Gods. This is not only a weak, but a false, argument;
for, first of all, how do you know the opinions of all nations? I
really believe there are many people so savage that they have no
thoughts of a Deity. What think you of Diagoras, who was called the
atheist; and of Theodorus after him? Did not they plainly deny the very
essence of a Deity? Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just now mentioned,
the greatest sophist of his age, was banished by order of the Athenians
from their city and territories, and his books were publicly burned,
because these words were in the beginning of his treatise concerning
the Gods: "I am unable to arrive at any knowledge whether there are, or
are not, any Gods." This treatment of him, I imagine, restrained many
from professing their disbelief of a Deity, since the doubt of it only
could not escape punishment. What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the
impious, and the perjured? If Tubulus Lucius, Lupus, or Carbo the son
of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had believed that there were Gods, would
either of them have carried his perjuries and impieties to such excess?
Your reasoning, therefore, to confirm your assertion is not so
conclusive as you think it is. But as this is the manner in which other
philosophers have argued on the same subject, I will take no further
notice of it at present; I rather choose to proceed to what is properly
your own.
I allow that there are Gods. Instruct me, then, concerning their
origin; inform me where they are, what sort of body, what mind, they
have, and what is their course of life; for these I am desirous of
knowing. You attribute the most absolute power and efficacy to atoms.
Out of them you pretend that everything is made. But there are no
atoms, for there is nothing without body; every place is occupied by
body, therefore there can be no such thing as a vacuum or an atom.
XXIV. I advance these principles of the naturalists without knowing
whether they are true or false; yet they are more like truth than those
statements of yours; for they are the absurdities in which Democritus,
or before him Leucippus, used to indulge, saying that there are certain
light corpuscles--some smooth, some rough, some round, some square,
some crooked and bent as bows--which by a fortuitous concourse made
heaven and earth, without the influence of any natural power. This
opinion, C. Velleius, you have brought down to these our times; and you
would sooner be deprived of the greatest advantages of life than of
that authority; for before you were acquainted with those tenets, you
thought that you ought to profess yourself an Epicurean; so that it was
necessary that you should either embrace these absurdities or lose the
philosophical character which you had taken upon you; and what could
bribe you to renounce the Epicurean opinion? Nothing, you say, can
prevail on you to forsake the truth and the sure means of a happy life.
But is that the truth? for I shall not contest your happy life, which
you think the Deity himself does not enjoy unless he languishes in
idleness. But where is truth? Is it in your innumerable worlds, some of
which are rising, some falling, at every moment of time? Or is it in
your atomical corpuscles, which form such excellent works without the
direction of any natural power or reason? But I was forgetting my
liberality, which I had promised to exert in your case, and exceeding
the bounds which I at first proposed to myself. Granting, then,
everything to be made of atoms, what advantage is that to your
argument? For we are searching after the nature of the Gods; and
allowing them to be made of atoms, they cannot be eternal, because
whatever is made of atoms must have had a beginning: if so, there were
no Gods till there was this beginning; and if the Gods have had a
beginning, they must necessarily have an end, as you have before
contended when you were discussing Plato's world. Where, then, is your
beatitude and immortality, in which two words you say that God is
expressed, the endeavor to prove which reduces you to the greatest
perplexities? For you said that God had no body, but something like
body; and no blood, but something like blood.
XXV. It is a frequent practice among you, when you assert anything that
has no resemblance to truth, and wish to avoid reprehension, to advance
something else which is absolutely and utterly impossible, in order
that it may seem to your adversaries better to grant that point which
has been a matter of doubt than to keep on pertinaciously contradicting
you on every point: like Epicurus, who, when he found that if his atoms
were allowed to descend by their own weight, our actions could not be
in our own power, because their motions would be certain and necessary,
invented an expedient, which escaped Democritus, to avoid necessity. He
says that when the atoms descend by their own weight and gravity, they
move a little obliquely. Surely, to make such an assertion as this is
what one ought more to be ashamed of than the acknowledging ourselves
unable to defend the proposition. His practice is the same against the
logicians, who say that in all propositions in which yes or no is
required, one of them must be true; he was afraid that if this were
granted, then, in such a proposition as "Epicurus will be alive or dead