12

12. An apology for Raymond Sebond

[The chapter which follows is by far the longest one which Montaigne ever wrote. It is discussed in the Introduction (pp. xx–xliv). In the Appendices to that Introduction are given a translation of Montaigne’s dedication to his father of his French version of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis, as well as a translation of Montaigne’s French version of the Prologue of Raymond Sebond himself].

[A] Truly, learning is a most useful accomplishment and a great one. Those who despise it give ample proof of their animal-stupidity. Yet I do not prize its worth at that extreme value given to it by some, such as the philosopher Erillus who lodged Supreme Good in it, holding that it was within the power of learning to make us wise and contented.1 That, I do not believe – nor what others have said: that learning is the Mother of virtue and that all vice is born of Ignorance. If that is true, it needs a lengthy gloss.2

My house has long been open to erudite men and is well known to them, since my father, who had the ordering of it for fifty years and more, all ablaze with that new ardour with which King Francis I embraced letters and raised them in esteem, spent a great deal of trouble and money seeking the acquaintance of the learned, welcoming them into his house as holy persons who had been granted private inspiration by Divine Wisdom; he collected their sayings and their reasonings as though they were oracles – with all the more awe and devotion in that he had less right to judge: he had no acquaintance with literature, [A1] any more than his forebears did. [A] I like learned men myself, but I do not worship them.

Among others there was Pierre Bunel, a man who, in his own time, enjoyed a great reputation for learning.3 He and other men of his kind stayed several days at Montaigne in my father’s company; when leaving, Bunel gave him a book called Theologia Naturalis sive Liber creaturarum magistri Raymondi de Sabonde – Natural Theology, or, The Book of Creatures by Master Raymond Sebond. My father was familiar with Italian and Spanish and so, since the book is composed in a kind of pidgin – Spanish with Latin endings – Bunel hoped that my father could profit by it with only very little help. He recommended it to him as a book which was very useful for the period in which he gave it to him: that was when the novelties of Luther were beginning to be esteemed, in many places shaking our old religion. He was well advised, clearly deducing that this new disease would soon degenerate into loathsome atheism. The mass of ordinary people4 lack the faculty of judging things as they are, letting themselves be carried away by chance appearances. Once you have put into their hands the foolhardiness of despising and criticizing opinions which they used to hold in the highest awe (such as those which concern their salvation), and once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty [C] any [A] articles of their religion, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty. They had no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those you have just undermined; and so, as though it were the yoke of a tyrant, they shake off all those other concepts which had been impressed upon them by the authority of Law and the awesomeness of ancient custom.

[B] Nam cupide conculcatur nimis ante metutum.

[That which once was feared too greatly is now avidly trampled underfoot.]5

[A] They then take it upon themselves to accept nothing on which they have not pronounced their own approval, subjecting it to their individual assent.

Now, my father, a few days before he died, happened to light upon this book beneath a pile of old papers; he ordered me to put it into French for him. It is good to translate authors like these, where there is little to express apart from the matter. Authors much devoted to grace and elegance of language are a dangerous6 undertaking, [C] especially when you are turning them into a weaker language. [A] It was a strange and novel occupation for me, but, happening to be at leisure and never being able to refuse any command from the best father that ever was, I did what I could and finished it. He took particular delight in it and gave instructions to have it printed. They were carried out after his death.7

I found the concepts of Sebond to be beautiful, the structure of his book well executed and his project full of piety. Many people spend time reading it – especially ladies, to whom we owe greater courtesy. I have often been able to help them by relieving this book of the weight of the two main objections made against it. (Sebond’s aim is a bold and courageous one, since he undertakes to establish against the atheists and to show by human, natural reasons the truth of all the articles of the Christian religion.)

Frankly, I find him so firm and so successful in this, that I do not think it is possible to do better on this topic and I do not believe that anyone has done so well.

It seemed too rich and too fine a book for an author whose name is so obscure – all we know of him is that he was a Spaniard professing medicine in Toulouse some two hundred years ago; so I once asked Adrian Turnebus – who knew everything – what he made of it.8 He replied that he thought it was a quintessence distilled from St Thomas Aquinas, only a wit like Thomas’s, full of infinite learning and staggering subtlety, being capable of such concepts. Anyway, whoever it was who conceived and wrote this book (and it is not reasonable to deprive Sebond of his title without greater cause), he was a most talented man, having many fine accomplishments.

The first charge made against the book is that Christians do themselves wrong by wishing to support their belief with human reasons: belief is grasped only by faith and by private inspiration from God’s grace.

A pious zeal may be seen behind this objection; so any assay at satisfying those who put it forward must be made with gentleness and respect. It is really a task for a man versed in Theology rather than for me, who know nothing about it. Nevertheless, this is my verdict: in a matter so holy, so sublime, so far surpassing Man’s intellect as is that Truth by which it has pleased God in his goodness9 to enlighten us, we can only grasp that Truth and lodge it within us if God favours us with the privilege of further help, beyond the natural order.

I do not believe, then, that purely human means have the capacity to do this; if they had, many choice and excellent souls in ancient times – souls abundantly furnished with natural faculties – would not have failed to reach such knowledge by discursive reasoning. Only faith can embrace, with a lively certainty, the high mysteries of our religion.10

But that is not to imply that it is other than a most fair and praiseworthy undertaking to devote to the service of our faith those natural, human tools which God has granted us. It is not to be doubted that it is the most honourable use that we could ever put them to and that there is no task, no design, more worthy of a Christian than to aim, by assiduous reflection, at beautifying, developing and clarifying the truth of his beliefs. We are not content merely to serve God with our spirits and our souls: we owe him more than that, doing him reverence with our bodies; we honour him with our very members, our actions and with things external. In the same way we must accompany our faith with all the reason that lies within us – but always with the reservation that we never reckon that faith depends upon ourselves or that our efforts and our conjectures can ever themselves attain to a knowledge so supernatural, so divine.

If faith does not come and dwell within us as something infused, beyond the natural order; if she comes in, not just by reasoning but by any human means, then she is not there in her dignity and splendour. And yet I fear that we do only enjoy her presence in that way. If we held fast to God by means of a lively faith; if we held fast to God by God, not by ourselves; if our footing and our foundation were divine: then human events would not have the power to shake us which they do have; our fortress would not be for surrendering to so feeble a battery; the love of novelty, the constraint of Princes, the good luck of one party or rash and fortuitous changes in our own opinions, would have no power to shake our beliefs or modify them. We would not let our faith be troubled at the mercy of some new argument or by persuasion – not by all the rhetoric there ever was. We would withstand such billows with a firmness, unbending and unmoved:

Illisos fluctus rupes ut vasta refundit, Et varias circum latrantes dissipat undas Mole sua…

[As a mighty rock, by its very mass, withstands the lashing waves, pouring them back and breaking up the waters raging round about it…]11

If a ray of God’s light touched us even slightly, it would be everywhere apparent: not only our words but our deeds would bear its lustre and its brightness. Everything emanating from us would be seen shining with that noble light. We ought to be ashamed: among the schools of human philosophy there never was an initiate who did not make his conduct and his life conform, at least in some respect, to their teachings, however difficult or strange: and yet so holy and heavenly an ordinance as ours only marks Christians on their tongues.

[B] Do you want to see that for yourself? Then compare our behaviour with a Moslem’s or a pagan’s: you always remain lower than they are. Yet, given the advantage of our own religion, our superiority ought to outshine them, far beyond any comparison. Men ought to say: ‘Are they really so just, so loving, so good? Then these people must be Christians.’12 [C] All other manifestations are common to all religions: hope, trust, deliverances, ceremonies, penances and martyrdoms. The distinctive mark of the Truth we hold ought to be virtue, which is the most exacting mark of Truth, the closest one to heaven and the most worthy thing that Truth produces.

[B] That is why our good Saint Louis was right, when the Tartar king who was converted to Christianity planned to come to Lyons to kiss the Pope’s feet and to study the holiness he hoped to find in our behaviour, to turn him away from it at once, fearing that our disordered way of life would sour his taste for so sacred a belief.13

The actual outcome, on the other hand, was different for that later convert who went to Rome for the same purpose: seeing the dissolute life of the prelates and people there at that time, he became even more firmly attached to our religion: he considered how much strength and holiness it must have to be able to maintain its dignity and splendour in the midst of corruption so great, in hands so vicious!14

[A] The Word of God says that if we had one single drop of faith we would ‘move mountains’:15 our actions, guided and accompanied by God, would not be simply human: they would partake of the miraculous, just as our belief does. [C] ‘Brevis est institutio vitae honestae beataeque, si credas’ [Laying the principles for an honourable and blessed life is soon done… if you believe].16

Some people make the world believe that they hold beliefs they do not hold. A greater number make themselves believe it, having no idea what ‘believing’ really means, once you go deeply into the matter. [A] We find it strange when, in the wars now besetting our country, we see the outcome of events drifting and changing in a manner marked by nothing unusual or beyond the natural order. That is because we bring to it nothing beyond ourselves. There is Justice on one of the sides, but only as a decoration and a cloak – often cited but never received, welcomed and truly wedded. Justice is lodged as in the mouth of a lawyer, not as in the heart and emotions of the man whose suit it is. God owes help – beyond the natural order – to our faith, to our religion: he does not owe it to our passions.17 Men take the lead in them, making use of religion: things ought to be clean contrary.18

[C] Think whether we do not take religion into our own hands and twist it like wax into shapes quite opposed to a rule so unbending and direct. Has that ever been seen more clearly than in France today? Some approach it from this side, some from the other; some make it black, others make it white: all are alike in using religion for their violent and ambitious schemes, so like each other in managing their affairs with excess and injustice, that they make you doubt whether they really do hold different opinions over a matter on which depends the way we conduct and regulate our lives. Could you find behaviour more like, more closely identical even, coming from the same teaching in the same school? Just see the horrifying impudence with which we toss theological arguments to and fro and how irreligiously we cast them off or take them up again, whenever we happen to switch places in these civil tumults. Take that most formal proposition: Whether it be permitted for a Subject to rebel and to take up arms against his Ruler, in defence of his religion? First, remember which side, only last year, was mouthing the affirmative, making it the buttress of their faction, and what side was mouthing the negative, making their buttress out of that. Then listen from what quarter come voices defending which side now, and judge whether they are rattling their swords less for this side than they did for the other!19 We burn people at the stake for saying that Truth must bow to our necessities: and, in France, how much worse is what we do than what we say!

[A] Let us confess the truth: pick out, even from the lawful, moderate army,20 those who are fighting simply out of zeal for their religious convictions; then add those who are concerned only to uphold the laws of their country and to serve their King: you would not have enough to form one full company of fighting men. How does it happen that so few can be found who maintain a consistent will and action in our civil disturbances? How does it happen that you can see them sometimes merely ambling along, sometimes charging headlong – the very same men sometimes ruining our affairs by their violence and harshness and at other times by their lukewarmness, their softness and their sloth? It must be that they have been motivated by private concerns, [C] by ones due to chance; [A] as these change, so do they.

[C] It is evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians excel at hating enemies. Our zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency towards hatred, enmity, ambition, avarice, evil-speaking… and rebellion. On the other hand, zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, unless he is miraculously predisposed to them by some rare complexion. Our religion was made to root out vices: now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them.

[A] There is a saying: ‘Do not try to palm off sheaves of straw on God.’ If we believed in God – I do not mean by faith but merely with bare credence, indeed (and I say it to our great shame) if we believed him and knew him just as we believe historical events or one of our companions, then we would love him above all other things, on account of the infinite goodness and beauty shining within him: at the very least he would march equal in the ranks of our affections with riches, pleasure, glory and friends.21 [C] The best among us does not fear to offend him as much as offending neighbour, kinsman, master. On this side there is the object of one of our vicious pleasures: on the other, the glorious state of immortality, equally known and equally convincing – is there anyone so simple-minded as to barter one for the other? And yet we often give it up altogether, out of pure contempt; for what attracts us to blasphemy except, perhaps, the taste of the offence itself?

Antisthenes, the philosopher, was being initiated into the Orphic mysteries; the priest said that those who make their religious profession would receive after death joys, perfect and everlasting. He replied: ‘Why do you not die yourself then?’ Diogenes’ retort was more brusque (that was his fashion) and rather off our subject: when the priest was preaching at him to join his order so as to obtain the blessings of the world to come, he replied: ‘Are you asking me to believe that great men like Agesilaus and Epaminondas will be wretched, whilst a calf like you will be happy, just because you are a priest?’22

[A] If we were to accept the great promises of everlasting blessedness as having the same authority as a philosophical argument, no more, we would not hold death in such horror as we do:

[B] Non jam se moriens dissolvi conquereretur; Sed magis ire foras, vestemque relinquere, ut anguis, Gauderet, praelonga senex aut cornua cervus.

[The dying man would not then complain that he is being ‘loosened asunder’, but would, rather, rejoice to be ‘going outside’, like a snake casting off its skin, or an old stag casting off his over-long antlers.]23

[A] ‘I wish to be loosened asunder’, he would say, ‘and to be with Jesus Christ.’ The force of Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul led some of his disciples to kill themselves, the sooner to enjoy the hopes which he gave them.24

All this is a clear sign that we accept our religion only as we would fashion it, only from our own hands – no differently from the way other religions gain acceptance. We happen to be born in a country where it is practised, or else we have regard for its age or for the authority of the men who have upheld it; perhaps we fear the threats which it attaches to the wicked or go along with its promises. Such considerations as these must be deployed in defence of our beliefs, but only as support-troops. Their bonds are human. Another region, other witnesses, similar promises or similar menaces, would, in the same way, stamp a contrary belief on us. [B] We are Christians by the same title that we are Périgordians or Germans.

[A] Plato said few men are so firm in their atheism that a pressing danger does not bring them to acknowledge divine power;25 such behaviour has nothing to do with a true Christian; only mortal, human religions become accepted by human procedures. What sort of faith must it be that is planted by cowardice and established in us by feebleness of heart! [C] What an agreeable faith, which believes what it believes, because it is not brave enough to disbelieve it! [A] How can vicious passions, such as inconstancy and sudden dismay, produce in our souls anything right?

[C] Plato says that people first decide, by reasoned judgement, that what is told about hell and future punishment is just fiction. But when they have the opportunity really to find out, by experience, when old age or illness brings them close to death, then the terror of it fills them with belief again, out of horror for what awaits them.

To impress such ideas upon people is to make them timorous of heart: that is why Plato in his Laws forbids any teaching of threats such as these or of any conviction that ill can come to Man from the gods. (When it does happen, it is for man’s greater good or like a medical purgation.)26

They tell that Bion, infected by the atheistic teachings of Theodorus, used to mock religious men; but eventually, when death approached, he gave himself over to the most extreme superstitions, as though the gods took themselves off and brought themselves back according to the needs of Bion.27

Plato – and these examples – lead to the conclusion that either love or force can bring us back to a belief in God. Atheism, as a proposition, is a monstrous thing, stripped, as it were, of natural qualities. It is awkward and difficult to fix it firmly in the human spirit, however impudent or however unruly. We have seen plenty of people who are egged on by vanity and pride to conceive lofty opinions for setting the world to rights; to put themselves in countenance they affect to profess atheism: but even if they are mad enough to try and plant it in their consciousness, they are not strong enough to do so. Give them a good thrust through the breast with your sword and they never fail to raise clasped hands to heaven. And when fear or sickness has cooled down the licentious fever-heat of that transient humour, they never fail to come back to themselves again, letting themselves be reconciled to recognized standards and beliefs. Seriously digested doctrine is one thing: these surface impressions are quite another. They are born of a mind unhinged, in the spirit of debauchery; they drift rashly and erratically about in the fancies of men. What wretched, brainless men they are, trying to be worse than they can be!

[A] That great soul [C] of Plato [A] – great, however, with merely human greatness – was led into a neighbouring mistake by the error of paganism and his ignorance of our holy Truth: he held that it is children and old men who are most susceptible to religion, as if religion were born of human weakness and drew her credibility from it.28 [A] The knot which ought to attach our judgement and our will and to clasp our souls firmly to our Creator should not be one tied together with human considerations and strengthened by emotions: it should be drawn tight in a clasp both divine and supernatural, and have only one form, one face, one lustre; namely, the authority of God and his grace.

But, once our hearts and souls are governed by Faith, it is reasonable that she should further her purposes by drawing upon all of our other parts, according to their several capacities. Moreover, it is simply not believable that there should be no prints whatsoever impressed upon the fabric of this world by the hand of the great Architect, or that there should not be at least some image within created things relating to the Workman who made them and fashioned them. He has left within these lofty works the impress of his Godhead: only our weakness stops us from discovering it. He tells us himself that he makes manifest his unseen workings through those things which are seen. Sebond toiled at this honourable endeavour, showing us that there is no piece within this world which belies its Maker. God’s goodness would be put in the wrong if the universe were not compatible with our beliefs. All things, Heaven, Earth, the elements, our bodies and our souls are in one accord: we simply have to find how to use them. If we have the capacity to understand, they will teach us. [B] For this world is a most holy Temple into which Man has been brought in order to contemplate the Sun, the heavenly bodies, the waters and the dry land – objects not sculpted by mortal hands but made manifest to our senses by the Divine Mind in order to represent intelligibles. [A] “The invisible things of God’, says St Paul, ‘are clearly seen from the creation of the world, his Eternal Wisdom and his Godhead being perceived from the things he has made.’29

Atque adeo faciem coeli non invidet orbi Ipse Deus, vultusque suos corpusque recludit Semper volvendo; seque ipsum inculcat et offert, Ut bene cognosci possit, doceatque videndo Qualis eat, doceatque suas attendere leges.

[God himself does not begrudge to the world the sight of the face of heaven, which, ever-rolling, unveils his countenance, his incorporate being inculcating and offering himself to us, so that he may be known full well; he teaches the man who contemplates to recognize his state, teaches him, also, to wait upon his laws.]30

Our human reasonings and concepts are like matter, heavy and barren: God’s grace is their form, giving them shape and worth. The virtuous actions of Socrates and of Cato remain vain and useless, since they did not have, as their end or their aim, love of the true Creator of all things nor obedience to him: they did not know God; the same applies to our concepts and thoughts: they have a body of sorts, but it is a formless mass, unenlightened and without shape, unless accompanied by faith in God and by grace. When Faith tinges the themes of Sebond and throws her light upon them, she makes them firm and solid. They then have the capacity of serving as a finger-post, as an elementary guide setting an apprentice on the road leading to knowledge such as this; they fashion him somewhat into shape and make him capable of God’s grace, which then furnishes out our belief and perfects it.

I know a man of authority, a cultured, educated man, who admitted to me that he had been led back from the errors of disbelief by means of the arguments of Sebond. Even if you were to strip them of their ornaments and of the help and approbation of Faith – even if you were to take them for purely human notions – you would find, when it comes to fighting those who have plunged down into the dreadful, horrible darkness of irreligion, that they still remain more solid and more firm than any others of the same kind which you can set up against them. We rightly can say to our opponents, ‘Si melius quid habes, accerse, vel imperium fer’ [If you have anything better, produce it, or submit]:31 let them allow the force of our proofs or else show us others, elsewhere, on another subject, as closely woven or of better stuff.

Without thinking I have already half-slipped into the second of the charges which I set out to counter on behalf of Sebond.

Some say that his arguments are weak and unsuited to what he wants to demonstrate; they set out to batter them down with ease. People like those need to be shaken rather more roughly, since they are more dangerous than the first and more malicious. [C] We are only too willing to couch other men’s writings in senses which favour our settled opinions: an atheist prides himself on bringing all authors into accord with atheism, poisoning harmless matter with his own venom.32 [A] Such people have some mental prepossession which makes Sebond’s reasons seem insipid. Moreover it seems to them that they have been allowed an easy game, with freedom to fight against our religion with purely human weapons: they would never dare to attack her in the full majesty of her imperious authority. The means I use and which seem more fitted to abating such a frenzy is to trample down human pride and arrogance, crushing them under our feet; I make men feel the emptiness, the vanity, the nothingness of Man, wrenchingfrom their grasp the sickly arms of human reason, making them bow their heads and bite the dust before the authority and awe of the Divine Majesty, to whom alone belong knowledge and wisdom; who alone can esteem himself in any way, and from whom we steal whatever worth or value we pride ourselves on: [God permits no one to esteem himself higher].33

[C] Let us smash down such presumption. It is the very foundation of the tyrannous rule of the Evil Spirit: ‘Deus superbis resistit; humilibus autem dat gratiam’ [God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble]. ‘There is intelligence in all the gods,’ says Plato, ‘but very little of it in men.’34

[A] Yet it is a great source of consolation to a Christian man to see our transitory mortal tools so properly matched to our holy and divine faith that when we use them on subjects which, like them, are transitory and mortal, it is precisely then that they are most closely and most powerfully matched. Let us try and see, then, whether a man has in his power any reasons stronger than those of Sebond – whether, indeed, it is in man to arrive at any certainty by argument and reflection.

[C] St Augustine, pleading his case against presumptuous people, has cause to criticize their injustice when they consider those parts of our faith to be false which human reason is unable to establish. In order to show that many things can exist or have had existence, even though their nature and causes have no foundation which can be fixed by rational discourse, he advances various indubitable, recognized experiences, for which Man admits he can see no explanation. Augustine does this, as he does all things, after careful and intelligent search.35 We must do even more, teaching such people the lesson that the weakness of their reason can be proved without our having to marshal rare examples; that reason is so inadequate, so blind, that there is no example so clear and easy as to be clear enough for her; that the easy and the hard are all one to her; that all subjects and Nature in general equally deny her any sway or jurisdiction.

[A] What is Truth teaching us, when she preaches that we must fly from the wisdom of this world; when she so frequently urges that what seems wise to Man is but foolishness to God; that of all vain things, Man is the most vain; that a man who dares to presume that he knows anything, does not even know what knowledge is; that Man, who is nothing yet thinks he is something, misleads and deceives himself? These are verdicts of the Holy Ghost;36 they express so clearly and so vividly what I myself wish to uphold that I would need no other proof to use against people who, with due submission and obedience, would surrender to his authority. But these people simply ask to be whipped, and will not let us fight their reason, save by reason alone.

So let us consider for a while Man in isolation – Man with no outside help, armed with no arms but his own and stripped of that grace and knowledge of God in which consist his dignity, his power and the very ground of his being.37 Let us see how much constancy there is in all his fine panoply. Let Man make me understand, by the force of discursive reason, what are the grounds on which he has founded and erected all those advantages which he thinks he has over other creatures and who has convinced him that it is for his convenience, his service, that, for so many centuries, there has been established and maintained the awesome motion of the vault of heaven, the everlasting light of those tapers coursing so proudly overhead or the dread surging of the boundless sea? Is it possible to imagine anything more laughable than that this pitiful, wretched creature – who is not even master of himself, but exposed to shocks on every side – should call himself Master and Emperor of a universe, the smallest particle of which he has no means of knowing, let alone swaying! Man claims the privilege of being unique in that, within this created frame, he alone is able to recognize its structure and its beauty; he alone is able to render thanks to its Architect or to tot up the profit or loss of the world… But who impressed his seal on such a privilege? If Man has been given so great and fair a commission, let him produce documents saying so. [C] Were they drawn up in favour of wise men only? (They apply to few enough!)38 Are fools and knaves worthy of a favour so far exceeding the normal order – the worst thing in the world exalted above all others? Are we supposed to believe that fellow who wrote: ‘Quorum igitur causa quis dixerit effectum esse mundum? Eorum scilicet animantium quae ratione utuntur. Hi sunt dii et homines, quibus profecto nihil est melius’ [Who will tell for whose sake this world has been brought about? Why, for the sake of beings having souls able to use reason, those most perfect of beings, gods and men].39 Coupling gods and men together! We can never do enough to batter down such impudence.

[A] Poor little wretch! What is there in man worthy of such a privilege?

Consider the sun, moon and stars, with their lives free from corruption, their beauty, their grandeur, their motions ever proceeding by laws so just:

cum suspicimus magni caelestia mundi Templa super, stellisque micantibus Aethera fixum, Et venit in mentem Lunae Solisque viarum;

[When we gaze upwards to the celestial temples of this great Universe, to the Aether with its fixed and twinkling stars, and when there comes to mind the courses of the Moon and of the Sun…]40

then consider the dominion and power which those bodies have, not only over our lives and the settled detail of our fortunes –

Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab astris

[For he made the deeds and lives of man to depend upon the Sun, the Moon and the Stars]41 –

– but over our very inclinations, our discursive reasoning and our wills, which are all governed, driven and shaken at the mercy of their influences. Our reason tells us that and finds it to be so;

speculataque longeDeprendit tacitis dominantia legibus astra, Et totum alterna mundum ratione moveri, Fatorumque vices certis discernere signis.

[it gazes in the distance, grasping that the heavenly bodies govern us by silent laws, that all the world is moved by periodic causes; and it discerns changing Fate in fixed and certain signs.]

Then see how not merely one man or one king is sent reeling by the slightest motion of the heavenly bodies, but whole monarchies, empires and all this lower world:

Quantaque quam parvi faciant discrimina motus: Tantum est hoc regnum, quod regibus imperat ipsis!

[When such small motions produce such changes, how great must be the kingdom which rules over kings themselves!]

Then allow that our reason judges that our virtues and our vices, our competencies, our knowledge, and this very discourse we are making here and now about the power of the heavenly bodies, comes to us by their means and by their favour:

furit alter amore,Et pontum tranare potest et vertere Trojam; Alterius sors est scribendis legibus apta; Ecce patrem nati perimunt, natosque parentes; Mutuaque armati coeunt in vulnera fratres: Non nostrum hoc bellum est; coguntur tanta movere, Inque suas ferri poenas, lacerandaque membra; Hoc quoque fatale est, sic ipsum expendere fatum.

[One man, mad with love, can cross the sea and topple Troy: another’s lot is to be apt at prescribing laws. Look: children kill parents: parents, children; brothers bear arms and clash to wound each other. Such wars do not belong to men alone. Men are compelled to do such things, compelled to punish themselves, to tear their limbs apart. And when we ponder thus on Fate, that too is fated…]

If we are dependent upon the disposition of the heavens for such little rationality as we have, how can our reason make us equal to the Heavens? How can their essence, or the principles on which they are founded, be subjects of human knowledge? Everything that we can see in those bodies produces in us ecstatic wonder. [C] ‘Quae molitio, quae ferramenta, qui vectes, quae machinae, qui ministri tanti operis fuerunt?’ [What engineering, what tools, what levers, what contrivances, what agents were used in such an enterprise?]42

[A] Why do we deprive the heavenly bodies of souls, life or rationality? Have we, who have no dealings with them beyond pure obedience, been able to recognize in them some kind of stupor, motionless and insensible? [C] Shall we say that we have seen no other creature but Man possessed of a rational soul? What do we mean? Have we ever seen anything like the Sun? And just because we have seen nothing like it, does it cease to be; or, since we have seen nothing like its movements, shall they, too, cease to be? If things we have not actually seen do not exist, then our knowledge is wondrously diminished! ‘Quae sunt tantae animi angustiae’ [What narrow defiles has our mind].43

[A] What vain human dreams, to make the Moon into some celestial Earth, [C] dreaming up, like Anaxagoras, mountains and valleys for it, [A] planting human dwellings and habitations on it and, like Plato and Plutarch, settling colonies there for our convenience: and then to make our own Earth into a brightly shining star: [C] ‘Inter caetera mortalitatis incommoda et hoc est, calligo mentium, nec tantum necessitas errandi sed errorum amor’ [Among the other disorders of our mortal condition there is that mental darkness which not only compels us to go wrong but makes us love to do so]. ‘Corruptibile corpus aggravat animam, et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem’ [For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth on many things].44

[A] The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride.45 This creature knows and sees that he is lodged down here, among the mire and shit of the world, bound and nailed to the deadest, most stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest storey of the building, the farthest from the vault of heaven; his characteristics place him in the third and lowest category of animate creatures, yet, in thought, he sets himself above the circle of the Moon, bringing the very heavens under his feet. The vanity of this same thought makes him equal himself to God; attribute to himself God’s mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures; and (although they are his fellows and his brothers) carve out for them such helpings of force or faculties as he thinks fit. How can he, from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden, inward motivations of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless brutes?

[C] When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?46

In his description of the Golden Age under Saturn, Plato counted among one of the principal advantages which Man then had his ability to communicate with the beasts; inquiring and learning from them, Man knew what they were really like and how they differed from each other. By this means Man used to acquire a full understanding and discretion, leading his life far more happily than we ever can now. After that, do we need a better proof of the impudence of Man towards beast? Well, that great author then opined that Nature mainly gave the beasts their bodily forms to enable the men in his time to foretell the future!47

[A] Why should it be a defect in the beasts not in us which stops all communication between us? We can only guess whose fault it is that we cannot understand each other: for we do not understand them any more than they understand us. They may reckon us to be brute beasts for the same reason that we reckon them to be so. It is no great miracle if we cannot understand them: we cannot understand Basques or Troglodytes! –

[A1] Some have boasted, though, that they could understand the beasts: Apollonius of Thyana, [B] Melampus, Tiresias, Thales [AI] and others. [B] And since there are nations (so the cosmographers tell us) who acknowledge a dog as their king, they must interpret its bark and its movements as having some definite meaning.48 [A] We ought to note the parity there is between us. We have some modest understanding of what they mean: they have the same of us, in about equal measure. They fawn on us, threaten us and entreat us – as we do them. Meanwhile we discover that they manifestly have converse between themselves, both whole and entire: they understand each other, not only within one species but across different species.

[B] Et mutae pecudes et denique secla ferarumDissimiles suerunt voces variasque cluere,Cum metus aut dolor est, aut cum jam gaudia gliscunt.

[And dumb cattle and, finally, the generations of wild beasts customarily make sounds having various meanings, when they feel fear or pain or when joy overflows.]49

[A] A horse knows there to be anger in a given bark of a dog; but that horse does not take fright when the same dog makes some other meaningful cry. Even in beasts who cannot utter meaningful sounds we can readily conclude that there is some other means of communication between them, from the way they work purposefully together; [C] their very movements serve as arguments and ideas.

[B] Non alia longe ratione atque ipsa videtur Protrahere ad gestum pueros infantia linguae.

[In a not dissimilar way, the very inability to speak leads infants to make gestures.]50

[A] And why not? Our deaf-mutes have discussions and arguments, telling each other stories by means of signs.51 I have seen some who are so nimble and so practised at this that they truly lack nothing necessary for making themselves perfectly understood. After all, lovers quarrel, make it up again, beg favours, give thanks, arrange secret meetings and say everything, with their eyes.

[A1] E’l silentio ancor suole Haver prieghi e parole.

[Silence itself can talk and beg requests.]52

[C] And what about our hands? With them we request, promise, summon, dismiss, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, question, show astonishment, count, confess, repent, fear, show shame, doubt, teach, command, incite, encourage, make oaths, bear witness, make accusations, condemn, give absolution, insult, despise, defy, provoke, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, advise, exalt, welcome, rejoice, lament; show sadness, grieve, despair; astonish, cry out, keep silent and what not else, with a variety and multiplicity rivalling the tongue.

What of the head? We summon, dismiss, admit, reject, deny, welcome, honour, venerate, disdain, request, refuse, rejoice, lament, fondle, tease, submit, brave, exhort, menace, affirm and inquire.

And what of our eyebrows or our shoulders? None of their movements fails to talk a meaningful language which does not have to be learned, a language common to us all. This suggests (given the variety and different usage among spoken languages) that it is, rather, sign-language that should be judged the ‘property’ of Man.53

I shall leave aside what Necessity can suddenly teach men in individual cases of particular need, as well as finger-alphabets, grammars of gesture and those branches of learning conducted and expressed through them and, finally, those peoples who, according to Pliny, have no other tongue.54 [B] An ambassador from the city of Abdera, after delivering a long address to King Agis of Sparta, asked him: ‘Sire, what reply do you want me to bear back to our citizens?’ – ‘That I allowed you to say all you wanted, for as long as you wanted, without uttering a word.’ Was that not an eloquent and most intelligible silence?55

[A] After all, what aspects of our human competence cannot be found in the activities of animals? Is there any form of body politic more ordered, more varied in its allocation of tasks and duties or maintained with greater constancy than that of the bees? Can we conceive that an allocation of tasks and activities, so striking for its orderliness, should be conducted without reasoned discourse and foresight?

His quidam signis atque haec exempla sequuti, Esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus Aethereos dixere.

[From such signs and examples men conclude that bees have been given some part of the divine Mind and have drunk Aethereal draughts.]56

Take the swallows, when spring returns; we can see them ferreting through all the corners of our houses; from a thousand places they select one, finding it the most suitable place to make their nests: is that done without judgement or discernment? And then when they are making their nests (so beautifully and so wondrously woven together) can birds use a square rather than a circle, an obtuse angle rather than a right angle, without knowing their properties or their effects? Do they bring water and then clay without realizing that hardness can be softened by dampening? They cover the floors of their palaces with moss or down; do they do so without foreseeing that the tender limbs of their little ones will lie more softly there and be more comfortable? Do they protect themselves from the stormy winds and plant their dwellings to the eastward, without recognizing the varying qualities of those winds and considering that one is more healthy for them than another? Why does the spider make her web denser in one place and slacker in another, using this knot here and that knot there, if she cannot reflect, think or reach conclusions?

We are perfectly able to realize how superior they are to us in most of their works and how weak our artistic skills are when it comes to imitating them. Our works are coarser, and yet we are aware of the faculties we use to construct them: our souls use all their powers when doing so. Why do we not consider that the same applies to animals? Why do we attribute to some sort of slavish natural inclination works that surpass all that we can do by nature or by art?

In this, we thoughtlessly give them a very great superiority over us: we make Nature take them by the hand and guide them with a mother’s gentle care in all the actions and advantages of their lives; we, on the other hand, are abandoned by Nature to chance and to Fortune, obliged to seek, by art, all things necessary for our conservation; meanwhile, Nature refuses us the very means which would enable us to reach, by education or intelligent application, the level reached by the natural industry of other creatures. In this way we make their brutish stupor have every advantage over our divine intelligence!57

In truth, on this account, we would be right to treat Nature as a very unjust stepmother. But it is not so. We do not live under so misshapen or so lawless a constitution:58 Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

There are commonplace lamentations which I hear men make (as the unruly liberty of their opinions raises them above the clouds and then tumbles them down lower than the Antipodes): We are, they say, the only animal abandoned naked on the naked earth; we are in bonds and fetters, having nothing to arm or cover ourselves with but the pelts of other creatures; Nature has clad all others with shells, pods, husks, hair, wool, spikes, hide, down, feathers, scales, fleece or silk, according to the several necessities of their being; she has armed them with claws, teeth and horns for assault and defence; and, as is proper to them, has herself taught them to swim, to run, to fly or to sing. Man, on the other hand, without an apprenticeship, does not know how to walk, talk, eat or to do anything at all but wail:59

[B] Tum porro puer, ut saevis projectus ab undis Navita, nudus humi jacet, infans, indigus omni Vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras Nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit; Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aequum est Cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum. At variae crescunt pecudes, armenta, feraeque, Nec crepitacula eis opus est, nec cuiquam adhibenda est Almae nutricis blanda atque infracta loquella; Nec varias quaerunt vestes pro tempore coeli; Denique non armis opus est, non moenibus altis, Queis sua tutentur, quando omnibus omnia large Tellus ipsa parit, naturaque deadala rerum.

[Then the child, like a sailor cast up by raging seas, lies naked on the earth, unable to talk, bereft of everything that would help him to live, when Nature first tears him struggling from his mother’s womb and casts him on the shore of light. He fills the place with his mournful cries – rightly, for one who still has to pass through so many evils. Yet all sorts of cattle, farm animals as well as wild beasts, thrive; they need no rattles nor the winsome baby language of the gentle nurse; they do not need clothing varying with the weather; and finally they need no weapons nor lofty walls to make them safe, since Earth herself and skilful Nature give all of them, amply, everything they need.]60

[A] Such plaints are false. There are more uniform relationships and greater fairness in the constitution of this world.61 Our skin, like theirs, is adequately provided with means to resist intemperate weather with firmness: witness those many peoples who have yet to acquire a taste for clothing. [B] Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes: nor do the Irish, our neighbours, under a sky so cold.

[A] But we can judge that from ourselves; all parts of the body which we are pleased to leave uncovered to air and wind prove able to endure it: face, feet, hands, legs, shoulders, head, as custom suggests. If there be a part of us so weak that it does seem that it has to fear the cold it is our belly, in which digestion takes place: yet our forefathers left it uncovered – and in our society ladies (however soft and delicate they are) occasionally go about with it bare down to the navel. Binding and swaddling up children is not necessary. The mothers of Sparta used to bring up their children with complete freedom of movement for their limbs, without binders or fastenings.62 Infant cries are common to most other animals; nearly all can be seen wailing and whining long after they are born; such behaviour is quite appropriate to the helplessness that they feel. As for eating, it is natural to us and to them; it does not have to be learned.

[B] Sentit enim vim quisque suam quam possit abuti.

[For every creature feels the powers at its disposal.]63

[A] Does anyone doubt that a child, once able to feed himself, would know how to go in search of food? And Earth, with no farming and with none of our arts, produces quite enough for his needs and offers it to him – perhaps not at all seasons, but neither does she do that for the beasts: witness the stores we can see ants or others provide for the barren season of the year. Those peoples we have recently discovered, so abundantly furnished with food and natural drinks needing no care or toil, have taught us that there is other food beside bread and that Mother Nature can provide us plenteously, without ploughing, with all we need – indeed (as is likely) more straightforwardly and more richly than she does nowadays, when we have brought in our artificial skills.

Et tellus nitidas fruges vinetaque laetaSponte sua primum mortalibus ipsa creavit;Ipsa dedit dulces foetus et pabula laeta,Quae nunc vix nostro grandescunt aucta labore, Conterimusque boves et vires agricolarum.

[And Earth herself first willingly provided grain and cheerful vines; she gave sweet produce and good pastures, such as, with all our increased toil, we can but scarcely make to grow; we wear out oxen and the strength of farmers…]64

The lawless flood of our greed outstrips everything we invent to try and slake it.

As for armaments, we have more natural ones than most other animals do, as well as a greater variety in our movements; we draw greater service from them, too – naturally, without being taught. Men trained to fight naked throw themselves into danger just as our men do. Although some beasts are better armed than we are, we are better armed than others. And we are given to covering the body with acquired means of protection because Nature teaches us to do so instinctively.

To see that this is true, note how the elephant sharpens to a point the teeth which it uses to fight with (for it has special teeth reserved for fighting, and never used for other tasks); when bulls come out to fight they throw up dust and scatter it round about; wild boars whet their tusks; and the ichneumon, before coming to grips with the crocodile, takes mud, kneaded and compressed, and smears it over itself as a crust to serve as body-armour. Why do we not say, therefore, that arming ourselves with sticks and iron bars is equally natural?65

As for the power of speech, it is certain that, if it is not natural, then it cannot be necessary. And yet I believe (though it would be difficult to assay it) that if a child, before learning to talk, were brought up in total solitude, then he would have some sort of speech to express his concepts; it is simply not believable that Nature has refused to us men a faculty granted to most other animals; we can see they have means of complaining, rejoicing, calling on each other for help or inviting each other to love; they do so by meaningful utterances: if that is not talking, what is it? [B] How could they fail to talk among themselves, since they talk to us and we to them? How many ways we have of speaking to our dogs and they of replying to us! We use different languages again, and make different cries, to call birds, pigs, bulls and horses; we change idiom according to each species.

[AI] Così per entro loro schiera bruna S’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica Forse à spiar lor via, e lor fortuna.

[As one ant from their dark battalion stops to talk to another, perhaps asking the way or how things are faring.]

And does not Lactantius appear to attribute not only speech to animals, but laughter too?

[A] The different varieties of speech found among men of different countries can be paralleled in animals of the same species. On this subject Aristotle cites the ways in which the call of the partridge varies from place to place.

[B] variaeque volucres Longe alias alio jaciunt in tempore voces, Et partim mutant cum tempestatibus una Raucisonos cantus.

[At different times some birds utter highly different sounds, some even making their songs more raucous with changes in the weather.]

[A] But we do not know what language an isolated child would actually speak and the guesses made about it all seem improbable.66

If anyone challenges my opinion, citing the fact that people who are born deaf never learn to talk at all, I have an answer to that: it is not simply because they are unable to receive instruction in speech through the ear but rather because of the intimate relationship which exists between the faculty of hearing (the power they are deprived of) and the faculty of speech, which are by their nature closely sutured together. Whenever we talk, we must first talk as it were to ourselves: our speech first sounds in our own ears, then we utter it into the ears of other people.

I have gone into all this to emphasize similarities with things human, so bringing Man into conformity with the majority of creatures. We are neither above them nor below them. ‘Everything under the Sky’, said the Wise Man, ‘runs according to like laws and fortune.’67

[B] Indupedita suis fatalibus omnia vinclis.

[All things are enchained in the fetters of their destiny.]

[A] Some difference there is: there are orders and degrees: but always beneath the countenance of Nature who is one and the same.

[B] res quaeque suo ritu procedit, et omnes Foedere naturae certo discrimina servant.

[Each thing proceeds after its own manner, and all things maintain their distinctive qualities by the fixed compact of Nature.]68

[A] Man must be restrained, with his own rank, within the boundary walls of this polity: the wretch has no stomach for effectively clambering over them; he is trussed up and bound, subject to the same restraints as the other creatures of his natural order. His condition is a very modest one. As for his essential being, he has no true privilege or pre-eminence: what he thinks or fancies he has, has no savour, no body to it. Granted that, of all the animals, Man alone has freedom to think and such unruly ways of doing so that he can imagine things which are and things which are not, imagine his wishes, or the false and the true! but he has to pay a high price for this advantage – and he has little cause to boast about it, since it is the chief source of the woes which beset him: sin, sickness, irresolution, confusion and despair.

To get back to the subject, there is, I say, no rational likelihood that beasts are forced to do by natural inclination the selfsame things which we do by choice and ingenuity. From similar effects we should conclude that there are similar faculties. Consequently, we should admit that animals employ the same method and the same reasoning as ourselves when we do anything.69 Why should we think that they have inner natural instincts different from anything we experience in ourselves? Added to which, it is more honourable that we be guided towards regular, obligatory behaviour by the natural and ineluctable properties of our being: that is more God-like than rash and fortuitous freedom; it is safer to leave the driver’s reins in Nature’s hands, not ours. Our empty arrogance makes us prefer to owe our adequacies to our selves rather than to the bounty of Nature; we prefer to lavish the natural goods on other animals, giving them up so as to flatter and honour ourselves with acquired properties. We do that, it seems to me, out of some simple-minded humour. Personally I value graces which are mine since I was born with them more than those which I have had to beg and borrow as an apprentice. It is not within our power to acquire a higher recommendation than to be favoured by God and Nature.

Consider the fox which Thracians employ when they want to cross the ice of a frozen river; with this end in view they let it loose. Were we to see it stopping at the river’s edge, bringing its ear close to the ice to judge from the noise how near to the surface the current is running; darting forward or pulling back according to its estimate of the thickness or thinness of the ice, would it not be right to conclude that the same reasoning passes through its head as would pass through ours and that it ratiocinates and draws consequences by its natural intelligence like this: ‘That which makes a noise is moving; that which moves is not frozen; that which is not frozen is liquid; that which is liquid bends under weight’? Attributing all that exclusively to its keen sense of hearing, without any reasoning or drawing of consequences on the part of the fox, is unthinkable, a chimera. The same judgement should apply to all the ingenious ruses by which beasts protect themselves from our schemes against them.

Should we pride ourself on our ability to capture them and make them work for us? But that is no more than the advantage we have over each other: our slaves are in the same condition. [B] Were not the Climacides Syrian slave-women who went down on all fours to serve as steps or ladders for the ladies to climb up into their coaches? [A] Even the majority of free men and women, for very slight advantages, place themselves in the power of others. [C] Thracian wives and concubines beg to be selected for slaughter over the dead husband’s tomb. [A] Have tyrants ever failed to find men sworn and devoted to them – even though some require them to follow them in death as in life? [B] Whole armies have been bound to their captains that way.

The form of oath used in that rough school which trained gladiators to fight to the finish included the vows: ‘We swear to let ourselves be fettered, burned, beaten or killed by the sword, suffering all that true gladiators suffer at the hands of their Master’; they most scrupulously bound themselves, body and soul, to his service:

Ure meum, si vis, flamma caput, et pete ferro Corpus, et intorto verbere terga seca.

[Burn my head, if you will, with fire, plunge your iron sword through my body or lash my back with your twisted thongs.]

It was a real, binding undertaking. And yet, one year, ten thousand men were found to enter that school and perish there.

[C] When the Scythians buried their king, over his body they strangled his favourite concubine, his cup-bearer, his ostler, his chamberlain, the guard to his bedchamber and his cook. And on the anniversary of his death they would take fifty pages mounted on fifty horses and kill them, impaling them from behind, from spine to throat, and leaving them dead on parade about his tomb.70

[A] The men who serve us do so more cheaply than our falcons, our horses or our hounds; and they are less carefully looked after – [C] what menial tasks will we not bow to for the convenience of those animals! The most abject slaves, it seems to me, will not willingly do for their masters what princes are proud to do for such creatures. When Diogenes saw his parents striving to purchase his freedom he exclaimed: ‘They must be fools: my Master looks after me and feeds me; he is my servant!’71 So too those who keep animals can be said to serve them, not be served by them.

[A] There is as well a nobility in animals such that, from want of courage, no lion has ever been enslaved to another lion; no horse to another horse. We go out to hunt animals: lions and tigers go out to hunt men; each beast practises a similar sport against another: hounds against hares; pike against tenches; swallows against grasshoppers; sparhawks against blackbirds and skylarks:

[B] serpente ciconia pullos Nutrit, et inventa per devia rura lacerta, Et leporem aut capream famulae Jovis, et generosae In saltu venantur aves.

[The stork feeds her young on snakes and on lizards found in trackless country places; eagles, those noble birds, servants of Jupiter, hunt hares and roes in the forests.]72

We share the fruits of the chase with our hounds and our hawks, as well as its skill and hardships. In Thrace, above Amphipolis, huntsmen and wild falcons each share a half of the booty, very exactly, just as the fisherman by the marshes of the Sea of Azov sets aside, in good faith, half of his catch for the wolves: if not, they go and tear his nets.

[A] We have a kind of hunting conducted more with cunning than with force, as when we use gin-traps, hooks and lines. Similar things are found among beasts. Aristotle relates that the cuttle-fish casts a line of gut from its neck, pays it out and lets it float. When it wants to, it draws it in. It spots some little fish approaching, remains hiding in the sand or mud and allows it to nibble at the end of the gut and gradually draws it in until that little fish is so close it can pounce on it.

As for force, no animal in the world is liable to so many shocks as Man. No need for a whale, an elephant, a crocodile or animals like that, any one of which can destroy a great number of men. Lice were enough to make Sylla’s dictatorship vacant; and the heart and life-blood of a great and victorious Emperor serve as breakfast for some tiny worm.

Why do we say, in the case of Man, that distinguishing plants which are useful for life or for medicines from those which are not (recognizing, say, the virtues of rhubarb or polypody) is a sign that he has scientific knowledge based on skill and reason? Yet the goats of Candia can be seen picking out dittany from a million other plants when they are wounded by spears; if a tortoise swallows a viper it at once goes in search of origanum as a purge; the dragon wipes its eyes clear and bright with fennel; storks give themselves salt-water enemas; elephants can remove darts and javelins thrown in battle from their own bodies, from those of their fellows and even from those of their masters (witness the elephant of that King Porus who was killed by Alexander); they do so with more skill than we ever could while causing so little pain. Why do we not call it knowledge and discretion in their case? To lower them in esteem we allege that Nature alone is their Schoolmaster; but that is not to deprive them of knowledge or wisdom: it is to attribute them to them more surely than to ourselves, out of respect for so certain a Teacher.

In all other cases Chrysippus was as scornful a judge of the properties of animals as any philosopher there ever was, yet he watched the actions of a dog which came upon three crossroads – it was either looking for its master or chasing some game fleeing before it; it tried first one road then a second; then, having made sure that neither of them bore any trace of what it was looking for, it charged down the third road without hesitation. Chrysippus was forced to admit that that dog at least reasoned this way: ‘I have tracked my master as far as these crossroads; he must have gone down one of these three paths; not this one; not that one; so, inevitably, he must have gone down this other one.’ Convinced by this reasoned conclusion, it did not sniff at the third path; it made no further investigations but let itself be swayed by the power of reason. Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and copulative propositions and adequately enumerated the parts. Does it matter whether he learned all this from himself or from the Dialectica of George of Trebizond?

Yet beasts, like us, are not incapable of instruction. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies and parrots can be taught to speak:73 we recognize in them a capacity for making their voice and their breath subtle and pliant enough for us to mould and restrict them to a definite number of letters and syllables. That capacity witnesses to an inward power of reasoning which makes them teachable – and willing to learn. We have all had our fill I expect of the sort of monkey-tricks which minstrels teach their dogs to do: those dances in which they never miss a note they hear or those varied jumps and movements which they perform on command. But I am much more moved to wonder by the action of the guide-dogs used by the blind in town and country, common enough as they are. I have watched those dogs stop at certain doors where people regularly give alms, and seen how, even when there is room enough to squeeze through themselves, they still avoid encounters with carts and coaches; I have seen one, following the town trench but abandoning a level, even path for a worse one, in order to keep its master away from the ditch. How was that dog brought to realize that it was its duty to neglect its own interests and to serve its master? How does it know that a path might be wide enough for itself but not wide enough for a blind man? Could all that be grasped without thought and reasoning?

I should not overlook what Plutarch tells us about a dog he saw with the elder Vespasian, the Emperor, in the theatre of Marcellus in Rome. This dog served a juggler who was putting on a play with several scenes and several parts. The dog had its own part: it had to pretend, among other things, to swallow some poison and to lie dead for a while. First it swallowed the supposedly poisoned bread; then it began to shake and tremble as though it were dizzy; finally, it lay down and stiffened as though it were dead. It let itself be pulled about and dragged from one place to another, as the plot required. Then, when it knew the time was right, it began to stir very gently, as though awakening from a deep sleep and raised its head, looking from side to side in a way which made the audience thunderstruck.

Oxen were used to water the Royal Gardens of Susa: they had to draw up the water by turning large wheels with buckets attached – you can see plenty of them in Languedoc. Each one had been ordered to do one hundred turns of the wheel a day. They grew so used to this number that nothing would force them to do one more; when their alloted task had been done they stopped dead. Yet we have reached adolescence before we can count up to a hundred; and we have just discovered peoples with no knowledge of numbers at all.

You need still greater powers of reason to teach others than to be taught yourself. Democritus thought, and proved, that we had been taught most of our arts by animals: the spider taught us to weave and to sew and the swallow to build; the swan and nightingale taught us music and many other animals taught us by imitation the practice of medicine. Moreover, Aristotle maintains that nightingales teach their young to sing, spending time and trouble doing so: that explains why the song of nightingales brought up in cages, with no freedom to be schooled by their parents, loses much of its charm. [B] From that we may conclude that any improvement is due to learning and study.

Even nightingales born free do not all sing one and the same song: each one sings according to its capacity to learn. They make jealous classmates, squabbling and vying with each other so heartily that the vanquished sometimes drops down dead, not from lack of song but lack of breath. The youngest birds ruminate thoughtfully and then begin to imitate snatches of song; the pupils listen to the lessons of their tutors and then give an account of themselves, taking it in turns to stop their singing. You can hear their faults being corrected; some of the criticisms of their tutors are perceptible even to us.

Arrius74 said that he once saw an elephant with cymbals hanging from each thigh and a third on its trunk; the other elephants danced round in a ring, rising and falling to the cadences of this musical instrument, which was harmonious and pleasant to listen to. [A] In the great spectacles of Rome it was quite usual to see elephants trained to execute dance steps to the sound of the human voice; such performances comported several intricate movements, interlacings, changes of step and cadenzas, all very hard to learn. Some were seen revising their lessons in private, practising and studying so as to avoid being beaten or scolded by their masters.

But strange indeed is the account of a female magpie vouched for by Plutarch, no less. It lived in a barber’s shop in Rome and was wonderfully clever at imitating any sounds it heard. It happened one day that some musicians stopped quite a while in front of the shop, blasting away on their trumpets. Immediately the magpie fell pensive, mute and melancholic, remaining so all the following day. Everyone marvelled, thinking that the blare of the trumpets had frightened and confused it, making it lose both hearing and song at the same time. But they eventually found that it had been deeply meditating and had withdrawn into itself; it had been inwardly practising, preparing its voice to imitate the noise of those trumpeters. The first sound it did make was a perfect imitation of their changes, repetitions and stops; after this new apprenticeship it quit with disdain all that it was able to do before.

I do not want to leave out another example of a dog, also seen by Plutarch. (I realize I am digressing, showing no sense of order, but I can no more observe order when arranging these examples than I can in the rest of my work.) Plutarch was on board ship when he saw a dog which wanted to lap up some oil in the bottom of a jar; it could not get its tongue right down into the vessel because the neck was too narrow, so it went in search of pebbles which it dropped into the jar until the oil rose near to the top where it could get at it. What is that if not the actions of a very subtle intelligence? It is said that Barbary ravens do the same when the water they want to drink is too low to get at.

The above action is somewhat akin to what is related by Juba (a king in elephant country): hunters cunningly prepare deep pits hidden beneath a cover of undergrowth; when an elephant is trapped in one, its fellows promptly bring a great many sticks and stones to help it clamber out.

But so many of their actions bring elephants close to human capacities that if I wanted to relate in detail everything that experience has shown us about them, I would easily win one of my regular arguments: that there is a greater difference between one man and another than between some men and some beasts.

An elephant-driver in a private household in Syria used to steal half the allotted rations at every feed. One day the master himself wanted to attend to things; he tipped into the elephant’s manger the right measure of barley, as prescribed. The elephant glared at its driver and, with its trunk, set half the ration aside, to reveal the wrong done to it. Another elephant, whose driver used to adulterate its feed with stones, went up to the pot where he was stewing meat for his own dinner and filled it with ashes. Those are special cases, but we all know from eye-witnesses that the strongest elements in the armies based in the Levant were elephants; their effectiveness surpassed what we can obtain nowadays from our artillery, which more or less replaces elephants in line of battle (as can be easily judged by those who know their ancient history).

[B] siquidem Tirio servire solebant Annibali, et nostris ducibus, regique Molosso, Horum majores, et dorso ferre cohortes, Partem aliquam belli et euntem in praelia turmam.

[Their sires served Hannibal of Carthage, as well as our generals and the Molossian King, bearing on their backs into the fray cohorts and squadrons, and taking part in the battle themselves.]75

[A] To make over to them like this the vanguard of their army soldiers must have seriously relied on the trustworthiness of these beasts and on their powers of reason; because of their size and bulk the slightest stoppage on their part or else the slightest panic making them head back towards their own side would be enough to undo everything. There are fewer examples of their turning and charging their own troops than of us men charging back on each other in rout. They were entrusted not with one simple manoeuvre but with several different roles in combat.

[B] The Spaniards, likewise, employed dogs in their recent conquest of the American Indies; they paid them like, soldiers and gave them a share in the booty. Those animals displayed eagerness and fierceness but no less skill and judgement, whether in pursuing victory or in knowing when to stop, in charging or withdrawing as appropriate, and in telling friend from foe.76

[A] Much more than everyday things, far-off things move us to wonder; they impress us more; otherwise I would not have spent so much time over this long catalogue; for, in my opinion, anyone who took careful note of the everyday animals we see living among us would find them doing things just as astonishing as the examples we gather from far-off times and places.77 [C] Nature is One and constant in her course. Anybody who could adequately understand her present state could draw reliable conclusions about all the future and all the past.

[A] I once saw men brought to us from distant lands overseas. We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were far different from ours. Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance? After all, they knew no French, were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows, our bearing and our behaviour – such things must, of course, serve as a pattern for the whole human race…

Everything which seems strange we condemn, as well as everything we do not understand; that applies to our judgements on animals. Many of their characteristics are related to ours; that enables us to draw conjectures from comparisons. But they also have qualities peculiar to themselves: what can we know about that? Horses, dogs, cattle, sheep, birds and most other animals living among men recognize our voices and are prepared to obey them. Why, Crassus even had a lamprey which came to him when he called it, and there are eels in the fountain of Arethusa which do the same. [B] I have seen stews in plenty where the fish, on hearing a particular cry from those who tend them, all rush to be fed.

[A] nomen habent, et ad magistriVocem quisque sui venit citatus.

[They have a name and each comes to its master when he calls them.]78

Such evidence we can judge.

We can also go on to say that elephants have some notion of religion since, after ablutions and purifications, they can be seen waving their trunks like arms upraised, while gazing intently at the rising sun; for long periods at fixed times in the day (by instinct, not from teaching or precept) they stand rooted in meditation and contemplation; there may be no obvious similarities in other animals, but that does not allow us to make judgements about their total lack of religion. When matters are hidden from us, we cannot in any way conceive them.

We can partly do so in the case of an activity noticed by Cleanthes the philosopher, because it resembles our own. He saw, he said, ants leave their own ant-hill for another one, bearing the body of a dead ant. Several others came out to meet them, as if to parley. They remained together for some time; then the second group of ants went back to consult, it was thought, their fellow-citizens. They made two or three such journeys, because of hard bargaining. In the end, the newcomers brought a worm out from their heap, apparently as a ransom for the dead ant. The first lot loaded it on their shoulders and carried it back, leaving the body of the dead ant with the others.

That is the interpretation given by Cleanthes; it witnesses to the fact that voiceless creatures are not deprived of mutual contact and communication; if we cannot share in it, that is because of a defect in us; we would be very stupid indeed to have any meddlesome opinions on the matter.

Animals do many actions which surpass our understanding; far from being able to imitate them we cannot even conceive them in our thoughts. Many hold that in that last great sea-fight which Antony lost against Augustus, the flag-galley was stopped dead in its course by the fish which is called Remora (‘Hindrance’) since it has the property of hindering any ship it clings to. When the Emperor Caligula was sailing along the coast of Romania with a large fleet, his galley alone was pulled up short by this very fish. Attached as it was to the bottom of his vessel, he caused it to be seized, angry that so small a creature – it is a shellfish – could just cling by its mouth to his galley and outdo the combined might of the sea, the winds and all his oarsmen. Understandably, he was even more amazed to learn that, once it was brought aboard ship, it no longer had the power it had had in the water.

A citizen of Cyzicum once acquired a reputation as a good mathematical astrologer from noticing the practice of the hedgehog: its den is open in various places to various winds; it can foretell from which direction the wind will blow and plugs up the hole on the windward side. Observing that, he supplied the town with reliable forecasts about the direction of the winds.

The chameleon takes on the colour of its surroundings, but the octopus assumes whatever colour it likes to suit the occasion, hiding, say, from something fearful or lurking for its prey. The chameleon changes passively, the octopus actively. We change hue as well, from fear, anger, shame and other emotions which affect the colour of our faces. That happens to us, as to the chameleon, passively. Jaundice, not our will, has the power to turn us yellow.

Such characteristics in other animals which we realize to surpass our own show that they have, to an outstanding degree, a faculty which we classify as ‘occult’. Similarly, animals probably have many other characteristics and powers [C] which are in no way apparent to us.

[A] Of all the omens of former times, the most ancient and the most certain were those drawn from the flight of birds. We have nothing corresponding to that, nothing as wonderful. The beatings of the birds’ wings, from which consequences were drawn about the future, show rule and order: only some very special means could produce so noble an activity: to attribute so great an effect entirely to some ordinance of Nature, without any understanding, agreement and thought on the part of the creatures which perform it, is to be taken in by words; such an opinion is evidently false. Here is proof of that: the torpedo is a fish with the property of benumbing the limbs of anyone who directly touches it; in addition it can even send a numbing torpor into the hands of anyone touching it or handling it indirectly through a net or something similar. They even say that, if you pour water on to it, you can feel this effect working upwards, numbing your sense of touch through the water. This force is worth marvelling at, but is not without its usefulness to the torpedo; that fish knows it has it and uses it to trap its prey when hunting; it snuggles down into the mud: other fish gliding overhead, struck by its cold torpor, are benumbed and fall into its power.

Cranes, swallows and other birds of passage which change dwellings with the seasons, clearly show that they are aware of their ability to foretell and put it to good use.

Hunters assure us that the way to choose from a litter the puppy which will turn out best is simply to make the bitch choose it herself: take the puppies out of their kennel and the first one she brings back will always prove the best; or else make a show of putting a ring of fire around their kennel; then take the first puppy she dashes in to rescue. From that it is obvious that either bitches have powers of foresight which we lack or else that they have a capacity for judging their young which is more lively than our own.79

Beasts are born, reproduce, feed, move, live and die in ways so closely related to our own that, if we seek to lower their motivations or to raise our own status above theirs, that cannot arise from any reasoned argument on our part. Doctors recommend us to live and behave as animals do – and ordinary people have ever said:

Tenez chauts les pieds et la teste; Au demeurant, vivez en beste.

[Keep feet and head warm: Then live like the beasts.]

Sexual generation is the principal natural action. Our human members are rather more conveniently arranged for that purpose; and yet we are told that if we want to be really effective we should adopt the position and posture of the animals:

more ferarumQuadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur Concipere uxores; quia sic loca sumere possunt, Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis.

[Most think that wives conceive more readily in the posture of wild animals and four-footed beasts; that is because the semen can find its way better when the breasts are low down and the loins upraised.]

[AI] All those immodest and shameless movements that women have invented out of their own heads are condemned as positively harmful; women are advised to return to the more modest and poised comportment of animals of their sex.

Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque repugnat, Clunibus ipsa viri Venerem si laeta retractet, Atque exossato ciet omni pectore fluctus. Ejicit enim sulci recta regione viaque Vomerem, atque locis avertit seminis ictum.

[For the woman hinders or averts conception when passion leads her to withdraw Venus and her buttocks from the man, diverting the flow entirely over her yielding belly; she makes the plough-share leap out of its furrow and broadcasts the seed where it does not belong.]80

[A] If justice consists in rendering everyone his due, then animals which serve, love and protect those that treat them well and which attack strangers and those that do them harm show some resemblance to aspects of our own justice; as they also do by maintaining strict fair-shares for their young.

As for loving affection, theirs is incomparably more lively and consistent than men’s. King Lisimachus had a dog called Hircanus. When its master died it remained stubbornly by his bed, refusing to eat or drink; when the day came to cremate the body, it ran dashing into the fire and was burned to death. The dog of a man called Pyrrhus did the same: from the moment he died it would not budge off its master’s bed, and when they bore the body away, it let itself be carried off too, finally throwing itself into the pyre as they were burning its master’s corpse.

There are also inclinations where our affection arises not from reasoned counsel but by that random chance sometimes called sympathy. Animals are capable of it too. We can see horses grown so attracted to each other that we can hardly get them to live or travel apart. We can see them attracted to a particular kind of coat among their fellow horses, as we are to particular faces; whenever they come across it they straightway approach it with pleasure and display their affection, whereas they dislike or hate a different kind of coat.

Animals, like us, have a choice of partners and select their females. Nor are they free from our jealousies and great irreconcilable hatreds.

Desires are either natural and necessary, like eating and drinking; natural and not necessary, such as mating with a female; or else neither natural nor necessary, like virtually all human ones, which are entirely superfluous and artificial. Nature needs wonderfully little to be satisfied and leaves little indeed for us to desire. The activities of our kitchens are not Nature’s ordinance. Stoics say that a man could feed himself on one olive a day. The choiceness of our wines owes nothing to Nature’s teachings, any more than do the refinements we load on to our sexual appetites:

neque illa Magno prognatum deposcit consule cunnum.

[That does not demand a cunt descended from some great consul.]81

False opinions and ignorance of the good have poured so many strange desires into us that they have chased away almost all the natural ones, no more nor less than if a multitude of strangers in a city drove out all the citizens who were born there, snuffed out their ancient power and authority, seized the town and entirely usurped it.

Animals obey the rules of Nature better than we do and remain more moderately within her prescribed limits – though not so punctiliously as to be without something akin to our debaucheries. Just as there have been mad desires driving humans to fall in love with beasts, so beasts have fallen in love with us, admitting monstrous passions across species: witness the elephant which was the rival of Aristophanes the Grammarian for the affection of a young Alexandrian flower-girl and which was every bit as dutiful in its passion as he was: when walking through the fruit market it took fruit in its trunk and brought it to her. It never took its eyes off her except when it had to and sometimes slipped its trunk into her bosom through her neckband and stroked her breasts. We are also told of a dragon which fell in love with a maiden; of a goose enamoured of a boy in the town of Asopus, and of a ram which sighed for Glaucia the minstrel-girl – and baboons falling madly in love with women are an everyday occurrence. You can also see some male animals falling for males of their own kind.

Oppianus82 and others relate some examples to show that beasts in their couplings respect the laws of kinship, but experience frequently shows us the contrary:

nec habetur turpe juvencae Ferre patrem tergo; fit equo sua filia conjux; Quasque creavit init pecudes caper; ipsaque cujus Semine concepta est, ex illo concipit ales.

[The heifer feels no shame if covered by the sire nor does the mare; the billy-goat goes on to the nanny-goats he has fathered, and birds conceive from the semen that begot them.]83

Has there ever been a more express case of subtle malice than that of the mule of Thales the philosopher? Laden with salt, it chanced to stumble when fording a river, so wetting the sacks; noticing that the salt dissolved and lightened its load, it never failed, whenever it could, to plunge fully loaded into a stream. Eventually its master discovered its trick and ordered it to be laden with wool. Finding its expectations deceived, it gave up that trick.

Some animals so naturally mirror the face of human avarice that you can see them stealing anything they can and hiding it carefully, even though they never have any use for it.

As for household management beasts surpass us in the foresight necessary to gather and store for the future, and also possess many of the kinds of knowledge required to do so. When ants notice their grain or seeds going mouldy and smelling badly, they stop them from spoiling or going rotten by spreading them on the ground outside their storehouses, airing, drying and freshening them up. But the measures and precautions they take to gnaw out their grains of corn surpass any imaginable human foresight. Corn does not always stay dry and wholesome but gets soft, flabby and milky, as a step towards germinating and sprouting anew; to stop it turning to seed-corn and losing its nature and properties as grain in store for future use, ants gnaw off the end which does the sprouting.

As for war – the most grandiose and glorious of human activities – I would like to know whether we want to use it to prove our superiority or, on the contrary, to prove our weakness and imperfection. We know how to defeat and kill each other, to undermine and destroy our own species: not much there, it seems, to make them want to learn from us.

[B] quando leoniFortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam Expiravit aper majoris dentibus apri?

[When has a stronger lion ever torn life from a weaker lion? In what woodlands has a wild boar ever died at the teeth of a stronger?]84

[A] They are not universally free from this, though – witness the furious encounters of bees and the enterprises of their monarchs in the opposing armies:

saepe duobusRegibus incessit magno discordia motu, Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello Corda licet longe praesciscere.

[Often there arises great strife between two King bees; great movements are afoot; you may imagine the passion and the warlike frenzy which animates the populace.]85

I can never read that inspired account without thinking that I am reading a description of human vanity and ineptitude.

The deeds of those warriors which ravish us with their horror and their terror; those tempestuous sounds and cries:

[B] Fulgur ibi ad coelum se tollit, totaque circum Aere renidescit tellus, subterque virum vi Excitur pedibus sonitus, clamoreque montes Icti rejectant voces ad sidera mundi;

[There, armour glitters up to heaven and all the surrounding fields shimmer with bronze; the earth shakes beneath the soldiers’ tread; the mountains re-echo to the stars above, the clamour striking against them;]86

[A] that dread array of thousands upon thousands of soldiers bearing arms; such bravery, ardour, courage: be pleased to consider the pretexts, many and vain, which set them in motion and the pretexts, many and frivolous, which make them cease.

Paridis propter narratur amorem Graecia Barbariae diro collisa duello.

[They narrate how Greece, for the love of Paris, made fatal war against the Barbarians.]87

It was because of the lechery of Paris that all Asia was ruined and destroyed: one man’s desires, the annoyance and pleasure of one man, one single family quarrel – causes which ought not to suffice to set two fishwives clawing at each other’s throats – were the soul, the motive-force, of that great discord.

Do we want to trust the word of those who were the main authors and prime movers of wars like these? Then let us listen to Augustus, the greatest, most victorious and most powerful Emperor there ever has been, sporting and jesting (most amusingly and wittily) about several battles risked on land and sea, the life and limb of the five hundred thousand men who followed his star, and the might and treasure of both parts of the Roman world, exhausted in the service of his adventures:

Quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam Fulvia constituit, se quoque uti futuam. Fulviam ego ut futuam? Quid, si me Manius oret Paedicem, faciam? Non puto, si sapiam. Aut futue, aut pugnemus, ait. Quid, si mihi vita Charior est ipsa mentula? Signa canant!

[Because Antony fucked Glaphyra, Fulvia decided I had to fuck her – as revenge. Me, fuck Fulvia! Supposing Manius begged me to bugger him? Not if I can help it! ‘Fuck or we fight,’ she said. What if my cock is dearer than life to me?… Sound the war trumpets!]

(I quote my Latin with freedom of conscience! You, my Patroness, have given me leave.)88

Now this mighty Body, War, with so many facets and movements, which seems to threaten both earth and heaven –

[B] Quam multi Lybico volvuntur marmore fluctus, Saevus ubi Orion hybernis conditur undis, Vel cum sole novo densae torrentur aristae, Aut Hermi campo, aut Lyciae flaventibus arvis, Scuta sonant, pulsuque pedum tremit excita tellus.

[As the waves innumerable which roll in the Libyan sea, when fierce Orion plunges into the billows as winter returns; or, as when the summer sun bakes the thick shooting corn on the plains of Hermus or the golden fields of Lycia: so clash the shields, and the stricken land trembles beneath their feet] –

[A] this mad Monster with all its many arms and legs, is only Man: weak, miserable, wretched Man. An ant-hill disturbed and hot with rage!

It nigrum campis agmen.

[The black battalion advances in the plain.]89

A contrary wind, the croak of a flight of ravens, a stumbling horse, an eagle chancing by, a dream, a word, a sign, a morning mist, all suffice to cast him down and bring him to the ground. Let a ray of sunlight dazzle him in the face, and there he lies, limp and faint. Let a speck of dust blow into his eyes (as our poet Virgil writes of the bees), and all our ensigns, all our legions, even with Pompey the Great himself at the head of them, are broken and shattered… (I believe it was Pompey who was defeated by Sertorius in Spain with such fine arms as these, [B] which also served a turn for others – for Eumenes against Antigonus, and for Surena against Crassus:

[A] Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent.

[These passionate commotions and these great battles are calmed down with a handful of dust.]90

[C] Send out a detachment made up of a couple of bees: they will be strong and brave enough to topple the Monster of war. We still recall how the Portuguese were investing the town of Tamly in their territory of Xiatime when the inhabitants, who had hives in plenty, carried a great many of them to their walls and smoked the bees out so vigorously that their enemies were unable to sustain their stinging attacks and were all put to rout. They owed the freedom of their town and their victory to such novel reinforcements – and with so happy an outcome that not one bee was reported missing.91

[A] The souls of Emperors and of cobblers are cast in the same mould. We consider the importance of the actions of Princes and their weight and then persuade ourselves that they are produced by causes equally weighty, equally important. In that we deceive ourselves. They are tossed to and fro by the same principles as we are. The reasons that make us take issue with a neighbour lead Princes to start a war; the same reason which makes us flog a lackey makes kings lay waste a province. [B] They can do more but can wish as lightly. [A1] The same desires trouble a fleshworm and an elephant.

[A] As for faithfulness, there is no animal in the world whose treachery can compete with Man’s. Our history books tell of certain dogs which vigorously reacted to the murders of their masters. King Pyrrhus once came across a dog guarding the body of its dead master; when he was told the dog had done this duty for three days, he ordered the corpse to be buried and took the dog away with him. Later, when he was making a general review of his troops the dog recognized the murderers of its master and ran at them barking loudly and angrily. This was the first piece of evidence leading to its master’s murder being avenged; justice was soon done in the courts. The dog of Hesiod the Wise did the same, leading to the sons of Ganistor (a man from Naupactus) being convicted of the murder of its master.

Another dog was guarding a temple in Athens when it spotted a thief sacrilegiously making off with the finest jewels. It began barking at him as loud as it could, but the temple sextons never woke up; so the dog started to trail the thief and, when day broke, hung behind a little without losing him from sight. When the thief offered it food, it refused to take anything from him, whilst accepting it from others who passed by, treating them all to a good wagging of its tail. When the thief stopped to sleep, so did the dog, in the same place. News of this dog reached the sextons of that church; they set out to find it; by making enquiries about the colour of its coat, they eventually caught up with it at Cromyon. The thief was there too; they brought him back to Athens, where he was punished. In recognition of its good sense of duty, the judges awarded the dog a fixed measure of wheat out of public funds to pay for its keep and ordered the priests to look after it. This happened in Plutarch’s own time and he himself asserts that the account was very thoroughly vouched for.

As for gratitude – and it seems to me that we could well bring this word back into repute – one example will suffice. Apion relates it as something he had seen himself. He tells how, one day, the people of Rome were given the pleasure of watching several strange animals fight – mainly, in fact, unusually big lions; one of these drew the eyes of the entire audience by its wild bearing, the strength and size of its limbs and its proud and terrifying roar. Amongst the slaves presented to the populace to fight with these beasts was Androdus, a slave from Dacia, belonging to a Roman lord of consular rank. This lion, seeing him from afar, first pulled up short, as though struck with wonder; it then came gently towards him; its manner was soft and peaceful, as if it expected to recognize an acquaintance. Then, having made certain of what it was looking for, it began to wag its tail as dogs do when fondly greeting their masters; it kissed and licked the hands and thighs of that poor wretch, who was beside himself, ecstatic with fear. The gracious behaviour of the lion brought Androdus back to himself so that he fixed his gaze on it, staring at it and then recognizing it. It was a rare pleasure to see the happy greetings and blandishments they lavished on each other. The populace raised shouts of joy; the Emperor sent for the slave to learn how this strange event had come about. He gave him an account, novel and wonderful: ‘My Master’, he said, ‘was a proconsul in Africa; he treated me so cruelly and so harshly, flogging me every day, that I was forced to steal myself from him and run away. I found the quickest way to hide myself safely from a person having such great Provincial authority was to make for that country’s uninhabited sandy deserts, fully resolved, if there was no means of keeping myself in food, to kill myself. The midday sun was so fierce and the heat so intolerable that when I stumbled on a hidden cave, difficult of access, I plunged into it. Soon afterwards this lion came in, its paw all wounded and bloody; it was groaning and whining with pain. I was very frightened when it arrived but, when it saw me hiding in a corner of its lair, it came gently up to me and showed me its wounded paw, as though asking for help. I removed a great splinter of wood; when I had made it a little more used to me, I squeezed out the filthy pus that had collected in the wound, wiped it and made it as clean as I could. The lion, aware that things were better and that the pain had been relieved, began to rest, falling asleep with its paw in my hands. After that we lived together in that cave for three whole years; we ate the same food since the lion brought me choice morsels of the animals it had killed in the hunt; I had no fire but I fed myself by cooking the meat in the heat of the sun. In the end I grew disgusted with this savage, brutish life and so, when the lion had gone out one day on its usual quest for food, I slipped away. Three days later I was surprised by soldiers who brought me from Africa to Rome and handed me over to my master. He promptly condemned me to die by being exposed to the beasts in the arena. I realize now that the lion was also captured soon afterwards and that it wanted to repay me for my kindness in curing its wound.’

That is the account which Androdus told to the Emperor and which he also spread from mouth to mouth. Androdus was given his freedom by general acclaim and relieved of his sentence; by order of the people he was made a gift of the lion.

Ever since, says Apion, we can see Androdus leading the lion about on a short leash, going from tavern to tavern in Rome collecting money, while the lion lets itself be strewn with flowers. All who meet them say: ‘There goes the Lion, host to the Man: there goes the Man, doctor to the Lion.’92

[B] We often shed tears at the loss of animals which we love: they do the same when they lose us:

Post, bellator equus, positis insignibus, Aethon It lachrymans, guttisque humectat grandibus ora.

[Then comes Aethon, the war-horse, stripped of its insignia, weeping and drenching its face in mighty tears.]93

Some peoples hold their wives in common while in others each man has a wife of his own; can we not see the same among the beasts? Do they not have marriages better kept than our own?

[A] As touching the confederations and alliances which animals make to league themselves together for mutual succour, oxen, pigs and other animals can be seen rushing in to help when one of their number is being attacked and rallying round in its defence. If a scar-fish swallows a fisherman’s hook, its fellows swarm around and bite through the line; if one of them happens to get caught in a wicker trap, the others dangle their tails down into it from outside while it holds on grimly with its teeth. In this way they drag it right out. When a barbel-fish is hooked, the others stiffen the spine which projects from their backs; it is notched like a saw; they rub it against the line and saw it through.

As for the special duties we render to each other in the service of life, there are several similar examples amongst the animals. The whale, it is said, never travels without a tiny fish like a sea-gudgeon swimming ahead of it (for this reason it is called a ‘guide-fish’). The whale follows it everywhere, allowing itself to be directed and steered as easily as a rudder turns a boat. Everything else – beast or ship – which falls into the swirling chaos of that creature’s mouth is straightway lost and swallowed up: yet that little fish can retire there and sleep in its mouth in complete safety. While it is asleep, the whale never budges, but as soon as it swims out, the whale constantly follows it; if it should chance to lose its guide-fish it flounders about all over the place, often dashing itself to pieces against the rocks like a rudderless ship. Plutarch testifies to having seen this happen on the island of Anticyra.

There is a similar companionship between the tiny wren and the crocodile: the wren stands guard over that big creature; when the crocodile’s enemy, the ichneumon, closes in for a fight, this little bird is afraid that its companion may be caught napping, so it pecks it awake and sings to warn it of danger. The wren lives on the leftovers of that monstrous crocodile, which welcomes it into its jaws and lets it pick at the meat stuck between its teeth. If it wants to shut its mouth it warns the wren to fly out by gradually closing its jaws a little, without squashing it or harming it in any way.

The shellfish called a nacre lives in similar company with the pinnothere, a kind of small crab which serves it as tout and doorkeeper; squatting by the orifice which the nacre always keeps half-open, it waits until some little fish worth catching swims into it. The crab then slips into the nacre, pinching its living flesh to make it close its shell. Having imprisoned the fish they both set about eating it.

Three parts of Mathematics are particularly well known to tunny-fish: the way they live shows that.

First, Astrology; it is they who teach it to men: wherever they may be when surprised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the following equinox (which explains why even Aristotle readily allows them a knowledge of that science).

Next Geometry and Arithmetic: tunny-fish always form up in the shape of a cube, equally square on all sides. Drawing themselves up into a solid battalion, a corps enclosed and protected all round by six faces of equal size, they swim about in this order, square before, square behind – so that if you count one line of them you have the count of the whole school, since the same figure applies to their depth, breadth and length.

As for greatness of spirit, it would be hard to express it more clearly than that great dog did which was sent to King Alexander from India. It was first presented with a stag, next with a boar, then with a bear: it did not deign to come out and fight them, but as soon as it saw a lion it leaped to its feet, clearly showing that it thought such an animal was indeed worthy of the privilege of fighting against it.

[B] Touching repentance and the acknowledging of error, they tell of an elephant which killed its master in a fit of anger; its grief was so intense that it refused to eat and starved itself to death.

[A] As for clemency, they tell of a tiger – the most inhuman of all beasts – which was given a goat to eat. It fasted for two days before being even tempted to harm it; by the third day, it considered the goat as a familiar guest, so, rather than attack it, it broke out of its cage and sought food elsewhere.

As for rights bred of familiarity and friendly converse, it is quite normal to train cats, dogs and hares to live tamely together.

But surpassing all human imagination is what experience has taught travellers by sea – especially those in the sea of Sicily – about the halcyons. Has Nature ever honoured any creature as she has honoured these kingfishers in their procreation, lying-in and birth? The poets feign that one single island, Delos, was a floating land before being anchored so that Latona might give birth upon it. But God himself has wished the entire sea to be settled, smooth and calm, free from wave and wind and rain, on those halcyon days when these creatures produce their young. (This befalls, precisely, about the shortest day of the year, the solstice: this privilege of theirs gives us seven days and nights at the very heart of the winter, when, without danger, we can sail the seas.) Each female knows no male but its own; it helps it all its life and never forsakes it. If the male is weak or crippled the female carries it everywhere on her back, serving it till death.

But no ingenuity has ever fathomed the miraculous artifice by which the halcyons build their nest for their young nor divined its fabric. Plutarch saw several of them and handled them. He thinks they may be composed of the bones of certain fish, joined, bound and interwoven together, some lengthwise, some crosswise; bent and rounded struts are then added, eventually forming a coracle ready to float upon the water. The female halcyon then brings them where they can be lapped around by the waves of the sea. The salt water gently beats upon them, showing her where ill-fitting joints need daubing and where she needs to strengthen the sections where her construction is coming loose or pulling apart at the beating of the sea. On the other hand this battering by the waves binds all the good joints up tight and knits them so close that they can only with difficulty be smashed, broken or even damaged by blows with stone or iron. Most wonderful of all are the shape and proportions of the concave hold, for it is shaped and proportioned to admit only one creature snugly: the one who made it. To everything else it is closed, barred and impenetrable. Nothing can get in, not even sea water.

That is a fine description of this construction, taken from a fine book. Yet even that, it seems to me, fails to enlighten us adequately about the difficulty of such architecture. What silly vanity leads us to take products we can neither imitate nor understand, range them beneath us and treat them with disdain.94

Let us go further into such equalities and correspondences between us and the beasts. The human soul takes pride in its privilege of bringing all its conceptions into harmony with its own condition: everything it conceives is stripped of its mortal and physical qualities; it compels everything which it judges worthy of notice to divest itself completely of such of its own conditions as are corruptible – of all physical accidents such as depth, length, breadth, weight, colour, smell, roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness; it casts them aside like old garments; it clothes everything in its own condition, spiritual and immortal: the Rome or the Paris which exists in my soul – the Paris imagined in thought – is conceived in my imagination without size, without place, without stone, without plaster, without wood. Well, that selfsame privilege seems evidently shared with the beasts; for, asleep on its litter, a war-horse accustomed to trumpet, harquebus and combat can be seen twitching and trembling as though in the thick of battle: clearly its mind is conceiving a drum without drum-beats, an army without arms, without physical body.

Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque saepe, Et quasi de palma summas contendere vires.

[You can, indeed, see vigorous racehorses, resting their limbs in sleep, yet often sweating and panting as though disputing the prize with all their might.]

The greyhound imagines a hare in a dream: we can see it panting after it in its sleep as it stretches out its tail, twitches its thighs and exactly imitates its movements in the chase: that hare has no coat and no bones.

Venantumque canes in molli saepe quiete Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras, Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum. Expergefactique sequuntur inania saepe Cervorum simulachra, fugae quasi dedita cernant: Donec discussis redeant erroribus ad se.

[Often hunting dogs lying quietly asleep, suddenly paw about, bark out loud and sharply draw their breath as if they were on the track of their prey. Even after they have started out of their sleep they still pursue that empty ghost of a stag as though they could see it fleeing before them, until the error fades and they come back to themselves.]

Guard dogs can be found growling in their sleep, then yapping and finally waking with a start as though they saw some stranger coming: that stranger which their souls can see is a spiritual man, not perceptible to the senses, without dimensions, without colour and without being.

consueta domi catulorum blanda propago Degere, saepe levem ex oculis volucremque soporem Discutere, et corpus de terra corripere instant, Proinde quasi ignotas facies atque ora tueantur.

[The dog, that fawning creature at home in our houses, often quivers its eyelids in winged sleep and starts to its feet as if it saw the faces and features of strangers.]95

As for physical beauty, before I can go any further I need to know if we can agree over its description. It seems we have little knowledge of natural beauty or of beauty in general, since we humans give so many diverse forms to our own beauty; [C] if it had been prescribed by Nature, we would all hold common views about it, just as we all agree that fire is hot. We give human beauty any form we fancy:

[B] Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color.

[On the face of a Roman. Belgian’s colour is ugly.]96

[A] For a painter in the Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat noses; [B] there, they load the cartilage between the nostrils with great rings of gold, so that it hangs right down to the lips; the lower lip is similarly weighed down to the chin with great hoops studded with precious jewels; for them it is elegant to lay their teeth bare [C] exposing the gum below their roots. [B] In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, artificially. [C] A man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in their lobes. [B] Elsewhere there are whole nations who carefully blacken their teeth and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red. [C] Not only in the Basque country do they prefer beautiful women to have shaven heads; the same applies elsewhere – even, according to Pliny, in certain icy lands. [B] The women of Mexico count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck hair from the rest of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it artificially. They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they affect giving suck to their children over their shoulders.97

[A] We would fashion ugliness that way.

Italians make beauty fat and heavy; Spaniards gaunt and skinny; some of us French make it fair, others dark; some soft and delicate; others strong and robust; some desire grace and delicacy; others proud bearing and majesty. [C] Similarly, while Plato considered the sphere to be the perfection of beauty98 the Epicureans preferred the pyramid or the square, finding it hard to swallow a god who was shaped like a ball!

[A] Anyway, Nature has no more given man privileges in beauty than in any other of her common laws. If we judge ourselves fairly we will find some animals less favoured than we are, others (more numerous) which are more so: [C] ‘a multis animalibus decore vincimur’ [we are surpassed in beauty by many of the beasts]99 – especially among our fellow-citizens, the denizens of dry land. As for the creatures of the sea, we can leave their beauty of form aside, since it has no point of comparison with ours; we are thoroughly beaten by them in colour, brightness, sheen and the general disposition of our members; beaten by the birds of the air, too, in all qualities. And [A] then there is that privilege the poets stress – the fact that we hold ourselves erect, gazing up to heaven, from whence we came:

Pronaque cum spectent animalia caetera terram, Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque videre Jussit, et erectos ad sydera tollere vultus.

[The other animals look downwards to the ground; God gave Man a face held high and ordered him to look towards heaven and raise his eyes towards the sun, moon and stars.]100

That privilege is well and truly poetic! Some quite small animals gaze up to heaven all the time; camels and ostriches seem to me to have necks straighter than ours and more erect. [C] And which are these animals which are supposed not to have faces in front and on top, not to look straight ahead as we do nor, in their normal posture, to see as much of heaven and earth as we do? What characteristics of man’s body as described by Plato and Cicero do not equally apply to a thousand other animals!101 [A] The animals most like us are the worst and the ugliest of the bunch: the one with an outward appearance and face closest to ours is the baboon;

[C] Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!

[That vilest of beast, the monkey – how like us!]102

[A] the one with inwards and vital organs closest to ours is the pig.103

When a think of the human animal, stark naked, with all its blemishes, natural weaknesses and flaws, I find that we have more cause to cover ourselves up than any other animal. (That even applies to the female sex which seems to have a greater share of beauty.) We could be excused for having borrowed from those which Nature has favoured more than us, decking ourselves in their beauty,104 hiding ourselves in their coats: wool, feathers, hide or silk.

We may note en passant that we are the only animals whose physical defects are offensive to our fellows; we are also the only ones to hide from others of our species when answering the calls of Nature. Also worth considering is the fact that those who know prescribe for lovesickness a good look at the totally naked body which is so much desired. To cool amorous passion, all you need to do is to be free to look at the one you love!

Ille quod obscoenas in aperto corpore partes Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor.

[It has been known for a man to see his mistress’s private parts and to find his ardour pulled up short.]105

It is true that this prescription may result from a cool and delicate humour in Man; nevertheless it is a striking sign of our weakness that it is enough for us to frequent and know each other for us to feel disgust. [B] Ladies are circumspect and keep us out of their dressing-rooms before they have put on their paint and decked themselves out for public show: that is not so much modesty as skill and foresight.

[A1] Nec veneres nostras hoc fallit: quo magis ipsae Omnia summopere hos vitae post scenia celant, Quos retinere volunt adstrictoque esse in amore.

[Fair women know this: they are all the more careful to hide the changing-rooms of their lives from those lovers they wish to hold and bind to them.]106

Yet we like all the parts of some animals, finding them so pleasing to our tastes that from their very droppings, discharges and excreta we make dainty things to eat as well as ornaments and perfumes.

Such arguments apply only to the common order of men; they are not sacrilegious enough to want to include those beauties, supernatural and beyond the common order, which can sometimes be seen shining among us like stars beneath a bodily and earthly veil.

Now even that share in Nature’s favour which we do concede to the animals is much to their advantage. To ourselves we attribute goods which are purely imaginary and fantastical; future, absent goods, which it exceeds our human capacity, of itself, to vouch for; or else they are goods which our unruly opinions attribute to ourselves quite wrongly, such as knowledge, rationality or pre-eminence. We abandon to animals a share in solid, palpable goods which really do exist: peace, repose, security, innocence, health… Health! the fairest and finest gift that Nature can bestow. That is why even Stoic Philosophy dares to assert that Heraclitus (who had dropsy) and Pherecydes (who had been infected by lice) would have been right, if they could, to barter their wisdom against a cure. By weighing and comparing wisdom against health they make it even more splendid than in another of their assertions. Supposing Circe (they say) had presented Ulysses with two different potions, one to make a madman wise, the other a wise man mad: rather than allow her to transform him from human to beast, he ought to have accepted the one that would make him mad. Wisdom herself, they say, would have argued like this: ‘Leave me, forsake me, rather than lodge me in the bodily shape of an ass.’ What? Will philosophers forsake Wisdom, great and divine, to cleave to the veil of this earthy body?107 So we do not, after all, excel over beasts by wit and our power of reason but merely by our physical beauty, our beautiful colour, the beautiful way our members are arranged! For things like that we must forsake our intellect, our moral wisdom and what not!

Well, that is a frank and artless admission and I accept it. At least philosophers have admitted that all those qualities they make such a fuss about are fantastic and vain: even if beasts had all the virtue, knowledge, wisdom and contentment of the Stoic [C] they would still be beasts, [A] in no way to be compared to any man, however wretched, wicked or daft! [C] In fine, nothing is worth anything if it does not look like us. Even God has to become like us, to be appreciated – I shall go into that later.108 It is clear from this that [A] we do not place ourselves above other animals and reject their condition and companionship by right reason but out of stubbornness and insane arrogance.

To get back to the subject: we have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive if it includes those passions without number which prey upon us. [B] Unless, that is, we choose, like Socrates, to pride ourselves on the one noteworthy prerogative we do have over the beasts: Nature lays down limits and seasons to their lusts, but gives us a full rein – anytime, any place.

[C] Ut vinum aegrotis, quia prodest raro, nocet saepissime, melius est non adhibere omnino, quam, spe dubiae salutis, in apertam perniciem incurrere: sic haud scio an melius fuerit humano generi motum istum celerem cogitationis, acumen, solertiam, quam rationem vocamus, quoniam pestifera sint multis, admodum paucis salutaria, non dari omnino, quam tam munifice et tam large dari.

[Wine is often bad and rarely good for the sick, so it is better to let them have none at all than to run known risks for a doubtful remedy. So too with that mental agility, shrewdness and ingenuity which we call reason: it is baleful to many and good for only a few. It would have been better for Man not to have been given it at all than to have been given it with such great munificence.]109

[A] What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout – and did they feel it any the less because they knew how that humour lodged in their joints? Did it help them to come to terms with death, knowing that whole tribes take delight in it? Did they not mind being cuckolded, since they knew that in some place or other men have wives in common? Not at all. Varro among the Romans and Aristotle among the Greeks were ranked first for knowledge at a time when learning was flourishing and at its best. Yet nobody says that their lives were particularly outstanding. There are, in fact, notorious stains on the life of the Greek one, which he cannot easily escape.110 [B] Have we discovered that health and pleasure taste better if you know astrology or grammar –

Illiterati num minus nervi rigent?

[Men who cannot read do not find it harder to get an erection, do they?]

– or that shame and poverty become more bearable?

Scilicet et morbis et debilitate carebis,Et luctum et curam effugies, et tempora vitaeLonga tibi post haec fato meliore dabuntur.

[You will doubtless be free from ills and weakness and be free from grief and care, and a long life will be granted you, one with a better destiny.]111

I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than University Rectors – and whom I would rather be like. Among the necessities of life learning seems to me to rank with fame, noble blood and dignity112 [C] or, at most, with beauty, riches [A] and such other qualities which do indeed contribute a great deal to life, but from a distance and somewhat more in the mind than in nature.

[C] We hardly need more duties, laws and rules of conduct in human society than cranes or ants do in theirs: they have no learning, yet live their lives quite ordinately. If Man were wise he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.

[A] If anyone were to tot up our deeds and our actions he would find more outstanding men among the ignorant than among the wise – outstanding in virtues of every kind. Old Rome seems to me to have borne many men of greater worth, both in peace and war, than the later, cultured Rome which brought about its own downfall. Even if everything else were identical, at very least valour and uprightness would still tilt the balance towards Old Rome, for they make uniquely good bedfellows with simplicity.

But I will let this subject drop; it would draw me further on than I want to go. I will merely add this: only humility and submissiveness113 can produce a good man man. We must not let everyone work out for himself what his duties are. Duty must be laid down for him, not chosen by him from his own reasoning; otherwise, out of the weakness and infinite variety of our reasons and opinions, we will – as Epicurus said – end up forging duties for ourselves which will have us eating each other. The first commandment which God ever gave to Man was the law of pure obedience. It was a bare and simple order, leaving Man no room for knowing or arguing [C] – since the principal duty of a reasonable soul which acknowledges. Superior and. Benefactor in heaven is to obey him. All other virtues are born of submission and obedience, just as all other sins are born of pride. [B] The first temptation came to humankind from the opposite extreme: the Devil first poured his poison into our ears with promises about knowledge and understanding: ‘Eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum’ [Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil]. [C] In Homer, when the Sirens wished to deceive Ulysses, draw him into their dangerous snares and so destroy him, they offered him the gift of knowledge.114

[A] There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something. That is why ignorance is so strongly advocated by our religion as a quality appropriate to belief and obedience. [C] ‘Cavete ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanes seductiones secundum elementa mundi’ [Beware lest any man cheat you through philosophy and vain deceptions, according to the rudiments of the world].115

[A] All the philosophers of all the sects are in general accord over one thing: that the sovereign good consists in peace of mind and body. [B] But where are we to find it?

[A] Ad summum sapiens uno minor est Jove: dives, Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum: Praecipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est.

[To sum up then: the wise man has only one superior – Jupiter – and is rich, free, honourable, beautiful, the king of kings in fact… especially when well and not troubled by snot!]

It does seem true that Nature allotted us one thing only to console us for our pitiful, wretched condition: arrogance. Epictetus agrees, saying that Man has nothing properly his own except his opinions. For our portion we have been allotted wind and smoke.116

[B] Philosophy asserts that gods enjoy health as it really is, though they can understand illness; Man, on the contrary, enjoys his goods only in fantasy, but knows ills as they really are.117 [A] We have done right to emphasize our imaginative powers: all our goods exist only in a dream.

Man is a wretched creature, subject to calamities;118 but just listen to him bragging: ‘There is no occupation’, says Cicero, ‘so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity of matter, the immense grandeur of Nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety, moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation’…119 Is this fellow describing the properties of almighty and everlasting God! In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived lives more gentle, more equable, more constant than his.

[AI] Deus ille fuit, Deus, inclute Memmi, Qui princeps vitae rationem invenit eam, quae Nunc appellatur sapientia, quique per artem Fluctibus e tantis vitam tantisque tenebris In tam tranquillo et tam clara luce locavit.

[It was a god, noble Memmius, yes, a god who first discovered that rule of life which we now call Wisdom and who, through his skill, brought our lives out from storm and darkness and fixed them in such tranquillity and light.]

Beautiful, magnificent words, those! Yet, despite the god who taught him such divine wisdom, a minor accident reduced the wits of the fellow who wrote them to a state worse than that of the meanest shepherd!120

[A] Of similar impudence are [C] that promise of Democritus in his preface: ‘I am going to write about Everything’; the stupid title Aristotle bestows on us men: ‘Mortal Gods’;121 and [A] Chrysippus’ judgement that Dion was as virtuous as God. And even Seneca, my favourite, asserts that, by God’s gift he is living: but living well he owes to himself [C] – which conforms to what that other fellow said: ‘In virtute vere gloriamur; quod non contingeret, si id donum a deo, non a nobis haberemus’ [We rightly glory in our virtue; that would not arise if it were a gift of God and not of ourselves]. This is in Seneca, too: ‘The wise man has fortitude similar to God’s, but since he has it within human weakness, he surpasses God.’122

[A] There is nothing more common than rash quips like these. We are so much more jealous of our own interests than of those of our Creator that not one of us is more shocked when he sees himself made equal to God than reduced to the ranks of the other animals. We must trample down this stupid vanity, violently and boldly shaking the absurd foundations on which we base such false opinions. So long as Man thinks he has means and powers deriving from himself he will never acknowledge what he owes to his Master. All his geese will be swans, as the saying goes. So we must strip him down to his shirt-tails. Let us look at some notable examples of what his philosophy actually produces.

Possidonius was beset with an illness so painful that it made him twist his arms and grind his teeth; he thought he could cock a snook at Pain by crying out at her: ‘It’s no good; whatever you do I will never admit that you are evil.’ He boasts that he will at least contain his speech within the rules of his sect, yet he feels exactly the same pain as my footman.123 [C] ‘Re succumbere non oportebat verbis gloriantem’ [If you boast in words you should not surrender in fact].

Arcesilaus was suffering from gout. Carneades came to see him and was just going sadly away when he called him back; he pointed from his feet to his heart and said, ‘Nothing has passed from here to there.’ There is a little more elegance in that: he admits to pain and would gladly be rid of it; it is an evil, all right, but his heart is neither cast down nor weakened by it. That other fellow clings to his position, which is, I fear, more a matter of words than of reality. When Dionysius of Heraclea was nearly driven out of his mind by stabbing pains in his eyes, he was forced to give up such Stoical assertions.124

[A] But supposing knowledge actually could produce the effects claimed for it, actually could blunt and reduce the pangs of the misfortunes which beset us: even then, what does it really achieve over and beyond what ignorance does – more purely and more evidently? When Pyrrho, the philosopher, was exposed to the hazards of a mighty tempest, he could set no better example before his companions than the indifference of a pig on board ship with them: it gazed at the storm quite free from fear. When Philosophy has run out of precepts she sends us back to athletes and mule-drivers. Such men are usually less apprehensive of death, pain and other misfortunes. They also show more steadfastness than scholarship affords to any man not already predisposed to it by birth and by a duly cultivated natural talent.125 What is it if not ignorance which allows our surgeons to make incisions in the tender limbs of children more easily than in our own? [C] (The same applies to horses.) [A] How many men have been made ill by the sheer force of imagination? Is it not normal to see men bled, purged and swallowing medicines to cure ills which they feel only in their minds? When we run out of genuine ills, Learning will lend us some of her own: this or that colour are symptoms of a catarrh you will have; this heat-wave threatens you with some turbulent fever; this break in the line of life on your left hand warns you of some grave and imminent illness… Finally Learning openly makes assaults against health itself: that youthful vigour and liveliness of yours cannot remain stable for long! Better bleed away some of their force in case it turns against you…

Compare the life of a man, or enslaved by such fantasies with the life of a ploughman who, free from learning and prognostics, merely follows his natural appetites and judges things as they feel at present. He only feels ill when he really is ill; the other fellow often has stone in the mind before stone in the kidney. As though it were not time enough to suffer pain when it really comes along, our thoughts must run ahead and meet it.

What I say about medicine applies to erudition in general – hence that ancient philosophical opinion that sovereign good lies in recognizing the weakness of our powers of judgement. My ignorance can supply as good a cause to hope as to fear; for me, the only rule of health lies in the example of other people and how I see them fare in similar circumstances; but since I can find all sorts of examples, I dwell on the comparisons which are most favourable to me! Health, full, free and entire, I welcome with open arms. I whet my appetites so that I can truly enjoy it, all the more so since health is not usual to me any more, but quite rare. Far be it from me to trouble the sweet repose of health with bitterness arising from a new regime based on restraint. The very beasts can show us that illness can be brought on by mental agitations.

[C] The natives of Brazil are said to die only of old age; they attribute that to the serenity and tranquillity of the air: I would attribute it to the serenity and tranquillity of their souls; they are not burdened with intense emotions and unpleasant tasks and thoughts: they pass their lives in striking simplicity and ignorance. They have no literature, no laws, no kings and no religion of any kind.126

[A] Experience shows that gross, uncouth men make more desirable and vigorous sexual partners; lying with a mule-driver is often more welcome than lying with a gentleman. How can we explain that except by assuming that emotions within the gentleman’s soul undermine the strength of his body, break it down and exhaust it, [A1] just as they exhaust and harm the soul itself? Is it not true that the soul can be most readily thrown into mania and driven mad by its own quickness, sharpness and nimbleness – in short by the qualities which constitute its strength? [B] Does not the most subtle wisdom produce the most subtle madness? As great enmities are born of great friendships and fatal illnesses are born of radiant health, so too the most exquisite and delirious of manias are produced by the choicest and the most lively of the emotions which disturb the soul. It needs only a half turn of the peg to pass from one to the other. [A1] When men are demented their very actions show how appropriate madness is to the workings of our souls at their most vigorous. Is there anyone who does not know how imperceptible are the divisions separating madness from the spiritual alacrity of a soul set free or from actions arising from supreme and extraordinary virtue? Plato says that melancholics are the most teachable and the most sublime; yet none has a greater propensity towards madness. Spirits without number are undermined by their own force and subtlety. There is an Italian poet, fashioned in the atmosphere of the pure poetry of Antiquity, who showed more judgement and genius than any other Italian for many a long year; yet his agile and lively mind has overthrown him; the light has made him blind; his reason’s grasp was so precise and so intense that it has left him quite irrational; his quest for knowledge, eager and exacting, has led to his becoming like a dumb beast; his rare aptitude for the activities of the soul has left him with no activity… and with no soul. Ought he to be grateful to so murderous a mental agility? It was not so much compassion that I felt as anger when I saw him in so wretched a state, surviving himself, neglecting himself (and his works, which were published, unlicked and uncorrected; he had sight of this but no understanding).127

Do you want a man who is sane, moderate, firmly based and reliable? Then array him in darkness, sluggishness and heaviness. [C] To teach us to be wise, make us stupid like beasts; to guide us you must blind us.

[A] If you say that the convenience of having our senses chilled and blunted when tasting evil pains must entail the consequential inconvenience of rendering us less keenly appreciative of the joys of good pleasures, I agree. But the wretchedness of our human condition means we have less to relish than to banish: the most extreme pleasures touch us less than the lightest of pains: [C] ‘Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt’ [Men feel pleasure more dully than pain]. [A] We are far less aware of perfect health than of the slightest illness:

pungitIn cute vix summa violatum plagula corpus, Quando valere nihil quemquam movet. Hoc juvat unum, Quod me non torquet latus aut pes: caetera quisquam Vix queat aut sanum sese, aut sentire valentem.

[A man feels the slightest prick which scarcely breaks his skin; yet he remains unmoved by excellent health. Personally I feel delight in simply being free from pain in foot or side, while another scarcely realizes he is well and remains unaware of his good health.]

For us, being well means not being ill. So that philosophical school which sets the highest value on pleasure reduces it to the mere absence of pain. To be free from ill is the greatest good that Man can hope for. [C] As Ennius puts it,

Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali

[Ample good consists in being free from ill].128

[A] For even that tickling excitement which accompanies certain pleasures and which seems to exalt us above mere good health and freedom from pain, that shifting delight, active, inexplicably biting and sharp, aims in the end at freedom from pain. The appetite which enraptures us when we lie with women merely aims at banishing the pain brought on by the frenzy of our inflamed desires; all it seeks is rest and repose, free from the fever of passion.

The same applies to all other appetites. I maintain, therefore, that if ignorant simplicity can bring us to an absence of pain, then it brings us to a state which, given the human condition, is very blessedness.

[C] Yet we should not think of a simplicity so leaden as to be unable to taste anything. Crantor was right to attack ‘freedom from pain’ as conceived by Epicurus, insofar as it was built upon foundations so deep that pain could not even draw near to it or arise within it. I have no words of praise for a ‘freedom from pain’ which is neither possible nor desirable. I am pleased enough not to be ill but, if I am ill, I want to know; if you cut me open or cauterize me, I want to feel it. Truly, anyone who could uproot all knowledge of pain would equally eradicate all knowledge of pleasure and finally destroy Man: ‘Istud nihil dolere, non sine magna mercede contingit immanitatis in animo, stuporis in corpore’ [That ‘freedom from pain’ has a high price: cruelty in the soul, insensate dullness in the body]. For Man, ill can be good at times; it is not always right to flee pain, not always right to chase after pleasure.

[A] It greatly advances the honour of Ignorance that Learning has to throw us into her arms when powerless to stiffen our backs against the weight of our ills; she has to make terms, slipping the reins and giving us leave to seek refuge in the lap of Ignorance, finding under her protection a shelter from the blows and outrages of Fortune.

Learning instructs us to [C] withdraw our thoughts from the ills which beset us now and to occupy them by recalling the good times we have known; [A] to make use of the memory of past joys in order to console ourselves for present sorrows, or to call in the help of vanished happiness to set against the things which oppress us now – [C] ‘Levationes aegritudinum in avocatione a cogitanda molestia et revocatione ad contemplandas voluptates ponit’ [He found a way to lessen sorrows by summoning thoughts away from troubles and calling them back to gaze on pleasure] – [A] when Learning runs out of force, she turns to cunning; when strength of arm and body fails, she resorts to conjuring tricks and nimble footwork; if that is not what is meant, what does it mean? When any reasonable man, let alone a philosopher, feels in reality a blazing thirst brought on by a burning fever, can you buy him off with memories of the delights of Greek wine? [B] That would only make a bad bargain worse.

Che ricordarsi il ben doppia la noia.

[Recalling pleasure doubles pain.]

[A] Of a similar nature is that other counsel which Philosophy gives us: to keep only past pleasures in mind and to wipe off the sorrows we have known – as if we had the art of forgetfulness in our power. [C] Anyway, such advice makes us worse:

Suavis est laborum praeteritorum memoria.

[Sweet is the memory of toils now past.]

[A] Philosophy ought to arm me with weapons to fight against Fortune; she should stiffen my resolve to trample human adversities underfoot; how has she grown so weak as to have me bolting into burrows with such cowardly and stupid evasions? Memory reproduces what she wants, not what we choose. Indeed there is nothing which stamps anything so vividly on our memory as the desire not to remember it: the best way to impress anything on our souls and to make them stand guard over it, is to beg them to forget it.

– [C] The following is false: ‘Est situm in nobis, ut et adversa quasi perpetua oblivione obruamus, et secunda jucunde et suaviter meminerimus’ [There is within us a capacity for consigning misfortunes to total oblivion, while remembering favourable things with joy and delight].

The following is true: ‘Memini etiam quae nolo, oblivisci non possum quae volo’ [I remember things I do not want to remember and I cannot forget things I want to forget].129 –

[A] Whose advice have I just cited? Why, that of the man [C] ‘qui se unus sapientem profiteri sit ausus’ [who, alone, dared to say he was wise];

[A] Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit, et omnes Praestrinxit Stellas, exortus uti aetherius sol.

[who soared above human kind by his genius and who, like the Sun rising in heaven, obscured all the stars.]

Emptying and stripping memory is, surely, the true and proper road to ignorance. [C] ‘Iners malorum remedium ignorantia est’ [Ignorance is an artless remedy for our ills].130

[A] We find several similar precepts permitting us, when strong and lively Reason cannot suffice, to borrow the trivial pretences of the vulgar, provided that they make us happy or provide consolation. Those who cannot cure a wound are pleased with palliatives which deaden it. If philosophers could only find a way of adding order and constancy to a life which was maintained in joy and tranquillity by weakness and sickness of judgement, they would be prepared to accept it. I do not think they will deny me that.

Potare et spargere flores Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi!

[I may appear silly, but I am going to start drinking and strewing flowers about!]131

You would find several philosophers agreeing with Lycas: he was a man of very orderly habits, living quietly and peaceably at home; he failed in none of the duties he owed to family and strangers; he guarded himself effectively from harm; however, some defect in his senses led him to imprint a mad fantasy on his brain: he always thought he was in the theatre watching games, plays and the finest comedies in the world. Being cured of this corrupt humour, he nearly took his doctors to court to make them restore those sweet fantasies132 to him:

pol! me occidistis, amici, Non servastis, ait, cui sic extorta voluptas, Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error.

[‘You have killed me, my friends, not cured me,’ he said. ‘You have wrenched my pleasure from me and taken away by force that most delightful wandering of my mind.’]

Thrasilaus, son of Pythodorus, had a similar mad fantasy; he came to believe that all the ships sailing out of the port of Piraeus or coming in to dock there were working for him alone. When good fortune attended their voyages he rejoiced in it and welcomed them with delight. His brother Crito brought him to his senses, but he sorely missed his former condition, which had been full of happiness, not burdened by troubles.

A line of Ancient Greek poetry says ‘There is great convenience in not being too wise’: So does Ecclesiastes: ‘In much wisdom there is much sadness, and he that acquireth knowledge acquireth worry and travail.’

Philosophy in general agrees133 that there is an ultimate remedy to be prescribed for every kind of trouble: namely, ending our life if we find it intolerable. [C] ‘Placet? Pare. Non placet? Quacunque vis, exi.’ [All right? Then put up with it. Not all right? Then out you go, any way you like.] – ‘Pungit dolor? Vel fodiat sane. Si nudus es, da jugulum; sin tectus armis Vulcaniis, id est fortitudine, resiste.’ [Does it hurt? Is it excruciating? If you are defenceless, get your throat cut; if you are armed with the arms of Vulcan (that is, fortitude) then fight it!] As the Greeks said at their banquets: ‘Let him drink or be off!’ (‘Aut bibat, aut abeat!’) – That is particularly apt if you pronounce Cicero’s language like. Gascon, changing your ‘B’s to ‘V’s: Aut vivat- ‘Let him live…’

[A] Vivere si recte nescis, decede peritis; Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti; Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius aequo Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius aetas.

[If you do not know how to live as you should, give way to those who do. You have played enough in bed; you have eaten enough, drunk enough: it is time to be off, lest you start to drink too much and find that pretty girls rightly laugh at you and push you away.]

But what does this consensus amount to, if not to a confession of powerlessness on the part of Philosophy? She sends us for protection not merely to ignorance but to insensibility, to a total lack of sensation, to non-being.

Democritum postquam matura vetustas Admonuit memorem motus languescere mentis, Sponte sua leto caput obvius obtulit ipse.

[When mature old age warned Democritus that he was losing his memory and his mental faculties, he spontaneously offered his head to Destiny.]

As Antisthenes said: We need a store of intelligence, to understand; failing that, a hangman’s rope. In this connection Chrysippus used to quote from Tyrtaeus the poet: ‘Draw near to virtue… or to death.’ [C] Crates used to say that love was cured by time or hunger; those who like neither can use the rope. [B] Sextius – the one whom Seneca and Plutarch talk so highly of – gave up everything and threw himself into the study of philosophy; he found his progress too long and too slow, so he decided to drown himself in the sea. In default of learning, he ran to death.

Philosophy lays down the law on this subject in these words: If some great evil should chance upon you – one you cannot remedy – then a haven is always near: swim out of your body as from a leaky boat; only a fool is bound to his body, not by love of life but by fear of death.134

[A] Just as life is made more pleasant by simplicity, it is also made better and more innocent (as I was about to say earlier on). According to St Paul, it is the simple and the ignorant who rise up and take hold of heaven, whereas we, with all our learning, plunge down into the bottomless pit of hell.135 I will not linger here over two Roman Emperors, Valentian – a sworn enemy of knowledge and scholarship – and Licinius, who called them a poison and a plague within the body politic;136 nor over Mahomet who, [C] I am told, [A] forbade his followers to study. What we must do is to attach great weight to the authoritative example of a great man, Lycurgus, as well as to the respect we owe to Sparta, a venerable, great and awe-inspiring form of government, where letters were not taught or practised but where virtue and happiness long flourished. Those who come back from the New World discovered by the Spaniards in the time of our fathers can testify how those peoples, without magistrates or laws, live lives more Ordinate and more just than any we find in our own countries, where there are more laws and legal officials than there are deeds or inhabitants.

Di cittatorie piene e di libelli, D’esamine e di carte, di procure, Hanno le mani e il seno, e gran fastelli Di chiose, di consigli e di letture: Per cui le faculta de poverelli Non sono mai ne le citta sicure; Hanno dietro e dinanzi, e d’ambi ilati, Notai procuratori e advocati.

[Their hands and their law-bags are full of summonses, libels, inquests, documents and powers-of-attorney; they have great folders full of glosses, counsels’ opinions and statements. For all that, the poor are never safe in their cities but are surrounded, in front, behind and on both sides, by procurators and lawyers.]137

A later Roman senator meant much the same when he said that the breath of their forebears stank of garlic but inwardly they smelt of the musk of a good conscience; men of his time, on the contrary, were doused in perfume yet inwardly stank of every sort of vice.138 In other words he agrees with me: they had ample learning and ability but were very short of integrity. Lack of refinement, ignorance, simplicity and roughness go easily with innocence, whereas curiosity, subtlety and knowledge have falsehood in their train; the main qualities which conserve human society are humility, fear and goodness: they require a soul which is empty, teachable and not thinking much of itself.139

In Man curiosity is an innate evil, dating from his origins: Christians know that particularly well. The original Fall occurred when Man was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led headlong to eternal damnation. Pride undoes man; it corrupts him; pride makes him leave the trodden paths, welcome novelty and prefer to be the leader of a lost band wandering along the road to perdition; prefer to be a master of error and lies than a pupil in the school of Truth, guided by others and led by the hand along the straight and beaten path. That is perhaps what was meant by that old Greek saying, that Superstition follows Pride and obeys it as a father 140

[C] ‘Oh Pride! How thou dost trammel us!’ When Socrates was told that the god of Wisdom had called him wise, he was thunderstruck; he ransacked his mind and shook himself out but could find nothing to base this divine judgement upon. He knew other men who were as just, temperate, valiant and wise as he was: others he knew to be more eloquent, more handsome, more useful to their country. He finally concluded that, if he was different from others and wiser, it was only because he did not think he was; that his God thought any human who believed himself to be knowledgeable and wise was a singularly stupid animal; that his best teaching taught ignorance and his best wisdom was simplicity.141

[A] The Word of God proclaims that those of us who think well of ourselves are to be pitied: Dust and ashes (it says to them) what have ye to boast about? And elsewhere: God maketh man like unto a shadow who will judge him when the light departeth and the shadow vanisheth?142

In truth we are but nothing.

It is so far beyond our power to comprehend the majesty of God that the very works of our Creator which best carry his mark are the ones we least understand. To come across something unbelievable is, for Christians, an opportunity to exercise belief; it is all the more reasonable precisely because it runs counter to human reason. [B] If it were reasonable, it would not be a miracle if it followed a pattern, it would not be unique. [C] ‘Melius scitur deus nesciendo’ [God is best known by not knowing], said St Augustine. And Tacitus says, ‘Sanctius est ac reverentius de actis deorum credere quam scire’ [It is more holy and pious to believe what the gods have done than to understand them].143 Plato reckons that there is an element of vicious impiety in inquiring too curiously about God and the world or about first causes. As for Cicero, he says: ‘Atque ilium quidem parentem hujus universitatis invenire difficile; et, quum jam inveneris, indicare in vulgus, nefas’ [It is hard to discover the Begetter of this universe; and when you do discover him, it is impious to disclose him to the populace].144

[A] We confidently use words like might, truth, justice. They are words signifying something great. But what that ‘something’ is we cannot see or conceive. [B] We say that God ‘fears’, that God ‘is angry’, that God ‘loves’:

Immortalia mortali sermone notantes.

[Denoting immortal things in mortal speech.]145

But they are disturbances and emotions which in any form known to us find no place in God. Nor can we imagine them in forms known to him. [A] God alone can know himself; God alone can interpret his works. [C] And he uses improper, human, words to do so, stooping down to the earth where we lie sprawling.

Take Prudence; that consists in a choice between good and evil; how can that apply to God? No evil can touch him. Or take Reason and Intelligence, by which we seek to attain clarity amidst obscurity; there is nothing obscure to God. Or Justice, which distributes to each his due and which was begotten for the good of society and communities of men; how can that exist in God? And what about Temperance? It moderates bodily pleasures which have no place in the Godhead. Nor is Fortitude in the face of pain, toil or danger one of God’s qualities: those three things are unknown to him. That explains why Aristotle held that God is equally as free from virtue as from vice. ‘Neque gratia neque ira teneri potest, quod quae talia essent, imbecilla essent omnia’ [He can experience neither gratitude nor anger; such things are found only in the weak].146

[A] Whatever share in the knowledge of Truth we may have obtained, it has not been acquired by our own powers. God has clearly shown us that: it was out of the common people that he chose simple and ignorant apostles to bear witness of his wondrous secrets; the Christian faith is not something obtained by us: it is, purely and simply, a gift depending on the generosity of Another. Our religion did not come to us through reasoned arguments or from our own intelligence: it came to us from outside authority, by commandments. That being so, weakness of judgement helps us more than strength; blindness, more than clarity of vision. We become learned in God’s wisdom more by ignorance than by knowledge. It is not surprising that our earth-based, natural means cannot conceive knowledge which is heaven-based and supernatural; let us merely bring our submissiveness and obedience: ‘For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the prudence of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath God not made the wisdom of this world like unto the foolishness as of beasts? For seeing that the world, through wisdom, knew not God, it pleased God through the vanity of preaching to save them that believe.’147

But is it within the capacity of Man to find what he is looking for? Has that quest for truth which has kept Man busy for so many centuries actually enriched him with some new power or solid truth? Now, at last, it is time to look into that question.

I think Man will confess, if he speaks honestly, that all he has gained from so long a chase is knowledge of his own weakness.148 By long study we have confirmed and verified that ignorance does lie naturally within us. The truly wise are like ears of corn: they shoot up and up holding their heads proudly erect – so long as they are empty; but when, in their maturity, they are full of swelling grain, their foreheads droop down and they show humility. So, too, with men who have assayed everything, sounded everything; within those piles of knowledge and the profusion of so many diverse things, they have found nothing solid, nothing firm, only vanity. They then renounce arrogance and recognize their natural condition.149

[C] For that is what Velleius reproached Cotta and Cicero with: they had learned from Philo that they had learned nothing.150

When one of the Seven Sages of Greece, Pherecides, lay dying, he wrote to Thales saying, ‘I have commanded my family, once they have buried me, to send you all my papers; if you and the other Sages are satisfied with them, publish them; if not, suppress them: they contain no certainties which satisfy me. I make no claim to know what truth is nor to have attained truth. Rather than lay subjects bare, I lay them open.’151

[A] The wisest man that ever was, when asked what he knew, replied that the one thing he did know was that he knew nothing.152 They say that the largest bit of what we do know is smaller than the tiniest bit of what we do not know; he showed that to be true. In other words, the very things we think we know form part of our ignorance, and a small part at that. [C] We know things in a dream, says Plato; we do not know them as they truly are.153

‘Omnes pene veteres nihil cognosci, nihil percipi, nihil sciri posse dixerunt; angustos sensus, imbecillos animos, brevia curricula vitae’ [Virtually all the Ancients say that nothing can be understood, nothing can be perceived, nothing can be known; our senses are too restricted, our minds are too weak, the course of our life is too short].154

[A] Cicero himself, who owed such worth as he had to his learning, was said by Valerius to have begun to think less of literary culture .in his old age.155 [C] And even while he was still writing he felt bound to no sect; he followed the teachings of this school or that as seemed to him most probable, remaining always within that Doubt taught by the Academy: ‘Dicendum est, sed ita ut nihil affirmem: quaeram omnia, dubitans plerumque et mihi diffidens’ [I have to write, but in such a way as to vouch for nothing; I shall always be seeking, mostly doubting, rarely trusting myself].156

[A] It would be too easy a game if I limited myself to the ordinary run of men considered en masse; I would be justified in doing so by Man’s curious convention that votes are not to be weighed but counted. But let us leave aside the ordinary people,

Qui vigilans stertit, Mortua cui vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti;

[Who snore whilst they are awake and whose lives are dead even while they live and keep their eyes open;]157

they have no self-awareness; they never judge themselves and let most of their natural faculties stand idle. I want to take Man in his highest state. Let us consider only that tiny number of outstanding, handpicked men who are born with a fine natural endowment peculiar to themselves and who then take care to strengthen and sharpen it by skill and study; by such means they raise it to the highest point [C] of wisdom [A] that it can attain to. They mould their souls in ways which keep them open on every side to every tendency; they assist their souls with the help of every appropriate outside support; they adorn them and enrich them with every advantage which they can discover both within and beyond this world. The highest possible form of human nature finds its home in such men. These are men who have given laws and constitutions to the world; it is their arts and sciences which have taught the world; so, too, the example of their astounding moral integrity. I will take account of the testimony and experience only of men such as these. Let us see how far they got and what they concluded. They form a fellowship such that any ills and defects found in them can confidently be accepted by the world as inherent ones.

Whoever sets out to find something eventually reaches the point where he can say that he has found it, or that it cannot be found, or that he is still looking for it. The whole of Philosophy can be divided into these three categories; her aim is to seek true, certain knowledge.

Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics158 and others think they have discovered it. They founded the accepted disciplines and expounded their knowledge as certainties.

Clitomachus, Carneades and the Academics despaired of their quest; they conclude that Truth cannot be grasped by human means. Their conclusion is one of weakness, of human ignorance. This school has had the greatest number of adherents and some of the noblest.159

As for Pyrrho and the other Sceptics or Ephectics, [C] (whose teachings many of the Ancients derived from Homer, the Seven Sages, Archilochus and Euripides, and associated with Zeno, Democritus and Xenophanes), [A] they say they are still looking for Truth. They hold that the philosophers who think they have found it are infinitely wrong. They go on to add that the second category – those who are quite sure that human strength is incapable of reaching truth – are overbold and vain. To determine the limits of our powers and to know and judge the difficulty of anything whatsoever constitutes great, even the highest, knowledge. They doubt whether Man is capable of it.

Nil sciri quisquis putat, id quoque nescit An scire possit quo se nil scire fatetur.

[Any man who thinks that ‘nothing can be known’, does not know whether he can know even that thing by which he asserts that he knows nothing.]160

Ignorance which is aware of itself, judges itself, condemns itself, is not complete ignorance: complete ignorance does not even know itself. Consequently the professed aim of Pyrrhonians is to shake all convictions, to hold nothing as certain, to vouch for nothing. Of the three functions attributed to the soul (cogitation, appetite and assent) the Sceptics admit the first two but keep their assent in a state of ambiguity, inclining neither way, giving not even the slightest approbation to one side or the other.

[C] It was by gesture that Zeno illustrated his conception of the three functions of the soul: a hand stretched out open meant probability; half-closed, with the fingers bent over, meant assent; clenched, it meant understanding; with the other hand pressing it tighter still, it meant knowledge.161

[A] Now the Pyrrhonians make their faculty of judgement so unbending and upright that it registers everything but bestows its assent on nothing. This leads to their well-known ataraxia: that is a calm, stable rule of life, free from all the disturbances (caused by the impress of opinions, or of such knowledge of reality as we think we have) which give birth to fear, acquisitiveness, envy, immoderate desires, ambition, pride, superstition, love of novelty, rebellion, disobedience, obstinacy and the greater part of our bodily ills. In this way, they even free themselves from passionate sectarianism, for their disputes are mild affairs and they are never afraid of the other side having its say. When they assert that heavy things tend to fall downwards, they would be most upset if you believed them. They want you to contradict them in order to achieve their end: doubt and suspense of judgement. They only put forward propositions of their own in order to oppose the ones they think we believe in. Accept theirs, and they will gladly maintain the opposite. It is all the same to them: they take no sides. If you maintain that snow is black, they will argue that it is, on the contrary, white. If you say that it is neither, their task is to say that it is both. If you conclude that you definitely know nothing, they will maintain that you do know something. Yes, and if you present your doubt as axiomatic, they will challenge you on that too, arguing that you are not in doubt, or that you cannot decide for certain and prove that you are in doubt. This is doubt taken to its limits; it shakes its own foundations; such extremes of doubt separate them completely from many other theories including those which in many ways do indeed teach doubt and ignorance.162

[B] If some Dogmatists call green what others call yellow, why, they ask, cannot they doubt both of them? Can there be any proposition capable of acceptance or rejection which it is not right to consider ambiguous?

Other people are prejudiced by the customs of their country, by the education given them by their parents or by chance encounter: normally, before the age of discretion, they are taken by storm and, without judgement or choice, accept this or that opinion of the Stoic or Epicurean sects. There they stay, mortgaged, enslaved, caught on a hook which they cannot get off – [C] ‘ad quamcumque disciplinam velut tempestate delati, ad eam tanquam ad saxum adhaerescunt’ [they cling to any old teaching, like sailors washed up on a rock]. [B] But why should people like these not also be allowed their freedom, making up their own minds without bonds and slavery? [C] ‘Hoc liberiores et solutiores quod integra illis est judicandi potestas’ [They are all the more independent and free in that they enjoy the full power of judgement].163 There is some advantage, surely, in being detached from the reins of the Necessity which curb others. [B] Is it not better to remain in doubt, than to get entangled in the many errors produced by human fantasy? Is it not better to postpone one’s adherence indefinitely than to intervene in factions, both quarrelling and seditious?

[C] ‘What ought I to choose?’ – ‘Anything you wish, so long as you choose something.’ A daft enough reply! Yet it seems to be the one reached by every kind of dogmatism which refuses us the right not to know what we do not know.

[B] Try siding with the school enjoying majority support: but it will never be safe enough: to defend it you will have to attack opponents by the hundreds. Is it not better to keep out of the fray altogether? You allow yourself to espouse, like honour and dear life, Aristotle’s beliefs about the eternity of the soul; to do that you must reject and contradict Plato. In that case, why should others be forbidden simply to go on doubting?164

[C] Panaetius was legally permitted to suspend judgement about dreams, oracles, prophecies and divination by entrails; yet his school, the Stoics, never doubted them. Why cannot a wise man dare to doubt anything and everything, if Panaetius could dare to doubt doctrines which were taught by his own masters and founded on the common consent of the school he adhered to and whose doctrines he claimed to profess?

[B] If it is a child who makes the judgement, he does not know enough about the subject: if it is a learned man, then he has made up his mind already! – Pyrrhonians have given themselves a wonderful strategic advantage by shrugging off the burden of self-defence. It does not matter who attacks them, as long as somebody does. Anything serves their purpose: if they win, your argument is defective; if you do, theirs is. If they lose, they show the truth of Ignorance; if you lose, you do. If they can prove that nothing is known: fine. If they do not succeed in proving it, that is fine too. [C] ‘Ut quum in eadem re paria contrariis in partibus momenta inveniuntur, facilius ab utraque parte assertio sustineatur’ [So that by finding equally good cases, for and against, on the very same subject, it is easier to suspend one’s judgement about either side].165

They make it their pride to be far more ready to find everything false than anything true and to show that things are not, rather than that they are. They prefer to proclaim what they do not believe, rather than what they do. [A] Their typical phrases include: ‘I have settled nothing’; ‘It is no more this than that’; ‘Not one rather than the other’; ‘I do not understand’; ‘Both sides seem equally likely’; ‘It is equally right to speak for and against either side’. [C] To them, nothing seems true which cannot also seem false. [A] They have sworn loyalty to the word : ‘I am in suspense’; I will not budge.166

These sayings, and others like them, form refrains which lead to a pure, whole, complete suspension of their judgement, which is kept permanently in abeyance. They use their reason for inquiry and debate but never to make choices or decisions. If you can picture an endless confession of ignorance, or a power of judgement which never, never inclines to one side or the other, then you can conceive what Pyrrhonism is.

I have tried to explain this notion as clearly as I can, because many find it hard to grasp, and its very authors present it somewhat diversely and rather obscurely.

Where morals are concerned, they conform to the common mould. They find it appropriate to yield to natural inclinations, to the thrust and constraints of their emotions, to established laws and customs and to the traditional arts.167 [C] ‘Non enim nos Deus ista scire, sed tantummodo uti voluit’ [For God did not want us to know such things: merely to make use of them]. [A] They let their everyday activities be guided by such considerations, neither assenting nor adhering to anything. That is why I cannot square with these conceptions what is told about Pyrrho himself. They168 describe him as emotionless and virtually senseless, adopting a wild way of life, cut off from society, allowing himself to be bumped into by wagons, standing on the edge of precipices and refusing to conform to the law. That goes well beyond his teaching. He169 was not fashioning a log or a stone but a living, arguing, thinking man, enjoying natural pleasures and comforts of every sort and making full use of all his parts, bodily as well as spiritual – [C] in, of course, a right and proper way. [A] Those false, imaginary and fantastic privileges usurped by Man, by which he claims to profess, arrange and establish the truth, were renounced and abandoned by Pyrrho, in good faith.

– [C] Yet there is not one single school of philosophy which is not forced to allow its Sage (if he wishes to live) to accept a great many things which he cannot understand, perceive or give his assent to. Say he boards a ship. He carries out his design, not knowing whether it will serve his purpose; he assumes the vessel to be seaworthy, the pilot to be experienced and the weather to be favourable. Such attendant details are, of course, merely probable: he is obliged to let himself be guided by appearances, unless they are expressly contradicted. He has a body. He has a soul. He feels the impulsions of his senses and the promptings of his spirit. He cannot find within himself any sign specifically suggesting that it be appropriate for him to make an act of judgement: he realizes he must not bind his consent to anything, since something false may have every appearance of particular truth. Despite all this, he never fails to do his duty in this life, fully and fittingly.

How many disciplines are there which actually profess to be based on conjecture rather than on knowledge, and which, being unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, merely follow what seems likely? Pyrrhonians say that truth and falsehood exist: within us we have means of looking for them, but not of making any lasting judgement: we have no touchstone.

We would be better off if we dropped our inquiries and let ourselves be moulded by the natural order of the world. A soul safe from prejudice has made a wondrous advance towards peace of mind. People who judge their judges and keep accounts of what they do fail to show due submissiveness. Among people who are amenable to the legitimate teachings of religion and politics, there are more simple and uninquisitive minds than minds which keep a schoolmasterly eye on causes human and divine. –

[A] No system discovered by Man has greater usefulness nor a greater appearance of truth [than Pyrrhonism] which shows us Man naked, empty, aware of his natural weakness, fit to accept outside help from on high: Man, stripped of all human learning and so all the more able to lodge the divine within him, annihilating170 his intellect to make room for faith; [C] he is no scoffer, [A] he holds no doctrine contrary to established custom; he is humble, obedient, teachable, keen to learn – and as a sworn enemy of heresy he is freed from the vain and irreligious opinions introduced by erroneous sects. [B] He is a blank writing-tablet, made ready for the finger of God to carve such letters on him as he pleases. The more we refer ourselves to God, commit ourselves to him and reject ourselves, the greater we are worth. Ecclesiastes says: ‘Accept all things in good part, just as they seem, just as they taste, day by day. The rest is beyond thy knowledge’:171 [C] ‘Dominus novit cogitationes hominum, quoniam vanae sunt’ [The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men, that they are vanity].

[A] And so two out of the three generic schools of Philosophy make an express profession of doubt and ignorance; it is easy to discover that most who belonged to the third school, the Dogmatists, put on an assured face merely because it looks better. They did not really think that they had established any certainties, but wanted to show us how far they had advanced in their hunt for Truth, [C] ‘quam docti fingunt, magis quam norunt’ [which the learned feign rather than know]. When Timaeus had to reveal to Socrates what he knew about the Gods, the world and mankind, he determined to speak of such things as one man to another: it would be enough if the reasons he gave had as much probability as anyone else’s, since precise reasons were neither in his grasp nor in the grasp of any mortal man.172

One of the followers of his school imitated him in these words: ‘Ut potero, explicabo: nec tamen, ut Pythius Apollo, certa ut sint et fixa, quae dixero; sed, ut homunculus, probabilia conjectura sequens’ [I will unravel things as best I may. What I shall say is neither fixed nor certain: I am no Pythian Apollo; I am a little man seeking the probable through conjecture]. Yet he was merely treating a common, not supernatural theme: contempt for death! In another place he translates Timaeus directly from Plato: ‘Si forte, de deorum natura ortuque mundi disserentes, minus id quod habemus animo consequimur, haud erit mirum. Aequum est enim meminisse et me qui disseram, hominem esse, et vos qui judicetis; ut, si probabilia dicentur, nihil ultra requiratis’ [If we are unable to achieve what we have in mind to do when we set out to treat the nature of the Gods and the origin of the world, that will not be surprising. It is right to remember that both I who am speaking and you who are judging are men. If what I say is probable, you can demand nothing more].173

[A] Aristotle regularly piles up many different opinions and beliefs, so as to evaluate his own against them. He shows how much farther he has gone and how much nearer he has approached to probability – Truth not being something we should accept on authority or from the testimony of others. [C] (That is why Epicurus scrupulously avoided citing such evidence in his writings.) [A] Aristotle is the Prince of the Dogmatists; and yet it is from him we learn that greater knowledge leads to further doubt. You can often find him hiding behind a deliberate obscurity,174 so deep and impenetrable that you cannot make out what he meant. In practice it is Pyrrhonism cloaked in affirmation.

[C] Just listen to this assertion of Cicero, explaining to us another’s notion by his own: ‘Qui requirunt quid de quaque re ipsi sentiamus, curiosius id faciunt quant necesse est. Haec in philosophia ratio contra omnia disserendi nullamque rem aperte judicandi, profecta. Socrate, repetita ab Arcesila, confirmata a Carneade, usque ad nostram viget aetatem. Hi sumus qui omnibus veris falsa quaedam adjuncta esse dicamus, tanta similitudine ut in iis nulla insit certe judicandi et assentiendi nota.’ [Those who want to know what my personal opinions are on each of these subjects are more inquisitive than they ought to be. Up to now it has been a principle of philosophy to argue against anything but to decide nothing. This principle was established by Socrates; Arcesilaus repeated it; Carneades strengthened it further… I am one of those who hold that there is, in all truths, an admixture of falsehood so like Truth that there is no way of deciding or determining anything whatever with complete certainty.]175

[B] Not only Aristotle but most philosophers aim at being hard to understand; why? – if not to emphasize the vanity of their subject-matter and to give our minds something to do! Philosophy is a hollow bone with no flesh on it: are they providing us with a place to feed in, where we can chew on it?176

[C] Clitomachus maintained that he could not tell from Carneades’ books what his opinions were.177 [B] That is why Epicurus avoided perspicuity in his writings and why Heraclitus was surnamed ‘Dark’. Difficulty is a coin [C] which the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and [B] which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.

Clarus, ob obscuram linguam, magis inter inanes, Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque Inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernunt.

[Clear was his fame, especially among the empty-headed, simply because his language lacked clarity: for stupid people are filled with awe and wonder when they find ideas wrapped up in words turned inside out.]178

[C] Cicero reproached some of his friends with being accustomed to give more time than they were worth to such subjects as astrology, law, dialectic and geometry: it kept them away from the more useful and honourable of life’s duties. The Cyrenaic philosophers held physics and dialectic in equal contempt. At the very beginning of his books on the Republic Zeno pronounced all liberal disciplines to be useless. [A] Chrysippus said that what Plato and Aristotle wrote about logic must have been written for sport or as an exercise; he could not believe that they had anything serious to say on so empty a subject. [C] Plutarch makes a similar remark about metaphysics.179 [A] Epicurus would have spoken similarly about rhetoric, grammar, [C] poetry, mathematics and all subjects of study other than physics – [A] and Socrates, about every one of them, with the sole exception of the study of how we should behave in this life. [C] Whatever question Socrates was asked, he first made the speaker give a detailed account of his way of life, both present and past; he made that the basis of his inquiries and judgements, believing as he did that any other approach was secondary to that and superfluous.

‘Parum mihi placeant eae literae quae ad virtutem doctoribus nihil profuerunt’ [I take no pleasure in the kind of writings which do not increase the virtue of those who teach them].180

[A] Learning181 itself has despised most disciplines, but men have thought it not inappropriate to train and entertain their minds even by studying subjects where nothing solid is to be gained. Moreover, some have classified Plato as. Dogmatist; some, as a Doubter; others as both, depending on the subject.

[C] Socrates, who takes the lead in the Dialogues, always asks questions designed to provoke discussion: he is never satisfied and never reaches any conclusion. He says that the only thing he knew how to do was to make objections.

All schools of philosophy derive their foundations from Homer, but it was a matter of indifference to him what direction we then took; to show that, he gave equally good foundations to all of them. They say that ten distinct schools sprang from Plato. And indeed, as I see it, if his teachings are not faltering and unaffirmative, then I do not know whose are!182

Socrates said that midwives were Sage-women who stop producing children of their own once they help others to do so; when, therefore, the gods conferred the title Sage on him, he too gave up his capacity for producing brain-children of his own by acts of manly love, in order to encourage and help other men to deliver theirs: he opened the genitals of their minds, lubricated the passages and made it easier for their child to issue forth; he then made an appreciation of that child, washed it, nursed it, strengthened it, swaddled it up and circumcised it. He used and exercised his own ingenuity: the others faced the perils and the risks.183

[A] What I said just now is true of most other philosophers in the third category, [B] as the Ancients already noted in the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Zenophanes and others: [A] their substance induces doubt; their purpose is inquiry rather than instruction, even though, in their works, they do at times interlard184 [C] their style with Dogmatic cadences. Is that not equally true of both Seneca and Plutarch? Go into it closely and you see they are constantly talking from different points of view. As for those jurisconsults whose task it is to harmonize the various legal authorities, they first ought to harmonize each authority with himself.

Plato seems to me to have quite knowingly chosen to treat philosophy in the form of dialogues: he was better able to expound the diversity and variety of his concepts by putting them appropriately into the mouths of divers speakers. Variety of treatment is as good as consistency. Better in fact: it means being more copious and more useful.

Let us take one example from our own society. The highest degree of dogmatic and conclusive speaking is reached in parliamentary rescripts. Of the judicial decrees which French Parliaments hand down to the people, the ones which are most exemplary (and the most proper to encourage the respect which is rightly due to such high office, mainly on account of the ability of those who exercise it) do not draw their beauty from their decisions as such. Decisions are everyday affairs, common to all judges. Their beauty lies in the disquisitions and that pursuit of varied and opposing arguments which legal matters can so well accommodate.

When philosophers find fault with each other, their widest field of action lies in the internal contradictions and inconsistencies which entangle them all – either deliberately (so as to show the vacillations of the human mind over any subject whatever) or else quite unintentionally, because all matters are shifting and elusive.

[A] What else can that refrain mean: ‘In slippery, shifting places, let us suspend our judgement’? For, as Euripides said, ‘The works of God, in divers ways, perplex us,’185 [B] which is similar to the words which Empedocles strewed throughout his books when he was shaken as by divine mania and compelling truth: ‘No, no! We feel nothing: we know nothing! All things are hidden from us: we can determine the nature of nothing whatsoever,’ [C] words which conform to that holy saying: ‘Cogitationes mortalium timidae et incertae adinventiones nostrae et providentiae’ [For the thoughts of mortal men are timorous, and our devices and foresight prone to fail].186

[A] We ought not to find it strange that people who despair of the kill should not renounce the pleasure of the hunt: study is, in itself, a delightful occupation, so delightful that, among the forbidden pleasures which need to be held on a tight rein, the Stoics include pleasure arising from exercising the mind.187 [C] They find intemperance in knowing too much.

[A] Democritus ate some figs which tasted of honey. He at once began to rack his brains to try and explain this unusual sweetness. He was about to abandon his dinner and set out to trace and examine the place where the figs had been picked, when his servant-girl heard the cause of the commotion and began to laugh; she told him to stop worrying about all that, since she had put the figs in a jar which had previously held honey. He flew into a rage with her because she had deprived him of the chance of finding things out for himself and had robbed his curiosity of something to work on: ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘you have offended me. I shall continue to look for the cause as though it were to be found in Nature.’ [C] And he did manage to find some sort of ‘true’ explanation for a false and imaginary fact!

[A] This story about a great and famous philosopher clearly illustrates that passion for study which keeps us occupied, hunting after things we can never hope to catch. Plutarch relates a similar anecdote about a man who did not want anyone to enlighten him on a subject of doubt, so as not to lose the pleasure of the search – like that other man, who would not allow his doctor to cure a thirst brought on by fever, so as not to lose the pleasure of quenching it! [C] ‘Satius est supervacua discere quam nihil’ [Better to learn something useless than nothing at all].188 It is the same with food of all kinds. Sometimes we eat just for pleasure: there are things we eat which are neither nutritious nor sustaining. So too for the pabulum which our spirits draw from erudition: it may be neither nutritious nor sustaining, but it gives great pleasure.

[B] This is how they put it: contemplating Nature supplies good food to the spirit: it replenishes it, helps it to soar aloft, makes it despise low and earthly things by comparing them with heavenly things. It is delightful merely to study great and abstruse subjects: that remains true even of the man who acquires nothing from study except a sense of awe and a fear of making judgements on such matters.189

That, in a few words, is what they profess.

An express image of the vanity of such sickly curiosity can be better seen from another example, which philosophers are always honouring themselves by quoting. Eudoxus prayed to the gods, hoping to be allowed to have just one sight of the sun from close at hand, so as to apprehend its shape, grandeur and beauty. Even if it meant being burned alive, he would pay the price. He wanted to learn, at the cost of his life, something he would lose as soon as he had acquired it. For such a brief and fleeting glimpse of knowledge he was prepared to surrender all the knowledge he already had or could later have acquired.190

[A] I cannot really convince myself that Epicurus, Plato and Pythagoras genuinely wanted us to accept their Atoms, Ideas and Numbers as valid currency. They were too wise to base the articles of their belief on foundations so shaky and so challengeable. Each of these great figures strove to bring some image of light into the dark ignorance of this world; they applied their minds to concepts which had at least some subtle and pleasing appearance of truth, [C] their only proviso being that they could stand up to hostile objections: ‘unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiae vi’ [such theories are fictions, produced not from solid knowledge but from their individual wits].191

[A] One of the Ancients was reproved for not judging philosophy to be of much account yet continuing to profess it; ‘That is what being a philosopher means,’ he replied.192 Such men wanted to weigh everything in their mental balances; there is curiosity in all of us: this, they found, was a proper way to keep it occupied. Part of what they wrote was simply designed to meet the social needs of the general public – their accounts of their religion, for example.193 With that end in view it was reasonable not to strip popularly held opinions of their living feathers. They had no wish to spawn ideas which would disturb the people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their land.

[C] When treating religion Plato plays a very open game. Writing in his own name he lays down nothing as certain, but, whenever he acts as Lawgiver, he adopts an assertive professorial style. Even then, he is bold enough to work in a few of his most fantastic notions (which were as useful for convincing the people as they were ridiculous for convincing himself), well aware how receptive our minds are to any impressions, especially to the wildest and most extraordinary ones. That explains why, in the Laws, Plato is careful to allow no poetry to be recited in public unless its fables and fictions serve some moral end: it is so easy to impress fancies on the human mind that it is not right to feed minds on useless, harmful lies, when you can feed them on profitable ones. In the Republic he says quite bluntly that you must often deceive the people for their own good.194

You soon discover that some schools of philosophy were chiefly concerned to pursue truth, and others – gaining credit thereby – moral usefulness. Our human condition is pitiable: often, the things which strike our imagination as the most true are ones which appear least useful for the purposes of life. Even the most audacious of the schools, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonians and the New Academy, are constrained in the end to bow to the laws of society.

[A] There are other subjects which philosophers toss to and fro in their sieves, trying to dredge them (whether they deserve it or not) into some appearance of likelihood. Having discovered nothing so profound as really to be worth talking about, they are obliged to forge some weak and insane conjectures of their own, treating them not as bases for truth but for studious exercises. [C] ‘Non tam id sensisse quod dicerent, quam exercere ingenia materiae difficultate videntur voluisse’ [They do not seem to believe what they say, but, rather, to exercise their wits on difficult material].195

[A] If you will not take it that way, how else can we explain the obvious inconstancy, diversity and vanity of the opinions produced by such excellent and, indeed, awesome, minds? What can be more vain, for example, than trying to make guesses about God from human analogies and conjectures which reduce him and the universe to our own scale and our own laws, taking that tiny corner of intellect with which it pleases God to endow the natural Man and then employing it at the expense of his Godhead? And since we cannot stretch our gaze as far as the seat of his Glory, are we to drag him down to our corruption and our wretchedness?

Of all the ancient opinions of men touching religion, it seems to me that the most excusable and verisirnilitudinous was the one which recognized God as some incomprehensible Power, the Origin and Preserver of all things, of all goodness and of all perfection, who took and accepted in good part, the honour and reverence which human beings rendered him, under any guise, under any name and in any way whatsoever.

[C] Jupiter omnipotens rerum, regumque deumque Progenitor genitrixque.

[Almighty Jupiter, Father and Mother of the world, of rulers and of gods.]196

Such devotion has always been regarded by Heaven with favour.

All forms of government have profited from their allegiance to it; under it, men and impious deeds have met their just deserts; even pagan histories acknowledge the dignity, order and justice of the portents and oracles manifested in their fabulous religions for the benefit and instruction of men. With such temporal benefits as these God in his mercy may perhaps have deigned to protect those tender principles of rough-and-ready knowledge of Himself which Natural Reason affords us, amid the false imaginings of our dreams. But there are religions Man has forged entirely on his own: they are not only false but impious and harmful.

[A] Of all the religions which St Paul found honoured in Athens, the most excusable, he thought, was the one dedicated to a hidden, ‘unknown God’.197

[C] Pythagoras closely adumbrated truth when he concluded that any conception we have of that First Cause, of that Being of beings, must be free of limits, restrictions or definitions; it was in fact the utmost striving of our intellect towards perfection, each of us enlarging the concept according to his capacity.

But if Numa really did attempt to make his people’s worship conform to this model, tying them to an entirely cerebral religion with no object set up before their eyes and no material elements mixed in with it, then his undertaking could serve no purpose.198 The human mind cannot stand such wanderings through an infinity of shapeless thoughts: they must be brought together into some definite concept modelled on man. The very majesty of God allows itself to be, in some sense, circumscribed for us within physical limits: God’s sacraments are supernatural and celestial, yet they bear signs of our own condition, which is earthly; and we express our adoration in words and duties perceptible to the senses. After all, it is Man who does the believing and the praying.

I shall leave aside other arguments marshalled on this topic; consider the sight of our crucifixes and the piteous chastisement which they portray; the ornaments and moving ceremonial in our churches; the voices so aptly fitted to the reverent awe of our thoughts, and all the stirring of our emotions: you will have a hard time making me believe that such things do not set whole nations’ souls ablaze with a passion for religion, with very useful results.

[A] Of all the deities to which bodies have been ascribed (as necessity required during that universal blindness), I think199 I would have most willingly gone along with those who worshipped the Sun:

la lumiere commune,L’æil du monde; et si Dieu au chef porte des yeux, Les rayons du Soleil sont ses yeux radieux, Qui donnent vie à tous, nous maintiennent et gardent, Et les faicts des humains en ce monde regardent: Ce beau, ce grand soleil qui nous faict les saisons, Selon qu’il entre ou sort de ses douze maisons; Qui remplit l’univers de ses vertus connues; Qui, d’un traict de ses yeux, nous dissipe les nues: L’esprit, l’ame du monde, ardant et flamboyant, En la course d’un jour tout le Ciel tournoyant; Plein d’immense grandeur, rond, vagabond et ferme; Lequel tient dessoubs luy tout le monde pour terme; En repos sans repos; oysif, et sans sejour; Fils aisné de nature et le pere du jour.

[… the Common Light, the Eye of the World; if God himself has eyes they are radiant ones made of the Sun’s rays which give life to all, protect and guard us meri, gazing down upon our actions in this world; this fair, this mighty Sun who makes the seasons change according to his journey through his dozen Mansions; who floods the earth with his acknowledged power; who, with a flicker of his eye disperses clouds; the Spirit and Soul of the World, ardent and aflame, encompassing the world in the course of one single day; full of immense grandeur, round, wandering and firm; who holds beneath him the boundaries of the world; resting, unresting; idle, never staying; the eldest Son of Nature and the Father of Light.]200

Even leaving its grandeur and beauty aside, the Sun is the most distant part of the universe which Man can descry, and hence so little known that those who fell into reverent ecstasies before it were excusable.

[C] Thales201 was the first to inquire into such matters: he thought God was. Spirit who made all things out of water; Anaximander said that the gods are born and die with the seasons and that there are worlds infinite in number; Anaximenes said God was Air, immense, extensive, ever moving; Anaxagoras was the first to hold that the delineation and fashioning of all things was directed by the might and reason of an infinite Spirit; Alcmaeon attributed Godhead to the Sun, the Moon, the stars and to the soul; Pythagoras made God into a Spirit diffused throughout all nature and from whom our souls are detached; for Parmenides God was a circle of light surrounding the heavens and sustaining the world with its heat; Empedocles made gods from the four natural elements of which all things are compounded; Protagoras would not say whether the gods existed or not or what they are if they do; Democritus sometimes asserted that the constellations and their circular paths were gods, sometimes that God was that Nature whose impulse first made them move; then he said our knowledge and our intellect were God; Plato’s beliefs are diffuse and many-sided: in the Timaeus he says that the Father of the world cannot be named; in the Laws he forbids all inquiry into the proper being of God: elsewhere, in these very same books, he makes the world, the sky, the heavenly bodies, the earth and our souls into gods, recognizing as well all the gods accepted by ancient custom in every country. Xenophon records a similar confusion in the teachings of Socrates: sometimes he has Socrates maintaining that no inquiry should be made into the properties of God; at other times he has him deciding that the Sun is God, that the soul is God, that there is only one God and then that there are many. The nephew of Plato, Speusippus, holds God to be a certain animate Power governing all things; Aristotle sometimes says that God is Mind and sometimes the World; at times he gives the world a different Master and sometimes makes a god from the heat of the sky. Zenocrates has eight gods: five are named after the planets; the sixth has all the fixed stars as his members, the seventh and eighth being the Sun and Moon. Heraclides of Pontus meanders along beneath these various notions and ends up with. God deprived of all sensation; he has him changing from one form to another and finally asserts that he is heaven and earth. Theophrastus is similarly undecided, wandering about between his many concepts, attributing the government of the world sometimes to Intelligence, sometimes to the sky and sometimes to the stars; Strato says God is Nature, giving birth, making things wax and wane, but itself formless and insensate; Zeno makes a god of Natural Law: it commands good, forbids evil and is animate; he dismisses the gods accepted by custom –Jupiter, Juno and Vesta; Diogenes of Apollonia says God is Time. Xenophanes makes God round, able to see and hear but not to breathe and having nothing in common with human nature; Ariston thinks that the form of God cannot be grasped: he deprives him of senses and cannot tell whether he is animate or something quite different. For Cleanthes God is sometimes Reason, sometimes the World, sometimes the Soul of Nature, sometimes absolute Heat surrounding and enveloping all things. Perseus, a pupil of Zeno’s, maintained that the name god was bestowed on people who had contributed some outstandingly useful improvements to the life of Man – or even on the improvements themselves. Chrysippus made a chaotic mass of all these assertions and included among his thousand forms of gods men who had been immortalized. Diagoras and Theodorus bluntly denied that gods exist. Epicurus has shiny gods, permeable to wind and light, who are lodged between two worlds which serve as fortresses protecting them from being battered; they are clothed in human shape, with limbs like ours which are quite useless.

Ego deûm genus esse semper duxi, et dicam coelitum; Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus.

[Personally I have always thought, and will always say, that a race of gods exists in heaven. But I do not think that they care about the actions of the human race.]202

So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!

I have drawn some profit from the confusion of forms in the customs of the world: manners and concepts different from mine do not so much annoy me as instruct me; comparing them does not puff me up with pride but humbles me. There is for me no such thing as a privileged choice, except one coming expressly from the hand of God.

I shall not go into monstrous and unnatural vice but on that subject the legislatures of this world are no less contradictory than the rival schools of philosophy. From that we can learn that Fortune herself is not more varied, fickle, blind and ill-advised than human reason.

[A] Things we know least about are the ones we find most proper to deify.203 [C] Making gods of men [A] as Antiquity did surpasses even the most extreme imbecility of reason. I would rather have followed those who worship the serpent, the dog and the bull; since the natures of such animals are less known to us, we are free to imagine them as we like and to endow them with extraordinary qualities. But the Ancients attributed to their gods our own condition – the imperfections of which we ought to know; they gave them desire, wrath, acts of vengeance, marriages, powers of generation and family trees, love, jealousy, bones and limbs like ours, our own feverish passions and pleasures, [C] our deaths and funerals. [A] The human intellect must have been astonishingly drunk to produce all that!

[B] Quae procul usque adeo divino ab numine distant, Inque Deum numero quae sint indigna videri.

[Things far removed from numinous deity, unworthy to appear among the Gods.]

[C] ‘Formae, aetates, vestitus, ornatus noti sunt; genera, conjugia, cognationes omniaque traducta ad similitudinem imbecillitatis humanae: nam et perturbatis animis inducuntur; accipimus enim deorum cupiditates, aegritudines, iracundias’ [We know their faces, their ages, their vestments and their adornments. Their families, their marriages and their kinships are all reduced to the model of human weakness. They are even given troubled minds. We hear of the desires of the gods, of their sicknesses and of their fits of anger].

[A] Similarly they made gods [C] not only of Faith, Virtue, Honour, Concord, Freedom, Victory, Piety, but even of Pleasure, Fraud, Death, Envy, Old Age and Misery, [A] of Fear, Fever, Ill-Fortune and the other evils which beset our fragile and decaying lives:

[B] Quid juvat hoc, templis nostros inducere mores? O curvae in terris animae et coelestium inanes!

[What pleasure can be found from introducing our manners into our temples? O souls bowed earthwards, entirely void of things celestial!]204

[C] With what unwise wisdom did the Egyptians forbid, under pain of hanging, that anyone should let it be known that their Gods Serapis and Isis had once been human: everybody knew then that they had been so! According to Varro effigies of these Gods were carved with their fingers on their lips to signify this mysterious command to their priests to hush up their mortal origins (otherwise all worship of them would inevitably be brought to naught).205