Philo of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
In every obscure and serious matter it is right to invoke God, since he is a good begetter and nothing is obscure to one who has attained the most exact knowledge of the universe; and for an argument concerning the incorruptibility of the world it is most necessary of all, since among perceptible things nothing is more complete than the world, and among intelligible things nothing more perfect than God. Mind is always the guide of sense-perception, and the intelligible guides the perceptible; and it is a law for subjects to inquire eagerly of their ruler and overseer, since in them there is planted a still greater longing for truth.
If, then, having trained ourselves in the doctrines of practical wisdom and self-control and every virtue, we had wiped away the stains left by our passions and sicknesses, God would perhaps not have thought it unworthy to guide souls thoroughly purified and made radiant with a brilliance like sunlight to the knowledge of heavenly things, whether through dreams, or oracles, or signs, or portents. But since we bear impressions hard to wash out, stamped upon us by folly and injustice and the other vices, we must be content if, even through mere likely conjectures, we discover by our own efforts some imitation of the truth.
It is worth the while of those who inquire whether the world is incorruptible—since both 'corruption' and 'world' are terms used in many senses—first to investigate the names, so that we may determine which meaning is now in question; not that we must enumerate everything the words can signify, but only what is useful for the present teaching.
The word 'world,' then, is used in one sense for the whole system composed of heaven and the stars together with everything they encompass, and earth and the living creatures and plants upon it; in another sense for heaven alone, as when Anaxagoras, gazing up at it, answered the man who asked why he wore himself out keeping watch all night beneath the open sky, 'to behold the world'—hinting at the dances and revolutions of the stars; and in a third sense, as the Stoics hold, for the substance extending all the way to the conflagration, whether ordered or unordered, whose motion they say time is the measure of. Our present inquiry, however, concerns the world in the first sense, the one composed of heaven and earth and the living creatures within them.
'Corruption,' too, is used in more than one sense: it is said of change for the worse, and also of the complete removal of a thing from existence, which must be called a passing into non-being. For just as nothing comes into being from what does not exist, so nothing passes away into what does not exist: 'for it is impossible for anything to come to be out of that which in no way exists, and equally impossible and inconceivable for that which exists to be utterly destroyed.' And the tragic poet says: 'nothing that comes to be ever dies, but one thing separating from another displays a different form. Nothing is so foolish as to be perplexed—'
—whether the world passes away into non-being, or whether it merely undergoes the change involved in its ordered arrangement being dissolved, its various forms of elements and compounds resolved into one and the same condition, as when things crushed or broken receive a complete confounding of their parts.
Three opinions have arisen concerning the question before us: some say the world is eternal, ungenerated and indestructible; others, on the contrary, say it is generated and perishable; and there are some who, taking one element from each side, accepted generation from the later thinkers and incorruptibility from the earlier, and so arrived at a mixed opinion, supposing the world to be both generated and incorruptible.
Democritus and Epicurus, then, and the great crowd of philosophers from the Stoa, attribute to the world both generation and corruption, though not in the same way. The former describe many worlds, ascribing the generation of some to the collisions and interweavings of atoms, and their corruption to the clashings and collisions of things already formed; while the Stoics hold that there is a single world, that God is the cause of its coming to be, but no longer the cause of its passing away—rather, the power of unwearied fire that exists within things, in the long cycles of time, resolves everything into itself, and from this fire, in turn, a rebirth of the world is constituted through the providence of the craftsman.
According to these thinkers, one might in a sense call the world both eternal and perishable: perishable with respect to its ordered arrangement, but eternal with respect to the conflagration, made immortal through rebirths and cycles that never cease.
Aristotle, however—perhaps with reverent and pious insight—declared that the world is ungenerated and incorruptible, and condemned as dreadful atheism the position of those who argued the opposite, who thought that so visible a god as this differed not at all from things made by hand, though it truly contains within itself the sun and moon and the whole company, wandering and fixed, of a veritable pantheon.
And he used to say, as the story goes—mocking those men—that formerly he had feared for his own house, lest it be overturned by violent winds or extraordinary storms, or by time, or by neglect of the care it required, but that now a greater fear hung over him from those who, with their corrosive arguments, were destroying the whole world.
Some, however, say that it was not Aristotle who first discovered this opinion, but certain of the Pythagoreans. I myself have come across a treatise by Ocellus, a Lucanian by birth, entitled On the Nature of the Universe, in which he not only declared the world to be ungenerated and incorruptible but established it by demonstrations as well.
They say that the view that the world is both generated and incorruptible is shown by Plato in the Timaeus, through the divinely fitting proclamation in which the eldest and ruler is represented as saying to the younger gods: 'Gods of gods, I am the craftsman and father of works which, so far as I will it, are indissoluble. Now everything that has been bound may be dissolved; yet to wish to dissolve what has been well fitted together and is in good condition would be the act of one who is evil. Therefore, since you have come into being, you are not altogether immortal, nor are you wholly indissoluble; nevertheless you shall not be dissolved, nor shall you incur the doom of death, since you have obtained a bond even stronger and more sovereign than those with which you were bound at your generation—the bond of my will.'
But some, being over-subtle, suppose that according to Plato the world is called 'generated' not because it took a beginning of generation, but because, if it were generated, it could not have been constituted otherwise than as described—or because its parts are observed to be involved in generation and change.
It is better and truer to hold the former interpretation—not only because throughout the whole treatise Plato calls that God-fashioned being father, maker, and craftsman, and calls this world his work and offspring, an imitation perceptible to sense of an intelligible archetypal pattern, containing within itself, in perceptible form, all that the archetype contains in intelligible form—a most perfect impression, made after a most perfect model, addressed to sense as the model is addressed to mind—
but also because Aristotle himself bears witness to this concerning Plato, he who, out of reverence for philosophy, would never have lied, and than whom no one is a more trustworthy witness to his teacher's views, especially so trustworthy a pupil—one who did not treat his education as a mere sideline pursued with fickle indolence, but who, striving to surpass the discoveries of the ancients, made original contributions of his own on some of the most essential points in every branch of philosophy.
Some consider the poet Hesiod the father of the Platonic doctrine, supposing that he too speaks of the world as generated and incorruptible—generated, because he says: 'Verily first of all Chaos came to be, and thereafter broad-bosomed Earth, the ever-secure seat of all things,'
and incorruptible, because he has nowhere indicated its dissolution or destruction. As for Chaos, Aristotle supposes it to be a kind of place, on the ground that whatever is to receive a body must necessarily be presupposed to exist beforehand; while some of the Stoics think the name was formed from 'water,' by way of its 'pouring' (chysis). Whichever view is correct, it is quite plainly indicated by Hesiod that the—
—world is generated. But long ages before him, Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews, declared in the sacred books that the world is both generated and incorruptible. There are five of these books, of which he entitled the first Genesis; it opens in this way: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible and unformed' (Gen. 1:1-2). Then, proceeding further, he shows again that days and nights, seasons and years, and the moon and sun, which display the nature of the measurement of time, together with the whole of heaven, have obtained an immortal portion and continue on, incorruptible (cf. Gen. 1:14; 8:22).
Those who construct arguments for the world's being ungenerated and incorruptible, out of reverence toward the visible god, are to be ranked first, and they must take their own proper starting point. For everything liable to corruption there are two causes of destruction lying ready beforehand, one from within, the other from without. Iron and bronze, for instance, and substances of that kind, you will find perishing sometimes from within themselves, when rust, running over them like a creeping disease, eats through them, and sometimes from without, when, a house or a city being set on fire, they are consumed together with it by the violent onrush of the flame. In the same way, death comes upon living creatures too—sometimes from within, when they fall sick, sometimes from without, when they are slaughtered or stoned or burned, or endure the impure death that comes by strangling.
If, then, the world too is perishable, it must of necessity be destroyed either by some external force or by one of the powers within it; but each of these is impossible. There is nothing external to the world, since the whole of substance has been used up in constituting it—for if anything at all had been left over, then what now exists would have become other than it is by that omission, whereas it is whole precisely because the entire substance has been spent upon it. And it is ageless and diseaseless, since bodies subject to disease and old age are overturned by the powerful assault, from outside, of heat and cold and other opposites falling upon them, whereas none of these powers can escape the world so as to encircle and attack it from without, all of them, with no part left outside, being wholly enclosed within it. And if, after all, there is anything external to it, it can only be the void—that impassive—
—nature, which is incapable of either acting or being acted upon. Nor, indeed, will the world be dissolved by any cause operating within it. In the first place, because then the part would be greater and mightier than the whole, which is utterly absurd; for the world, wielding a power beyond all surpassing, governs all its parts and is governed by none of them. And in the second place, because, there being two causes of corruption, one from within and the other from without, whatever is capable of undergoing the one is altogether capable of receiving the other as well.
Here is the proof: ox and horse and man and similar living creatures, because it is their nature to be destroyed by the sword, will also die of disease; for it is difficult, or rather impossible, to find anything which, being by nature liable to the external cause of destruction, is wholly incapable of the internal one.
Since, then, it has been shown that the world will not be destroyed by any force from without—because, as demonstrated, nothing at all has been left outside it—neither will it be destroyed by any force within it, because of the proof already reasoned out above, according to which whatever is susceptible to the one of these causes is by nature also receptive of the other.
Confirming testimony is found also in the Timaeus, concerning the world's being free from disease and destined not to perish, in these words: 'Now the constitution of the world has taken up each one of the four elements whole; for its constitutor constituted it out of the whole of fire and water and air and earth, leaving no part or power of any of them outside,' having reasoned thus:
First, so that it might be as whole a living creature as possible, complete from complete parts; and besides this, one, since nothing was left over from which another such creature might come to be; and further, that it might be free from old age and disease, observing that in a composite body heat and cold and everything that has strong powers, when they beset it from outside and fall upon it at the wrong time, cause distress and bring on diseases and old age and make it waste away. For this reason and by this reasoning God fashioned it whole from the whole of all things, complete, free from old age, and free from disease.
Let this, then, be taken as testimony from Plato for the indestructibility of the world; and let the fact that it is ungenerated be taken from the sequence of nature. For dissolution follows upon what has come to be, while indestructibility follows upon what is ungenerated; since even the poet who composed that iambic trimeter—"what has come to be, it has been granted, must die"—seems to have spoken to the point, understanding the sequence of causes of coming-to-be and of destruction... it stands thus.
In another way it is as follows: everything composed of things fitted together is destroyed by dissolution into the elements out of which it was composed; so dissolution was nothing other than a return to what is natural for each element, so that, conversely, the combination forced the things that came together into a state contrary to nature. And indeed this seems to hold altogether truly.
For we human beings, compounded from the four elements—which together make up the whole of heaven, earth, water, air, and fire—have borrowed small portions and been blended together; and the things blended have been deprived of their natural position: the heat that tends upward has been forced down, while the earthy substance, which has weight, has been made light and has claimed the upper place,
which the most earthy part in us, the head, has occupied. And the weakest of bonds is the one that violence has drawn tight—small and short-lived; for it is broken all the sooner by the very things bound by it, since they strain to break free from longing for their natural motion, toward which they hasten as they migrate. For, as the tragic poet says: "What grew from earth returns again to earth, and what sprang from the seed of heaven goes back to the vault of heaven. Nothing that comes to be perishes; separated, one thing from another, it displays its own proper form." For all things subject to destruction, then, this law and this ordinance stands written:
whenever the things that have come together in the mixture stand fast, they must, before their arrangement according to nature, instead take on disorder and migrate to their opposite places, so that they seem in a way to be living as strangers; but whenever they are dissolved, they return to the place proper to their own nature.
But the world has no share in the disorder just described. For, come, let us consider: if it were being destroyed, its parts would now of necessity be arranged each in a place contrary to nature; but this is not a reverent thing to suppose. For all the parts of the world have obtained the best position and a harmonious order, so that each, cherishing its place as if it were its native land, seeks no change for the better.
For this reason the middle place was assigned to earth, toward which all earthy things, even if you toss them up, are carried down—and this is a sign of a place according to nature; for wherever a thing, not carried by any force, comes to rest and remains still, it has obtained its own proper place. Water has been poured out over the earth, while air and fire have moved from the middle toward the upper region, air having been allotted the place between water and fire, and fire the highest place; hence even if you light a torch and carry it down toward the earth, the flame will nonetheless resist and, lightening itself, will run back up toward the natural motion of fire.
If, then, disorder contrary to nature is the cause of destruction for other living things, while in the world each of the parts has been arranged according to nature, each having been allotted its own proper place, the world may justly be said to be indestructible.
Further, this too is clear to everyone: that every nature is eager to preserve and keep safe, and, if it were possible, even to make immortal, each of the things of which it is the nature—the nature in trees preserving the trees, the nature in animals each of the animals.
But the nature concerned with a part is too weak to bring it necessarily to eternity; for either want, or burning heat, or freezing cold, or countless other things that are accustomed to arise, fall upon it and shake it violently and dissolve the bond that holds it together, and in the end break it apart; whereas if nothing of this sort lay in wait from outside, it would, so far as lay in its own power, keep all things, small and great alike, free from old age.
It is necessary, then, that the nature of the world too should be eager for the persistence of the whole; for it is surely not inferior to the natures concerned with parts, so as to run away and desert its post, contriving sickness in place of health and destruction in place of complete safety, since "she who has the fairest head and brow among them all, easily recognized, and all of them are fair." But if this is true, the world will not admit destruction. Why? Because the nature that holds it together is unconquerable, by reason of its great strength and might, prevailing over all the other things that were going to do it harm.
For this reason Plato rightly says, "for nothing went out from it, nor did anything come to it from anywhere"; for there was nothing outside it. For, providing for itself its own wasting as its own nourishment, and both acting and being acted upon in every way within itself and by itself, it came to be by design; for its maker judged that, being self-sufficient once put together, it would be better than if it were in need of something else.
There is, indeed, another argument, that most demonstrative one on which I know countless people pride themselves as though it were exact and wholly irrefutable. For they ask: for what reason will God destroy the world? Either in order no longer to make a world, or in order to construct another one.
The former is foreign to God; for it would mean changing from order to disorder, not from disorder to order; besides, this would mean that he takes on a change of mind—a passion and a disease of the soul; for he ought either not to have made a world at all, or, having judged the work fitting for himself, to rejoice in what had come to be.
The second alternative is worthy of no little inquiry. For if he is going to construct another world in place of the one now existing, the one that comes to be will in every case turn out either worse, or similar, or better; and each of these is open to censure. For if the world is worse, the craftsman too is worse. But the works of God, wrought by the most perfect art and knowledge, are blameless, irrefutable, and beyond correction; for, as they say, "not even a woman is so lacking in good sense as to choose the worse instead of the better"; and it is fitting for God to give shape to the shapeless and to work wonders of beauty even from the most unsightly things.
But if it is similar, the craftsman labors in vain, being no different at all from little children who, playing often on the shore, build up hills of sand and then, scooping them away with their hands, tear them down again; for it is far better not to construct anything similar, neither taking away nor adding anything, nor again changing for better or worse what came to be in the beginning, but to let it remain as it once became.
But if he is going to fashion something better, then the craftsman too will become better than before, so that when he was constructing the earlier world he was less complete both in art and in understanding—which it is not even lawful to suppose; for God is equal to himself and like himself, admitting neither relaxation toward the worse nor intensification toward the better. It is to such irregularities that human beings are subject, being by nature disposed to change toward either the better or the worse, accustomed to undergo increases and advances and improvements, and all their opposites as well.
Besides this, it would be fitting that the works of us mortals should be perishable, while the works of the immortal, by reasonable account, should surely be imperishable; for it is reasonable that the things fashioned should be made like the nature of their makers.
And indeed this too is clear to everyone: that if the earth were destroyed, the land animals would necessarily perish, the whole race of them together; if water were destroyed, the water creatures; and likewise, if air and fire were destroyed, the creatures that fly through the air and those born of fire.
By the same analogy, then, heaven is destroyed: the sun and moon will be destroyed, the remaining planets will be destroyed, the fixed stars will be destroyed—that vast and once-blessed army of perceptible gods. And this, were it to happen, would be nothing other than to suppose gods destroyed; for it is equal to supposing human beings immortal. And yet, comparing the two in a ranking of absurdities, one would find the latter more reasonable than the former; for it is plausible that a mortal should, by the grace of God, obtain a share of immortality, but it is impossible that gods should cast off indestructibility, even if the wisdom of human beings runs mad.
And indeed those who introduce conflagrations and rebirths of the world consider and agree that the stars are gods, yet they do not blush to destroy them in their argument. For they ought either to declare them fiery lumps of molten metal, as some who babble such nonsense about the whole of heaven as though it were a prison do, or, considering them divine or daemonic natures, to agree that the indestructibility fitting for gods belongs to them as well. As it is, they have missed the true opinion so badly that they do not notice that they are bringing destruction upon Providence itself—which is the soul of the world—through the very things by which they philosophize inconsistently.
Chrysippus, then, the most esteemed among them, in his treatise On the Growing Argument, has concocted some such marvel as this. Having first established that it is impossible for two individually qualified things to subsist upon the same substance, he says: "let it be supposed, for the sake of argument, that one is conceived as whole and entire, and the other as lacking one of its two feet; and let the whole one be called Dion, and the incomplete one Theon; and then let one of Dion's two feet be cut off." When the question then arises which of the two has been destroyed, he says it is more fitting to affirm that it is Theon. But this is the talk of a paradox-monger rather than of one speaking the truth.
For how is it that Theon, who has had no part cut off, has been snatched away, while Dion, whose foot has been cut off, has not been destroyed? "Rightly so," he says; "for Dion, once his foot has been amputated, has run up into the incomplete substance of Theon, and it is not possible for two individually qualified things to exist in respect of the same substrate. Therefore it is necessary that Dion remain, and that Theon has been destroyed." "But things that are caught not by others but by their own feathers," as the tragic poet says; for anyone who takes an impression of the pattern of this argument and applies it to the whole world will show most clearly that Providence itself is destroyed along with it.
Consider it thus: let the world be supposed as, so to speak, Dion—for it is complete—and the soul of the world as, so to speak, Theon, since the part is less than the whole; and let there be removed, just as the foot from Dion, so also from the world whatever is bodily in it.
Consider it this way: let the world stand for Dion — for it is complete — and let the soul of the world stand for Theon, since a part is less than the whole; and let something be removed, just as a foot from Dion, so also from the world whatever is bodily in it.
It is therefore necessary to say that the world is not destroyed by the removal of its body, just as Dion, having had his foot cut off, is not destroyed either — but Theon is, who suffered nothing at all. For the world, when its bodily element is removed, subsides into a lesser substance, but the soul of the world is destroyed, because two distinct qualities cannot belong to the same underlying subject. And it is a forbidden thing to say that providence is destroyed; but since providence is indestructible, the world too must of necessity be indestructible.
Time, moreover, furnishes the greatest proof of the world's eternity. For if time is ungenerated, the world of necessity is ungenerated as well. Why? Because, as the great Plato says, days and nights and months and the cycles of years brought time to light. And it is impossible for any of these to arise apart from the sun's motion and the revolution of the whole heaven; so that those who are accustomed to define things have rightly given time as the interval of the world's motion. Since this is sound, the world proves to be the same age as time, and its cause.
But of all things it is most absurd to suppose that there was once a world, when there was not yet time — since time's nature is without beginning and without end, given that these very words, "was," "once," "when," themselves imply time. And it follows from this that time could not have subsisted on its own even at a time when there was no world; for what does not exist does not move either, and time has been shown to be the interval of the world's motion. It is necessary, then, that each of the two — world and time — has subsisted from eternity, having taken no beginning of generation; and eternal things do not admit of destruction.
Perhaps some hair-splitting Stoic will say that time is given as the interval of the world's motion not only of the world as it is now ordered, but also of the world supposed to exist during the conflagration. To him one must say: my good man, you are renaming disorder and calling it order. For if this world we see has been called "order" truly and most fittingly, since it has been arranged and set in order by an art incapable of further improvement, then its change into fire would rightly be called disorder.
Critolaus, one of those who have danced attendance on the Muses, a devotee of the Peripatetic philosophy, in supporting the doctrine of the world's eternity, used arguments of this kind: if the world came into being, the earth too must of necessity have come into being; and if the earth came into being, then certainly the race of humankind did too; but humankind is ungenerated, its race having subsisted from eternity, as will be demonstrated.
Therefore the world too is eternal. But what has been set aside must now be established, if indeed proof is needed even for things so evident — and it is needed, it seems, on account of the myth-makers, who, having filled their lives with falsehoods, have banished truth beyond the border. Not only cities and households but every single possession they have forced into widowhood, and, devising meters and rhythms as bait for an ambush to serve the allure of their diction, with which they bewitch the ears of the foolish — just as ugly and hideous courtesans bewitch the eyes with borrowed and counterfeit ornament in place of genuine beauty.
For they say that the generation of human beings from one another is a more recent work of nature, while generation from the earth is more ancient and primordial, since the earth is and is regarded as the mother of all things; and that the Sown Men celebrated among the Greeks sprang from it.
Just as trees do now, so these sprang up as complete and armed children of the earth. That this is the fabrication of myth is easy to see from many considerations. To begin with, the first man to come into being would have had to grow according to fixed measures and reckonings of time; for nature has produced certain steps of the stages of life, through which a human being in a sense ascends and descends — ascending as he grows, descending in the diminutions — and the boundary of the topmost steps is the prime of life, beyond which, once one has reached it, one no longer advances, but, like runners in a double-course race who turn back over the same road, gives back in feeble old age what one received from vigorous youth.
To suppose that some were born full-grown is the mark of people ignorant of the laws of nature, its unmovable ordinances. For our own judgments, being smeared with the error that comes from the mortal element yoked to them, may reasonably admit of changes and shifts, but the workings of the nature of the universe are unchangeable, since it holds sway over all things and, on account of the certainty of what has once been established, preserves unmoved the boundaries fixed from the beginning.
If, then, nature had thought it fitting for creatures to be brought forth full-grown, a human being would even now be born full-grown, not becoming an infant, a child, or a youth, but being at once a man — and perhaps even ageless and immortal in every respect. For that which is not subject to growth is not subject to diminution either; for the changes up to the age of manhood consist in growth, and those from that point to old age and death consist in diminution; and it is reasonable that what has no share in the former changes should not undergo the latter ones either.
And what was there to prevent human beings, as they say happened formerly, from springing up now as well? Has the earth grown so old, through length of time, that it seems to have become barren? No — it remains ever alike, ever young, because it is the fourth part of the universe, and for the sake of the permanence of the whole it must not decay, since its sister elements too — water, air, and fire — continue ageless.
Clear proof of the earth's uninterrupted and eternal prime lies in the things that grow from it. For, purified either by the overflowing of rivers, as they say happens in Egypt, or by the yearly rains, it relaxes and unwinds the weariness that comes from its yield, and then, having rested and recovered its own strength up to full vigor, it begins again the generation of like offspring, giving abundant nourishment
to every form of living creature. For this reason, I think, the poets were not wide of the mark in naming her Pandora — "all-giving" — since she gives all things toward benefit and the enjoyment of pleasure, not to some but to all creatures endowed with soul. If, then, someone were to rise winged aloft when spring is at its height, and look down upon the mountain country and the plain, he would see the one region rich in grass and green, sending up fodder and grasses, barley and wheat and countless other kinds of sown crops, both those which farmers have planted and those which the season of the year yields of its own accord; and the other region shaded by branches and leaves, with which the trees are adorned, and abounding most of all in fruits — not only those for eating but also those which happen to heal our labors, for the fruit of the olive relieves the body's weariness, while that of the vine, drunk in moderation, eases the violent pains of the soul —
and further, the sweetest-scented breezes rising up from the flowers, and the countless distinctive hues, variegated by a marvelous artistry; and if, turning his gaze away from the cultivated regions, he were to survey in turn the poplars, cedars, pines, firs, the towering heights of oaks, and the other continuous and deep forests of wild trees, which overshadow the greatest and most numerous of the mountains and much of the deep-soiled foothill country, he would recognize the unyielding and untiring prime of an earth that is forever young —
so that, having lost nothing of its ancient strength, it would even now, if it had done so before, bring forth human beings, for two most necessary purposes: first, so as not to abandon its own proper station, especially in the sowing and generation of humankind, the best and most commanding of all land creatures; and second, for the relief of women, who while pregnant are burdened by the heaviest weight for some ten months, and, when about to give birth, often die in the very pains of labor.
Is it not, in general, a piece of gross foolishness to suppose that the earth has a womb folded within it for the sowing of human beings? For the region that generates living creatures is a womb — "nature's workshop," as someone called it — in which only living creatures are shaped; but this is not a part of the earth, but of a female creature, fashioned for the purpose of generation. Since one would also have to say that the earth acquired breasts, like a woman, when it was generating humans, so that those first brought forth might have their proper nourishment; yet no river, no spring anywhere in the inhabited world is ever recorded to have rained down milk instead of water.
And beyond this: just as the newborn must be nourished with milk, so too it must have the protection of clothing, on account of the harm that comes to bodies from cold and heat — for which reason midwives and mothers, who feel a necessary concern for their offspring, wrap infants in swaddling clothes. But those born of the earth — how would they not have been destroyed at once, left naked, by either the chill of the air or the scorching of the sun? For cold and heat, when they prevail, produce diseases and destruction.
But once the myth-makers had begun to disregard the truth, they went on to fable that those Sown Men were also born armed, fully equipped for battle at once. Yet what kinship is there between the first human beings to come into existence and the wielding of arms? For man is the gentlest of creatures, nature having bestowed on him reason as his special gift, by which even savage passions are charmed and tamed. It would have been far better if, instead of weapons, heralds' wands had sprung up — the tokens of reconciling truces — fitting for a rational nature, so that it might everywhere proclaim peace before war to all —
in every place. Now the idle chatter of those who attack the truth with falsehood has been adequately refuted. But one must know well that from eternity, in unbroken succession, human beings spring from human beings: the man sowing into the womb as into a field, the woman receiving the seed to preserve it safely, while nature invisibly shapes each of the parts, both of body and of soul, and bestows on the whole race what no single one of us was able to obtain — immortality; for it remains forever, though particular individuals perish, a truly wondrous and divine work. And if man, a small portion of the universe, is eternal, then surely the world too is ungenerated, and hence indestructible.
Critolaus, contending further, also employed an argument of this kind: the cause in itself of health is healthy; but also the cause in itself of wakefulness is wakeful; and if this is so, the cause in itself of eternity is eternal; and the world is the cause in itself of its own existence, as it is also for all other things; therefore the world is eternal.
It is also worth considering this: that everything which comes into being must at the beginning of necessity be imperfect, and, as time goes forward, grow until it reaches complete perfection. So that, if the world came into being, there was once a time when it was, to use the names we use for stages of life, an utter infant, and, advancing again through cycles of years and lengths of time, it was completed only late and with difficulty; for the prime of what lives longest is necessarily slow in coming.
But if anyone imagines that the world was ever subject to such changes, let him not fail to realize that he is held fast by an incurable madness. For it is plain that not only its bodily element would grow, but its mind too would make progress, since those who hold it to be destructible also suppose it to be rational.
Then, in the manner of a human being, it would be irrational at the beginning of its generation, but rational when it reached its prime — which it is impious not only to say but even to suppose. For it is not fitting to suppose that the most perfect enclosure of the visible gods, containing within it the portions allotted in particular, is not always perfect in both body and soul, exempt from the ills to which everything generated and destructible is bound?
In addition to this he says that, apart from external causes, three causes of death are laid upon living creatures — disease, old age, want — and that the world is vulnerable to none of these; for it has been compounded of the totality of the elements, so that it can be overpowered by no part left outside and set free from it; and it prevails over the powers that produce weaknesses, while the powers that yield to it it keeps free of disease and age. And it has become most self-sufficient and in need of nothing, falling short in nothing needed for its permanence, having repudiated the alternating cycles of emptying and filling, which, on account of an unrefined insatiability, living creatures undergo, courting death instead of life, or, to put it more cautiously, a life more pitiable than destruction.
Furthermore, if no eternal nature were ever seen, those who introduce the destruction of the world would seem less to be doing wrong, since they would have no example of eternity before them. But since fate, according to those who reason best about nature, is without beginning and without end, weaving the causes of each thing without gap and without interruption, why should one not also call the nature of the world long-lived — the order of disordered things, the harmony of unharmonious things, the concord of discordant things, the union of separated things, the persistence of wood and stone, the nature of plants and trees, the soul of every living creature, the mind and reason of human beings, the most perfect virtue of the excellent? And if the nature of the world is ungenerated and indestructible, it is clear that the world too, held together and controlled by an eternal bond, is indestructible.
Some, defeated by the truth, changed their allegiance even against the doctrines they had held. For beauty has a power that calls to us, and truth is marvelously beautiful, just as falsehood is monstrously ugly. At any rate Boethus of Sidon and Panaetius, men of great standing among the Stoics, as though seized by a god, abandoned the conflagrations and rebirths of the world and deserted to the more reverent doctrine, the indestructibility of the whole cosmos.
It is also said that Diogenes, when he was young, had signed on to the doctrine of the conflagration, but late in life he hesitated and held back — for it is not youth but old age that discerns what is truly solemn and worth contending for, especially matters that cannot be judged by the irrational and deceptive faculty of sense-perception, but only by the purest and most unmixed mind.
The followers of Boethus employ the most persuasive proofs, which I will now state. If, they say, the cosmos is generated and destructible, then something will come to be out of what does not exist — which even the Stoics themselves regard as utterly absurd. Why? Because no destructive cause can be found, either internal or external, that would do away with the cosmos. External to it there is nothing except, perhaps, void, once the elements have been separated out whole into it; and within it there is no such disease that could become a cause of dissolution for so great a god. But if it perishes without a cause, then clearly the coming-to-be of its destruction will arise from what does not exist — and this not even the mind can accept.
Moreover, they say, there are three generic modes of destruction: by division, by removal of the quality that holds a thing together, and by fusion. Things that consist of separated parts — herds of goats, herds of cattle, choruses, armies — or, again, bodies formed by things joined together, are dissolved by separation and division. Destruction by removal of the quality that holds a thing together occurs, for example, when wax is remolded or smoothed out so that it no longer presents any distinct shape of form. Destruction by fusion is exemplified by the physicians' four-ingredient remedy: the individual powers of the ingredients, once combined, vanish into the production of a single, distinct compound.
By which of these, then, is it fitting to say that the cosmos is destroyed? By division? But it does not consist of separated things, such that its parts could be scattered apart, nor of things joined together, such that it could be dissolved, nor is it unified in the same manner as our own bodies. For our bodies are perishable of themselves and are overpowered by countless things that harm them, whereas the cosmos's strength is invincible, ruling over all things with tremendous superabundance.
But is it destroyed by the complete removal of its quality? That, too, is impossible — for according to those who hold the opposite view, the quality of the ordered arrangement remains, sent into a lesser substance, that of Zeus, at the time of the conflagration. Is it, then, by fusion?
Away with that idea — for then, once again, destruction would have to be admitted as coming-to-be out of what does not exist. Why? Because if each of the elements were destroyed individually, it could undergo change into another; but if all are removed together, all at once, by fusion, one is forced to suppose the impossible.
Furthermore, they say, if everything is consumed in the conflagration, what will God do during that time? Absolutely nothing? And perhaps rightly so — for now he watches over each thing and, like a true father, exercises guardianship of all, and, to speak the truth, in the manner of a charioteer or a helmsman he drives and steers the whole universe, standing by the sun and moon and the other wandering and fixed stars, and further the air and the other parts of the cosmos, cooperating in all that serves the preservation of the whole and its correct, unimpeachable governance according to right reason.
But if all things are removed, he will lead an unlivable life through terrible idleness and inactivity — and what could be more absurd than that? I hesitate even to say it, though it is not even lawful to suspect it, that death will follow upon God, if indeed stillness will. For if you remove the ever-moving element from a soul, you utterly remove the soul itself along with it; and the soul of the cosmos, according to those of the opposing view, is God.
It is also worth raising this difficulty: in what manner will there be a rebirth, once everything has been dissolved into fire? For once the substance has been entirely consumed by fire, the fire itself, having no further fuel, must necessarily be extinguished. So long as it remains, then, the seminal principle of the ordered arrangement is preserved; but once it is destroyed, that principle is destroyed along with it. And this is already a doubly lawless and impious thing — not only to charge the cosmos with destruction, but also to do away with its rebirth, as though God took delight in disorder and inactivity and every kind of disharmony.
The argument must be examined more precisely as follows. Fire has three forms: ember, flame, and radiance. Ember is fire within an earthy substance, which lies hidden as a kind of breath-like condition, lurking throughout the whole substance to its very limits. Flame is what rises up, lifted from fuel. Radiance is what is sent out from flame, cooperating with the eyes for the perception of visible things. Flame occupies the middle position between radiance and ember: when extinguished it ends in ember, but when kindled it produces radiance, which flashes out, having lost its burning power.
If, then, we were to say that the cosmos is dissolved in the conflagration, it could not become ember, because a vast quantity of earthy matter would remain in which the fire could lurk — yet it is agreed that none of the other bodies will then subsist, but that earth and water and air will all have been dissolved into unmixed fire.
Nor, moreover, could it become flame; for flame is a kindling of fuel, and once nothing is left, having no fuel it will immediately be extinguished. It follows from this that no radiance either will be produced; for radiance has no subsistence of its own, but flows from the two prior forms, ember and flame — a lesser amount from ember, but a great deal from flame, since it is diffused very widely. But since those two, as has been shown, do not exist at the time of the conflagration, no radiance either could arise. Indeed, even the abundant, deep radiance of daytime, once the sun's course passes beneath the earth, vanishes at once with the coming of night, especially a moonless one. The cosmos, therefore, is not consumed in a conflagration, but is indestructible; and if it were to be consumed in one, no other cosmos could come to be afterward.
For this reason some of the Stoic school, seeing the refutation bearing down on them from afar with sharper eyes, thought it necessary to prepare remedies in advance for their doctrine as though for a dying patient — but these were of no help at all. For since fire is the cause of motion, and motion is the beginning of coming-to-be, and nothing whatsoever can come to be without motion, they said that after the conflagration, when the new cosmos is about to be fashioned, the fire is not extinguished in its entirety, but a certain portion of it is left remaining; for they were very much on guard lest, if it were extinguished all at once, everything would remain still and unorganized forever, there being no longer any cause of motion.
But these are fabrications of men seeking clever arguments, contriving against the truth. Why so? Because it is impossible, as has been shown, for the cosmos, once consumed by fire, to become like an ember, since a great deal of earthy substance would be left in which the fire would need to lurk; and perhaps the conflagration would not even prevail at all, if the heaviest and least consumable of the elements — earth — remains undissolved. And it must change into either flame or radiance: into flame, as Cleanthes supposed, or into radiance, as Chrysippus held.
But if it becomes flame, once it turns toward extinction it will be extinguished not in part but all at once; for flame exists together with its fuel — hence when fuel is abundant it increases and spreads, but when fuel is withdrawn it diminishes. One could confirm what happens from things among us: a lamp, so long as someone keeps pouring in oil, gives off a most radiant flame, but once that stops, having consumed whatever remnant of fuel was left, it is immediately extinguished, without reserving any portion of its flame.
And if instead it becomes not flame but radiance, again it changes all at once. Why? Because radiance has no subsistence of its own, but is generated from flame; and since flame in its entirety, throughout, undergoes extinction, radiance too must necessarily be done away with not in part but all at once. For what fuel is to flame, radiance is to flame; just as, then, flame is destroyed along with its fuel, so radiance is destroyed along with flame.
So it is impossible for the cosmos to undergo rebirth, since no seminal principle smolders on, once everything has been consumed — the rest by fire, and fire itself by want of fuel. From this it is clear that the cosmos continues on, ungenerated and indestructible.
But come, let us grant, as Chrysippus says, that the fire which resolves the ordered arrangement back into itself is the seed of the cosmos that is to be brought into being afterward, and that nothing he has philosophized about it is false. First, because coming-to-be proceeds from seed and dissolution proceeds into seed; and next, because the cosmos is described in natural philosophy as a rational nature, being not only ensouled but also possessed of mind, and moreover prudent — from these very premises the opposite of what they intend is established: that it will never be destroyed.
The proofs are most ready at hand for those not reluctant to examine the matter together. The cosmos, it seems, is either a plant or an animal. But whether it is a plant or an animal, once destroyed in the conflagration it will never become its own seed. The things among us bear witness to this, none of which, whether great or small, once destroyed, was ever separated out into the generation of seed.
Do you not see how much timber of cultivated plants, and how much of wild ones, is spread over every part of the earth? Each of these trees, so long as its trunk is healthy, produces its offspring-seed together with its fruit; but once withered by length of time, or otherwise destroyed at the very roots, it undergoes its dissolution into seed.
In the very same way, the kinds of animals too — which it is not even easy to enumerate for their multitude — so long as they survive and are in their prime, emit fertile seed, but once they have died, they never in any way become seed. Indeed it would be foolish to suppose that a man, while living, uses an eighth part of his soul — what is called the generative part — for the sowing of his likeness, but that once dead he does so with his whole self; for death is by no means more effective than life.
Besides, none of the things that exist comes to completion from seed alone, apart from its proper nourishment; for seed resembles a beginning, and a beginning by itself does not bring anything to full generation. Do not suppose, again, that the ear of wheat sprouts from the single grain sown by farmers into the fields alone, but rather that the greatest part of its growth is contributed by the moist and dry nourishment it draws, in its two forms, from the earth. And likewise the things fashioned in wombs are by nature brought to life not from seed alone, but also from the nourishment supplied from outside, which the mother who is pregnant takes in.
Why do I say all this? Because at the conflagration only seed will be left behind, there being no nourishment, since everything that was going to provide nourishment will have been dissolved into fire; so that the cosmos brought to completion at the rebirth will have a lame and imperfect generation, since that which most contributes to its perfection — the thing upon which, as upon a kind of staff, the seminal principle is set to lean — will have been destroyed. And this is absurd, refuted by plain evidence itself.
Furthermore, all things that receive their generation from seed are greater in bulk than what produced them, and are observed to occupy a greater space. Trees reaching to the sky, at any rate, often spring up from the smallest millet-seed, and the fattest and tallest animals from a small quantity of moisture emitted beforehand. But it also happens, as was said a little earlier, that at the time nearest to their generation the things born are smaller, and afterward grow in size until they reach complete maturity.
But with the universe the opposite will occur. For the seed will be larger and will occupy more space, while the result will appear smaller and in a lesser space; and the cosmos, composed from seed, will not gradually increase toward growth, but on the contrary will be drawn together from a greater bulk into a lesser one.
What is meant is easy to grasp. Every body that is resolved into fire is both dissolved and poured out, but when the flame within it is extinguished, it contracts and is drawn together. For things so evident there is no need of proofs, as though they were unclear. And indeed the cosmos, once set on fire, will become larger, since the whole of its substance will have been resolved into the finest ether. This, it seems to me, is also why the Stoics, in reasoning it through, leave an infinite void outside the cosmos, so that, since the cosmos was going to undergo some boundless expansion, it would not lack a space to receive the diffusion.
Now, when it has expanded and grown to such a degree that it very nearly coincides, in the boundlessness of its expansion, with the indeterminate nature of the void, this too has the character of seed. But when, at the regeneration, it comes from the complete parts of the whole substance... [lacuna] ...as the fire contracts in being extinguished into thick air, and the air contracts into water and settles, and the water thickens still further in its change into earth, the densest of the elements. These things run contrary to the common notions of those able to reason out the sequence of events.
Apart, then, from what has been said, one might use the following also as proof, and it will draw in even those who choose not to contend beyond due measure. Of opposites paired together, it is impossible for the one to exist and not the other: if white exists, black must also exist; and if great, small; if odd, even; if sweet, bitter; if day, night; and all things of that kind. But once conflagration occurs, something impossible will result: one member of each pair will exist, while the other will not. Come, let us examine it in this way.
When all things have been resolved into fire, there will be something light, rarefied, and hot — for these are the properties of fire — but nothing heavy, dense, or cold, the opposites of what has been named. How, then, could one better demonstrate the disorder woven into conflagration than by showing that things which by nature coexist as pairs are torn apart from their pairing? The estrangement has gone so far that to some properties eternity is granted, while to others non-existence.
Furthermore, this too seems to me to have been said, not without purpose, by those tracking down the truth. If the cosmos is destroyed, it will be destroyed either by some other cause or by God. By nothing else at all will it undergo dissolution, for there is nothing that does not contain it; and what is contained and dominated is surely weaker than what contains and dominates it. But to say that it is destroyed by God is the most impious thing of all, for God has been acknowledged by those who hold true opinions to be the cause not of disorder, disarray, and destruction, but of order, good arrangement, life, and everything that is best.
One might well wonder at those who babble on about conflagrations and regenerations, not only for the reasons stated, by which they are refuted as holding false opinions, but especially for this reason too. Since there are four elements of which the cosmos is composed — earth, water, air, fire — why, having singled out fire from all the rest, do they say that the others will be resolved into this alone? For, one might say, why not rather into air, or water, or earth? Surely there are excessive powers in these as well. But no one has said that the cosmos is turned into air, or into water, or into earth; so it would likewise be reasonable not to say that it is turned into fire either.
One must, however, also consider the equality of distribution inherent in the cosmos, and either fear or feel shame at charging so great a God with causing death. For there is an overwhelming counterbalancing exchange among the four powers, their returns weighed by the standards of equality and the bounds of justice.
For just as the yearly seasons, in their cycle, succeed one another in turn, receiving each other in relay toward the never-ceasing revolutions of the years, in the same way the elements of the cosmos also arrange themselves through their mutual transformations into one another — and, most paradoxical of all, the things that seem to die are made immortal, running their course forever and continually alternating the same path upward and downward.
The upward path, then, begins from earth: melting, it takes on the change into water; and water, evaporating, changes into air; and air, being made fine, changes into fire. The downward path begins from the top: fire, contracting as it is extinguished, changes into air; air, contracting when compressed, changes into water; and water, in its abundant outpouring, thickens by its change into earth, the densest of the elements.
Heraclitus, too, puts it well where he says: "For souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth." For, holding that the soul is breath, he hints at the ending of air being the coming-to-be of water, and the ending of water in turn being the coming-to-be of earth, calling "death" not the utter destruction into nothing, but the change into another element.
Since, then, this self-governing equality of distribution is kept unbroken and continuous, as is not merely probable but necessary — since inequality is injustice, and injustice is the offspring of vice, and vice has been banished from the household of immortality, while the cosmos, on account of its greatness, has been shown to be something divine and the household of the visible gods — to say that it is destroyed is the mark of those who fail to perceive the coherence of nature and the interconnected sequence of things.
Some of those who suppose the cosmos to be eternal, elaborating further, also employ an argument of the following kind for their construction. They say there are four highest modes of destruction: addition, subtraction, transposition, and alteration. A pair, then, is destroyed by the addition of a unit, becoming a triad and no longer remaining a pair; a tetrad by the subtraction of a unit becomes a triad; the letter I is destroyed by transposition into H, when the two vertical parallel strokes stand up at right angles and the cross-stroke, tilted diagonally, is turned to join the two sides; and wine changes by alteration into vinegar.
But none of the listed modes touches the cosmos at all. For what shall we say — that something is added to the cosmos toward its destruction? But there is nothing outside it that has not become part of it, the whole; for it is contained and held together. Is something then taken away? First, what is taken away will again be a cosmos, only smaller than the present one; and further, it is impossible for any body to be dispersed outside, once torn away from its natural union.
But perhaps the parts are transposed? Then they will remain in like fashion, not exchanging their places; for all earth will never be borne upon water, nor water upon air, nor air upon fire. Rather, the naturally heavy things, earth and water, will occupy the middle region — earth underpinning it like a foundation, water floating above it — while air and fire, naturally light, occupy the upper region, though not in the same way; for air has become the vehicle of fire, and what is carried is necessarily borne above.
And surely one must not suppose it destroyed by alteration either. For the interchange of the elements is on equal terms, and equality of terms is the cause of unshaken stability and unwavering permanence, since neither element gains advantage nor is put at a disadvantage. So the mutual giving and taking, the counterbalancing of powers equalized by the standards of proportion, is the craftsman of health and unending preservation. From these considerations the cosmos is shown to be eternal.
Theophrastus, indeed, says that those who charge the cosmos with coming-to-be and destruction have been deceived by four very great phenomena: the unevenness of the earth, the retreat of the sea, the dissolution of each of the parts of the whole, and the destruction of land animals by whole species.
The first of these they establish as follows: if the earth had not received a beginning of generation, none of its projecting parts would still be seen standing up; all the mountains would already have become level, and all the hills flattened to the plain. For since so much rain has fallen every year through eternity, it is likely that the parts raised to a height would have been broken off by the torrents, and those that subsided would have been worn down, and by now everything would have been leveled through and through.
But as it is, the continuous unevennesses and the vast number of mountains rising to an ethereal height are signs that the earth is not eternal. For long ago, as I said, in infinite time, the rains would have made every place, from one end to the other, a level highway; for the nature of water, especially when it comes crashing down from the heights, tends both to thrust things aside by force and, by the continuous striking of its drops, to hollow out and work upon even the hardest and most rocky earth, no less than diggers do.
And indeed the sea, they say, has already diminished. Witnesses to this are the most renowned of islands, Rhodes and Delos; for these long ago had vanished, submerged and overwhelmed beneath the sea, but later, as the sea gradually diminished, they rose little by little and became visible, as the histories written about them attest.
And they named Delos also Anaphe, confirming what is said by both names, since, having appeared, it became "Delos" ("visible"), though it was formerly hidden and unseen. That is why Pindar too says of Delos: "Hail, god-built, most lovely offshoot to the children of rich-haired Leto, daughter of the sea, unmoved wonder of the broad earth, whom mortals call Delos, but the blessed ones on Olympus call the far-shining star of the dark-blue earth." For in saying this he hints that Delos is a daughter of the sea.
In addition to this, great gulfs and deep bays of great seas, once dried up, have become mainland, and have turned into no meager portion of the neighboring country, sown and planted, on which certain traces of the ancient inundation by the sea have been left behind — pebbles and shells and whatever else is customarily cast up along shores.
If, then, the sea is diminishing, the earth too will diminish, and over long cycles of years each of the two elements will be entirely consumed; and the whole of the air too will be spent, being gradually reduced, and all things will be resolved into the single substance of fire.
For the establishing of the third heading they employ an argument of this kind: "That is altogether destroyed of which all the parts are destructible; but of the cosmos all the parts are destructible; therefore the cosmos is destructible.
We must now examine — the point we postponed — what part of the earth, to begin with this element, whether greater or smaller, is not dissolved by time. Do not the hardest of stones grow soft and rot, owing to the weakness of their state — which is a tension of breath, a bond not unbreakable but only hard to dissolve — crumbling and flowing, first resolved into fine dust, and then in time being consumed and spent entirely? And what of water: if it is not stirred by the winds, does it not, once left motionless, die from stillness? At any rate it does die, and becomes utterly foul-smelling, like a living creature deprived of its soul.
The destruction of air, at least, is obvious to everyone: it is its nature to fall sick, to waste away, and in a sense to die. For what would anyone say, aiming not at a decorous name but at the truth, that a plague is, except the death of air, pouring out its own affliction to the destruction of everything that has a share of soul?
Why should I speak at length about fire? Once deprived of nourishment it is instantly extinguished, having become, as the poets say, lame all by itself. This is why it stays upright only by leaning on something, so long as the kindled material remains, but once that has been used up it vanishes.
They say that Indian serpents suffer something similar. Creeping up onto the largest of animals, the elephants, they coil themselves around the back and the whole belly, and cutting whatever vein they happen to reach, they drink the blood, drawing it in insatiably with a violent, forceful hiss. For a while, as the elephants are being drained, they hold out, leaping about in their helplessness and striking their side with the trunk as if trying to reach the serpents; then, as the vital fluid keeps emptying out, they can no longer leap, and stand there trembling; a little later, their legs too give way, and shaken by faintness they breathe their last, and in falling they destroy the very cause of their death, in the following way.
No longer having any nourishment, the serpents try to loosen the coil they have wrapped themselves in, longing now for release, but they are squeezed and crushed by the weight of the elephants, and all the more so whenever the ground happens to be hard and rocky. Writhing and doing everything they can to break free, pinned by the force of what is crushing them, they exhaust themselves in every kind of helpless, resourceless struggle, and, like men being stoned to death, or men caught beneath a wall that has suddenly collapsed on them, unable even to lift their heads, they die by suffocation. If, then, each of the parts of the world undergoes destruction, it is clear that the world compounded of them will not be indestructible either.
The fourth and final argument, they say, must be examined precisely as follows: if the world were eternal, the animal species would also be eternal—and much more so the human race, inasmuch as it is superior to the others. But it turns out to be recent, as those who wish to investigate the facts of nature can see. For it is likely, or rather necessary, that the arts and crafts should have come into existence together with human beings, as their exact coevals—not only because a methodical, systematic capacity is proper to a rational nature, but also because life without them is not possible.
Let us, then, look at the actual dates involved, setting aside the myths woven tragically around the gods... but if man is not eternal, then no animal is either, and so neither are the regions that received them—earth, water, and air. From this it is clear that the world is subject to destruction.
We must answer this elaborate ingenuity of argument, so that none of the less experienced should be taken in and give way to it. And the refutation should begin exactly where the sophists' deception begins. 'Should not the irregularities of the earth no longer exist, if the world were eternal?' Why, my good fellows? Others will come forward and reply that the natural constitution of mountains is no different from that of trees: just as trees shed their leaves at certain seasons and put out new growth again at others—hence the poet's fine saying, 'Some leaves the wind scatters on the ground, but the burgeoning wood grows others, when the season of spring comes on'—in the same way, parts of mountains are broken off, and other parts grow on in their place.
Over long periods of time this growth becomes noticeable, because trees, having a swifter nature, have their increase perceived more quickly, while mountains, having a slower one, only barely have their growths become perceptible, and only after a long time.
They seem, then, to be ignorant of the manner of their formation, since otherwise they would perhaps have been ashamed and kept quiet. There is no reluctance on our part to teach them: what is being said is neither new nor words of our own devising, but the ancient teaching of wise men, who left nothing unexamined of what is necessary for knowledge.
Whenever the fiery matter enclosed within the earth is driven upward by fire's own natural force, it makes its way toward its proper place, and if it finds even a small breathing-passage, it draws up with it a great deal of the earthy substance, as much as it can, and once it emerges outside it moves more slowly, and, having been forced to travel along together with the fire for a long stretch, once raised to its greatest height, it narrows as it tapers, ending in a sharp peak, imitating the shape of fire.
For then a forced struggle takes place between the lightest and the heaviest elements, natural opponents clashing together, each hastening toward its own proper region and resisting the force pressing against it. The fire, in drawing the earth up with it, is compelled to become heavy because of the earth's downward-tending weight surrounding it, while the earth, which by nature sinks to the lowest place, is lightened along with the fire's upward tendency and is lifted aloft, and, barely mastered by the stronger power of that which lightens it, is pushed upward toward fire's own seat and stands erect.
What wonder is it, then, if the mountains are not worn away by the downpours of rain, since the power that holds them together—the very power by which they also stand erect—grips them very firmly and strongly? For if the binding force that holds them were released, it would be natural for them to dissolve and be scattered by water, but being tightly held by the power of fire, they withstand the downpours of rain all the more securely. Let this, then, be said by us concerning the fact that the irregularity of the earth is no proof of the world's coming-to-be and destruction.
Against the argument mounted from the shrinking of the sea, this could fittingly be said: do not look only, and always, at islands that have emerged, or at any promontories that, once submerged long ago, later became joined to the mainland—for contentiousness is the enemy of natural philosophy, which holds truth as its most cherished pursuit. Rather, investigate also the opposite: how many regions on the continents, not only coastal but also inland, have been swallowed up by the sea, and how much dry land, having become sea, is now sailed by ships carrying countless cargoes.
Are you unaware of the story sung about the most sacred Sicilian strait? Long ago Sicily was joined to the mainland of Italy, but when the great seas on either side, driven by violent winds, rushed together from opposite directions, the boundary between them was flooded and torn apart, and beside it a city was founded and named Rhegium ('Break') after this very event. And the opposite of what one would have expected came about: the seas, previously separate, were joined together and united in their confluence, while the land, previously united, was split apart by the strait that now lies between, and beside it Sicily, once part of the mainland, was forced to become an island.
Report says that many other cities besides were made to vanish, swallowed up when the sea rose over them, since in the Peloponnese too they say three cities—Aegira, Boura, and lofty Helike, 'whose walls would soon grow countless seaweed'—once prosperous, were overwhelmed by a great onrush of the sea.
And the island of Atlantis, 'greater than Libya and Asia together,' as Plato says in the Timaeus, in a single day and night, 'when there occurred prodigious earthquakes and floods, sank beneath the sea and suddenly vanished,' becoming a sea that is not navigable, but a chasm of mud.
The supposed shrinking of the sea, then, contributes nothing to the world's being destroyed; for it plainly withdraws from some places while flooding others. One ought to reach a judgment not by observing one of these two phenomena alone but both together, since even in the disputes of ordinary life a lawful judge does not render a verdict before hearing both parties to the case.
Moreover, the third argument refutes itself, having been improperly framed from the very outset in its premise. For that whose parts perish is surely not thereby perishable, but only that all of whose parts perish together, all at once, and at the same time; since a man who has had the tip of a finger cut off is not thereby prevented from living, whereas if the whole union of his parts and limbs were destroyed, he would die at once.
In the same way, then, if all the elements together vanished all at once at a single moment, one would be bound to admit that the world could suffer destruction; but if each one individually changes into the nature of its neighbor, it is rather made immortal than destroyed, in accordance with the philosophical saying of the tragedian: 'Nothing of what comes to be dies; each thing, separating from another, shows forth a different form.'
It is sheer folly, however, to judge the age of the human race by the arts and crafts; for anyone who follows this absurd line of reasoning will end up declaring the world to be young, having barely come into being a scant thousand years ago, since even those we have learned of as the discoverers of the various branches of knowledge do not exceed that stated number of years.
But if one is indeed to say that the arts are the exact coevals of the human race, one must say so on the basis of a natural historical account, not carelessly and casually. And what is this account? Destructions of human beings across the earth—not of all of them together, but of most—are attributed to two principal causes: the uncontrollable onrushes of fire and of water. They say each of these strikes in turn, at intervals of very long cycles of years.
Whenever, then, a great conflagration takes hold, a stream of ethereal fire, poured out from above, is said to scatter itself in many directions, running across vast regions of the inhabited world. And whenever a flood occurs, the whole nature of water is said to sweep everything away, as native rivers and winter torrents not only overflow but exceed their usual level of rise, either violently bursting their banks or leaping over them in a rise to an immense height; so that, overflowing, they pour out into the adjoining plain, which at first is divided up into great lakes, as the water keeps settling into the lower-lying hollows, but then, as more water flows in and floods the intervening ridges of land by which the lakes were kept separate, they merge into the vastness of a single boundless sea through the union of the many.
And, furthermore, as these opposing forces contend in turn, those who dwell in the corresponding regions perish accordingly: by fire, those who live in mountains, on hilly ground, and in places poorly supplied with water, since they naturally lack an abundance of water as a defense against fire; and conversely by water, those who live along rivers, lakes, or the sea—for calamities are apt to touch their nearest neighbors first, or even only them.
In these ways described, then, along with countless other lesser calamities, when the greater part of humankind perishes, the arts too are necessarily lost along with them; for knowledge cannot be seen existing by itself, apart from the one who practices its method. But whenever these general calamities relax their grip, and the human race begins to renew its youth and to sprout again from those not overtaken by the crushing disasters, then the arts too begin to be reconstituted—not coming into being for the first time then, but having become scarce through the diminished numbers of those who possessed them.
What we have received concerning the indestructibility of the world, then, has been stated to the best of our ability. The objections to each point must be set forth in what follows.