Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But the philosophers' physical theory relies on their authority as sworn slaves of wisdom. A marvelous wisdom indeed, whose feebleness is attested from the outset by this very variety of opinions — a variety born of ignorance of the truth! But who can be wise while a stranger to truth, ignorant as he is of God, the father and lord of wisdom and truth themselves? For Solomon too declared, by divine utterance elsewhere, "The beginning of wisdom is fear of God." And the origin of fear is knowledge: who, after all, fears what he does not know? So then — once he has feared God, having gained knowledge of the God whom all else is ignorant of, and pursued the full and perfect knowledge and truth of God — he will attain wisdom whole and entire. But this is precisely what philosophy has never clearly achieved. Granted, in their curiosity to inspect literature of every kind, the philosophers may seem to have dipped even into the divine scriptures, as being the older writings, and to have lifted a few things from them; yet since they reject other parts of them, they prove either that they never examined the whole, or that they did not believe the whole (for indeed elsewhere too the simplicity of truth wavers in its credit through human over-scrupulousness) — and so, driven on by the itch for a reputation of their own, they reworked what they took into productions of their private genius. And through this process even what they had found went astray into uncertainty, and there arose a flood of arguments out of one or two mere drips of truth.
For once they had found God — not the way they had actually found him, but as they then set him forth — they went on to dispute about his quality, his nature, even his dwelling-place. The Platonists make him one who cares for things, arbitrates, and judges; the Epicureans make him idle and unemployed, and, so to speak, nobody at all; the Stoics place him outside the world, the Platonists inside it. Since they had never fully admitted him, they could neither know him nor fear him nor draw wisdom from him — straying, of course, from the very beginning of wisdom, which is the fear of God. There survive testimonies to a divinity both unknown and doubted among the philosophers. Diogenes, when asked what goes on in the heavens, said, "I have never gone up there." Likewise, asked whether there were gods, he said, "I don't know — except that it's expedient there should be." Thales of Miletus, questioned by Croesus about his opinion of the gods, after several rounds of deliberation, finally reported back: "Nothing." Socrates himself denied those gods as though certain of it — and the very same man, as though equally certain, ordered a rooster's throat cut in sacrifice to Aesculapius. And so, given that philosophy is caught being so uncertain and undefined about God, what fear could a man have of a being he could not even clearly pin down?
We say that gods are made out of the world. This is how they force theology into a species of physics — those who have handed elements over as gods, as Dionysius the Stoic does, who splits the gods three ways: one kind that is plainly visible, like the Sun and Moon; another that does not show itself, like Neptune; and the rest, said to have passed over from being human to being divine, like Hercules and Amphiaraus. Arcesilaus likewise introduces a threefold form of divinity: the Olympians, the Stars, and the Titans, born of Heaven and Earth — and from these, from Saturn and Ops, Neptune, Jupiter, and Orcus, and the rest of the succession. Xenocrates the Academic divides them two ways, Olympians and Titans, the latter born of Heaven and Earth. Most of the Egyptians believe in four gods: Sun and Moon, Sky and Earth. Democritus supposes the gods were born along with the rest of the fire from on high, and Zeno wants nature to be of the same stuff. Hence Varro too makes fire the soul of the world, so that fire governs everything in the world just as the soul does in us. But how utterly empty a claim! "When it is present in us," he says, "we ourselves exist; when it departs, we die." So then, when fire departs from the world by way of lightning, the world must die too.
III.