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| The Old Philosophers are Not to Be Consulted Concerning the Resurrection and Concerning Things to Come.
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Chapter 16.—The Old
Philosophers are Not to Be Consulted Concerning the Resurrection
and Concerning Things to Come.
21. These people also blame us for
believing the resurrection of the flesh, and rather wish us to
believe themselves concerning these things. As though, because they
have been able to understand the high and unchangeable substance by
the things which are made,524
for this reason they had a claim to
be consulted concerning the revolutions of mutable things, or
concerning the connected order of the ages. For pray, because they
dispute most truly, and persuade us by most certain proofs, that
all things temporal are made after a science that is eternal, are
they therefore able to see clearly in the matter of this science
itself, or to collect from it, how many kinds of animals there are,
what are the seeds of each in their beginnings, what measure in
their increase, what numbers run through their conceptions, births,
ages, settings; what motions in desiring things according to their
nature, and in avoiding the contrary? Have they not sought out all
these things, not through that unchangeable wisdom, but through the
actual history of places and times, or have trusted the written
experience of others? Wherefore it is the less to be wondered at,
that they have utterly failed in searching out the succession of
more lengthened ages, and in finding any goal of that course, down
which, as though down a river, the human race is sailing, and the
transition thence of each to its own appropriate end. For these are
subjects which historians could not describe, inasmuch as they are
far in the future, and have been experienced and related by no one.
Nor have those philosophers, who have profiled better than others
in that high and eternal science, been able to grasp such subjects
with the understanding; otherwise they would not be inquiring as
they could into past things of the kind, such as are in the
province of historians, but rather would foreknow also things
future; and those who are able to do this are called by them
soothsayers, but by us prophets:E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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