Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| My ignorance of many natural phenomena is no excuse for your ignorance as to the origin of souls. You ought, according to your boasting dream to know everything. The thing of most importance was forgotten in your cargo of Eastern wares. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
29. You press me to give my
opinions about the nature of things. If there were room, I could repeat
to you the views of Lucretius who follows Epicurus, or those of
Aristotle as taught by the Peripatetics, or of Plato and Zeno by the
Academics and the Stoics. Passing to the church, where we have the rule
of truth, the books of Genesis and the Prophets and Ecclesiastes, give
us much information on questions of this kind. But if we profess
ignorance about all these things, as also about the origin of souls,
you ought in your Apology to acknowledge your ignorance of all alike,
and to ask your calumniators why they had the impudence to force you to
reply on this single point when they themselves know nothing of all
those great matters. But Oh! how vast was the wealth contained in that
trireme3188
3188 In Macarius’ dream, see Ruf. Apol. i, 11. | which had come full of all the
wares of Egypt and the East to enrich the poverty of the city of
Rome.
3189
3189 A parody upon the verse of Virgil and Ennius on Fabius Maximus
called Cunctator because by his tactics of delay he saved Rome from the
Carthaginians. “Thou art Maximus (greatest) who savedst the state
by delaying (cunctando).” | “Thou art that hero, well-nam’d Maximus,
Thou who alone by writing
sav’st the state.”
Unless you had come from the
East, that very learned man would be still sticking fast among the
mathematici,3190
3190 Astrologers or magicians. | and all Christians would still be
ignorant of what might be said against fatalism. You have a right to
ply me with questions about astrology and the cause of the sky and the
stars, when you brought to land a ship full of such wares as these. I
acknowledge my poverty; I have not grown rich to this extent in the
East like you. You learned in your long sojourn under the shadow of the
Pharos what Rome never knew: Egypt instructed you in lore which Italy
did not possess till now.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|