Lactantius — Divine Institutes 6.6

I have said first that knowledge of the good is not virtue, then what virtue is and wherein it lies: it follows that I briefly show the philosophers also did not know what good and evil are, almost already declared in the third book when I disputed of the highest good. Those who did not know what the highest was must have erred in the other goods and evils that are not highest: no one can examine them with true judgment who does not hold the fountain itself from which they descend. The fountain of goods is God; of evils, that perpetual enemy of the divine name of whom we have often spoken: from these two principles goods and evils arise. Things that come from God have this purpose, that they prepare immortality, which is the highest good; those from that other have this office, that they call the soul away from heavenly things, sink it in earthly ones, and destroy it for everlasting punishment, which is the highest evil. Is it then doubtful that all who knew neither God nor God's adversary were ignorant of what good and evil are? So they referred the end of goods to the body and this brief life, which must dissolve and die; they did not go further, but all their precepts and all the goods they introduce cling to earth and lie on the ground, since they die together with the body, which is earth. For they belong not to preparing life for a human, but to seeking or increasing wealth, honors, glory, power — all mortal, as is he who labored that they might come to him.

Hence that saying: virtue is to know the end and measure of the thing to be sought. They teach by what modes and arts household wealth is to be sought, because they see it is usually sought badly. But such virtue is not set before the wise: for it is not virtue to seek wealth, whose finding and possession are not in our power. So both in seeking and in obtaining, the wicked find it easier than the good. Virtue cannot therefore lie in seeking those things in whose contempt the force and reason of virtue appear; nor will it flee to the very things a great and lofty mind longs to tread down and crush; nor is it right that a soul intent on heavenly goods be called away from its immortal riches to get itself these fragile ones — rather the reason of virtue consists most of all in getting those things which no human and not death itself can take from us. Since this is so, what follows is true: virtue is to be able to pay the price of riches. That verse means nearly the same as the first two. But neither he nor any of the philosophers could know what that price itself is, or of what kind. For the poet and all those he followed thought right use of wealth was to be frugal — not to set sumptuous banquets, not to give rashly, not to pour the household into needless or base things. Someone may say: 'What of you? Do you deny this is virtue?' I do not deny it — I would seem to prove the contrary if I denied — but I deny it is the true one, because it is not heavenly but wholly earthly, since it effects nothing except what remains on earth. What it is to use wealth rightly and what fruit is to be sought from riches I will declare more openly when I begin to speak of the office of piety. The rest that follows is in no way true. For to declare enmity on the wicked, or to take up defense of the good, can be common even with the wicked. Some by feigned honesty pave themselves a way to power and do many things the good usually do — all the more readily because they do them to deceive. Would that it were as easy to perform goodness as to simulate it! But when they become masters of their plan and wish and seize the highest step of power, then dropping the mask they uncover their manners: they seize everything, violate, vex, and chase those very good people whose cause they had taken up, and cut away the steps by which they climbed lest anyone be able to imitate them against themselves. Yet let us suppose this office belongs only to the good, that he defend the good. To take it up is easy; to fulfill it is hard, because when you commit yourself to contest and clash, victory is set in God's judgment, not yours, and often the wicked are stronger in number and conspiracy than the good, so that to overcome them not so much virtue as luck is needed. Does anyone not know how often the better and more just part has been beaten? Hence bitter dominations over citizens have always arisen. All history is full of examples, but we will be content with one. Gnaeus Pompeius wished to be defender of the good, since he took up arms for the republic, for the senate, for liberty. Yet the same man, conquered, died with liberty itself and, beheaded by Egyptian eunuchs, was thrown out unburied. It is therefore not virtue either to be an enemy of the wicked or a defender of the good, because virtue cannot be subject to uncertain chances.

Moreover, to put the fatherland's advantages first — once human discord is removed — is nothing at all. For what are a fatherland's advantages except another city's or nation's disadvantages: to push borders violently seized from others, to enlarge empire, to make taxes greater? All of which are not virtues but overturnings of virtues. First of all the bond of human society is removed, innocence is removed, abstinence from another's goods is removed, and finally justice itself — which cannot bear the sundering of the human race, and wherever arms flash, from there it must be put to flight and driven out. For that saying of Cicero is true: those who say citizens' account is to be kept and foreigners' denied tear apart the common society of the human race; when that is removed, beneficence, liberality, goodness, and justice are utterly taken away. For how can one be just who harms, who hates, who strips, who kills? All of which those do who strive to benefit the fatherland. For what that very 'benefiting' is they do not know who think nothing useful, nothing advantageous, except what can be held in the hand — which alone cannot be held, because it can be snatched away. So whoever has acquired for the fatherland these things they themselves call goods — that is, who by overturning cities and destroying nations has refilled the treasury with money, seized fields, made his citizens richer — this one is praised to heaven; in him the height and perfection of virtue is thought to lie. That error belongs not only to the people and the unskilled, but even to philosophers, who also give precepts toward injustice lest the discipline and authority of folly and malice be lacking. So when they dispute of duties belonging to military affairs, that whole discourse is fitted neither to justice nor to true virtue, but to this life and civil custom, which both the facts show and Cicero himself testified is not justice. 'But we,' he says, 'hold no solid and expressed image of true right and genuine justice; we use shadow and images — and would that we followed even those! For they are drawn from the best examples of nature and truth.' — Shadow and image of justice, then, is what they thought justice. What? Does he not confess that wisdom is none among the philosophers? 'Or when Fabricius,' he says, 'or Aristides is named just, an example of fortitude is sought from those, or of justice from this one, as from a wise man. For none of these is wise as we wish the wise man to be understood, nor were those held and named wise — Marcus Cato and Gaius Laelius — wise, nor even those seven, but from the frequency of middle duties they bore a certain likeness and appearance of the wise.' If therefore by their own confession wisdom is taken from the philosophers and justice from those held just, all those descriptions of virtue must be false, because what true virtue is none can know except the just and wise. But no one is just and wise except the one whom God has instructed with heavenly precepts.