CONTRA FATUM

"Attack the silence of Pythagoras, or the Orphic beans, or the extraordinary pretentiousness of "Thus spake the Master." Attack Plato's Ideas, and the Re-embodiments and Cycles of our souls, and their Recollections, and those distasteful love-affairs where the soul was the object, but the beautiful body the route. Then there is Epicurus' atheism, or his atoms, or his ideal of Pleasure, unworthy of a philosopher; or Aristotle's mean conception of Providence, his artificial system, his mortal view of the soul, and the human-centered nature of his teaching. Or what about the superciliousness of the Stoics, the greed and vulgarity of the Cynics? Attack "the Void" - which is full of nonsense, or all the mumbojumbo of gods and sacrifices, idols, demons beneficent or malignant, of soothsaying, summoning the gods or the spirits of the dead, and of the influences of the stars." (Gregory Nazianzus, or. 28??)

That God, the creative and sustaining cause of all, exists, sight and instinctive law inform us - sight, which lights upon things seen as nobly fixed in their course, borne along in, so to speak, motionless movement; instinctive law, which infers their author through the things seen in their orderliness. How could this universe have had a foundation or constitution, unless God gave all things being and sustains them?

"Every slightest objection bars, hinders, the course of the argument, and checks its progress. It is like applying the reins suddenly to galloping horses, making them veer round with the surprise of the shock. So it was with Solomon, the superior of his predecessors and contemporaries in education, gifted by God with breadth of heart and an expanse of vision ampler than the sand. The more he entered into profundities, the more his mind reeled. He made it a goal of his wisdom to discover just how far off it was. (Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 28,21)

All truth, all philosophy, to be sure, is obscure, hard to trace out. It is like employing a small tool on big constructions, if we use human wisdom in the hunt for knowledge of reality. We do not abandon the senses, they go with us, when we look at supra-sensible realities. But by these same senses we are perplexed and led astray. We cannot get nearer the truth by meeting things in their naked reality with naked intellect. (Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 28,21)