Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Arnobius/Adversus Gentes/Book II/Chapter LVIII

by Arnobius

58. What, then, are we alone ignorant? do we alone not know who is the creator, who the former of souls, what cause fashioned man, whence ills have broken forth, or why the Supreme Ruler allows them both to exist and be perpetrated, and does not drive them from the world? have you, indeed, ascertained and learned any of these things with certainty? If you chose to lay aside audacious^[1] conjectures, can you unfold and disclose whether this world in which we dwell^[2] was created or founded at some time? if it was founded and made, by what kind of work, pray, or for what purpose? Can you bring forward and disclose the reason why it does not remain fixed and immoveable, but is ever being carried round in a circular motion? whether it revolves of its own will and choice, or is turned by the influence of some power? what the place, too, and space is in which it is set and revolves, boundless, bounded, hollow, or^[3] solid? whether it is supported by an axis resting on sockets at its extremities, or rather itself sustains by its own power, and by the spirit within it upholds itself? Can you, if asked, make it clear, and show most skilfully,^[4] what opens out the snow into feathery flakes? what was the reason and cause that day did not, in dawning, arise in the west, and veil its light in the east? how the sun, too, by one and the same influence,^[5] produces results so different, nay, even so opposite? what the moon is, what the stars? why, on the one hand, it does not remain of the same shape, or why it was right and necessary that these particles of fire should be set all over the world? why some^[6] of them are small, others large and greater,—these have a dim light, those a more vivid and shining brightness?

Footnotes

1. Lit., “audacity of.”
2. Lit., “world which holds us.”
3. The first five edd. insert the mark of interrogation after “hollow:” “Whether does a solid axis,” etc.
4. So the edd. except. Hild., who retains the ms. reading in scientissime—“most unskilfully” (the others omitting in-), and Oehler, who changes e into i—“and being most witless show,” etc.
5. Lit., “touch.”
6. So the later edd., reading from the margin of Ursinus figi? cur alia, for the ms. figuralia, except LB., which reads figurari—“be formed.”