The contradictions of the Stoics (32-33)

Some of the Pythagoreans blame him for having in his book of Justice written concerning cocks, that they are usefully procreated, because they awaken us from our sleep, hunt out scorpions, and animate us to battle, breeding in us a certain emulation to show courage; and yet that we must eat them, lest the number of chickens should be greater than were expedient. But he so derides those who blame him for this, that he has written thus concerning Jupiter the Savior and Creator, the father of justice, equity, and peace, in his Third Book of the Gods: As cities overcharged with too great a number of citizens send forth colonies into other places and make war upon some, so does God give the beginnings of corruption. And he brings in Euripides for a witness, with others who say, that the Trojan war was caused by the Gods, to exhaust the multitude of men.

But letting pass their other absurdities (for our design is not to enquire what they have said amiss, but only what they have said dissonantly to themselves), consider how he always attributes to the Gods specious and kind appellations, but at the same time cruel, barbarous, and Galatian deeds. For those so great slaughters and carnages, as were the productions of the Trojan war and again of the Persian and Peloponnesian, were no way like to colonies unless these men know of some cities built in hell and under the earth. But Chrysippus makes God like to Deïotarus, the Galatian king, who having many sons, and being desirous to leave his kingdom and house to one of them, killed all the rest; as he that cuts and prunes away all the other branches from the vine, that one which he

leaves remaining may grow strong and great. And yet the vine-dresser does this, the sprigs being slender and weak; and we, to favor a bitch, take from her many of her new born puppies, whilst they are yet blind. But Jupiter, having not only suffered and seen men to grow up, but having also both created and increased them, plagues them afterwards, devising occasions of their destruction and corruption; whereas he should rather not have given them any causes and beginnings of generation.

However this is but a small matter; but that which follows is greater. For there is no war amongst men without vice. But sometimes the love of pleasure, sometimes the love of money, and sometimes the love of glory and rule is the cause of it. If therefore God is the author of wars, he must be also of sins, provoking and perverting men. And yet himself says in his treatise of Judgment and his Second Book of the Gods, that it is no way rational to say that the Divinity is in any respect the cause of dishonesty. For as the law can in no way be the cause of transgression, so neither can the Gods of being impious; therefore neither is it rational that they should be the causes of any thing that is filthy. What therefore can be more filthy to men than the mutual killing of one another? —to which Chrysippus says that God gives beginnings. But some one perhaps will say, that he elsewhere praises Euripides for saying,

If Gods do aught dishonest, they’re no Gods;

and again,

’Tis a most easy thing t’ accuse the Gods;[*]

as if we were now doing any thing else than setting down such words and sentences of his as are repugnant to one another.