DE NATURA DEORUM LIBRI TRES WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY BY JOSEPH B. MAYOR, M.A. TOGETHER WITH A NEW COLLATION OF SEVERAL OF THE ENGLISH MSS. [The rights of translation and reproduction are reserved.] PREFACE. IN concluding a work which has cost me many years of labour, it may not be out of place to state why I first undertook it and what I have tried to accomplish. Believing that the entrance of Christianity into the world is the central fact of man's history, the key to all that preceded and all that has followed it, I have always esteemed it to be the highest office of classical scholarship to throw light upon the state of thought and feeling in the two great nations of antiquity at the time of the birth of Christ. It is as a contribution to such an inquiry that the treatise on the Nature of the Gods seems to me to possess a unique interest and value; not because Cicero was himself the most original, the most earnest, or the most religious thinker of his time; but because he, more than any other, reflects for us the best tone of his time, because he represents to us most truly its highest level of intelligence and morality. To what extent then do we find in his writings any 18633 anticipation of the religion which was to establish itself, not in Judaea alone but in Greece and Italy also, within a hundred years of his death? We find in the first place the way prepared for Christianity by the abandonment of the old polytheism. The arguments used against the later Paganism by such men as Minucius, Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius and even Augustine himself are largely borrowed from this very dialogue. Nor is it only in the negative direction that Cicero exhibits to us philosophy preparing the way for Christianity. That God is perfect in wisdom, power, and goodness, that men are his children, partakers of his Spirit, that his Providence overrules all things to the best end, that the only acceptable worship is that in spirit and in truth, that virtue is a Divine gift, that God is the animating Spirit of the universe and yet has his peculiar abode in the heart of the virtuous, who shall hereafter be partakers of eternal blessedness in heaven,-this is the teaching of Balbus, as modified by the criticisms of Cicero, and this is also the foundation of the teaching of the New Testament; it is Bishop Butler's Natural Religion' in its purest form. That Christians themselves recognized a positive element of Christianity in the writings of Cicero is strikingly shown by the passage given as the motto of this volume, in which St Augustine describes the impression produced upon his own mind by the study of the Hortensius2. 1 Cf. V. D. II 62, III 12. 2 Confess. 111 4. |
