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Reason does even a little more, and it is all she can do. She gives the best direction possible to the absurdity. Thus she directs those who must believe because they cannot know, to believe in the laws of their country, and conform their opinions and practice to those of their ancestors, to those of Coruncanius, of Scipio, of Scaevola not to those of Zeno, of Cleanthes, of Chrysippus.
"Sovereign God," said Cleanthes, in that sublime prayer which Paul quoted, "whom men invoke under many names, and who rulest alone, ... it is to thee that all nations should address themselves, for we all are thy children." To say that different races worship different Gods, is like saying that they are warmed by different suns. The names differ, but the sun is the same, and so is God.
Cleanthes lived by the labour of his own hands, and boasted that Cleanthes, if he would, could yet maintain another Cleanthes. Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful. What is wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way wherein I have so long lived.
Plato and some of the mathematicians conspire in the same opinion; others place the sun as the centre of the planets. Anaximander, Metrodorus of Chios, and Crates assign to the sun the superior place, after him the moon, after them the fixed stars and planets. Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Cleanthes say that all the stars have their motion from east to west.
And touching bookes: Historie is my chiefe studie, Poesie my only delight, to which I am particularly affected: for as Cleanthes said, that as the voice being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last issueth forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence cunningly and closely couched in measure keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth more furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke.
And it is imbued with the breath of Godhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming.
Cleanthes the philosopher; speaking of one to whom he was attached, says his only hold on him was by his ears, while his rivals had all the others offered them; and there is no question that Alcibiades was very easily caught by pleasures; and the expression used by Thucydides about the excesses of his habitual course of living gives occasion to believe so.
As to the two other causes of Cleanthes, one of which is derived from the great abundance of desirable things which we enjoy, the other from the invariable order of the seasons and the heavens, I shall treat on them when I answer your discourse concerning the providence of the Gods a point, Balbus, upon which you have spoken at great length.
Death is the separation of soul from body, but it is impossible to separate what is incorporeal from body; therefore, again, the soul must be corporeal. In the belief of Cleanthes, the souls of all creatures remained to the next period of cyclic conflagration; Chrysippus believed that only the souls of the wise and good remained.
Cleanthes reads plays, dances, dresses, and spends his time in drawing rooms, instead of being a good lawyer, divine, or physician; Cleanthes is a down-right coxcomb, and will remain to all that knew him a contemptible example of talents misapplied.
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