The people whose talk is for ever of conflagration and rebirth may well excite our wonder, not only for the aforesaid reasons which prove the falsity of their creed, but particularly on the following grounds. As there are four elements, earth, water, air and fire, of which the world is composed, why out of all these do they pick out fire and assert that it will be resolved into that alone? Surely it may be said that it is just as right that it should be resolved into earth or water or air, for all these have transcendent powers, and yet no one has declared that the world is converted into any of the three, and therefore the natural conclusion is that it is not turned into fire either. Indeed also observation of the equality inherent in the world should make them afraid or ashamed to affirm the death of so great a deity. For there is a vast reciprocation between the four powers and they regulate their interchanges according to the standards of equality and the bounds laid down by justice. For just as the annual seasons circle round and round, each making room for its successor as the years ceaselessly revolve, so, too, the elements of the world in their mutual interchanges seem to die, yet, strangest of contradictions, are made immortal as they ever run their race backwards and forwards and continually pass along the same road up and down. The uphill journey begins from earth. Earth is transformed by melting into water, water by evaporation into air, air by rarefaction into fire. The downhill path leads from the top, the fire as it is extinguished subsides into air; air as it is compressed subsides into water, while water is condensed as it changes into earth. Well, too, spoke Heracleitus when he says, “death for souls is to become water, death for water to become earth,” for conceiving that soul is breath he indicates that the final end of air is to become water and again of water to become earth, while by the term death he does not mean complete annihilation but transmutation into another element. That this self-determined equality should be maintained for ever inviolate and constant is not only natural but necessary. And, therefore, since inequality is unjust and injustice is the child of wickedness, and wickedness is banished from the dwelling-place of immortality, while the world is divine in its vastness and has been shown to be the dwelling-place of visible deities, the assertion that it is destroyed shows inability to descry the chain of nature and the unbroken sequence of events.
On the Eternity of the World 21
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