Lactantius — Divine Institutes 3.12

If it is asked for what we are born, what virtue effects, we can investigate thus. There are two from which the human consists, mind and body. Many things are proper to the mind, many to the body, many common to both, as is virtue itself: which whenever it is referred to the body is named fortitude for the sake of distinguishing. Since therefore fortitude underlies both, a combat is set before both and from the combat a victory for both: the body, because it is solid and graspable, must clash with solid and graspable things; but the mind, because it is thin and invisible, meets those enemies that cannot be seen and touched.

But what are the mind's enemies if not desires, vices, sins? Which if virtue has conquered and put to flight, the mind will be unstained and pure. Whence then can it be gathered what the mind's fortitude effects? Clearly from what is joined and equal—that is, from the body's fortitude: which when it has come into some meeting and contest, what else does it seek from victory than life? For whether you fight with a human or with a beast, the struggle is for safety. Therefore as the body by conquering attains this, that it not perish, so also the mind, that it remain; and as the body conquered by its enemies is punished with death, so the mind overcome by vices must die.

What then will be the difference between the mind's and the body's combat except that the body seeks temporal life, the mind everlasting? If therefore virtue is not blessed through itself—since, as I said, its whole force is in enduring evils—if it neglects all things that are desired as goods, if its highest step opens toward death, seeing that it often spurns the life desired by others and bravely takes up the death others fear—if it is necessary that it produce from itself some great good, because labors undertaken and overcome even to death cannot be without a prize—if no prize worthy of it is found on earth, seeing that it scorns all fragile and falling things—what else remains except that it effect something heavenly, because it contemns all earthly things, and strain to higher things, because it despises the low? But that can be nothing other than immortality.

Rightly therefore Euclid, not obscure among philosophers, who was founder of the Megaric school, dissenting from the rest said that the highest good is that which is like and always the same. He understood of course what the nature of the highest good is, though he did not explain what it is: but it is immortality and nothing else at all, because it alone can neither be lessened nor increased nor changed. Seneca also unwittingly fell into confessing that there is no other prize of virtue than immortality. For praising virtue in that book which he wrote on untimely death: There is one thing, he says, virtue, which can gift us with immortality and make us peers of the gods.

But the Stoics too, whom he followed, deny that anyone can be made blessed without virtue. Therefore virtue's prize is the blessed life, if virtue—as was rightly said—makes the blessed life. Therefore it is not, as they say, that virtue is to be sought for its own sake, but for the blessed life which necessarily follows virtue. Which argument could teach them what the highest good is. But this present and bodily life cannot be blessed, because through the body it is subject to evils. Epicurus calls God blessed and incorrupt, because He is everlasting. For blessedness ought to be perfect, so that there is nothing that can vex or lessen or change it. Nor can anything otherwise be thought blessed unless it has been incorrupt. But nothing is incorrupt except what is immortal. Therefore immortality alone is blessed, because it cannot be corrupted and dissolved.

But if virtue falls to the human—which no one can deny—blessedness also falls: for it cannot be that one endowed with virtue is wretched. If blessedness falls, then immortality also falls to the human, which is blessed. Therefore the highest good is found to be immortality alone, because it touches neither another animal nor the body nor can it come to anyone without knowledge and virtue—that is, without knowledge of God and justice. How right, how true its appetite is, this very desire of this life indicates, which though temporal and fullest of labor is nevertheless sought and wished by all: for old men as much as boys, kings as much as the lowest, finally the wise as much as fools desire it.

It is of such worth, as it seemed to Anaxagoras, that contemplation of heaven and of light itself is such that one is willing to bear whatever miseries. Since therefore this laborious and brief life is held a great good by the consensus not only of humans but also of other living things, it is clear that the same becomes the highest and perfect good if it both lacks end and every evil. Finally no one would ever have existed who would contemn this brief life itself or undergo death unless by hope of a longer life. For those who offered themselves to voluntary killing for citizens' safety—as at Thebes Menoeceus, at Athens Codrus, at Rome Curtius and the two Mures—would never have preferred death to life's advantages unless they thought they would obtain immortality by citizens' opinion. Who yet, though they did not know immortality's way, the matter nevertheless did not deceive them.

For if virtue contemns riches and wealth because they are fragile, pleasures because brief, therefore it also contemns fragile and brief life that it may obtain solid and perpetual life. Therefore thought itself, advancing by order and considering all things, leads us to that outstanding and singular good for whose sake we are born. Which if the philosophers had done, and had not preferred stubbornly to guard what they had once grasped, they would certainly have arrived at this true thing, as I have just shown. Which if it was not of those who extinguish heavenly souls together with bodies, yet those who dispute about the soul's immortality ought to have understood that virtue is set before us so that, with lusts subdued and desire of earthly things overcome, pure and victorious souls may return to God—that is, to their origin.

For therefore alone of living things we are raised to the sight of heaven, that we may believe our highest good is in the highest; therefore we alone take religion, that from this we may know the human spirit is not mortal, because it both desires and recognizes God who is immortal. Therefore of all philosophers who embraced either knowledge or virtue as the highest good, they indeed held the path of truth, but did not arrive at the summit. For these two are what together effect that which is sought: knowledge provides that we know how and to where we must come; virtue, that we arrive. One without the other avails nothing: for from knowledge virtue, from virtue the highest good is born.

Therefore the blessed life which philosophers have always sought and seek—whether in the cult of the gods or in philosophy—is nothing, and therefore could not be found by them, because they sought the highest good not in the highest but in the lowest. But what is highest except heaven and God, whence the mind arises? What lowest except earth, whence the body is? And so although some philosophers gave the highest good not to the body but to the mind, yet since they referred it to this life which ends with the body, they rolled back to the body, whose is all this time spent on earth. Therefore not undeservedly they did not grasp the highest good, because whatever looks to the body and is without immortality must be lowest.

Therefore that blessedness does not fall to the human in the way the philosophers thought, but it falls thus—not that he is then blessed when he lives in the body, which of course must be corrupted that it may be dissolved, but then when the soul, freed from the body's partnership, lives in spirit alone. By this one thing we can be blessed in this life: if we seem least blessed, if fleeing the allurements of pleasures and serving virtue alone we live in all miseries and labors, which are exercises and strengthenings of virtue, if finally we hold that rough and difficult way which has been opened to us toward blessedness. Therefore the highest good which makes blessed cannot be except in that religion and teaching to which the hope of immortality is joined.