7. The Platonici are named from the philosopher Plato. They assert that God is the creator of souls, the angels of bodies; they say that after many cycles of years souls return to different bodies.
9. [The Stoics] assert that no one is happy without virtue. They claim that every sin is equally sinful, saying: “He is as guilty who steals chaff as he who steals gold, he who kills a waterfowl as he who kills a horse; for it is not the thing but the spirit (non animal sed animus) that makes the sin.”
10. These also say that the soul perishes with the body. They love the virtue of self-control, and seek eternal glory although they assert that they are not immortal.
11. The Academici are named from Academia, Plato’s villa at Athens, where he taught. These believe that all things are uncertain; but although it must be admitted that many things which God willed to surpass the understanding of man, are uncertain and hidden from us, yet there are very many things which can be received by the senses and apprehended by man.
15. The Epicureans are named from Epicurus, a certain philosopher, a lover of vanity not of wisdom, whom the very philosophers themselves called a swine because he wallowed in carnal filth and asserted that bodily pleasure was the highest good, and even said that the universe was not formed and ruled by a divine Providence.
16. But he assigned the origin of things to atoms, that is, to indivisible material bodies, from the chance combination of which all things arise and have arisen. He said that God did nothing, that all things are corporeal, that the soul is not different from the body. And so he said, “I shall not exist after I die.”
22. These errors of the philosophers have given rise also to heresies in the church....
23. When it is said that the soul perishes, Epicurus is honored; and the denial of the resurrection of the flesh is taken from all the philosophers; and where matter is put on an equality with God, it is the teaching of Zeno; and where anything is read about a God of fire, Heraclitus comes in. The same material is used and the same errors are embraced over and over by heretics and philosophers.
Chapter 7. On poets.
1. Tranquillus thus tells why poets were so named: “When men putting off savagery first began to have a settled mode of life and to obtain a knowledge of themselves and their gods, they contrived a modest way of living and necessary words for themselves, but sought for magnificence in each for the worship of their gods.