Nature's untaught wisdom and the soul's natural virtues

For it cuts through the very middle of the grains with its own claws, so that they will not sprout and become useless to it for food. And it dries them out whenever it perceives that they are soaked through. It does not bring them out at every season, but only when it perceives beforehand that the air is holding in a fair-weather condition. Indeed, you would not see rain pouring from the clouds for as long as the grain has been brought out by the ants. What speech could reach all this? What hearing could contain it? What time would be enough to tell and recount all the wonders of the Craftsman? Let us too say with the prophet, “How great are your works, O Lord; in wisdom you made them all” (Psalm 104:24, LXX Psalm 103:24). So it is not enough for our defense that we were not taught what is beneficial by letters, since we have received the choice of what is advantageous by the untaught law of nature. Do you know what good you will do to your neighbor? What you wish to have done to yourself by another. Do you know what evil is? What you yourself would not choose to suffer from another. No root-cutting skill and no botanical experience discovered the teaching of what is beneficial for the irrational animals. Rather, each of the animals is naturally resourceful for providing its own safety, and possesses a certain inexpressible affinity for what is according to nature. 9.4 There are also among us virtues according to nature, toward which the soul’s affinity exists not from human teaching but from nature itself. For just as no argument teaches us to hate sickness, but we have an automatic aversion to what causes pain, so too the soul has a certain untaught avoidance of evil. Every evil is a sickness of the soul, and virtue holds the place of health. For some have well defined health as the stability of the natural activities. If one says this also about the good condition of the soul, he will not miss what is fitting. From this the soul is, without teaching, desiring of what is its own and according to nature. Therefore temperance is praised by all, and justice is accepted, and courage is admired, and prudence is eagerly sought. These are more akin to the soul than health is to the body. Children, love your fathers. Parents, do not provoke your children. Does not nature itself say these things? Paul urges nothing new, but tightens the bonds of nature. If the lioness loves her offspring, and the wolf fights for its pups, what can a person say who both disobeys the commandment and falsifies nature, when either a child dishonors the old age of a father, or a father through a second marriage forgets his earlier children? The mutual affection of children and parents toward one another is irresistible in the irrational animals, because the God who created them compensated for the lack of reason through the abundance of their senses. For how is it that among countless sheep a lamb, leaping out from the folds, knows the very color and the voice of its mother, and hurries toward her, and seeks out its own fountains of milk? And if it happens upon its mother’s poor teats, it is content with those, having run past many heavy udders. And how does the mother among countless lambs recognize her own? The voice is one, the color the same, the smell alike from all, as far as it presents itself to our sense of smell—but nevertheless there is in them a perception sharper than our comprehension, by which each one has the recognition of its own.