Letter 41

You are doing an excellent thing, and one wholesome for yourself, if, as you write, you persevere in going toward a good mind, which it is foolish to pray for, when you can obtain it from yourself. There is no need to lift up your hands to heaven, nor to entreat the temple-keeper to admit us to the ear of the image, as though we could be better heard so; the god is near you, is with you, is within you.

So I say, Lucilius: a holy spirit dwells within us, the observer and guardian of our evils and our goods. Even as he is treated by us, so does he himself treat us. Indeed, no man is good without god; or can anyone rise above fortune unless aided by him? It is he who gives counsels magnificent and lofty. In each good man—"which god is uncertain"—a god dwells.

If a thick grove of ancient trees that have outgrown their accustomed height meets you, and shuts out the sight of the sky by its screen of boughs sheltering one another, that loftiness of the wood and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of so dense and unbroken a shade in the open will give you a conviction of a divine presence. If some cavern, the rocks deeply eaten away, holds up a mountain, hollowed out to so great a spaciousness not by hand but by natural causes, it will strike your mind with a certain intimation of religion. We venerate the sources of great rivers; the sudden bursting forth of a vast stream from the hidden depths has its altars; the springs of warm waters are worshipped, and certain pools either their shade or their measureless depth has made sacred.

If you have seen a man undaunted amid dangers, untouched by desires, happy amid adversities, calm in the midst of storms, looking down on men from a higher place and on the gods as an equal, will not a veneration of him steal upon you? Will you not say: "This thing is greater and loftier than that it could be believed like to the petty body in which it is"? A divine power has descended into that man.

A mind that is excellent, moderate, passing over all things as if of less account, laughing at whatever we fear and pray for, a heavenly power sets in motion. So great a thing cannot stand without the support of a divinity. And so by the greater part of itself it abides there whence it came down. Just as the rays of the sun touch the earth indeed, but are there whence they are sent, so a mind great and sacred, sent down to this end that we might know the divine more nearly, consorts with us indeed, but cleaves to its own origin; on that it depends, thither it looks and strives, while it is engaged among our affairs as something better than they.

What then is this mind? It is one that shines with no good but its own; for what is more foolish than to praise in a man what is another's? What more mad than the man who admires the things that can straightway be transferred to another? Golden bridles do not make a horse better. A lion is sent into the arena differently with gilded mane, while it is handled and, worn out, is forced into endurance of receiving the ornament, differently when wild and of unbroken spirit; this lion, of course, fierce in its onset, such as Nature willed it to be, splendid in its very wildness—whose beauty is this, that it cannot be looked upon without fear—is preferred to that languid and gold-leafed beast.

No one ought to glory save in what is his own. We praise the vine if it loads its branches with fruit, if by its weight it bends to the ground the very props of what it has borne; would anyone prefer to it that vine from which golden grapes and golden leaves hang? Fertility is the proper virtue in a vine; in a man too that is to be praised which is his own. He has a handsome household and a beautiful house, he sows much, he lends out much at interest; none of these is in the man himself, but about him.

Praise in him that which can neither be snatched away nor given, which is the proper possession of a man. Do you ask what that is? The mind, and reason perfected in the mind. For man is a rational animal. His good is therefore brought to completion, if he has fulfilled that for which he is born.

But what is it that this reason demands of him? A most easy thing: to live according to his own nature. But this is made difficult by the common madness; we thrust one another into faults. And how can those be recalled to soundness whom no one holds back, and the crowd drives on? Farewell.