Letter 85

I had spared you, and had passed over whatever knotty matter still remained, content to give you, as it were, a taste of the things said by our school, to prove that virtue alone is effective enough to fill out the happy life. You bid me embrace whatever there is of questions, whether ours or those devised to refute us. If I should wish to do this, it will be not a letter but a book. This I declare again and again, that I take no delight in this kind of argument. I am ashamed to go down into the line of battle, undertaken on behalf of gods and men, armed with a cobbler's awl.

"He who is prudent is also temperate. He who is temperate is also steadfast. He who is steadfast is unperturbed. He who is unperturbed is without sorrow. He who is without sorrow is happy; therefore the prudent man is happy, and prudence is enough for a happy life."

To this chain certain Peripatetics reply in this way, so as to interpret "unperturbed," "steadfast," and "without sorrow" thus: that a man is called unperturbed who is rarely and moderately perturbed, not who never is. Likewise they say that a man is called "without sorrow" who is not given to sorrow nor frequent or excessive in this fault. For, they say, it denies human nature that any man's mind should be immune from sorrow. The wise man is not overcome by grief, but he is touched by it. And the rest after this manner, answering to their school.

By these distinctions they do not do away with the passions, but temper them. But how little do we grant the wise man, if he is braver than the feeblest, more cheerful than the most despondent, more moderate than the most unbridled, greater than the meanest? What if Ladas should boast of his swiftness by comparison with the lame and the weak? "He might fly over the topmost blades of the untouched corn-field, nor in his course bruise the tender ears, or hold his way over mid-sea, poised above the swelling wave, nor wet his swift feet in the deep." This is fleetness valued in itself, not such as is praised by comparison with the slowest. What if you should call a man healthy who is slightly feverish? A moderate degree of disease is not good health.

"So," he says, "the wise man is called unperturbed in the way that things are called stoneless, not those in which there is no hardness of seeds, but in which there is less." This is false. For I do not understand a diminution of evils in the good man, but an absence of them; there ought to be none, not small ones. For if there are any, they will grow and in the meantime hamper him. As a larger and complete cataract blinds the eyes, so a moderate one disturbs them.

If you grant the wise man some passions, his reason will be unequal to them and will be swept away as by a torrent, especially since you give him not one passion to struggle with, but all. And a multitude of passions, however moderate, can do more than the violence of a single one. He has a desire for money, but a moderate one.

He has ambition, but not inflamed. He has irascibility, but appeasable. He has inconstancy, but less wandering and shifting. He has lust that is not mad. Better it would go with the man who had one whole vice than with him who had all, but lighter ones.

Then it makes no difference how great a passion is; however great it is, it knows not how to obey, it takes no counsel. As no animal obeys reason, neither the wild nor the tame and gentle, for their nature is deaf to one who urges, so the passions do not follow, do not listen, however small they are. Tigers and lions never put off their ferocity; sometimes they let it down, and when you least expect it, the savageness, mollified, is roused again. Vices never in good faith grow tame.

Then, if reason prevails, the passions will not even begin; if they have begun against reason's will, against her will they will persist. For it is easier to forbid their beginnings than to govern their onset. And so that mean is false and useless, to be held in the same place as if someone should say that one should be moderately mad, moderately sick.

Virtue alone admits of a mean; the evils of the mind do not admit of a tempering. You will more easily remove them than govern them. Is there any doubt that the inveterate and hardened vices of the human mind, which we call diseases, are immoderate, such as avarice, such as cruelty, such as ungovernableness? Therefore the passions too are immoderate; for from them is the transition to the others.

Then if you grant any right to sorrow, to fear, to desire, and the other motions, they will not be in our power. Why? Because the things that rouse them are placed outside us. Therefore they will grow according as the causes by which they are stirred have been greater or less. Fear will rise higher, if that by which it is terrified has been beheld more fully or more nearly; sharper will be desire, if a hope of something more ample has called it forth.

If it is not in our power whether the passions exist, neither is it in our power how great they shall be; if you have allowed them to begin, they will grow with their causes and will be as great as they become. Add now that those passions, however small, pass into something greater. Destructive things never keep measure. However slight, the beginnings of diseases creep on, and sick bodies are sometimes overwhelmed by the smallest addition.

But what madness it is to believe that of things whose beginnings are placed outside our choice, the ends are within our choice! How am I strong enough to fear in moderation that which I was too weak to forbid altogether, when it is easier to shut out than to repress what has been admitted?

Some have distinguished thus, saying: "The temperate and prudent man is indeed tranquil in the disposition and habit of his mind, but not in the event. For so far as concerns the habit of his mind, he is not perturbed nor saddened nor afraid, but many causes from without befall which bring him perturbation."

Such is what they mean: that he is indeed not irascible, yet sometimes grows angry; and indeed not timid, yet sometimes fears; that is, he is free of the vice of fear, but not free of the passion. But if this is admitted, by frequent use fear will pass into a vice, and anger, once admitted into the mind, will undo that habit of a mind free from anger.

Besides, if he does not despise the causes that come from without and fears something, when he must go bravely against weapons, fires, on behalf of his country, the laws, liberty, he will go forth hesitatingly and with a shrinking mind. But this division of mind does not befall the wise man.

This too, I judge, must be observed, that we do not confuse two things which must be proved separately. For it is concluded by itself that the one good is the honourable, and by itself, again, that virtue is enough for the happy life. If the one good is the honourable, all concede that virtue suffices for living happily; on the contrary, it will not be conceded, if virtue alone makes a man happy, that the one good is the honourable.

Xenocrates and Speusippus think that a man can be made happy by virtue alone, yet that the honourable is not the one good. Epicurus too judges that he who possesses virtue is happy, but that virtue is not by itself enough for the happy life, because what makes happy is the pleasure that comes from virtue, not virtue itself. A foolish distinction. For the same man says that virtue is never without pleasure. So if it is always joined and inseparable, virtue is by itself enough; for it has pleasure with it, nor is it without this even when it is alone.

But it is absurd, what is said, that a man will indeed be happy by virtue alone, but will not be perfectly happy. How this can come about, I do not find. For the happy life has in itself a perfect good, one not to be surpassed. If it has this, it is perfectly happy. If the life of the gods has nothing greater or better, and the happy life is divine, it has nothing to which it can be raised further.

Besides, if the happy life is in need of nothing, every happy life is perfect, and the same life is both happy and most happy. Do you doubt that the happy life is the highest good? Therefore, if it has the highest good, it is happy in the highest degree. As the highest good admits of no addition (for what will there be above the highest?), so neither does the happy life, which does not exist without the highest good. But if you introduce someone as more happy, you will introduce someone as much more happy; you will make countless gradations of the highest good, whereas I understand the highest good to be that which has no step above itself.

If there is someone less happy than another, it follows that he will desire the life of the other, the happier man, more than his own. But the happy man prefers nothing to his own. Either of these is incredible: that something should remain to the happy man which he would rather were so than what is, or that he should not prefer that which is better than what he has. For the more prudent a man is, the more he will reach out for the best, and will desire to attain it by every means. But how is he happy who can still, who indeed ought still, to long for something?

I will tell you what it is from which this error comes: they do not know that the happy life is one. Its quality, not its magnitude, sets it in the best state. And so a long and a short life are on a level, and a diffused and a more confined one, one distributed over many places and many parts, and one drawn into a single point. He who values it by number and measure and parts robs it of that which is its chief excellence. But what is the chief excellence in the happy life? That it is full.

The end of eating and drinking, I think, is satiety. This man eats more, that one less; what does it matter? Each is now full. This man drinks more, that one less; what does it matter? Neither is thirsty. This man has lived more years, that one fewer; it makes no difference, if the many years have made the one as happy as the few have made the other. He whom you call less happy is not happy; the name cannot be lessened.

"He who is brave is without fear. He who is without fear is without sorrow. He who is without sorrow is happy." This is a question of our school. Against it they try to answer thus: that we are claiming as confessed a thing false and disputable, namely that he who is brave is without fear. "What then?" he says, "will the brave man not fear impending evils?" That is the mark of a madman and one out of his senses, not of a brave man. "Nay," he says, "he fears most moderately, but he is not altogether outside fear."

Those who say this roll back again into the same thing, that lesser vices stand to them in the place of virtues. For he who indeed fears, but more rarely and less, is not free of badness, but is vexed by a lighter one. "But I think him mad who does not greatly fear impending evils." What you say is true, if they are evils; but if he knows that those things are not evils and judges baseness alone to be an evil, he ought to look upon dangers securely and to despise the things to be feared by others. Or if it is the mark of a fool and a madman not to fear evils, then the more prudent a man is, the more he will fear.

"As it seems to you," he says, "the brave man will offer himself to dangers." By no means; he will not fear them, but he will avoid them. Caution becomes him, fear does not become him. "What then?" he says, "will he not fear death, chains, fire, and the other weapons of fortune?" No. For he knows that those things are not evils, but seem so. He reckons all these as the bugbears of human life.

Describe captivity, scourging, chains, want, and the mangling of limbs whether by disease or by violence, and whatever else you bring forward: he counts them among the terrors of the deranged. Such things are to be feared by the timid. Or do you think that an evil to which we must sometimes come of our own accord? "What, then," you say, "is an evil?" To yield to those things which are called evils and to surrender to them one's freedom, for which all things must be endured. Freedom perishes unless we despise those things which lay a yoke upon us.

They would not doubt what befits a brave man, if they knew what bravery is. For it is not ill-considered rashness nor a love of dangers nor a craving for things to be dreaded; it is the knowledge of distinguishing what is an evil and what is not. It is most careful in the protection of itself, and equally most patient of the things which have a false appearance of evils.

"What then? If the steel is held to the neck of a brave man, if one part after another is pierced through, if he has seen his own entrails in his lap, if at intervals, that he may feel the torments the more, fresh blood is let down upon his dried-out vitals, does he not fear?" Will you say that he does not even feel pain? He does indeed feel pain. For no virtue strips a man of sensation. But he does not fear; unconquered, from on high he looks down upon his own pains. Do you ask what mind he then has? Such as those have who comfort a sick friend.

"What is evil does harm. What does harm makes a man worse. But pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore they are not evils." "It is false," he says, "what you put forward; for it does not follow that, if a thing does harm, it also makes a man worse. A storm and tempest harms the helmsman, yet does not make him worse."

Some of the Stoics answer against this thus: that the helmsman is made worse by storm and tempest, because he cannot accomplish what he set out to do nor keep his course; he is not made worse in his art, but in his work. To them the Peripatetic says: "Therefore poverty too will make the wise man worse, and pain, and whatever else of the kind there is. For it will not snatch his virtue from him, but will hamper its works."

This would be rightly said, were not the condition of the helmsman and of the wise man unlike. For the wise man's purpose in conducting his life is not at all costs to accomplish what he attempts, but to do all things rightly. The helmsman's purpose is at all costs to bring his ship into harbour. The arts are handmaids, they must furnish what they promise. Wisdom is mistress and ruler; the arts serve life, wisdom commands.

I judge that the answer must be made otherwise: that neither is the helmsman's art made worse by any storm, nor the very practice of the art. The helmsman has promised you not good fortune, but useful service and the knowledge of steering a ship. This appears the more, the more some chance force has resisted him. He who could say, "Neptune, never shall you sink this ship except upright," has done justice to his art; the storm does not hinder the helmsman's work, but his success.

"What then?" he says, "does not that thing harm the helmsman which forbids him to make harbour, which renders his efforts vain, which either carries him back or holds him fast and dismasts him?" It harms him not as a helmsman, but as a voyager; otherwise he is not a helmsman. So far is it from hindering the helmsman's art that it displays it; for, as the saying is, "in calm weather anyone is a helmsman." These things are adverse to the ship, not to the steersman, in so far as he is a steersman.

The helmsman has two characters: one common to him with all who have gone aboard the same ship: he too is a passenger; the other peculiar to him: he is the helmsman. The storm harms him as a passenger, not as a helmsman.

Then the helmsman's art is another's good: it concerns those whom he carries, as the physician's concerns those whom he cures. But the wise man's good is a common good: it belongs both to those among whom he lives and to himself. Therefore the helmsman may perhaps be harmed, who has promised his service to others and is hindered from rendering it; but the wise man is not harmed by poverty, not by pain, not by the other storms of life.

For not all his works are hindered, but only those that concern others; he himself is always in action, and then greatest when fortune has opposed itself to him. For then he does the very business of wisdom, which we said was both another's good and his own.

Besides, not even then is he forbidden to benefit others, when some necessities press upon him. Because of poverty he is forbidden to teach how the commonwealth must be managed, but he teaches this, how poverty must be managed. Through his whole life his work extends. Thus no fortune, no circumstance shuts out the activities of the wise man. For he does the very thing by which he is forbidden to do the others. He is fitted for both kinds of chance: he is the ruler of goods, the conqueror of evils.

So, I say, he has trained himself to display virtue as much in prosperity as in adversity, and to look not at its material but at virtue itself. And so neither poverty nor pain nor anything else that turns the inexperienced aside and drives them headlong stops him. Do you think him pressed by evils? He makes use of them. Not out of ivory alone did Phidias know how to make statues; he made them out of bronze. If you had offered him marble, if you had offered him even a cheaper material, he would have made out of it the best that could be made from it.

So the wise man will unfold his virtue, if he be allowed, amid riches, if not, amid poverty; if he can, in his country, if not, in exile; if he can, as a general, if not, as a soldier; if he can, whole, if not, maimed. Whatever fortune he has received, he will make of it something memorable.

Sure are those tamers of beasts who bring the most savage animals, dreadful to meet and everywhere to be shuddered at, to submit to dwelling with man; nor content to have driven the terror from them, they admit them even to companionship. The lion-keeper puts his hand into the lion's mouth; the tiger is kissed by his trainer. The little Ethiopian bids the elephant kneel down and walk along a rope. So the wise man is a skilled tamer of evils. Pain, want, disgrace, prison, exile, everywhere to be dreaded, when they have come to him, grow tame. Farewell.