Letter 88

You desire to know what I think about the liberal studies. I admire none of them, I count none among the goods, which has money for its end. They are hireling trades, useful so far as they prepare the mind, not detain it. For we must dwell on these things only so long as the mind can do nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our work.

Why the liberal studies are so called you see; because they are worthy of a free man. But there is in truth one study that is liberal, the one that makes a man free. This is the study of wisdom, lofty, brave, great-souled. The rest are petty and childish; or do you believe there is any good in those things whose professors you behold to be the basest of all men and the most disgraceful? We ought not to be learning those things, but to have learned them. Some have judged that this should be asked about the liberal studies, whether they make a man good; but they do not even promise it, nor lay claim to the knowledge of this matter.

The grammarian is occupied with the care of language, and, if he wishes to range more widely, with histories, and, to push his bounds out as far as possible, with poems. Which of these paves a way to virtue? The parsing of syllables, and care over words, and the memorizing of fables, and the law and metre of verses? Which of these takes away fear, removes desire, bridles lust?

Let us pass to geometry and music; you will find nothing in them that forbids you to fear, forbids you to desire. And whoever does not know these will know other things to no purpose. Let us see whether these men teach virtue or not. If they teach it, they are philosophers. But if they do not teach it, why are they called liberal studies?

Unless perhaps they persuade you that Homer was a philosopher, when they deny it by the very arguments by which they prove it. For now they make him a Stoic, approving virtue alone and shunning pleasures and not departing from the honourable even at the price of immortality; now an Epicurean, praising the state of a city at rest and one passing its life amid feasts and songs; now a Peripatetic, bringing in three kinds of goods; now an Academic, saying that all things are uncertain. It is plain that none of these is in him, because all of them are. For these things are at odds among themselves. Let us grant them that Homer was a philosopher; surely he became wise before he knew any poems. Therefore let us learn the things that made Homer wise.

For me to ask which was the elder, Homer or Hesiod, no more belongs to the matter than to know, since Hecuba was younger than Helen, why she bore her age so badly. What? Do you think it belongs to the matter to inquire into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles?

Do you ask where Ulysses wandered, rather than bring it about that we should not always be wandering? There is no leisure to hear whether he was tossed between Italy and Sicily, or outside the world known to us, for so long a wandering could not have been in so narrow a space; the storms of the mind toss us daily, and wickedness drives us into all the ills of Ulysses. There is no lack of beauty to disturb our eyes, no lack of an enemy; here are savage monsters that delight in human blood, here the treacherous flatteries of the ears, here shipwrecks and so many varieties of evils. Teach me this, how I may love my country, how my wife, how my father, how I may sail toward these things so honourable even after shipwreck.

Why do you inquire whether Penelope was chaste, whether she deceived her own age? Whether she suspected him to be Ulysses, before she knew it? Teach me what chastity is, and how great a good is in it, whether it is placed in the body or in the mind.

I pass to the musician: you teach me how high and low notes accord with one another, how a concord is made of strings rendering an unlike sound; rather make my mind accord with itself, and my counsels not be discordant. You show me which are the mournful modes; show me rather how, amid adversities, I may not let out a mournful cry.

The geometer teaches me to measure my broad estates, rather than teach me how I may measure how much is enough for a man. He teaches me to reckon, and lends my fingers to avarice, rather than teach me that these computations have nothing to do with the matter, that a man is not happier whose estate wearies the accountants; nay, how superfluous are the things he possesses who will be most unhappy if he is forced to reckon by himself how much he has.

What does it profit me to know how to divide a little field into parts, if I do not know how to divide it with my brother? What does it profit to gather up exactly the feet of an acre and to grasp even what has escaped the measuring-rod, if it makes me gloomy when an overbearing neighbour scrapes away something from my land? He teaches how I may lose nothing of my boundaries; but I wish to learn how to lose the whole of them cheerfully.

'I am driven,' he says, 'from my father's and grandfather's field.' What? Before your grandfather who held that field? Can you explain whose, I do not say man's, but people's it was? You entered there not as owner, but as tenant. Whose tenant are you? If it goes well with you, your heir's. The lawyers deny that anything public can be acquired by use; this which you hold, which you call your own, is public, and indeed belongs to the human race.

O excellent art! You know how to measure round things, you reduce to a square whatever shape you have received, you tell the distances of the stars, there is nothing that does not fall under your measure. If you are an artist, measure a man's mind. Say how great it is, say how petty it is. You know what a straight line is; what does it profit you, if you do not know what is straight in life?

I come now to him who boasts of his knowledge of the heavens: 'whither the cold star of Saturn betakes itself, into what circles wanders the Cyllenian fire of heaven.' What will it profit to know this? That I should be anxious when Saturn and Mars stand opposed, or when Mercury makes his evening setting in the sight of Saturn, rather than learn this, that wherever those bodies are, they are propitious and cannot be changed?

An unbroken order of fates and an inevitable course drives them. They return through their fixed turns and either move or mark the effects of all things. But whether they make whatever happens, what will the knowledge of an unchangeable thing profit? Or whether they signify it, what does it matter to foresee what you cannot escape? Whether you know these things or do not know them, they will come to pass.

'But if you look back to the swift sun and the stars that follow in order, never will tomorrow's hour deceive you, nor will you be ensnared by the treacheries of a cloudless night.' It has been provided fully and abundantly that I should be safe from snares.

Does not tomorrow's hour deceive me? For that deceives which befalls a man unawares. I do not know what will be; I know what may be. From this I shall despair of nothing, I await the whole; if anything is remitted, I count it gain. The hour deceives me if it spares me, but not even thus does it deceive me. For just as I know that all things can happen, so I know also that they will not necessarily happen. I await prosperity, I am prepared for adversity.

In this you must bear with me, that I do not go by the prescribed path. For I am not brought to receive painters into the number of the liberal arts, any more than statuaries or marble-workers or the other servants of luxury. Likewise I expel from these liberal studies wrestlers and the whole science that consists of oil and mud; or else I shall receive perfumers too, and cooks, and the rest who apply their wits to the service of our pleasures.

For what, I pray you, that is liberal have those fasting vomiters, whose bodies are in fattening and their minds in leanness and lethargy? Or do we believe that to be a liberal study for our youth, whom our ancestors trained upright, to throw javelins, to hurl the stake, to ride a horse, to handle arms? They taught their children nothing that had to be learned lying down. But neither these nor those teach or nourish virtue. For what does it profit to govern a horse and to temper his course with the rein, yet to be dragged away by the most unbridled passions? What does it profit to conquer many in wrestling or in boxing, yet to be conquered by anger?

What then? Do the liberal studies confer nothing on us? For other things much, for virtue nothing. For even those arts, avowedly mean, which consist of the hand, contribute very much to the equipment of life, yet do not belong to virtue. Why then do we educate our sons in the liberal studies? Not because they can give virtue, but because they prepare the mind for receiving virtue. Just as that first instruction, as the ancients called it, in letters, through which the elements are handed to boys, does not teach the liberal arts, but soon makes room for grasping them, so the liberal arts do not lead the mind to virtue, but clear the way for it.

Posidonius says there are four kinds of arts: there are the common and mean, there are the entertaining, there are the children's, and there are the liberal. The common are those of the craftsmen, which consist of the hand and are taken up for equipping life, in which there is no pretence of comeliness, none of the honourable.

The entertaining are those which aim at the pleasure of the eyes and ears. To these you may add the engineers who devise platforms rising of themselves, and floors silently mounting aloft, and other unexpected transformations, either of things that cohered gaping apart, or of things that stood apart coming together of their own accord, or of things that projected gradually settling into themselves. By these the eyes of the ignorant are struck; all sudden things are wondered at, because they do not know the causes.

The children's, and having something in common with the liberal, are those arts which the Greeks call enkyklious, but our people liberal. But the only truly liberal, or rather, to speak more truly, free, are those whose concern is virtue.

'Just as,' he says, 'there is one part of philosophy that is natural, one moral, one rational, so this crowd of liberal arts too claims for itself a place in philosophy. When it comes to natural questions, one rests on the testimony of geometry; therefore it is a part of that which it helps.'

Many things help us and are not therefore parts of us; nay, if they were parts, they would not help us. Food is a help to the body, but is not a part of it. Geometry renders us some service; it is necessary to philosophy as the carpenter is to geometry; but the carpenter is not a part of geometry, nor is geometry of philosophy.

Besides, each has its own bounds. For the wise man both inquires into and knows the causes of natural things, whose numbers and measures the geometer pursues and computes. By what reasoning the heavenly bodies subsist, what their force is or their nature, the wise man knows; their courses and recoils and certain phenomena by which they descend and are lifted up and at times offer the appearance of standing still, though it is not allowed to the heavenly bodies to stand still, these the mathematician gathers.

What cause produces images in a mirror the wise man will know; the geometer can tell you how far the body ought to be from the image, and what shape of mirror renders what images. That the sun is great the philosopher will prove; how great it is, the mathematician, who proceeds by a certain practice and exercise; but in order to proceed he must obtain certain first principles. But that is not an art in its own right whose foundation is begged.

Philosophy asks nothing from another, it raises its whole structure from itself alone; mathematics, so to speak, is a thing of the surface, it builds on another's ground. It receives first principles, by whose favour it may come to further things. If it went by itself to the truth, if it could grasp the nature of the whole world, I should say it would confer much on our minds, which grow by the handling of celestial things and draw something from on high.

The mind is perfected by one thing only, the unalterable knowledge of good and evil, which belongs to philosophy alone; for no other art inquires into good and evil. Let me run through the several virtues. Bravery is the despiser of things to be feared; the things that are terrible, that send beneath the yoke our liberty, it scorns, challenges, breaks. 'Do the liberal studies strengthen this? Loyalty is the most sacred good of the human breast, which is forced by no necessity to deceive, corrupted by no reward. "Burn," it says, "strike, kill; I will not betray, but the more pain shall seek out the secrets, the deeper will I bury them." Can the liberal studies make these minds? Temperance commands the pleasures, some it hates and drives away, others it dispenses and reduces to a sound measure, nor does it ever come to them for their own sake. It knows that the best measure of things desired is to take not as much as you wish, but as much as you ought.

Humanity forbids us to be proud toward our fellows, forbids us to be grasping. In words, in deeds, in feelings it shows itself courteous and kind to all; it counts no man's evil its own; its own good it loves chiefly for this, that it will be the good of another. Do the liberal studies teach these manners? No more than they teach simplicity, than modesty and moderation, no more than frugality and thrift, no more than mercy, which spares another's blood as its own and knows that a man must not be prodigally used by a man.

'Since you say,' he says, 'that one does not come to virtue without the liberal studies, how do you deny that they contribute nothing to virtue?' Because one does not come to virtue without food either, yet food does not belong to virtue. Timber contributes nothing to a ship, although a ship is not made except of timber. There is no reason, I say, why you should think anything is made by the aid of that without which it cannot be made.

Indeed it may even be said that one can come to wisdom without the liberal studies; for although virtue must be learned, yet it is not learned through these. What reason is there why I should think a man who does not know letters will not be wise, since wisdom is not in letters? It hands over things, not words, and I know not whether the memory is not surer which has no support outside itself.

Wisdom is a great and spacious thing. It needs empty room. One must learn about things divine and human, about the past and the future, about things perishable and eternal, about time. Concerning this one thing alone, see how many questions are asked: first, whether it is anything in itself; then, whether anything is before time and without time; whether it began with the world, or, because there was something even before the world, time too existed.

There are countless questions about the soul alone: whence it is, what it is, when it begins to be, how long it is; whether it passes from one place to another and changes its dwelling, transferred into the shapes of other animals one after another, or serves only once and then, set free, wanders through the universe; whether it is body or not; what it will do when it ceases to act through us; how it will use its freedom when it has fled this prison; whether it forgets things past and then begins to know itself, when, parted from the body, it has withdrawn on high.

Whatever part of things human and divine you grasp, you will be wearied by a vast abundance of things to be inquired into and learned. That these things, so many, so great, may have a free lodging, the superfluous must be cleared from the mind. Virtue will not give itself into these straits; a great thing requires a roomy space. Let all things be expelled, let the whole breast be free for it.

'But the knowledge of many arts delights one.' Therefore let us retain only as much of them as is necessary. Or do you think the man worthy of blame who gets together superfluous things for use and spreads out in his house a parade of costly objects, but do not think that man so who is busied with the superfluous furniture of letters? To wish to know more than is enough is a kind of intemperance.

And what of this, that this pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, ill-timed, pleased with themselves, and for this reason not learning the necessary things, that they have learned the superfluous? The grammarian Didymus wrote four thousand books. I should pity him, had he merely read so many superfluous ones. In these books it is inquired what was Homer's country, in these who was the true mother of Aeneas, in these whether Anacreon lived more lustfully or more drunkenly, in these whether Sappho was a public woman, and other things which, if you knew them, you would have to unlearn. Go now and deny that life is long.

But when you come to our own school too, I will show you many things that should be given to the axe. At a great expense of time, at great trouble to others' ears, this praise is bought: 'O man of letters!' Let us be content with this more rustic title: 'O good man!'

Is it so? Shall I unroll the annals of all the nations and ask who first wrote poems? Shall I, since I have no calendar, compute how much time lies between Orpheus and Homer? And shall I review the trifles of Aristarchus, with which he pricked the poems of others, and waste my years on syllables? Shall I so stick fast in the dust of geometry? Has that saving precept so slipped from me, 'Spare your time'? Shall I know these things? And what shall I not know?

The grammarian Apion, who went about all Greece in the days of Gaius Caesar and was adopted into the name of Homer by all the cities, used to say that Homer, when he had finished both his works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, added a beginning to his poem, in which he embraced the whole Trojan war. As proof of this argument he alleged that Homer had set in his first verse two letters by design, containing the number of his books.

Such things must he know who wishes to know many things, not to consider how much time bad health takes from you, how much public business, how much private business, how much daily business, how much sleep. Measure your life; it does not hold so many things.

I speak of the liberal studies; how much of the superfluous, how much departing from use, have the philosophers! They too have come down to the distinctions of syllables and the properties of conjunctions and prepositions, and have envied the grammarians, envied the geometers. Whatever was superfluous in those men's arts they have transferred into their own. So it has come about that they know how to speak more carefully than to live.

Hear how much harm too great subtlety does, and how hostile it is to truth. Protagoras says that on every matter one can argue on either side with equal force, and on this very point, whether every matter is debatable on either side. Nausiphanes says that of the things which seem to be, nothing is any more than it is not.

Parmenides says that of the things which seem, nothing exists except the universe. Zeno of Elea has dismissed all difficulties into one; for he says that nothing exists. About much the same lines go the Pyrrhonians and the Megarians and the Eretrians and the Academics, who have brought in a new knowledge: that we know nothing.

Cast all these into that superfluous herd of liberal studies; the one set hand me a knowledge that will not profit me, the other snatch away the hope of all knowledge. It is better to know superfluous things than nothing. The one set do not carry a light before me, by which my gaze may be directed toward the truth; the other dig out my eyes. If I believe Protagoras, there is nothing in the nature of things but the doubtful; if Nausiphanes, this one thing is certain, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, there is nothing except the one; if Zeno, not even the one.

What, then, are we? What are these things which surround us, feed us, sustain us? The whole nature of things is a shadow, either empty or deceptive. I could not easily say with which I am more angry, those who wished us to know nothing, or those who did not leave us even this, to know nothing. Farewell.