Letter 92

I think it will be agreed between you and me that external things are acquired for the body, the body is tended in honour of the mind, and that in the mind there are serving parts, through which we move and are nourished, given to us for the sake of the ruling part itself. In this ruling part there is something irrational, and something rational. The former serves the latter; the latter is the one thing that is not referred to another, but refers all things to itself.

If on this it is agreed between us, it follows that on this too it should be agreed, that the happy life is placed in this one thing, that the reason in us be made perfect. For this alone does not bow down the mind, but stands against fortune; in whatever state of things it keeps us secure and at the summit, and leaning on no one but itself. For he who is upheld by some aid can fall. If it is otherwise, things not our own will begin to have great power in us. But who wishes fortune to stand firm, or which sensible man prides himself on what is another's?

What is the happy life? Security and perpetual tranquillity. This greatness of soul will give, this constancy, tenacious of a well-judged decision. How are these reached? If the truth has been wholly perceived; if in things to be done order, measure, decorum have been preserved, and a will harmless and kindly, intent on reason and never departing from it, lovable at once and admirable. In short, that I may write you the formula briefly, the wise man's mind ought to be such as would befit a god.

What can he desire to whom all honourable things fall? For if things not honourable can contribute anything to the best state, then the happy life will lie in those things without which it is not honourable. And what is baser, what more foolish, than to bind together the good of the rational soul with things irrational? Yet some judge that the highest good can be increased, because it is little full when chance things stand against it.

Antipater too, among the great authorities of this school, says that he assigns something to externals, but a very little. You see, however, what it is not to be content with the day without that little spark of daylight. What strength can it have in this brightness of the sun, if a single spark be hidden in it?

If you are not content with the honourable alone, it follows that you wish to add to it either what the Greeks call aochlesia, freedom from disturbance, or pleasure. The one of these can in some sense be admitted. For the mind is then free of trouble, free for the inspection of the universe, and nothing calls it away from the contemplation of nature. That other thing, pleasure, is the good of cattle. We are adding the irrational to the rational, the dishonourable to the honourable. A pleasant tickling of the body moves such a life.

Why, then, do you hesitate to say that it is well with a man if it is well with his palate? And do you reckon this man, I will not say among men of worth, but among men at all, whose highest good is in flavours and colours and sounds? Let him be removed from the number of that noblest of living creatures, ranking next to the gods; let him be joined to the dumb beasts, an animal delighting in fodder.

The irrational part of the mind has two parts, one spirited, ambitious, ungovernable, placed in the passions, the other lowly, languid, given over to pleasures; the former, unbridled but better, certainly stronger and more worthy of a man, they have left aside, while this latter, slack and base, they have thought necessary to the happy life.

To this they bade reason be a slave, and they have made the highest good of the noblest of living creatures both base and ignoble, and besides a monstrous thing, composed of unlike members ill matched. For, as our Virgil, describing Scylla, says, "a maiden's is her upper face and lovely breast as far as the waist, below a sea-monster of vast body, with the tails of dolphins joined to a belly of wolves." Yet to this Scylla wild creatures are joined, dreadful, swift; but out of what monsters have these men compounded wisdom!

The first art of man is virtue itself; to this is committed the useless and fluid flesh, fit only for receiving food, as Posidonius says. That divine virtue ends in a slippery thing, and to its higher parts, venerable and heavenly, is stitched a sluggish and flabby animal. That other thing, freedom from disturbance, indeed furnished nothing of itself to the mind, but removed hindrances; pleasure, on the contrary, dissolves and softens all its strength. What so discordant a joining of bodies will be found? To the bravest thing the most sluggish is attached, to the most austere the not-serious, to the most holy the intemperate even to the point of incest.

"What then?" he says, "if good health and rest and freedom from pains are going to be no hindrance to virtue, will you not seek them?" Why should I not seek them? Not because they are goods, but because they are according to nature, and because they will be taken by me with a good judgment. What then will be the good in them? This one thing, to be well chosen. For when I put on a garment as I ought, when I walk as I ought, when I dine as I should, it is not the dinner or the walk or the clothing that are goods, but my own purpose in them, preserving in each thing the measure agreeable to reason.

I will add still further: the choice of a clean garment is something to be sought by a man. For man is by nature a clean and well-groomed creature. Therefore a clean garment is not a good in itself, but the choice of a clean garment is, since the good is not in the thing but in the choosing of quality; our actions are honourable, not the things themselves which we do.

What I have said of clothing, the same think me to say of the body. For this too nature has put around the mind as a kind of garment; it is its covering. But who has ever valued garments by the wardrobe? It is not the sheath that makes the sword good or bad. Therefore concerning the body too I give you the same answer: I shall indeed take, if the choice be given me, both health and strength, but the good will be my judgment about them, not they themselves.

"The wise man, indeed," he says, "is happy; yet he does not attain that highest good unless the natural instruments too answer to him. So a man who has virtue cannot indeed be wretched, but he is not most happy who is bereft of natural goods, such as health, such as the soundness of his limbs."

What seems more incredible, that you grant, that someone amid the greatest and continual pains is not wretched, is even happy; what is lighter, you deny, that he is most happy. And yet if virtue can bring it about that a man is not wretched, it will more easily bring it about that he is most happy. For there is less interval between the happy and the most happy than between the wretched and the happy. Can a thing which has the power to snatch a man from misery and set him among the happy fail to add, what remains, that he be most happy? It fails at the very summit of the ascent.

There are in life things advantageous and disadvantageous, both outside our power. If a good man is not made wretched, however many disadvantages press upon him, neither is he made not-most-happy, however many goods are lacking to him. For as he is not pressed below the happy by the abundance of disadvantages, so he is not driven from the most happy by the lack of goods. He is as much most happy without those things as he is happy under those evils.

A little while ago I was saying that a little spark contributes nothing to the light of the sun. For by its brightness whatever would shine without it is hidden. "But some things," he says, "stand in the sun's way too." But the sun is whole even amid the things that stand in its way, and even when something stands between to shut off our view, it is in its work, on its course. As often as it shines through the midst of the clouds, it is no less, nor even slower, than when it is clear, since there is a great difference whether something merely stands in the way, or hinders.

In the same way things set against virtue take nothing from it; it is not less, but shines less. To us perhaps it does not appear and gleam as fully, but to itself it is the same and, after the manner of the obscured sun, exercises its force in secret. So much, then, can calamities and losses and wrongs do against virtue as a mist can do against the sun.

There is one found who says that the wise man who has used a body not very prosperous is neither wretched nor happy. This man too is mistaken, for he sets the gifts of chance on a level with the virtues and grants as much to honourable things as to things lacking the honourable. But what is fouler, what more unworthy, than that things venerable should be compared with things despised? For venerable are justice, devotion, faith, bravery, prudence; on the contrary, cheap are the things which often befall the cheapest men in greater measure, a solid leg and arm and teeth and the soundness of the muscles.

Then, if the wise man whose body is troublesome shall be held neither wretched nor happy, but in the middle, his life will be one to be neither sought nor shunned. But what is so absurd as that the wise man's life should be one to be neither sought nor shunned? Or what is so far from belief as that any man's life should not be to be sought, or that, if it is to be sought, it should not be most happy? The losses of the body do not make him wretched; they suffer him to be happy. For things that have not the power to transfer to the worse have not the power to overcome the better.

"We know," he says, "something cold and hot; between the two is the lukewarm; so someone is happy, someone wretched, someone neither happy nor wretched." I wish to shake out this image set against us. If I add more cold to that lukewarm thing, it will become cold. If I pour in more heat, it will at last become hot. But to this man who is neither wretched nor happy, however much I add to his miseries, he will not be wretched, as you say; therefore that image is unlike.

Then I hand you a man neither wretched nor happy. To him I add blindness; he does not become wretched. I add lameness; he does not become wretched. I add continual and grievous pains; he does not become wretched. The man whom so many evils do not transfer to a wretched life do not even draw him out of a happy one.

If, as you say, the wise man cannot fall from happy to wretched, he cannot fall to not-happy. For why should he, who has begun to slip, stop at any point? What forbids him to slide to the bottom forbids him to stop in the middle. Why should not a life that cannot be made wretched be a happy one? If it is whole in any part, it is whole.

"What then?" he says, "is not the wise man happier who has lived longer, whom no pain has called away, than he who has always wrestled with bad fortune?" Answer me: is he also better and more honourable? If he is not these, neither is he happier. He must live more rightly to live more happily; if he cannot live more rightly, neither can he live more happily.

What is chief in virtue? Not to need the future, nor to count its days; in however little time it completes eternal goods. These things seem to us incredible and running beyond human nature. For we measure its majesty by our own weakness, and we give to our vices the name of nature. What of this, that to a man set amid the greatest torments it is permitted to say, "I am happy"? And yet this very voice was heard in the workshop of pleasure. "This day, and this most happy day, I pass," said Epicurus, when on the one side the difficulty of his urine tormented him, on the other the incurable pain of his ulcerated bowels.

Why, then, should these things be incredible among those who cultivate virtue, when they are found even among those over whom pleasure is mistress? These men too, low and base of mind, say that the wise man will be neither wretched nor happy. And yet this too is incredible, nay, the more incredible. For I do not see how, when virtue has been removed from its place, the happy life does not fall to the very bottom. But it keeps its goods, even though they are vexed; for those goods are unconquered. And though they may be assailed, they cannot be vanquished.

"To the immortal gods alone," he says, "have virtue and the happy life fallen; to us a kind of shadow and likeness of those goods. We approach them, we do not arrive." But reason is common to gods and men; in them it is consummated, in us it is capable of consummation.

But our vices lead us to despair; for that other, the second-best man, is, as it were, someone too little steadfast in keeping the best things, whose judgment still wavers and is uncertain. He longs for the use of his eyes and ears, for good health, and for a body not foul to look upon, and besides, with his present condition remaining, for a longer span of years.

By this a life not to be repented of can be led; but to the imperfect man there is in his evil a certain force, because he has a mind given to error, capable of being moved into wickedness. "But if any man has virtue and a mind present in his body, he equals the gods and tends toward that place, mindful of his origin."

No one strives wrongly to ascend whence he had descended. And what reason is there why you should not think that something divine exists in him who is a part of God? This whole by which we are contained is both one and God; and we are his fellows and his members. Our mind is capable of him, it is carried up to him, if vices do not press it down. As the posture of our bodies is upright and looks toward heaven, so the mind, which may stretch as far as it wills, was formed by the nature of things for this, that it should wish for things equal to the gods. And if it uses its own strength and stretches itself into its own space, it climbs to the heights by no path that is another's.

Great was the labour to go to heaven; the mind returns thither. When it has gained this road, it goes boldly, a despiser of all things, nor does it look back to money, and it judges gold and silver, most worthy of that darkness in which they have lain, not by that splendour by which the eyes of the ignorant are struck, but by the foul mire with which our age, deceived as to the true things, has befouled them. It knows, I say, that riches are stored elsewhere than where they are heaped; that the mind ought to be filled, not the money-box.

This mind one may set over the dominion of all things, this one may bring into possession of the nature of things, so that it may bound its own with the limits of the rising and the setting, and, after the manner of the gods, possess all things, and may, by its own vast wealth, look down on the rich, of whom no one rejoices so much in what is his as each grieves at what is another's.

When it has borne itself up to this height, the body too it tends not from love but from care, as a needful thing, and is unwilling to be subject to that which it rules. For no one is free who is a slave to the body, who is even sold for it. For, that I may pass over the other masters whom excessive care of it finds, its sway is fickle, dainty.

From this body the mind goes forth now with an even temper, now leaps out, and does not then inquire what the end of the abandoned body is to be. But as we take no heed of shavings from the beard and hair, so that divine mind, about to go out of the man, considers it indifferent whither its lodging shall be borne, whether fire burns it up, or stone shuts it in, or earth presses it down, or wild beasts tear it. "It is no more its concern than the afterbirth is the concern of a newborn child." Whether thrown out, the body lies a prey to the birds, or is consumed, "given as spoil to the dogs of the sea," what is that to one who is nothing?

But even then, while he is among men, he fears none of the threats against his body, nor those who would foully mangle the corpse for the sake of insult. "I ask no one for the last office, I commend to no one my remains. The nature of things has provided that no one should lie unburied; whomever cruelty has cast out, the day will cover." One spoke eloquently who said: "I care not for a tomb. Nature buries the abandoned." You would think a man tight-girt had said this. For he had a talent both great and manly, had he not loosened its girdle in prosperity. Farewell.