524 2026
This is an AI modernization of The Consolation of Philosophy into contemporary English. The original is available from Standard Ebooks. Also available as an epub.
In 523 Boethius was the most powerful civilian official in Italy. He was a Roman aristocrat serving Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who then ruled the peninsula; he had been consul, his two sons had been consuls together the year before, and he had set out to translate the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, getting as far as most of Aristotle's logic before he was stopped. He had set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin before the language was lost. Then he defended a senator accused of treasonable correspondence with Constantinople, was charged with the same offence himself, condemned without a hearing, and held in custody at Pavia. He wrote this book there, and was executed shortly afterwards.
It opens with him feeling sorry for himself, writing verses about his own misfortune with the Muses of poetry standing at his elbow. A tall woman appears in the cell, throws the Muses out for making the sickness worse, and identifies herself as Philosophy. The rest is a conversation between the two of them across five books: on Fortune and what she ever promised, on what happiness actually is, on why the wicked appear to prosper, and finally on whether God's knowing tomorrow leaves anything for a person to decide. He never mentions his sentence again.
The book alternates prose argument with poems — thirty-nine of them, one after most chapters. They are not ornament. Philosophy uses them deliberately, as a change of medicine, and they carry the argument restated as feeling. All thirty-nine are here, as verse, and they are unrhymed, because Boethius wrote them unrhymed in some twenty-eight different classical metres. The rhyme in the Victorian English this edition works from was the translator's own addition. Abridged editions cut the poems, which removes half the book.
There is not one Christian doctrine in it. No scripture, no Christ, no resurrection, nothing that would place its author in any church — a Christian under sentence of death consoling himself entirely by argument. That matters because of who read it afterwards. For a thousand years this was the book educated Europe actually had by heart: Alfred the Great put it into Old English, Chaucer into Middle English, Elizabeth I into her own hand. Fortune's wheel is in every medieval manuscript because of Book Two, where Fortune stops being a figure of speech and speaks in her own defence.
The definition of eternity in Book Five — the complete and perfect possession of endless life all at once — is the one Aquinas took over whole. It is also, given where the man was sitting, the point of the whole exercise.
Book One: The Sorrows of Boethius
Book Two: The Vanity of Fortune’s Gifts
Book Three: True Happiness and False
Book Four: Good and Ill Fortune
Book Five: Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge
I who once wrote songs with pleasure, in the flourishing of my days, now am driven, weeping, to take up measures made for grief. Look — the Muses, hair torn loose, guide my pen and give my sorrow words; real tears, running down their faces, fall into my sad complaint. These alone were unafraid to keep me company in danger; these have followed the exiled man to the end of his lonely road. These that were the pride and pleasure of my youth and my high place are the only comfort left me in an old man's bitter fate. Old? Yes — quickly, before I knew it, age has come, pressed on me by these griefs; and Grief has told me to put on the clothes that suit her. White hairs, scattered on my head before their time, proclaim my troubles, and the skin hangs loose and shrivelled on a frame that sorrow shrank. Happy the death that does not come in the sweet, sweet years of peace, but that comes to the brokenhearted when they call, and brings release. Yet Death walks past the wretched, stops his ears and sleeps on deeply; will not hear the cry of anguish, will not close the eyes that weep. While inconstant Fortune poured her gifts on me and all was bright, one dark hour had nearly drowned me in the darkness that has no end. Now, because misfortune's shadow has come over that false face, cruel Life drags out its lingering, though I loathe its weary running. Friends, why did you tell me once so lightly that I was a happy man? Anyone who could fall this far was never firmly founded.
While I was brooding like this in silence, setting down my miserable complaints with my pen, it seemed to me that a woman appeared standing over my head, and her face was more than usually worth reverence. Her eyes burned like fire and saw further than human eyes see; her colour was fresh and her strength showed no sign of wearing out — and yet she was full of years, and plainly did not belong to our age at all. Her height was hard to judge. One moment she was no taller than anyone else; the next her forehead seemed to strike the sky, and when she lifted her head higher still she began to pierce into the heavens themselves and to defeat the eyes of anyone watching her. Her clothes were made of some imperishable stuff, woven of the finest thread with the most delicate workmanship; and she had made them herself with her own hands, as she told me later. Their beauty had been somewhat dulled by age and neglect, and they had the grimy look marble takes on when it is left out in the weather. Along the bottom edge was woven the Greek letter Π, which stands for the practical life; at the top the letter θ, for the life of thought; and between the two, steps like a staircase leading from the lower letter to the upper one. The robe had also been torn by violent hands, each of which had snatched away whatever it could grab. In her right hand she held a notebook, and in her left a staff.
And when she saw the Muses of Poetry standing by my bed, dictating the words of my lament, she was angry for a moment and her eyes flashed. "Who," she said, "let these stagey little tarts in to see a sick man? They have no medicine for his illness; they feed it with sweet poison. These are the ones who kill off the rich crop of reason with the barren thorns of feeling, who get people's minds used to being ill instead of setting them free. If it were some ordinary man your charms were seducing, as is usually the way with you, I would mind less. I should not have wasted my own work on him. But this man was brought up on the philosophy of Elea and the Academy. Go on, get out, you sirens — your sweetness does not last. Leave him to my Muses to look after and heal."
At this scolding the whole troop looked more downcast than ever, hung their heads, went red with shame, and left the room in misery.
But my sight was blurred with so much weeping, and I could not make out who this woman of such commanding authority was. I was struck dumb, and with my eyes fixed on the ground I went on silently waiting to see what she would do next. Then she came closer and sat down on the edge of my bed; and looking into my face, which was heavy with grief and turned down towards the ground in sadness, she lamented the disorder of my mind in these words:
Look how deep his mind is sunk, how wildly it is thrown about! Always, always towards the dark it settles, its own light lost, whenever the winds that rise from earth beat on it, and the waves of worry climb. Once he walked the open sky, traced out the bright road of the sun, watched the cold moon fill and empty; and he would not rest until no star that steers among the spheres was missing from his reckoning. Why the blustering winds go out and trouble the calm face of the sea; whose hand it is that turns the world; and why the sun should run his even course from the red east down to the waters in the west; what it is that tempers so the mild hours of the spring, so that the earth breaks into roses and garlands itself with them; who loads the ripened year with grapes in clusters when the autumn comes: all this he knew — he always strove to guess at nature's deepest law. Now he lies with reason's light put out, his neck in chains, and forced down by the heavy weight, his eyes are fastened to dull earth.
"But the time," she said, "calls for treatment rather than complaint." Then, fixing her eyes full on me: "Are you that man," she said, "who was once fed on my milk and brought up on my food, and who grew from it into the full strength of a grown mind? And I had given you armour that would have made you unbeatable, if you had not thrown it away first. Do you know me? Why do you say nothing? Is it shame or astonishment that has struck you dumb? I would rather it were shame; but as I can see, it is a stupor that has come over you."
Then, when she saw that I was not merely not answering but mute and altogether unable to speak, she laid her hand gently on my chest and said: "There is no danger. This is lethargy, the usual illness of a mind that has been taken in. He has forgotten himself for a while; he will get his memory back easily enough, if he first recognises me. And so that he can, let me wipe his eyes clear of the fog of mortal things." And with a fold of her robe she dried my eyes, which were swimming with tears.
Then the darkness of night was scattered and my eyes could see again. So it is when the rainy north-west wind rolls the storm-clouds up the sky: the sun is hidden, the whole heaven blotted out in a starless night. But let the north wind sweep down on it and set the imprisoned daylight free, and all at once the shining god streams out and strikes our dazzled eyes with his own beams.
In the same way the clouds of my depression broke up. I saw the clear sky, and got back the power to recognise my doctor's face. So when I had lifted my eyes and looked steadily at her, I saw it was my old nurse Philosophy, in whose house I had spent my time since I was young.
"Why," I said, "mistress of every excellence, have you come down from above into the loneliness of my exile? Is it so that you can be falsely accused along with me?"
"Could I abandon you, child," she said, "and not take a share of this trouble, and so lighten the load you have taken on yourself because people hate my name? Even leaving aside that Philosophy is not permitted to let an innocent man walk his road without company — do you suppose I would be afraid of a bad reputation, or shrink from it as though something strange and new had happened? Do you imagine this is the first time in a wicked age that Wisdom has been in danger? Long ago, before my servant Plato was alive, did I not fight hard battles against the recklessness of stupidity? And in Plato's own lifetime his master Socrates won, with my help, the victory of an unjust death.
"And afterwards, when the herd of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest tried one after another to seize what he had left behind, and were dragging me off as their prize while I protested and fought them, they tore to pieces the robe I had woven with my own hands; and each of them made off clutching his torn scrap, convinced that the whole of me had come into his possession. Some of them were destroyed because a few threads of my clothing were seen on them, and the ignorant crowd mistook them for my disciples.
"Perhaps you have not heard about the banishment of Anaxagoras, or the cup of poison Socrates drank, or the torturing of Zeno, because those things happened in another country. But you might well have learned the fate of Arrius, of Seneca, of Soranus, whose stories are neither old nor obscure. Nothing brought those men down except that they had settled into my principles, and their lives were an obvious contrast to the way the wicked live. So there is nothing for you to wonder at if we are knocked about by storms on the sea of this life, when our chief aim has been to refuse to go along with people who do wrong.
"And although the army of the wicked may be large, it deserves contempt, because it has no commander and is rushed about here and there at the blind driving of a mad delusion. And if from time to time they draw up against us and come on in overwhelming numbers, our own leader withdraws her forces into the citadel while they are busy looting the useless baggage. And we, from up there, safe out of all that wild work, laugh at them carrying off the most worthless things there are, protected by a wall that aggressive stupidity cannot even hope to reach."
Whoever, calm and self-possessed, sets his foot on arrogant fate, standing firm, come what may, keeping his face unbeaten still — him the rage of furious seas heaving up their wild threats, and the flames out of the smoky forge that Vesuvius throws up, and the bolt out of the sky that splits the tower, cannot frighten. Why then should you be terrified by a tyrant's feeble strength? Do not dread him, fear no harm, and you will have disarmed his rage. But the man who gives way to hope or fear, who has lost the rule of his own heart, has thrown his shield away and run from the field like a coward; without knowing it he has forged the chains his own neck must wear.
"Do you follow?" she asked. "Are my words getting into your mind? Or are you like 'the donkey listening to the lyre'? Why are you crying? Why are the tears running down your face?
"'Speak out, do not hide it in your heart.'
If you want the doctor's help, you have to show her the wound."
Then I pulled together what strength I had and began. "Does it still need telling? Is Fortune's cruelty against me not plain enough? Does the mere look of this place not move you? Is this the library, the room you had chosen as your regular haunt in my house, where we so often sat together and talked about everything in heaven and earth? Did I look like this, and dress like this, when I searched out nature's hidden secrets with you, and you traced the courses of the stars for me with your rod, and shaped my character and my whole way of living to the pattern of the order of the sky? Is this what my obedience has earned?
"And yet you laid down through Plato's mouth the maxim that states would be happy either if philosophers ruled them, or if it happened that their rulers took up philosophy. Through his mouth too you pointed out this compelling reason why philosophers should go into public life: that if the reins of government are left to unprincipled and dissolute citizens, trouble and ruin come upon the good. Following these instructions, I have tried to apply in the business of public administration the principles I learned from you in unhurried privacy. You are my witness, and so is the god who planted you in the minds of the wise, that I brought nothing to my duties but a keenness for the public good.
"That is why I have got into bitter and unforgivable quarrels, and why — as always happens if a man holds on to an independent conscience — I have had to think nothing of offending the powerful in the cause of justice. How often have I met Conigastus and stopped him in his attacks on the property of the weak? How often have I blocked Trigguilla, the steward of the king's household, even when his villainous schemes were as good as done? How often have I risked my own position and influence to protect miserable people from the endless false charges with which the greed and licence of the foreigners were constantly harassing them? Nobody has ever pulled me aside from justice into injustice.
"When the fortunes of the provincials were being ruined by private plunder and public taxation together, I grieved as much as the victims did. When in a time of serious shortage a compulsory purchase was announced — as ruinous as it was unjustifiable, and certain to leave Campania starving — I took on a fight with the praetorian prefect in the public interest; I argued the case in front of the king himself, and I got the purchase stopped. I pulled the ex-consul Paulinus out of the open jaws of the court's bloodhounds, who in their greedy hopes had already carved up his wealth in their minds. To save Albinus, a man of the same high rank, from the penalties of a charge that had already been decided, I laid myself open to the hatred of the informer Cyprian.
"You would think I had built up enough enemies? Well, with the rest of my countrymen at any rate my safety should have been secure, since my love of justice had left me no hope of security at court. And yet who was it who brought the charges that have destroyed me? One of my accusers is Basil, who, after being dismissed from the king's household, was driven by his debts to lay information against my name. There is Opilio, and there is Gaudentius, men whom the king's sentence had condemned to banishment for a whole range of offences; and when they refused to go and tried to save themselves by taking sanctuary, the king, as soon as he heard, decreed that if they did not leave the city of Ravenna within a set time they should be branded on the forehead and thrown out. What could be more severe than that? And on that very day these same men laid information against me — and it was accepted. Was this what my way of life had earned? Did being certain of my conviction in advance make them suitable accusers? Has Fortune no shame — if not at an innocent man being accused, then at least at the vileness of the accusers?
"Perhaps you are wondering what the charges against me actually add up to. I wanted, they say, to save the senate. How? I am accused of preventing an informer from producing evidence to prove the senate guilty of treason. So tell me, mistress, what is your advice? Shall I deny the charge, so as not to bring shame on you? But I did want it, and I shall never stop wanting it. Shall I admit it? Then the work of blocking that informer is over. Shall I call wanting to preserve that famous institution a crime? The senate, by its own decrees about me, has certainly made it one. But blind stupidity, however it may fool itself with false names, cannot change what things really deserve; and remembering Socrates' rule, I do not think it right either to keep the truth hidden or to let a falsehood stand. However that may be, I leave it to your judgement and to the verdict of people who can tell the difference. And so that the course of events and the true facts should not be hidden from later ages, I have written an account of the affair myself.
"What is there to say about the forged letters, which are used to try to prove that I hoped for the freedom of Rome? Their falsity would have been obvious if I had been allowed to use the informers' own confession, which in every matter is the most convincing evidence there is. Why — what hope of freedom is left to us? I wish there were any. I should have answered as Canius did, when Caligula accused him of having known about a conspiracy against him. 'If I had known,' he said, 'you never would have.'
"Grief has not blunted my judgement so far on this point that I complain of wicked men plotting their villainies against the good; what does astonish me is that they get what they hoped for. Wanting to do evil is perhaps down to the imperfection of human nature; that scoundrels should be able to carry out their worst designs against the innocent, while God is watching, is truly monstrous. That is why one of your own students asked, and not unreasonably, 'If God exists, where does evil come from? And where does good come from, if he does not?'
"But it might well be that wretches who want the blood of every honest man and of the whole senate should want to destroy me too, whom they could see was a bulwark of the senate and of every honest man. But did I deserve such a fate from the senators as well? You remember, I think — since you always stood beside me to direct what I should do and say — you remember how at Verona, when the king, keen for a general destruction, was determined to implicate the entire senatorial order in the treason charge brought against Albinus, I maintained the innocence of every one of its members without a thought for my own danger. You know that what I say is true, and that I have never boasted about my good deeds in order to praise myself. For whenever a man announces his good deeds and gets the reward of a reputation for them, he reduces to that extent the secret reward of a good conscience.
"You can see what my innocence has come to. Instead of collecting the rewards of real virtue, I am undergoing the penalties of a guilt falsely charged against me — and more than that. Never did an outright confession of guilt produce such unanimous severity in a bench of judges, without at least a few of them being softened by some consideration, either of the mere frailty of human nature or of the universal instability of fortune. If I had been accused of planning to burn the temples, to butcher the priests with a sacrilegious sword, to arrange the massacre of every honest man, I would still have been produced in court and punished only on proper confession or conviction. As it is, for excessive zeal on the senate's behalf I have been condemned to outlawry and death, unheard and undefended, at a distance of nearly five hundred miles. My judges — you thoroughly deserve that nobody should ever again be convicted of a fault like mine.
"And yet even my accusers could see how honourable the charge they were bringing was; so, in order to smear some shadow of guilt over it, they falsely claimed that in the pursuit of my ambition I had polluted my conscience with acts of sacrilege. And yet your spirit, living in me, had driven every appetite for worldly success out of the room where my soul lives; and with your eye always on me there could have been no room left for sacrilege. For you repeated in my ear every day, and dripped into my mind, the Pythagorean maxim: follow God. It was hardly likely that I would want help from the lowest sort of spirits when you were shaping me towards an excellence that would make me resemble God. And besides, the blamelessness of the inner rooms of my own house, the company of friends of the highest integrity, and a father-in-law respected both for his pure character and for his active generosity, protect me from the very suspicion of sacrilege.
"And yet — this is the outrageous part — they even get this charge believed because of you. I am likely to be thought mixed up in wickedness for the very reason that I am steeped in your teaching and settled in your ways. So it is not enough that my devotion to you should do me no good; you must be attacked as well, because of the hatred I have brought on myself. Truly this is the crown of my misfortunes: that people's opinions mostly look not at what a thing actually deserves but at how it turned out, and only credit foresight where Fortune has stamped the outcome with her approval. And so reputation is the very first thing to abandon the unlucky. I remember with disgust how perverse popular report is, and how varied and contradictory people's judgements. I will say only this: the most crushing of Fortune's burdens is that as soon as a charge is fixed on unhappy men, they are believed to have deserved what they suffer. As for me, banished from every blessing life has, stripped of my offices, my name blackened, I am being punished for doing good.
"And now I think I can see the villains' dens heaving with joy and celebration, all the most recklessly unscrupulous of them threatening a new crop of lying informations, good men flattened with terror at my danger, every thug spurred on to new daring by going unpunished and to success by the profits of nerve, and the innocent robbed not only of peace of mind but of every means of defending themselves. So I would gladly cry out:
Builder of that dome of stars, you who, throned in the eternal, spin the swift globe of the sky and steer the stars by more than earthly law: so the moon in the full splendour of her sphere puts out the lamps of night, but drawn in close to her brother's disc she loses her own light. You, who at nightfall show us the evening star with its cold shine, and make the morning star put out his beams as the sun's light grows; while winter's frost holds power you keep the daylight short; and when the summer's heat is on you speed the hours of night away. You rule the turning year: when the rough north wind bears down the leaves fall; and they come back again when the west wind coaxes them. The crops that Sirius burns high were sown under Arcturus' watch: each one confesses the reign of law and keeps to its own place. Ruler over everything — is it only man You have no regard for? It is against him, poor slave, that Fortune plays her most reckless games. The punishment guilt has earned falls on the innocent instead; and lifted high, the most profane work their spite on the just. Virtue cowers in dark corners, the righteous carry the stain of crime, perjury and elaborate lies do no harm to the man who dares them. But whenever the wicked decide to use their strength to get what they want, then kings whom whole nations call mighty grovel in the dust. Look, look at this earth, You who founded everything on sure law: are we worth nothing, we human beings, out of all creation? We are badly tossed on Fortune's tide; Master, tell the waves to fall. And guide the ways of earth by that same order You keep in Your heaven.
When I had poured out my grievances in this long unbroken wail, she, with a calm face and not in the least put out by my complaints, said:
"When I saw you miserable and in tears, I knew at once that you were wretched and an exile. But how distant an exile I would not have known if your own speech had not told me. And yet how far from your country have you really been banished? Say rather that you have wandered off — or, if you insist on calling it banishment, that you have banished yourself, since nobody else could ever lawfully have had that power over you.
"Now if you will call to mind what country you come from, it is not governed, as Athens once was, by the sovereignty of the crowd. 'One is its ruler, one its king,' and he takes pleasure in the number of his citizens, not in their exile; and to submit to his government and obey his laws is perfect freedom. Do you not know that most ancient law of this country of yours, which lays down that no one at all who has chosen to settle there may be sent into exile? For there is truly no danger that a man inside its walls and defences should deserve to be exiled. But the man who has stopped wanting to live there has at the same moment stopped deserving to.
"So it is not the look of this place that moves me so much as the look of you. What I miss is not walls of a library set off with glass and ivory but the room in your mind, where I once put — not books, but the thing that gives books their value: the doctrines that are in mine.
"Now, what you have said about your services to the state is true, though far too little compared with the size of what you deserve. The things charged against you that you have described, whether they are to your credit or simply false accusations, are public knowledge. As for the crimes and deceptions of the informers, you were right to think it best to pass over them lightly, because popular opinion has passed a better and fuller judgement on them already. You have complained bitterly about the injustice of the senate. You have grieved that I have been slandered, and lamented the damage to my reputation. And at last your anger blazed out against Fortune, and you complained about how unfairly your merits have been repaid. Finally your frantic muse framed a prayer that the peace which rules in heaven might rule the earth as well.
"But since a crowd of unruly passions has attacked your mind, and you are pulled apart by anger and pain and grief, strong remedies are not right for you in your present state. So for a while I shall use gentler methods, so that the swellings which have hardened under this inflow of disturbing passion may be softened by mild treatment, until they can stand the force of sharper cures."
The man who trusts the generous seed to furrows that will not take it when the Crab is at its fiercest and scorching all the plain will find his barn empty and live on acorns instead. Do not go out to gather violets from the purple hillside while the furious winds of winter are sweeping down the valleys; do not rush the grape to the press in the middle of spring. God has given each thing its own appointed season, and allows no confusing change in that great plan of his. So whoever leaves the proper order will regret how it turns out.
"First, then, will you let me test the state of your mind with a few questions, so that I can work out how to begin the cure?"
"Ask whatever you like," I said, "and I will answer."
Then she said: "This world of ours — do you think it is run at random and by accident, or do you believe there is some rational guidance in it?"
"No," I said, "there is no way I could think that motions as fixed as these are settled by random chance. I know that God the creator presides over his own work, and the day will never come that drives me off holding on to the truth of that."
"Yes," she said, "you said so just now in your song, when you complained that human beings alone had no share in the divine care. About everything else you were unshaken in believing that reason governs it. And yet I am astonished that you have fallen ill while holding that opinion so firmly. But let us probe deeper: something or other is missing, I think. Tell me — since you have no doubt that God governs the world, do you see by what means he rules it?"
"I hardly understand what you mean," I said, "let alone answer the question."
"Was I not right that something is missing, through which, as through a gap in the ramparts, disease has got in and unsettled your mind? But tell me: do you remember what universal end everything in nature is aimed at?"
"I heard it once," I said, "but grief has blunted my memory."
"And yet you know where everything came from."
"Yes, I know that," I said, "and I have already answered: from God."
"Then how is it possible that you do not know what the end of existence is, when you understand its source and origin? Still, these disturbances of mind have the power to shake a man's footing; they cannot pull him up and root him out of himself altogether. But answer this too, if you would: do you remember that you are a human being?"
"How could I not?" I said.
"Then can you say what a human being is?"
"Is your question whether I know myself to be a creature that has reason and dies? I do acknowledge myself to be that."
Then she said: "Do you know yourself to be anything else?"
"No."
"Now," she said, "I know another cause of your illness, and a serious one. You have stopped knowing what you yourself are. So now I have found out both the causes of your sickness and the means of restoring your health. It is because forgetting yourself has bewildered your mind that you have wept over yourself as an exile stripped of what was his; it is because you do not know the end of existence that you think loathsome and wicked men are happy and powerful; and it is because you have forgotten by what means the earth is governed that you think Fortune's changes ebb and flow with no guiding hand to hold them in.
"These are serious enough to cause not just illness but death. But thanks to the author of our health, the light of nature has not left you completely. In your sound judgement about the world's government — in your believing it subject not to the random drift of chance but to divine reason — we have the spark from which your recovery can be hoped for. So do not be afraid: from these weak embers the vital heat will be kindled in you again. But since it is not yet time for strong remedies, and since the mind is plainly so made that when it throws off true opinions it immediately puts on false ones, from which rises a cloud of confusion that spoils its proper sight, I shall now try to break up these mists with a mild and soothing application, so that the darkness of misleading passion may be scattered and you may come to make out the brightness of the true light."
Stars give no light through the black night when the clouds close. And the whipped wave, if the winds rage over the sea — once as serene as the bright day — is fouled and spoiled by the storm's spite, and shows itself clouded and dirty. Often the clear stream straying downhill towards the sea is blocked and held by some tumbled slab of fallen rock. So: do you want to make out the truth clear and plain, and hold to the road steadily, and not turn off it? Then let no joy, no hope, no fear come near you; drive grief away. The mind these rule is chained and blind.
After that she was silent for a while; and when a measured pause in her talk had brought my flagging attention back, she began: "If I have properly worked out the character and the causes of your illness, you are wasting away with a regretful longing for the fortune you used to have. It is the change in that fortune, as you see it, that has done all this to your mind.
"I know that Siren's many tricks perfectly well — the deadly charm of the friendship she pretends to have for her victims while she is scheming to trap them, and how she abandons them without warning and leaves them flattened under a grief they cannot carry. Think about her nature, her character, what she is worth, and you will soon admit that in her you neither possessed nor have lost anything of any value. I do not think I need take much trouble bringing this back to you, since even while she was still with you, even while she was making a fuss of you, you used to attack her in manly terms and tell her off with maxims out of my own holy storehouse.
"But every sudden change of circumstances inevitably brings a certain upheaval of the spirit. That is how it has come about that you too have been separated for a while from your peace of mind. But it is time for you to take and drain a draught that is soft and pleasant to the taste, which as it works inward may prepare the way for stronger doses. So I call in the sweet persuasiveness of Rhetoric — who only walks the right road when she does not desert my instructions — and I tell my servant Music to join in with her singing, now in a lighter and now in a graver strain.
"So what is it, poor mortal, that has thrown you into weeping and mourning? Your eyes have seen something strange and unfamiliar, I think. You imagine Fortune has changed towards you; you are mistaken. Her ways were always these, and this was always her nature. In her very changeableness she has kept her real constancy towards you. She was exactly this when she was loading you with caresses, when she was leading you on with the enticements of a false happiness. You have found out how changeable the face of the blind goddess is. She still veils herself from everyone else; to you she has revealed her whole character.
"If you like her, take her as she is and do not complain. If you loathe her treachery, turn away from her in contempt, have nothing to do with her, because her illusions are poisonous. The very thing that is now the cause of your great grief ought to have brought you peace. You have been left by somebody nobody can be sure will not leave him. Or do you really put a value on a happiness that is certain to go? Let me ask again: is Fortune's presence precious to you, when she cannot be trusted to stay and will bring grief when she leaves? Why, if she cannot be kept as long as you please, and if her flight brings disaster down on you, what is this passing visitor but a sign of trouble coming?
"It is truly not enough to look only at what is in front of your eyes. Wisdom measures how things turn out, and this same changeableness, cutting both ways, makes Fortune's threats nothing to be frightened of and her caresses hardly worth wanting. Finally, you ought to put up with whatever happens inside Fortune's estate, once you have put your head under her yoke. But if you want to lay down a law about staying and going for the woman you have of your own accord chosen for your mistress, are you not in the wrong? Are you not embittering by impatience a lot you cannot change?
"If you handed your sails to the winds, you would travel not where you meant to go but where the winds drove you; if you trusted your seed to the fields, you would have to set the fruitful years against the barren ones. You have handed yourself over to Fortune's rule; you must put up with your mistress's whims. What — are you actually trying to stop the swing of a turning wheel? You most stupid of mortals: if it ever stopped turning, it would stop being Fortune's wheel."
Mad Fortune sweeps along in reckless pride, as unreliable as the tide in the Euripus strait; one moment she tramples great kings underfoot, the next she puts the beaten man in the winner's seat. She pays no attention to the wail of the miserable, but laughs at the griefs her own mischief causes. This is her game; this is how she proves her power; and it is a fine wonder when in a single hour she shows her favourite lifted high into bliss and then dropped headlong into the pit of misery.
"Now I should like to argue with you a little in Fortune's own words. You judge whether her case is a fair one.
"'Man,' she might say, 'why do you come after me every day with your complaints? What harm have I done you? What goods of yours have I taken away? Pick any judge you like and let us argue in front of him about who rightfully owns wealth and rank. If you can show me that any one of these things really belongs to a mortal man, I will freely grant that the things you claim are yours.
"'When nature brought you out of your mother's womb, I took you up — naked and with nothing, as you were — I fed you out of my own substance, and, being partial to you, I brought you up rather too indulgently; and that is exactly what makes you rebellious against me now. I surrounded you with a royal abundance of everything in my power. Now it is my pleasure to draw my hand back. You have reason to thank me for the use of what was not yours; you have no right to complain, as though you had lost something entirely your own.
"'So why are you groaning? I have done you no violence. Wealth, honours and all such things are under my control. They are my servants; they know their mistress; they come with me and they leave when I leave. I would go so far as to say that if the things whose loss you are lamenting had been yours, you could never have lost them at all.
"'Am I alone to be forbidden to do what I like with my own? Nobody scolds the sky when it shows the brightness of day at one hour and wraps the daylight in the darkness of night at another; the year may garland the face of the earth with flowers and fruit and then disfigure it with storms and cold. The sea is allowed to invite you with a smooth calm surface today and to roughen tomorrow with waves and gales. Is man's insatiable greed to tie me down to a constancy that is not in my character?
"'This is my art; this is the game I never stop playing. I turn the wheel that spins. I enjoy watching the high come down and the low go up. Climb up if you want to — but only on the condition that you will not think it an outrage to come down when the rules of my game require it.
"'Did you not know what I was like? Did you not know how Croesus, king of the Lydians, who had once been a rival Cyrus feared, was afterwards pitifully handed over to the flames of the pyre and only saved by a shower of rain sent from heaven? Have you forgotten how Paullus wept honest tears over the misfortunes of King Perseus, his own prisoner? What else do the tragedies wail over, if not kingdoms brought down by Fortune's indiscriminate blows? Did you not learn as a child how there stand at the threshold of Zeus two jars, one full of blessings and the other of disasters? What if you have drawn rather generously from the good one? What if even now I have not left you altogether? What if this very changeableness of mine is a fair reason for hoping for something better?
"'But listen now, and stop letting your heart eat itself away with fretting, and do not expect to live on your own terms in a kingdom that belongs to everybody.'"
Suppose Plenty poured out her gifts with an unstinting hand, as many as the stars are, countless as the sand: would the human race be satisfied and stop its grumbling and complaint? No — though God in his generosity gave gold for the asking, and honours and rank and fame, we would be not one step nearer content; an all-devouring greed gapes with a need that only widens. Then what limits could ever hold back this wild appetite for having, when every fresh gift it is fed makes the frantic craving grow? No man is rich whose fear sees grim Want always at the door.
"If Fortune argued against you like that, you would certainly have nothing to say in reply; or, if you can find some justification for your complaints, you must show me what it is. I will give you room to speak."
Then I said: "Your arguments are plausible, certainly — soaked in the honeyed sweetness of music and rhetoric. But their charm lasts only while they are sounding in the ear; a wretched man's sense of his own misfortunes lies deeper than that, in the heart. So when the sound has stopped vibrating in the air, the grief that lives in the heart is felt again, and more bitterly."
Then she said: "That is exactly right, because we have not yet come to the cure of your illness. So far these are only sedatives, working towards the treatment of a complaint that has been stubborn up to now. The remedies that go deep I shall apply when the time comes.
"All the same, to talk you out of your determination to be thought wretched: have you forgotten how far your happiness reached and where its limits were? I say nothing of how, when you were orphaned and alone, you were taken into the care of distinguished men; how you were chosen to be allied with the highest in the state, and were already dear to them before marriage tied you to their house — which is the most precious of all bonds. Did everybody not call you supremely happy in your wife's virtues, in the splendid offices her father held, and in the blessing of sons? I pass over the distinctions you had in your youth which are often denied to old age, because I do not care to talk about blessings other people have shared.
"I would rather come to the unequalled peak of your good fortune. If the enjoyment of any earthly success weighs anything at all in the scale of happiness, can the memory of that splendid day be washed away by any rising flood of troubles? That day when you watched your two sons ride out from your house as joint consuls, with a train of senators behind them and the goodwill of the people to welcome them; when the two of them sat in the curule chairs in the senate house, and you, by your speech in praise of the king, earned a reputation for eloquence and ability; when in the Circus, seated between the two consuls, you satisfied the crowd packed around you with the triumphal handouts they were waiting for — I think that day you cheated Fortune while she was making a fuss of you and treating you as her favourite. You carried off a prize she had never granted to a private citizen before.
"So do you want to settle accounts with Fortune? This is the first time she has ever looked at you with envy. If you compare the extent and the limits of your blessings and your misfortunes, you cannot deny that you are fortunate still. Or, if you do not count yourself favoured by Fortune because what then looked like prosperity has gone, then do not count yourself wretched either, since what you now believe to be a disaster is also passing.
"What — have you only just arrived in this life, a sudden stranger to the scene? Do you think there is any stability in human affairs, when man himself vanishes in the swift running of time? It is true that there is little reason to trust that the gifts of chance will stay; and yet the last day of a life is in a manner the death of whatever Fortune is left. So what difference do you think there is between your leaving her by dying and her leaving you by running away?"
When the sun in his rose-coloured chariot begins to light the dawn, his flaming beams come at the stars and every glimmering one of them goes pale. When the wood, fed by the west wind, blushes red with rose-blossom, let the rough south wind breathe on it and it stands bare, its glory gone. The deep lies smooth and quiet while the winds are hushed asleep; then angry storms whip it up and the waves run wild and high. So if the changing face of nature does not hold still for a moment, count a man's fortunes fleeting, count happiness as brief as a dream. One law only stands fast: created things do not last.
Then I said: "What you say is true, nurse of every excellence, and I cannot deny how astonishing the swift career of my fortune was. But that is exactly what galls me more cruelly when I remember it. In bad fortune the sharpest sting of misery is to have been happy."
"Well," she said, "if you are paying the penalty for a mistaken belief, you cannot fairly lay the blame on circumstances. If it is the happiness Fortune gives that moves you — mere name though it is — then come and reckon up with me how rich you are in the number and weight of your blessings.
"If, by the kindness of Providence, you still have safe and untouched the thing that, however you rated your fortune, you would have called your most precious possession, what right have you to talk about bad luck while you keep all Fortune's better gifts? Symmachus, your wife's father — a man whose splendid character does the human race credit — is safe and unhurt; and while he grieves over the wrongs done to you, that rare nature, in whom wisdom and virtue are so finely mixed, is himself out of danger, a thing you would have been quick to buy at the price of your own life. Your wife is still alive, with her gentle temper, her unmatched decency and virtue — and the summary of all her graces is that she is her father's true daughter. She is alive, I say, and keeps her breath only for your sake, though she loathes it, and wastes away in grief and tears because you are gone; and there, if nowhere else, I will grant some damage to your happiness. And what shall I say about your sons and their consulships — how in them, so far as it can be in young men of that age, the example of their father's and grandfather's character shines out?
"Since, then, the chief concern of a mortal man is to keep his life, how happy you are, if only you could recognise your blessings, when you still possess what nobody doubts is dearer than life. So dry your tears now. Fortune's hatred has not swallowed everyone you love; the storm that has hit you is not unbearably violent, since there are anchors still holding firm, which will not let you go without either comfort in the present or hope for the future."
"I pray they may hold. While they do, however things go, I shall ride the storm out. But you can see how much of the splendour of my fortunes has been stripped away."
"We are gaining a little ground," she said, "if there is something in your lot that you are not yet altogether discontented with. But I cannot stomach your fastidiousness, when you complain with such violent grief and anxiety because your happiness falls short of complete. Who enjoys such settled good fortune as to have no quarrel at all with his circumstances? The conditions of human happiness are a troublesome business: either they are never fully realised or they never stay.
"One man has abundant riches and is ashamed of his low birth. Another is conspicuous for his high birth and would rather be obscure, because poverty embarrasses him. A third, richly supplied with both, laments living unmarried and alone. Another, happily married, is condemned to childlessness, and nurses his wealth for a stranger to inherit. Another, blessed with children, weeps over what his son or daughter has done. So it is not easy for anybody to be entirely at peace with his circumstances. In every portion there lurks something that those who have not experienced it know nothing about, and that makes the man who has wince.
"Besides, the more favoured a man is by Fortune, the more fastidiously sensitive he becomes; and unless everything answers to his whim, he is knocked flat by the most trifling misfortunes, because he has had no schooling in adversity at all. Such tiny things rob the most fortunate men of perfect happiness. How many people do you suppose would think themselves next door to heaven if some small piece of the wreck of your fortune fell to them? This very place you call exile is home to the people who live in it. So true is it that nothing is wretched but thinking makes it so, and, the other way about, every lot is happy if it is borne with an even mind.
"Who is so blessed by Fortune that he would not want to change his condition, once he gives a rebellious mood its head? How many bitternesses are mixed into the sweetness of human happiness! And even if that sweetness seems delightful while he has it, he cannot stop it leaving when it chooses to. How obviously wretched, then, is the happiness of earthly fortune, which does not last for ever even with people of an even temper, and can never fully satisfy the anxious.
"So why, children of mortality, do you look outside for the happiness whose seat is only inside you? Error and ignorance have you baffled. I will show you briefly the hinge that perfect happiness turns on. Is there anything more precious to you than yourself? Nothing, you will say. Then if you are master of yourself, you will possess something you will never be willing to lose and that Fortune cannot take from you.
"And so that you can see that happiness cannot possibly consist in things that are the playthings of chance, consider this. If happiness is the highest good of a creature that lives by reason, and if a thing that can be taken away by any means is not the highest good — since a thing that cannot be taken away is better than it — then plainly Fortune cannot hope to give happiness, because she is unstable. And besides, a man carried along by this transitory happiness either knows it is unstable or does not. If he does not know, how poor is a happiness that depends on the blindness of ignorance! If he does know, he must be afraid of losing a happiness he believes he can lose — and so a never-ending fear stops him being happy. Or does he think the chance of losing it a small matter? Then the good whose loss can be taken so calmly must be a small one.
"And further, I know you to be settled in the belief that human souls certainly do not die with the body, and convinced of it by many proofs. It is also clear that the happiness Fortune gives is brought to an end by the body's death. So there can be no doubt that if happiness is conferred that way, the whole human race sinks into misery when death closes everything. But if we know that many people have looked for the joy of happiness not only through death but through pain and suffering as well, how can life make men happy by being there, when it does not make them wretched by going away?"
The man who wants to be founded firm and to go on living secure, unmoved and fast in his place whatever the storm and the gale; who would like to be able to laugh at the sea's threatening tide — let him not look for a house on sand or on a mountain top. Up on the mountain's height the storm-winds work off their spite; the shifting sands refuse to carry what is put on them. Run from these dangers, then, however fine the view, and set your resting place on the sure base of some low rock. Then, though the tempests roar and seas thunder on the shore, you will be safe in your stronghold and rest undisturbed; you will live your days serene and laugh at the temper of the sky.
"But since my arguments are beginning to have a soothing effect on your mind, I think I may turn to somewhat stronger remedies. Come, then: suppose the gifts of Fortune were not fleeting and passing. What is there in them that could ever really become yours, or that does not lose value when it is looked at steadily and weighed fairly?
"Are riches precious, I ask you, because of your nature or because of their own? What are they but gold and heaps of money? And these fine things show their quality better in the spending than in the hoarding; for I take it to be plain that greed always makes men hateful, while generosity brings a good name. But what is transferred to somebody else cannot stay in your own possession; and if that is so, then money is only precious when it is given away, and by being handed to others stops being yours.
"Again, if all the money in the world were heaped up in one man's hands, everybody else would be made poor. A sound fills many ears at once without being broken into parts; your riches cannot pass to many people without being reduced in the process. And when that happens, they necessarily impoverish the people they leave. How poor and cramped a thing riches are, then, when more than one person cannot possess them whole, and when they fall to one man only by impoverishing everyone else.
"Or is it the glitter of gems that catches the eye? However rare and excellent their brilliance may be, remember the flashing light is in the jewels and not in you. I am frankly amazed that men admire them; for what can rightly look beautiful to a creature that has life and reason, if it has neither the movement nor the structure of life? And although such things do in the end take on some beauty from their maker's care and from their own brightness, they still in no way deserve your admiration, since their excellence is set on a lower rung than yours.
"Does the beauty of the countryside delight you? Certainly — it is a beautiful part of a very beautiful whole. And rightly we sometimes enjoy the serene calm of the sea and admire the sky, the stars, the moon, the sun. But is any of these your business? Do you dare to boast of the beauty of any of them? Is it you who are decked out with the flowers of spring? Is it your fertility that swells in the fruits of autumn? Why are you carried away by these empty raptures? Why do you hug somebody else's excellence as if it were your own? Fortune will never make yours what the nature of things has shut out of your ownership.
"No doubt the fruits of the earth are given to feed living creatures. But if you are content to supply your needs as far as nature requires, there is no need to go to Fortune for a handout. Nature is satisfied with few things, and with very little of them. If you insist on forcing extras on her when she is satisfied, what you add will turn out to be either unpleasant or harmful. But now you think it fine to shine in clothes of many colours; and yet — if there is any pleasure in the sight of such things at all — what I shall admire is the weaving, or the skill of the man who made it.
"Or perhaps it is a long train of servants that makes you happy? Why, if they behave badly they are a ruinous burden on your house and extremely dangerous to their own master; and if they are honest, how can you count somebody else's virtue among your possessions? From all of which it is plainly proved that not one of the things you count among your possessions is really yours. And if there is no beauty in them worth wanting, why should you either grieve at losing them or be glad to keep them? While if they are beautiful in their own nature, what is that to you? They would have been no less pleasing in themselves if they had never been counted among your possessions. They do not become precious by being counted in your riches; you have chosen to count them in your riches because they looked precious to you.
"So what are you after with all this noisy outcry about fortune? To drive poverty away with abundance, I suppose. And yet you find the result is exactly the opposite. This varied array of precious furniture needs more accessories to protect it; and it is a true saying that those want most who have most, and, the other way about, those want very little who measure their abundance by what nature requires and not by the surplus of empty display.
"Have you no good of your own planted inside you, that you look for your good in things outside and separate? Has the nature of things been so reversed that a creature divine by right of reason can only be splendid in his own eyes by owning lifeless goods? Everything else is content with its own; and you, who in your intelligence are like God, look for ornaments for a nature of supreme excellence among the lowest things there are, and cannot see how great a wrong you do your maker. His will was that mankind should excel everything on earth; you push your own worth down below the lowest of things.
"For if the thing in which each thing finds its good is plainly more precious than the thing whose good it is, then by your own reckoning you put yourselves below the most worthless things, when you judge those worthless things to be your good. And this does not happen undeservedly. Man is so made that he excels other things only when he knows himself, and is brought lower than the animals if he loses that self-knowledge. For other creatures to be ignorant of themselves is natural; in a human being it shows as a defect.
"How extravagant, then, is this error of yours, in thinking that anything can be improved by ornaments that are not its own. It cannot be. If such accessories add any brightness, it is the accessories that get the praise, while the thing they veil and cover stays as ugly as it was. And I say again: that is no good which harms the man who has it. Is that untrue? No, you say, quite true. And yet riches have often hurt the people who had them, since the worst sort of men, who are all the greedier because they are wicked, think nobody but themselves deserves to own all the gold and gems in the world. So you, who now go in fear of pike and sword, might have sung a carol 'in the robber's face' if you had set out on the road of life with empty pockets. What a marvellous blessing perishable wealth is, when getting it robs you of your safety!"
Too fortunate, that earlier age whose people lived content in the fields, and, still unspoiled by luxury, fed sparingly on acorns. They had no skill for blending the rich grape with the sweetness of honey, nor for dyeing the soft shining silks of China with bold Tyrian purple. Grass was their wholesome bed, the stream their drink, the tall pine's shade their roof; it was not for them to cut the deep sea or hunt the spoils of trade in strange far countries. The war trumpet had not been heard, and no bloodshed had stained the fields; for why should the fierce madness of war take up arms, when fighting brought wounds and no profit? If only our hearts could go back to walking in those ancient ways. But the greed of getting burns fiercer than the fires of Etna. Curse him, whoever he was, who first uncovered the hidden store of gold and dug out — dangerous treasure — the gems that would rather have stayed hidden.
"And what am I to say about rank and power, by which you hope to reach the sky because you do not know what real power and dignity are? Yet when rank and power have fallen to the worst sort of men, has any Etna, belching flame and a flood of fire, ever done such damage? I think you remember how your ancestors tried to abolish the consulship, which had been the foundation of their liberties, because of the overbearing pride of the consuls — and how for that same pride they had already abolished the title of king.
"And if, as happens only rarely, these privileges are given to good men, the only thing that pleases us is the virtue of the men who hold them. So it turns out that honour does not come to virtue from rank, but to rank from virtue.
"Look, too, at the nature of the power you find so attractive and glorious. Do you creatures of earth never consider what you are, and who it is you are exercising your imaginary lordship over? Suppose, among the mice, one were to stand up and claim rights and powers over the rest — would you not laugh yourselves sick? And yet, if you look only at his body, what creature can you find feebler than a man, who is often killed by a fly's bite or by some insect creeping into the inner passages of his body?
"And what rights can one man exercise over another except over the body, and over what is lower than the body — I mean his fortune? Will you bind the free spirit with your orders? Can you force a mind firmly settled by reason out of the calm that belongs to it? A tyrant once thought he could make a freeborn man reveal his fellow conspirators; the prisoner bit off his own tongue and threw it in the furious tyrant's face. So the tortures the tyrant thought were the instruments of his cruelty, the wise man turned into an opportunity for heroism.
"Besides, what is there that one man can do to another that he may not have to undergo in his own turn? We are told that Busiris, who used to kill his guests, was killed by his guest Hercules. Regulus had put in irons many of the Carthaginians he had taken in war; and soon afterwards he was holding out his own hands for the chains of the men he had beaten. So do you think a man has any power at all, when he cannot stop somebody else being able to do to him exactly what he can do to others?
"Besides, if there were any element of natural and proper good in rank and power, they would never come to the utterly bad, since opposites do not usually keep company. Nature will not have contraries joined. So, seeing there is no doubt that wicked wretches are often put in high places, it is also clear that things which will keep company with the worst of men cannot be good in their own nature. Indeed there is some reason to pass this judgement on all the gifts of fortune, which fall so plentifully to the most wicked.
"This ought to be considered as well, I think. Nobody doubts that a man is brave in whom he has seen a brave spirit living. Plainly a man endowed with speed is fast on his feet. In the same way music makes men musical, medicine makes physicians, rhetoric makes public speakers. Each of these has its own proper working by nature; there is no confusion with the effects of contrary things — indeed each of itself rejects what is incompatible with it. And yet wealth cannot put out insatiable greed, and power has never made a man master of himself when vicious appetites kept him tied in chains that would not come undone; and high office given to the wicked not only fails to make them worthy, but on the contrary reveals and puts their unworthiness on display.
"Why does that happen? Because you enjoy giving false names to things whose nature is quite unsuited to them — names the very effects of the things themselves easily prove false. And so it is: these riches, that power, this dignity, are none of them rightly so called. And finally we can draw the same conclusion about the whole realm of Fortune, in which there is plainly nothing truly worth wanting and nothing excellent in itself; for she neither always attaches herself to the good, nor makes good men of those she does attach herself to."
We know what terrible harm he did — Rome burned, the senators killed — whose hand, still wet with a brother's blood, went on to stain itself with a mother's. No tear of pity wet his cheek as he stood and looked at the corpse; that mother's beauty, once so famous, was appraised in a critic's voice. And yet from east to west, far and wide, the nations acknowledged his rule; and the scorching south and the frozen north obeyed his will alone. Did high power, then, put any check on the frenzy of Nero's will? It is a bad day when the evil heart is handed the sword as well.
Then I said: "You know yourself that ambition for worldly success has had little hold on me. What I did want was scope for action, in case virtue should waste away for lack of exercise."
Then she said: "This is that 'last infirmity' which can still tempt minds that are of noble quality but have not yet been shaped into any fine refinement by bringing the virtues to completion — I mean the love of glory, and of a reputation for great services done to the state. And yet consider with me how poor and insubstantial a thing that glory is.
"The whole globe of this earth, as you have learned from the demonstrations of astronomy, is no bigger than a point compared with the expanse of the heavens; that is, measured against the vastness of the heavenly sphere, it is reckoned to take up no space at all. And of this so insignificant portion of the universe it is about a quarter, as Ptolemy's proofs have taught us, that is inhabited by living creatures known to us. Take away in thought from that quarter everything taken up by seas and marshes, or lying as a vast waterless desert, and there is barely an extremely narrow strip left for human habitation. And you, shut in and imprisoned in this mere fraction of a point, take thought about advertising your fame and spreading your reputation abroad? What size or magnificence can glory have when it is confined within limits so narrow and petty?
"Besides, the cramped bounds of this scanty dwelling place are inhabited by many nations differing widely in language, in customs and in way of life; and to many of them, because travel is difficult, because languages differ, because there is no trade between them, the fame not only of individual men but even of cities cannot reach. In Cicero's day, as he points out somewhere himself, the fame of the Roman republic had not yet crossed the Caucasus — and by that time her name had already grown formidable to the Parthians and the other nations of those parts. Do you see, then, how narrow and confined the glory is that you take such pains to spread and extend? Can the fame of a single Roman get through where the glory of the Roman name itself fails to pass?
"What is more, the customs and institutions of different races do not agree, so that what is thought praiseworthy in one country is thought punishable in another. So if a man loves the applause of fame, it will do him no good to publish his name among many peoples. Each must be content to have the range of his glory limited to his own people, and the splendid immortality of fame must be shut inside the borders of a single race.
"And again, how many men of great reputation in their own day have been lost in oblivion because nobody wrote them down? Indeed, what use are written records either, which, along with their authors, are overtaken by the dimness of age after a somewhat longer time? But you, when you think about future fame, imagine you are fathering an immortality for yourselves. Why — if you scan the infinite spaces of eternity, what room is left for taking pleasure in your name's durability? If a single moment is compared with ten thousand years, it has a certain relative duration, however small, since both periods are definite. But this same number of years, and a number many times as large, cannot even be compared with unending duration; finite periods can in a way be compared with one another, but a finite and an infinite never can. So it turns out that fame, however wide a stretch of years it extends over, when it is compared with eternity, which never grows less, does not merely look short-lived but looks like nothing at all.
"But as for you, you do not know how to act rightly unless it is to court the popular breeze and win the empty applause of the crowd; in fact you abandon the supreme worth of conscience and virtue, and ask for your payment in other people's poor words. Let me tell you how wittily somebody once mocked the shallowness of this sort of arrogance. A man attacked somebody who had put on the name of philosopher as a cloak for pride and vanity, not to practise real virtue, and added: 'Now I shall know whether you are a philosopher, if you take insults calmly and patiently.' The other pretended to be patient for a while, and having put up with the abuse, called out derisively, 'Now do you see that I am a philosopher?' The first man said, with cutting sarcasm, 'I would have, if you had kept quiet.'
"And besides, what have choice spirits — for we are talking about men of that sort, who seek glory by virtue — what have they to do with fame after the body has dissolved in death's last hour? For if men die completely, which our reasoning forbids us to believe, then there is no such thing as glory at all, since the man the glory is said to belong to does not exist. But if the mind, aware of its own uprightness, is released from its earthly prison and makes for heaven in free flight, does it not despise everything earthly, when it is rejoicing at being freed from earthly chains and entering the joys of heaven?"
Let the man who pants after glory's reward and thinks glory is everything look and see how wide the sky spreads and how small the earth's enclosing bounds are. It is a disgrace, if your swelling glory cannot even fill this narrow room. Why struggle so uselessly, you proud ones, to escape the death you must die? Though your name is carried into distant regions and spread wide across the earth, though many a grand-sounding title lends its lustre to your house, Death scorns all this pomp and glory when his hour comes near; he wraps the exalted and the humble alike and levels lowest and highest. Where are the bones of steadfast Fabricius now? Brutus, Cato — where are they? A lingering fame, with a few carved letters, puts their empty name on show. But knowing the great dead is not something a gilded name can give us; no, you must all lie forgotten alike — it is not you that fame makes known. You fondly imagine life's little hour is lengthened by fame's mortal breath. What waits for you, when this is taken too, is a second death at the end.
"But so that you do not think I am waging an implacable war against Fortune, I admit there is a time when the deceitful goddess does men good — I mean when she shows herself, uncovers her face, and admits what she really is. Perhaps you do not follow me yet. What I am trying to say is a strange thing, and that is why I can hardly find words to make my meaning clear.
"I truly believe that Bad Fortune is more use to men than Good Fortune. Good Fortune, when she wears the look of happiness and seems to be at her most affectionate, is always lying; Bad Fortune is always truthful, since by changing she shows how inconstant she is. The one deceives, the other teaches. The one chains up the minds of those who enjoy her favour with the appearance of a good that is not there; the other sets them free by letting them know how fragile happiness is. So you may see the one fickle, shifting like the wind, and always self-deceived; and the other sober, alert and watchful, precisely because adversity has disciplined her.
"And finally, Good Fortune with her enticements drags men far away from the real good; Bad Fortune often hauls them back to the real good with grappling irons. Again — do you think it a small favour that this cruel, this hateful Fortune has shown you the hearts of your faithful friends? The other one hid the faces of the true friends and the false alike; but in leaving, she has taken away her friends and left you yours. What would you not have paid for that service in the fullness of your prosperity, when you thought yourself a lucky man? So stop looking for the wealth you have lost, since in true friends you have found the most precious riches there are."
Why are nature's changes bound to a fixed and ordered round? What has bent to a treaty of peace every element that was at war? Why does the rose-coloured morning rise carried on the sun's chariot? Why should the moon rule the night, led by the evening star's light? What is the power that holds the restless sea in its place, that keeps it inside fixed limits and stops it flooding over the earth? Love it is that holds the chains, Love that rules over sea and land; Love — who else but sovereign Love? — Love, high lord in heaven above. Yet if he relaxed his care, everything that is now knit so close in sweet love and holy peace would not stop fighting any more, but with the rough shock and jar of strife would wreck the fair fabric of the world. Love unites tribes and nations by the sacred rites of a fair treaty; Love makes the bonds of marriage holy with affection's softest ties; Love lays down, as is right, faithful laws for true companions. Love, all-sovereign Love — then you are blessed, you sons of men, if the love that rules the sky is enthroned high in your hearts.
She stopped; but I stood fixed by the sweetness of the song, wondering and eager, my ears still straining to listen. And then after a moment I said: "You supreme comfort of the exhausted mind, what refreshment you have brought me, as much by the sweetness of your singing as by the weight of your argument! I really do not think I shall be unequal to Fortune's blows in future. So I no longer dread the remedies you said were a little too severe for my strength; on the contrary, I am eager to hear about them and I ask for them urgently."
Then she said: "I noticed you fastening on my words silently and intently, and I was expecting this state of mind in you — or, to put it more truthfully, I brought it about myself. What is left is the sort of thing that bites on the tongue and turns sweet once it is inside. But since you say you are keen to hear it, how you would burn to, if you could see where it is my job to lead you!"
"Where?" I said.
"To true happiness," she said, "which your mind sees even now in its dreams but cannot look at properly, while your eyes are taken up with appearances."
Then I said: "Please, show me its true shape, and do not lose a moment."
"Gladly, for your sake," she said. "But first I shall try to sketch in words, and describe, something you are more familiar with; so that when you have examined it carefully you can turn your eyes the other way and recognise the beauty of real happiness."
The man who wants to sow the fallow field and watch the corn come up must first get rid of the useless weeds, the bramble and the thorn. After a foul taste, honey is sweeter in the mouth; after the storm, the twinkling stars are a more cheerful sight. When the night has gone, the bright dawn comes in her rose-coloured chariot. So drive the false happiness out of your mind and you will see the true one.
For a little while she stayed gazing fixedly, withdrawn as it were into the stately chamber of her own mind; then she began:
"All mortal creatures, in the anxious aims that keep them busy in so many different pursuits, take many roads but are all trying to reach one goal: happiness. Now the good is what a man cannot want anything further once he has got it. This is the supreme good of all, containing every particular good inside itself; so that if anything at all were still missing from it, it could not be the supreme good, since something would be left outside that could still be wanted. It is clear, then, that happiness is a condition made perfect by the assembling of every good thing together.
"Everyone is trying to reach that condition, as we have said, but by different roads; for the desire for the true good is naturally planted in human minds, and it is only error that leads them off the road in pursuit of a false one. Some, thinking the highest good is to be short of nothing, spare no effort to get rich. Others, judging that the good is whatever most deserves respect, work to win the reverence of their fellow citizens by holding office. Some locate the chief good in supreme power; these either want to hold sovereignty themselves or try to attach themselves to somebody who does. Others again, who think reputation is something supremely excellent, are in a hurry to spread the glory of their name abroad, whether through the arts of war or of peace. A great many measure the attainment of good by joy and gladness of heart; these think the height of happiness is to give themselves up to pleasure.
"And there are others who swap ends and means about in what they aim at: some want riches for the sake of pleasure and power, some want power either for the money or to bring their name renown. So it is on these ends that human actions and wishes are centred, and on others like them — good birth and popularity, for instance, which seem to bring a certain reputation; a wife and children, which are wanted for the sweetness of having them. As for friendship, the most sacred kind is counted in the category of virtue and not of fortune, but the other kinds are entered into for the sake of power or enjoyment. And bodily excellences obviously belong with the list above: strength and stature clearly suggest power, beauty and speed of foot bring celebrity, health brings pleasure.
"It is plain, then, that the only object sought in all these ways is happiness; for whatever a man seeks in preference to everything else is in his judgement the supreme good, and we have defined the supreme good as happiness. So the condition each man wants in preference to all others is in his judgement the happy one.
"So you have in front of you something like a plan of human happiness: wealth, rank, power, glory, pleasure. Now Epicurus, looking at these considerations alone, concluded with some consistency that the highest good is pleasure, because all the other objects seem to bring the mind some delight.
"But to come back to human pursuits and aims: the human mind is trying to recover the good that properly belongs to it, in spite of the mistiness of its memory — but like a drunk man it does not know which road leads home. Do you think the people who struggle to escape want are wrong? Not at all; there is nothing that can complete happiness so well as a condition that has every good thing in abundance, needs nothing from outside, and is entirely self-sufficient. Do they go wrong who judge that what is best also best deserves reverence? Not at all. A thing that nearly the whole human race directs its efforts at getting cannot possibly be cheap and contemptible. Is power, then, not to be counted a good? Can what is plainly more effective than anything else be reckoned feeble and without strength? Or is reputation to be thought worthless? No; it cannot be ignored that the highest reputation is constantly found alongside the highest excellence. And what need is there to say that happiness is not haunted by anxiety and gloom, or exposed to trouble and vexation, when that is a condition we ask of the smallest things we expect any delight from owning?
"So these are the blessings men want to win: they want riches, rank, sovereignty, glory and pleasure, because they believe that by these means they will secure independence, reverence, power, reputation and gladness of heart. So it is the good that men are looking for along all these different roads; and here you can easily see the strength of nature's power, since although opinions are so various and contradictory, they all agree in holding good to be the end."
How the strength of nature sways the whole world in ordered ways, how laws that cannot be resisted control the least part of the whole — this is what I would gladly rehearse in sounding verse on my responsive strings. Look at the lion taken captive: he wears his gilded chain meekly, and though he is fed by hand and dreads a master's whip, if once the taste of blood sharpens his cruel lips again, his sleeping fierceness wakes at once; with one roar he breaks his chains, and takes his revenge first on the mangled body of his trainer. And the woodland songbird, shut up in his forlorn imprisonment, though a mistress's lavish care sets out a store of honeyed treats: still, if in his narrow cage, as he hops from bar to bar, he should catch sight of the woods far off, cool under their sheltering leaves, he will kick all these delicacies aside; his heart will turn to the woods. It is only the woods he longs for; he pipes the woods in all his songs. The sapling bends to rough force while the hand keeps up its pressure; let the hand relax that pressure and the supple wood springs straight back. The sun sinks into the western sea; but his chariot is swiftly carried back again by a secret road to the usual gates of morning. So everything is seen to long for its own return in its own time; and no fixed order can last except the one that in the appointed way joins the end back to the beginning and spins in a steady circle.
"You creatures of earth have some glimmer of where you came from, however faint; and though the vision is dim and clouded, you do somehow make out the true end of happiness, and so nature's aim leads you towards it — towards the true good — while error in many forms leads you off. Consider whether men are able to win happiness by the means through which they think they will reach the goal they have set.
"Truly, if wealth or rank or any of the rest brings with it something that seems to lack no good at all, then we too admit that some people are made happy by getting these things. But if they cannot keep their promises, and are moreover short of many good things, is the happiness men look for in them not plainly shown up as a false front?
"So I ask you first, who were living in affluence only a short while ago: in the middle of all that abundance of wealth, was your mind never troubled by some wrong done to you?"
"No," I said, "I cannot remember a time when my mind was so completely at peace that it felt no twinge of uneasiness at all."
"Was that not because something was missing that you did not want missing, or something was there that you wanted out of the way?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then you wanted the presence of the one and the absence of the other?"
"I admit it."
"But a man lacks what he wants?"
"He does."
"And a man who lacks something is not self-sufficient at every point?"
"No, certainly not," I said.
"So you were carrying this insufficiency about with you, in the fullness of your wealth?"
"I must have been."
"Then wealth cannot make its owner independent and free of every want — and that was exactly what it seemed to promise. And I think this too deserves considering: there is nothing in the particular nature of money to stop it being taken away from those who have it against their will."
"I admit it."
"Of course there is not, when every day the stronger wrests it from the weaker without his consent. Where else do lawsuits come from, except from trying to recover money taken away against the owner's will by force or fraud?"
"True," I said.
"Then everybody will need some outside means of protection to keep his money safe."
"Who would dare deny it?"
"And yet he would not need it, unless he had the money that can be lost."
"No, certainly he would not."
"Then we have worked our way round to the opposite conclusion: the wealth that was supposed to make a man independent actually puts him in need of further protection. So how in the world can want be driven off by riches? Cannot the rich feel hunger? Cannot they get thirsty? Are the limbs of the wealthy not sensitive to winter cold? 'But,' you will say, 'the rich have the means to satisfy their hunger, and the means to get rid of thirst and cold.' True enough: want can be soothed by riches that way, but it cannot be removed. For if this ever-gaping, ever-craving want is stuffed full by wealth, then the want that could be stuffed full is necessarily still there. I say nothing of how very little is enough for nature, and how nothing at all is enough for greed. So if wealth cannot get rid of want, and creates new wants of its own, how can you believe it confers independence?"
Though the greedy man grows rich and watches his piles of gold go up; though he gathers a store of treasure that can never satisfy him; though his collar blazes with pearls, the rarest the ocean yields; though a hundred head of oxen labour in his broad fields: gnawing anxiety will not leave him as long as he draws breath, and his riches will not go with him when his eyes close in death.
"Very well, but public office clothes the man who gets it in honour and reverence. Do offices of state, then, have the power to plant virtue in the minds of the men who hold them and drive out vice? No: they tend rather to advertise wickedness than to chase it away, and that is why we are indignant that honours so often fall to the most wicked of men. Catullus, for instance, calls Nonius an 'ulcer' even though he was 'sitting in the curule chair'. Do you not see what infamy high position brings on bad men? Their unworthiness would certainly be less conspicuous if their rank did not draw the public eye onto them.
"In your own case: would all these dangers ever have persuaded you to think of sharing office with Decoratus, once you had seen in him the mind of a crooked hanger-on and informer? No. We cannot reckon men worthy of reverence because of their office when we reckon them unworthy of the office itself. But if you saw a man endowed with wisdom, could you suppose him not worthy of reverence, or not worthy of the wisdom he was endowed with?"
"No, certainly not."
"Virtue has a dignity of her own, which she passes straight on to anyone she is joined to. And since public honours cannot do that, plainly they do not possess the true beauty of dignity.
"And here something well worth noticing: if a man is despised the more in proportion as more people despise him, then high position not only fails to win reverence for the wicked but actually loads them with more contempt, by drawing more attention to them. And not without payment either; for the wicked pay the offices they take on back in kind, by polluting them with their touch.
"Perhaps another consideration may bring you to admit that true reverence cannot come from these counterfeit dignities. It is this. If a man who had been consul several times happened to travel among foreign peoples, would his office win him their reverence? And yet if reverence were the natural effect of high office, it would not give up its proper function in any part of the world, just as fire never anywhere fails to give out heat. But since this effect is not produced by any power of their own, and is attached to them by the mistaken opinion of mankind, they vanish at once when they are set in front of people who do not consider them dignities at all.
"So it stands with foreign peoples. But does their reputation last for ever even in the country they came from? The prefecture, which was once a great power, is now an empty name and merely a drain on a senator's fortune; the commissioner of the public corn supply was once a personage, and now what is more contemptible than the job? For, as we said a moment ago, whatever has no true beauty of its own now gains and now loses lustre at the whim of the people who have to do with it.
"So if high offices cannot win men reverence; if they are actually dirtied by contact with the wicked; if they lose their splendour as times change; if they fall into contempt simply because the public stops valuing them — what precious beauty do they have in themselves, let alone any to give away to others?"
Though royal purple soothed his pride and white pearls decorated his neck, Nero lived out all his excesses as the mark of universal contempt. And yet it was he who conferred the inglorious offices of state on respected men. So are we to call those blessed whom such promotion made great?
"Well then, are sovereignty and being close to kings able to confer power? Does the happiness of kings last for ever? Antiquity is full of examples, and so are our own days, of kings whose happiness turned into disaster. What a glorious power, which is not even effective at preserving itself!
"And if happiness has its source in sovereign power, then surely happiness is reduced, and misery brought in instead, in so far as that power falls short of being complete. But however widely human sovereignty is extended, there must still be more peoples left over whom any particular king holds no sway. Now at whatever point the power that happiness depends on stops, powerlessness creeps in and makes wretchedness. So by this reckoning there must be a balance of wretchedness in a king's lot.
"A tyrant who had tried out the dangers of his own position pictured the fears that haunt a throne as a sword hanging over a man's head. So what sort of power is this, which cannot drive off the gnawing of anxiety or dodge the stings of terror? They would gladly have lived in safety themselves, and cannot — and then they boast about their power.
"Do you count a man powerful when you can see that he wants what he cannot bring about? Do you count a man powerful who surrounds himself with a bodyguard, who fears the people he terrifies more than they fear him, who, to keep up the appearance of power, is himself at the mercy of his own servants?
"Need I say anything about kings' friends, when I have shown royal rule itself to be so utterly and wretchedly weak? Royal power at its fullest often brings them down, and often drags them down in its own fall. Nero forced his friend and teacher Seneca to choose the manner of his own death. Antoninus exposed Papinianus, long powerful at court, to the soldiers' swords. And each of them was willing to give up his power; Seneca even tried to hand his wealth over to Nero and retire. Neither got what he wanted. When they wobbled, their very greatness pulled them down.
"So what sort of thing is this power, which keeps men in fear while they have it — which you are not safe keeping and cannot get rid of when you want to lay it down? And are friends any protection when it was fortune and not virtue that attached them? No: the man good fortune has made a friend, bad fortune will make an enemy. And what plague is better at doing harm than an enemy inside your own household?"
The man whose aim is power must first tame his own spirit; he must keep from pushing his neck under the unholy yoke of appetite. For though far-off India should bow to his wide command, and furthest Thule pay him homage — if he cannot drive away the anxiety that haunts him and the black misery, then in his power he is powerless.
"Again: how misleading and how cheap a thing glory often is. The tragic poet puts it well:
"'Reputation, you fool, how many times have you raised some low-born nobody up into pride!'
For many have won a great name through the mistaken beliefs of the crowd — and what could be imagined more disgraceful than that? People who are praised falsely must blush at their own praises. And even when praise is earned by merit, what does it add to the good conscience of a wise man, who measures his good not by popular report but by the truth of inner conviction?
"And if it does seem a fine thing to have that reputation spread about, it follows that any failure to spread it counts as ugly. But since, as I set out just now, there must be many tribes and peoples the fame of any single man cannot reach, it follows that the man you rate as glorious looks entirely inglorious in the next quarter of the globe. As for popular favour, I do not think it even worth mentioning here, since it never comes from judgement and never lasts steadily.
"And then, who does not see how empty and how silly the fame of noble birth is? If nobility is founded on reputation, then the reputation belongs to somebody else. Nobility seems to be a kind of standing that comes from the merits of ancestors; and if it is praise that produces the standing, then necessarily it is the people being praised who are famous. So somebody else's fame does not clothe you in splendour if you have none of your own. If there is any excellence in high birth, I think it is only this: that it seems to lay an obligation on the well-born not to fall away from their ancestors' virtue."
All men come of one stock, however far and wide they are scattered, for there is one Father of us all, and one who provides for all. He gave the sun his golden beams and the moon her silver horn; he set mankind upon the earth as he set stars to decorate the sky. He shut a soul — a soul born in heaven — inside the body's frame; the noble origin he gave is one every mortal creature can claim. Why do you shout so loud, then, about race and high ancestry? If you would look at where your being came from, and at God's supreme design, nobody is degenerate and nobody base, unless by the taint of sin and by cherishing vice he foully stains where he came from in heaven.
"Then what shall I say about the pleasures of the body? Wanting them is full of uneasiness; having your fill of them is full of regret. What illnesses, what unbearable pains they usually bring on the bodies of the people who enjoy them — the fruits of wrongdoing, as it were. What sweetness the first stimulus of pleasure may have, I do not know; but that pleasure ends painfully anyone can understand who cares to recall his own bodily appetites. And if these can make happiness, there is no reason why animals should not be happy too, since everything they do is eagerly aimed at satisfying the body's wants.
"I know, of course, that the sweetness of a wife and children ought to be a fine thing; and yet it was only too true to nature, what somebody said about a man who found his tormentors in his own sons. How galling that sort of thing would be, I have to remind you, since you have never had any such experience and are not uneasy about it now. In a case like that I agree with my servant Euripides, who said that a man with no children was fortunate in his misfortune."
This is the way of Pleasure: she stings the men who rob her; and, like the winged worker who has lost her hoard of honey, she flies off, but leaves the sting rankling deep in the heart.
"There is no doubt, then, that these roads do not lead to happiness, and cannot bring anyone to the goal they promise. Now I will show you very briefly what serious evils are involved in following them.
"Just consider. Is it your object to pile up money? Then you must wrench it away from whoever has it now. Do you mean to put on the splendour of high office? Then you must beg from the men who have it in their gift; you who want to outdo everybody else in honour must lower yourself into the humble posture of a petitioner. Do you long for power? Then you must face danger, because you will be at the mercy of your subjects' plots. Is glory your aim? Then you are lured on through every kind of hardship, and there is an end of your peace of mind. Do you want to lead a life of pleasure? But who does not despise a man who is the slave of the weakest and cheapest thing there is, the body?
"And again, how slight and perishable a possession people are relying on who set bodily excellences in front of themselves. Can you ever beat the elephant for bulk or the bull for strength? Can you outrun the tiger? Look at the infinity of the heavens, their solidity, the speed of their motion, and stop admiring worthless things for once. And even the heavens are not to be admired so much for that as for the reason that steers them.
"Then how quickly the brightness of beauty passes, and how soon it is gone — more fleeting than the fading bloom of spring flowers. And yet if, as Aristotle says, men could see with the eyes of Lynceus, so that their sight went through obstructions, would not the body of Alcibiades, so gloriously fair on the outside, look utterly disgusting once all its insides were open to view? So it is not your own nature that makes you look beautiful, but the weakness of the eyes that see you.
"Prize your body's excellences as extravagantly as you like — so long as you know that this thing you admire, whatever it is worth, can be dissolved away by the feeble heat of a three-day fever. From all of which we may conclude, on the whole, that these things which cannot deliver the advantages they promise, and which are never made perfect by the assembling of every good together, neither serve as side roads to happiness nor make men completely happy in themselves."
How far astray does Ignorance lead these wretched mortals from the road of Truth! You do not look for gold on leafy stems in the green wood, or strip the vine for gems; you do not spread your nets on hilltops, to get the groaning table furnished with fish; and if you want to hunt the bounding goat, you do not sweep the ruffled face of the sea for it. Men know the sea's far depths, every hidden corner where the waves wash over the pearl as white as snow; they know where the Tyrian shellfish lurks, where fish and prickly urchins are plentiful — all this they know perfectly well. But not to know, or care, where the good that every heart wants lies hidden: this blindness they can live with. With their eyes bent low on the earth they look for the thing that lies far beyond the starry sky. What curse can I call down on minds so dull? Let them go on running after wealth and a great name; and when after all that trouble they have grasped the false good — ah, then, too late — let them make out the true one.
"That is probably enough to set out the shape of false happiness; and if it is now clear to your eyes, the next step is to show what true happiness is."
"I can see clearly enough," I said, "that independence is not to be found in wealth, nor power in sovereignty, nor reverence in high office, nor fame in glory, nor real joy in pleasures."
"Have you worked out the reasons why?"
"I have an inkling of it, but I would like to learn it from you more fully."
"The reason is close at hand. What is simple and indivisible by nature, human error separates, and turns from the true and complete into the false and incomplete. Do you suppose that what lacks nothing can be short of power?"
"Certainly not."
"Right; for if there is any weakness of strength in anything, it must necessarily need protection from outside."
"That is so."
"So the nature of independence and of power is one and the same."
"It seems so."
"Well — do you think anything of that nature can be looked at with contempt, or is it rather the most deserving of respect there is?"
"There can be no doubt about that."
"Then let us add reverence to independence and power, and conclude that the three are one."
"We must, if we are going to admit the truth."
"And do you think this combination of qualities is obscure and undistinguished, or famous everywhere? Just consider: can a thing lack renown when it has been agreed to lack nothing, to be supreme in power, and thoroughly worthy of honour — on the grounds that it cannot confer renown on itself and so ends up looking a little poor in esteem?"
"I cannot help admitting that, being what it is, this union of qualities is thoroughly famous as well."
"Then it follows that we must admit renown is no different from the other three."
"It does," I said.
"Then a thing that needs nothing outside itself, that can achieve everything by its own strength, that enjoys fame and commands reverence — must it not obviously be completely crowned with joy as well?"
"I cannot imagine," I said, "how any sadness could get into such a state, so I have to admit it is full of joy — at least if our earlier conclusions are to stand."
"Then for the same reasons this is necessary too: that independence, power, renown, reverence and the sweetness of delight differ only in name, and in substance do not differ from one another at all."
"That is so," I said.
"This thing, then, which is one and simple by nature, human perverseness separates; and in trying to win a part of what has no parts, it fails to get not only that portion — since there are no portions — but the whole as well, which it never dreams of aiming at."
"How is that?" I said.
"The man who seeks riches to escape want gives no thought to power; he prefers a mean and lowly position, and denies himself many pleasures that nature loves, so as not to lose the money he has made. But at that rate he does not even reach independence: he is a weakling with no strength, harassed by troubles, cheap and despised and buried in obscurity.
"The man who thirsts for power alone squanders his wealth, despises pleasure, and thinks fame and rank alike worthless without power. But you can see how many ways his condition is defective too. Sometimes he goes short of necessities, and is gnawed by anxieties; and since he cannot rid himself of these inconveniences, he even stops having that power which was his whole aim.
"We can add up the account the same way for rank, for glory, for pleasure. Since each of them separately is identical with the rest, whoever looks for any one of them without the others does not even get hold of the one he is aiming at."
"Well," I said, "what then?"
"Suppose somebody wanted to get them all together. He is certainly wishing for happiness as a whole; but will he find it in things which, as we have proved, cannot deliver what they promise?"
"No, certainly not," I said.
"Then happiness must certainly not be looked for in these things, each of which is believed to supply one of the blessings people most want."
"They must not, I admit. No conclusion could be truer."
"So the shape of false happiness, and its causes, are now in front of your eyes. Now turn your gaze the other way; there you will see at once the true happiness I promised."
"Indeed, it is plain even to the blind," I said. "You pointed it out just now, in unfolding the causes of the false one. Unless I am mistaken, true and perfect happiness is what crowns a man with independence, power, reverence, renown and joy all together. And to prove to you how carefully I have listened — since all of these are the same thing — I know that whatever can truly give one of them is beyond doubt full and complete happiness."
"You are fortunate in that conviction, my pupil; only you should add one thing."
"What is that?" I said.
"Do you think there is anything among these mortal and perishable things that could produce a condition like that?"
"Certainly not; and you have demonstrated it so amply that no more words are needed."
"Well, then, these things seem to give mortals shadows of the true good, or some kind of incomplete good; but the true and perfect good they cannot give."
"Just so," I said.
"Since, then, you have learned what true happiness is, and what people falsely call happiness, it remains for you to learn where to look for it."
"That is what I have been eagerly waiting for."
"Well, since, as Plato maintains in the Timaeus, we ought to call on divine protection even in the most trivial matters, what do you think we should do now, to deserve to find the seat of that highest good?"
"We must call on the Father of all things," I said, "for without that no undertaking begins rightly."
"You are right," she said; and at once she lifted up her voice and sang:
Maker of earth and sky, who from age to age govern the world by reason; at whose word time comes out of the depths of eternity; to everything that moves, the source of movement, yourself fixed and unmoving. No cause outside you drove you to shape this measured frame out of shapeless matter; set deep within your inmost being was the form of the perfect good, free of all envy; and you moulded the whole to that heavenly pattern. Beautiful is the world imaged in you, being yourself most beautiful. So you fashioned the work in that fair likeness, telling it to put on perfection through the exquisite perfectness of every part's contrivance. You bind the elements in balanced harmony, so that hot and cold, wet and dry do not fight; and the pure fire leaping up does not escape, nor the weight of water drown the earth. You join and pour through the whole, linking its several parts in agreement, a soul of threefold nature, that moves everything. This, cut in two and gathered into two circles, speeds along a path that returns on itself, going round the limits of mind, and shapes the heavens to her own true likeness. Lesser souls and lesser lives, by a like ordinance, you send out, fastening each to its starry chariot, and you strew them far and wide over earth and heaven. These by a kindly law you tell to turn again, and to render back their fires to you. Almighty Father, grant that we may soar aloft on reason's wing to the height of heaven; grant that we may see the fountain of good; grant that, having found the true light, we may fix our eyes steadily and clearly on you. Scatter the heavy mists of earth and shine out in your own splendour. For you are the true serenity and the perfect rest of every devoted soul: to see your face is the end and the beginning — one and the same the guide, the traveller, the road and the goal.
"Now that you have seen what the shape of the imperfect good is, and the shape of the perfect one too, I think the next thing is to show how this perfection of happiness is built up. And here I think it right to ask first whether any excellence of the kind you have just defined can exist in the nature of things at all — in case we are being taken in by an empty fiction of thought that nothing real answers to. But it cannot be denied that such a thing does exist, and is, so to speak, the source of everything good. For anything called imperfect is called imperfect because it is deprived of some perfection; so it follows that whenever imperfection is found in any particular respect, there must necessarily be a perfection in that same respect as well. For if there were no such perfection, it is impossible to conceive how the so-called imperfection could have come into existence at all. Nature does not make a beginning with things that are mutilated and incomplete; she starts from what is whole and perfect, and falls away afterwards into these feeble, inferior productions. So if there is, as we showed earlier, a happiness of a frail and imperfect kind, there can be no doubt that there is also a happiness that is substantial and perfect."
"Your conclusion is perfectly true, and perfectly certain," I said.
"The next thing is to consider where this happiness lives. It is the common belief of all mankind that God, the supreme of all things, is good. For since nothing better than God can be imagined, how can we doubt that a being is good when there is nothing better than it? Now reason shows God to be good in such a way as to prove that the perfect good is in Him. For if it were not, He would not be supreme of all things: there would be something else more excellent that possessed the perfect good, and that would evidently have the advantage in priority and dignity, since we have clearly seen that all perfect things come before the less complete ones. And so, to avoid falling into an infinite regress, we have to acknowledge that the supreme God is full of the supreme and perfect good. But we have determined that true happiness is the perfect good; therefore true happiness must live in the supreme God."
"I accept your reasoning," I said. "There is no way of disputing it."
"But come, see how strictly and unanswerably you can prove this claim of ours, that the supreme Godhead possesses the highest good in the fullest way."
"How, exactly?" I said.
"Do not carelessly suppose that He who is the Father of all things has received that highest good He is said to possess from some source outside Himself, or has it as a natural endowment in such a way that you could think of the essence of the happiness possessed and of the God who possesses it as two distinct and different things. For if you take it to have been received from outside, you might reckon what gives to be more excellent than what has received. But Him we most rightly acknowledge to be the most supremely excellent of all things. And if the good is in Him by nature, but is logically distinct from Him, the thought is inconceivable — since we are speaking of God, who is supreme of all things. Who was there to join these distinct essences together? Finally, when one thing is different from another, the things conceived as distinct cannot be identical. So whatever is by its own nature distinct from the highest good is not itself the highest good — and that is an impious thing to think of Him, than whom, clearly, nothing can be more excellent. For universally nothing can be better in its nature than the source it came from; so on the truest grounds of reason I would conclude that the source of all things is, in its own essence, the highest good."
"And quite rightly," I said.
"But the highest good has been admitted to be happiness."
"Yes."
"Then," she said, "we have to acknowledge that God is happiness itself."
"Yes," I said. "I cannot go back on what I admitted before, and I see clearly that this follows necessarily from it."
"Consider, too," she said, "whether the same conclusion is not further confirmed by this: that there cannot be two supreme goods distinct from one another. For goods that are different clearly cannot each be what the other is; so neither of the two can be perfect, since each is missing the other. But since it is not perfect, it plainly cannot be the supreme good. So supreme goods cannot possibly be different from one another. And we have concluded that both happiness and God are the supreme good; therefore that which is the highest Divinity must itself also necessarily be the highest happiness."
"No conclusion," I said, "could be truer to the facts, or more soundly reasoned, or more worthy of God."
"Then further," she said, "just as geometers are in the habit of drawing extra inferences from their demonstrations — the things they call corollaries — so I will add a sort of corollary here. Since men become happy by acquiring happiness, and happiness is Godhood itself, it is clear that they become happy by acquiring Godhood. But just as men become just by acquiring justice, and wise by acquiring wisdom, so by the same reasoning they must necessarily become gods by acquiring Godhood. So every man who is happy is a god; and although in nature God is One only, there is nothing to stop a great many being gods by sharing in that nature."
"That is a fine conclusion, and a precious one," I said — "deduction or corollary, whichever you want to call it."
"And yet," she said, "not one bit finer than this, which reason urges us to add."
"What is that?" I said.
"Since happiness has many particular things included under it, should all of them be regarded as forming a single body of happiness, made up of various parts, as it were? Or is there some one of them that constitutes the whole essence of happiness, with all the rest related to that?"
"I wish you would set the whole matter out for me at length."
"We judge happiness to be good, do we not?"
"Yes — the supreme good."
"And that superlative applies to all of them; for this same happiness is judged to be the completest independence, the highest power, reverence, renown and pleasure."
"What then?"
"Are all these goods — independence, power and the rest — to be counted as limbs of happiness, so to speak? Or are they all related to the good as to their summit and crown?"
"I understand the problem, but I want to hear how you would solve it."
"Then listen to how the matter is settled. If all these were limbs composing happiness, they would differ from one another individually. For that is the nature of parts: they compose one body by being different. But all of these have been proved to be the same thing; so they cannot possibly be limbs, or happiness will look as though it were built up out of a single limb, which is impossible."
"There can be no doubt about that," I said, "but I am impatient to hear the rest."
"Why, it is obvious that all the others are related to the good. The very reason independence is sought is that it is judged to be good — and so with power, because it is believed to be good. We may suppose the same of reverence, of renown and of the delight of pleasure. Good, then, is the sum and source of everything worth wanting. Whatever has no good in it, either really or apparently, cannot be wanted at all. And conversely, even things that are not good by nature are wanted as though they were truly good, if they seem so. So it turns out that goodness is rightly believed to be the sum and the hinge and the cause of everything desirable. Now the thing for whose sake anything is wanted seems to be the thing most wished for. For instance, if somebody wants to ride for the sake of his health, it is not so much the exercise of riding that he wants as the benefit to his health. Since, then, all things are sought for the sake of the good, it is not those things so much as the good itself that everyone is seeking. But the thing on account of which everything else is wished for was, we agreed, happiness; so this also shows that it is happiness alone that is sought. From all of which it is transparently clear that the essence of absolute good and the essence of happiness are one and the same."
"I cannot see how anyone could disagree with these conclusions."
"But we have also proved that God and true happiness are one and the same."
"Yes," I said.
"Then we can safely conclude too that God's essence is seated in absolute good, and nowhere else."
Come here, all you whose minds lust binds with rosy chains — lust that hauls into hard bondage the earthy souls he lives in — here your labour shall end; here is your harbour of rest. Come, press towards your one refuge; it stands wide open to every distress. Not the glint of yellow gold rolled down bright Hermus' stream; not the precious sands of Tagus, nor, in far-off scorching lands, all the shining gems that hide under Indus' famous tide — green emerald and glittering white — can light up our feeble sight; rather they leave the mind blind in the darkness it was born to. For the finest beams they shed were fed in earth's lowest depths; but the splendour that supplies strength and vigour to the skies, and governs the universe, keeps clear of dark and ruined souls. Anyone who has once seen this light will not call the sunbeam bright.
"I quite agree," I said. "All your reasonings really do hold together admirably."
Then she said: "What price would you put on the gift, if you were to come to know absolute good?"
"An infinite one," I said, "if only I were lucky enough to come to know God too, who is the good."
"Then I will make that clear to you on the truest grounds of reason — provided our recent conclusions stand firm."
"They will."
"Have we not shown that the things most people want are not the true and perfect good, and precisely for this reason: that they differ from one another individually, and since each is missing what the others have, none of them can bestow the full and absolute good? And that they become the true good when they are gathered, so to speak, into a single form and a single working, so that what is independence is also power, reverence, renown and the delight of pleasure — and that unless they are all one and the same thing, they have no claim to be counted among the things worth wanting at all?"
"Yes; that was clearly proved, and cannot be doubted in any way."
"Now, when things are far from being good while they are different, but become good as soon as they are one, is it not true that they become good by acquiring unity?"
"It seems so," I said.
"But do you not grant that everything good is good by sharing in goodness?"
"I do."
"Then on similar grounds you must admit that unity and goodness are the same thing; for when things do not differ in what they naturally do, their essence is one and the same."
"There is no denying it."
"Now, do you know," she said, "that everything that is stays in being and holds together as long as it goes on being one, but as soon as it stops being one it perishes and falls to pieces?"
"How so?"
"Take animals, for instance. When soul and body come together and continue as one, we call the result a living creature; but when that unity is broken by the two separating, the creature dies, and is plainly no longer alive. The body too, while it remains in one form by the joining of its parts, presents a human appearance; but if the separation and scattering of the parts breaks up the body's unity, it stops being what it was. And if we widen the survey to everything else, it will undoubtedly become clear that each individual thing holds together while it is one, and perishes when it stops being one."
"Yes — when I think about it further, I see it is exactly as you say."
"Well, is there anything," she said, "which, in so far as it acts in accordance with its nature, gives up the wish to live and wants to come to death and decay?"
"Looking at living creatures, which have some power of choice, I can find none that gives up the will to live without being forced from outside, or that hurries towards destruction of its own accord. Every creature diligently pursues its own self-preservation and avoids death and destruction. As for plants and trees, and inanimate things generally, I am quite unsure what to think."
"And yet there is no room for a question about those either, since you can see how plants and trees grow in places that suit them, where, as far as their nature allows, they cannot quickly wither and die. Some spring up in the plains, others in the mountains; some grow in marshes, others cling to rocks; and others again find fertile soil in barren sand — and if you try transplanting them elsewhere, they wither away. Nature gives each of them the soil that suits it, and takes pains to stop any of them dying so long as it is possible for them to go on living. Why do they all draw their nourishment from their roots, like a mouth dipped into the earth, and spread the strong bark over the pith? Why are all the softer parts, like the pith, buried deep inside, while the outer parts have the tough texture of wood, and outside everything is the bark, standing up to bad weather like a champion who can take punishment? And then, how diligent nature is in securing propagation everywhere by multiplying seed! Who does not see that all these are contrivances not only for a species' present survival, but for its lasting continuance, generation after generation, for ever? And do not the things we believe to be inanimate seek what suits them too, on the same grounds of reason? Why do flames shoot lightly upwards, while the earth presses downwards with its weight, if it is not that these motions and positions suit their respective natures? What is more, each individual thing is preserved by what agrees with its nature, just as it is destroyed by what is hostile to it. Solid things like stones resist being broken up by the close adhesion of their parts. Fluid things like air and water give way easily to whatever divides them, but flow swiftly back and mingle again with the parts they were severed from; while fire refuses to be cut at all. And we are not talking here about the voluntary movements of an intelligent soul, but about the drift of nature. It is in that way that we digest our food without thinking about it, and draw our breath in our sleep without knowing it. Indeed, even in living creatures the love of life does not come from conscious will, but from the principles of nature. For often, under the pressure of circumstances, the will chooses the death that nature shrinks from; and conversely, in spite of natural appetite, the will restrains that work of reproduction by which alone perishable creatures are kept in being. So entirely does this love of self come from the drift of nature and not from animal impulse. Providence has given things this thoroughly compelling reason for continuing: they must want life, so long as it is naturally possible for them to go on living. So you may in no way doubt that things naturally aim at continuing to exist, and avoid destruction."
"I confess," I said, "that what I thought uncertain a moment ago I now see to be beyond doubt."
"Now, whatever seeks to hold together and continue wants to be one; for if its oneness goes, its very existence cannot continue."
"True," I said.
"All things, then, want to be one."
"I agree."
"But we have proved that one is the very same thing as good."
"We have."
"All things, then, seek the good. Indeed, you could put the fact this way: good is what all things want."
"Nothing could be more truly worked out. Either there is no single end that all things are related to, or else the end that all things everywhere hurry towards must be the highest good of all."
Then she said: "I am exceedingly glad, my pupil. Your eye is now fixed on the very centre of the target of truth. And what is more, this reveals the thing you declared yourself ignorant of a little while ago."
"What is that?" I said.
"The end and aim of the whole universe. Surely it is what all things want; and since we have concluded that the good is that, we ought to acknowledge that the end and aim of the whole universe is the good."
Anyone chasing truth, who wants to keep his steps off the false roads, must search inside himself by an inner light, in deep meditation; he must hold back everything that pulls him outward to take possession of his soul's true treasure. Then all that the mists of error hid will shine out clearer than daylight, for the forgetful weight of this body of flesh has not quite put reason out; the seeds of truth are lying inside us still, and by learning we can win them all back. How else could you give the right answer to a question nobody taught you, if it were not that deep within the soul truth's secret sparks are alive? And if Plato's teaching does not go wrong, all learning is remembering what we forgot.
Then I said: "I agree with Plato with all my heart. Indeed, this is now the second time these things have been brought back to my mind — first I lost them through the clogging contact of the body, and then through the weight of heavy grief."
Then she went on: "If you will think back over what you have already admitted, it will not be long before you also recollect the thing you confessed yourself ignorant of a while ago."
"What is that?" I said.
"The principles by which the world is governed," she said.
"Yes; I remember confessing it, and although I can already guess where you are going, I would like to hear the argument set out plainly."
"A little while ago you thought it beyond all doubt that God governs the world."
"I do not think it doubtful now, and never shall; and I will briefly set out the reasons that bring me to that assurance. This world could never have taken shape as a single system out of parts so diverse and opposed, if there were not One who joins such different things together. And once it had come together, the very diversity of its natures would have pulled it apart and torn it to pieces in universal discord, if there were not One who holds together what He has joined. Nor would the order of nature proceed so regularly, nor could its course display motions so exactly fixed in position, time, range, effect and character, unless there were One who, remaining unmoved Himself, arranged these various turns of change. This power, whatever it is, by which things remain as they were created and are kept in motion, I call by the name everyone recognises: God."
Then she said: "Since that is what you believe, it will cost me very little trouble, I think, to bring you to happiness and get you safely home to your own country. But let us give our attention to the task we set ourselves. Have we not counted independence as belonging to happiness, and agreed that God is happiness itself?"
"We certainly have."
"Then He will need no help from outside to rule the world. Otherwise, if He needs anything, He will not possess complete independence."
"That necessarily follows," I said.
"Then He arranges all things by His own power alone."
"That cannot be denied."
"Now, God was proved to be absolute good."
"Yes; I remember."
"Then He arranges all things by the agency of good, if it is true that the one who rules all things by His own power is the one we have agreed to be good — and He is, so to speak, the rudder and the tiller by which the mechanism of the world is kept steady and in order."
"I agree heartily; and in fact I saw what you were going to say, though perhaps only as a feeble guess."
"I well believe it," she said. "You now bring to the search, I think, eyes that are quicker at making out the truth. But what I shall say next is no less plain and easy to see."
"What is it?" I said.
"Why," she said, "since God is rightly believed to steer all things with the rudder of goodness, and since all things likewise, as I have taught you, hurry towards the good by the very aim of their nature, can it be doubted that His governing is willingly accepted, and that everything submits to the sway of the one who arranges it, being shaped and tuned to His rule?"
"Necessarily," I said. "No rule would look happy if it were a yoke imposed on unwilling wills rather than the safekeeping of obedient subjects."
"Then there is nothing which, while it follows its nature, tries to resist the good."
"No; nothing."
"But suppose something did: would it have the slightest success against the one we rightly agreed to be the supreme Lord of happiness?"
"It would be completely powerless."
"Then there is nothing that has either the will or the power to oppose this supreme good."
"No; I think not."
"So it is the supreme good," she said, "that rules in strength and graciously arranges all things."
Then I said: "How delighted I am by your reasonings, and by the conclusion you have brought them to — but most of all by these very words you are using! I am now at last ashamed of the foolishness that was tormenting me so badly."
"You have heard the story of the giants assaulting heaven; and a kindly strength dealt with them too, as they deserved. But shall we let our arguments collide with one another? Some fine spark of truth may be struck out of the impact."
"If that is your pleasure," I said.
"Nobody can doubt that God is all-powerful."
"Nobody at all who thinks consistently can question it."
"Now, there is nothing that One who is all-powerful cannot do."
"Nothing."
"But can God do evil, then?"
"No; by no means."
"Then evil is nothing," she said, "since the one to whom nothing is impossible is unable to do it."
"Are you making fun of me," I said, "weaving a maze of tangled arguments, seeming now to begin where you ended and now to end where you began? Or are you building up some marvellous circle of divine simplicity? For a little while ago you began with happiness, said it was the supreme good, and declared it to be seated in the supreme Godhead. You also affirmed that God Himself is the supreme good and complete happiness, and from that you went on to add, as if in passing, the proof that nobody would be happy unless he were a god as well. Then you said that the very form of the good is the essence both of God and of happiness, and you taught that the absolute One is the absolute good that all nature seeks. You maintained too that God rules the universe by the governance of goodness, that all things obey Him willingly, and that evil has no existence in nature. And you unfolded all of it without help from any assumption brought in from outside, using proofs that belong to the subject itself, each drawing its credit from the last."
Then she answered: "Making fun of you is the last thing I would do. By the blessing of God, whom we prayed to a moment ago, we have achieved the most important thing of all. For the form of the divine essence is such that it can neither pass out into things outside itself nor take anything external into itself; but, as Parmenides says of it,
"'in body like a sphere, on every side perfectly rounded,'
it rolls the restless globe of the universe while remaining motionless itself. And if I have used arguments that were not fetched in from outside but lay within the compass of our subject, you have no reason to be surprised, since you have learned on Plato's authority that words ought to be akin to the matter they treat of."
Happy the man whose feet have stood beside the fountain of good; happy the man whose will could break the chains of earth for wisdom's sake. The poet of Thrace, they say, mourned his dear wife, dead; the woods came trooping after him to hear that sorrowful strain, and the river stopped flowing, held still by so soft a grief; the deer lay down unafraid beside the lion, and the hound, quieted by the song, no longer hunted the hare. But the pain went unsoothed; it raged on in his own breast. The music that could calm all else brought him no comfort. Blaming the immortal powers, he came to the gate of Hell. There he breathed every tender thing into his sounding strings, every high-wrought melody his goddess mother had taught him — everything grief could lend him, and love that doubled the sorrow — until, as the echoes woke, all Taenarus was shaken; and he talked the king of the shades round into pity with his sweet pleading. Spellbound, the three-headed hound, at sounds so strangely sweet, falls crouching at his feet. The dread Avengers too, who hunt down guilty minds with fears that never let go, are all dissolved in tears. Ixion on his wheel feels a brief reprieve, for look — the wheel stands still. And while those sad notes thrill, Tantalus, maddened with thirst, listens, and forgets the stream's mockery and his long agony. The vulture, too, holds off a little while from tearing at Tityus' ripped-open side, full-fed and pacified. At last the shadowy king, pitying his sorrows, cried out: "He has won! We give him back his bride! She shall belong to him as the wages of his song. Only one condition is set upon the gift: he must not turn his eyes to look at his hard-won prize until the two have safely passed the gates of Hell." Alas — what law can move lovers? Love is a higher law. For Orpheus — the pity of it! — with the threshold of day all but won, looked at his Eurydice, lost her, and was undone. You who are chasing the light, this story is for you, you who are looking for the way up into the clearer day. If you cast one backward look at the darkness you have left, your weak and wandering eyes have lost the matchless prize.
Philosophy sang these verses through to the end, softly and sweetly, without losing any of the dignity of her language or the seriousness of her tone. Then, since I was still unable to forget the sorrow lodged deep in me, I broke in just as she was about to say something more, and cried:
"You who guide me into the way of the true light, everything your voice has said from the beginning until now has plainly seemed to me divine when I consider it in itself, and put beyond any possibility of overthrow by the force of your arguments. What is more, these truths have not been entirely unfamiliar to me before now, though indignation at my wrongs made me forget them for a while. But look — here is the very chief cause of my grief: that while there is a good ruler of the universe, it is possible for evil to exist at all, and still more possible for it to go unpunished. Surely you must see how thoroughly that deserves to astonish anyone. But a greater wonder follows it. While wickedness reigns and flourishes, virtue not only goes without its reward, but is actually pushed down and trampled under the feet of the wicked, and suffers the punishment that crime should have had. That this should happen under the rule of a God who knows everything and can do everything, but wills nothing but good, cannot be wondered at enough or lamented enough."
Then she said: "It would indeed be infinitely astonishing, and the most horrible of all monstrous things, if, as you suppose, in the well-ordered house of so great a householder the cheap crockery were kept in a place of honour and the precious vessels left to gather dust. But it is not so. For if we hold firmly to the conclusions we have just reached, you will learn that, by the will of the One whose kingdom we are talking about, the good are always strong and the bad always weak and powerless; that vices never go unpunished, nor virtues unrewarded; that good fortune always falls to the good and bad fortune to the bad, and much more of the same kind, which will quiet your complaining and settle you in the strong assurance of conviction. And since my recent teaching has shown you the form of happiness, and taught you where it is to be found, all the necessary preliminaries are now discharged, and I will show you the road that will take you home. I will fasten wings to your mind, too, for you to soar on, so that with all your disturbing doubts removed you may return safely to your own country under my guidance, along the path I shall show you, and by the means I supply."
I have wings; high above the pole I soar far aloft. Wearing them, my nimble soul scorns the hated shore of earth, cleaves the sky on the wind, and sees the clouds left far below. Soon she nears the glowing point where the heavens turn, follows the sun's own course through the starry spheres, or takes for a companion among the stars cold Saturn or glittering Mars; so she explores every circling orb that shows through the robe of Night; then, when she has counted them all, she soars far beyond the spheres, climbing to heaven's topmost height, to the very Fountain of light. There the Sovereign of the world keeps his calm sway; as the globe is whirled onward he holds the chariot reins, and in glittering splendour reigns as the universal King. If your wandering feet find their way here at last, here you will greet the home you lost so long ago, and say: "Dear lost land, though I have strayed far from you, this is where I came from, and here I will stay." And yet, if ever you should want to come as a visitor to the gloomy night of earth again, you will certainly see that the tyrants whole nations fear live down here in wretched exile.
Then I said: "Your promises really are wonderfully large; and yet I do not doubt you can make them good. Only, having raised such hopes, do not keep me in suspense."
"Learn first, then," she said, "how power always attends the good, while the bad are left entirely without strength. Each of these truths proves the other. Since good and evil are opposites, if it is made plain that good is power, the feebleness of evil is clearly seen; and conversely, if the frailty of evil is shown, the strength of good is known from it. Still, to win wider credit for my conclusion, I will follow both paths, and get confirmation for what I say first in one direction and then in the other.
"Carrying out any human action depends on two things: will and power. If either is missing, nothing can be done. For if the will is lacking, no attempt at all is made at what is not willed; while if there is no power, the will is entirely useless. So if you see someone wanting to reach an end and completely failing to reach it, you cannot doubt that he lacked the power to get what he wanted."
"Certainly not; there is no denying it."
"Can you doubt, then, that a man you see has accomplished what he wanted also had the power to accomplish it?"
"Of course not."
"Then a man is to be counted strong in respect of what he can do, and weak in respect of what he cannot?"
"Granted," I said.
"Then do you remember that our earlier reasoning concluded that the whole aim of a man's will, however much the means of pursuit vary, is fixed intently on happiness?"
"I do remember that being proved as well."
"Do you also recall that happiness is absolute good, and therefore that when happiness is sought it is good that is the object of desire in every case?"
"I do not so much recall it as keep it fixed in my memory."
"Then all men, good and bad alike, strive to reach the good with one and the same purpose?"
"Yes, that follows."
"But it is certain that men become good by attaining the good?"
"It is."
"Then do the good reach their object?"
"It seems so."
"But if the bad were to reach the good that is their object too, they could not be bad?"
"No."
"Then, since both seek the good, but one sort reach it and the other do not, can there be any doubt that the good are endowed with power, while those who are bad are weak?"
"Anyone who doubts it is incapable of reflecting on the nature of things, or on what follows from an argument."
"Again: suppose there are two things given the same function in the course of nature, and one of them successfully performs that function by a natural action, while the other is altogether incapable of that natural action and instead, in a way that does not suit its nature, does not so much fulfil the function as pretend to fulfil it. Which of the two would you say was the stronger?"
"I can guess what you mean, but please let me hear you spell it out."
"Walking is man's natural motion, is it not?"
"Certainly."
"And you do not doubt, I suppose, that it is natural for the feet to perform that function?"
"No, of course I do not."
"Now, if one man who can use his feet walks, and another, who lacks the natural use of his feet, tries to walk on his hands, which of the two would you rightly reckon the stronger?"
"Go on," I said. "Nobody can question that a man who has the natural capacity has more strength than one who has not."
"Now, the supreme good is set up as the end for the bad just as much as for the good; but the good pursue it by the natural action of the virtues, whereas the bad try to reach that same good through every kind of craving, which is not the natural way of reaching good. Or do you think otherwise?"
"No; in fact one further consequence is clear to me. From what I have admitted, it must follow that the good have power and the bad are powerless."
"You run ahead correctly, and that, as doctors reckon, is a sign that nature is at work and throwing off the disease. But since I see you are so quick at understanding, I will heap proof on proof. See how obvious the extremity of vicious men's weakness is: they cannot even reach the goal that the aim of their nature leads and almost forces them towards. What would they be like if they were left without this mighty, this nearly irresistible help of nature's guidance? Consider, too, how momentous the powerlessness is that disables the wicked. The prizes they contend for, and cannot win or hold, are not light or trivial; their failure concerns the sum and crown of things. Poor wretches: they fail to get even the thing they toil after day and night. And here too the strength of the good stands out. Just as you would judge the strongest walker to be the one whose legs could carry him to a point beyond which no further advance was possible, so you must reckon a man strong in power when he so reaches the end of his desires that there is nothing further left to desire. From which follows the obvious conclusion that those who are wicked are seen, likewise, to be wholly without strength. For why do they abandon virtue and follow vice? Is it from ignorance of what is good? Well, what is weaker and feebler than the blindness of ignorance? Or do they know what they ought to follow, but get driven off the road by desire? If so, they are frail from lack of self-control, since they cannot fight against vice. Or do they knowingly and deliberately abandon the good and turn aside to vice? Why, at that rate they not only stop having power, they stop existing at all. For those who abandon the common end of everything that exists, likewise stop existing at all. Now some may find it strange that we should claim that the bad, who make up most of mankind, do not exist. But so it is. I do not deny that those who are bad are bad; what I deny is that they are, in an unqualified and absolute sense. Just as we call a corpse a dead man but cannot call it simply a man, so I would allow the vicious to be bad, but I cannot allow that they are in an absolute sense. Only that thing is which holds its place and keeps its nature; whatever falls away from that abandons the existence that belongs to its nature. 'But,' you will say, 'the bad have an ability.' I do not want to deny that either; only this ability of theirs comes not from strength but from powerlessness. For their ability is an ability to do evil, and that would have had no efficacy at all if they could have gone on doing good. So this ability of theirs proves still more plainly that they have no power. For if, as we concluded just now, evil is nothing, it is clear that the wicked can bring nothing about, since all they are able to do is evil."
"That is evident."
"And so that you may understand the exact force of this power: did we not determine a while ago that nothing has more power than the supreme good?"
"We did," I said.
"But that same highest good cannot do evil?"
"Certainly not."
"Is there anybody, then, who thinks that men are able to do everything?"
"Nobody but a madman."
"Yet they are able to do evil?"
"Yes — I wish they were not!"
"Since, then, the one who can do only good is all-powerful, while those who can do evil as well are not all-powerful, it is clear that those who can do evil have less power. There is this too: we have shown that all power is to be counted among the things worth wanting, and that all such things are referred to the good as to a kind of completion of their nature. But the ability to commit a crime cannot be referred to the good; therefore it is not something to be wanted. And yet all power is worth wanting. So it is clear that the ability to do evil is not power. From all of which the power of the good appears, and the unmistakable weakness of the bad, and it is clear that Plato's verdict was true: the wise alone are able to do what they want, while the wicked follow the lust of their own hearts but can not accomplish what they want. For they go on in their wilfulness, imagining they will get what they want by the roads of pleasure; but they are very far from getting it, since shameful acts do not lead to happiness."
When the monarch sits high on his throne, magnificent in the pride of his purple, with flashing steel to guard him on every side; when deadly terrors lower on his forehead with a threatening frown and Passion heaves in his labouring breast — how dreadful his power looks! But strip the robes of state off such a man and you will see what a load of secret chains this lord of the earth is wearing. Lust's poison is festering; rage sweeps across his mind like a rough storm; sorrow torments his spirit, and empty hopes lead him on. Then you will admit it: one unlucky wretch, oppressed by many masters, who never does what he wants, but lives in the helplessness of slavery.
"You see, then, what filth unrighteous deeds are sunk in, and with what splendour righteousness shines. From which it is clear that goodness never goes without its reward, nor crime without its punishment. For in every kind of transaction the thing for whose sake the action is done may fairly be counted the reward of that action — just as the wreath the race is run for is the prize offered for running. Now we have shown that happiness is the very good for whose sake everything is done. So absolute good is offered as the common prize, so to speak, of all human actions. But this is a reward that cannot possibly be separated from the good man, since anyone without good cannot properly be called good at all; so righteous dealing never misses its reward. Let the wicked rage as violently as they like: the crown will not fall from the wise man's head, and will not wither. Other men's unrighteousness cannot pluck their proper glory from righteous souls. If the reward that the righteous soul delights in were received from outside, then it could be taken away by whoever gave it, or by somebody else; but since it is conferred by his own righteousness, he will lose his prize only when he has stopped being righteous. Finally, since every prize is wanted because it is believed to be good, who can count a man who possesses good as being without reward? And what a prize it is — the finest and grandest of all! Remember the corollary I insisted on so particularly a little while back, and reason like this: since absolute good is happiness, it is clear that all good men must be happy for the very reason that they are good. But it was agreed that those who are happy are gods. So the prize of the good is one that no length of time can wear down, no man's power reduce, no man's unrighteousness tarnish: it is Godhood itself. And this being so, the wise man cannot doubt that punishment is inseparable from the bad. For since good and bad, and likewise reward and punishment, are opposites, it necessarily follows that corresponding to everything we see accruing as the reward of the good there is some penalty attached as the punishment of evil. So just as righteousness is itself the reward of the righteous, wickedness is itself the punishment of the unrighteous. Now nobody who is visited with punishment doubts that he is visited with an evil. So if they were only willing to weigh up their own case, could they think themselves free of punishment, when wickedness, the worst of all evils, has not merely touched them but stained them through?
"And look at it from the opposite point of view too — the point of view of the good — and see what a penalty attends the wicked. You learned a little while ago that whatever is, is one, and that unity itself is good. So on this reckoning, whatever falls away from goodness stops existing; which means that the bad stop being what they were, and only the outward appearance is left to show that they were once men. So by their perversion into badness they have lost their true human nature. And further, since righteousness alone can raise men above the human level, unrighteousness must necessarily degrade below the human level those it has thrown out of the human condition. So it turns out that you cannot count a man human when you see he has been transformed by vice. The violent plunderer of other men's goods, inflamed with greed, surely looks like a wolf. The bold restless spirit, forever squabbling in the law courts, is like some yelping dog. The secret schemer, who takes pleasure in fraud and stealth, is the fox's own brother. The passionate man, frantic with rage, we might believe to be animated by the soul of a lion. The coward and the runaway, afraid where there is nothing to fear, may be compared to the timid deer. The man sunk in ignorance and stupidity lives like a dull donkey. The light, inconstant man, never sticking long to one thing, is a bird for all the world. The man who wallows in foul and unclean lusts is sunk in the pleasures of a filthy pig. So it comes about that the man who stops being a man by abandoning righteousness cannot pass into a godlike condition, but actually turns into a brute beast."
The shrewd man of Ithaca and all his storm-tossed fleet were driven far over the ocean by the winds of heaven — driven to the mysterious island where she lives in her cunning, that lovely and faithless one, the daughter of the Sun. There, for the visiting crew, with the spells she knew how to work, she mixed the enchanted cup. For whoever drinks it down must suffer a hideous change into strange and monstrous shapes. One comes out looking like a boar; this one rears up his huge frame, mighty in bulk and limb — an African lion, grim with claw and fang. This one, plainly a wolf, is wretched: when he wants to weep, he howls; and these, oddly tame, go prowling as companions of the Indian tiger. And though he was in such straits, the pity of the god who carries the mysterious wand had power to save the brave chieftain from her deadly arts; but his comrades, held back by nobody, drained the fatal goblet. Now every one of them, head hanging low, fed on acorns like a pig; human speech and human shape were stripped away, with no human feature left; but the mind stood firm, unaltered, unsurrendered, and mourned the monstrous change. How little use, then, those powers of evil were! These herbs, this deadly skill, may change every outward part, but cannot touch the heart. Deep-set in its true home, a man's spirit is living still. Those poisons are the deadlier, far stronger to drive a man out of his high estate, which work their way in subtly and leave the body whole but deeply infect the soul.
Then I said: "That is very true. I can see that vicious men, though they keep the outward form of a man, are rightly said to be changed into beasts as far as their spiritual nature goes. But since their cruel and polluted minds work off their rage in destroying the good, I wish they were not allowed that licence."
"Nor are they," she said, "as will be shown in its proper place. And yet if that licence you believe they are allowed were taken away from them, the punishment of the wicked would be largely remitted. For, incredible as it may seem to some, it must necessarily be true that the bad are more unfortunate when they have carried out what they wanted than when they cannot get it done. If it is wretched to will an evil, it is more wretched to have been able to accomplish one; for without the power, the wretched will would come to nothing. And so those whom you see willing crime, being able to commit it, and committing it, must necessarily be the victims of a threefold wretchedness, since each of these states has its own measure of wretchedness."
"Yes," I said, "and yet I earnestly wish they could be quickly rid of this misfortune by losing the ability to commit crime."
"They will lose it," she said, "sooner than you perhaps wish, or than they themselves think likely. Within the narrow bounds of our brief life there is truly nothing so slow in coming that anyone should think it a long wait — least of all an immortal spirit. Their great expectations, the towering structure of their crimes, is often brought down by a sudden and unlooked-for ending, and that only sets a limit to their misery. For if wickedness makes men wretched, a man who is wicked for longer is necessarily more wretched; and if death did not at any rate put an end to the evil doings of the wicked, I should count them wretched to the last degree. Indeed, if the conclusions we have reached about the ill fortune of wickedness are true, then a wretchedness doomed to be eternal is plainly infinite."
Then I said: "That is an astonishing inference, and hard to grant; but I can see it agrees entirely with our earlier conclusions."
"You are right," she said. "But if anyone finds the conclusion hard to admit, in fairness he ought either to prove that something in the premises is false, or to show that the propositions taken together do not adequately force the conclusion; otherwise, if the premises are granted, there is nothing whatever to be said against the inference. And here is another statement that looks no less astonishing, but is equally necessary given the premises we have assumed."
"What is that?"
"The wicked are happier when they undergo punishment than they would be if no penalty of justice corrected them. And I do not mean now the thing that would occur to anybody — that a bad character is improved by retribution and brought back onto the right road by the fear of punishment, or that it serves as an example warning others off wrongdoing. I mean that in another way the wicked are more unfortunate when they go unpunished, even leaving improvement out of account and paying no attention to the example."
"Why, what other way is there besides those?" I said.
Then she said: "Have we not agreed that the good are happy and the evil wretched?"
"Yes," I said.
"Now, if some good thing is given to a man in affliction along with his misery, is he not happier than a man whose misery is misery pure and simple, with no good mixed into it?"
"It would seem so."
"But if some further evil is added to a man who is wretched in that way, and destitute of all good, on top of the things that already make him wretched, is he not to be judged far unhappier than the man whose ill fortune is relieved by some share of good?"
"It could hardly be otherwise."
"Then surely, when the wicked are punished, a good thing is added to them — namely the punishment, which by the law of justice is good; and likewise when they escape punishment, a new evil attaches to them in that very freedom from punishment, which you have rightly acknowledged to be an evil in the case of the unrighteous."
"I cannot deny it."
"Then the wicked are far unhappier when they are indulged with an unjust freedom from punishment than when they are punished by a just retribution. Now it is obvious that it is just for the wicked to be punished, and unjust for them to get off unpunished."
"Why, who would dare deny it?"
"And nobody can possibly deny this either: that everything just is good, and conversely everything unjust is bad."
Then I answered: "These inferences certainly do follow from what we concluded a moment ago. But tell me: do you take no account of the punishment of the soul after the death of the body?"
"Indeed I do," she said. "These penalties are great — some of them inflicted, I imagine, in the severity of retribution, others in the mercy of purification. But it is not my present purpose to talk about them. So far my aim has been to make you recognise that the power of the bad, which shocked you so extremely, is no power at all; to make you see that the men whose freedom from punishment you complained of are never without the proper penalties of their unrighteousness; to teach you that the licence you prayed might soon come to an end does not last long; that it would be unhappier if it lasted longer, and unhappiest of all if it lasted for ever; and after that, that the unrighteous are more wretched when they are unjustly let off without punishment than when they are punished by a just retribution — from which it follows that the wicked are afflicted with more severe penalties precisely when they are supposed to be escaping punishment."
Then I said: "While I follow your reasonings, I am deeply struck by their truth. But if I turn to what people commonly believe, I find few who will even listen to such arguments, let alone allow that they are credible."
"True," she said. "They cannot lift eyes accustomed to darkness up to the light of clear truth, and they are like the birds whose sight night brightens and day blinds. For since they look not at the order of the universe but at their own frame of mind, they think the licence to commit crime and the escape from punishment are strokes of luck. But observe the ordinance of eternal law. If you have shaped your soul to the likeness of what is better, you need no judge to award you the prize: by your own act you have raised yourself in the scale of excellence. If you have twisted your affections towards baser things, do not look for punishment from anyone outside you: your own act has degraded you and pushed you down. It is like turning your gaze by turns on the vile earth and on the heavens: though everything outside you stands still, by the mere laws of sight you seem now to be sunk in the mud, now to be soaring among the stars. But the common herd pays no attention to these things. What then? Shall we go over to the people we have shown to be like brute beasts? Why, suppose someone who had entirely lost his sight also forgot that he had ever had the faculty of vision, and imagined that he lacked nothing that belongs to human perfection: should we then judge the people who could see as well as ever to be the blind ones? And they will not agree to this either — that those who do wrong are more wretched than those who suffer it — though the proof of it rests on grounds of reason just as strong."
"Let me hear those reasons," I said.
"Would you deny that every wicked man deserves punishment?"
"Certainly not."
"And that those who are wicked are unhappy is clear in a great many ways?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Then you do not doubt that those who deserve punishment are wretched?"
"Agreed," I said.
"So if you were sitting in judgment, on which of them would you order punishment inflicted — the man who had done the wrong, or the man who had suffered it?"
"Without a doubt I would compensate the sufferer at the wrongdoer's expense."
"Then the man who injures would seem more wretched than the man injured?"
"Yes; that follows. And so for this and other reasons resting on the same ground, since baseness by its own nature makes men wretched, it is plain that a wrong involves the misery of the doer, not of the sufferer."
"And yet," she said, "the practice of the law courts is exactly the opposite. Advocates try to rouse the judges' pity for people who have suffered some grievous and cruel wrong, whereas pity is rather owed to the criminal, who ought to be brought to the judgment seat by his accusers in a spirit not of anger but of compassion and kindness — as a sick man is brought to the doctor, to have the ulcer of his fault cut away by punishment. At which point the advocate's business would either come to a complete standstill, or, if men preferred to make it useful to mankind, would be restricted to the practice of accusation. And the wicked themselves, if they were allowed to see through some chink or cranny the virtue they have abandoned, and to see that by the pains of punishment they would rid themselves of the filth of their vices and win the reward of righteousness in exchange, would no longer think these sufferings were pains at all; they would refuse the help of advocates and hand themselves over entirely to their accusers and their judges. Which is why the wise have no room left in them for hatred. Only the greatest fool would hate the good, and hating the bad is unreasonable. For if a vicious tendency is a disease of the soul, as bodily sickness is of the body, then just as we count the physically sick as by no means deserving hatred but rather pity, so, and far more, should we pity those whose minds are under assault by wickedness, which is more frightening than any sickness."
Why all this furious fighting? Why provoke with a rash and wilful hand the day death has fixed for you? If it is death you are after — look, death is close at hand, and those swift horses do not slow down at their master's wish. Wild beasts vent their rage on man, yet men aim the murdering steel at the lives of their own brothers; they wage unjust and cruel wars and hurry to meet or deal out death by flying spears. They can show neither right nor reason for it; it is only that their lands and their laws are not the same. If you want to give each man his due, then know this: the good must have your love, and the bad have a claim on your pity.
At this I said: "I see how there is a happiness and a misery founded on what the righteous and the wicked actually deserve. Even so, I keep wondering whether there is not some good and evil in fortune as ordinary people understand it. Surely no sensible man would rather be exiled, poor and disgraced, than live prosperously in his own country, powerful, wealthy and high in honour. Indeed, the work of wisdom shows more clearly in its working when the happiness of rulers is passed on somehow to the people around them — especially considering that prison, and the law, and the other pains of legal punishment are properly owed only to mischievous citizens, on whose account they were set up in the first place. And so I am extremely puzzled about why all this is completely reversed: why the good are harried with the penalties that crime deserves and the bad carry off the rewards of virtue. I am longing to hear from you what reason there could be for such an unjust state of disorder. I should certainly wonder less if I could believe that everything was the confused result of chance. But as it is, my belief that God governs the world adds one amazement to another. For seeing that He sometimes assigns good fortune to the good and harsh fortune to the bad, and then again deals harshly with the good and gives the bad their hearts' desire, how does this differ from chance, unless some reason is found for it all?"
"There is nothing surprising in it," she said, "if everything is thought random and confused when the principle of order is not known. And although you do not know the causes this great system depends on, still, since a good ruler governs the world, do not doubt for your part that everything is rightly done."
Anyone who does not know how close to the pole Bootes runs his course must wonder what heavenly law moves his Wagon so slowly, why he plunges so late beneath the sea and lights his beams again so quickly. When the full-orbed moon grows pale in the middle of the night, and suddenly the stars come out that were faint in her light, whole nations stand and stare, astounded, and beat the air in wild bewilderment. Nobody wonders why the storm-driven breakers pound on the shore, or why the frost-locked glaciers melt in the fierce heat of summer; for here the cause seems plain and clear, and it is only what is dark and hidden that we fear. Feeble-minded folly magnifies everything rare and strange, and the dull herd is overwhelmed with awe at any unexpected change. But wonder goes out of an enlightened mind as soon as ignorance stops blinding it.
"True," I said; "but since it is your business to unfold the hidden causes of things and explain principles that are veiled in darkness, please tell me your own conclusions on this matter, since the wonder of it disturbs my mind more than anything else."
A smile played for a moment on her lips as she answered: "You are calling me to the greatest of all subjects of inquiry, a task the most exhaustive treatment barely covers. Its nature is such that as fast as one doubt is cut away, countless others spring up like the Hydra's heads; and there would be no limit to their sprouting again unless we put them down with the living fire of the mind. For the subject takes in the questions of the essential simplicity of providence, the order of fate, unforeseen chance, divine knowledge and predestination, and the freedom of the will. How heavy all that weighs you can judge for yourself. But since knowing these things is also part of the treatment of your illness, we will try to give them some consideration, in spite of the narrow limits of our time. What is more, you must do without the pleasures of music and song for a while, if you find any delight in them, while I weave the connected chain of reasons together in its proper order."
"As you wish," I said.
Then, as though making a fresh start, she began: "The coming into being of all things, the whole course of development in things that change, every sort of thing that moves in any way at all, receives its due cause, order and form from the steadfastness of the divine mind. That mind, calm in the citadel of its own essential simplicity, has decreed that its method of ruling shall be manifold. Seen in the very purity of the divine intelligence, that method is called providence; but seen with regard to the things it moves and arranges, it is what the ancients called fate. That these two are different will easily become clear to anyone who reviews what each of them does. Providence is the divine reason itself, seated in the Supreme Being, which arranges all things; fate is the arrangement inherent in all moving things, by which providence joins everything in its proper order. Providence embraces all things, however different, however infinite; fate sets individual things in motion separately, and assigns each of them its position, form and time.
"So the unfolding of this temporal order, gathered into one in the foresight of the divine mind, is providence; while the same unity, broken up and unfolded in time, is fate. And although they are different, there is a dependence between them, for the order of destiny issues from the essential simplicity of providence. Just as a craftsman first forms the idea of the thing to be made in his mind, then carries out his design and develops from moment to moment what he had seen before as a single whole in one instant, so God in His providence ordains all things as parts of a single unchanging whole, but carries out those very ordinances by fate, in a time of manifold unity. So whether fate is worked out by divine spirits as the servants of providence, or by a soul, or by the service of all nature — whether by the heavenly motion of the stars, by the power of angels, or by the many-sided cunning of demons — whether the destined series is woven by all of these or by some of them, this at least is clear: providence is the fixed and simple form of destined events, and fate is their shifting series in the order of time, as they are to take place by the arrangement of divine simplicity. And so all things that are under fate are subject to providence as well, since fate itself depends on it; whereas certain things that are set under providence are above the chain of fate — namely those things which by their nearness to the primal Divinity are steadfastly fixed and lie outside the order of fate's movements. For consider several circles revolving round the same centre. The innermost approaches the simplicity of the middle point, and is a kind of pivot for the outer circles to turn round, while the outermost, whirled in a wider orbit, sweeps through more and more space the further it gets from the indivisible unity of the centre; and whatever joins and allies itself to the centre is narrowed to a like simplicity and no longer spreads vaguely out into space. In just that way, whatever departs a long way from the primal mind gets more deeply entangled in the meshes of fate, and things are free of fate in proportion as they try to come nearer to that central pivot; while anything that clings close to the supreme mind in its absolute fixity is free of movement too, and rises above the necessity of fate. So what reasoning is to pure intelligence, what the generated is to what simply is, what time is to eternity, what a circle is to its centre — that is what the shifting series of fate is to the steadfastness and simplicity of providence.
"It is this causal series that moves the heavens and the stars, tunes the elements to mutual agreement and then in turn transforms them into new combinations; this is what renews the series of everything that is born and dies through the like succession of seed and birth; it is its working that binds the destinies of men in an unbreakable knot of causality — and since it issues at its source from unalterable providence, those destinies too must necessarily be unalterable. And so the world is ruled for the best if this unity, remaining in the divine mind, puts forth an inflexible order of causes. That order, by its intrinsic unchangeableness, holds in check changeable things that would otherwise ebb and flow at random. And so it happens that although to you, who are not entirely capable of understanding this order, everything looks confused and disordered, there is nevertheless an appointed limit everywhere, guiding all things towards good. Indeed nothing can be done for the sake of evil even by the wicked themselves — for, as we proved abundantly, they seek good and are dragged out of the way by a twisted error; still less can this order, which sets out from the supreme centre of good, turn aside anywhere from the road it began on.
"'And yet,' you will say, 'what confusion could be more unjust than that prosperity and adversity should fall on the good without distinction, and that what the bad like and what they loathe should come to them by turns?' Yes; but are men in real life so sound of mind that their judgments of righteousness and wickedness must necessarily correspond to the facts? Why, on this very point their verdicts contradict one another, and the men some think deserve a reward others think deserve punishment. But suppose there were someone who could rightly tell the good from the bad: would he be able to see into the innermost constitution of a soul, as we say of a body? The wonder here is not unlike what astonishes a man who does not know why, in health, sweet things suit some constitutions and bitter things others, or why some sick men are best relieved by mild remedies and others by severe ones. But the doctor, who can tell the precise conditions and characteristics of health and sickness, is not astonished. Now the health of a soul is nothing but righteousness, and vice is its sickness. It is God, the guide and physician of the mind, who preserves the good and drives out the bad. He looks out from the high watchtower of His providence, sees what suits each man, and assigns what He knows to be suitable.
"So this is what that extraordinary mystery of the order of destiny comes down to: something is done by one who knows, and the ignorant are astonished by it. But let us consider a few instances that show how competent human reason is to fathom the divine unsearchableness. Here is a man you take to be the perfection of justice and scrupulous integrity; to all-knowing Providence he looks quite otherwise. We all know our Lucan's remark that the winning cause found favour with the gods, and the beaten cause with Cato. So if you see something in this world turning out differently from what you expected, do not doubt that events are rightly ordered; the twisted confusion is in your judgment of them.
"But grant that somewhere there is found a man of so fortunate a character that God and man agree in their judgments about him: still he may be somewhat weak in strength of mind. It may be that if he falls into adversity he will give up practising the innocence that failed to secure his fortune. So God's wise arrangement spares the man whom adversity might make worse, and will not let a man suffer who is ill fitted to endure. There is another, perfect in every virtue, so holy and so near to God that providence judges it unlawful for anything harmful to happen to him — will not even allow him to be afflicted with bodily illness. As a better man than I has said:
"'The very body of the holy saint is built of purest ether.'
It often happens that government is given to the good so that a restraint may be put on the overflow of wickedness. To others providence assigns some mixed lot suited to their spiritual nature: some it will trouble in case they run rank through long prosperity; others it will let be harassed by painful afflictions so as to strengthen their virtues by the exercise and practice of patience. Some are too afraid of what they have the strength to bear; others are too dismissive of what their strength is unequal to. All of these it brings to the test of their true selves through misfortune. Some, too, have bought a name that later ages revere at the price of a glorious death; some by unconquerable steadiness under suffering have shown others by their example that virtue cannot be beaten by disaster. All of which, beyond doubt, comes about rightly and in due order, and to the benefit of the people it is seen to happen to.
"As for the other side of the wonder — that the bad now meet with affliction and now get their hearts' desire — that springs from the same causes. Nobody, of course, is surprised at the afflictions, since everybody holds that the wicked deserve to suffer. The truth is that their punishments both frighten others away from crime and improve the men they are inflicted on; while their prosperity is a powerful sermon to the good about what judgments they ought to pass on good fortune of that kind, which so often waits on the wicked so attentively.
"There is another object that may, I think, be achieved in such cases. There is perhaps a man whose nature is so reckless and violent that poverty would drive him more desperately into crime. His disorder providence relieves by letting him pile up money. Such a man, uneasy in a conscience stained with guilt, comparing his character with his fortune, may perhaps grow afraid of coming to mourn the loss of what it is so pleasant to have. So he will reform his ways, and out of fear of losing his fortune he abandons his wickedness. Some, carrying prosperity unworthily, have been flung headlong into ruin; to others the power of the sword has been given, so that the good may be tested by discipline and the bad punished. For just as there can be no peace between the righteous and the wicked, neither can the wicked agree among themselves. How should they, when each of them is at odds with himself, because his vices tear his conscience, and he often does things which, once done, he judges ought not to have been done? Hence this supreme providence brings about that notable wonder: the bad make the bad good. For some, when they see the injustice they suffer themselves at the hands of evildoers, are inflamed with loathing for the offenders, and in trying to be unlike the people they hate they come back to the ways of virtue. It is divine power alone that can make evil things good too, by putting them to a suitable use and bringing them in the end to some good outcome. For order embraces all things in one way or another, so that even what has departed from the appointed laws of the order still falls within an order — a different one, but another order — so that nothing in the realm of providence may be left to happen at random. But
"'Hard would the task be, even for a god, to recount it all, leaving nothing out.'
Nor is it lawful for a man to grasp the whole mechanism of the divine work in thought, or to set it out in speech. Let us be content with having understood just this much: that God, the creator of all nature, likewise arranges all things and guides them towards good; and while He works to preserve everything He has created in likeness to Himself, He banishes all evil from the borders of His commonwealth through the links of fated necessity. And so it comes about that if you look at the providence that does the arranging, you will nowhere find the evils that are believed to swarm on earth.
"But I see you have long been weighed down by the weight of the subject and tired out by the length of the argument, and are now looking for some refreshment of sweet poetry. Listen, then, and may the draught so restore you that you will bend your mind more resolutely to what is left."
If you want to see with an unclouded mind the laws God has designed, lift your steady gaze up high to the canopy of stars; see all the constellations move in a rightful league of love. The fiery Sun in full career never blocks the cold Moon's sphere; when the Bear at heaven's height wheels his horses' rapid flight, though he sees the starry train sinking in the western sea, he does not grudge it, and does not want to quench his own fires in the flood. In the true sequence laid down, morning and evening follow each day; the Evening Star brings on the shades of night, the Morning Star brings the light. Love, taking its turn as it should, keeps renewing the cycle, and discordant strife is driven out of the starry realm of heaven. So, in a marvellous friendship, the warring elements agree; hot and cold, and wet and dry lay their ancient quarrel by; the flickering flame climbs high, and earth tends downward for ever. So the year in spring's mild hours loads the air with the scent of flowers; summer paints the grain gold; then, when autumn comes round again, the orchards glow bright with fruit; winter brings the rain and the snow. So the fixed progression of the seasons, tempered in a due succession, nourishes and brings to birth everything that lives and breathes on earth. Then, when life's little day has run, it takes away all it brought. But One sits and holds the reins, who made everything and sustains it all; King and Lord and Fountainhead, most holy Judge, most dreadful Law; now He drives on and now holds back, and keeps each wanderer in the track. If that power were ever withheld that compels the circling spheres to turn in their orbits, this world's order would dissolve, and the harmonious whole would fall in one hideous ruin. But through this connected frame runs one universal aim; all things tend towards the Good, many paths, but one end. For nothing lasts unless it turns back in its course, and longs to flow again to that Source from which its being was first taken.
"Do you see, then, what follows from everything we have said?"
"No; what follows?"
"That absolutely every fortune is good fortune."
"And how can that be?" I said.
"Listen," she said. "Since every fortune, welcome and unwelcome alike, has for its object the rewarding or testing of the good and the punishing or improving of the bad, every fortune must be good, since it is either just or useful."
"The reasoning is perfectly true," I said, "and the conclusion, as long as I keep in mind the providence and the fate you have taught me about, rests on a strong foundation. Still, with your permission, we will count it among the propositions you called paradoxical a while ago."
"Why is that?" she said.
"Because ordinary speech is apt to say, and to say often, that some men's fortune is bad."
"Shall we come a little closer for a while, then, to the language ordinary people use, so as not to seem to have wandered too far from human custom?"
"As you please," I said.
"You call what does you good, good, do you not?"
"Certainly."
"And whatever tests or improves a man does him good?"
"Granted."
"And so is good?"
"Of course."
"Well, this is their case who have attained virtue and are at war with adversity, or who are turning away from vice and taking hold of the path of virtue."
"I cannot deny it."
"What about the good fortune that is given as a reward to the good — do ordinary people judge that bad?"
"Anything but; they think it is the best there is, as indeed it is."
"What, then, about the one case left — the fortune which, harsh though it is, puts the restraint of just punishment on the bad? Does popular opinion count that good?"
"No; of everything imaginable it is reckoned the most miserable."
"Then see whether, in following popular opinion, we have not ended up with a thoroughly paradoxical conclusion."
"How so?" I said.
"Why, it follows from what we have admitted that for everyone who has attained virtue, or is advancing in it, or is aiming at it, fortune is good in every case; while for those who stay in their wickedness fortune is always utterly bad."
"That is true," I said, "though nobody would dare admit it."
"And so," she said, "the wise man ought not to take it badly if he is ever caught up in one of fortune's battles, any more than it suits a brave soldier to be annoyed whenever the trumpet sounds for the fight. For each of them the time of trial is exactly the opportunity — for the soldier to win glory, for the wise man to perfect his wisdom. That is where virtue gets its name, in fact: relying on its own strength, it does not give way to adversity. And you who have taken your stand on virtue's steep ascent — it is not for you to be dissolved in delights or made feeble by pleasure. You close with all the turns of fortune in a struggle, and a very sharp one, so as not to let foul fortune overwhelm you or fair fortune corrupt you. Hold the middle with all your strength. Whatever falls short of it or goes beyond it is loaded with contempt for happiness, and misses the reward of the effort. It rests with you to make your fortune what you want it to be. For every harsh-looking fortune, unless it disciplines or improves, is a punishment."
Ten years of tedious war dragged on before Troy's smoking ruins paid for a marriage defiled and a promise betrayed, and the great son of Atreus had his anger eased. But when heaven's anger demanded a life and baffling winds held back his fleet, the king put his fatherhood aside and killed his own child with a priest's knife. When by the cave's flickering light Odysseus saw his dear companions swallowed in the huge Cyclops' hideous jaws, he wept at the pitiful sight. But soon, blinded and wild with pain — in bitter tears and misery — grim Polyphemus paid in his turn for the unholy pleasure of that foul feast. The labours of Hercules win him a name of glory far and wide; he broke the Centaurs' arrogant pride and stripped the lion of its skin. He shot the foul birds down with unerring arrows; he stole the golden fruit — the dragon kept its watch for nothing; and with a triple chain he hauled Cerberus up out of hell. He fed the wild horses on their own savage master's flesh; he beat the Hydra with fire. Maimed Achelous hid his head in shame beneath his own waves. Huge Cacus was killed for his crimes; Antaeus was flung down on Libya's sand; the great boar's slaver stained the shoulders that were to hold up the world. The last labour of all: his strength held up the globe of heaven, and he did not bend beneath it; and that toil, the end of his labours, won him the prize of heaven's high glory. Brave hearts, press on! Look — these bright examples lead the way to heaven! Do not turn your backs and run from the fight; win the struggle on earth, and the stars are your reward.
She stopped, and was about to move on in her discourse to set out other matters, when I broke in and said: "Your exhortation is excellent, and just what suits your high authority. But I am experiencing at this very moment one of the many difficulties which, as you said a moment ago, surround the question of providence. I want to know whether you think there is any such thing as chance at all, and if there is, what it is."
Then she answered: "I am anxious to keep my promise in full, and to open you a way back to your native land. As for these matters, useful as they are to know, they are a little off the path of our design, and I am afraid that digressions may tire you out and leave you unequal to finishing the direct journey to our goal."
"Have no fear of that," I said. "It is a rest to me to learn, when learning brings such exquisite delight — especially now that your argument has been built up on all sides with unquestionable conviction, and no room is left for uncertainty in what comes next."
She answered: "I will do as you ask," and began at once: "If chance is defined as a result produced by random movement with no link of causal connection, then I flatly declare that there is no such thing as chance at all, and I consider the word entirely empty of meaning except as a label for the thing we are discussing. What room can be left for random action when God constrains all things into order? For 'nothing comes from nothing' is sound doctrine, which none of the ancients denied — although they applied it to material substance and not to the efficient principle, and laid it down as a kind of foundation for all their reasoning about nature. Now if a thing came about without causes, it would appear to have come out of nothing. But if that is impossible, then chance as just defined is impossible too."
"Well," I said, "is there nothing, then, that can properly be called chance or accident? Or is there something these names do fit, though its nature is dark to ordinary people?"
"Our good Aristotle," she said, "defined it concisely in his Physics, and very much in accordance with the truth."
"How, exactly?" I said.
"Like this," she said. "Whenever something is done for the sake of a particular end, and for certain reasons some result other than the one intended follows, that is called chance. For instance, if a man is digging the ground to cultivate it and finds a mass of buried gold. Now such a find is regarded as accidental; and yet it did not come out of nothing, for it has its proper causes, whose unforeseen and unexpected coming together brought the chance about. If the farmer had not been digging, and if the man who hid the money had not buried it in that exact spot, the gold would not have been found. These, then, are the reasons why the find is a chance one: it results from causes that met and coincided, and not from any intention on the finder's part. Since neither the man who buried the gold nor the man who worked the field intended the money to be found, but, as I said, it happened by coincidence that one dug where the other had buried the treasure. So we may define chance as an unexpected result flowing from a coming together of causes, where each of the several factors had some definite end of its own. But the meeting and coinciding of those causes arises from that inevitable chain of order which, flowing from the fountainhead of Providence, arranges all things in their due time and place."
In the rugged Persian highlands, where the masters of the bow know how to fake a retreat, and, running, shoot their arrows back and hit the enemy; there the Tigris and Euphrates mingle their waters at one source, soon to draw apart, and each to make its separate way down to the plain. When their waters mingle again in a deep and wide channel, all the flotsam carried on the current comes together: ships, and trunks of trees torn up in the torrent's wild rush, meet as chance seems to steer them at random among the swirling waters. And yet the slope of the channel and the force of the flowing water guide every movement, and settle the course of each floating fragment. So wherever the drift of hazard seems to run most unrestrained, chance herself is reined and bitted, and knows the curb of law.
"I am following carefully," I said, "and I agree that it is as you say. But in this series of linked causes, is there any freedom left to our will? Or does the chain of fate bind the very movements of our souls as well?"
"There is freedom," she said. "Indeed, no creature can be rational unless it is endowed with free will. For whatever has the natural use of reason has the faculty of judging between things, and distinguishes for itself what is to be avoided and what wanted. Now everyone seeks what he judges desirable and avoids what he thinks should be avoided. So beings endowed with reason also possess the faculty of freely choosing and refusing. But I do not suppose this faculty is equal in all of them. The higher divine beings have a clear-sighted judgment, an uncorrupted will, and an effective power of getting what they want. Human souls are necessarily freer while they remain in the contemplation of the divine mind, less free when they pass into bodily form, and less free again when they are wrapped in earthly limbs. But when they are handed over to vices and fall away from possession of their own proper reason, then their condition is complete slavery. For when they let their gaze drop from the light of the highest truth to the lower world where darkness rules, ignorance soon blinds their sight; they are troubled by ruinous passions, and by giving way and consenting to those passions they help along the slavery they are caught in, and are in a way led captive by their very freedom. Yet He who sees all things from eternity looks on all this with the eyes of His providence, and assigns to each what its merits have destined for it:
"'surveying all things, overhearing all things.'"
Homer with his honeyed tongue has sung the glorious light of the sun, hymning his high praise; and yet his feeble beams cannot brighten the hollows of the ocean or light up the gloom at the earth's centre. But the might of the One who had the skill to build this great universe is not confined like that; neither the solid crust of earth nor the blackest canopy of night can baffle His all-seeing eye. Everything that is, has been or will be He makes out at once, all within a single glance, and no eyes but His survey the whole world — none at all. Him, then, you may truly call the Sun.
Then I said: "But now I am perplexed all over again by a still harder problem."
"And what is that?" she said. "Though in fact I can guess what is troubling you."
"It seems," I said, "too much of a paradox and a contradiction that God should know all things and yet there should be free will. For if God foresees everything, and can in no way be deceived, then whatever providence foresees as going to happen must necessarily happen. So if from eternity He foreknows not only what men will do but also their designs and purposes, there can be no freedom of the will, since nothing can be done and no purpose of any kind can be formed except the ones a divine providence incapable of being deceived has seen beforehand. For if events could be turned aside to some end other than the one providence foresaw, then there would be no sure foreknowledge of the future but only uncertain guesswork instead — and to think that of God I consider impious.
"What is more, I do not accept the reasoning by which some people think this puzzle can be solved. They say it is not because God has foreseen an event coming that it is therefore sure to happen, but conversely that because something is going to happen it cannot be hidden from divine providence — and so the necessity passes over to the other side, and it is not that what is foreseen must necessarily happen, but that what is going to happen must necessarily be foreseen. But this is just as if the question in debate were which is cause and which effect: whether the foreknowledge of the future is the cause of the necessity, or the necessity of the future the cause of the foreknowledge. And we need not take any trouble to show that whichever way round the causal sequence runs, the occurrence of things foreseen is necessary, even though the foreknowledge of future events does not by itself impose the necessity of occurring on them. For example, if a man is sitting, the statement that he is sitting is necessarily true; and conversely, if the statement that he is sitting is true because he really is sitting, then he must necessarily be sitting. So either way some necessity is involved: in the second case the necessity of the fact, in the first the necessity of the statement's truth. But in both cases the man is not sitting because the opinion is true; rather the opinion is true because he was already sitting as a matter of fact. So although the cause of the opinion's truth comes from the one side, there is a necessity on both sides alike. Obviously we can reason in the same way about providence and the future. Even if future events are foreseen because they are going to happen, and do not happen because they are foreseen, there is still a necessity all the same — a necessity both that they should be foreseen by God as going to happen, and that when they are foreseen they should happen. And that is enough to destroy free will. However, it is preposterous to speak of the occurrence of events in time as the cause of eternal foreknowledge. And yet if we believe that God foresees future events because they are going to happen, what is that but to think that the occurrence of events is the cause of His supreme providence? Further, just as when I know that something is the case that thing necessarily is the case, so when I know that something will be, it will necessarily be. It follows, then, that things foreknown happen inevitably.
"Lastly, to think of a thing as being in any way other than it is, is not merely not knowledge; it is a false opinion, a long way from the truth of knowledge. So if something is going to be, and yet its occurrence is not certain and necessary, how can anyone foreknow that it will occur? For just as knowledge itself has no admixture of falsity, so any conception drawn from knowledge cannot be other than as it is conceived. This is exactly why knowledge is free of falsehood: because each thing must necessarily correspond exactly to the knowledge that grasps its nature. In what way, then, are we to suppose that God foreknows these uncertainties as going to happen? For if He thinks of events that may possibly not happen at all as inevitably bound to happen, He is deceived; and that is something it is impious not only to believe but even to put into words. If, on the other hand, He sees them in the future as they are, in the sense of knowing that they may equally happen or not, what sort of foreknowledge is this, that takes in nothing certain and nothing fixed? How is it any better than the absurd prophecy of Teiresias?
"'Whatever I say will either happen — or not.'
In that case, too, how would divine providence be superior to human opinion, if it holds things uncertain whose occurrence is uncertain, exactly as men do? But if no shadow of uncertainty can possibly be found at that perfectly sure Fountainhead of all things, then the occurrence of the things He has surely foreknown as coming is certain. And so there can be no freedom in human actions and designs; the divine mind, which foresees all things without any possibility of mistake, ties them down and binds them to one outcome only. But once that is admitted, what an overturning of human affairs plainly follows! Rewards and punishments are proposed for the good and the bad in vain, since no free and voluntary movement of the will has deserved either; indeed the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous, which is now thought the perfection of justice, will look like the most flagrant injustice, since men are settled one way or the other not by any choice of their own but by the necessity of what is bound to be. And so neither virtue nor vice is anything at all, but deserving well and deserving badly are jumbled together with no distinction between them. And more: since the whole course of events is derived from providence, and nothing is left free to human design, it turns out that our vices too are referred back to the Author of all good — and no more abominable thought could possibly be conceived. Again, no ground is left for hope or prayer. For how can we hope for blessings, or pray for mercy, when every object of desire hangs on the links of an unalterable chain of causes? Then the one means of exchange between God and man is gone — the communion of hope and prayer — if it is true that we ever earn the priceless recompense of divine favour at the price of a proper humility; for this is the one way in which men seem able to hold communion with God, and are joined to that unapproachable light by the very act of asking, even before they get what they ask for. And then, since these things can hardly be believed to have any effect if the necessity of future events is admitted, what means will be left by which we can be brought near to Him who is the supreme Head of all, and cling to Him? So the human race must necessarily, just as you declared a while ago in your song, be parted and severed from its Source and fall to ruin."
Why does a strange discord break the fair harmony of the ordered scheme? Has God decreed that between truth and truth there may be such lasting warfare that truths, each of them plain on its own, we try and fail to reconcile? Or is the discord not in the truth, since truth is always consistent with itself? Is it that the mind of man, held close in its wrappings of flesh, and blinded, can never make out — her candle burns so faint — the subtle chain that binds it all together? Then why does man's restless mind burn to unlock the hidden gates of truth? Does he already know what he is looking for? Why labour to look for it, if he knows? And yet if he does not know, why does he blindly seek he knows not what? Who sighs for a good he does not know? Who can pursue an end he has never seen? How would he find it? And even if he found it, how would he greet a strange shape he never knew? Or is it that the inmost soul of man once knew each part, and knew the whole? Now, though she is dimmed by the vapours of the flesh, she has not forgotten everything she saw; for while the separate parts are lost, she still holds fast to the one whole; so the man who longs to find the truth is neither sound of sight nor blind. For he neither knows in full nor is stripped of knowledge altogether; but holding on to what is left him he gropes in the uncertain light, and by the part that still survives he strives bravely to win back the whole.
Then she said: "This debate about providence is an old one. Cicero discusses it vigorously in his book on divination, and you yourself have pondered the problem long and hard; yet nobody has had diligence and perseverance enough to find a solution. And the reason for the obscurity is that the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of divine foreknowledge. If any conception of its nature could be framed at all, no shadow of uncertainty would be left. So, with a view to making this clear and plain at last, I will begin by looking at the arguments that sway you.
"First, I want to know why you are dissatisfied with the proposed solution — the one that says that since the fact of foreknowledge is not thought to be the cause of the necessity of future events, foreknowledge should not be counted any obstacle to freedom of the will. Now surely the only ground on which you argue for the necessity of the future is that things foreknown cannot fail to happen. But if, as you were ready to acknowledge a moment ago, the fact of foreknowledge imposes no necessity on future things, what reason is there for supposing that the outcomes of voluntary action are constrained to a fixed result? Suppose, for the sake of argument and to see what follows, we assume there is no foreknowledge at all. Are willed actions tied down to any necessity in this case?"
"Certainly not."
"Then let us assume foreknowledge again, but without its involving any actual necessity; the freedom of the will, I imagine, will remain completely intact. But you will say that even though the foreknowledge is not the necessity of the future event's happening, it is still a sign that the event will necessarily happen. Granted; but then it is plain that even if there had been no foreknowledge, the outcomes would have been inevitably certain anyway. For a sign only indicates something that is; it does not bring about the thing it is a sign of. We should have to show in advance that all things without exception happen of necessity, in order for a preconception to be a sign of that necessity. Otherwise, if there is no such universal necessity, no preconception can be a sign of a necessity that does not exist. And clearly a proof established on firm grounds of reason must be drawn not from signs and loose general arguments but from suitable and necessary causes. But how could things that are foreseen ever fail to happen? Why, that is to suppose we believe that the events providence foresees as coming were not going to happen — instead of supposing that although they were going to happen, there was no necessity in their own nature forcing them to. Take an illustration that will help convey my meaning. There are many things we watch happening in front of us: the movements of charioteers, for instance, as they guide and turn their cars, and so on. Now, is any one of those movements forced by any necessity?"
"No, certainly not. There would be no point in skill if all the movements happened by compulsion."
"Then things which, in happening, are free from any necessity of being as they are in the present must also, before they happen, be going to happen without necessity. So there are things that will happen whose occurrence is perfectly free of necessity. At all events, I imagine nobody will deny that things happening now were going to happen before they actually did. Such things, however much they are foreknown, are free in their occurrence. For just as knowledge of things present imports no necessity into things that are happening, so foreknowledge of the future imports none into things that are going to come. But this, you will say, is the very point in dispute — whether there can be any foreknowing of things whose occurrence is not necessary. For here you see a contradiction: if they are foreseen, their necessity follows; whereas if there is no necessity, they cannot possibly be foreknown. And you think nothing can be grasped as known unless it is certain, so that if things whose occurrence is uncertain are foreknown as certain, that is the fog of opinion and not the truth of knowledge. For you believe that thinking of things otherwise than as they are is incompatible with sound knowledge.
"Now, the cause of the mistake is this: men think that all knowledge is known purely by the nature and power of the thing known. Whereas the case is exactly the reverse. Everything that is known is grasped not according to its own power but according to the faculty of the knower. An example will make this clear. The roundness of a body is recognised one way by sight and another way by touch. Sight looks at it from a distance as a whole, by a simultaneous reflection of rays; touch grasps the roundness piecemeal, by contact and attachment to the surface, and by actually moving round the circumference. In the same way a man himself is viewed one way by Sense, another by Imagination, another again by Thought, and another by pure Intelligence. Sense judges shape clothed in material substance; Imagination judges shape alone, without matter. Thought goes beyond that again, and by contemplating universals considers the type itself contained in the individual. The eye of Intelligence is higher still: passing beyond the sphere of the universal, it looks on absolute form itself by the pure force of the mind's vision. And the main point to notice here is this: the higher faculty of comprehension embraces the lower, while the lower cannot rise to the higher. For Sense has no power beyond matter; Imagination cannot take in universal ideas; Thought cannot embrace pure form. But Intelligence, looking down as it were from its higher standpoint in its intuition of form, also makes out the various elements that underlie it — and it comprehends them in the same way it comprehends that form itself, which nothing but Intelligence could know. For it knows the universal of Thought, the figure of Imagination and the matter of Sense without using Thought, Imagination or Sense, surveying everything, so to speak, under the aspect of pure form in a single flash of intuition. Thought likewise, in considering the universal, embraces images and sense-impressions without resorting to Imagination or Sense. For it was Thought that defined the universal from its own conceptual point of view: 'Man is a two-legged animal endowed with reason.' That is certainly a universal notion, and yet everybody knows that the thing can be imagined and presented to Sense — because Thought considers it not by Imagination or Sense but by means of rational conception. Imagination too, though its faculty of viewing and forming representations is founded on the senses, nevertheless surveys sense-impressions without calling Sense in, not in the manner of sense-perception but in the manner of Imagination. Do you see, then, how in knowing, all these use their own faculty rather than the faculty of the things they know? And that is not strange; for since every judgment is the act of the one judging, each must necessarily do its work by its own power and not by another's."
Out of the murky depths of the Porch comes a wise-sounding doctrine that likens the living mind to a written page; since all knowledge comes in through the senses, engraved there by experience. "Just as the pen," they say, "traces its marks with great care on the smooth unspotted white of the paper's face, so outer things stamp their images on consciousness." But if the mind really does lie as passive as that; if no living power inside it supplies a force of its own; if it only reflects things back, like a mirror, false and empty — then where does that marvellous faculty come from which perceives and knows, which arranges the world into one fair ordered scheme, grasps each whole the senses present or breaks it into its elements? Which divides and recombines like this, and, shifting as it goes, now descends to the low, and now climbs to the height; and last, in a swift inward review, sifts the false from the true? For powers as ample as these, the fitter cause, I think, would be the Mind itself, not marks stamped on it by the outside scene. And yet the body, through the senses, stirs up the soul's intelligence. When light flashes on the eye or a sound strikes the ear, the mind, roused to make its due response, makes the message clear, and combines the dumb external signs with the forms hidden inside it.
"Now in the case of bodies that have sensation, the qualities of external objects do affect the sense organs, and the activity of the mind is preceded by a bodily affection that calls out the mind's action on itself and stimulates the forms lying inactive within it until that moment. Yet even so, if in these bodies with sensation the mind is not merely written on by passive affection, but by its own power sorts out the impressions supplied to the body, how much more must intelligences free of all bodily affections use their own mental activities in their sorting, instead of conforming to external objects? So on these principles various modes of knowing belong to distinct and different kinds of being. To creatures with no power of movement — shellfish and other such creatures that cling to rocks and grow there — belongs Sense alone, with no other way of gaining knowledge. To beasts that can move, in whom some capacity for seeking and avoiding seems to have arisen, belongs Imagination as well. Thought belongs only to the human race, as Intelligence belongs to Divinity alone. From which it follows that the form of knowledge that surpasses the rest is the one that by its own nature knows not only its proper object but the objects of the other forms of knowledge too.
"But what if Sense and Imagination were to contradict Thought and declare that the universal Thought believes it sees is nothing at all? For the object of Sense and Imagination cannot be universal. So either the judgment of Reason is true and there is no sense-object; or else, since they know perfectly well that many objects are presented to Sense and Imagination, the conception of Reason is empty of content, since it looks at what is perceived by Sense and is particular as though it were something 'universal'. Suppose, further, that Reason replies that it does indeed contemplate the object of both Sense and Imagination under the form of universality, while Sense and Imagination cannot aspire to knowledge of the universal, since what they know cannot go beyond bodily shapes; and that in knowing reality we ought rather to trust the stronger and more perfect faculty of judgment. In a dispute of that kind, should not we, in whom the faculty of reasoning is planted as well as the faculties of imagining and perceiving, take Reason's side?
"It is in just this way that human reason thinks the divine Intelligence cannot see the future except in the manner in which reason's own knowledge is obtained. For your contention is that if events do not appear to involve certain and necessary outcomes, they cannot be foreseen as certainly going to happen. So there is no foreknowledge of such events; or if we can ever bring ourselves to believe there is, then there can be nothing that does not happen by necessity. If, however, we could have some share in the judgment of the divine mind, as we have a share in Reason, we should think it perfectly just for human Reason to submit itself to the divine mind, just as we judged that Imagination and Sense ought to give way to Reason. So let us soar, if we can, to the heights of that supreme Intelligence; for there Reason will see what in itself it cannot look upon — namely, how things whose occurrence is not certain may still be seen in a sure and definite foreknowledge, and how that foreknowledge is not guesswork but rather knowledge in its supreme simplicity, free of every limit and restriction."
In what different shapes and fashions the creatures, great and small, skim or scud or walk or crawl over the wide teeming face of the earth! Some sweep the ground with a long body, and as they move must trail a winding groove in the dust with a writhing belly; some, soaring up on light wings, swiftly divide the winds and glide smoothly in free motion through heaven's ample spaces; these press the solid surface of the earth and roam on with firm steps, ranging through the green meadows, crouching in the woodland groves. Great and marvellous is the difference between them! Yet in all of them the head hangs low, dulling the soul and blunting the senses, however different their shapes. Man alone stands erect and aspiring, and lifts his forehead to the skies, and in his upright posture seems to despise the baseness of the earth. If you are not altogether besotted with the earth, listen to this parable, you whose gaze is fixed on heaven, who hold your face up high: lift your soul up as well, in case it stains its heavenly worth and your eyes alone look upward while your mind clings to the ground.
"Since, then, as we proved a moment ago, everything that is known is known not according to its own nature but according to the nature of the faculty that grasps it, let us now consider, as far as we lawfully may, what the divine essence is like, so that we can understand what its knowledge is like too.
"God is eternal: on this judgment all rational beings agree. So let us consider what eternity is, for that word reveals both the divine nature and the divine knowledge. Now, eternity is the complete and perfect possession of endless life all at once. What that means becomes clearer if you compare it with things in time. For whatever lives in time is a present moving out of the past into the future, and nothing set in time can hold the whole space of its own life together at once. It has not yet got hold of tomorrow's state, and it has already lost yesterday's; and even in today's life you live no longer than one brief passing moment. So whatever is subject to the condition of time — even if, as Aristotle thought about the world, it never has a beginning or an end, and its life is stretched out over the whole extent of time's infinity — is still not the kind of thing that can rightly be thought eternal. For it does not include and embrace the whole space of an infinite life at once; it has no present hold on the things to come, which have not happened yet. Accordingly, what includes and possesses the whole fullness of an unending life at once, with nothing future missing from it and nothing past escaped out of it, is what is rightly called eternal. It must necessarily be always present to itself in full self-possession, and hold the infinity of moving time in an abiding present.
"So the people who imagine that on Plato's principles the created world is made co-eternal with its Creator are judging wrongly, just because they are told he believed the world had no beginning in time and is destined never to end. For it is one thing for existence to be prolonged endlessly, which is what Plato ascribed to the world, and quite another for the whole of an endless life to be embraced in the present, which is clearly a property belonging to the divine mind alone. Nor need God appear earlier than created things in mere length of time; He is prior only in the unique simplicity of His nature. For the infinite progression of things in time copies this immediate existence in the present of the changeless life; and when it cannot manage to equal it, it declines from stillness into motion and falls away from the simplicity of a perpetual present into the infinite duration of the future and the past. And since it cannot possess the whole fullness of its life at once — for the very reason that in a way it never stops being — it seems, up to a point, to rival what it cannot complete and express, by attaching itself indifferently to any present moment of time, however swift and brief; and since that bears some resemblance to the ever-abiding present, it grants to everything it is assigned to the appearance of existence. But since it cannot stay still, it hurries along the infinite path of time; and the result is that it continues by ceaseless movement the life whose completeness it could not embrace by standing still. So if we want to give things their right names, we shall follow Plato in saying that God is eternal, and the world everlasting.
"Since, then, every mode of judgment grasps its objects in accordance with its own nature, and since God remains for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge too transcends every movement of time and lives in the simplicity of its own changeless present; and embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and the future, it contemplates everything that falls within its simple knowing as though it were happening now. And so, if you consider carefully that immediate presentation by which it distinguishes all things, you will more rightly judge it to be not foreknowledge of something future but knowledge of a moment that never passes. That is why the name chosen to describe it is not prevision but providence: because, being utterly removed in nature from things mean and trivial, its gaze embraces all things as though from some lofty height. Why, then, do you insist that things surveyed by the divine eye are caught up in necessity, when it is clear that men impose no necessity on things they see? Does the act of seeing add any necessity to the things in front of your eyes?"
"Certainly not."
"And yet, if we may compare God's present with man's without impropriety, then just as you see certain things in this temporary present of yours, so He sees all things in His eternal present. So this divine anticipation does not change the natures and properties of things, and it sees things as present before it exactly as they will happen later in time. Nor does it confuse things in its judgment, but in one mental view it distinguishes what will come necessarily and what will not. Just as you, when you see at one and the same moment a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky, distinguish between the two, although a single glance takes in both, and judge the first a voluntary action and the second a necessary one — so also the divine vision in its universal range in no way confuses the characters of the things present to its gaze, though they are future as far as time goes. From which it follows that when it perceives that something will come into existence, and is nevertheless perfectly aware that this thing is bound by no necessity, its grasp of it is not opinion but knowledge based on truth.
"And if to this you say that what God sees as going to happen cannot fail to happen, and that what cannot fail to happen happens by necessity, and want to tie me down to that word 'necessity' — I will admit that you are asserting a very solid truth, but one that hardly anyone can get near who has not made the divine his special study. For my answer would be that the same future event is necessary from the standpoint of divine knowledge, and yet, considered in its own nature, is absolutely free and unfettered. So there are two kinds of necessity: one simple, as that men are necessarily mortal; the other conditional, as that if you know somebody is walking, he must necessarily be walking. For what is known certainly cannot be otherwise than it is known to be, and yet that fact does not carry the other, simple necessity with it at all. The first kind of necessity is not imposed by the thing's own nature but by the addition of a condition. No necessity compels a man who is walking voluntarily to move forward, although it is necessary for him to be moving forward at the moment when he is walking. In the same way, then, if Providence sees anything as present, that thing must necessarily be, even though it is bound by no necessity of nature. Now God views as present those coming events that happen by free will. So from the standpoint of the divine vision they are made necessary, conditionally on God's knowing them; but viewed in themselves they do not give up the absolute freedom that naturally belongs to them. So without doubt everything will happen that God foreknows as going to happen, but some of these things proceed from free will; and though they happen, they do not lose their proper nature by the fact of happening — the nature by which, before they happened, it really was possible that they might not have happened at all.
"What difference does it make, then, to deny that they are necessary, if, being conditioned by divine knowledge, they happen just as if they were under the compulsion of necessity in every respect? This difference, surely, which we saw in the examples I took earlier — the sun's rising and the man's walking. At the moment they happened, neither of them could have been otherwise than happening; and yet one of them was necessarily bound to be before it took place, while the other was not so at all. So likewise the things that are present to God undoubtedly exist, but some of them come from the necessity of things and others from the power of the agent. So we were quite right to say that these things are necessary if they are viewed from the standpoint of divine knowledge, but that if they are considered in themselves they are free of the bonds of necessity — just as everything accessible to the senses is universal when regarded from the standpoint of Thought, but particular when viewed in its own nature.
"'But,' you will say, 'if it is in my power to change my mind, I shall make providence void, since I may change something that falls within its foreknowledge.' My answer is this: you can certainly turn your purpose aside; but since the truth of providence is always at hand to see that you can, and whether you do, and where you turn yourself, you cannot escape divine foreknowledge — just as you cannot escape the sight of someone watching you now, even though of your own free will you turn to one action or another. Will you say, then: 'Shall the divine knowledge be changed at my discretion, so that when I will this or that, providence changes its knowledge to match?'"
"Surely not."
"Quite right; for the divine vision anticipates everything that is coming and transforms and reduces it to the form of its own present knowledge. It does not vary in its foreknowledge, as you suppose, alternating between this and that; in a single flash it forestalls and includes all your changes of mind without itself altering. And God has received this ever-present comprehension and survey of all things not from the outcome of future events but from the simplicity of His own nature. This also resolves the objection that offended you a little while ago — that our future doings were being spoken of as though they supplied the cause of God's knowledge. For this faculty of knowledge, embracing all things in its immediate awareness, has itself fixed the bounds of all things, and owes nothing to what comes after.
"And all this being so, the freedom of man's will stands unshaken, and the laws are not unjust, since their rewards and punishments are held out to wills that no necessity binds. God, who foreknows all things, still looks down from above, and the ever-present eternity of His vision runs alongside the future character of all our acts, dispensing rewards to the good and punishments to the bad. Our hopes and prayers too are not fixed on God in vain, and when they are rightly directed they cannot fail of their effect. So stand against vice, practise virtue, lift up your souls to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven. A great necessity of righteousness is laid on you, if you will not hide it from yourselves — seeing that everything you do is done before the eyes of a Judge who sees all things."