Empedocles of Agrigentum was one of the greatest luminaries of those immense and vague times that are known as antiquity. It is necessary to remark and be astonished by the fact that there was one century of history in which prodigious minds appeared almost at the same time, and that those minds were scattered here and there, from one end of the earth to the other, as if a seed had been thrown with a determined purpose. There were Lao-Tsu and Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, Pythagoras and then Socrates, Plato and Empedocles in the Mediterranean lands. The idea of a sowing with a determined but unknown purpose, of a vast and spiritual plan, is consoling to the highest degree and it is necessary to rejoice in seeing the traces of it.
Agrigentum was then a great city, the number of whose inhabitants is estimated at a million, although that figure must be very approximate. Empedocles possessed one of the largest fortunes in Sicily and in Agrigentum he was simultaneously a popular tribune, high priest, engineer, physician, healer, poet, scholar, naturalist and philosopher. He made laws favorable to the people and had the wisdom to exercise some oppression on the rich. He had the greater wisdom of refusing royalty when it was offered to him, but he did not refuse a kind of triumphal ceremony in his honor with a procession, a glorification of his person, and divine honors. Having refused to be a king, he accepted to be a god.
It seems from what was written but him and what remains of his poems that he was animated by the highest form of intellectual pride. The higher one rises on one scale, the lower one descends on another.
To that pride was added an immoderate love of the splendor of costumes. All those who have depicted him have mentioned a gold headband, a crimson robe and specially, bronze sandals. That last detail has always astonished me. Marcel Schwob, in a portrait that he made of Empedocles, adds that those sandals came from Lakonia, without my being able to discover where he obtained the detail of that origin.23 It is true that the writer was very well-informed relative to feet, since, talking about Panthea, who was resuscitated by Empedocles, he says that she wore sandals of which even the soles were perfumed.
That a great mind like Empedocles had such a great exterior vanity is what causes surprise. Thus, at the summit of philosophical superiority, one can still wear a band of gold around one’s head! One immediately thinks of the mysterious individual whom occultists place at the summit of the human hierarchy and who was known by the name of the Comte de Saint-Germain.
In what is known of his life he is seen occupied in the handling and transformations of jewels. He is represented going to Louis XIV’s feasts in elegant costumes with his hands covered in rings. One clairvoyant perceiving, or claiming to perceive by clairvoyance, a meeting of the Agartha24 in a solitary place in the Himalaya, saw the Comte de Saint-Germain several times with his rings, clad in multicolored uniforms that were always different.
Human perfection can therefore be obtained while retaining certain great faults, a certain paltry pettiness. Contradictions are in our nature, and we know that the highest artistic or intellectual faculty can be coupled with inferior sentiments. Francis Bacon, whose thought contributed to the formation of the English intellect as we know it, profited from his position as Lord Chancellor to take bribes, making a commerce of justice, enriching himself by all means, and his vanity was such that at the moment of his death he wrote: I bequeath my name to the centuries to come and foreign nations. There would be, at least in the foreign nations, a few people who would refuse that legacy, estimating that, in the balance in which everyone secretly weighs values, a great creative intelligence does not compensate for injustice and cupidity.
What has been transmitted to us regarding the death of Empedocles is eminently consoling. Nothing authorizes us to doubt the testimony of Diogenes Laertius. The more mediocre a historian is, the more reason one has to believe him truthful.
Having woken Panthea, the woman with the perfumed soles, from a sort of catalepsy, Empedocles held a banquet in his own honor, to celebrate his medical success. That, at least, was the pretext, for the banquet was in his mind a farewell feast. The physician Pausanius, who was present, says that about eighty people were there. When the meal was over, the guests dispersed. Some went home, while others went to chat in the nearby woods. Empedocles, Pausanius remarks, remained alone at the table. Was that by virtue of an ultimate regret for what he was about to abandon? Eventually, he went to his room, but the next day, his guests were astonished not to find him. They searched for him in vain; there was no trace of him.
A servant then recalled that during the night he had heard a voice outside the house calling “Empedocles!” He had looked out of the window and had perceived a light, which did not make much impression on him at the time, but which he subsequently qualified as supernatural and celestial. Legend, which could not forget the importance of the philosopher’s bronze sandal, subsequently declared that Etna had rejected that metal sandal and deduced that Empedocles had thrown himself into Etna in order to be consumed therein.
It is more plausible to think that Empedocles, who was then sixty-four years old, thought that the time had come to withdraw from life in order to escape his obligations. In order not to be importuned, he had not confided his place of retreat to anyone. Nevertheless, a conductor of horses or the owner of a fishing-boat must have had a rendezvous with him on the night of his flight. It was him who came with his lantern to summon him for the departure and it was that modest light that the servant who was not asleep perceived.
In India it is prescribed that every man should spend the final years of his life in meditation far from society. That is a practical rule, a rule of both wisdom and elementary prudence, which only sages obey. They put down the gold band then, as well as the crimson robe, and even the bronze sandals.
Every time that a man obeys that rule, one knows that he has understood the necessity of detachment and preparation for death, and that he has entered into the chain of those who can be taken as examples. Whatever their faults might have been, one can think that they submitted them to the purgation of the purifying flame that is solitude.
THE EXAGGERATION OF THE BUDDHA
The Buddha exaggerated, either to influence people by mans of an enormous affirmation or because what he affirmed was imposed upon him by a special temperament and the particular conditions of his education.
It is reported that his father, the king—the king of a petty kingdom—having doubtless recognized in him a particularly keen sensitivity, wanted to prevent him receiving the dolorous shock given by the sight of illness and that of death. He succeeded in that, says legendary history, and that is not implausible.
One can picture that patriarchal king of the small city of Kapilavastu, in the foothills of the Nepalese mountains, as a benevolent landowner having within the enclosure of his vast estates his herdsmen, his flocks, his temples with their Brahmins and his workshops with their carpenters and weavers.
Young Siddharta has shown since childhood and immoderate taste for philosophy. He is charming and loved by everyone. His father has spread the word to his friends, his wives and his servants. They must spare his exceedingly sensitive son any dolorous image and any painful emotion. His father’s gardens are vast and he scarcely leaves them. If he goes out, it is on horseback, surrounded by a numerous company who defend him from any exterior contact. His exclusive taste for things of the mind, as much as the paternal precautions, have isolated him from the true reality of the world. Even in our modern times, one sometimes sees certain young men whose education has kept them ignorant of life for a long time.
Now, he decides privately one day that that ignorance has lasted long enough. He thinks that he has remained enclosed in pure ideological speculation for too long. He wants to have direct experience of the world, and he begins with an excursion incognito in the back streets of the city, those of which he has heard vague mention as ill-famed and inhabited by a wretched population.
He knows about poverty, but only from a theoretical viewpoint. He must o
nly have seen stylized beggars and decorative corpses. Now, abruptly, he has before his eyes a pestilential beggar and a real dead man, clad in the ugliness of miserable death. He suffers a shock, and that shock engenders in his philosophical conceptions the prodigious exaggeration of despair that will tempt souls in the course of the centuries-for it is the same with doctrines as with material facts. They need, in order to be veridical and seductive, to be magnified enormously, to the point of being beyond nature, so great is human puerility.
Life is dolor, the Buddha has said. Now, it is not entirely that. In making up the portion of life that is neither wellbeing nor dolor, which is neutral, one can say that, for the most part, it is two-thirds dolor and one third joy. The joy is in the same proportion as fine weather in the greater part of the world. The third of joy is considered by the great majority of people as a sufficient justification for the fact of existence. In fact, a smaller proportion would still be sufficient for the majority.
But the Buddha in his negative determination, goes further. He affirms that all joy is vain because, the word being in a perpetual transformation, no joy is durable. He does not take account of the fact that many joys are joys precisely because of that quality of rapid disappearance. To be sure, one would like to retain and prolong them, but a large number would be changed into bleak ennui by duration and prolongation.
His argument becomes more solid and invites reflection when he considers joy as essentially deplorable because it is an element of attachment to existence. It is evidently to that question that the greatest human deliberation ought to be devoted. Pleasure, even issued from the most legitimate affection, engenders the desire for revivification, in order to recommence. We bind ourselves to matter by our love of forms. That love causes us to rotate in the wheel of new existences. For the miserable portion of joy on which we can count, we deprive ourselves of the blissful state of Nirvana—a blissful state only susceptible of attainment by those who are already spiritualized.
Thus Buddhism, which is the world religion that counts the most adherents, has conquered its faithful by offering them as an ultimate recompense something that is incomprehensible for them.
In fact, a promise equally mysterious for ordinary people was made by Jesus when he offered his father’s kingdom as an ideal goal. On that subject I remember a significant remark made to me in my childhood by a comrade older than me: “I wouldn’t want to go to Paradise, because one doesn’t enjoy anything there except the presence of God.”
That presence is the equivalent of Nirvana. The Buddha did not judge it necessary to disguise the divine effusion of the spirit by means of the image of a powerful and paternal individual. That doubtless comes from the fact that he was addressing himself to people more cultivated than Jesus’ auditors. But what did the immense mass of his believers think when they knew that it was necessary to renounce the portion of worldly joy for that Nirvana difficult to imagine?
Promises of an incomprehensible order have more attraction than the most desirable of known things, and the greatest influence on people is obtained by mystery.
The Buddha promised the Nirvana of which he knew via the experience of reality. Nirvana is the elevation of consciousness to the highest power. In order not to be afraid of that elevation, and even to grasp its extent, it is necessary to have risen very high already.
THE GARDENS OF EPICURUS
The biographers of Epicurus report with admiration that he freed by his testament the philosopher Mus, who was his slave as well as his disciple. That is more a sign of an immoderate liking for possession, for he need not have waited until his death to free him. He spent his days with him, he was on an equal footing in discussion, but he nevertheless maintained him in slavery for as long as possible! And he made a profession of amity as the most precious thing of all!
What has contributed most to the glory of Epicurus is the idea that he had of teaching philosophy in beautiful gardens near Athens. He had founded a little community of which he was the master, the members of which, especially those who were slaves, labored to maintain the gardens and render life mutually agreeable. Doubtless poor Mus accomplished a heavier labor than the others.
Nothing is made to be more rapidly popular than the fundamental principle of his teaching: It is necessary to spend life as agreeably as possible. There is a narrow relationship between wisdom and happiness. It is appropriate to be happy, by means of a calm and virtuous life, without occupying oneself with what happens after death. He thought, moreover, that nothing happened. According to him, the soul was composed of round and light atoms; it lost on dying its properties of roundness and lightness.
The amicable phalanstery founded by Epicurus included women, some of whom had very free mores, so his enemies did not fail to say that his gardens were witness on certain evenings to scandalous scenes. Everything depends on the idea one has of scandal. He has also been accused of delivering himself to inordinate excesses of nourishment, but a letter survives of his in which he solicits a consignment of cheese in order, he says, to add it to his bread and “finally” have a good meal.
“I am an Epicurean,” all those have said throughout the ages who put pleasure above everything else but nevertheless want to give themselves a certain philosophical gloss.
Epicurus was less of an Epicurean than his disciples, because he obtained his principal pleasure in the search for the secret of things. That research caused him to write a large number of books in which he intercalated numerous passages from other philosophers, while neglecting to indicate that they were quotations.
The gardens of Epicurus are more immortal than the philosopher himself. The gardens, with their trees and their amicable benevolence, are extraordinary useful to humans. Unfortunately, the names of the species that grew around the philosopher’s house have not been preserved. They must not have included eucalypti. Epicurus would have been penetrated by their influence merely by virtue of the perfume of their bark, and he would have discovered a less limited horizon for human destiny.
THE BEARD OF EPICTETUS
It is surprising, and perhaps consoling, to think that certain men have been able to lead a life exempt from desires and approaching perfection without any hope of future life and happiness after death. It is consoling and disappointing at the same time, but every disappointment bears within it a hidden consolation. It is admirable that human nature has been able to attain such a high degree of disinterest, for one can hope to equal it; but one is afflicted that sages who have scrutinized the problem of the afterlife throughout their lives have not been able to find sufficient certainty to support the legitimate hope of life after death. Is it the case, therefore, that those sages had glimpsed nothing n the course of all their research?
What a great name is that of Epictetus, and how little the average educated man knows about his existence! He was a slave, poor and deformed. Almost as the same time as him, Marcus Aurelius lived, who was sufficiently well-made physically, an emperor who enjoyed almost unlimited material power. Each of them has only left as a valuable trace one small volume of moral thoughts.
Often, sitting beneath one’s lamp, thinking about the infinitesimal capacity one possesses of acting upon one’s peers, one says to oneself that if, by some miraculous change of fortune, one suddenly enjoyed supreme power, one would transform humankind. Marcus Aurelius, who attained one of the highest summits of human wisdom was an emperor, and he changed nothing materially; his greatest action was exercised unknown to him, by the book in which he expressed his good intention and his resignation to the law.
Why does the poverty of Epictetus please me? It is similarly very agreeable to me to think that Ammonius Saccas, the founder of the Alexandrian school, the master of Plotinus, was socially a simple street-porter, a carrier of bags. Epictetus was poor and wanted to remain so. History does not say whether he had opportunities to make a fortune and rejected them scornfully, but I am pleased to suppose so. Thus, I am quite sure that a man has led a life absolutely ex
empt from desires and has found compensation in his solitary thoughts.
Epictetus lived in one of the suburbs of Nicopolis in Epirus, in a little house that had no door. That absence of a door entails a disdain for cold. Nor did he have any furniture, except for a straw mattress and a lamp whose nature history has transmitted to us; it was bronze. Perhaps it was a gift and perhaps it had some value, because a thief stole it from him. That was a subject of joy for Epictetus, for that theft made him sense that he had taken pleasure without being aware of it in an unnecessary and excessive luxury. He replaced the bronze lamp with a clay lamp of minimal value.
The existence of that lamp enables one to suppose that Epictetus read before going to sleep, which is a great self-indulgence. An absolute conformity with nature would have prescribed a contentment with the light of the sun or that of the moon.
People came a long way to consult him, for in those days people consulted philosophers as they consult physicians—or, rather, healers—nowadays. Philosophy had become a profession. There was a philosophical uniform, which consisted of a long beard and a torn cloak. One party of popular opinion was opposed to philosophers because they were ridiculous, or because they disdained to exploit their admirers, and Domitian had them imprisoned or exiled.
Unlike many other sages, Epictetus prescribed neatness and practiced it. But he was prejudiced with regard to beards. During a conversation with Arrian he criticized a young man because he was clean-shaven.
He taught virtue: virtue in the most elevated form, perhaps excessively elevated. In climbing the moral summits, virtue dresses itself in a kind of protestant authority inseparable from a certain ennui. He was scornful of pleasure in all its forms and never enabled a glimpse of the slightest prospect of future life.
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