To get back to the subject: we have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive if it includes those passions without number which prey upon us. [B] Unless, that is, we choose, like Socrates, to pride ourselves on the one noteworthy prerogative we do have over the beasts: Nature lays down limits and seasons to their lusts, but gives us a full rein – anytime, any place.
[C] Ut vinum aegrotis, quia prodest raro, nocet saepissime, melius est non adhibere omnino, quam, spe dubiae salutis, in apertam perniciem incurrere: sic haud scio an melius fuerit humano generi motum istum celerem cogitationis, acumen, solertiam, quam rationem vocamus, quoniam pestifera sint multis, admodum paucis salutaria, non dari omnino, quam tam munifice et tam large dari.
[Wine is often bad and rarely good for the sick, so it is better to let them have none at all than to run known risks for a doubtful remedy. So too with that mental agility, shrewdness and ingenuity which we call reason: it is baleful to many and good for only a few. It would have been better for Man not to have been given it at all than to have been given it with such great munificence.]109
[A] What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout – and did they feel it any the less because they knew how that humour lodged in their joints? Did it help them to come to terms with death, knowing that whole tribes take delight in it? Did they not mind being cuckolded, since they knew that in some place or other men have wives in common? Not at all. Varro among the Romans and Aristotle among the Greeks were ranked first for knowledge at a time when learning was flourishing and at its best. Yet nobody says that their lives were particularly outstanding. There are, in fact, notorious stains on the life of the Greek one, which he cannot easily escape.110 [B] Have we discovered that health and pleasure taste better if you know astrology or grammar –
Illiterati num minus nervi rigent?
[Men who cannot read do not find it harder to get an erection, do they?]
– or that shame and poverty become more bearable?
Scilicet et morbis et debilitate carebis,
Et luctum et curam effugies, et tempora vitae
Longa tibi post haec fato meliore dabuntur.
[You will doubtless be free from ills and weakness and be free from grief and care, and a long life will be granted you, one with a better destiny.]111
I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than University Rectors – and whom I would rather be like. Among the necessities of life learning seems to me to rank with fame, noble blood and dignity112 [C] or, at most, with beauty, riches [A] and such other qualities which do indeed contribute a great deal to life, but from a distance and somewhat more in the mind than in nature.
[C] We hardly need more duties, laws and rules of conduct in human society than cranes or ants do in theirs: they have no learning, yet live their lives quite ordinately. If Man were wise he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.
[A] If anyone were to tot up our deeds and our actions he would find more outstanding men among the ignorant than among the wise – outstanding in virtues of every kind. Old Rome seems to me to have borne many men of greater worth, both in peace and war, than the later, cultured Rome which brought about its own downfall. Even if everything else were identical, at very least valour and uprightness would still tilt the balance towards Old Rome, for they make uniquely good bedfellows with simplicity.
But I will let this subject drop; it would draw me further on than I want to go. I will merely add this: only humility and submissiveness113 can produce a good man man. We must not let everyone work out for himself what his duties are. Duty must be laid down for him, not chosen by him from his own reasoning; otherwise, out of the weakness and infinite variety of our reasons and opinions, we will – as Epicurus said – end up forging duties for ourselves which will have us eating each other. The first commandment which God ever gave to Man was the law of pure obedience. It was a bare and simple order, leaving Man no room for knowing or arguing [C] – since the principal duty of a reasonable soul which acknowledges. Superior and. Benefactor in heaven is to obey him. All other virtues are born of submission and obedience, just as all other sins are born of pride. [B] The first temptation came to humankind from the opposite extreme: the Devil first poured his poison into our ears with promises about knowledge and understanding: ‘Eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum’ [Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil]. [C] In Homer, when the Sirens wished to deceive Ulysses, draw him into their dangerous snares and so destroy him, they offered him the gift of knowledge.114
[A] There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something. That is why ignorance is so strongly advocated by our religion as a quality appropriate to belief and obedience. [C] ‘Cavete ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanes seductiones secundum elementa mundi’ [Beware lest any man cheat you through philosophy and vain deceptions, according to the rudiments of the world].115
[A] All the philosophers of all the sects are in general accord over one thing: that the sovereign good consists in peace of mind and body. [B] But where are we to find it?
[A] Ad summum sapiens uno minor est Jove: dives,
Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum:
Praecipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est.
[To sum up then: the wise man has only one superior – Jupiter – and is rich, free, honourable, beautiful, the king of kings in fact… especially when well and not troubled by snot!]
It does seem true that Nature allotted us one thing only to console us for our pitiful, wretched condition: arrogance. Epictetus agrees, saying that Man has nothing properly his own except his opinions. For our portion we have been allotted wind and smoke.116
[B] Philosophy asserts that gods enjoy health as it really is, though they can understand illness; Man, on the contrary, enjoys his goods only in fantasy, but knows ills as they really are.117 [A] We have done right to emphasize our imaginative powers: all our goods exist only in a dream.
Man is a wretched creature, subject to calamities;118 but just listen to him bragging: ‘There is no occupation’, says Cicero, ‘so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity of matter, the immense grandeur of Nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety, moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation’…119 Is this fellow describing the properties of almighty and everlasting God! In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived lives more gentle, more equable, more constant than his.
[AI] Deus ille fuit, Deus, inclute Memmi,
Qui princeps vitae rationem invenit eam, quae
Nunc appellatur sapientia, quique per artem
Fluctibus e tantis vitam tantisque tenebris
In tam tranquillo et tam clara luce locavit.
[It was a god, noble Memmius, yes, a god who first discovered that rule of life which we now call Wisdom and who, through his skill, brought our lives out from storm and darkness and fixed them in such tranquillity and light.]
Beautiful, magnificent words, those! Yet, despite the god who taught him such divine wisdom, a minor accident reduced the wits of the fellow who wrote them to a state worse than that of the meanest shepherd!120
[A] Of similar impudence are [C] that promise of Dem
ocritus in his preface: ‘I am going to write about Everything’; the stupid title Aristotle bestows on us men: ‘Mortal Gods’;121 and [A] Chrysippus’ judgement that Dion was as virtuous as God. And even Seneca, my favourite, asserts that, by God’s gift he is living: but living well he owes to himself [C] – which conforms to what that other fellow said: ‘In virtute vere gloriamur; quod non contingeret, si id donum a deo, non a nobis haberemus’ [We rightly glory in our virtue; that would not arise if it were a gift of God and not of ourselves]. This is in Seneca, too: ‘The wise man has fortitude similar to God’s, but since he has it within human weakness, he surpasses God.’122
[A] There is nothing more common than rash quips like these. We are so much more jealous of our own interests than of those of our Creator that not one of us is more shocked when he sees himself made equal to God than reduced to the ranks of the other animals. We must trample down this stupid vanity, violently and boldly shaking the absurd foundations on which we base such false opinions. So long as Man thinks he has means and powers deriving from himself he will never acknowledge what he owes to his Master. All his geese will be swans, as the saying goes. So we must strip him down to his shirt-tails. Let us look at some notable examples of what his philosophy actually produces.
Possidonius was beset with an illness so painful that it made him twist his arms and grind his teeth; he thought he could cock a snook at Pain by crying out at her: ‘It’s no good; whatever you do I will never admit that you are evil.’ He boasts that he will at least contain his speech within the rules of his sect, yet he feels exactly the same pain as my footman.123 [C] ‘Re succumbere non oportebat verbis gloriantem’ [If you boast in words you should not surrender in fact].
Arcesilaus was suffering from gout. Carneades came to see him and was just going sadly away when he called him back; he pointed from his feet to his heart and said, ‘Nothing has passed from here to there.’ There is a little more elegance in that: he admits to pain and would gladly be rid of it; it is an evil, all right, but his heart is neither cast down nor weakened by it. That other fellow clings to his position, which is, I fear, more a matter of words than of reality. When Dionysius of Heraclea was nearly driven out of his mind by stabbing pains in his eyes, he was forced to give up such Stoical assertions.124
[A] But supposing knowledge actually could produce the effects claimed for it, actually could blunt and reduce the pangs of the misfortunes which beset us: even then, what does it really achieve over and beyond what ignorance does – more purely and more evidently? When Pyrrho, the philosopher, was exposed to the hazards of a mighty tempest, he could set no better example before his companions than the indifference of a pig on board ship with them: it gazed at the storm quite free from fear. When Philosophy has run out of precepts she sends us back to athletes and mule-drivers. Such men are usually less apprehensive of death, pain and other misfortunes. They also show more steadfastness than scholarship affords to any man not already predisposed to it by birth and by a duly cultivated natural talent.125 What is it if not ignorance which allows our surgeons to make incisions in the tender limbs of children more easily than in our own? [C] (The same applies to horses.) [A] How many men have been made ill by the sheer force of imagination? Is it not normal to see men bled, purged and swallowing medicines to cure ills which they feel only in their minds? When we run out of genuine ills, Learning will lend us some of her own: this or that colour are symptoms of a catarrh you will have; this heat-wave threatens you with some turbulent fever; this break in the line of life on your left hand warns you of some grave and imminent illness… Finally Learning openly makes assaults against health itself: that youthful vigour and liveliness of yours cannot remain stable for long! Better bleed away some of their force in case it turns against you…
Compare the life of a man, or enslaved by such fantasies with the life of a ploughman who, free from learning and prognostics, merely follows his natural appetites and judges things as they feel at present. He only feels ill when he really is ill; the other fellow often has stone in the mind before stone in the kidney. As though it were not time enough to suffer pain when it really comes along, our thoughts must run ahead and meet it.
What I say about medicine applies to erudition in general – hence that ancient philosophical opinion that sovereign good lies in recognizing the weakness of our powers of judgement. My ignorance can supply as good a cause to hope as to fear; for me, the only rule of health lies in the example of other people and how I see them fare in similar circumstances; but since I can find all sorts of examples, I dwell on the comparisons which are most favourable to me! Health, full, free and entire, I welcome with open arms. I whet my appetites so that I can truly enjoy it, all the more so since health is not usual to me any more, but quite rare. Far be it from me to trouble the sweet repose of health with bitterness arising from a new regime based on restraint. The very beasts can show us that illness can be brought on by mental agitations.
[C] The natives of Brazil are said to die only of old age; they attribute that to the serenity and tranquillity of the air: I would attribute it to the serenity and tranquillity of their souls; they are not burdened with intense emotions and unpleasant tasks and thoughts: they pass their lives in striking simplicity and ignorance. They have no literature, no laws, no kings and no religion of any kind.126
[A] Experience shows that gross, uncouth men make more desirable and vigorous sexual partners; lying with a mule-driver is often more welcome than lying with a gentleman. How can we explain that except by assuming that emotions within the gentleman’s soul undermine the strength of his body, break it down and exhaust it, [A1] just as they exhaust and harm the soul itself? Is it not true that the soul can be most readily thrown into mania and driven mad by its own quickness, sharpness and nimbleness – in short by the qualities which constitute its strength? [B] Does not the most subtle wisdom produce the most subtle madness? As great enmities are born of great friendships and fatal illnesses are born of radiant health, so too the most exquisite and delirious of manias are produced by the choicest and the most lively of the emotions which disturb the soul. It needs only a half turn of the peg to pass from one to the other. [A1] When men are demented their very actions show how appropriate madness is to the workings of our souls at their most vigorous. Is there anyone who does not know how imperceptible are the divisions separating madness from the spiritual alacrity of a soul set free or from actions arising from supreme and extraordinary virtue? Plato says that melancholics are the most teachable and the most sublime; yet none has a greater propensity towards madness. Spirits without number are undermined by their own force and subtlety. There is an Italian poet, fashioned in the atmosphere of the pure poetry of Antiquity, who showed more judgement and genius than any other Italian for many a long year; yet his agile and lively mind has overthrown him; the light has made him blind; his reason’s grasp was so precise and so intense that it has left him quite irrational; his quest for knowledge, eager and exacting, has led to his becoming like a dumb beast; his rare aptitude for the activities of the soul has left him with no activity… and with no soul. Ought he to be grateful to so murderous a mental agility? It was not so much compassion that I felt as anger when I saw him in so wretched a state, surviving himself, neglecting himself (and his works, which were published, unlicked and uncorrected; he had sight of this but no understanding).127
Do you want a man who is sane, moderate, firmly based and reliable? Then array him in darkness, sluggishness and heaviness. [C] To teach us to be wise, make us stupid like beasts; to guide us you must blind us.
[A] If you say that the convenience of having our senses chilled and blunted when tasting evil pains must entail the consequential inconvenience of rendering us less keenly appreciative of the joys of good pleasures, I agree. But the wretchedness of our human condition means we have less to relish than to banish: the most extreme pleasures touch us less than the lightest of pains: [C] ‘Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt’ [Men feel p
leasure more dully than pain]. [A] We are far less aware of perfect health than of the slightest illness:
pungit
In cute vix summa violatum plagula corpus,
Quando valere nihil quemquam movet. Hoc juvat unum,
Quod me non torquet latus aut pes: caetera quisquam
Vix queat aut sanum sese, aut sentire valentem.
[A man feels the slightest prick which scarcely breaks his skin; yet he remains unmoved by excellent health. Personally I feel delight in simply being free from pain in foot or side, while another scarcely realizes he is well and remains unaware of his good health.]
For us, being well means not being ill. So that philosophical school which sets the highest value on pleasure reduces it to the mere absence of pain. To be free from ill is the greatest good that Man can hope for. [C] As Ennius puts it,
Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali
[Ample good consists in being free from ill].128
[A] For even that tickling excitement which accompanies certain pleasures and which seems to exalt us above mere good health and freedom from pain, that shifting delight, active, inexplicably biting and sharp, aims in the end at freedom from pain. The appetite which enraptures us when we lie with women merely aims at banishing the pain brought on by the frenzy of our inflamed desires; all it seeks is rest and repose, free from the fever of passion.
The Complete Essays Page 67