City of God (Penguin Classics) (143 page)

Of these three possibilities Varro chooses the third; man is neither the soul alone nor the body alone, in his view; he is soul and body in combination. It follows, he says, that the Supreme Good of man, which brings him happiness, consists in the combination of goods of both his elements, of soul, that is, and body. Accordingly, he holds that the primary blessings of nature are to be desired for their own sake, as also is virtue (which is implanted by teaching), as being the art of living, the most excellent among the goods of the soul. And therefore, when this virtue (the art of the conduct of life) has received the primary natural gifts which existed without virtue, in fact were there even when as yet they were without any instruction, she herself desires all these blessings for their own sake and at the same time aims at her own increase; thus she employs them and herself at the same time, in order that she may delight in all of them and enjoy them all. This enjoyment may be greater or less in proportion as each of these goods is of greater or lesser value. Nevertheless, she rejoices in all of them, although, if necessity requires, she may scorn some of the less important with a view to the attainment or conservation of those more valuable.

Of all these goods, however, whether of soul or body, there is none at all that virtue puts above herself. For virtue makes good use both of herself and of all the other goods which bring man happiness. But if she herself is not there, then, however many goods there are, they do the possessor no good, and so are not to be called his ‘goods’; for he uses these goods ill, and they cannot be of use to him. This is then the life of man which is rightly called happy – a life which enjoys virtue and the other goods of soul and body without which virtue cannot exist. But if a life enjoys any of the gifts, or many of them, which virtue can be without and still exist, it is called happier. And happiest of all if it enjoys all gifts without exception, so as to lack not even a single blessing of soul or body. Life, to be sure, is not the same thing as virtue, since not every kind of life, but only the wise conduct of life, is virtue. There can, indeed, be some sort of life without virtue; but there can be no virtue without any life at all. I could say the same of memory and reason, and any other such human characteristics. These
exist before any teaching; in fact without them teaching would be quite impossible, and consequently virtue also would be impossible, since virtue is certainly developed by teaching. On the other hand, ability in running, beauty of body, outstanding physical strength and the like, can exist without virtue, just as virtue can exist without them. They are goods, for all that, and, according to these thinkers, even these goods are esteemed by virtue for their own sake, and she uses and enjoys them in a way appropriate for virtue.

The philosophers say also that this happy life is social, and for its own sake values the good of friends as its own, just as it wishes for them, for their own sake, what it wishes for itself. And ‘friends’ here may mean those in the same house, such as a man’s wife or children, or any other members of the household; or it can mean all those in the place where a man has his home, a city, for example, and a man’s friends are thus his fellow-citizens; or it can extend to the whole world, and include the nations with whom a man is joined by membership of the human society; or even to the whole universe, ‘heaven and earth’ as we term it, and to those whom the philosophers call gods, whom they hold to be a wise man’s friends – our more familiar name for them is ‘angels’. These philosophers assert that there can be no possibility of doubt about the nature of the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil, its opposite. This, they maintain, marks the difference between themselves and those of the New Academy. And it is not of the least importance to them whether anyone who engages in philosophy adopts the Cynic dress and eating habits, or any other fashion whatsoever, in his pursuit of those ends which they hold to be the true ends. Furthermore, of the three kinds of life, the leisured, the active, and the compound of these two, they declare that they approve the third. The members of the Old Academy held and taught these views; so Varro asserts on the authority of Antiochus,
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Cicero’s master and his own, though Cicero makes out that on many points Antiochus had more in common with the Stoics than with the Old Academy. But what does that matter to us? For we ought to form our judgement on the actual facts of the case, instead of attaching importance to knowing what any particular individual thought about them.

For who is competent, however torrential the flow of his eloquence, to unfold all the miseries of this life? Cicero lamented them, as best he could, in his
Consolation
on the death of his daughter.
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But what did his best amount to? For, to tell the truth, when, where, how can the ‘primary gifts of nature’, so called, be in so flourishing a state in this life that they escape being tossed about at the mercy of chance and accident? For is there any pain, the opposite of pleasure, any disturbance, the contrary of repose, that cannot befall a wise man’s body? Certainly the amputation or enfeeblement of a man’s limbs makes havoc of his bodily soundness; ugliness despoils his beauty, sickness his health; weakness subdues his strength, lassitude or lethargy his mobility. And is there any of these which may not assault the
wise man’s physical frame? The attitudes and movements of the body, when they are graceful and harmonious, are reckoned among primary gifts of nature. But what if some illness makes the limbs shake and tremble? What if a man’s spine is so curved as to bring his hands to the ground, turning the man into a virtual quadruped? Will not this destroy all beauty and grace of body whether in repose or in motion?

Then what about the primary goods, so called, of the mind itself? The two ranked first are sensation and understanding, because they lead to the apprehension and awareness of truth. But what kind of sensation is left, and how much of it, if a man becomes blind and deaf, not to mention other disabilities? And whither will reason and intelligence retire, where will they slumber, if a man is rendered insane by some disease? Crazy people say and do many incongruous things, things for the most part alien to their intentions and their characters, certainly contrary to their good intentions and characters; and when we think about their words and actions, or see them with our eyes, we can scarcely – or possibly we cannot at all – restrain our tears, if we consider their situation as it deserves to be considered. And what am I to say of those subjected to the attacks of demons? Where is their intellect hidden away under cover, while the malignant spirit employs their soul and body to work his own will? Yet is anyone quite confident that such a disaster cannot happen to a wise man in this life? Again, what sort of awareness of truth is there, how much awareness is there when we are in this material flesh, when, as we read in the truth-telling Book of Wisdom, ‘The perishable body weighs down the soul, and the earthly habitation presses down the mind as it ponders many questions’?
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Moreover, the impulse or urge towards action (if this is the right way to express what the Greeks call
hormê
), which is also counted among the primary gifts of nature, is not this impulse responsible for the gestures and actions of the insane that move our pity, that make us shudder, when sensation is perverted and reason is asleep?

Then again, what of virtue itself, which is not one of the primary gifts, since it supervenes on them later, introduced by teaching? Although it claims the topmost place among human goods, what is its activity in this world but unceasing warfare with vices, and those not external vices but internal, not other people’s vices but quite clearly our own, our very own? And this is the particular struggle of that virtue called in Greek
sôphrosynê
, which is translated ‘temperance’
– the virtue which bridles the lusts of the flesh to prevent their gaining the consent of the mind and dragging it into every kind of immorality. For it is never true, in this life, that vice does not exist, when, as the Apostle says, ‘the desires of the flesh oppose the spirit’; but to this vice there is an opposing virtue, when, as the same Apostle says, ‘the desires of the spirit oppose the flesh. For these two are in mutual opposition, so that you do not achieve what you want to achieve.’
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But what in fact, do we want to achieve, when we desire to be made perfect by the Highest Good? It can, surely, only be a situation where the desires of the flesh do not oppose the spirit, and where there is in us no vice for the spirit to oppose with its desires. Now we cannot achieve this in our present life, for all our wishing. But we can at least, with God’s help, see to it that we do not give way to the desires of the flesh which oppose the spirit by allowing our spirit to be overcome, and that we are not dragged to the perpetration of sin with our own consent. God forbid, then, that, so long as we are engaged in this internal strife, we should believe ourselves to have already attained that happiness, the end we desire to reach by our victory. And who has reached such a height of wisdom as to have no struggle to maintain against his lusts?

And what of that virtue called prudence? Does she not employ all her vigilance in distinguishing good from evil, so that in our pursuit of the good and our endeavour to shun the evil, no mistakes may creep in? And does not she herself thus testify that we are in the midst of evils, or rather that evils are in us? For she teachers us that it is an evil to consent in sinning, and a good to refuse to consent. But although prudence teachers us not to consent to that evil, and self-control causes us not to consent, neither prudence nor self-control removes that evil from this life. Consider the virtue of justice. The function of justice is to assign to each his due; and hence there is established in man himself a certain just order of nature, by which the soul is subordinated to God, and the body to the soul, and thus both body and soul are subordinated to God. Does not justice demonstrate, in performing this function, that she is still labouring at her task rather than resting after reaching its completion? For, we may be sure, the less the soul has God in mind in all its thinking, the less it is subordinated to God; and the more the desires of the flesh oppose the spirit, the less subordinate is the body to the soul. So long, therefore, as there is in us this weakness, this disease, this lethargy, how shall we dare to claim that we are saved? And if not saved, how shall we dare
to assert that we are already blest with that final bliss? And then again, that virtue whose name is fortitude, however great the wisdom with which she is accompanied, bears most unmistakable witness to the fact of human ills; for it is just those ills that she is compelled to bear with patient endurance.

I am astounded at the effrontery of the Stoics in their contention that those ills are not ills at all, when they admit that if they should be so great that a wise man cannot or ought not to endure them, he is forced to put himself to death and to depart from this life.
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Yet so great is the stupefying arrogance of those people who imagine that they find the Ultimate Good in this life and that they can attain happiness by their own efforts, that their ‘wise man’ (that is, the wise man as described by them in their amazing idiocy), even if he goes blind, deaf, and dumb, even if enfeebled in limb and tormented with pain, and the victim of every other kind of ill that could be mentioned orimagined, and thus is driven to do himself to death – that such a man would not blush to call that life of his, in the setting of all those ills, a life of happiness! What a life of bliss, that seeks the aid of death to end it! If this is happiness, let him continue in it! How can these circumstances fail to be evil which overcome the good of fortitude, and not only compel that same fortitude to give way to them, but to reach such a pitch of delirium as to call a life happy and in the same breath persuade a man that he should make his escape from it? Is anyone so blind as to fail to see that if it were a happy life it would not be a life to seek escape from? In fact the admission that it is a life to be escaped from is an open confession of weakness. Then what keeps the Stoics from humbling their stiff-necked pride and admitting that it is a life of misery? Was it by patient endurance that Cato took his own life?
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Was it not rather through a lack of it? For he would not have so acted had he not been unable to endure Caesar’s victory. What happened, then, to his fortitude? Why, it yielded; it succumbed. It was so thoroughly defeated that it abandoned this ‘happy life’; it deserted and fled. Or was it a happy life no longer? If so, it was a wretched life. Then how can it be that those circumstances were not evil, if they made life a misery from which a man should escape?

This shows that those who acknowledged such things to be evils are talking in a more tolerable fashion; the Peripatetics, for example, and the members of the Old Academy – the sect supported by Varro. Even so, they also are guilty of a remarkable error, in contending that amid those evils, even if they are so grievous that a man who suffers them is
right to seek escape by self-inflicted death, life is nevertheless happy. ‘Bodily torments and agonies’ says Varro ‘are evils, and their evil increases in proportion to their severity. And to get free of them a man should escape from this life.’ What life, pray? ‘This life’, he replies, ‘which is burdened with such great evils.’ It is certainly happy, I take it, amid those same evils which lead you to say that one should escape from it? Or is your reason for calling it happy the very fact that you have permission to withdraw from these evils by death? Then what if by some divine judgement you were beset by such evils and not permitted either to the or ever to be exempt from them? Surely in that case, at any rate, you would call such a life wretched? That implies that it does not fail to be wretched simply because it is quickly abandoned, seeing that, if it were everlasting, it would be wretched, even in your judgement. And so it ought not to be regarded as free from any misery, simply because the misery is short-lived; nor – for this would be even more nonsensical – should it be called a state of bliss, simply because of the brevity of the wretchedness.

There is a mighty force in the evils which compel a man, and, according to those philosophers, even a wise man, to rob himself of his existence as a man; although they say, and say with truth, that the first and greatest utterance of nature, as we may call it, is that a man should be reconciled to himself and for that reason should naturally shun death – that he should be his own friend, in that he should emphatically desire to continue as a living being and to remain alive in this combination of body and soul, and that this should be his aim. There is a mighty force in those evils which overpower this natural feeling which makes us employ all our strength in our endeavour to avoid death – which defeat this feeling so utterly that what was shunned is now wished and longed for, and, if it cannot come to him from some other source, is inflicted on a man by himself. There is a mighty force in those evils which make Fortitude a murderer – if indeed she is still to be called fortitude when she is so utterly vanquished by those evils that she not only cannot by her endurance keep guard over the man she has undertaken to govern and protect, but is herself compelled to go so far as to kill him. The wise man ought, indeed, to endure even death with a stead fastness, but a death that comes to him from outside himself. Whereas if he is compelled, as those philosophers say, to inflict it on himself, they must surely admit that these are not only evils, but intolerable evils, when they compel him to commit this crime.

It follows from this that the life weighed down by such great and
grievous ills, or at the mercy of such chances, would never be called happy, if the men who so term it, and who, when overcome by the growing weight of ills, surrender to adversity in compassing their own death – if these people would bring themselves to surrender to the truth, when overcome by sound reasoning, in their quest for the happy life, and would give up supposing that the ultimate, Supreme Good is something to be enjoyed by them in this condition of mortality. For in this state the very virtues, which are certainly the best and most useful of man’s endowments here below, bear reliable witness to man’s miseries in proportion to their powerful support against man’s perils, hardships and sorrows. In fact, if they are genuine virtues (and genuine virtues can exist only in those in whom true godliness is present) they do not profess to have the power to ensure that the people in whom they exist will not suffer any miseries; genuine virtues are not such liars as to advance such claims. But they do claim that though human life is compelled to be wretched by all the grievous evils of this world, it is happy in the expectation of the world to come, just as, in expectation, it is saved. For how can it be happy, if it is not yet saved? This point is also made by the apostle Paul. He is speaking not about men without prudence, without stead-fastness, without self-control, without justice, but about those who lived by the standards of genuine godliness, whose virtues were therefore genuine virtues, and he says, ‘It is in hope that we are saved. But when hope is seen fulfilled it is hope no longer: why should a man hope for what he already sees? But if we are hoping for something we do not yet see, then it is with steadfast endurance that we await it.’
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As, therefore, we are saved in hope, it is in hope that we have been made happy; and as we do not yet possess a present salvation, but await salvation in the future, so we do not enjoy a present happiness, but look forward to happiness in the future, and we look forward ‘with steadfast endurance’. We are beset by evils, and we have to endure them steadfastly until we reach those goods where there will be everything to supply us with delight beyond the telling, and there will be nothing any longer that we are bound to endure. Such is the salvation which in the world to come will also be itself the ultimate bliss. Yet these philosophersrefuse to believe in this blessedness because they do not see it; and so they attempt to fabricate for themselves an utterly delusive happiness by means of a virtue whose falsity is in proportion to its arrogance.