The Consolation of Philosophy

/ Now, because she has clouded and changed her deceitful face, / my unholy life drags out its unwelcome delays. / Why, my friends, did you so often boast that I was happy? / One who has fallen never stood on steady feet.

And between the two letters, marked out like the rungs of a ladder, certain steps could be seen, by which one might climb from the lower letter to the higher. Yet the hands of certain violent men had torn this same robe and carried off whatever scraps each could. In her right hand she carried books, and in her left a scepter.

/ What is more, the causes why roaring / winds disturb the surface of the sea, / what spirit turns the steady globe, / or why the star that will set in the western waves / rises from the reddening east, / what tempers the calm hours of spring / so that it decks the earth with rosy flowers, / who granted that fertile autumn, when the year is full, / should flow with heavy grapes— / these he used to probe, and to set out / the various causes of hidden nature. / Now he lies, the light of his mind worn out, / his neck weighed down with heavy chains, / his face bowed low by the weight, / forced, alas, to gaze at the dull earth.

Because some traces of my dress could be seen on them, ignorance supposed them to be my intimates, and through the error of the uninitiated crowd it brought some of them to ruin. You may not know of the flight of Anaxagoras, the poison of Socrates, or the torture of Zeno, because they are foreign; but you could at least have known of men like Canius, Seneca and Soranus, whose memory is neither very old nor obscure. Nothing brought them to disaster except that, trained in my ways, they seemed utterly unlike the wicked in their pursuits. So there is nothing for you to wonder at if, on this sea of life, we are tossed by storms blowing all around us, since our chief aim is to displease the worst. Their army, though large, is to be despised, since it is led by no general but is swept along at random, in all directions, by frenzied error.note

If ever it draws up its battle line against us and presses on in greater strength, our general withdraws her forces into the citadel, while they busy themselves plundering useless baggage. And we, from above, laugh at them as they grab the cheapest of things, safe from all their furious uproar and protected by a rampart that raging folly may not hope to scale.

Through the mouth of the same man you taught that this is why the wise must take part in public affairs: so that the helm of cities should not be left to wicked and criminal citizens, bringing plague and ruin to the good. Following this authority, then, I wished to put into practice in public administration what I had learned from you in private leisure. You know, and so does the God who planted you in the minds of the wise, that nothing brought me to any office but the shared concern of all good men. That is the source of my grave and implacable quarrels with the wicked; and, as freedom of conscience will, in defending justice I always disregarded giving offense to the powerful. How often have I stood in the way of Conigastus as he attacked the fortunes of some weak person! How often have I thrown down Trigguilla, steward of the royal household, from an injustice he had begun, and even from one already fully carried out! How often have I put my authority in the way of danger to protect the wretched, whom the unpunished greed of the Goths was forever harassing with endless false charges! No one ever drew me from justice to injustice.note

I grieved no less than those who suffered it that the fortunes of the provincials were being ruined, now by private plunder, now by public taxes. When, at a time of bitter famine, a harsh and indefensible compulsory purchase was imposed that seemed likely to devastate the province of Campania with want, I took up the fight against the praetorian prefect for the sake of the common good; I argued the case with the king looking on, and I won, so that the purchase was not enforced. Paulinus, a man of consular rank, whose wealth the palace dogs had already devoured in their hopes and ambition, I dragged from their very gaping jaws. To keep Albinus, a man of consular rank, from being seized by the penalty of a prejudged accusation, I set myself against the hatred of Cyprian the informer. Do I seem to have stirred up great enough quarrels against myself? But I ought to have been all the safer among the rest, since out of love of justice I kept nothing in reserve among the courtiers to make myself safer. And by whose accusations was I struck down? One of them, Basilius, once dismissed from the king’s service, was driven by the pressure of his debts to inform against me.note

As for Opilio and Gaudentius: the king’s judgment had decreed that they go into exile for countless frauds of every kind; they refused to obey and took refuge in the sanctuary of holy buildings; and when the king learned of this, he decreed that unless they left the city of Ravenna by a set day, they would be driven out branded on their foreheads. What could be added to such severity? Yet on that very day the accusation against me was accepted, with these same men as informers. What then? Did my conduct deserve this? Or did their prior condemnation make them just accusers? Was Fortune not ashamed—if not of innocence accused, then at least of the baseness of the accusers? But do you ask what, in sum, the charge against me is? I am said to have wished the Senate to be safe. You want to know how? I am charged with having prevented an informer from delivering documents by which he would make the Senate guilty of treason. What then do you think, my teacher? Shall I deny the charge, so as not to be a disgrace to you? But I did wish it, and I will never stop wishing it. Shall I confess it?

But the work of stopping the informer has come to an end. Shall I call it a crime to have wished for the safety of that order? The Senate itself, by its decrees about me, had made it one. But folly, always lying to itself, cannot change the merits of things; nor, by the rule of Socrates, do I think it right either to hide the truth or to grant a lie. However that may be, I leave it to be weighed by your judgment and that of the wise. So that posterity may not be ignorant of the course and truth of the matter, I have also committed it to writing and to memory. As for the forged letters by which I am accused of having hoped for Roman liberty, what point is there in speaking of them? Their fraud would have been exposed if I had been allowed to use the confession of the informers themselves, which carries the greatest weight in all such business. For what liberty is left to hope for? If only there were any!

I would have answered in the words of Canius. When Gaius Caesar, son of Germanicus, said that he had known of a conspiracy against him, he replied: “If I had known, you would not have known.” In this matter grief has not so dulled my senses that I complain that wicked men have plotted crimes against virtue; what utterly amazes me is that they have accomplished what they hoped. To want to do worse things may perhaps be our own failing; but that every criminal should be able to carry out against the innocent whatever he has conceived, while God looks on—that is monstrous. Hence one of your intimates asked, not without reason: “If there is a God, where does evil come from? And where does good come from, if there is not?” But granted it was only to be expected that wicked men, who seek the blood of all good men and of the whole Senate, should have wanted to destroy me too, whom they had seen fighting for the good and for the Senate. Surely I did not deserve the same from the senators as well?note

You remember, I think—since you were always present and directed what I should say or do—you remember, I say, how at Verona, when the king, eager for the ruin of everyone, was trying to extend to the whole senatorial order the charge of treason laid against Albinus, I defended the innocence of the entire Senate with complete disregard for my own danger. You know that what I say is true, and that I have never boasted of it in any self-praise. For the secret of a conscience that approves itself is somehow diminished whenever someone, by showing off a deed, takes the reward of fame for it. But you see what outcome has met my innocence: instead of the rewards of true virtue I suffer the penalties of a false crime. Was there ever a confession of any crime so plain that it made the judges so unanimous in their severity that neither the error of human judgment nor the condition of fortune, uncertain for all mortals, would make some of them relent?

If I had been said to have wanted to burn down temples, to slaughter priests with an impious sword, to have plotted death for all good men, the sentence would still have punished me in person, after I had confessed or been convicted. As it is, some five hundred miles away, mute and undefended, I am condemned to death and proscription for too great a zeal for the Senate. How well they deserve that no one should ever be convicted of a crime like mine! Even my accusers saw how honorable the charge was; to darken it by mixing in some real crime, they lied that I had defiled my conscience with sacrilege out of ambition for office. Yet you, planted within me, were driving every desire for mortal things from the seat of my mind, and under your eyes there could be no place for sacrilege. For every day you dropped into my ears and thoughts that saying of Pythagoras, ἕπου θεῷ [follow God]. Nor was it fitting for me to seek the protection of the vilest spirits, when you were shaping me to such excellence as to make me like God.

Besides, the innocent inner sanctum of my home, the company of my most honorable friends, and my father-in-law too, a holy man as worthy of reverence as you yourself, defend me from all suspicion of this crime. But—oh, the wickedness of it!—they actually take you as their proof of so great a crime, and I will seem to have been involved in wrongdoing for this very reason, that I was steeped in your teachings and trained in your ways. So it is not enough that my reverence for you has done me no good; you must also be torn to pieces because of the offense against me. And now comes the crowning touch to my misfortunes: the judgment of most people looks not at the merits of things but at the outcome of fortune, and considers only those things to have been wisely planned that success has commended. So it happens that a good reputation is the first thing of all to desert the unfortunate. What the talk of the people is now, how discordant and various their opinions, I hate to recall.

This much only would I say: the final burden of adverse fortune is that, when some charge is invented against the wretched, they are believed to have deserved what they suffer. And I, stripped of all my goods, deprived of my offices, befouled in reputation, have suffered punishment for doing good. I seem to see the wicked workshops of criminals awash with joy and gladness; every most abandoned man threatening new frauds of informing; the good lying prostrate in terror at my peril; every scoundrel spurred on by impunity to dare crime, and by rewards to accomplish it; and the innocent deprived not only of security but even of any defense. And so I want to cry out:

/ Nothing, freed from the ancient law, / abandons the work of its own station. / Governing all things to a fixed end, / you refuse to restrain the acts of men alone, / as their ruler, in due measure. / For why does slippery Fortune bring / such great reversals? The innocent are crushed / by the punishment owed to crime, / while wicked ways sit / on the lofty throne, and the guilty / trample the necks of the holy by an unjust turn. / Bright virtue lies hidden, buried / in dark shadows, and the just man bears / the charge of the unjust. / Perjuries do them no harm, nor / fraud dressed up in lying colors. / But when they please to use their strength, / those whom countless peoples fear, / the highest kings, they gladly bring under. / O look now upon the wretched earth, / whoever you are who bind the compacts of the world! / No worthless part of so great a work, / we human beings are tossed on the sea of Fortune.

/ Ruler, restrain the rushing waves, / and with the compact by which you rule the boundless heaven / make firm and steady the lands.

For whoever is enclosed within its rampart and defenses has no fear of deserving exile; but whoever ceases to wish to dwell there ceases equally to deserve it. So it is not so much the look of this place that moves me as your look; and I do not miss the library walls adorned with ivory and glass so much as the seat of your mind, in which I once placed not books but what gives books their value—the thoughts of my books of old. As for your services to the common good, what you said was true, but little, given the great number of your deeds. Of the charges against you, whether honorable or false, you mentioned what everyone knows. You rightly thought the crimes and frauds of the informers should be touched on only briefly, since they are better and more fully celebrated on the lips of the crowd, which knows all about them. You also sharply rebuked the deed of the unjust Senate. You grieved too over the accusation against me, and wept for the loss of your damaged reputation.

Last, your grief blazed up against Fortune, and you complained that rewards are not weighed out fairly according to merit. At the end of your raging Muse you prayed that the peace that rules heaven might rule the earth too. But since a great tumult of passions has fallen upon you, and grief, anger and sorrow pull you in different directions, stronger remedies cannot yet reach you in your present state of mind. So for a little while we will use gentler ones, so that what has hardened into a swelling under the inflow of disturbances may be softened by a gentler touch, ready to receive the force of a sharper medicine.

“But tell me: since you do not doubt that the world is ruled by God, do you also see by what means of government it is ruled?” “I hardly understand the meaning of your question,” I said, “much less can I answer what you ask.” “Was I not right,” she said, “that something was missing, through which, as through a breach in a rampart, the sickness of the passions has crept into your mind? But tell me, do you remember what the end of things is, or what the aim of all nature is directed toward?” “I had heard it,” I said, “but grief has dulled my memory.” “Yet you know where all things have come from?” “I know,” I said, and I answered that it was God. “Then how can it be that, knowing the beginning, you do not know what the end of things is? But such are the ways of the passions, such is their power, that they can move a man from his place, but cannot uproot him and tear him wholly out of himself. But I would like you to answer this too: do you remember that you are a human being?” “Why would I not remember?” I said. “Then can you tell me what a human being is?”

“Are you asking whether I know that I am a rational and mortal animal? I know it, and I confess that I am that.” And she said: “Do you know that you are anything else?” “Nothing.” “Now I know,” she said, “another cause of your sickness, and the greatest: you have ceased to know what you yourself are. So I have found out most fully both the reason for your illness and the way to restore your health. Because you are confused by forgetting yourself, you have grieved that you are an exile and stripped of your own goods. Because you do not know what the end of things is, you think that worthless and wicked men are powerful and happy. And because you have forgotten by what means of government the world is ruled, you suppose that these turns of fortune drift about without a helmsman—great causes not only of sickness but of death itself. But thanks be to the author of health that nature has not yet wholly abandoned you.

“We have the best tinder for your recovery: your true opinion about the governing of the world, that you believe it is subject not to the randomness of chance but to divine reason. So you have nothing to fear; from this tiniest spark the warmth of life will soon shine upon you. But it is not yet time for stronger remedies; and it is well known that the nature of minds is such that whenever they cast off true opinions they put on false ones, and from these arises a fog of disturbances that confuses their true vision. So I will try to thin this fog a little with gentle and moderate soothing remedies, so that once the darkness of deceptive passions is dispelled, you may be able to recognize the splendor of the true light.”

But it is time for you to take and taste something mild and pleasant, which, once it has passed inside, will open the way for stronger draughts. So let the persuasion of Rhetoric’s sweetness assist us, which goes on the right path only when it does not abandon my teachings; and with her let Music, a servant born in my house, sing now lighter, now heavier measures. What is it, then, O man, that has cast you down into grief and mourning? You have seen something new, I suppose, something unusual. You think Fortune has changed toward you; you are wrong. These are always her ways; this is her nature. Toward you she has kept, rather, the constancy that is proper to her, in her very changeableness. She was the same when she was flattering you, when she was toying with you with the lures of a false happiness. You have caught out the two-faced looks of the blind goddess. She who still veils herself from others has made herself wholly known to you. If you approve of her, accept her ways; do not complain.

If you shudder at her treachery, scorn her and cast her off, since her games are ruinous. For what is now the cause of such great grief for you ought to have been the cause of your tranquility. She has left you—she whom no one can ever be sure will not leave. Or do you really think a happiness that is going to depart is precious? And is present fortune dear to you, though it cannot be trusted to stay, and will bring grief when it leaves? But if it can neither be kept at will and it makes people wretched when it flees, what is its fleetingness but a kind of sign of coming disaster? It is not enough to look at what lies before our eyes; prudence measures the outcome of things; and this same changeableness, in either direction, makes Fortune’s threats nothing to be feared and her flatteries nothing to be desired. Finally, you must bear with an even mind whatever happens within Fortune’s arena, once you have put your neck beneath her yoke.

But if you want to prescribe a law of staying and going to the one you freely chose as your mistress, would you not be unjust, and would you not by impatience make worse a lot you cannot change? If you committed your sails to the winds, you would move forward not where your will aimed but where the gusts drove you; if you entrusted seeds to the fields, you would balance the fruitful years against the barren. You have given yourself over to Fortune’s rule; you must obey your mistress’s ways. Are you really trying to hold back the force of the turning wheel? But, most foolish of all mortals, if she begins to stay, she ceases to be Fortune.

Handmaids recognize their mistress: they come with me, and when I go they leave. I would boldly assert that if the things whose loss you lament were yours, you would never have lost them. Am I alone to be forbidden to exercise my rights? The sky may bring forth bright days and bury them again in dark nights. The year may crown the face of the earth now with flowers and fruits, now confound it with clouds and cold. The sea has the right now to caress with a smooth surface, now to bristle with storms and waves. Shall the insatiable greed of human beings bind me to a constancy foreign to my ways? This is my power, this is the game I play without end: I turn the wheel in its spinning circle, and I delight in bringing the lowest to the top and the top to the lowest. Climb up, if you like, but on this condition: that you do not think it an injustice to come down when the rules of my game demand it. Or did you not know my ways?

Did you not know that Croesus, king of the Lydians, a little earlier a terror to Cyrus, soon became pitiable, was handed over to the flames of the pyre, and was saved by a shower sent from heaven? Has it escaped you that Paullus shed pious tears for the calamities of King Perseus, whom he had captured? What else does the clamor of tragedy bewail but Fortune overturning happy kingdoms with an indiscriminate blow? Did you not learn as a youth that δοιοὺς πίθους τὸν μὲν ἕνα κακῶν τὸν δ' ἕτερον ἐάων [two jars, the one of evils and the other of goods] lie on the threshold of Jupiter? What if you have taken more generously from the share of goods? What if I have not departed from you entirely? What if this very changeableness of mine is a just reason for you to hope for better things? All the same, do not waste away in spirit, and, placed within a kingdom common to all, do not wish to live by a law of your own.note

I say nothing of how, when you were left without a father, men of the highest rank took you into their care; how, chosen for alliance by marriage with the leading men of the city, you began to be dear to them before you became their kin—which is the most precious kind of relationship. Who did not proclaim you most fortunate, with such distinguished in-laws, with so chaste a wife, and with the blessing of sons too? I pass over—for I prefer to pass over what is common—the honors you took up in youth that are denied to old men; I am glad to come to the singular crowning point of your happiness. If any enjoyment of mortal things carries any weight of happiness, can the memory of that light be blotted out by any mass of evils bearing down on you, however great? I mean the day you saw your two sons made consuls together, and carried from your house amid a throng of senators and the eager rejoicing of the people; when, as they sat in their curule chairs in the Senate house, you, as the speaker of the king’s praises, earned the glory of talent and eloquence; when in the circus, standing between the two consuls, you satisfied the expectations of the crowd pouring round you with a triumphal largess.note

You outwitted Fortune, I think, while she caressed you, while she cherished you as her darling. You carried off a gift she had never granted to any private citizen. Do you want, then, to settle accounts with Fortune? This is the first time she has turned a jealous eye upon you. If you consider the number and measure of your joys and sorrows, you cannot yet deny that you are fortunate. But if you do not think yourself fortunate because the things that seemed joyful then have gone, there is no reason to think yourself wretched, since the things now believed to be sad are passing. Or have you come onto this stage of life only now, a sudden stranger? Do you think there is any constancy in human affairs, when a swift hour often dissolves a human being himself? For even if things of chance rarely keep faith in staying, yet the last day of life is a kind of death even for fortune that stays.

What difference, then, do you think it makes whether you leave her by dying or she leaves you by fleeing?

“Your wife lives, gentle in temper, outstanding in chastity and modesty, and—to sum up all her gifts in brief—like her father. She lives, I say, and, weary of this life, she keeps her breath for you alone; and in this one thing I would myself concede that your happiness is diminished: she wastes away in tears and grief with longing for you. What shall I say of your sons, the consuls, in whom, as far as boys of that age can show it, a likeness of their father’s or grandfather’s character already shines out? Since, then, mortals’ chief care is to keep their lives, O how happy you are, if you recognize your goods, you who still have what no one doubts is dearer than life! So dry your tears now. Fortune does not yet hate every one of you, nor has too strong a storm fallen upon you, since your anchors hold firm, and they do not allow either the comfort of the present or the hope of the future to be lacking.”

So no one is easily at peace with the condition of his fortune; for in each case there is something that the one who has not experienced it does not know, and the one who has experienced it dreads. Add that the most fortunate have the most delicate feelings, and unless everything is at their beck and call, being unused to any adversity, they are laid low by the smallest things; so very slight are the things that rob the most fortunate of the height of their happiness. How many do you suppose there are who would think themselves next to heaven if even the smallest share of what is left of your fortune came their way? This very place that you call exile is home to those who live here; so true is it that nothing is wretched unless you think it so, and, conversely, every lot is happy for one who bears it with equanimity. Who is so happy that, once he has given in to impatience, he would not wish to change his state? How much bitterness is sprinkled over the sweetness of human happiness! Even if it seems pleasant to the one enjoying it, still it cannot be held back from leaving when it wishes.

It is clear, then, how wretched is the happiness of mortal things, which neither lasts forever among the even-minded nor wholly delights the anxious. Why then, mortals, do you seek outside yourselves a happiness that lies within you? Error and ignorance confuse you. I will briefly show you the hinge of the highest happiness. Is there anything more precious to you than yourself? “Nothing,” you will say. So if you are in possession of yourself, you will possess what you would never want to lose and what Fortune could not take away. And so that you may recognize that happiness cannot consist in these things of chance, reason it out this way. If happiness is the highest good of a nature that lives by reason, and if what can in any way be snatched away is not the highest good, since what cannot be taken away is superior, then it is clear that the instability of Fortune cannot aspire to attaining happiness. Besides, whoever is carried along by this fleeting happiness either knows or does not know that it is changeable.

If he does not know, what lot can be happy in the blindness of ignorance? If he knows, he must be afraid of losing what he does not doubt can be lost; and so continual fear does not let him be happy. Or if he does lose it, does he think it of no account? Then too it is a very slight good that can be lost with an even mind. And you are the same man who, I know, is convinced by very many demonstrations, and has it firmly planted within him, that human minds are in no way mortal; and it is clear that chance happiness is ended by the death of the body. So it cannot be doubted, if this happiness can bring true happiness, that the whole human race slides into misery at the end of death. But if we know that many have sought the fruit of happiness not only by death but even by pain and torture, how can present happiness make people happy, when it does not make them wretched once it is gone?

A voice fills the hearing of many all at once and whole; but your riches cannot pass to many without being broken up. And when that happens, they must make poor those whom they leave. O narrow and needy riches, then, which many cannot have whole, and which come to no one without the poverty of the rest! Or does the gleam of jewels catch your eye? But if there is anything special in that brilliance, the light belongs to the jewels, not to human beings; and I marvel greatly that human beings marvel at them. For what is there that lacks the movement and structure of a soul that could rightly seem beautiful to a nature with a soul and reason? Though by their maker’s work and their own distinctness they draw some small share of the lowest beauty, they are placed below your excellence and in no way deserved your admiration. Or does the beauty of the fields delight you? Why not? It is a beautiful part of a most beautiful work.

So we sometimes rejoice at the face of a calm sea; so we admire the sky, the stars, the moon and the sun. Does any of these touch you? Do you dare to boast of the splendor of any such thing? Are you yourself adorned with spring flowers, or does your own fertility swell into summer fruits? Why are you carried away by empty joys? Why do you embrace external goods as your own? Fortune will never make yours what the nature of things has made foreign to you. The fruits of the earth are no doubt owed to the nourishment of living creatures. But if you want to fill your need to the extent that is enough for nature, there is no reason to seek Fortune’s abundance. For nature is content with few and very small things; and if you want to press its fullness with superfluities, what you pour in will become either unpleasant or harmful. Now you think it is beautiful to shine in various clothes; but if their appearance is pleasing to the eye, I will admire either the nature of the material or the skill of the craftsman.

Or does a long line of servants make you happy? If they are vicious in character, they are a ruinous burden on the house and bitterly hostile to their master himself; but if they are honest, how will someone else’s honesty be counted among your wealth? From all of this it is plainly shown that none of the things you count among your goods is your good. And if there is no beauty in them worth seeking, why should you grieve when they are lost or rejoice when you keep them? And if they are beautiful by nature, what is that to you? For they would have pleased in themselves even if separated from your wealth. They are not precious because they have come into your riches; rather, because they seemed precious, you chose to count them among your riches. But what do you all want with such a clamor about fortune? You seek, I suppose, to drive away want by abundance. Yet this turns out the opposite for you.

For more supports are needed to protect a variety of precious furnishings; and it is true that those who possess very much need very much, and on the contrary those need very little who measure their abundance by the necessity of nature, not by the excess of ambition. Is there, then, no good of your own, planted within you, that you seek your goods in things external and set apart? Is the condition of things so reversed that a creature made divine by the gift of reason thinks it can shine only by possessing lifeless furnishings? Other things are content with their own; but you, like God in your mind, seek the ornaments of your excellent nature from the lowest things, and do not understand how great a wrong you do to your creator. He willed that the human race should stand above all earthly things; you thrust your dignity down below the lowest of them.

For if every good of anything is agreed to be more precious than the thing whose good it is, then when you judge the vilest things to be your goods, by your own estimation you subject yourselves to them—and that indeed is deserved. For this is the condition of human nature: it surpasses all other things only when it knows itself, but it is brought lower than the beasts if it ceases to know itself. For other animals, not to know themselves is their nature; for human beings it comes from vice. How far this error of yours extends, which thinks that anything can be adorned by ornaments that belong to others! But that cannot be. For if anything shines by what is added to it, it is the added things themselves that are praised; what is covered and veiled by them remains, nonetheless, in its own ugliness. I, for my part, deny that anything is good that harms its possessor. Am I lying? “Not at all,” you say.

Yet riches have very often harmed their possessors, since all the worst men, being all the greedier for what belongs to others, think themselves alone most worthy to have whatever gold and jewels there are anywhere. So you, who now anxiously dread the pike and the sword, would sing in the robber’s face if you had set out on the path of this life as a traveler with empty pockets. O the splendid happiness of mortal wealth: once you have gained it, you stop being safe!note

/ Alas, who was that first man / who dug up the weight of hidden gold / and gems that wished to stay concealed— / precious perils?

And if you look at the body, what could you find weaker than a human being, whom the bite of a tiny fly, or some creeping thing working its way into the body’s hidden passages, often kills? How could anyone exercise any right over another except over the body alone, and over what is lower than the body—I mean his fortune? Will you ever command a free mind? Will you ever move a mind held together by firm reason from its own state of calm? When a tyrant thought he could force a free man by torture to betray those who knew of a conspiracy against him, the man bit off his tongue and spat it in the raging tyrant’s face. So the tortures that the tyrant thought were material for his cruelty, the wise man made material for virtue. And what can anyone do to another that he cannot suffer from another himself? We are told that Busiris, who used to kill his guests, was himself slain by his guest Hercules.note

Regulus had thrown many Carthaginians captured in war into chains, but soon he himself held out his hands to the chains of his conquerors. Do you think, then, that a man has any power if he cannot prevent another from doing to him what he can do to another? Besides, if offices and powers had in them any natural good of their own, they would never come to the worst of men. For opposites do not usually keep company; nature refuses to join contraries. So since there is no doubt that the worst men very often hold high office, it is also clear that things which allow themselves to cling to the worst men are not good by their own nature. This can be judged even more fittingly of all Fortune’s gifts, which come most abundantly to the most wicked. On this point I think we should also consider the following: no one doubts that a man is brave if he has seen bravery in him, and whoever has swiftness is plainly swift.note

In the same way music makes musicians, medicine physicians, rhetoric orators. For the nature of each thing does what is proper to it; it is not mixed with the effects of contrary things, and it actively drives away what is opposed to it. Yet riches cannot quench insatiable greed, nor could power make a man master of himself if vicious desires hold him bound in unbreakable chains; and dignity conferred on the wicked not only fails to make them worthy, but rather betrays them and puts their unworthiness on display. Why does this happen? Because you like to call things by false names when they are really otherwise, and those names are easily refuted by the effects of the things themselves. So those riches cannot rightly be called riches, nor that power power, nor this dignity dignity. Finally, the same conclusion may be drawn about Fortune as a whole: it is clear that there is nothing in her worth seeking, nothing of native goodness, since she does not always attach herself to the good, and does not make good those she is attached to.

Of this region, so tiny within the universe, about one quarter, as you learned from Ptolemy’s proofs, is inhabited by living creatures known to us. If from this quarter you subtract in thought all that is covered by seas and marshes and all the vast expanse stretched out in drought, hardly the narrowest space will be left for human beings to live in. Hedged in and shut up in this tiniest point of a point, do you think about spreading your fame and extending your name? What greatness or splendor can glory have, squeezed within such narrow and meager limits? Besides, this very enclosure of a small dwelling-place is inhabited by many nations differing in language, customs and their whole way of life. Because of the difficulty of travel, the diversity of speech and the rarity of trade, not only the fame of individual men but not even the fame of cities can reach them.note

In the age of Marcus Tullius, indeed, as he himself indicates somewhere, the fame of the Roman republic had not yet crossed the Caucasus mountains, though it was then at its height and feared even by the Parthians and the other peoples of that region. Do you see, then, how narrow, how cramped is the glory you labor to widen and extend? Where the fame of the Roman name cannot pass, will the glory of a Roman man advance? And what of the fact that the customs and institutions of different peoples disagree with one another, so that what is judged worthy of praise among some is judged worthy of punishment among others? So if anyone delights in being talked about, it does him no good at all to carry his name to many peoples. Each man, then, will be content with glory spread among his own people, and that glorious immortality of fame will be confined within the borders of a single nation. But how many men who were most famous in their own day have been wiped out by oblivion for lack of writers!note

And yet what good are writings themselves, when a long and dark antiquity buries them along with their authors? You seem to yourselves to be extending your immortality when you think of fame in time to come. But if you consider the infinite expanses of eternity, what reason do you have to rejoice in the long life of your name? The length of a single moment, compared with ten thousand years, has some share in it, however small, since both spans are finite. But this number of years, and any multiple of it you like, cannot even be compared with unending duration. Between finite things there can be some comparison, but between the infinite and the finite there can never be any. So it comes about that fame, however long it lasts, if it is thought of alongside inexhaustible eternity, seems not small but plainly nothing.

But you do not know how to act rightly except for the breeze of popular favor and empty rumors; abandoning the excellence of conscience and virtue, you demand your rewards from other people’s idle talk. Hear how wittily someone mocked the shallowness of this kind of arrogance. A certain man had assumed the false name of philosopher, not to practice true virtue but for proud glory. Someone attacked him with insults, adding that he would soon know whether he was a philosopher, if he bore the injuries done him gently and patiently. The man put on patience for a little while, and having taken the insult, said as if in triumph: “Now at last do you see that I am a philosopher?” Then the other replied, very bitingly: “I would have, if you had kept quiet.” But what has fame to do with outstanding men—for it is of them we are speaking—who seek glory through virtue? What, I say, has fame to do with them, once the body has been dissolved in death at the last?

For if human beings die entirely—which our reasoning forbids us to believe—there is no glory at all, since the one whose glory it is said to be does not exist at all. But if the mind, conscious of having done well, is released from its earthly prison and freely seeks heaven, will it not despise all earthly business, since, enjoying heaven, it rejoices to be free of earthly things?

/ But if you think life is prolonged / by the breath of a mortal name, / when a late day snatches even this from you, / then a second death awaits you.

Or do you think it should be counted among the least of things that this harsh, this terrible fortune has revealed to you the minds of your faithful friends? She has sorted out for you the sure faces of your companions from the doubtful ones; in leaving, she took away her own and left you yours. What would you have paid for this when you were unharmed and, as you thought, fortunate! Go on, complain now of lost riches: you have found friends, the most precious kind of riches there is.

/ O happy human race, / if your minds were ruled / by the love that rules the heavens.

“To true happiness,” she said, “which your mind also dreams of; but because its sight is taken up with images, it cannot look upon happiness itself.” Then I said: “Please do so, and show me without delay what true happiness is.” “Gladly,” she said, “for your sake. But first I will try to sketch in words and give shape to what is better known to you, so that once you have seen it clearly and then turned your eyes the other way, you may recognize the form of true happiness.”

Some of them, believing that the highest good is to need nothing, labor to abound in riches. Others, judging the good to be what is most worthy of veneration, strive to gain offices and so be revered by their fellow citizens. There are those who place the highest good in the highest power; these either want to rule themselves or try to attach themselves to those who rule. Those to whom renown seems something supremely good hurry to spread a glorious name through the arts of war or of peace. Very many measure the fruit of the good by joy and gladness; these think it the happiest thing to melt away in pleasure. There are also those who exchange the ends and causes of these things, one for another: for example, those who want riches for the sake of power and pleasures, or those who seek power either for money’s sake or to spread their name.

It is around these, then, and others like them that the aim of human actions and prayers turns: nobility, for example, and popular favor, which seem to procure a kind of renown; wife and children, which are sought for the delight they give. Friends, the most sacred kind of good, are counted not under fortune but under virtue; the rest are taken up either for the sake of power or of pleasure. As for the goods of the body, it is easy to see that they are to be referred to those above. Strength and size seem to bestow ability; beauty and speed, renown; health, pleasure. In all of these it is clear that happiness alone is desired. For what each person seeks above everything else, he judges to be the highest good. But we have defined the highest good as happiness; therefore each person judges the state he desires above all else to be happiness. So you have before your eyes, roughly, the pattern of human happiness: wealth, honors, power, glory, pleasures.

Epicurus, considering these alone, concluded consistently enough that the highest good was pleasure, since all the others seem to bring delight to the mind. But I return to human pursuits. The human mind, though its memory is clouded, still seeks its own good; but like a drunk man it does not know by which path to get home. Do those who strive to need nothing seem to be mistaken? But nothing can complete happiness so well as a state rich in all goods, needing nothing from outside, sufficient to itself. Are those mistaken who think that what is best is also most worthy of reverent honor? Not at all. For it is nothing cheap or contemptible that the effort of nearly all mortals labors to obtain. Or is power not to be counted among goods? What then? Is that to be thought weak and without strength which is plainly superior to all things?note

Or is renown to be counted as nothing? But it cannot be set apart: whatever is most excellent must also seem most renowned. As for happiness not being anxious and gloomy, nor subject to pains and troubles, what need is there to say it, when even in the smallest things people seek what it delights them to have and enjoy? These, then, are what people want to obtain; they desire riches, offices, kingdoms, glory and pleasures because they believe that through them they will gain sufficiency, reverence, power, renown and joy. It is the good, then, that people seek by such different pursuits. And in this it is easily shown how great the power of nature is, since, though their opinions vary and disagree, they agree in loving the good as their end.

/ The bird that chatters in the high branches / is shut in the hollow of a cage; / though cups smeared with honey / and lavish meals, with fond attention, / are served to it by playful human care, / yet if, hopping in its cramped wickerwork, / it sees the pleasant shade of the woods, / it tramples the scattered food with its feet, / longs sadly for the forests alone, / murmurs of the forests in its sweet voice. / A sapling, once bent by powerful force, / bows its top down toward the ground; / if the hand that bent it lets it go, / it looks at the sky with its top upright. / Phoebus sets in the western waves, / but by a hidden path again / turns his chariot to its usual rising. / All things seek again their own return / and each rejoices in its homecoming; / nor does any thing keep the order it is given / unless it has joined its rising to its end / and made its own circle steady.

“Yet,” I said, “I cannot remember ever having been so free in mind that I was not always troubled by something.” “Was it not because either something was absent that you did not want absent, or something was present that you did not want present?” “That is so,” I said. “So you desired the presence of the one and the absence of the other?” “I admit it,” I said. “But does a person lack what he desires?” she said. “He does,” I said. “And one who lacks something is not wholly sufficient to himself?” “No,” I said. “So you, full of riches,” she said, “had to put up with this insufficiency?” “Of course,” I said. “Then riches cannot make a person need nothing and be sufficient to himself; and that is what they seemed to promise. And I think this is especially worth considering: money has nothing in its own nature to prevent its being taken from those who possess it against their will.” “I admit it,” I said. “Of course you admit it, when every day someone stronger snatches it from someone unwilling.

“For where do lawsuits come from, except that money taken by force or fraud from unwilling owners is being reclaimed?” “That is so,” I said. “So everyone will need protection sought from outside to guard his money?” “Who would deny it?” I said. “But he would not need it unless he possessed money that he could lose?” “That cannot be doubted,” I said. “Then the matter has turned into its opposite: the riches that were thought to make people sufficient to themselves in fact make them need the protection of others. And in what way is need driven out by riches? Can the rich not be hungry? Can they not be thirsty? Do the limbs of the moneyed not feel the winter cold? But the wealthy, you will say, have the means to satisfy their hunger and drive off thirst and cold. In this way need can indeed be soothed by riches; it cannot be removed altogether.

“For if need, always gaping and demanding something, is filled by riches, there must always remain a need to be filled. I say nothing of the fact that very little is enough for nature, and nothing is enough for greed. So if riches cannot remove need, and even create need of their own, why do you believe they provide sufficiency?”

For virtue has a dignity of its own, which it at once passes on to those it is joined with. Since popular honors cannot do this, it is clear that they do not have the beauty proper to dignity.

They would like to have lived free from care, but they cannot; and then they boast of their power! Do you think a man powerful when you see him wanting what he cannot achieve? Do you think a man powerful who goes about with a bodyguard at his side, who fears more than those he terrifies, who, to seem powerful, is in the hands of his servants? And why should I speak of the friends of kings, when I show that kingdoms themselves are full of such weakness? Royal power often lays them low, sometimes while it stands, sometimes when it has fallen. Nero forced Seneca, his friend and teacher, to choose the manner of his own death. Antoninus threw Papinian, long powerful among the courtiers, to the soldiers’ swords. Yet both wanted to renounce their power; Seneca even tried to hand his wealth over to Nero and retire into leisure. But while their very bulk dragged them down to their fall, neither achieved what he wanted.note

What sort of power is this, then, which its possessors dread, which you are not safe in having when you want to have it, and which you cannot escape when you want to lay it down? Or are friends a protection, when fortune, not virtue, has won them? But the one whom good fortune made a friend, misfortune will make an enemy. And what plague is more effective at doing harm than an enemy who is an intimate?

Among these things I think popular favor not even worth mentioning, since it neither arises from judgment nor ever lasts firmly. And who does not see how empty, how worthless the name of nobility is? If it is referred to renown, the renown belongs to someone else. For nobility seems to be a kind of praise that comes from the merits of one’s parents. But if praise creates renown, then those who are praised must be the renowned. So if you have no renown of your own, another’s renown does not make you illustrious. If there is anything good in nobility, I think it is this alone: that the nobly born seem to be under an obligation not to fall short of their ancestors’ virtue.

And yet the sky is to be admired less for these things than for the reason by which it is governed. As for the gleam of beauty, how quick, how swift it is, more fleeting than the changing flowers of spring! If, as Aristotle says, human beings had the eyes of Lynceus, so that their sight could pierce through obstacles, would not the body of Alcibiades, so beautiful on the surface, seem utterly foul once its insides were seen? So it is not your own nature that makes you seem beautiful, but the weakness of the eyes that look at you. Value the goods of the body as highly as you like, so long as you know that whatever you admire can be dissolved by the little flame of a three-day fever! From all this we can sum up: these things, which cannot give the goods they promise and are not made perfect by the gathering of all goods, neither lead to happiness as paths nor make anyone happy by themselves.note

“Consider whether what has been granted to need nothing, to be most powerful and most worthy of honor, might lack renown, which it could not supply for itself, and so seem in some respect more lowly.” “I cannot help admitting,” I said, “that, being all this, it is also most renowned.” “It follows, then, that we must admit that renown does not differ from the other three.” “It follows,” I said. “So what needs nothing from anything else, what can do all things by its own strength, what is renowned and revered—is it not clear that this is also most joyful?” “But how any sorrow could steal upon such a thing,” I said, “I cannot even imagine; so, if what we said before holds, I must admit that it is full of joy.” “And by the same reasoning it also necessarily follows that the names of sufficiency, power, renown, reverence and delight are indeed different, but that their substance in no way differs.” “It necessarily follows,” I said.

“This, then, which is one and simple by nature, human perversity divides; and while it tries to gain part of a thing that has no parts, it obtains neither the part, which does not exist, nor the whole, which it hardly aims at.” “How so?” I said. “The man who seeks riches,” she said, “to escape poverty, cares nothing for power; he prefers to be lowly and obscure, and even denies himself many natural pleasures so as not to lose the money he has gathered. But in this way not even sufficiency comes to one whom strength abandons, whom trouble pricks, whom lowliness casts down, whom obscurity hides away. And the man who desires only power squanders wealth, scorns pleasures, and thinks honor and glory without power worth nothing. But you see how many things this man lacks too. It happens that at times he needs necessities, that he is gnawed by anxieties; and since he cannot drive these off, he ceases to be even what he most sought—powerful.

“One can reason in the same way about honors, glory and pleasures. For since each of these is the same as the others, whoever seeks one of them without the rest does not get even the one he desires.” “What then?” I said. “If someone wanted to obtain them all together, he would indeed want the sum of happiness. But will he find it in these things, which we have shown cannot give what they promise?” “No,” I said. “So happiness is by no means to be tracked down in the things that are believed to supply one or another of the things worth seeking.” “I admit it,” I said, “and nothing truer could be said.” “So you have,” she said, “both the form of false happiness and its causes. Now turn your mind’s gaze the other way; for there you will at once see the true happiness I promised.” “But that is plain even to a blind man,” I said, “and you showed it a little earlier, when you were trying to lay bare the causes of the false.

“For unless I am mistaken, true and perfect happiness is that which makes a person sufficient, powerful, revered, renowned and joyful. And so that you may know I have understood more deeply: since these are all the same, I recognize without any doubt that whatever can truly provide one of them is full happiness.” “O my pupil, how happy you are in this opinion,” she said, “if you add this …” “What?” I said. “Do you think there is anything among these mortal and perishable things that can bring such a state?” “I do not,” I said, “and you have shown it so clearly that nothing more is needed.” “These things, then, seem to give mortals either images of the true good or certain imperfect goods, but they cannot confer the true and perfect good.” “I agree,” I said. “Since, then, you have recognized what true happiness is, and what things only counterfeit it, it now remains for you to learn where you can seek this true happiness.”

“That,” I said, “is what I have long been eagerly waiting for.” “But since, as our Plato holds in the Timaeus,” she said, “we ought to call for divine help even in the smallest matters, what do you think we should do now, to be worthy of finding the seat of that highest good?” “We must call upon the Father of all things,” I said, “for without him no beginning is rightly founded.” “Rightly said,” she replied, and at once she sang these words.note

/ With like causes you bring forth souls and lesser lives, / and fitting them, raised on high, to light chariots, / you sow them in heaven and earth; and by a kindly law / you make them turn back to you and return by the fire that leads them home. / Grant, Father, that my mind may climb to your august seat, / grant it to behold the source of the good; grant that, the light found, / it may fix the clear sight of the soul on you. / Scatter the clouds and the weight of earthly mass, / and shine out in your splendor! For you are the clear sky, / you are calm rest for the devout; to see you is the end: / you are beginning, carrier, guide, path and goal, all at once.

“So if, as we showed a little earlier, there is a certain imperfect happiness in fragile good, there can be no doubt that there is some solid and perfect happiness.” “That is concluded most firmly,” I said, “and most truly.” “And where it dwells,” she said, “consider in this way. That God, the first principle of all things, is good is proved by the common conception of human minds. For since nothing better than God can be thought of, who could doubt that that than which nothing is better is good? Reason shows God to be good in such a way that it also proves that perfect good is in him. For if he were not such, he could not be the first principle of all things. There would be something more excellent than he, possessing perfect good, which would seem to be prior to him and more ancient; for it has become clear that all perfect things come before those less complete. So, lest our reasoning go on to infinity, we must admit that the highest God is utterly full of the highest and perfect good.

“But we have established that the perfect good is true happiness; therefore true happiness must be located in the highest God.” “I accept that,” I said, “and there is no way it can be contradicted.” “But I ask you,” she said, “see how reverently and inviolably you approve what we have said, that the highest God is utterly full of the highest good.” “How do you mean?” I said. “Do not presume that this Father of all things received from outside that highest good of which he is said to be full, or that he has it by nature in such a way that you would think the substance of God who has it and of the happiness he has are different. For if you think it was received from outside, you might judge the giver more excellent than the receiver. But we most rightly acknowledge that he is the most excellent of all things. And if it is in him by nature, but is distinct from him in concept, then—since we are speaking of God, the first principle of all things—let anyone imagine it who can: who joined these different things together?

“Finally, what is different from any thing is not the thing from which it is understood to be different. So what is by its nature different from the highest good is not the highest good—and it is wrong to think this of him than whom nothing is known to be more excellent. For absolutely nothing can be better by nature than its own source; so I would conclude by the truest reasoning that what is the source of all things is also, in its very substance, the highest good.” “Most rightly,” I said. “But it has been granted that the highest good is happiness.” “That is so,” I said. “Then,” she said, “we must admit that God is happiness itself.” “I cannot resist the premises laid down before,” I said, “and I see that this follows from them.” “See,” she said, “whether the same thing is proved still more firmly from this: that there cannot be two highest goods that are different from each other.

“For of goods that differ, it is clear that the one is not what the other is; so neither could be perfect, since each lacks the other. But what is not perfect is clearly not highest; so the goods that are highest can in no way be different. Yet we have concluded that both happiness and God are the highest good; therefore the highest happiness must be the same as the highest divinity.” “Nothing,” I said, “could be concluded that is truer in fact, firmer in reasoning or more worthy of God.” “On top of this, then,” she said, “just as geometers, once they have demonstrated their propositions, like to infer something further which they call porismata [‘deductions’], so I too will give you a sort of corollary.note

“Since people become happy by gaining happiness, and happiness is divinity itself, it is clear that they become happy by gaining divinity. And just as people become just by gaining justice, and wise by gaining wisdom, so by the same reasoning those who have gained divinity must become gods. Everyone who is happy, then, is a god. By nature, indeed, there is only one God; but nothing prevents there being as many as you like by participation.” “This is beautiful and precious,” I said, “whether you prefer to call it a porism or a corollary.” “Yet nothing is more beautiful than this, which reason persuades us to attach to it.” “What?” I said. “Since happiness seems to contain many things,” she said, “do all these join together into one body of happiness, as it were, through a variety of parts, or is there one of them that completes the substance of happiness, to which the rest are referred?” “I wish,” I said, “you would make this clear by going through the things themselves.” “Do we not think,” she said, “that happiness is a good?” “Yes, indeed, the highest,” I said.

“You may add that to all of them,” she said. “For happiness is judged to be the same as the highest sufficiency, the highest power, and reverence, renown and pleasure too. What then? Are all these goods—sufficiency, power and the rest—limbs, as it were, of happiness, or are they all referred to the good as to their summit?” “I understand,” I said, “what you propose to investigate, but I want to hear what you conclude.” “Take the answer to this question as follows. If all these were limbs of happiness, they would also differ from one another. For this is the nature of parts: being different, they make up one body. But all these have been shown to be the same; so they are not limbs at all. Otherwise happiness will seem to be made up of one limb—which is impossible.” “That is not in doubt,” I said, “but I am waiting for what remains.” It is obvious that the others are referred to the good.

Sufficiency is sought because it is judged to be good, and power because it too is believed to be good; and the same can be inferred about reverence, renown and delight. The good, then, is the sum and cause of all things sought. For what holds no good in itself, either in reality or in appearance, cannot be sought in any way. And conversely, things that are not good by nature are still sought as though they were truly good, if they seem to be good. So it comes about that goodness is rightly believed to be the sum, the hinge and the cause of all things sought. And that for the sake of which something is sought seems to be what is most desired: if someone wanted to ride for the sake of his health, for example, he does not so much desire the motion of riding as the effect of health. Since, then, all things are sought for the sake of the good, it is not they but the good itself that is desired by all.

But we have granted that happiness is that for the sake of which the other things are wished for; so in this way too happiness alone is sought. From this it plainly appears that the good itself and happiness have one and the same substance. “I see no reason why anyone could disagree.” “But we have shown that God and true happiness are one and the same.” “Yes,” I said. “Then we may safely conclude that the substance of God also lies in the good itself and nowhere else.”

“Then these things, which are not goods at all when they differ, but become goods when they begin to be one—is it not by acquiring unity that they come to be goods?” “So it seems,” I said. “But do you grant that everything good is good by participation in the good, or not?” “It is so.” “Then by the same reasoning you must grant that the one and the good are the same; for things whose effect is by nature not different have the same substance.” “I cannot deny it,” I said. “Do you know, then,” she said, “that everything that exists continues and subsists just as long as it is one, but perishes and dissolves as soon as it ceases to be one?” “How so?” “As with animals,” she said. “When soul and body come together into one and remain so, it is called an animal; but when this unity is dissolved by the separation of the two, it plainly perishes and is no longer an animal.

“The body itself, too, while it remains in one form through the joining of its limbs, is seen as a human shape; but if the parts of the body are separated and set apart and so break up its unity, it ceases to be what it was. Anyone who runs through other cases in the same way will see beyond doubt that each thing subsists while it is one, and perishes when it ceases to be one.” “When I consider more cases,” I said, “it seems to me no different.” “Is there, then,” she said, “anything which, insofar as it acts by nature, abandons the desire to subsist and wishes to come to destruction and decay?” “If I consider animals,” I said, “which have some nature capable of willing and not willing, I find none that, without compulsion from outside, throws away the will to endure and hurries of its own accord to its death. For every animal works to protect its life, and avoids death and destruction. But what I should think about plants and trees, and about inanimate things altogether, I am quite unsure.”

And yet there is no reason for you to be in doubt about this either, when you see, first, that plants and trees spring up in places suited to them, where, so far as their nature allows, they cannot quickly wither and die. Some grow on plains, others on mountains; marshes bear some, others cling to rocks, and barren sands are fertile for still others; and if anyone tried to move them to other places, they would wither. But nature gives each what suits it, and labors that they should not perish while they can still endure. What of the fact that all of them draw their nourishment through their roots, as though with mouths plunged into the earth, and spread strength through their pith and bark? What of the fact that the softest part, such as the pith, is always hidden in the innermost place, while outside there is a certain firmness of wood, and last of all the bark is set against the harshness of the weather, like a defender able to endure hardship? And then how great is nature’s care, that all things are propagated by multiplying their seed!

Who does not know that all these are like mechanisms, not only for enduring for a time, but for enduring, generation after generation, as if forever? And the things believed to be inanimate—does not each of them, by similar reasoning, desire what is its own? Why else does lightness carry flames upward, while weight presses earth downward, except that these places and motions suit each of them? Moreover, what is in keeping with each thing preserves it, just as what is hostile to it destroys it. Hard things such as stones cling most tightly to their parts and resist being easily broken up. Fluid things such as air and water yield easily to what divides them, but quickly flow back into the parts from which they were cut; and fire refuses all division.

We are not now dealing with the voluntary motions of the knowing soul, but with natural inclination—as when we digest the food we have taken without thinking about it, or breathe in our sleep without knowing it. For even in animals the love of survival comes not from the will of the soul but from the principles of nature. Often, under compelling causes, the will embraces death, which nature dreads; and conversely the will sometimes restrains the work of procreation, by which alone mortal things endure, and which nature always seeks. So true is it that this love of self proceeds not from a movement of the soul but from natural inclination. For providence gave the things it created this, as the greatest cause of their endurance: that they naturally desire to endure as long as they can. So there is no way you can doubt that all things that exist naturally seek to persist, and avoid destruction.

“I confess,” I said, “that I now see beyond doubt what long seemed uncertain.” “Now whatever seeks to subsist and endure,” she said, “desires to be one; for take this away, and nothing will even continue to exist.” “That is true,” I said. “All things, then,” she said, “desire the one.” I agreed. “But we have shown that the one is the very same as the good.” “Yes, indeed.” “All things, then, seek the good; which you may in fact define like this: the good is that which is desired by all.” “Nothing truer can be thought of,” I said. “For either all things are referred to nothing single and, left without one summit as it were, will drift with no one to guide them; or, if there is something toward which all things hurry, it will be the highest of all goods.” And she said, “I am very glad, my pupil; for you have fixed in your mind the very mark of the central truth. But in this it has become clear to you what you said a little while ago you did not know.” “What?” I said.

“What the end of all things is,” she said. “For it is surely that which is desired by all; and since we have concluded that this is the good, we must admit that the end of all things is the good.”

“And once they were joined, the very diversity of their natures, at odds with itself, would pull them apart and tear them asunder, unless there were one who held together what he had bound. Nor would the order of nature proceed so surely, nor would things unfold such well-ordered motions in place, time, operation, extent and quality, unless there were one who, himself remaining unchanged, ordered these varieties of change. Whatever this is by which created things endure and are moved, I call it by the word everyone uses: God.” Then she said, “Since this is what you think, I believe little work remains for me before you can see your homeland again, safe and in possession of happiness. But let us look at what we set out. Did we not count sufficiency as part of happiness, and agree that God is happiness itself?” “Yes, indeed.” “Then to rule the world,” she said, “he will need no help from outside; otherwise, if he needed anything, he would not have full sufficiency.” “That,” I said, “necessarily follows.” “Then he orders all things through himself alone.” “That cannot be denied,” I said.

“And yet God has been shown to be the good itself.” “I remember,” I said. “Then he orders all things through the good, since he rules all things through himself, whom we have agreed to be the good; and this is, as it were, the helm and rudder by which the machine of the world is kept stable and unimpaired.” “I agree strongly,” I said, “and a little while ago I foresaw, if only with a faint suspicion, that you were going to say this.” “I believe it,” she said; “for now, I think, you are turning your eyes more alertly to see what is true. But what I am going to say is no less plain to see.” “What?” I said. “Since God is rightly believed to steer all things with the helm of goodness,” she said, “and all these same things, as I have taught, hurry toward the good by natural inclination, can there be any doubt that they are ruled willingly, and turn of their own accord at the nod of the one who orders them, as things in tune and in harmony with their ruler?” “It must be so,” I said; “nor would it seem a happy rule if it were a yoke on the unwilling rather than the well-being of the obedient.”

“Then there is nothing that, keeping its nature, tries to oppose God.” “Nothing,” I said. “And if it tried,” she said, “would it achieve anything at all against him whom we agreed is most powerful by right of his happiness?” “It would have no power at all,” I said. “Then there is nothing that either wishes or is able to resist this highest good.” “I think not,” I said. “Then it is the highest good,” she said, “that rules all things mightily and disposes them sweetly.” Then I said, “How I am delighted, not only by the conclusion your arguments have reached, but much more by these very words you use—so that at last the folly that tears at great things may be ashamed of itself!” “You have heard in the stories,” she said, “of the Giants attacking heaven; but a kindly strength disposed of them too, as they deserved. But would you like us to set the arguments themselves against one another? Perhaps from such a clash some beautiful spark of truth may fly out.” “As you please,” I said.note

“No one would doubt,” she said, “that God is all-powerful.” “No one at all who is in his right mind,” I said, “would hesitate.” “But for one who is all-powerful,” she said, “there is nothing he cannot do.” “Nothing,” I said. “Can God, then, do evil?” “Not at all,” I said. “Then evil is nothing,” she said, “since he cannot do it, who can do everything.” “Are you playing with me,” I said, “weaving with your arguments a labyrinth from which there is no way out—now going in by the way you should come out, now coming out by the way you went in—or are you folding together some wonderful circle of the divine simplicity? For a little earlier, beginning from happiness, you said it was the highest good, and you described it as located in the highest God. You also argued that God himself is the highest good and full happiness; and from this you handed me, as a little bonus, that no one would be happy unless he were likewise a god.

“Again, you said that the very form of the good is the substance of God and of happiness, and you taught that the one itself is the very good that is sought by the whole of nature. You argued, too, that God rules the universe by the rudders of goodness, that all things obey willingly, and that evil has no nature. And you unfolded all this with no proofs brought in from outside, but with proofs internal and at home, each drawing its credibility from the other.”

/ The three-headed doorkeeper stands stunned, / captured by the new song; / the goddesses who avenge crimes, / who drive the guilty with fear, / now are wet with sorrowful tears. / Ixion’s head is not whirled / headlong by the swift wheel, / and Tantalus, ruined by long thirst, / disdains the rivers. / The vulture, sated with the music, / did not tear at Tityus’s liver. / At last the judge of the shades, in pity, / says, “We are beaten. / We give the man his wife as companion, / bought by his song. / But let a law restrain the gift: / until he has left Tartarus, / he may not turn his eyes back.” / Who can give lovers a law? / Love is a greater law to itself. / Alas, near the very bounds of night / Orpheus saw his Eurydice, / lost her, killed her. / This tale concerns you, / all who seek to lead your mind / up into the day above.note

/ For whoever, overcome, turns his eyes / back toward the pit of Tartarus / loses whatever excellent thing he draws with him, / while he looks upon the dead below.

“That these things should happen in the kingdom of a God who knows all things, can do all things, but wills only good things—no one can wonder at it or lament it enough.”

“I will also fasten wings to your mind, by which it may raise itself on high, so that, with your turmoil driven away, you may return safe to your homeland under my guidance, by my path, and even in my vehicles.”

/ If the road should bring you back here, / the road you now seek, having forgotten it, / “This,” you will say, “I remember—this is my homeland; / here I was born, here I will plant my feet.” / And if you should wish to look back / at the night of earth you have left behind, / you will see the grim tyrants whom wretched peoples fear / living as exiles.

“So if you see someone wanting to obtain what he does not obtain at all, you cannot doubt that he lacked the strength to get what he wanted.” “That is clear,” I said, “and cannot be denied in any way.” “And if you see someone who has accomplished what he wanted, will you doubt that he was also able to?” “Not at all.” “And in what each person can do he must be judged strong, and in what he cannot do, weak.” “I admit it,” I said. “Do you remember, then,” she said, “that it was concluded in our earlier arguments that the whole aim of the human will, though it is driven along by various pursuits, hurries toward happiness?” “I remember,” I said, “that this too was demonstrated.” “Do you recall that happiness is the good itself, and so, when happiness is sought, the good is desired by all?” “I do not so much recall it,” I said, “as keep it fixed in my memory.” “All people, then, good and bad alike, strive with the same undivided aim to reach the good?” “Yes,” I said, “that follows.”

“But it is certain that people become good by acquiring the good.” “Certain.” “Then the good obtain what they seek?” “So it seems.” “But if the wicked obtained the good they seek, they could not be wicked.” “That is so.” “Since, then, both seek the good, but the one group obtains it and the other does not, can there be any doubt that the good are powerful, while those who are wicked are weak?” “Whoever doubts it,” I said, “can consider neither the nature of things nor the logical sequence of arguments.”

“But the highest good, which is set before bad and good alike, the good seek by the natural function of the virtues, while the wicked try to obtain the very same thing through various desires, which is not a natural function for obtaining the good. Or do you think otherwise?” “Not at all,” I said, “for what follows is also clear. From what I have granted, it must be that the good are powerful and the wicked weak.” She said: You run ahead rightly, and that, as doctors like to hope, is a sign of a nature now rallying and fighting back. But since I see that you are very quick to understand, I will pile up arguments one after another. For see how great is the weakness of vicious people, who cannot even arrive at that toward which their natural inclination leads and almost compels them. And what if they were deprived of this great and almost invincible help of nature going before them? Consider, too, how great a powerlessness grips wicked people.

For the prizes they seek, and cannot gain and keep, are not light or trivial ones; they fail in the very sum and summit of things, and the wretches do not succeed in the one thing they labor at day and night. And in this the strength of the good stands out. For just as you would judge that person most capable of walking who, going on foot, could reach the place beyond which there was nothing further open to travel, so you must judge that person most powerful who grasps the end of things worth seeking, beyond which there is nothing more. From this follows the opposite: that the same people who are wicked are seen to be deserted by all their strength. For why do they abandon virtue and pursue vices? From ignorance of what is good? But what is more feeble than the blindness of ignorance? Or do they know what they should pursue? But desire drives them headlong off course. So they are weak through lack of self-control too, since they cannot struggle against vice. Or do they abandon the good knowingly and willingly, and turn aside to vices?

But in this way they cease not only to be powerful but to be at all. For those who abandon the common end of all things that are cease, equally, to exist. This may perhaps seem strange to someone—that we should say the wicked, who are the majority of people, do not exist; but that is how things stand. I do not deny that those who are wicked are wicked; but I deny that they exist purely and simply. For just as you might call a corpse a dead man but could not simply call it a man, so I would grant that the vicious are wicked, but I cannot admit that they exist in an absolute sense. For that exists which keeps its order and preserves its nature; but what falls away from this also abandons the existence that lies in its nature. “But the wicked can do things,” you will say. I would not deny it either; but this power of theirs comes not from strength but from weakness.

For they can do evil, which they would have no power to do if they had been able to remain in the efficacy of the good. And this ability shows all the more clearly that they can do nothing. For if, as we concluded a little earlier, evil is nothing, then since they can do only evil, it is plain that the wicked can do nothing. “That is clear.” “And so that you may understand what the force of this power is, we established a little while ago that nothing is more powerful than the highest good.” “That is so,” I said. “But the same cannot do evil,” she said. “Not at all.” “Is there anyone, then,” she said, “who thinks that human beings can do everything?” “No one, unless he is mad.” “And yet they can do evil.” “I only wish,” I said, “that they could not.” “Since, then, one who is capable only of good can do everything, while those who are capable of evil too cannot do everything, it is clear that those who can do evil have less power.

“Add to this that we have shown that all power is to be counted among the things worth seeking, and that all things worth seeking are referred to the good, as to a kind of summit of their nature. But the ability to commit crime cannot be referred to the good; therefore it is not worth seeking. Yet all power is worth seeking; so it is plain that the ability of the wicked is not power. From all this the power of the good, and the weakness of the wicked, appear beyond doubt; and it is plain that Plato’s view is true, that only the wise can do what they desire, while the wicked can indeed practice whatever they please, but cannot fulfill what they desire. For they do whatever they like, thinking that through the things that delight them they will obtain the good they desire; but they do not obtain it, since disgraceful deeds never arrive at happiness.”note

If a good person rejoiced in something received from outside, then someone else, or even the very person who had given it, could take it away; but since each person’s goodness confers it on him, he will lack his reward only when he has ceased to be good. Finally, since every reward is sought because it is believed to be good, who would judge one who possesses the good to be without reward? And what reward? The most beautiful and greatest of all. For remember that corollary which I gave you a little while ago as a special gift, and reason thus: since the good itself is happiness, it is plain that all good people, by the very fact that they are good, become happy. But it is agreed that those who are happy are gods. So the reward of the good is one that no day can wear away, no one’s power diminish, no one’s wickedness darken: to become gods. Since this is so, no wise person could doubt that punishment, too, is inseparable from the wicked.note

For since good and evil, and likewise punishment and reward, stand opposed face to face, what we see accruing to the reward of the good must correspond, on the opposite side, in the punishment of the wicked. Just as goodness itself becomes the reward of the good, so wickedness itself is the punishment of the wicked. Now whoever is afflicted with punishment does not doubt that he is afflicted with an evil. If, then, they were willing to assess themselves, could they think themselves free of punishment, when wickedness, the worst of all evils, has not only affected them but thoroughly infected them? But see, from the side opposite to the good, what punishment accompanies the wicked. You learned a little earlier that everything that is, is one, and that the one itself is good; from which it follows that everything that is also appears to be good.

In this way, whatever falls away from the good ceases to be; so the wicked cease to be what they were—though that they were human beings is still shown by the shape of the human body that remains. So, having turned to wickedness, they have lost their human nature too. But since goodness alone can raise anyone above the human, it must be that wickedness thrusts down below the dignity of a human being those whom it has cast down from the human condition. The result is that you cannot regard as human someone you see transformed by vices. Does a violent robber of others’ wealth burn with greed? You might call him like a wolf. Is someone fierce and restless, always exercising his tongue in quarrels? You will compare him to a dog. Does a secret plotter delight in having stolen by fraud? Let him be ranked with foxes. Does someone roar with unrestrained anger? Let him be thought to carry the spirit of a lion. Is someone fearful and quick to flee, dreading what need not be feared? Let him be held to be like a deer. Is someone lazy and dull, sunk in torpor? He lives the life of an ass. Is someone fickle and inconstant, always changing his pursuits? He is no different from the birds.

Is someone sunk in foul and unclean lusts? He is held fast by the pleasures of a filthy sow. So it happens that one who has abandoned goodness and ceased to be human, since he cannot pass over into the divine condition, is turned into a beast.

/ O hand too weak, / herbs without true power! / Though they can change the limbs, / they cannot change the heart. / The strength of human beings is within, / hidden in a secret citadel. / Those poisons are more powerful / that drag a person away from himself, / dread poisons that sink deep within, / and, though they do no harm to the body, / rage by wounding the mind.

“They will be free of it,” she said, “sooner than you perhaps wish, or than they themselves think they will. For in the short span of life there is nothing so late in coming that an immortal soul, above all, should think it a long wait; their great hopes and their lofty machinery of crime are often destroyed by a sudden and unexpected end, and that indeed sets a limit to their misery. For if wickedness makes people wretched, the longer one is wicked, the more wretched he must be; and I would judge them the unhappiest of all, if at least death did not finally put an end to their malice. For if our conclusions about the misfortune of depravity are true, it is plain that misery known to be eternal is infinite.” Then I said, “That is indeed a remarkable inference, and hard to grant; but I recognize that it agrees only too well with what was granted before.” “You judge rightly,” she said.

“But whoever thinks it hard to accept a conclusion should, in fairness, either show that something false came before it, or show that the arrangement of the premises does not produce a necessary conclusion; otherwise, once the premises are granted, there is no ground at all to object to the inference. For what I am about to say may seem no less astonishing, yet it follows just as necessarily from what has been assumed.” “What is that?” I said. “That the wicked are happier when they pay penalties than if no punishment of justice restrains them. I am not now working toward what might occur to anyone—that depraved characters are corrected by punishment and led to what is right by fear of penalties, and that they serve as an example to others to avoid what deserves blame. I think that the wicked who go unpunished are more unhappy in another way, even if no account is taken of correction and no regard is had to example.” “And what other way will there be,” I said, “besides these?”

And she said, “Did we not grant that the good are happy and the wicked wretched?” “Yes,” I said. “If, then,” she said, “something good is added to someone’s misery, is he not happier than one whose misery is pure and solitary, with no admixture of any good?” “So it seems,” I said. “And what if, to that same wretched man who lacks all goods, some further evil is attached besides those that make him wretched—must he not be judged much unhappier than one whose misfortune is relieved by sharing in some good?” “Of course,” I said. “But it is plain that it is just for the wicked to be punished, and unjust for them to escape unpunished.” “Who would deny it?” “But no one will deny this either,” she said, “that everything just is good, and conversely whatever is unjust is evil.” “That is clear,” I replied.

“So when the wicked are punished, they have something good attached to them—namely the punishment itself, which is good by reason of justice—and when they escape punishment, they have in them a further evil, impunity itself, which you have admitted is an evil because it is unjust.” “I cannot deny it.” “Then the wicked are much more unhappy when granted an unjust impunity than when punished by a just penalty.” Then I said, “That does follow from what was concluded a little while ago. But I ask you,” I said, “do you leave no punishments for souls after the body has died?” “Great ones indeed,” she said; “some of them, I think, are exacted with penal severity, others with purifying mercy.

“But it is not my plan to discuss these now. What we have done so far is this: that you should recognize that the power of the wicked, which seemed to you most unworthy, is nothing; that you should see that those whom you complained went unpunished are never without the punishment of their wickedness; that you should learn that the license which you prayed might soon end is not long, and would be unhappier if it lasted longer, and unhappiest of all if it were eternal; and after this, that the wicked are more wretched when let off with an unjust impunity than when punished with a just penalty. And it follows from this conclusion that they are weighed down by heavier punishments precisely when they are believed to go unpunished.”

“But the common crowd does not consider these things. What then? Should we side with those whom we have shown to be like beasts? What if someone who had wholly lost his sight even forgot that he had ever had vision, and thought he lacked nothing of human perfection—would we who can see therefore think as the blind do? For they will not accept this either, which rests on equally strong supports of argument: that those who do wrong are more unhappy than those who suffer it.” “I would like to hear these very arguments,” I said. “Do you deny,” she said, “that every wicked person deserves punishment?” “Not at all.” “And it is plain in many ways that those who are wicked are unhappy.” “Yes,” I said. “Then you do not doubt that those who deserve punishment are wretched?” “Agreed,” I said. “If, then, you sat as judge,” she said, “on whom would you think punishment should be inflicted—the one who had done the wrong, or the one who had suffered it?” “I have no hesitation,” I said, “that I would make amends to the one who suffered by the pain of the one who did it.”

“Then the one who inflicts a wrong would seem to you more wretched than the one who receives it.” “That follows,” I said. “From this, then, and for other reasons resting on the same root—that wickedness by its own nature makes people wretched—it is clear that a wrong done to anyone is the misery not of the one who receives it but of the one who does it.” “And yet,” she said, “orators nowadays do the opposite. For they try to rouse the judges’ pity for those who have suffered something grave and bitter, when a juster pity is owed rather to those who commit it. They ought to be brought to trial, like the sick to a doctor, not by angry accusers but rather by kind and compassionate ones, so that the diseases of guilt might be cut away by punishment. In that way the work of defense counsel would either go entirely cold, or, if it preferred to benefit people, would turn into the role of prosecution.

“The wicked themselves, too, if they were allowed to glimpse through some little crack the virtue they have abandoned, and saw that through the torments of punishment they would lay aside the filth of their vices in exchange for gaining goodness, would not consider these torments at all; they would refuse the help of their defenders and hand themselves over wholly to their accusers and judges. So it is that among the wise no place at all is left for hatred. For who but the greatest fool would hate the good? And to hate the wicked is without reason. For if, just as sickness is of the body, so vice is a kind of disease of the soul, then since we judge those sick in body to deserve not hatred but pity, much more are they to be pitied, not persecuted, whose minds are oppressed by wickedness, which is fiercer than any sickness.”

“As it is, God as ruler heightens my bewilderment. Since he often gives pleasant things to the good and harsh things to the wicked, and conversely gives hard things to the good and grants the wicked what they wish for, unless the cause is discovered, what is there that seems to differ from chance events?” “It is no wonder,” she said, “if something is believed to be random and confused when the principle of its order is unknown. But though you do not know the cause of so great an arrangement, still, since a good ruler governs the world, do not doubt that all things are done rightly.”

“But if the delights of musical song please you, you must put off that pleasure a little, while I weave together arguments linked to one another in order.” “As you like,” I said. Then, as if starting from another beginning, she argued as follows: The coming-to-be of all things, the whole progress of changeable natures, and whatever is moved in any way, receive their causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine mind. This mind, set in the citadel of its own simplicity, has established a manifold way of ruling things. When this way is seen in the very purity of the divine intelligence, it is called providence; but when it is referred to the things it moves and orders, it was called fate by the ancients. That these are different will easily become clear if one considers the force of each in the mind. For providence is that divine reason itself, established in the supreme ruler of all, which orders all things; fate, on the other hand, is the ordering inherent in movable things, through which providence binds each thing in its own order.

For providence embraces all things alike, however different, however infinite; but fate sets individual things in motion, distributed in places, forms and times. So this unfolding of temporal order, united in the foresight of the divine mind, is providence; and the same union, distributed and unfolded in time, is called fate. Though they are different, one depends on the other. For the order of fate proceeds from the simplicity of providence. Just as a craftsman, grasping beforehand in his mind the form of the thing to be made, sets the work in motion, and leads through temporal stages what he had foreseen simply and all at once, so God by providence orders what is to be done singly and stably, but by fate administers these same things he has ordered in manifold ways and in time.

Whether, then, fate is carried out by certain divine spirits serving providence, or whether the chain of fate is woven by a soul, or by the whole of nature serving it, or by the heavenly motions of the stars, or by angelic power, or by the varied cunning of daemons, or by some or all of these, this at least is clear: providence is the unmoving and simple form of things to be done, while fate is the movable interweaving and temporal order of those things which the divine simplicity has arranged to be done. So it is that everything subject to fate is also subject to providence, to which fate itself is subject; but certain things placed under providence rise above the chain of fate. These are the things which, stably fixed near the first divinity, exceed the order of fate’s mobility.note

For consider spheres turning about the same pivot: the innermost comes close to the simplicity of the center and becomes a kind of pivot for the others placed outside it, around which they turn; the outermost, turning in a wider circuit, is spread over larger spaces the further it departs from the indivisible middle point; and if anything connects and joins itself to that middle, it is drawn together into simplicity and ceases to spread out and flow apart. In the same way, whatever departs further from the first mind is entangled in tighter bonds of fate, and a thing is freer from fate the nearer it approaches that pivot of things. And if it clings to the firmness of the supreme mind, it is free of motion and rises above the necessity of fate as well. So as reasoning is to understanding, as what comes to be is to what is, as time is to eternity, as the circle is to its center, so is the moving chain of fate to the stable simplicity of providence.

This chain moves the heaven and the stars, blends the elements with one another and transforms them by alternating exchange; it likewise renews all things that are born and die through the like progression of offspring and seeds. It also binds the actions and fortunes of human beings by an indissoluble connection of causes; and since these causes set out from the beginnings of unmoving providence, they too must be unchangeable. For things are best ruled in this way: if the simplicity abiding in the divine mind imposes an unswerving order of causes, and this order by its own unchangeableness restrains things that are changeable and would otherwise drift at random. So it happens that although to you, who are not at all able to contemplate this order, all things seem confused and disordered, nonetheless their own proper measure orders all things, directing them toward the good.

For there is nothing that is done for the sake of evil, even by the wicked themselves, whom, as has been most fully shown, a depraved error turns aside while they seek the good—still less could an order that proceeds from the pivot of the highest good turn aside anywhere from its beginning. “But what confusion,” you will say, “could be more unjust than that sometimes adversity and sometimes prosperity should befall the good, and to the wicked too sometimes what they want and sometimes what they hate?” Do human beings, then, live with such soundness of mind that those whom they judge good or wicked must necessarily be as they think? Yet human judgments clash on this very point, and some think those deserving of reward whom others think deserving of punishment. But let us grant that someone could distinguish the good from the wicked; will he then be able to see that inmost temperament of souls, as people usually speak of it in bodies?

For it is no less a wonder, to one who does not know the reason, why among healthy bodies sweet things suit some and bitter things others, and why some sick people are helped by mild remedies and others by sharp ones. But the doctor, who knows the measure and balance of health itself and of sickness, does not wonder at this at all. And what else does the health of souls seem to be but goodness? What else their sickness but vices? And who else is either the preserver of the good or the banisher of evils but God, the ruler and healer of minds? When he looks out from the high watchtower of providence, he recognizes what suits each person, and assigns what he knows to be suitable. Here, then, is that remarkable wonder of the order of fate: something is done by one who knows, at which those who do not know are astonished.

For, to touch briefly on the few things human reason can grasp of the divine depth: the man whom you think most just and most observant of fairness seems otherwise to providence, which knows all things. And our friend Lucan reminded us that the victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated cause pleased Cato. So whatever you see done here contrary to your expectation is right order in the things themselves, but perverse confusion in your opinion. But suppose there is someone so good in character that divine and human judgment agree about him, yet he is weak in strength of mind; if anything adverse happened to him, he might perhaps stop practicing the innocence by which he could not keep his fortune. So a wise dispensation spares one whom adversity could make worse, so as not to let one suffer for whom hardship is not suitable.note

There is another, perfect in all virtues, holy and close to God; providence judges it wrong that he should be touched by any adversity at all, so much so that it does not allow him to be troubled even by bodily illness. For as someone more excellent than I has said, ἀνδρὸς δὴ ἱεροῦ δέμας αἰθέρες ᾠκοδόμησαν [the heavens have built the body of a holy man]. Often, too, it happens that the supreme direction of affairs is given to the good, so that overflowing wickedness may be beaten back. To others providence distributes a certain mixture, according to the quality of their souls: some it stings, so that they may not grow wanton through long prosperity; others it lets be tossed by hardships, so that they may strengthen the virtues of the soul by the use and exercise of patience. Some fear more than they should what they can bear; others despise more than they should what they cannot bear; these it leads into sorrows, to test themselves. Some have bought a name revered by the ages at the price of a glorious death; some, unconquerable under torture, have shown others by their example that virtue cannot be defeated by evils.note

There is no doubt how rightly and in what good order these things are done, and for the good of those to whom they seem to happen. For that other fact, too—that the wicked meet now with sorrows, now with what they desire—derives from the same causes. As for their sorrows, no one wonders, since everyone thinks they deserve ill. Their punishments both deter others from crimes and correct the very people on whom they are inflicted. Their joys, on the other hand, speak a great lesson to the good about what they should think of this kind of prosperity, which they often see serving the wicked. In this I believe something else is also being arranged: perhaps someone’s nature is so headlong and unruly that poverty at home might rather provoke him into crime; providence cures this man’s disease with the remedy of money bestowed on him.

This man, looking at his conscience stained with disgrace and comparing himself with his fortune, perhaps grows afraid that the loss of what he enjoys using may be painful. So he will change his ways and, while he fears to lose his fortune, he abandons his wickedness. Others have been thrown headlong into a deserved disaster by prosperity they did not deserve. To some the right of punishing has been granted, so that it might be a cause of exercise for the good and of punishment for the wicked. For just as there is no treaty between the good and the wicked, so the wicked cannot agree even among themselves. How could they, when each is at odds with himself, as his vices tear his conscience apart, and they often do things which, once done, they decide should not have been done? From this that highest providence has often produced a remarkable wonder: that the wicked have made wicked men good. For some, when they think they are suffering injustice at the hands of the worst people, burn with hatred of the guilty and return to the fruit of virtue, striving to be unlike those they hated.

For it is only divine power for which even evils are good, since by using them fittingly it draws out the effect of some good. For a certain order embraces all things, so that whatever departs from the principle of order assigned to it slips back into order—another order, perhaps, but order—so that nothing in the kingdom of providence may be left to chance. ἀργαλέον δέ με ταῦτα θεὸν ὥς πάντ᾽ ἀγορεύειν [but it is hard for me to tell all this as if I were a god]. For it is not right for a human being either to grasp with his intellect or to set out in words all the machinery of the divine work. Let it be enough to have seen only this: that God, the maker of all natures, also orders all things, directing them to the good; and while he hastens to keep the things he has brought forth in his own likeness, he banishes all evil from the boundaries of his commonwealth through the chain of fated necessity. So it is that, although evils are believed to abound on earth, if you look at the providence that orders them, you will judge that there is no evil anywhere.note

But I see that you have long been weighed down by the weight of the question and wearied by the length of the argument, and are waiting for some sweetness of song. Take, then, a draught, so that, refreshed by it, you may press on more firmly to what lies further.

/ By the same causes, in warm spring / the flower-bearing year breathes out its scents, / burning summer parches Ceres’ grain, / autumn returns heavy with fruit, / and falling rain waters the winter. / This tempering feeds and brings forth / whatever breathes life in the world; / the same, seizing, hides and takes away, / drowning in final death all that has risen. / Meanwhile the Maker sits on high, / and, ruling all things, steers them by the reins: / king and lord, fountain and origin, / law and wise judge of what is right. / What he stirs to go in motion / he halts, drawing it back, and steadies what wanders. / For unless he called back their straight paths / and forced them again into curving orbits, / the things a stable order now holds together / would fall apart, cut off from their source.

/ This is the love shared by all things: / they seek to be held by the goal of the good, / since they could not otherwise endure / unless, turning back in love, / they flowed again to the cause that gave them being.

“That is so,” I said. “And what exercises or corrects is beneficial?” “I admit it,” I said. “Good, then?” “Of course.” “But this is the fortune of those who, either established in virtue, are waging war against hardship, or, turning away from vices, are setting out on the road of virtue.” “I cannot deny it,” I said. “And what of pleasant fortune, which is given as a reward to the good—surely the crowd does not judge it bad?” “Not at all; rather, it thinks it the best, as indeed it is.” “And the rest—the fortune which, being harsh, restrains the wicked with just punishment—surely the people do not think that good?” “On the contrary,” I said, “it judges it the most miserable of all that can be imagined.” “Take care, then, that by following the opinion of the people we have not arrived at something very contrary to opinion.” “What?” I asked.

“From what has been granted,” she said, “it follows that for those who are in possession of virtue, or advancing in it, or attaining it, all fortune, whatever it may be, is good; while for those who remain in wickedness, all fortune is the very worst.” “That is true,” I said, “though no one would dare to admit it.” “Therefore,” she said, “the wise man should not be aggrieved whenever he is brought into a contest with fortune, just as it does not befit a brave man to be indignant whenever the din of war resounds. For both of them, difficulty itself is the material: for the brave man, of spreading his glory; for the wise man, of shaping his wisdom. That is also why virtue is so called: because, relying on its own strength, it is not overcome by adversity. For you who are set on the path of progress in virtue have not come here to dissolve in luxuries and wither away in pleasure. You join a very fierce battle with every kind of fortune, so that harsh fortune does not crush you nor pleasant fortune corrupt you. Hold the middle ground with firm strength!note

“Whatever falls short of it or goes beyond it shows contempt for happiness but gains no reward for its toil. For it lies in your own hands what kind of fortune you prefer to shape for yourselves; for all fortune that seems harsh, unless it exercises or corrects, punishes.”

/ The Hydra perished, its poison burned away; / the river Achelous, his brow disfigured, / sank his shamed face into his banks. / He laid Antaeus low on the Libyan sands; / Cacus sated the wrath of Evander; / and the bristling boar flecked with foam the shoulders / on which the high heavens were to press. / His last labor: on his unbending neck / he held up the sky, and in return / won the sky as the prize of that last labor. / Go now, you brave, where the lofty road / of a great example leads! Why, idle, / do you turn and bare your backs? The earth, once overcome, / gives you the stars.note

“I will do as you wish,” she said, and at once began thus: “If someone defines chance as an event produced by random motion and by no chain of causes, I affirm that chance is nothing at all, and I judge it to be an utterly empty word, signifying no real thing beneath it. For what place can be left for randomness when God constrains all things into order? That nothing comes from nothing is a true saying, which none of the ancients ever contradicted—although they laid it down, as a kind of foundation for all their reasoning about nature, with reference not to the active principle but to the material substrate. But if something arises from no causes, it will seem to have arisen from nothing. And if this cannot happen, then chance of the kind we defined a moment ago cannot exist either.”

“What then,” I said, “is there nothing that can rightly be called chance or accident? Or is there something, though hidden from the crowd, to which these words apply?” “My Aristotle,” she said, “defined it in his Physics, with an account both brief and close to the truth.” “In what way?” I asked. “Whenever,” she said, “something is done for the sake of some end, and, for certain reasons, something other than what was intended occurs, it is called chance: as if someone, digging the ground in order to till a field, were to find a buried mass of gold. This is believed to have happened by chance, yet it does not come from nothing; for it has its own causes, whose unforeseen and unexpected coming-together seems to have produced the chance. For if the farmer had not dug the ground, and if the one who hid his money had not buried it in that spot, the gold would not have been found. These, then, are the causes of the chance gain, which comes from causes meeting and flowing together, not from the intention of the one acting.note

“For neither the man who buried the gold nor the man who worked the field intended that the money should be found; but, as I said, it happened that where one had buried it, the other dug—the two coincided. We may therefore define chance as an unexpected event arising from causes that flow together, among things done for some purpose. And what makes causes meet and flow together is that order which proceeds by an inescapable chain of connection and, descending from the fountain of providence, arranges all things in their places and times.”

“Human souls, however, must be freer when they keep themselves in the contemplation of the divine mind, less free when they slip down into bodies, and less still when they are bound in earthly limbs. Their ultimate slavery comes when, given over to vices, they have fallen from possession of their own reason. For once they have cast their eyes down from the light of highest truth to what is lower and dark, they are soon clouded by the fog of ignorance and troubled by destructive passions; by yielding and consenting to these, they add to the slavery they have brought upon themselves, and are, in a certain way, captives of their own freedom. Yet the gaze of providence, which looks forth on all things from eternity, sees these things, and disposes each, predestined according to its merits.”

For they say that it is not because providence has foreseen that something will be that it is going to happen, but rather the contrary: because something is going to be, it cannot be hidden from divine providence; and in this way the necessity slips back to the other side. For, they say, it is not necessary that what is foreseen should happen, but it is necessary that what will be should be foreseen—as if the difficulty were which is the cause of which, whether foreknowledge of the future is the cause of its necessity, or the necessity of the future the cause of providence; and as if we were not striving to show that, however the order of causes stands, the outcome of things foreknown is necessary, even if foreknowledge does not seem to impose on future things the necessity of happening. For if someone is sitting, the opinion that supposes he is sitting must be true; and conversely, if the opinion about someone that he is sitting is true, he must be sitting.

In both cases, then, there is necessity: in the one, the necessity of sitting; in the other, of truth. But no one sits because the opinion is true; rather, the opinion is true because someone’s sitting came first. So, although the cause of the truth comes from one side, there is nevertheless a necessity common to both. Plainly we can reason in the same way about providence and future things. For even if they are foreseen because they are going to be, and do not happen because they are foreseen, it is nonetheless necessary either that things to come be foreseen by God or that things foreseen happen—and this alone is enough to destroy free will. And how preposterous it is to say that the outcome of temporal things is the cause of eternal foreknowledge! Yet what else is it to think that God foresees future things because they are going to happen, than to suppose that things which happen at some point in time are the cause of that highest providence?

Besides, just as when I know that something is, it must necessarily be, so when I know that something will be, it must necessarily be going to be. So it follows that the outcome of a thing foreknown cannot be avoided. Finally, if anyone thinks a thing is otherwise than it is, that is not only not knowledge, but false opinion, far removed from the truth of knowledge. So if something is going to be in such a way that its outcome is not certain and necessary, how could anyone know beforehand that it will happen? For just as knowledge itself is unmixed with falsehood, so what is grasped by it cannot be otherwise than as it is grasped. That is why knowledge is free of falsehood: because each thing must be just as knowledge grasps it to be. What then?

How does God foreknow these uncertain future things? For if he judges that things will inevitably happen which it is possible may not happen, he is deceived—which it is impious not only to think but even to say aloud. But if he decides that they will be just as they are, so that he knows they can equally happen or not happen, what is this foreknowledge, which grasps nothing certain, nothing stable? Or how is it different from that ridiculous prophecy of Tiresias: “Whatever I say will either be or not be”? And how would divine providence surpass human opinion if, like human beings, it judged uncertain those things whose outcome is uncertain? But if there can be nothing uncertain in him, that most certain source of all things, then the outcome of those things which he has firmly foreknown is certain.note

Therefore there is no freedom in human plans and actions, since the divine mind, foreseeing all things without the error of falsehood, binds and constrains them to a single outcome. Once this is accepted, it is plain how great a collapse of human affairs follows. For in vain are rewards and punishments set before the good and the wicked, since no free and voluntary movement of their minds has earned them. And what is now judged most just—that the wicked are punished or the good rewarded—will seem the most unjust of all, since it is not their own will that sends them to either, but the fixed necessity of what is to come that compels them. So neither vices nor virtues will be anything at all; rather, there will be a mixed and undistinguished confusion of all deserts. And—nothing more wicked than this can be imagined—since the whole order of things is derived from providence, and nothing is left to human plans, it follows that even our vices are referred to the author of all good things. So there is no reason either to hope for anything or to pray against anything.

For what could anyone hope for, or even pray against, when an unbending chain links together everything that can be wished for? So that one and only exchange between human beings and God will be taken away: hoping, that is, and praying. For it is by the price of rightful humility that we earn the priceless return of divine grace; this is the only way in which human beings seem able to converse with God, and to be joined, by the very act of supplication, to that unapproachable light even before they obtain what they ask. But if, once the necessity of future things is accepted, hopes and prayers are believed to have no force, what will there be by which we could be connected to that highest principle of all things and cling to it? Therefore the human race must, as you were singing a little while ago, be cut off and separated from its source and fall apart.note

/ Now, hidden in the cloud of the limbs, / it has not wholly forgotten itself; / it keeps the whole, though it loses the parts. / So whoever searches for the truth / is in neither condition: for he neither knows, / nor yet is wholly ignorant of everything; / but, keeping hold of the whole which he remembers, / he consults it, going back over what he saw on high, / so that to what he has kept he may add / the parts he has forgotten.

“If, then, foreknowledge adds no necessity to future things—as you yourself admitted a little while ago—why should the voluntary outcomes of things be forced to a fixed result? For the sake of argument, so that you may see what follows, let us suppose there is no foreknowledge. Would the things that come about by free will, as far as this goes, be forced into necessity?” “Not at all.” “Let us suppose, again, that foreknowledge exists, but imposes no necessity on things; the same free will, I think, will remain whole and unconditioned. ‘But,’ you will say, ‘foreknowledge, even if it is not a necessity of happening for future things, is nonetheless a sign that they will necessarily come about.’ In that case, then, even if there had been no foreknowledge, it would be established that the outcomes of future things are necessary. For every sign only shows what is; it does not bring about what it signifies. So it must first be shown that nothing happens except by necessity, so that foreknowledge may appear to be a sign of this necessity.

“Otherwise, if there is no such necessity, foreknowledge cannot be a sign of a thing that does not exist. Moreover, it is agreed that a proof resting on firm reasoning must be drawn not from signs, nor from arguments fetched from outside, but from fitting and necessary causes. ‘But how can it be that things foreseen as future do not come about?’ As if we believed that the things providence foreknows to be future will not happen, and did not rather judge that, although they do happen, they had nothing in their own nature that made it necessary for them to happen. You may easily weigh this from the following. We see many things before our eyes while they are being done, such as what charioteers are seen to do in guiding and turning their four-horse chariots, and other things of that kind. Does any necessity compel any of these to be done as they are?” “Not at all. For the effect of skill would be in vain if everything moved under compulsion.”

Then things which, when they happen, lack the necessity of existing, were, before they happened, going to be without necessity. So there are some things going to happen whose outcome is free from all necessity. For I do not think anyone will say that things now happening were not going to happen before they happened. These things, then, even though foreknown, have free outcomes. For just as knowledge of present things imposes no necessity on what is happening, so foreknowledge of the future imposes none on what is to come. “But this,” you say, “is the very question—whether there can be any foreknowledge of things that do not have necessary outcomes.” For these ideas seem out of tune with each other: you think that if things are foreseen, necessity follows; that if necessity is lacking, they are not foreknown at all; and that nothing can be grasped by knowledge unless it is certain; and that if things of uncertain outcome are foreseen as though certain, this is the fog of opinion, not the truth of knowledge.

For you believe that to judge a thing otherwise than as it is falls short of the integrity of knowledge. The cause of this error is that everyone supposes that all the things he knows are known solely by the power and nature of the things known. But the very opposite is true. For everything that is known is grasped not according to its own power but rather according to the capacity of those who know it. To make this clear with a brief example: sight recognizes the same roundness of a body in one way, touch in another. Sight, remaining at a distance, takes in the whole at once by the rays it casts; touch, clinging and joined to the sphere, moving around its very circumference, grasps the roundness part by part. Man himself, too, is viewed in one way by the senses, in another by imagination, in another by reason, in another by intelligence. The senses judge the shape as constituted in its underlying matter; imagination judges the shape alone, without matter. Reason goes beyond this too, and examines, by a universal consideration, the species itself that is present in individual things.note

But the eye of intelligence stands higher still; for, passing beyond the compass of the universal, it beholds with the pure gaze of the mind that simple form itself. Here the chief point to consider is this: the higher power of comprehension embraces the lower, but the lower in no way rises to the higher. For the senses have no power beyond matter, nor does imagination behold universal species, nor does reason grasp the simple form; but intelligence, looking as it were from above, having conceived the form, discerns also all the things that lie beneath it—but in the same way in which it grasps that form itself, which could be known to no other power. For it knows the universal of reason, the shape of imagination, and the material object of sense, without using reason or imagination or the senses, but seeing all things beforehand, so to speak, formally, in that single glance of the mind. Reason too, when it looks at something universal, grasps what is imaginable and sensible without using imagination or the senses.

For it is reason that has defined the universal of its conception thus: man is a two-footed rational animal. Although this is a universal notion, no one is unaware that the thing is imaginable and sensible; yet reason considers it not by imagination or sense, but in a rational conception. Imagination, too, although it took its start from the senses in seeing and forming shapes, nevertheless surveys all sensible things when the senses are absent, by a way of judging that is not sensory but imaginative. Do you see, then, how in knowing, all things use their own capacity rather than that of the things known? And rightly so; for since every judgment is the act of the one who judges, each must accomplish its work by its own power, not another’s.

/ This is a cause more active, / far more powerful / than one that, like matter, / passively receives impressed marks. / And yet there comes first, arousing / and stirring the powers of the mind, / a sensation in the living body, / when light strikes the eyes / or a voice sounds in the ears. / Then the mind’s vigor, aroused, / calling the forms it holds within / to similar motions, / applies them to the marks from outside / and mingles the images / with the forms hidden within.

So it is that the kind of knowledge which, by its own nature, knows not only its proper object but also the objects of the other kinds, surpasses the rest. What, then, if sense and imagination were to oppose reasoning, saying that the universal which reason thinks it beholds is nothing? For, they would say, what is sensible or imaginable cannot be universal; so either the judgment of reason is true and nothing is sensible, or, since reason knows that many things are subject to the senses and imagination, the conception of reason, which considers what is sensible and particular as if it were something universal, is empty.

If, in reply, reason were to answer that it does indeed view both the sensible and the imaginable under the aspect of the universal, whereas they cannot aspire to knowledge of the universal, since their knowledge cannot go beyond bodily shapes; and that, in the knowledge of things, one should rather trust the firmer and more perfect judgment—in a dispute of this kind, should not we, who possess the power of reasoning as well as of imagining and perceiving, rather take reason’s side? It is just the same when human reason does not think that divine intelligence beholds future things except as reason itself knows them. For this is how you argue: if some things do not seem to have certain and necessary outcomes, they cannot be known beforehand as certainly going to happen. So there is no foreknowledge of these things; and if we believe there is foreknowledge even of them, there will be nothing that does not come about of necessity.

If, then, just as we share in reason, we could also have the judgment of the divine mind, then, just as we have judged that imagination and sense ought to yield to reason, so we would think it most just that human reason should submit itself to the divine mind. Therefore let us be raised up, if we can, to the summit of that highest intelligence; for there reason will see what it cannot behold in itself: that is, how even things that have no certain outcomes are nonetheless seen by a certain and definite foreknowledge, and how this is not opinion but rather the simplicity of highest knowledge, enclosed by no limits.

So whatever undergoes the condition of time, even if—as Aristotle held of the world—it never began to be and never ceases, and its life extends with the infinity of time, is still not such that it may rightly be thought eternal. For it does not comprehend and embrace the whole extent of its life, infinite though it be, all at once; it does not yet have the future, and no longer has what is past. What, therefore, comprehends and possesses at once the whole fullness of unending life, to which nothing of the future is lacking and nothing of the past has flowed away, is rightly held to be eternal; and it must both be present to itself, always in possession of itself, and have the infinity of moving time present to it. Hence some are wrong who, when they hear that Plato thought this world had no beginning in time and will have no end, suppose that in this way the created world is made co-eternal with its creator.note

For it is one thing to be led through unending life, which Plato attributed to the world; it is another to have embraced the whole presence of unending life all at once, which is clearly proper to the divine mind. Nor should God seem older than created things by a quantity of time, but rather by the property of his simple nature. For the infinite motion of temporal things imitates this present state of unmoving life; and since it cannot reproduce or equal it, it falls from immobility into motion and dwindles from the simplicity of presence into the infinite quantity of future and past. And since it cannot possess the whole fullness of its life at once, by the very fact that in a certain way it never ceases to be, it seems to some extent to rival what it cannot fulfill and express, binding itself to whatever presence belongs to this tiny, fleeting moment—a presence which, because it bears a certain image of that abiding presence, grants to whatever it touches that they seem to be.

But since it could not stay still, it seized on the infinite journey of time, and so it came about that by going it continued the life whose fullness it could not embrace by staying. So if we wish to give things fitting names, let us follow Plato and say that God is eternal, but the world perpetual. Since, then, every judgment comprehends what is subject to it according to its own nature, and the state of God is always eternal and present, his knowledge too, surpassing all the motion of time, abides in the simplicity of its presence, and, embracing the infinite spaces of past and future, considers all things in its simple act of knowing as though they were happening now.

So, if you wish to weigh the presence by which he discerns all things, you will more rightly judge it to be not foreknowledge, as of something future, but knowledge of a never-failing present. Hence it is called not foresight but providence, because, set far above the lowest things, it looks forth on all things as if from the lofty summit of the world. Why, then, do you demand that things lit by the divine light become necessary, when not even human beings make necessary the things they see? For does your gaze add any necessity to the things you see present? “Not at all,” I said. And yet, if a comparison of the divine present and the human is fitting, just as you see certain things in this temporal present of yours, so he sees all things in his eternal present. So this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature and property of things; it sees them present before it just as they will turn out in time at some future point.note

Nor does it confuse its judgments of things; with one glance of its mind it discerns both what will come about necessarily and what will not. Just as when you see at the same time a man walking on the earth and the sun rising in the sky—though you see both at once, you nevertheless distinguish them, and judge the one voluntary and the other necessary—so the divine gaze, looking down on all things, in no way disturbs the quality of things that are present to it but, with respect to the condition of time, are future. So it comes about that this is not opinion but knowledge resting on truth, since it knows that something will come to be which, as it is well aware, lacks the necessity of existing.

At this point, if you say that what God sees will happen cannot fail to happen, and that what cannot fail to happen happens of necessity, and so tie me to this word “necessity,” I will admit that this is a matter of the most solid truth, but one which scarcely anyone but a contemplator of the divine has reached. For I will reply that the same future thing, when referred to divine knowledge, is necessary, but when considered in its own nature, seems entirely free and unconditioned. For there are two necessities: one simple, as that it is necessary that all human beings are mortal; the other conditional, as, if you know that someone is walking, it is necessary that he is walking. For what anyone knows cannot be otherwise than as it is known; but this conditional necessity by no means carries the simple one along with it.

For this necessity is produced not by a thing’s own nature but by the addition of a condition; no necessity compels a man who is walking of his own will to go forward, although, at the time he is walking, it is necessary that he goes forward. In the same way, then, if providence sees something as present, it must be, though it has no necessity of nature. But God beholds as present those future things that come about from free will. These things, then, referred to the divine gaze, become necessary through the condition of divine knowledge; but considered in themselves, they do not lose the absolute freedom of their nature. All things, then, that God foreknows will be will undoubtedly come to pass; but some of them proceed from free will, and these, though they come to pass, do not by coming into existence lose their own nature, by which, before they happened, they could also have not happened.

What does it matter, then, that they are not necessary, since, because of the condition of divine knowledge, they will in every way come about as if by necessity? It matters in just the way that the examples I set out a little while ago differ: the rising sun and the walking man. While these are happening, they cannot fail to happen; yet one of them, even before it happened, had to come to be, while the other did not. So too the things God has present will undoubtedly come to be; but one kind comes down from the necessity of things, the other from the power of those who act. Not wrongly, then, did we say that these things, if referred to divine knowledge, are necessary, and if considered in themselves, are free from the bonds of necessity; just as everything that lies open to the senses is universal if you refer it to reason, and particular if you look at it in itself.

“But,” you will say, “if it lies in my power to change my purpose, I shall make providence void, if I happen to change what it foreknows.” I will reply: you can indeed turn your purpose aside, but since the present truth of providence sees both that you can, and whether you will, and in which direction you will turn, you cannot escape divine foreknowledge, just as you could not escape the gaze of an eye that is present, however you might turn to various actions by your free will. What then will you say? “Will divine knowledge be changed by my arrangements, so that when I will now this, now that, it too seems to alternate its turns of knowing?” Not at all. For the divine gaze runs ahead of every future thing, and bends it back and recalls it to the presence of its own knowledge; nor does it alternate, as you suppose, foreknowing now this, now that; but, remaining still, it anticipates and embraces your changes in a single glance.

This presence, in which he comprehends and sees all things, God has obtained not from the outcome of future things, but from his own simplicity. This also resolves the point you set down a little while ago as unfitting: that our future actions should be said to provide the cause of God’s knowledge. For this power of knowledge, embracing all things in its present awareness, itself sets the measure for all things and owes nothing to what comes after. Since this is so, free will remains inviolate for mortals, and the laws are not unjust that set rewards and punishments before wills released from all necessity. There also remains God, the onlooker from above who foreknows all things, and the ever-present eternity of his vision runs together with the future quality of our actions, dispensing rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. Nor are hopes and prayers placed in God in vain; when they are right, they cannot be ineffective.

Turn away, then, from vices; cultivate virtues; lift up your minds to right hopes; offer humble prayers on high. A great necessity of goodness is laid upon you, if you will not pretend otherwise, since you act before the eyes of a judge who sees all things.