The Highest Good Is Immortality

So the highest good of a human being lies in religion, and nowhere else. Everything else — even the things that are supposed to belong to us alone — turns up in the other animals as well. They tell one another’s calls apart by marks of their own, and so they look as though they were talking. They also look as though they had something like a smile: ears at ease, mouth drawn back, eyes loosened into play, they fawn on a man, or on their own mates and young. Is that not a greeting with some resemblance to affection given and returned? Then there are the creatures that look ahead and store up food for themselves; those plainly have foresight. Signs of reason turn up in many of them too. They want what is useful to them, they guard against harm, they get out of the way of danger, they prepare hiding places for themselves that stand open in several spots with different ways out — so they certainly have some understanding. Can anyone deny that they have reason, when they often outwit a human being? And the ones whose business is making honey: when they settle into the place assigned to them, they fortify a camp, they build their dwellings with a skill beyond describing, and they obey their king. I am not sure that what they have is not perfect good sense. [a]

So it is uncertain whether the things given to a human being are shared with the other living creatures or not. What is certain is that they have no religion. My own judgment is this: reason is given to every animal, but to the speechless creatures only to protect their life, and to a human being to prolong it as well. And because reason is complete in a human being, it has a name of its own — wisdom, which sets a human being apart in this one respect, that he alone is given the capacity to take in what is divine. On this point Cicero’s opinion is right. He says: “Of all the many kinds of animals there is none except man that has any knowledge of God; and among men themselves there is no nation so uncivilized or so wild that, even when it does not know what it ought to think about the divine, it does not know that something ought to be thought about him.” The upshot is that the man who acknowledges God is, so to speak, calling to mind the source he sprang from.

So the philosophers who want to free the mind from every fear take religion away along with the rest, and by doing that they strip a human being of the good that is his alone and stands above the others — a good set apart from living an upright life and from everything else that belongs to being human. For God, who made every living creature subject to man, also made man subject to himself. And what reason have they left for maintaining, as they also do, that the mind must be turned in the same direction the face is lifted? If we are to look at the sky, it is certainly for no other reason than religion; and if religion is taken away, the sky is nothing to us. So we must either look that way or bend down toward the ground. Bend to the ground we cannot, even if we wanted to, because we are built standing upright. So we must look up at the sky, where the nature of our body calls us. And if it is agreed that this has to be done, it must be done either so that we may give ourselves to religion, or so that we may learn the nature of the things in the sky. But the nature of the things in the sky is exactly what we cannot learn, because nothing of that kind can be found out by thinking it over, as I showed earlier. So we must give ourselves to religion; and the man who will not take it up throws himself flat on the ground, imitates the life of the brutes, and resigns from the office of being human. That is why the ignorant are the wiser ones: they go wrong in the religion they pick, but at least they remember their own nature and their own station.

So it is agreed by the common consent of the whole human race that religion has to be taken up. What has to be explained is the mistakes people make about it. God willed human nature to be this way: hungry and eager for two things, religion and wisdom. But here is where men go wrong. Either they take up religion and pay no attention to wisdom, or they give themselves to wisdom alone and pay no attention to religion — though neither one can be true without the other. So the result is either a crowd of religions, all of them false, because they have left wisdom behind, which could have taught them that there cannot be many gods; or else a wisdom that is false, because they paid no attention to the religion of the Most High God, who could have taught them to know the truth. Men who take either of these roads are on a track that wanders, and one full of the worst errors, since a human being’s duty and the whole truth are contained in these two things, and the two cannot be pulled apart. [e]

So it amazes me that not one of the philosophers found out where the highest good lives and keeps house. They could have looked for it this way. Whatever the greatest good is, it has to be something set before everyone. There is pleasure, which everyone wants; but a human being shares that with the beasts, and it does not carry the weight of what is honorable, and it brings on a feeling of having had enough, and in excess it does harm, and it dwindles as a man gets older, and it does not come to many people at all — since those without means, who are most of the human race, must go without pleasure too. So pleasure is not the highest good; it is not even a good. What are we to say about riches? The same is even truer of them. They come to fewer men, and generally by luck; they often come to the lazy, and sometimes by crime; and they are wanted by the very people who already have them. What about ruling power itself? That is not the highest good either. Not everyone can be a king, and everyone has to be able to reach the highest good.

So let us look for something that is held out to all. Is it virtue? No one can deny that virtue is a good, and beyond doubt a good for every man. But if it cannot be happy — since its whole force and nature consist in bearing up under evils — then it certainly is not the highest good. Let us look for something else. And yet nothing more beautiful than virtue can be found, nothing worthier of a wise man. If vices are to be avoided because they are ugly, then virtue is to be wanted because it is beautiful. What follows from that? Can it be that a thing everyone admits to be good and honorable is paid back with no reward at all, and is so barren that nothing comes of it? All that hard labor and difficulty, all that struggling against the evils this life is filled with, must of necessity produce some great good. But what shall we say it is? Pleasure? Nothing shameful can come out of what is honorable. Riches, then, or high command? Those things are brittle and uncertain. Glory? Honor? A name that lasts? None of those are contained inside virtue itself; they hang on other people’s opinion and judgment, and virtue is often hated and paid back with harm. The good that comes out of virtue ought to be joined to it so closely that it cannot be separated or pulled loose from it. And it cannot look like the highest good in any other way than by belonging to virtue as its own, and being the sort of thing nothing can be added to or taken from. Why should I even need to say it — the whole duty of virtue consists in despising all those things. Not to long for, or want, or love pleasures, riches, positions of command and honors, and everything else that is reckoned a good, the way other men do when desire has the better of them: that is precisely what virtue is. So virtue is bringing about something else, something higher and finer. Nothing fights against the goods that are here in front of us except what is longing for goods that are greater and truer. Let us not despair of being able to find it, if we turn our thoughts in every direction; the rewards being looked for are no small or trifling ones.

But the question we are asking is what we were born for, and that is how we can track down what virtue accomplishes. There are two parts a human being is made of, soul and body. Many things belong to the soul alone, many to the body alone, and many to both together — virtue itself among them; and whenever virtue is referred to the body it is given another name, for the sake of the distinction: fortitude. Since fortitude belongs to each of the two, then, a contest is set for each, and out of the contest a victory is held out to each. The body, being solid and able to be gripped, has to fight things that are solid and can be gripped. The soul, on the other hand, being thin and fine and invisible, fights enemies that cannot be seen or touched. And what are the soul’s enemies but lusts and vices and sins? If virtue beats them and drives them off, the soul will be clean and unstained. [h]

Where, then, can we gather what fortitude of soul accomplishes? Surely from the thing standing next to it that resembles it — fortitude of the body. When the body has come to some encounter and contest, what else does it look for out of victory but life? Whether you are fighting a man or a beast, the fight is for survival. So just as the body gets by its victory an escape from being destroyed, the soul gets the continuation of its existence; and just as the body dies when its enemies overcome it, so the soul has to die when vices overpower it. What difference is there, then, between the contest the soul carries on and the contest the body carries on, except that the body is fighting for temporary life and the soul for everlasting life? So: if virtue is not happy by itself, since its whole force lies, as I have said, in bearing up under evils; if it passes over everything men want as good; if at its highest it is exposed to death, since it often refuses the life others want and bravely goes to the death others fear; if it must of necessity produce some great good out of itself, because labors borne and beaten down even to the point of death cannot fail of a reward; if no reward such as it deserves is to be found on earth, since it looks down on everything brittle and passing — then what is left, except that it should win some reward in heaven, since it treats everything earthly with contempt, and that it should aim at higher things, since it looks down on low ones? And that reward can be nothing but immortality.

So there was good reason for what Euclid said — no obscure philosopher, the founder of the Megarian school — when, differing from the rest, he said that the highest good was the thing that never varies and is always the same. He certainly understood what the nature of the highest good is, though he did not explain what it consists of. It consists of immortality, and of nothing else at all, since immortality alone cannot be diminished or increased or changed. Seneca too, without meaning to, happened to admit that virtue has no other reward than immortality. Praising virtue in the book he wrote on dying before one’s time, he says: “Virtue is the one thing that can give us immortality and make us the equals of the gods.” But the Stoics as well, whom he was following, say that no one can be made happy without virtue. So the reward of virtue is a happy life, if virtue — as they rightly say — is what makes a life happy. Which means virtue is not, as they claim, to be pursued for its own sake, but for the sake of the happy life that necessarily follows it. That argument could have taught them what the highest good consists of.

But this present bodily life cannot be happy, because through the body it is exposed to evils. Epicurus calls God happy and incorruptible because he lasts forever. A state of happiness has to be complete, so that there is nothing that can harass it or lessen it or change it. And nothing can be judged happy in any other respect unless it is incorruptible; and nothing is incorruptible except what is immortal. So immortality alone is happy, because it can neither be corrupted nor destroyed. But if virtue is within a human being’s power, and no one can deny that it is, then happiness belongs to him too — for it is impossible for a man who has virtue to be wretched. And if happiness is within his power, then so is immortality, which carries happiness as one of its properties.

So the highest good turns out to be immortality alone, which belongs to no other animal and to no body; and it cannot come to anyone without the virtue of knowledge — that is, without knowing God and justice. How true and right the search for it is, the very desire for this present life shows. Short as this life is, and packed with hard labor, everyone still looks for it and wants it: old men and boys, kings and men of the lowest station, the wise no less than the foolish. To Anaxagoras the sight of the sky and the light itself was worth so much that men will willingly put up with any misery for it. So if this short and laborious life is reckoned a great good by the common agreement not only of men but of the other animals as well, plainly it becomes a very great and perfect good if it has no end and is free of every evil. In short, there would never have been anyone who looked down on this life, short as it is, or went to his death, except in the hope of a longer life. The men who freely offered themselves up to death for their countrymen’s safety — Menoeceus at Thebes, Codrus at Athens, Curtius and the two Decii at Rome — would never have preferred death to the advantages of living, unless they had thought they would come into immortality in their countrymen’s esteem. They knew nothing about a life of immortality, but the reality itself did not get past them. For if virtue looks down on wealth and riches because they are brittle, and on pleasures because they last such a short time, then it also looks down on a life that is brittle and short, in order to get one that is solid and lasting.

So thinking itself, going forward in its proper order and weighing everything, brings us to that outstanding and surpassing good we were born for. If the philosophers had gone about it this way — if they had not preferred to hold on stubbornly to whatever they had once got hold of — they would undoubtedly have arrived at this truth, as I showed a little while back. And even if that was not to be expected from men who put out the heavenly soul along with the body, still the men who argue for the soul’s immortality ought to have understood that virtue is set before us for this reason: that with lusts subdued and the desire for earthly things beaten, our souls, clean and victorious, may return to God — that is, to the source they came from. For it is on this account that we alone of living creatures are lifted up to the sight of the sky: so that we may believe our highest good is in the highest place. And it is on this account that we alone receive religion: so that we may know from it that the spirit of a human being is not mortal, since it longs for God and acknowledges him, and God is immortal.

So of all the philosophers, the ones who took either knowledge or virtue as the highest good have kept to the road of truth, but have not come to the end of it. These are the two things that together make up what is being looked for. Knowledge makes us know by what means and to what end we have to arrive; virtue makes us arrive. Either one is worth nothing without the other, for virtue comes out of knowledge, and the highest good is produced out of virtue. So the happy life the philosophers have always looked for, and are still looking for, has no existence either in the worship of the gods or in philosophy. The reason they could not find it is that they did not look for the highest good in the highest place, but in the lowest. For what is highest but heaven, and God, from whom the soul takes its origin? And what is lowest but the earth, out of which the body is made? So although some philosophers have assigned the highest good to the soul and not to the body, still, since they referred it to this life, which comes to an end along with the body, they have gone back to the body after all — because the whole of this time we spend on earth has to do with the body. So it was not for nothing that they failed to reach the highest good: whatever looks to the body only, and has no immortality in it, must necessarily be the lowest thing. So happiness does not fall to a human being’s lot in the way the philosophers thought. It falls to him not so that he is happy while he is living in the body, which certainly has to be corrupted in order to be dissolved, but then — when the soul has been set free from its dealings with the body and he lives in the spirit alone. In this life there is one thing only in which we can be happy, and that is to seem unhappy: if we keep clear of the enticements of pleasures and give ourselves to the service of virtue alone; if we live in all the labors and miseries that exercise virtue and strengthen it; if, in short, we keep to that rough and difficult path that has been opened for us toward happiness. So the highest good, the thing that makes men happy, cannot exist except in that religion and that teaching to which the hope of immortality is attached.