No Teacher of Virtue

The subject seems to call at this point for something further. I have taught that immortality is the chief good; I ought now to prove the other half of it, that the soul is immortal. There is a great deal of argument among the philosophers on that question, and even those who held true opinions about the soul were never able to explain or prove anything. Having no knowledge from God, they brought forward neither arguments true enough to win the case nor evidence strong enough to convince anyone. But it will be more convenient to handle this question in the last book, when I have to discuss what a happy life is. [a]

That leaves the third part of philosophy, the one they call logic, which takes in the whole business of dialectic and the whole method of speaking. Learning that comes from God has no need of it, because wisdom does not have its seat in the tongue but in the heart, and it makes no difference what kind of language you use: the question is not about words but about facts. We are not discussing the grammarian or the orator here, whose skill has to do with the proper way of speaking, but the wise man, whose learning has to do with the right way of living. So if the natural philosophy I spoke of earlier is not necessary, and this logic is not either, since neither of them can make a man happy, then the whole force of philosophy is left in the moral part alone — the part Socrates is said to have devoted himself to, laying the others aside. And since I have shown that the philosophers went wrong in that part too, and never grasped the chief good for the sake of which we are born, it turns out that philosophy is altogether false and empty. It does not prepare us for the duties of justice, and it does not strengthen the obligations or the settled course of a man’s life.

Let them understand, then, that they are mistaken who imagine that philosophy is wisdom. Let no one’s reputation draw them off; let them lean toward the truth instead, and come near it. There is no room for recklessness here. If we are taken in either by an empty reputation or by a false opinion, we shall have to bear the punishment of our folly for all eternity. And man, being what he is, if he trusts in himself — that is, if he trusts in a man — is beyond question arrogant, daring to claim for himself what the human condition does not allow; and I will not even call him a fool for failing to see his own mistake.

We can see how badly the greatest writer of the Latin language is deceived from a remark of his own. In his books On Duties he had said that philosophy is nothing but the desire of wisdom, and that wisdom itself is the knowledge of things divine and human. Then he added: “And if anyone finds fault with the desire for this, I really do not understand what he imagines is worth praising. For if what is wanted is enjoyment of the mind and rest from cares, what enjoyment can be compared with the pursuits of men who are always inquiring into something that bears on a good and happy life and tends toward it? Or if consistency and virtue are what count, either this is the study by which we reach them, or there is none at all. To say that there is no method for the greatest subjects, when not even the least of them is without a method, is to talk thoughtlessly and to blunder about the greatest matters. But if there is any discipline of virtue, where is it to be looked for once you have walked away from that kind of learning?”

For my own part, I did try to reach some command of the means of learning, because I wanted to teach others; but I have never been eloquent, since I never so much as took part in public speaking. Still, the goodness of the case cannot fail to make me eloquent by itself, and for a clear and full defense of it the knowledge of God and the truth itself are enough. So I could wish that Cicero might rise from the dead for a little while, and that a man of such finished eloquence might be taught by an unimportant person with no eloquence at all. First, what it is that the man who blames the study called philosophy thinks worth praising. Second, that it is not that study by which virtue and justice are learned, nor any other study, as he supposed. And last, since there is a discipline of virtue, where it is to be looked for once you have laid aside that kind of learning — which he did not go looking for in order to hear it and learn it. From whom could he have heard it, when nobody knew it? He was doing what he usually did when he pleaded a case: pressing his opponent with questions in order to lead him to a confession, as though he were confident that no answer could be given to show that philosophy is not the instructress of virtue.

And in the Tusculan Disputations he professed it openly, turning to address philosophy herself, as though he were showing himself off in a set piece of declamation. “O philosophy, guide of life! O searcher out of virtue and driver out of vices! What could we — what could the life of men — have done at all without you? You have been the inventor of laws, you the teacher of morals and of discipline.” As though she could see anything by herself, and as though the one who gave her were not the one to be praised instead. He might just as well have given thanks to food and drink, since life cannot go on without them; and yet these serve the senses without doing us any good. But food and drink are the nourishment of the body, and wisdom is the nourishment of the soul.

Lucretius does better, then, in praising the man who first discovered wisdom — but he does a foolish thing in supposing that a man discovered it, as though the man he praises had found it lying about somewhere, like flutes at a fountain in the poets’ stories. Still, if he had praised the discoverer of wisdom as God — and this is how he speaks: [i]

— even then God ought not to have been praised on that account, for discovering wisdom, but for creating the man who could be capable of receiving it. A man cuts the praise down when he praises only a part of the whole. As it is, Lucretius praised him as a man, when he ought to have been reckoned a God on this very ground, that he found wisdom out. For this is how he speaks:

From this it appears that he meant to praise either Pythagoras, who was the first, as I have said, to call himself a philosopher, or Thales of Miletus, who is reported to have been the first to discuss the nature of things. So in trying to lift the thing up he has pushed it down. It is nothing great if a man could have discovered it. But he is a poet, and may be forgiven.

That same finished orator, though, that same consummate philosopher, also finds fault with the Greeks, whose frivolity he is always accusing and always imitating. Wisdom itself, which he calls at one moment the gift of the gods and at another their invention, he dresses up in the manner of the poets and praises for her beauty. He complains bitterly, too, that there have been men who ran her down. “Can anyone dare to find fault with the parent of life, to stain himself with this guilt of parricide, and to be so wickedly ungrateful?”

So are we parricides, Marcus Tullius, and in your judgment fit to be sewn into a sack, because we deny that philosophy is the parent of life? Or are you the ungrateful one — wickedly ungrateful toward God? Not this god of yours whose image you worship as he sits in the Capitol, but the one who made the world and created man, and who gave wisdom too among his gifts from heaven. Do you call her the teacher of virtue, or the parent of life, when a man who has gone to her as a learner ends in far greater uncertainty than he began with? Teacher of what virtue? To this day the philosophers cannot explain where virtue is to be found. Parent of what life? The teachers themselves have been worn out by old age and death before ever settling what the fitting course of life is. And what truth can you hold her up as the explorer of, when you yourself keep testifying that in so great a crowd of philosophers not one wise man has yet existed? What, then, did that mistress of life teach you? To attack the most powerful consul with abuse, and to make him the enemy of his own country by your poisoned speeches? But let us pass over the things that can be excused under the name of bad luck.

You did apply yourself to the study of philosophy, and worked at it so hard that no one has ever worked harder. You knew every system of philosophy — you are in the habit of boasting of it — you set the subject out in Latin books, and you presented yourself as an imitator of Plato. Tell us, then, what you learned, or in which school you found the truth. In the Academy, no doubt, the one you followed and approved. But the Academy teaches nothing, except that you know your own ignorance. So your own books refute you, and show how little the learning to be got out of philosophy does for a life. These are your words: “But to me we seem not only blind to wisdom, but dull and slow even about the things that appear to be discerned to some degree.” If philosophy is the teacher of life, why did you look to yourself blind and dull and slow, when under her teaching you ought both to see and to be wise, and to be moving in the clearest light of all? And we learn what you really thought of philosophy from the letters written to your son, where you advise him that the precepts of philosophy ought to be known, but that a man must live as a citizen among citizens.

What could be said that contradicts itself more? If the precepts of philosophy ought to be known, they ought to be known for this, that we may live well and wisely. Or if a man must live as a citizen among citizens, then philosophy is not wisdom, seeing that it is better to live by the rule of society than by the rule of philosophy. For if what is called philosophy is wisdom, then the man who does not live by philosophy certainly lives foolishly. But if the man who lives by the rule of society does not live foolishly, it follows that the man who lives by philosophy lives foolishly. By your own verdict, then, philosophy stands convicted of folly and emptiness. And in your Consolation as well — not a light or amusing book — you brought in this sentiment about philosophy: “But I do not know what error has hold of us, or what wretched ignorance of the truth.” Where is the guidance of philosophy, then? What has that parent of life taught you, if you are wretchedly ignorant of the truth? But if this confession of error and ignorance has been dragged out of the bottom of your heart almost against your will, why not admit the truth to yourself at last — that a philosophy which teaches nothing, though you praised it to the skies, cannot be the teacher of virtue?

Seneca fell into the same mistake — and who could keep to the right road when Cicero is off it? He said: “Philosophy is nothing else than the right method of living, or the science of living honorably, or the art of passing a good life. We shall not be wrong in saying that philosophy is the law of living well and honorably. And the man who called it a rule of life gave it what was its due.” [r]

He plainly was not talking about what usually goes by the name of philosophy. That is spread out into many sects and systems and has nothing settled about it — nothing at all, in short, on which everyone agrees with one mind and one voice. So what could be falser than to call philosophy the rule of life, when the disagreement of its own precepts blocks the right road and throws everything into confusion? Or the law of living well, when the men under that law are wildly at odds with each other? Or the science of passing life, when the only thing its endless contradictions produce is uncertainty all around? For I ask whether he thinks the Academy is philosophy or not. I do not think he will deny it. And if that is so, then none of these descriptions fits philosophy — philosophy, which makes everything uncertain, repeals the law, counts the art as nothing, overturns the method, twists the rule, and takes knowledge away altogether. So all those descriptions are false, because they do not hold together with a system that is always uncertain and has to this day explained nothing.

No system, then, no science, no law of living well has been established anywhere except in this one true and heavenly wisdom, which was unknown to the philosophers. That earthly wisdom of theirs is false, and so it comes out varied and manifold and completely at war with itself. But as there is one founder and ruler of the world, God, and as truth is one, so wisdom has to be one and simple; because if a thing is true and good, it cannot be perfect unless it is the only one of its kind.

Again, if philosophy were able to shape a life, then no one but philosophers would be good, and everyone who had not studied it would always be bad. But there are, and always have been, countless people who are good or have been good without any learning at all, while among philosophers there has hardly ever been one who did anything praiseworthy in his own life. Who, I ask, does not see that men like that are not teachers of a virtue they do not have themselves? If anyone looks carefully into their character, he will find them hot-tempered, greedy, driven by lust, arrogant and self-indulgent — men who hide their vices behind a show of wisdom and do at home the very things they condemned in the lecture room.

Perhaps I am lying in order to make my charge stick. Does not Cicero admit the same thing, and complain of it? “How few philosophers are found with the character, the make of soul and life, that reason demands! How few who think that true instruction is not a display of knowledge but a law of life! How few who obey themselves and submit to their own rulings! We can see some so frivolous and full of show that it would have been better for them never to have studied at all; others hungry for money, others for glory; many the slaves of their lusts, so that their speech disagrees with their life in the most astonishing way.”

Cornelius Nepos writes to the same Cicero: “I am so far from thinking that philosophy is the teacher of life and the finisher of happiness, that I consider that nobody needs teachers of living more than many of the men who are engaged in discussing the subject. For I see that a great many of those who lay down the most elaborate rules in their schools about modesty and self-restraint are living at the same time in the unrestrained indulgence of every lust.”

And Seneca, in his Exhortations, says: “Many of the philosophers are of this kind: eloquent to their own condemnation. If you were to hear them arguing against greed, against lust and ambition, you would think they were publishing a disclosure of their own character, so completely do the reproaches they make in public flow back on themselves. There is no other way to look at them than as doctors whose placards advertise medicines while their medicine chests hold poison. Some are not even ashamed of their vices; they invent defenses for their own baseness, so that they may seem to sin with honor as well.”

Seneca says this too: “The wise man will even do things he does not approve of, in order to find a way through to the accomplishment of greater things. He will not give up good morals; he will fit them to the occasion, and the things others use for glory or for pleasure he will use for the sake of getting something done.” Then, a little later: “Everything the self-indulgent and the ignorant do, the wise man will do as well — but not in the same manner and with the same purpose.” But it makes no difference what your intention is when the action itself is vicious. Acts are seen; the intention is not seen.

Aristippus, the master of the Cyrenaics, kept up an affair with Lais, the famous prostitute; and that grave teacher of philosophy defended the fault by saying that there was a great difference between himself and the rest of Lais’ lovers, because he possessed Lais while the others were possessed by her. What splendid wisdom, for good men to copy! Would you really hand your children over to this man to be educated, so that they might learn how to possess a prostitute? He said there was a further difference between himself and the loose-living, that they wasted their property while he indulged himself at no cost at all. And in this the prostitute was plainly the wiser of the two, since she had the philosopher for her creature, so that all the young men, corrupted by the example and the authority of their teacher, could crowd to her without any shame. What difference did it make, then, what intention the philosopher had in taking himself off to the most notorious prostitute in the world, when the public and his own rivals saw him more depraved than all the worthless? And it was not enough for him to live this way: he began to teach lusts as well. He carried his habits over from the brothel into the school, arguing that bodily pleasure is the chief good. That ruinous and shameful doctrine had its origin not in the philosopher’s heart but in the prostitute’s lap.

And why should I speak of the Cynics, who practiced their indecencies in public? What wonder if they took their name and title from dogs, when they imitated the life of dogs as well? So there is no schooling in virtue in this sect either. Even those of them who prescribe more honorable things either do not practice what they advise; or, if they do — which rarely happens — it is not the system that leads them to what is right, but nature, which often drives even the untaught toward what deserves praise.