Philosophers Who Chose Death

Others argue the opposite: that the soul goes on living after death. These are mainly the Pythagoreans and the Stoics. They deserve to be handled gently, because they do catch sight of the truth; but I cannot help blaming them all the same, since they did not reach the truth by their reasoning — they stumbled into it. And so they went wrong even in the one matter they got right. They were afraid of the argument that runs like this: the soul must die with the body, because it is born with the body. So they claimed that the soul is not born with the body but brought into it from outside, and that it moves on from one body to another. It never occurred to them that the soul could outlive the body without having existed before the body. So there is an equal, and almost identical, error on both sides. One side is deceived about the past, the other about the future. Nobody saw the truest thing of all — that the soul is both made and does not die. They could not see it, because they did not know why this should be so, or what the nature of a human being is. [a]

Many of them, then, because they suspected the soul was immortal, laid violent hands on themselves, as though they were setting out for heaven. That is how it went with Cleanthes and Chrysippus, with Zeno, and with Empedocles, who in the dead of night threw himself into a vent of burning Etna so that, when he suddenly vanished, people would believe he had gone off to the gods. Among the Romans, Cato died the same way — a man who spent his whole life imitating Socrates’ way of showing off. Democritus was of another mind. But even so:

Nothing could be more wicked than this. If a murderer is guilty because he destroys a human being, then the man who puts himself to death falls under the same guilt, because he puts a human being to death. In fact the crime may be reckoned the greater, since the punishment of it belongs to God alone. We did not come into this life by our own choice; and in the same way we can only leave this dwelling of the body — which was assigned to us to keep — at the command of the one who placed us in this body to live in it, and who will order us out of it when he chooses. If violence is done to us, we must bear it with a steady mind, since the death of an innocent person cannot go unavenged, and since we have a great Judge who alone always holds in his hands the power of taking vengeance.

So all these philosophers were murderers. Cato too, the head of Roman wisdom, who is said to have read Plato’s treatise on the immortality of the soul from beginning to end before he put himself to death: it was the philosopher’s authority that led him into this great crime. He does at least seem to have had some cause for dying, in his hatred of slavery. Why should I bring up the man from Ambracia, who read the same treatise and threw himself into the sea for no other reason than that he believed Plato? A teaching like that is thoroughly detestable and to be kept clear of, if it drives men out of life. If Plato had known and taught by whom immortality is given, and how, and to whom, and for what actions, and at what time, he would not have driven Cleombrotus or Cato to a voluntary death. He would have trained them to live justly. It seems to me that Cato was hunting for a cause to die, not so much to escape Caesar as to obey the rulings of the Stoics, whose school he followed, and to make his name famous by some grand act. And I do not see what harm could have come to him if he had lived. Gaius Caesar was merciful enough that even at the hottest point of the civil war he wanted nothing more than to appear to have served the state well by preserving two excellent citizens, Cicero and Cato.

But let us come back to the people who praise death as a benefit. You complain about life as though you had ever lived, or had ever settled with yourself why you were born at all. May not the true and common Father of us all justly find fault with that line of Terence?

You are outraged that you are exposed to evils — as though you deserved anything good, you who do not know your own Father and Lord and King; you who see the bright daylight with your eyes and are still blind in mind, lying in the depths of the darkness of ignorance. That ignorance is what has made some men unashamed to say that we are born for this purpose: to pay the penalty for our crimes. I cannot see what could be more senseless. Where, or what, could we have done wrong, when we did not even exist? Unless we happen to believe that trifling old man who falsely claimed that he had lived before, and that in his earlier life he had been Euphorbus. Because he was born into an undistinguished family, I imagine, he picked out a family for himself from Homer’s poems. What a wonderful and remarkable memory Pythagoras had! And what a wretched forgetfulness on the rest of us, who do not know who we were in our earlier life! But perhaps some slip, or some favor, kept him — him alone — from touching the depths of Lethe or tasting the water of forgetting. No: the silly old man made up stories for credulous children, the way idle old women do. If he had thought well of the people he was saying these things to — if he had reckoned them human beings — he would never have taken for himself the liberty of telling lies as twisted as these. The folly of this most trifling man deserves to be laughed at. But what are we to do about Cicero? At the beginning of his Consolation he said that men are born in order to pay for their crimes, and then said it again later, as though scolding anyone who does not think life is a punishment. He was right, then, when he warned beforehand that he was held fast by error and by a wretched ignorance of the truth.

But those who argue that death is an advantage, knowing nothing of the truth, reason like this. If there is nothing after death, then death is not an evil, because it takes away the ability to feel evil. But if the soul survives, death is actually an advantage, because immortality follows. Cicero puts the point this way in his book On the Laws: “We may congratulate ourselves, since death is going to bring either a better state than the one we have in life, or at any rate not a worse one. For if the soul is in full vigor without the body, that is a divine life; and if it has no perception at all, then certainly there is no evil.” Cleverly argued, so it seemed to him — as though there could be no other state than those two. But both conclusions are false. The sacred writings teach that the soul is not wiped out; it is either rewarded according to its righteousness or punished forever according to its crimes. It is not right that a man who has lived wickedly in the middle of prosperity should escape the punishment he has earned, nor that a man who has been miserable on account of his righteousness should be cheated of his reward. [j]

This is so true that Cicero himself, in his Consolation, said that the righteous and the wicked do not live in the same place. Those same wise men, he says, did not judge that the same road into heaven lay open for everyone; they taught that men fouled by vices and crimes are pushed down into darkness and lie in the mire, but that souls which are chaste, pure, upright and unfouled, refined besides by the study and practice of virtue, take a light and easy flight to the gods — that is, to a nature like their own. But this contradicts the earlier argument, which rests on the assumption that every man is handed immortality at birth. What difference will there be between virtue and guilt, then, if it makes no difference whether a man is Aristides or Phalaris, Cato or Catiline? A man does not notice this clash between what is said and what is done unless he has hold of the truth. So if anyone asks me whether death is a good or an evil, I will answer that what it is depends on the course of the life. Life itself is a good if it is spent well and an evil if it is spent badly; and death in the same way is to be weighed by the past actions of a life. And so it works out like this: if life has been lived in the service of God, death is not an evil, because it is a crossing over into immortality. If not, death has to be an evil, because it carries a man over, as I said, into everlasting punishment.

What, then, are we to say, except that they are wrong who either want death as a good or run from life as an evil? — unless they are simply unjust, refusing to weigh the smaller number of evils against the greater number of good things. They spend their whole lives among a variety of choice pleasures, and then, if some bitterness happens to follow, they want to die. They take it in such a way that they seem never to have been well off at all, if at any point they happen to be badly off. So they condemn the whole of life and count it nothing but a thing full of evils. That is where that foolish saying came from — that this condition we take for life is death, and that what we fear as death is life; and so that the first good is not to be born, and the second is to die early. And to give the saying more weight, it is credited to Silenus. Cicero says in his Consolation:

“Not to be born at all is by far the best thing, and not to run onto these rocks of life. But the next best is, once you have been born, to die as quickly as possible, and to run from the violence of fortune as from a fire.” That he believed this most foolish expression is clear from the fact that he added something of his own to dress it up. So I ask: who is it best for, not to be born, when there is no one there at all who can perceive anything? It is perception that makes a thing good or bad. And next, why did he treat the whole of life as nothing but rocks and a fire — as though it were in our power not to be born, or as though life were given to us by fortune and not by God, or as though the course of a life looked anything like a fire?

Plato’s saying is much the same. He gave thanks to nature: first, that he had been born a human being and not a dumb animal; next, that he was a man and not a woman; that he was a Greek and not a barbarian; and last, that he was an Athenian, and born in the time of Socrates. There is no saying how much blindness and how many errors ignorance of the truth produces. I would maintain outright that nothing in human affairs was ever said more foolishly. As though, if he had been born a barbarian, or a woman, or for that matter a donkey, he would still be the same Plato, and not the very creature that had been produced! But he clearly believed Pythagoras, who — in order to stop men from feeding on animals — said that souls pass out of human bodies into the bodies of other animals. That is both foolish and impossible. Foolish, because there was no need to bring long-existing souls into new bodies, when the same Craftsman who once made the first ones was always able to make fresh ones. Impossible, because a soul equipped with right reason can no more change the nature of its condition than fire can rush downward, or pour its flame out sideways the way a river runs. So the wise man imagined that the soul which was in Plato at the time might be shut up in some other animal, and might still be given a human being’s power of feeling, so that it would understand its situation and grieve at being weighed down by a body that did not suit it. How much more sense he would have made if he had said that he gave thanks because he was born with good ability, able to be taught, and because he had the means that let him get a proper education.

What good did it do him to be born at Athens? Have not many men of outstanding talent and learning lived in other cities, any one of whom was better than all the Athenians together? How many thousands must we suppose there were who were born at Athens, and in the time of Socrates, and were still ignorant and foolish? It is not the walls, or the place a man was born in, that can invest him with wisdom. And what good was it to congratulate himself on being born in the time of Socrates? Could Socrates supply his learners with talent? It did not occur to Plato that Alcibiades and Critias were constant listeners to that same Socrates — and one of them became his country’s most energetic enemy, the other the cruelest tyrant of them all.

Now let us see what there was in Socrates himself that was so great that a wise man could rightly give thanks for being born in his time. I do not deny that he was a little shrewder than the others, who thought the nature of things could be taken in by the mind. On that point I judge that they were not only senseless but impious as well, because they wanted to send their prying eyes into the secrets of that heavenly providence. We know that at Rome, and in many cities, there are certain sacred objects that a man commits an outrage by so much as looking at. So the men who are not permitted to defile those objects keep from looking at them; and if by a mistake or an accident a man does happen to see them, his guilt is paid off first by his punishment and afterwards by repeating the sacrifice. What can you do with people who want to pry into what is not permitted? The men who try to profane the secrets of the world, and this heavenly temple, with impious arguments are far more wicked than the ones who walked into the temple of Vesta, or of the Good Goddess, or of Ceres. And those shrines, which men are not allowed to approach, were built by men in the first place. But these men not only escape the charge of impiety; what is far more unfitting, they win a reputation for eloquence and a name for talent. And what if they could actually find something out? They are as foolish in what they assert as they are wicked in what they search for, since they can neither find anything out nor, if they had found it out, defend it. Even when they have seen the truth by accident — which often happens — they handle it in such a way that other men refute it as false. Nobody comes down from heaven to pass sentence on one man’s opinion or another’s. So no one can doubt that the men who chase after these questions are foolish, senseless and out of their minds. [r]

Socrates, then, had something of human wisdom in him: when he understood that these things could not possibly be settled, he took himself away from questions of this kind. But I am afraid that this is the only place where he acted so. Many of the things he did are not merely undeserving of praise, they deserve the sharpest blame, and in them he looked most like the rest of his class. I will pick out one of them that anyone can judge. Socrates used to use this well-known saying: “What is above us is nothing to us.” Then let us fall flat on the ground, and use for feet the hands that were given us for producing excellent work. Heaven is nothing to us — heaven, for the looking at which we were stood upright; and in the end the light itself can have nothing to do with us, though the cause of our food and keeping is certainly from heaven. But if he saw this much, that we ought not to argue about the nature of heavenly things, he was not able to grasp even the nature of what lay under his own feet. What then? Did he misspeak? That is not likely. He undoubtedly meant what he said: that we are not to give ourselves to religion. But if he had said that openly, nobody would have put up with it.

For who can fail to see that this world, finished off with such wonderful method, is governed by some providence, since there is nothing that can exist without someone to direct it? A house left by the man who lived in it falls into decay; a ship without a helmsman goes to the bottom; a body abandoned by the soul rots away. Much less, then, can we suppose that so great a structure was either put together without a Craftsman, or has lasted this long without a Ruler. If what he wanted was to pull down those public superstitions, I do not disapprove — in fact I will praise it, if he found something better to put in their place. But this is the same man who swore by a dog and a goose. What a buffoon, as Zeno the Epicurean calls him: senseless, lost, past hope, if he meant to sneer at religion; and a madman, if he did it seriously, and actually reckoned a thoroughly base animal to be God. Who can dare to find fault with the superstitions of the Egyptians, when Socrates backed them at Athens with his own authority? And was it not the height of empty-headedness that before his death he asked his friends to sacrifice for him a rooster he had vowed to Aesculapius? He was afraid, apparently, that Aesculapius would haul him into court before Rhadamanthus the judge over the vow. I would think him completely out of his mind if he had died in the grip of a disease. But since he did this while in his right mind, anyone who thinks he was wise is himself out of his right mind. There is the man in whose times the wise man congratulates himself on having been born.