The Steep Road and True Virtue

There is one way, then, of virtue and of the good, and it does not lead where the poets say — to the fields of Elysium — but to the citadel of the world itself. [a]

That other road belongs to the accuser, who invented false religions, turns people away from the road to heaven, and leads them off into the way of destruction. Its look and its shape are arranged for the eye: it seems level and open, and delightful with every kind of flower and fruit. Everything the earth counts good has been set out along it — wealth, honor, ease, pleasure, every sort of attraction — but along with these injustice, cruelty, pride, treachery, lust, greed, discord, ignorance, lying, foolishness, and the rest of the vices. And this is how the road ends. When travelers reach the point where there is now no turning back, it is whipped away, and all its beauty with it, so suddenly that no one can see the trick coming before he falls headlong into a deep pit. For whoever is caught by the look of present goods, and taken up with chasing them and enjoying them, will not have looked ahead to what follows after death; he will have turned aside from God, and he will be thrown down to hell and condemned to punishment that never ends.

But that heavenly way is laid out as hard and uphill, rough with cruel thorns, tangled with stones sticking out of the ground, so that a man has to walk it with the greatest labor and wearing of the feet, taking great care not to fall. In it God has set righteousness, moderation, patience, faith, chastity, self-control, harmony, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and the other virtues — and along with these, poverty, disgrace, hard work, pain, and every kind of hardship. For whoever has stretched his hope past the present and chosen the better things will go without these earthly goods, so that he can travel light and unhindered and get over the difficulty of the road. A man who has wrapped himself in royal display, or loaded himself down with riches, cannot even set out on such difficulties, much less keep going through them.

From this you can see why it is easier for the wicked and the unrighteous to get what they want: their road runs downward, on the slope. And it is hard for good men to reach what they want, because they are walking a difficult and steep path. So the righteous man, having started up a hard and rugged road, is bound to be despised, laughed at, and hated. Everyone who is dragged along headlong by desire or by pleasure envies the man who has managed to reach virtue, and takes it badly that anyone should have what they do not have themselves. So he will be poor, low, without standing, open to injury — and still bearing everything that hurts. And if he keeps his patience up without a break to that last step and end, the crown of virtue will be given him, and God will pay him back with immortality for the work he has done in this life for the sake of righteousness.

These are the ways God has assigned to human life, and in each of them he has shown both good things and evil things, but in a changed and inverted order. In the one he has put temporary evils first and eternal goods after them, which is the better order. In the other, temporary goods first and eternal evils after them, which is the worse. So whoever has chosen present evils along with righteousness will get goods greater and more certain than the ones he turned down; and whoever has preferred present goods to righteousness will fall into evils greater and longer lasting than the ones he dodged. This bodily life is short, so its goods and its evils have to be short as well; but that other life, the life of the spirit, which is the opposite of this earthly one, goes on forever, and so its goods and its evils go on forever too. That is how it works out that goods of short duration are followed by eternal evils, and evils of short duration by eternal goods.

Since, then, good things and evil things are set in front of a man at the same time, it is worth every man’s while to work out with himself how much better it is to make up for evils of short duration with goods that never end, than to endure evils that never end for the sake of goods that are short and perishable. Think how it goes in this life when a fight with an enemy is in front of you. You have to work first so that you can rest afterward. You have to go hungry and thirsty, put up with heat and cold, sleep on the ground, keep watch, run into danger — so that your children and your house and your property come through safe and you can enjoy all the good of peace and victory. But if you should choose present ease instead of the work, you do yourself the greatest harm there is: the enemy will come on you with nothing in his way, your fields will be laid waste, your house looted, your wife and children carried off as plunder, and you yourself killed or taken prisoner. To keep all that from happening, present advantage has to be put aside so that a greater and more lasting advantage can be won.

So it is with the whole of this life. God has provided us with an adversary, so that we might be able to acquire virtue; and present gratification has to be laid aside, or the enemy will overpower us. We have to be on the watch, post sentries, go out on campaign, spill our blood to the last drop — in short, we have to put up patiently with everything that is unpleasant and hard, and put up with it the more readily because God our commander has fixed eternal rewards for our labors. And since in this earthly warfare men spend so much labor to get for themselves things that can be lost the same way they were got, surely we ought to refuse no labor at all, when what we gain cannot be lost in any way.

For God, who created men for this warfare, wanted them to stand ready in battle order, watching with minds keenly intent for the tricks or the open attacks of our one enemy. Like skilled and experienced generals, he tries to trap us by one art after another, aiming his fury at each man according to his nature and his bent. Into some he pours a greed nothing satisfies, so that, chained by their riches as if by fetters, he can drive them off the way of truth. Others he sets alight with the excitement of anger, so that while they are busy doing damage he can turn them away from thinking about God. Others he plunges into lusts beyond all measure, so that, given over to the pleasure of the body, they cannot so much as look toward virtue. Others he fills with envy, so that, taken up with torments of their own, they think of nothing but the happiness of the people they hate. Others he swells with ambition. These are the men who give the whole occupation and care of their lives to holding public office, so that they may set a mark in the annals and give their name to the years. Other men’s desire climbs higher: not to govern provinces with the sword of the day, but to have themselves called lords of the whole human race, with power that has no limit and no end.

The men he sees to be religious he tangles in one superstition after another, so as to make them irreligious. And in front of the men who are looking for wisdom he throws philosophy, so that he can blind them with the appearance of light and keep anyone from grasping the truth and holding on to it. In this way he has blocked every approach against us and occupied the road, delighted with the errors everybody shares. But so that we might be able to scatter those errors and beat the author of evils himself, God has given us light and armed us with true and heavenly virtue — which is what I must speak about now.

But before I begin to set out the separate virtues, I have to mark out the character of virtue itself, which the philosophers never defined rightly — not what it is by nature, and not what it consists in — and I have to describe how it works and what its business is. They kept the name and lost the force of it, and its nature, and its effect. Whatever they usually say when they define virtue, Lucilius packs into a few lines, which I would rather quote than take longer than I need in refuting the opinions of many men: [l]

Out of these definitions, which the poet packs together so briefly, Marcus Tullius drew the duties of living, following Panaetius the Stoic, and laid them out in three books.

But we shall see in a moment how false all this is, so that it may appear how much God has given us in stooping to open the truth to us. The poet says it is virtue to know what is good and what is evil, what is low, what is honorable, what is useful, what is useless. He could have made his book shorter by speaking only of what is good and evil; for nothing can be useful or honorable that is not also good, and nothing useless or low that is not also evil. The philosophers see it this way too, and Cicero shows the same thing in the third book of the work I have just mentioned.

But knowledge cannot be virtue, because it is not inside us; it comes to us from outside. And whatever can pass from one person to another is not virtue, because virtue is each man’s own property. So knowledge amounts to a benefit got from someone else: it depends on hearing. Virtue is altogether ours: it depends on the will to do what is good. Just as, when you set out on a journey, it is no use knowing the road unless you also have the effort and the strength for walking, so knowledge is no use at all if our virtue fails. Take people in general who sin: they do perceive what is good and evil, though not perfectly, and whenever they behave badly they know they are sinning, which is why they try to hide what they have done. The nature of good and evil does not escape them; but an evil desire to sin overpowers them, because they are short of virtue — that is, of the desire to do what is right and honorable.

So knowing good and evil is one thing and virtue another, and it shows here: knowledge can exist without virtue, as it has in the case of many of the philosophers. And since not having done what you knew to be right deserves blame, a twisted will and a bad mind, which ignorance cannot excuse, will be justly punished. So, as the knowledge of good and evil is not virtue, doing what is good and keeping away from what is evil is. And yet knowledge is joined to virtue in this way: knowledge comes first and virtue follows after it, because knowledge is of no use unless action follows it up. Horace puts it rather better:

But even he puts it badly, because he has defined virtue by its opposite, as if a man were to say: what is good is what is not evil. When I do not know what virtue is, I do not know what vice is either. Each of them needs its own definition, because the case is such that either you understand both or you understand neither.

But let us do what he should have done. It is virtue to hold anger back, to control desire, to curb lust; for this is what running away from vice means. Nearly everything that is done unjustly and dishonestly comes out of these feelings. If the force of the emotion we call anger is blunted, all the evil quarrels of men will be put to rest: no one will plot, no one will rush out to injure another. If desire is held back, no one will use violence by land or by sea, no one will lead an army out to carry off and lay waste what belongs to other people. If the heat of lust is put down, every age and either sex will keep its purity: no one will suffer anything shameful or do anything shameful. So every crime and every disgraceful act will be taken out of the lives and the characters of men, if these feelings are quieted and calmed by virtue. And this quieting of the feelings and the emotions means just this, that we do everything that is right.

The whole business of virtue, then, is not to sin. And a man who does not know God certainly cannot carry that out, since ignorance of the one from whom good things come is bound to push him into vices before he notices. So, to fix the business of each more briefly and more exactly: knowledge is knowing God, virtue is worshiping him. The first is wisdom, the second righteousness.