Endurance and the Three Furies

But let us leave the philosophers behind. Either they know nothing at all, and hold out that very ignorance as the greatest knowledge; or else, because they think they know what in fact they do not, they are foolish in an absurd and arrogant way. So — to come back to our subject — let us, to whom alone the truth has been revealed by God and wisdom has been sent down from heaven, practice what the God who gives us light commands. Let us hold up under the hard work of living, and bear it, by helping one another. And if we have done some good work, let us not aim at glory from it. God warns us that a man who does what is right must not be a boaster. Otherwise it will look as though he did his acts of kindness not so much out of a wish to obey God’s commands as out of a wish to please people; and then he already has the reward of glory he was aiming at, and will not receive the repayment of that heavenly and divine reward. [a]

Once these virtues are grasped, the other things a worshipper of God must keep are easy — that no one should ever speak falsely in order to deceive or to injure. A man who cultivates truth is not permitted to be deceitful in anything, or to depart from the very truth he follows. On this road of justice and of all the virtues there is no room for a lie. So the true and just traveler will not use the line of Lucilius: “It is no business of mine to lie to a man who is my friend and one of my own household.” He will hold, instead, that it is no business of his to lie even to an enemy and a stranger. He will never act in such a way that his tongue, which is the interpreter of his mind, is at odds with what he feels and thinks.

If he lends anyone money, he will not take interest on it, so that the kindness that relieves someone’s need may stay whole and undamaged, and so that he may keep his hands off another man’s property altogether. In this kind of duty he ought to be content with what is his own — though in other matters it is his duty not to be sparing with his property, in order to do good. But to take back more than you gave is unjust. A man who does that is lying in wait, in a way, to take plunder out of another man’s need.

The just man will let no chance go by of doing something out of mercy, and he will not stain himself with profit of that kind. He will act so that what he lends may be counted among his good works, without any loss to himself. He must not accept a gift from a poor man, so that if he has given anything himself it may be good — that is, given for nothing. If anyone speaks evil of him, he must answer with a blessing. He must never speak evil of anyone himself, so that no evil word may come out of the mouth of a man who honors the good Word. He must also take care never, by any fault of his own, to make an enemy. And if anyone is shameless enough to do a good and just man an injury, he must bear it with an even mind and with restraint, and not take the avenging of it on himself, but keep it for the judgment of God.

He must guard innocence at all times and in all places. And this command does not stop at not inflicting an injury; it goes on to not avenging one that is inflicted on him. For a very great and impartial Judge sits on the bench, the watcher and the witness of everything. Let a man prefer him to any man. Let him choose that the sentence in his case be pronounced by the one whose verdict nobody escapes, either by anyone’s pleading or by favor. So it comes about that the just man is an object of contempt to everybody. Because people think he cannot defend himself, they take him for lazy and useless; whereas a man who has avenged himself on his enemy is judged to have spirit and energy, and everybody honors and respects him. And though the good man is able to do many people good, people look up to the man who is able to do harm rather than to the man who is able to do good. But the depravity of men will not be able to corrupt the just man out of trying to obey God. He would rather be despised, so long as he always does the duty of a good man and never of a bad one.

Cicero says, in those same books On Duties: “But if anyone should want to unfold this folded-up notion of his own mind, let him teach himself on the spot that a good man is one who does good to those he can and injures no one — unless provoked by an injury.”

Oh, how he ruined a plain and true statement by adding two words! What need was there to add “unless provoked by an injury”? Only so that he might fasten vice onto the good man like a most disgraceful tail, and show him as a man without endurance, which is the greatest of all the virtues. He said a good man would inflict injuries if he were provoked — and by that very fact he must lose the name of good man, if he inflicts an injury. Returning an injury is no less the mark of a bad man than inflicting one. Where do quarrels among men come from, where do fights and disputes come from, except that a refusal to endure, set against injustice, often whips up great storms? Meet injustice with endurance — and nothing truer than that virtue can be found, nothing worthier of a human being — and it goes out at once, as though you had poured water on a fire. But if the injustice that provokes has met a refusal to endure as well matched as itself, then, as though oil had been poured over it, it will start a blaze so great that no river can put it out, but only the shedding of blood.

Great, then, is the advantage of endurance — and the wise man robbed the good man of it. Endurance alone brings it about that no evil happens; and if it were given to everyone, there would be no wickedness and no fraud in human affairs. What, then, can be so ruinous to a good man, so contrary to his character, as to let the reins go slack for anger? Anger strips him not only of the title of good man but of the title of man, since to injure another, as Cicero himself says most truly, is not in keeping with human nature. Provoke cattle or horses and they turn on you with hoof or horn; and snakes and wild animals give no trouble unless you go after them to kill them. And to come back to human examples: even people with no experience and no sense, when they are injured, are carried off by a blind and unreasoning fury and try to strike back at the men who injured them. In what, then, does the wise and good man differ from the wicked and foolish, except that he has an endurance that cannot be beaten, which the foolish have none of; except that he knows how to govern himself and to take the heat out of his own anger, which they, having no virtue, cannot rein in?

What plainly misled him was this: when the question was about virtue, he thought it belonged to virtue to win every kind of contest. He was quite unable to see that a man who gives way to grief and anger, who indulges the emotions he ought rather to be fighting, and who rushes off wherever injustice calls him, is not doing what virtue requires. For a man who tries to return an injury wants to imitate the very person who injured him — and a man who imitates a bad man cannot possibly be good. So by two words he has taken away from the good and wise man two of the greatest virtues: innocence and endurance.

But, as Sallust reports, Appius said — for he practiced that dog-like eloquence himself — that a man too should live in the manner of a dog, and bite back when he is set on. And to show how destructive this repaying of insults is, and what slaughter it usually produces, where could a better example be looked for than the wretched ruin of the teacher himself, who destroyed himself while wanting to obey these rules of the philosophers? If, when he was attacked with an injury, he had kept his endurance; if he had learned that it is a good man’s part to take no notice of an insult and to bear it; if his refusal to endure, his vanity and his madness had not poured out those famous speeches, titled with a name borrowed from somewhere else — then he would never have fouled with his own head, fastened up on it, the platform where he had once made his name, and that proscription would never have wrecked the state altogether.

So it is not the part of a wise and good man to want to fight and to put himself in danger, since winning is not in our power and every contest is uncertain. It is the part of a wise and excellent man not to want to remove his opponent, which cannot be done without guilt and danger, but to put an end to the quarrel itself, which can be done both to his advantage and justly. Endurance, then, is to be reckoned a very great virtue. And so that the just man might come to have it, God willed — as I said before — that he should be despised as a do-nothing. For unless a man is insulted, it will never be known what strength he has in holding himself back. If, when an injury provokes him, he starts to go after his attacker with violence, he is beaten. But if he has put that impulse down by reasoning, he has complete command of himself; he is able to rule himself. And this holding of oneself up is rightly named endurance, the one virtue that stands against every vice and every emotion. It calls the shaken and unsteady mind back to its calm; it settles a man; it gives him back to himself.

Since, then, it is impossible and useless to resist nature so as not to be stirred at all, let the feeling be put to sleep in good time, as far as that can be done, before it bursts out into doing someone an injury. God has commanded us not to let the sun go down on our anger, so that it may not go away as a witness of our madness. Finally Cicero, going against his own rule, which I have just spoken of, gave the highest praise to the forgetting of injuries. He says: “I have hopes, Caesar, since you are in the habit of forgetting nothing except injuries.” But if he acted like that — a man very far removed not only from heavenly justice but from public and civil justice as well — how much more ought we to do it, we who are, so to speak, candidates for immortality?

When the Stoics try to tear the emotions out of a man as though they were diseases, the Peripatetics stand against them. They not only keep the emotions but defend them, and say that there is nothing in a man that was not produced in him with great reason and foresight. And they say this rightly — if they know the true limits of each thing. And so they say that this very emotion of anger is the whetstone of virtue, as though nobody could fight bravely against an enemy unless anger stirred him up; and by that they show plainly that they know neither what virtue is nor why God gave anger to a man. If it was given to us for this, that we might use it for killing people, what is to be thought more savage than a human being, what more like the wild beasts, than this animal God formed for fellowship and for doing no harm? [t]

There are, then, three emotions that drive people headlong into every crime: anger, desire, and lust. That is why the poets have said there are three furies that harass the minds of men. Anger longs for revenge, desire for riches, lust for pleasures. But God has set fixed limits to all of them; and if they pass those limits and begin to grow too great, they must of necessity twist out of their own nature and turn into diseases and vices. It is no great labor to show what those limits are. Desire is given us for providing what life needs. Lust is given for the begetting of children. The emotion of anger is given for holding down the faults of those under our authority — that is, so that the years when a person is young may be shaped to honesty and justice by a harder discipline. For if that time of life is not held in check by fear, license will breed boldness, and boldness will break out into every disgraceful and reckless act.

So just as it is both just and necessary to use anger on the young, it is both destructive and wicked to use it on people of our own age. Wicked, because our common humanity is wounded; destructive, because if they resist, either they must be destroyed or we must die. That what I have described is the reason the emotion of anger was given to a human being can be understood from the commands of God himself, who orders us not to be angry with the people who insult us and injure us, but always to keep a hand over the young — that is, when they go wrong, to correct them with steady blows, in case a useless fondness and too much indulgence trains them for evil and feeds them into vice.

But people who have no experience of affairs and no knowledge of reason have driven out the emotions that were given to a human being for good uses, and they wander further than reason asks. That is why they live unjustly and without regard for God. They use anger on people their own age: from that come quarrels, from that come banishments, from that have come wars, against all justice. They use desire for piling up riches: from that come frauds, from that come robberies, from that have come crimes of every kind. They use lust for nothing but the enjoying of pleasures: from that come debaucheries, from that come adulteries, from that have come all corruptions. So whoever has brought those emotions back inside their proper limits — which people who do not know God cannot do — he is a man of endurance, he is brave, he is just.