From Seneca to Lucilius
Greetings
1 You are doing what is best and most beneficial for you if, as your letter says, you persevere in moving toward excellence of mind. How silly it is to pray for that! It is a wish you yourself can grant.
You need not raise your hands to heaven; you need not beg the temple keeper for privileged access, as if a near approach to the cult image would give us a better hearing. The god is near you—with you—inside you. 2 I mean it, Lucilius. A sacred spirit dwells within us, and is the observer and guardian of all our goods and ills. However we treat that spirit, so does the spirit treat us. In truth, no one is a good man without God. Or is there anyone who can rise superior to fortune without God’s aid? It is God who supplies us with noble thoughts, with upright counsels.
In each and every good man resides a god: which god, remains unknown.*
3 If you happen to be in a wood dense with ancient trees of unusual height, where interlocking branches exclude the light of day, the loftiness and seclusion of that forest spot, the wonder of finding above ground such a deep, unbroken shade, will convince you that divinity is there. If you behold some deeply eroded cavern, some vast chamber not made with hands but hollowed out by natural causes at the very roots of the mountain, it will impress upon your mind an intimation of religious awe. We venerate the sources of great rivers; we situate an altar wherever a rushing stream bursts suddenly from hiding; thermal springs are the site of ritual observance; and more than one lake has been held sacred for its darkness or its measureless depth. 4 So if you see a person undismayed by peril and untouched by desire, one cheerful in adversity and calm in the face of storms, someone who rises above all humankind and meets the gods at their own level, will you not be overcome with reverence before him?
Will you not say, “Something is there that is so great, so exalted, that we cannot possibly believe it to be of the same kind as that paltry body it inhabits. 5 A power divine has descended on him. That eminent and disciplined mind, passing through everything as lesser than itself, laughing at all our fears and all our longings, is driven by some celestial force. Such magnitude cannot stand upright without divinity to hold it up. In large part, then, its existence is in that place from which it has come down. Even as the sun’s rays touch the earth and yet have their existence at their point of origin, so that great and sacred mind, that mind sent down to bring us nearer knowledge of the divine, dwells indeed with us and yet inheres within its source. Its reliance is there, and there are its aim and its objective: though it mingles in our affairs, it does so as our better.”*
6 So what mind is this? It is one that shines with a good that is its own. Do we praise a person for qualities belonging to someone else? What could be sillier than that? Do we marvel at possessions that can be transferred to another at a moment’s notice? What could be more foolish? A golden bridle does not improve the horse. The tamed lion with his gold-encrusted mane, harried into submission and loaded down with trinkets, is goaded on by his handlers: how different is the spring of the wild lion, whose spirit is unbroken! Surely he, fierce in the attack, as nature intended—he, with his rugged splendor that has no ornament but in the terror of the beholder—is superior to that other languid, gilded creature!
7 No one should glory except in what is his own. We commend the vine only if its branches are laden with grapes, if it bears so heavily that the stakes cannot support it. Would anyone really prefer the vine that is hung with golden fruit and golden leaves? Fruitfulness is the distinctive excellence of the vine; similarly in a human being we should praise that which belongs to him. So what if he has attractive slaves, a lovely home, vast plantations, substantial investments? All these things surround him; they are not in him. 8 Praise in him that which nothing can take away and nothing can confer—that which is distinctive about the human being.*
Do you ask what that is? It is the mind, and rationality perfected within the mind. For a human being is a rational animal. Hence his good is complete if he fulfills that for which he is born. But what is it that this rationality requires of him? The easiest thing of all: to live in accordance with his own nature. It is our shared insanity that makes this difficult: we push one another into faults. And how can we be recalled to health, when all people drive us forward and no one holds us back?
Farewell.