CHAPTER VIII EPICTETUS ON SIN

When we reached the lecture-room, a little late, we found it unusually crowded. My place was taken, and I could not see Arrian in his customary seat. Epictetus was in one of his discursive moods. He began with the assertion—by this time familiar to me, but somewhat distasteful now, fresh as I was from the atmosphere of the Jewish writings—that Gods and men alike seek nothing but “their own profit.” As in most of his epigrams, he meant just the opposite of what he seemed to assert. He hated high-flown language as much as he loved high thought and action. Even when he mentioned “the beautiful”—on which most Greeks go off into rhapsodies—he almost always subordinated it to the “logos” or told us that we must look for it in ourselves. So here again. Man, he declared, must give up all things—property, reputation, children, wife, country, if they are incompatible with his true “profit.” Then, of course, he shewed that man’s “profit” is virtue, so that we need not give up these blessings unless their possession is incompatible with virtue.

What he said next was new to me. A father, losing a child in death, must not say “I have lost my child,” but “I have given it back.” When I say “new,” I mean new in his teaching. But I had recently met something like it in my books of Hebrew poems, “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Later on, I heard Epictetus repeat this almost in the same form. This seemed to me not only beautiful and devout but also consistent with reasonable faith.

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But I could not follow him when, in reply to the objection, “He that took away this thing from me is a villain,” he said, “What does it matter to you by whom the Giver asked back the gift?” It seemed to me that a recoil from villainy, as well as delight in virtue, ought to find a place even in the calmest of mankind. No philosopher, he said, can have an “enemy,” because no one can do him any harm or touch anything that really belongs to him. This was true—in a sense. Its reasonableness contrasted with the passionate poetry of the Jews, which I had found full, too full, of talk about enemies. And yet, the more I meditated on the contrast, the more this “What does it matter to you?” seemed to become a cold-blooded, unnatural, and immoral question. Surely it ought to “matter” to us a great deal whether we suffered loss from some neighbour’s forgetfulness or from some enemy’s premeditated and malignant treachery. He went on in the same chilling style. “Desire,” said he, “about that which is happening, that it shall happen. Then you will have a stream of constant peace.” I seemed to see Priam “desiring that which was happening” when he saw Troy burned and the women ravished! His son, Polites, was being butchered by Pyrrhus before his eyes, and the old king was standing by, placidly enjoying “a stream of constant peace”!

Then Epictetus said, “An uneducated man blames others for his own evils. A beginner blames himself. An educated man blames neither others nor himself.” After this, he introduced what he called the law laid down by God. “Right convictions make the will and purpose good. Crooked and perverse convictions make the will bad. This law,” he said, “God has laid down, and He says to each of us, ‘If you will have anything that is good, take it from yourself’.” Then came another mention of the law—“the divine law” he now called it. It was connected with “right convictions,” as to which he asked “What are these?” His reply was, “They are such as a man ought to meditate on all the day long. We must have such a conviction as will prevent us from attaching our feelings to anything that is other than our own—whether companion, or place, or bodily exercise, or even the body itself.[87] We must remember the law and have it always before our eyes.”

This phrase, “meditate all the day long,” reminded me of some words of David, which I had been reading the day before, “Oh how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day.” Other Hebrew expressions also came into my mind concerning the sweetness and fragrance of the Lord’s commandment, how the poet “opened his mouth and drew in his breath” to taste its delight. These I could understand, when they applied to a law of love, a law of the emotions, a “feeling.” But I wondered what Epictetus could produce for us of a nature to kindle such enthusiasm. He continued, “And what is the divine law? It is this. First, Keep the things that are your own. Secondly, Do not claim things not your own; use them, if given; do not desire them, if not given. Thirdly, When anything is being taken from you, give it up at once in a detached spirit, and with gratitude for the time during which one has used it.”

“Keep the things that are your own!”—This he placed first, and on this he laid most emphasis, dwelling on each syllable. I fancied that he knew he was disappointing us and almost took pleasure in it as though he were administering to us a wholesome but bitter medicine. “You find this sour,” he seemed to say: “Sour or not, it is the truth, the only solid and safe truth. It is not the dream of a poet, or the scheme of a student. It is the plan of a man of business, practicable for all—for slaves as well as free men, for individuals in a desert as well as for communities in a city. ‘Love your neighbour’—that is expecting too much. ‘Do not covet what is your neighbour’s’—that is expecting too little. ‘Keep that which belongs to you!’ There you have a rule that makes you independent of all neighbours.” I was miserably disappointed; yet I could not help respecting and admiring our Master’s unflinching frankness, his determination to force us to face the austere truth, and his contempt for anything that seemed incapable of being put into practice at all times and in all circumstances.

He spoke next of “sin” or “error.” Some of his language strangely resembled Paul’s, but with great differences. He made mention of a “conflict,” but he seemed mostly to mean[88] “a conflicting state of things,” “logical contradiction,” or inconsistency. It might be called self-contradiction, taken as including actions, and not words alone. He also used the very same phrase as Paul’s “that which he willeth he doeth not,” but not in the same way, as may be seen from the following extract which I took down exactly: “Every error includes self-contradiction. For since the person erring does not wish to err but to go straight, it is clear that what he wills to do he does not do.… Now every soul endowed with ‘logos’ by nature is disposed to dislike self-contradiction. As long as a man has not followed up the facts and perceived that he is in a state of self-contradiction, he is in no way prevented from doing things that are self-contradictory; but, when he has followed them up, he must necessarily revolt from the self-contradiction.… Here then comes in the need of the teacher skilled in ‘logos’ … but the teacher needs also power to refute what is wrong and to stimulate the pupil to what is right. This teacher will give the erring man a glimpse into the self-contradiction in which he errs, and will make it clear to him that he is not doing that which he wills to do and that he is doing that which he wills not to do. As soon as this is made clear to the person in error, he will, of himself and of his own accord, depart from his error.”

Then he supposed a case where a man had relapsed from philosophy into a profligate and shameless life. And first he tried to shew the offender how much he had lost in losing modesty and decency and true manliness. “There was a time,” he said, “when you counted this as the only loss worth mentioning.” Next, he shewed each of us how to regain what we had lost. “It is you yourself,” he exclaimed, “you yourself, no other whom you have to blame. Fight against yourself! Tear yourself away to seemliness, decency, and freedom.”

Lastly, he appealed—as I had never heard him do before—to the feelings of loyalty and affection that we might entertain for himself. I thought he must be recalling his old days in Rome, when he, a boy and a slave, in the house of Epaphroditus, might be exposed to the temptations and coercions to which such slaves were subject; and he asked his pupils to imagine their feelings if someone came to them reporting that their Master, Epictetus, had been forced to succumb.

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“If,” said he, very slowly and deliberately, with emphasis on each syllable, “if someone were to come and tell you that a certain man was compelling me”—here he hurried onward—“to lead the sort of life that you are now leading, to wear the sort of dress that you wear, to perfume myself as you perfume yourself, would you not go off straightway and lay violent hands on the man that was thus abusing me? Rescue yourself, then, as you would have rescued me. You need not kill anyone, strike anyone, go anywhere. Talk to yourself! Persuade (who else should do it better?)—persuade yourself.”

Never, in my experience, had Epictetus more nearly fulfilled the promise made in his behalf by Arrian—that he would always make his hearers feel, for the moment, precisely what he wished them to feel. There were two or three in the class notorious for their profligacy; but the appeal went home to others as well, conscious of minor derelictions. “Persuade yourself!” There was no need of it. We were all, to a man, already persuaded. Infants and babies though we were, we could all stand up and walk—for the moment. He proceeded in the same spirit-stirring tone, as though—now that we had all resolved to go on this arduous journey with him as a guide—he would go first and shew us how to push our way through the forest.

“First of all,” said he, “give sentence against the present state of things.” He did not say “against yourselves.” That would have been too discouraging. We were to condemn “the present state of things”; that is, our present self. “In the next place,” he continued, “do not give up hope of yourself. Do not behave like the poor-spirited creatures who, because of one defeat, give themselves up altogether and let themselves be carried downward by the stream. Take a lesson from the wrestling-ring. That young fellow yonder has had a fall. ‘Get up,’ says the trainer, ‘Wrestle again, and go on till you get your full strength.’ Act you in the same spirit. For, mark you, there is nothing more pliable than the human soul. You must will. Then the thing is done, and the crooked is made straight. On the other hand, go to sleep; and then all is ruined. From your own heart comes either your destruction or your help.”

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He concluded with a word of warning. Perhaps some of us might appeal to his own dictum about seeking our own “profit,” as being the only right and wise course. He met it as follows: “After this, do you say ‘What good shall I get by it?’ What greater ‘good’ do you look for than this? Whereas you once were shameless, you will now have received again the faculty of an honourable shame. From the orgies of vice you will have passed into the ranks of virtue. Formerly faithless and licentious, you will now be faithful and temperate. If you seek any other objects better than these, go on doing still the things you are doing now. Not even a God can any longer save you.”