The Complete Essays (122 page)

29. On virtue

[More considerations on virtue and its relationship to ecstasy and constancy, as well as a fresh consideration of how Fate and Classical determinism may be reconciled with God’s omnipotence and human freedom. There are suggestions that this chapter was written in its first form before ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ (II, 12), since it contains an elementary exposition of Pyrrhonism.]

[A] I find from experience that there is a difference between the leaps and sallies of the soul and a settled constant habit: and I am well aware that there is nothing we cannot do (indeed, even surpassing the Divinity, as somebody once said, since it is a greater thing to make oneself impassible than to be so as a property of one’s being) even combining the frailty of Man with the resolution and assurance of God.
¹
But only spasmodically. Sometimes there is in the lives of those heroes in Ancient times miraculous flashes which appear far to exceed our natural powers: but, truly, flashes they are; it is hard to believe that we can so steep and dye our soul in such elevated attributes that they become ordinary and natural to her. It happens even to us who are mere abortions of men that we can occasionally enrapture our Soul far beyond her ordinary state when she is awakened by the words or examples of another man: but it is a kind of passion which impels her, disturbs her and ravishes her somewhat outside ourselves; for once that whirlwind is over, we can see that she spontaneously relaxes and comes down, not perhaps down to the lowest stage of all but at least to less than she was, so that we can be moved to anger more or less like any ordinary man by the loss of a hawk or by a broken glass.

[C] Ordinate conduct, moderation, constancy apart, I believe that anything at all can be done, even by a man who, taken overall, is lacking and deficient. [A] That is why the wise men say that to judge a man we properly we must principally look at his routine activities and surprise him in his everyday dress.

Like all other true philosophers, Pyrrho, the man who built up ignorance into so pleasing a science, made an assay at conforming his life to his doctrine. And because he maintained that the feebleness of human judgement was so extreme as to be unable to incline towards any decision or persuasion and wanted to keep it forever hanging in the balance, regarding and welcoming all things as adiaphora, stories are told how he always maintained the same manner and expression: when he had started to say anything he never failed to go on to the end, even if the man he was speaking to had walked off; he never swerved from his path for any obstacle whatsoever, protected only by his friends from precipices or from being bumped into by carts, and similar accidents; for to fear or to avoid anything would have shocked his own principles, which remove all choice and election even from the senses. On occasions he allowed himself to be cut open or cauterized with such steadfastness that he never batted an eyelid.

Now it is one thing to bring your soul to accept such ideas: it is quite another to combine theory and practice. Yet it is not impossible. But what is virtually incredible is that you should combine them with such perseverance and constancy as to make it your regular routine in actions so far from common custom. That is why, when he was once surprised in his home quarrelling bitterly with his sister and reproached for having thereby forgotten his adiaphorism, he retorted: ‘What! Must even this silly woman serve to prove my rules?’ On another occasion he was seen defending himself against a dog; ‘It is,’ he said, ‘very difficult to cast off the Man entirely, and we must make it our duty to strive to fight against things first by deeds or, as second best, by reason and argument.’
²

About seven or eight years ago, some two leagues from here, there was a villager, who is still alive; his brain had long been battered by his wife’s jealousy; one day he came home from work to be welcomed by her usual nagging; it made him so mad that, taking the sickle he still had in his hand he suddenly lopped off the members which put her into such a fever and chucked them in her face.

It is also told how one of our young local gentry who was desperately in love at last succeeded, by sheer perseverance, in softening the heart of his beautiful lady; he was thrown into despair when about to make his sally to find that it was he who was the soft and yielding one, and that

non viriliter
Iners senile penis extulerat caput;

[without virility his sluggish penis raised its senile head;]
³

he went straight back home and cut it off, sending it as a cruel and bloody victim to atone for his offence. If that had been done rationally for religion, like the priests of Cybele, what would we not have said of so sublime an action!

A few days ago at Bergerac, about five leagues up the Dordogne from my house, there was a wife who had been battered and beaten the previous night by her husband, a man melancholic and irritable by complexion; she resolved to escape from his brutality at the cost of her life. She got up and gossiped with her neighbours as usual, slipping in a word or two entrusting her affairs to them; she took a sister of hers by the hand and led her to the bridge; after saying goodbye as though it were a game, with no other shift or change of expression, she threw herself off it down into the river, where she perished. What is more remarkable in her case is that this project had matured in her brain all night long.

It is quite another matter with women in India. It is the custom there for husbands to have several wives and for the one he loves most to kill herself after him: during the whole of their lives they each scheme to gain this vantage point over the others; the kindnesses which they do to their husband aim at no other reward than to be selected to accompany him in death:

[B]
Ubi mortifero jacta est fax ultima lecto,
Uxorum fusis stat pia turba comis;
Et certamen habent lethi, quæ viva sequatur
  Conjugium; pudor est non licuisse mori.
Ardent victrices, et flamme pectora præbent
,
  
Imponuntque suis ora perusta viris
.

[When the last torch is cast on the funeral pyre, the wives remain there with their hair in disarray and begin their mortal combat over which of them, alive, may join their husband in death; for it is a disgrace not to be allowed to die. Those who emerge victorious offer their bosoms to the flames and press their scorched lips on their husband.]
⁴

[C] One writer says that even in our own times he has seen the custom honoured by those Eastern peoples among whom not only the wives are buried with their husbands but also the slave-girls he had enjoyed. This is the way it is done. When her husband is dead the widow can if she wishes – but few do – ask for two or three months to arrange her affairs. When the day arrives she is arrayed as for a wedding, a looking-glass in her left hand and a wand in the other; she mounts a horse and with a happy face as though, she says, she were going to lie asleep beside her husband. Having paraded in pomp accompanied by her friends and relations and by a crowd in festive mood, she eventually comes to a public place devoted to such spectacles – a great square in the midst of which is a ditch filled with wood, having next to it a mound four or five steps high on to which she is escorted where she is served a sumptuous repast. After which she begins to dance and to sing; when the moment seems right to her she commands that the fire be lit. That done, she comes down and, taking her husband’s nearest kinsman by the hand, they go together to the neighbouring river where she strips herself naked, distributes her clothes and jewels among her friends and plunges into the water as though to lave away her sins. She comes out and wraps herself in a yellow cloth fourteen yards long; then, again offering her hand to her husband’s kinsman, they return to the mound from which she addresses the people and, if she has any, entrusts her children to their care. Between the ditch and the mound they are willing to draw a curtain to hide that burning furnace from her view; many widows forbid them to do so, to show greater courage. When she has finished what she has to say, a woman presents her with a cruse of oil to anoint her head and her whole body; after having done so, she casts it into the fire and then immediately leaps in herself, whereupon the people throw a great many faggots on top of her to save her from a lingering death; then their joy turns to mourning and sadness. If they are people of meaner stuff the dead body of the husband is taken to the spot where it is to be buried; there it is placed in a sitting position; the widow kneels before it and embraces it tightly. She remains in that posture while they build a wall around them; when it reaches just up to the widow’s shoulders, one of her family grabs her head from behind and twists her neck; once her spirit has departed the wall is quickly raised and covered over and there they remain entombed.
⁵

[A] In that same country there was a similar practice among their
Gymnosophists for, not by the constraint of others nor by a sudden caprice but by the express terms of their profession, their custom was, as they were approaching a certain age or realized that they were threatened by some disease, to have a pyre built for them, on top of which was, placed a bed richly adorned; then, after having joyfully feasted their friends and acquaintances, they settled themselves firmly on that bed, resolved that when the fire was put to it no man should see them stir hand or foot. Thus did one of them, Calanus, die before the entire army of Alexander the Great.
⁶
[B] And no man among them was reckoned holy or blessed unless he killed himself that way, having dispatched his soul, purged and purified by fire, after all that was mortal and earthy in him had been consumed.

[A] What makes it a miracle is that stable, lifelong premeditation. For intermingled with it is, among our other debates, the question of fate,
FATUM
. For if we bind things to come and our very wills to a definite and inevitable necessity, we are still on that age-old argument: since God foresees, as he undoubtedly does, that all must happen thus, happen thus they must. To which
Magistri Nostri
⁷
reply that to see something happen as we do – and God, too (since all is present to him; he sees rather than foresees) – is not to force it to happen. Indeed, we see the things because they happen: they do not happen because we see them. The event produces the knowledge, not the knowledge the event. What we see happen
is
happening: but it could have happened otherwise. And God, in the book of the causes of events which he has in his foreknowledge, also includes such causes as we term fortuitous and voluntary, those which depend on the liberty which he has given to our free-will: he knows that we will go astray because we shall have willed to do so. Now I have seen plenty of nations encouraging their troops with this necessity of Fate. For if our hour is bound to come at a particular point, neither volleys from enemy harquebuses nor our own rashness nor our running away nor our cowardice can advance it or retard it. That is a beautiful saying: but find a man who will act on it! And if it is the case that a strong and lively belief brings in its train analogous actions, then that faith which our mouths are so full of is
wondrously light in our own age, unless it be that her contempt for works makes her despise their company!
⁸
All the same, while on this subject, the Sire de Joinville, as good a witness as any other, tells us that the Bedouin, a people living among the Saracens with whom our King Saint Louis had some trouble in the Holy Land, believe so firmly by their religion that the days of each man have been numbered in advance by a preordained inevitability that they go bare to the wars except for a sword of Turkish fashion and a white linen garment. And the worst malediction they always had on their lips when they were angry with one of their own men was, ‘Cursed be thou like he who wears armour for fear of death!’ That is a very different proof of belief and faith than ours is.
⁹

We can rank with it the proof given by two monks of Florence in the time of our fathers. Opposed over some point of doctrine they agreed that both of them should be burned in the public square before all the people, each one wishing to prove he was right. All the preparations had been made and the deed on the very point of being done when it was interrupted by some unforeseen incident.
¹⁰

[C] A young Turkish lord had personally performed some remarkable feat of arms before the armies of both Amurath and Hunyadi who were ready to join battle; when Amurath asked him how a youth so young and inexperienced (for it was the first war he had seen) had been filled with such noble and valliant courage, he replied that his sovereign tutor in valour had been a hare. ‘I was out hunting one day,’ he said, ‘when I came across a hare lying in its form; although I had two excellent greyhounds at my side it seemed to me better, so as not to lose it, to use my bow, for it made a very good target. I started shooting off my arrows – I had some forty odd in my quiver – but did not hit it, let alone disturb it. In the end I let loose my hounds: they could do nothing either. This made me realize
that that hare was protected by destiny and that swords or arrows only strike home by leave of our fate, which it is not in our power to retard or advance.’