Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] You are doing something excellent, something good for your own health, if, as you write, you keep pressing on toward a sound mind. How foolish to pray for what you could grant yourself! There is no need to lift your hands toward the sky, no need to beg the temple attendant to let us close to the statue's ear, as though the god could hear us better there. God is near you, with you, inside you. [2] I mean it, Lucilius: a holy spirit has its seat within us, watching over our bad deeds and our good ones, guarding them. As we treat this spirit, so it treats us. No one is a good man without god. Can anyone rise above fortune unless god lifts him? It is god who supplies counsel that is grand and upright. In every good man a god dwells - which god, we cannot say.
In every good man, though which god is uncertain, a god makes his home.
[3] Suppose you come upon a grove thick with ancient trees grown past their usual height, where the tangle of branch over branch shuts out any view of the sky: the sheer stature of that forest, the seclusion of the place, the wonder of shade so deep and unbroken out in open country, will convince you a divine power is there. Or suppose a cave holds up a mountain on rock hollowed deep beneath it - not cut by any hand, but opened out to that vastness by natural causes: some tremor of religious awe will strike your soul. We venerate the sources of great rivers; where a huge stream bursts suddenly out of hiding, altars stand; springs of hot water have their cults, and certain pools have been made sacred by their darkness or their fathomless depth. [4] Now suppose you see a man unshaken by dangers, untouched by cravings, happy in the middle of adversity, calm at the center of storms, looking down on other men from a higher place and at the gods as an equal - won't reverence for him steal over you? Won't you say: this thing is too great, too lofty, to be of the same stuff as the scrap of body it lives in? [5] A divine force has come down into him. A soul that stands above things, well-ordered, passing through everything as if it were beneath it, laughing at all we fear and all we pray for - such a soul is driven by a power from heaven. Something that great cannot stand without a god propping it; so the greater part of it remains where it came down from. The sun's beams reach down to the earth, yet their home is the source that sends them; in the same way a soul that is great and holy - sent down here so that we might know the divine at closer range - keeps company with us, yes, but stays fastened to its origin. It hangs from there, it looks and strains back toward there; it moves among our affairs as something better than we are. [6] What kind of soul is this, then? One that shines by no good but its own. What is more foolish than to praise in a man what belongs to someone else? What is crazier than admiring things that can be handed over to another in an instant? Golden bridles do not improve a horse. A lion with a gilded mane goes into the arena one way - handled, worn down, forced to put up with having the ornament fastened on; a lion untouched, its spirit whole, goes in quite another. That one, fierce in its charge, the way nature meant it to be, magnificent in its shagginess - its beauty being exactly this, that you cannot look at it without fear - stands above the listless, gold-leafed one. [7] No one should take pride in anything but his own. We praise a vine if it loads its shoots with fruit, if the sheer weight of what it has borne drags its supports toward the ground. Would anyone prefer to it a vine hung with golden grapes and golden leaves? The vine's own excellence is fruitfulness; in a man, too, what deserves praise is what is his. He has a good-looking household staff and a beautiful house, he plants widely, he lends at high interest: none of this is in him; it is around him. [8] Praise in a man what can neither be snatched away nor handed to him, what belongs to the human being as such. You ask what that is? The soul, and reason brought to completion in the soul. For man is a rational animal; his good is therefore complete when he has fulfilled the purpose he was born for. And what does this reason demand of him? The easiest thing there is: to live according to his own nature. What makes it hard is the shared madness of us all: we push each other over into vice. And what recall to health is possible for men whom nobody restrains and the whole populace shoves forward? Farewell.