Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Yesterday I split with my bad health: it claimed the morning, and the afternoon it surrendered to me. So first I tested my mind with reading; then, when it stood up to that, I dared to demand more of it — or rather, to allow it more. I wrote something, and with more concentration than usual, since I was wrestling with difficult material and refused to be beaten — until some friends broke in, applied force, and reined me in like a patient who won't behave. [2] Conversation took the pen's place, and I'm going to bring you the part of it that is still in dispute. We've appointed you judge. You have more work on your hands than you think: the case has three sides.
Our Stoics say, as you know, that there are two things in nature from which everything comes: cause and matter. Matter lies there inert, a thing ready for anything, and it would sit idle if no one set it moving; cause — that is, reason — shapes matter, turns it wherever it wants, and produces from it all sorts of works. So there has to be something a thing is made from, and then something it is made by: the latter is the cause, the former the matter. [3] Every art imitates nature; so take what I have said about the universe and apply it to whatever human hands must make. A statue required both matter that would submit to the craftsman and a craftsman to give the matter a face. In the statue, then, the matter was the bronze, the cause the workman. The same condition holds for everything: it consists of what is made and what makes.
[4] The Stoics hold that there is one cause — that which makes. Aristotle thinks 'cause' is said in three ways: 'The first cause,' he says, 'is the matter itself, without which nothing can be produced; the second is the workman; the third is the form, which is stamped on each work as on a statue.' This is what Aristotle calls the 'idos.' 'A fourth,' he says, 'joins these: the purpose of the whole work.' [5] Let me unpack that. The bronze is the statue's first cause, for it would never have been made without something for it to be cast or hammered from. The second cause is the craftsman, since that bronze could not have been shaped into the figure of a statue unless skilled hands had been brought to bear. The third cause is the form: the statue would not be called 'the Spear-bearer' or 'the Ribbon-binder' unless that particular look had been pressed into it. The fourth cause is the purpose of making it — without that, it would not have been made. [6] What is the purpose? Whatever drew the craftsman on, what he was pursuing when he made it: money, if he built it to sell; or fame, if he worked for a name; or piety, if he was preparing a gift for a temple. So this too is a cause of the thing's being made — or don't you think that something whose removal would have meant the work was never made deserves to be counted among its causes?
[7] To these Plato adds a fifth, the model, which he himself calls the 'idea': this is what the craftsman kept looking back at while he produced what he intended. It makes no difference whether he has his model outside him, to fix his eyes on, or inside, where he himself conceived and installed it. God holds these models of all things within himself; his mind has embraced the numbers and measures of everything that is to be brought about. He is full of these shapes, which Plato calls 'ideas' — deathless, unchanging, never wearying. And so human beings perish, but humanity itself, the pattern a human being is molded on, endures; while people struggle and die, it suffers nothing. [8] There are five causes, then, as Plato says: that from which, that by which, that in which, that toward which, that for the sake of which; and last of all, what results from these. In the statue — since that is where we started — that from which is the bronze; that by which is the craftsman; that in which is the form fitted to it; that toward which is the model the maker imitates; that for the sake of which is the maker's purpose; what results from them all is the statue itself. [9] The world, too, as Plato says, has all of these: a maker — this is god; that from which it is made — this is matter; a form — this is the arrangement and order of the world we see; a model — namely what god looked to in making this vast and beautiful work; a purpose — what he made it for. [10] You ask what god's purpose is? Goodness. So Plato says, at any rate: 'What was god's reason for making the world? He is good, and the good begrudges no one any good thing; so he made it the best he could.'
So sit as judge, hand down your verdict, and declare who seems to you to say what is most like the truth — not who says what is truest, for that is as far above us as truth itself.
[11] This crowd of causes assembled by Aristotle and Plato covers either far too much or far too little. If they judge that anything whose removal makes production impossible is a cause of the making, they have named too few. Let them put time among the causes: nothing can happen without time. Let them add place: if there is nowhere for a thing to happen, it will not happen at all. Let them add motion: without it nothing comes to be or perishes; there is no art without motion, no change. [12] But what we are after now is the first and general cause. That must be simple, for matter too is simple. What is the cause, we ask? Reason that makes — in other words, god. All those items you have listed are not so many separate causes; they hang from one, the one that makes. [13] You say form is a cause? The craftsman imposes it on the work: it is part of the cause, not the cause. The model too is not a cause but a necessary instrument of the cause. The model is necessary to the craftsman the way a chisel is, or a file: the art cannot proceed without them, yet they are not parts of the art, nor causes. [14] 'The craftsman's purpose,' someone says, 'his reason for setting out to make something, is a cause.' Even granting it is a cause, it is not the efficient cause but an accessory one. And such causes are countless; we are asking about the general cause. And when they said that the whole world, the finished work, is a cause, that fell short of their usual precision: there is a great difference between a work and the cause of a work.
[15] Either hand down a ruling, or — and in questions of this kind it is the simpler path — admit the matter is not clear to you and send us back for a rehearing. 'What pleasure do you get,' you say, 'from wearing away your time on questions that rid you of no passion and drive off no desire?' For my part I do take up and handle those matters that bring the mind peace: I examine myself first, and this world afterward. [16] Nor am I wasting time even now, as you suppose. All these questions, provided they are not minced up and pulled apart into useless hair-splitting, lift and lighten the mind, which, weighed down by its heavy load, longs to be freed and to return to the things it once belonged to. For this body is the mind's burden and its punishment; under its pressure the mind is crushed, in chains, unless philosophy comes to it, bids it draw breath at the spectacle of nature, and releases it from earthly things toward the divine. This is its freedom, this its excursion: for a while it slips out of the custody in which it is held and is restored by the sky. [17] Just as craftsmen doing some fine-grained work that strains and tires the eyes, if their light is poor and borrowed, go out into the open and, in some quarter given over to public leisure, treat their eyes to free daylight — so the mind, shut up in this gloomy, dark lodging, seeks the open whenever it can and finds rest in the contemplation of nature. [18] The wise man, and the pursuer of wisdom, does stay attached to his body, but with the best part of himself he is elsewhere, and he directs his thoughts toward what is above. Like a man under military oath, he counts this life of his as his term of service; and his character is so shaped that life draws from him neither love nor hatred, and he endures mortal things although he knows greater ones remain. [19] Do you forbid me the study of nature — drag me away from the whole and shut me up in a part? Am I not to ask what the beginnings of all things were? who shaped the world? who sorted out everything that was sunk in a single mass, wrapped up in sluggish matter? Am I not to ask who the craftsman of this universe is? by what plan such vastness came under law and order? who gathered what was scattered, separated what was jumbled, and dealt out distinct faces to things lying in one common shapelessness? from what source so much light is poured out? whether it is fire, or something brighter than fire? [20] Am I not to ask these things? Am I not to know where I came down from? whether I get to see all this once, or must be born again and again? where I am headed from here? what home awaits the soul once released from the laws of human slavery? You bar me from the sky — in other words, you order me to live with my head down. [21] I am greater, and born for greater things, than to be the slave of my body, which I look at as nothing other than a shackle fastened around my freedom. So I throw it in fortune's way as the point where she can spend her attack, and I let no wound pass through it to me. Whatever in me can suffer injury is just this; in this exposed lodging lives a free mind. [22] Never will this flesh drive me to fear, never to any pretense unworthy of a good man; never will I lie for the sake of this scrap of body. When it seems right, I will dissolve my partnership with it; and even now, while we cling together, we will not be partners on equal terms: the mind will draw every right to itself. Contempt for one's own body is freedom guaranteed.
[23] To return to the point: this freedom is much helped by the very inquiry we were just discussing. Everything, after all, consists of matter and god. God governs the things that surround him and follow their ruler and guide. And what makes — which is god — is more powerful and more precious than matter, which is passive under god. [24] The place god occupies in this world is the place the mind occupies in a human being; what matter is there, the body is in us. So let the worse serve the better. Let us be brave against whatever chance brings; let us not tremble at injuries, at wounds, at chains, at poverty. What is death? Either an end or a crossing. I am not afraid to stop — it is the same as never having begun — nor to cross over, because nowhere will I be so cramped. Farewell.