The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have willed ; to have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste ; but the things we seek tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance, health and freedom from pain ; which of these has any great charm ? As long as we possess them, we set no store upon them.

Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to happiness, which when lacking is desired because of the presence of an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.

Such things can never make part of our final object : our Term must be such that though these pleasanter conditions be absent and their contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.

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Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled by the man established in happiness ?

Here is our answer : —

These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle towards the Sage’s felicity : but they do serve towards the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being or complicates the Term : it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side.

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In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the sUghtest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or falling from day to day ; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No : a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession of the Term.

But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances !

What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to anything below ?

If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter — kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork — how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland ? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking.

n though all be his own handiwork — how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland ? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or . . . Zeus ... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.

But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice ?

Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars ?

But if he go unburied ?

Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot.

But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument ?

The littleness of it !

But if he falls into his enemies’ hands, into prison ?

There is always the way towards escape, if none towards well-being.

But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters dragged away to captivity ?

What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong ? Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that nothing of all this could happen ? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that

I. 4. 8]

HAPPINESS

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it is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur ? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease ; so, too, when the evil has come about.

He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings these things to pass and man must bow the head.

Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage ; and those that suffer have their freedom in their hands : if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real grievance, or they stay against reason, when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of his neighbours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil : his state cannot hang upon the fortunes good or bad of any other men.

8.

As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well as he can ; if they overpass his endurance they will carry him off.

And so in all his pain he asks no pity : there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.

rpass his endurance they will carry him off.

And so in all his pain he asks no pity : there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.

But what if he be put beyond himself ? What if pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but kills ? Well, when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done ; he retains his freedom of action.

Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man ; neither ordinary experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.

And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they come : this is not concern for others’ welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our imperfection : we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble over what perhaps may be.

Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over mis-

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fortune to our household must learn that this is not so with all, and that, precisely, it is virtue’s use to raise the general level of nature towards the better and finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.

We cannot be indolent ; this is an arena for the powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of fortune, and knowing that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing dreadful, nursery terrors.

So, the Sage would have desired misfortune ?

It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable soul.

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But when he is out of himself, reason quenched by sickness or by magic arts ?

If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not equally remain happy ? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep ; no one counts up that time and so denies that he has been happy all his life.

If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the Sage : but we do suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the state of felicity.