The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

according to Pythagoras, upon virtue and upon truth." The virtue, that he acquires by purification, tempers and directs the passions; the truth, which he attains by his union with the Being of beings, dissipates the darkness with which his intelligence is obsessed; and both of them, acting jointly in him, give him the divine form, according as he is disposed to receive it, and guide him to supreme felicity.* But how difficult to obtain this desired goal !

J2. For few know happiness: playthings of the passions. Hither, thither tossed by adverse waves. Upon a shoreless sea, they blinded roll. Unable to resist or to the tempest yield.

Lysis shows in these lines what are the greatest obstacles to the happiness of man. They are the passions: not the passions in themselves, but the evil effects that they produce by the disordered movement that the understanding allows them to take. It is to this that the attention must be directed so that one should not fall into the error of the Stoics. Pythagoras, as I have said, did not command his disciples to destroy their passions, but to moderate their ardour, and to guide them well. "The passions, " said this philosopher, "are given to be aids to reason; it is necessary that they be its servants and not its masters. " This is a truth that the Platonists and even the Peripatetics have recognized, by the evidence of Hierocles." Thus Pythagoras regarded the passions as instruments of which the understanding makes use in raising the intellectual edifice. A man utterly deprived of them would resemble a mass inert and inamovable in the course of life; it is true that he might be able not to become depraved, but then he could not enjoy his noblest advantage, which is perfectibility. Reason is established in the understanding to hold sway over the passions; it must o Hi^rol., In Pram. * Ibid. « Ut suprd,, v. lo et 1 1.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 261

command them with absolute sovereignty, and make them tend towards the end that wisdom indicates.

If it shotild not recognize the laws that intelligence gives it, and if, presimiptuously, it wishes, instead of acting according to given principles, to lay down principles itself, it falls into excess, and makes man superstitious or skeptic, fanatic or atheist; if, on the contrary, it receives laws from the passions that it ought to rule, and if weak it allows itself to be subjugated by them, it falls into error and renders man stupid or mad, brutish in vice, or audacious in crime.

There are no true reasonings except those admitted by wisdom; the false reasonings must be considered as the cries of an insensate soul, given over to the movements of an anarchical reason which the passions confuse and blind."