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1. It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them. We can seize hold even of Virtue in such a way that our action makes her vicious if we clasp her in too harsh and too violent an embrace. Those who say that Virtue knows no excess (since she is no longer Virtue if there is excess within her) are merely playing with words.
Insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus iniqui,
Ultra quam satis est virtutem si petat ipsam
[The name of 'insane' is borne by the Sage and the name of 'unjust' is borne by the Just, if in their strivings after Virtue herself they go beyond what is sufficient.]
That is a subtle observation on the part of philosophy: you can both love virtue too much and behave with excess in an action which itself is just. The Voice of God adapts itself fittingly to that bias: 'Be not more wise than it behoveth, but be ye soberly wise.'
2. I have seen one of our great noblemen harm the reputation of his religion by showing himself religious beyond any example of men of his rank.
3. I like natures which are temperate and moderate. Even when an immoderate zeal for the good does not offend me it still stuns me and makes it difficult for me to give it a Christian name. Neither Pausanias' mother (who made the first accusation against her son and who brought the first stone to wall him up for his death) nor Posthumius (the Dictator who had his own son put to death because he had been carried away by youthful ardour and had fought - successfully - slightly ahead of his unit) seem 'just' to me: they seem odd.
I neither like to advise nor to imitate a virtue so savage and so costly: the archer who shoots beyond his target misses it just as much as the one who falls short; my eyes trouble me as much when I suddenly come up into a strong light as when I plunge into darkness.
4. Callicles says in Plato
that, at its extremes, philosophy is harmful; he advises us not to go more deeply into it than the limits of what is profitable: taken in moderation philosophy is pleasant and useful, but it can eventually lead to a man's becoming vicious and savage, contemptuous of religion and of the accepted laws, an enemy of social intercourse, an enemy of our human pleasures, useless at governing cities, at helping others or even at helping himself - a man whose ears you could box with impunity. What he says is true, for in its excesses philosophy enslaves our native freedom and with untimely subtleties makes us stray from that beautiful and easy path that Nature has traced for us.
5. The affection which we bear towards our wives is entirely legitimate: yet Theology nevertheless puts reins on it and restrains it. Among the reasons which Saint Thomas Aquinas [1] cites in condemnation of marriages between relatives who are within the forbidden affinities I think I once read the following: There is a risk that the love felt for such a wife might be immoderate; for if the marital affection between them is full and entire (as it ought to be) and then you add on to it the further affection proper among kinsfolk, there is no doubt that such an over-measure would ravish such a husband beyond the limits of reason.
6. Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as Theology and philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction. Only mere beginners criticize their freedom to do so: they are like the kind of women whose organs are as accessible as you wish for copulation but who are too bashful to show them to the doctor. On behalf of these sciences I therefore want to teach husbands the following - if, that is, there are any who are still too eager: even those very pleasures which they enjoy when lying with their wives are reproved if not kept within moderation; you can fall into licence and excess in this as in matters unlawful. All those shameless caresses which our first ardour suggests to us in our sex-play are not only unbecoming to our wives but harmful to them when practised on them. At least let them learn shamelessness from some other hand! They are always wide enough awake when we need them. Where this is concerned what I have taught has been natural and uncomplicated.
7. Marriage is a bond both religious and devout: that is why the pleasure we derive from it must be serious, restrained and intermingled with some gravity; its sensuousness should be somewhat wise and dutiful. Its chief end is procreation, so there are those who doubt whether it is right to seek intercourse when we have no hope of conception, as when the woman is pregnant or too old. For Plato that constitutes a kind of homicide. There are whole peoples, including the Mahometans, who abominate intercourse with women who are pregnant, and others still during monthly periods. Zenobia admitted her husband for a single discharge; once that was over she let him run wild throughout her pregnancy, giving him permission to begin again only once it was over. There was a fine and noble-hearted marriage for you!
8. It was from some yearning sex-starved poet that Plato borrowed his story about Jupiter's making such heated advances to his wife one day that he could not wait for her to lie on the bed but tumbled her on the floor, forgetting the great and important decisions which he had just reached with the other gods in his celestial Court and boasting that he had enjoyed it as much as when, hidden from her parents, he had first taken her maidenhead.
9. The kings of Persia did invite their wives as guests to their festivities, but once the wine had seriously inflamed them so that they had to let their lust gallop free, they packed them off to their quarters so as not to make them accomplices of their immoderate appetites, sending instead for other women whom they were not bound to respect.
10. It is not every pleasure or favour that is well lodged in people of every sort. Epaminondas had a dissolute boy put in prison: Pelopidas, for his own purposes, begged for his freedom; Epaminondas refused but granted it to one of his whores who also begged for it, saying that it was a favour due to a mistress but not to a captain. Sophocles, when a Praetor with Pericles, happened to see a handsome youth go by: 'What a handsome boy,' said he to Pericles. 'That', said Pericles, 'would be all right coming from anyone but a Praetor, who must not only have pure hands but pure eyes.'
11. When the wife of the Emperor Aelius Verus complained of his permitting himself affairs with other women, he replied that he acted thus for reasons of conscience, marriage being a term of honour and dignity not of wanton and lascivious lust. And our old Church authors make honourable mention of a wife who rejected her husband since she had no wish to be a partner to his lascivious and immoderate embraces.
12. In short there is no pleasure, however proper, which does not become a matter of reproach when excessive and intemperate.
13. But, seriously though, is not Man a wretched creature? Because of his natural attributes he is hardly able to taste one single pleasure pure and entire: yet he has to go and curtail even that by arguments; he is not wretched enough until he has increased his wretchedness by art and assiduity.
Fortunae miseras auximus arte vias.
[The wretched paths of Fortune we make worse by art.]
14. Human wisdom is stupidly clever when used to diminish the number and sweetness of such pleasures as do belong to us, just as she employs her arts with diligence and fitness when she brings comb and cosmetics to our ills and makes us feel them less. If I had founded a school of philosophy I would have taken another route - a more natural one, that is to say a true, convenient and inviolate one; and I might have made myself strong enough to know when to stop.
15. Consider the fact that those physicians of our souls and bodies, as though plotting together, can find no other way to cure us and no other remedy for our illnesses of soul and body than by torment, pain and tribulation. Vigils, fasting, hair-shirts and banishments to distant solitary places, endless imprisonments, scourges and other sufferings have been brought in to that end: but only on condition that the suffering is real and should cause bitter pain, and that there should not befall what happened to a man called Gallio who was banished to the island of Lesbos: Rome was told that he was enjoying himself there and that what had been inflicted as a punishment was turning into a pleasure, at which he was ordered back to wife and home and commanded to stay put, so as to adapt the punishment to his real feelings.
For if a man's health and happiness were made keener by fasting, or if he found fish more tasty than meat, it would cease to be a salutary prescription: just as drugs prescribed by the other kind of doctor have no effect on anyone who swallowed them with pleasure and enjoyment. The bitter taste and the hardship are attributes which make them work. A constitution which could regularly stand rhubarb would spoil its efficacy: to cure our stomachs it must be something which hurts it: and here the usual axiom that 'contraries cure contraries' breaks down; for in this case illness cures illness.
16. This notion is somewhat like that other very ancient one which was universally embraced by all religions and which leads us to think that we can please Heaven and Nature by our murders and our massacres.
17. Even in our fathers' time Amurath, when he conquered the Isthmus, sacrificed six hundred Greek youths for the soul of his father, so that their blood might serve as a propitiation, expiating the sins of that dead man.
And in those new lands discovered in our own time, lands pure and virgin compared with ours, the practice is accepted virtually everywhere: all their idols are slaked with human blood, not without various examples of dreadful cruelty. Men are burned alive; when halfroasted they are withdrawn from the fire so that their hearts and entrails can be plucked out; others, even women, are flayed alive: their skin, all bloody, serves as a cloak to mask others; and there are no less examples of constancy and determination. For those wretches who are to be immolated, old men, women and children, beg for alms a few days beforehand as offertories at their sacrifice, and present themselves to the slaughter singing and dancing with the congregation. The ambassadors from the King of Mexico, to make Fernando Cortez realize the greatness of their master, first told him that he had thirty vassal-lords, each one of whom could muster a hundred thousand fighting men, and that he dwelt in the strongest fairest city under Heaven; they then added that he had fifty thousand men sacrificed to the gods every year. It is truly said that he cultivated war with some great neighbouring peoples not merely to train the youth of his country but chiefly to furnish prisoners of war for his sacrifices. In another place there was a town where they welcomed Cortez by sacrificing fifty men at the same time. And I will relate one more account: when Cortez had conquered some of these peoples they sent messengers to find out about him and to seek his friendship. They offered him three sorts of gifts in this wise: 'Lord, here are five slaves; if thou art a fierce god who feedest on flesh and blood, eat them and we shall bring thee more. If thou art a kindly god, here are feathers and incense; if thou art human, accept these birds and these fruits.'
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, II a , II ac , 154, art. 9.