. . . For every living creature has a
natural tendency to avoid and shun what seems harmful and all that causes it,
and to pursue and admire what is helpful and all that causes it.
It is not possible then for one who thinks he
is harmed to take pleasure in what he thinks is the author of the harm, any
more than to take pleasure in the harm itself.
That is why a father is reviled by his
son, when he does not give his son a share of what the son regards as good
things; thus Polynices and Eteocles were set at enmity with one another by
thinking that a king's throne was a good thing.
That is why the farmer, and the sailor,
and the merchant, and those who lose wife or children revile the gods. For
men's religion is bound up with their interest.
Therefore he who makes it his concern
rightly to direct his will to get and his will to avoid, is thereby making
piety his concern.
But it is proper on each occasion to
make libation and sacrifice and to offer first fruits according to the custom
of our fathers, with purity and not in slovenly or careless fashion, without
meanness and without extravagance.
—Epictetus,
The Handbook, Chapter 31 (tr
Matheson)
When
brothers fight over an inheritance, they are no longer acting as brothers. They
demand what was never theirs.
We will
all ask for what we think is good for us, and we will all ask to be relieved of
what we think is bad for us. Whenever our desires and aversions overlap, we
have the root of all conflict. Our usual solution, of course, is to fight it
out, and to force our wants and fears upon others. If we don’t win, we sulk and
complain.
The
Stoic has a very different solution. Instead of insisting upon what I want, I
can also simply change what I want. This isn’t a matter of limiting myself at
all, but a matter of freeing myself of all the things in life that are
completely unnecessary. This is only possible when I recognize what is rightly
in my own realm, and what is rightly in the realm of others.
I will
only blame God, and therefore be impious, when I think that God has taken
something from me that I sincerely believe to be my own. The usual train of
thought goes something like this:
I want
this, but I don’t have it. Since God supposedly rules all things, it must be
His job to give to me. He hasn’t given it to me. God is therefore unjust to me.
I also therefore refuse to acknowledge Him.
Now how
much does this sound like the bickering of spoiled children or the musings of jilted
lovers?
This
whole mess would be easily resolved if I properly understood what I should
really want, and what the world really needs to give me. My own bubble of power
grows bigger when I arrogantly insist on my way, and God’s bubble grows smaller,
but it’s quite funny how I still blame God.
I
regularly keep in mind that last recorded words of John the Baptist:
He must increase, as I must
decrease.
We argue
far too often about our own particular image of the Divine, which isn’t about
God at all, but all about us. We love to relativize the Absolute. That is in
itself a symptom of expanding our own bubbles, our arrogant spheres of
influence.
Piety
isn’t about how you cut your hair, or what books you have read, which direction
of the compass you pray toward, or whether or not you wear a doily on your
head. It begins only with reverence and humility. This comes from recognizing
that we are a part of the Universe, and not the whole sum of it.
An old
Jesuit once put it to me this way: “Be proud to be yourself, and bow to
everything else.”
Written in 3/1996
Image: Leo Von Klenze, Akropolis (1846)
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