Epictetus, The Handbook 36: Prophecy and Trembling

When you make use of prophecy remember that while you know not what the issue will be, but are come to learn it from the prophet, you do know before you come what manner of thing it is, if you are really a philosopher.

For if the event is not in our control, it cannot be either good or evil. Therefore do not bring with you to the prophet the will to get or the will to avoid, and do not approach him with trembling, but with your mind made up, that the whole issue is indifferent and does not affect you and that, whatever it be, it will be in your power to make good use of it, and no one shall hinder this.

With confidence then approach the gods as counselors, and further, when the counsel is given you, remember whose counsel it is, and whom you will be disregarding if you disobey. And consult the oracle, as Socrates thought men should, only when the whole question turns upon the issue of events, and neither reason nor any art of man provides opportunities for discovering what lies before you.

Therefore, when it is your duty to risk your life with friend or country, do not ask the oracle whether you should risk your life. For if the prophet warns you that the sacrifice is unfavorable, though it is plain that this means death or exile or injury to some part of your body, yet reason requires that even at this cost you must stand by your friend and share your country's danger.

Wherefore pay heed to the greater prophet, Pythian Apollo, who cast out of his temple the man who did not help his friend when he was being killed.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 32 (tr Matheson)

We might think we are now too scientific to appeal to a prophet. Fine, let us appeal to a financial advisor, a political consultant, a legal counselor, a marketing guru, or a statistician.  It’s quite the same idea, but just a different setting.

I am told that fortune-tellers will always make their predictions so vague that anything could fit into them, and that analysts are so dodgy that anything will make them a profit. I will hardly judge if anyone truly knows the future.

Let us assume, however, that a prophet or an analyst, like Isaac Asimov’s “psychohistorian” in the Foundation novels, can tell us what will be. We think this would make all the difference in our lives. I think Epictetus is telling us that it should make no difference at all.

What matters, of course, isn’t what happens, could happen, or even inevitably will happen. What matters is what I will choose to do with what happens, now or in the future. My circumstances, past, present, or future, are entirely indifferent. My choices about them will be what make all the difference.

I knew a fellow in middle school, and I think of him with compassion now, because I suspect he was quite troubled, who one day brought in a whole series of old black-and-white pictures depicting the Chinese practice of Lingchi, the Death of a Thousand Cuts. They showed a poor fellow being slowly dismembered as a form of punishment and execution, one part of his body after another being sliced away.

I was horrified, and I still suffer nightmares from it, not because I am squeamish, but because all I could think about was the pain this man must have suffered before he died, not just of the body, but also in his heart and mind.

I know I’m an odd fellow, but I thought about how I would feel if I were ever to suffer such a horror. They say that kindly people would slip huge doses of opium to the victim, or that a merciful executioner might stab the condemned in the heart before the dismemberment, but that hardly makes it any better.

My father owned a wonderful set of German books about World War II, complete with striking photographs I have never seen anywhere else. One photo always stood out to me. Crystal clear, it shows a young German soldier, running across a field somewhere on the Eastern Front, at the exact moment he is shot. There is a combination of shock and pain on his face.

He was barely a grown man. Here was one man among many millions, but he was still a man. He had parents who surely loved him as they raised him, he surely had friends, perhaps a girl back home. And here he was, dying in a foreign land, all alone, well before his expected time.

That photograph would make me cry, and I think of it whenever I get too bellicose, or think that any man should have to die for those powers and ideologies that care nothing for him.

I share these memories with myself not to disturb, but to enlighten. What if I knew I would suffer the agony of that poor Chinese man? What if I knew I would die in a forgotten field like that German soldier? I don’t mean a hunch, or an inkling, but let’s say I knew it with certainty. How would this change my life?

The weak man in me, the one who measures his life by all the externals, shrinks in terror. The little bit of a Stoic in me, that bit I wish to nourish, shrugs his shoulders. I will only care about when, or how I suffer, or when and how I die, if I measure my life in all the wrong ways.

Give me more or less time, more of less conveniences, more or less pleasure and pain, and I should still say that any and all of it is just there to give me a chance to live well. If I knew that last scene, however gruesome, it should not discourage me, but only encourage me to get it right.

One need not be a Christian to understand how Jesus must have felt at Gethsemane. Please take it all away, but if that can’t be so, I will face this with all that is within my power. There is nothing greater than a man who will give of himself completely to love his friends.

Written in 5/1999