Reflections

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Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Seneca, Moral Letters 66.1


Book 2  

Letter 66: On various aspects of virtue 

I have just seen my former schoolmate Claranus for the first time in many years. You need not wait for me to add that he is an old man; but I assure you that I found him hale in spirit and sturdy, although he is wrestling with a frail and feeble body. 
 
For Nature acted unfairly when she gave him a poor domicile for so rare a soul; or perhaps it was because she wished to prove to us that an absolutely strong and happy mind can lie hidden under any exterior. Be that as it may, Claranus overcomes all these hindrances, and by despising his own body has arrived at a stage where he can despise other things also. The poet who sang 
 
“Worth shows more pleasing in a form that's fair,
 
is, in my opinion, mistaken. For virtue needs nothing to set it off; it is its own great glory, and it hallows the body in which it dwells. 
 
At any rate, I have begun to regard Claranus in a different light; he seems to me handsome, and as well-set-up in body as in mind. A great man can spring from a hovel; so can a beautiful and great soul from an ugly and insignificant body. 
 
For this reason Nature seems to me to breed certain men of this stamp with the idea of proving that virtue springs into birth in any place whatever. Had it been possible for her to produce souls by themselves and naked, she would have done so; as it is, Nature does a still greater thing, for she produces certain men who, though hampered in their bodies, none the less break through the obstruction.
 
I think Claranus has been produced as a pattern, that we might be enabled to understand that the soul is not disfigured by the ugliness of the body, but rather the opposite, that the body is beautified by the comeliness of the soul. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 66 
 
This one of my favorite Letters by Seneca, precisely because it throws a monkey wrench into the workings of everything we are constantly commanded to hold dear. Please forgive me if I dwell upon it for too long. 
 
I don’t know who this Claranus might have been, though I have had the privilege to know some fine folks who rather closely fit his description, and their example was an inspiration for me to reconsider how I chose to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. It has even gradually come to the point where what I find most immediately “attractive” about someone is all within the content of character. 
 
Even as a young pup, my hero in the now long-forgotten sci-fi drama Space: 1999 was Professor Victor Bergman, not one of the square-jawed blokes who had fistfights with the menacing aliens of the week. This wasn’t just because he was intelligent, but also because he was so remarkably patient and kind. 
 
Most of the people I cross paths with, however much they may claim to possess refinement and class, will reduce the value of a person to the appearances of the body. If they happen to praise the powers of the mind, they are interested only in how being clever can get them more gratification, hardly in being reflective and thoughtful. While they don’t necessarily know it, they are the acolytes of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught us that reason should be a slave to the passions. As Plato said, they have flipped themselves upside down. 
 
Take special note, therefore, when you come across the man who is weak in the flesh but mighty in the spirit, for here Nature has chosen to highlight the glory of the virtues by contrasting it to the weakness of matter. It is as if there is a flashing sign pointing to him, reminding us to properly distinguish the greater from the lesser, the divine from the mortal. Without the distraction of a pretty face or a strong arm, the best of human nature, the defining essence, is more readily exposed. 
 
With Seneca, I may at first feel it unfair that a good man should suffer from injury or disease, yet I then realize how his willingness to rise above his fragility is the very opportunity for him to act with greater excellence, and it is the very example that Providence has given me for my own life. Mortality is not an existential threat—it is a challenge to attain a victory of constancy through any and every circumstance. 
 
Just in case I am confused about the true source of human merit, there are people in my life who possess a mark of inner beauty, while completely lacking in any outer adornments. They are the proof of how beauty is fundamentally moral, not physical. Fortune may grant me a healthy body, or she may grant me a diseased one, and neither one will determine whether I choose to act with righteousness or with wickedness. 

—Reflection written in 7/2013 



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