The Encheiridion of Epictetus/Preface
PREFACE.
But for the zeal and ability of one disciple, we should not now possess any trustworthy account of the philosophy of Epictetus. For, like many other sages, he wrote nothing; and for us he would now be little more than a name, had not Arrian, the future historian of Alexander, taken down a very full record of the oral teaching which he had from Epictetus' own lips in Nicopolis. This record he afterwards published in eight books (of which we now possess four), called the Discourses of Epictetus, and out of these he drew most of the materials for compiling the little work, the Encheiridion, of which I now offer a translation.[1] Arrian also wrote a Life of Epictetus, now unfortunately lost. The few facts about him which we know with any approach to certainty are-that he was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia; that he became (how is unknown) slave to Epaphroditus, a freedman and favourite of Nero; that while in his master's service he attended the philosophic lectures[2] of a Stoic, C. Musonius Rufus; that he somehow obtained his freedom, and was banished from Rome about the year 90 A.D., when the tyrant Domitian, by a public edict, 'cleared Rome of what most shamed him,' the teachers of philosophy; that he then settled in Nicopolis, a city of Epirus, where he taught publicly for many years. It is said that Epaphroditus treated him with much cruelty, and on one occasion even broke his leg, perhaps to see whether his philosophic slave was making satisfactory progress in Stoicism under C. Musonius Rufus. But this story rests on no good authority, and is probably a mere legend which grew up to account for the undoubted fact that Epictetus was in some way crippled or deformed. Simplicius tells us he was so from an early age. He never married; it is said, however, that he adopted and brought up a child whom a friend of his, led by a sense of the inconvenience of a large family, was about to expose: a practice not condemned in those days. The date of his death we cannot determine, but there is reason to believe that he lived to a venerable age.
Such is about all we know of the history of Epictetus. And it is much to be regretted that we have no fuller means of realising to ourselves somewhat of his outward life, appearance, manners, studies—all now shrouded in that veil which hides from us all but the outline of so many distinguished figures. For this crippled slave of Hierapolis had undoubtedly a brightness and energy of intellect, a buoyancy of spirit, an instinctive sense of what is excellent in action, an instinctive aversion for all facile and unreal thinking such as few of the world's teachers before or after him have possessed. He has the rare and important characteristic that he deserves to be read as much for what is not in him as for what is. If, as seems clear, man can never arrive at a satisfactory relation towards the problems and mysteries of life except by following out the lines of Greek thought with its resolute logic combined with reverence for that which gives the data for logic—human experience, then Epictetus ought to be held of more account than he has ever yet been, even though there were periods when he was far more fully appreciated than he is now. For though the final triumph of Hellenism, the union of sane practice with sound theory which it was the mission of Hellenism to bring about, can hardly be said to be achieved in Epictetus, yet it is at least indicated there, and the promise of it made clearly visible to discerning eyes. He did not take formal and public possession of the citadel, but he showed for the first time how it was to be won.
When Arrian was putting forth his edition of the Discourses, he wrote a preface to the work in the form of a letter to a friend, Lucius Gellius, which indirectly throws some light on the origin of the Encheiridion. On account of its general interest for readers of Epictetus, I here translate it in full:—
The style of the Discourses answers very well to the above account of their origin and purpose. They are brightly and vividly written, containing passages of great interest, but are, as a whole, wanting in unity and coherent development. Moreover, there is a great deal of this unsystematic record of Epictetus' daily conversation. The eight books must have made up a volume sufficiently bulky and expensive to prevent the slave-philosopher from being very widely read among the class for whom his teaching was intended. And it is particularly important to notice that it was by no means intended for aristocratic amateurs in Stoicism, but for men subject every day to the stress of life,[3] workers, to whom a philosopher must speak clearly and briefly if he would have a chance of being listened to. It seems likely, then, that it was considerations such as these which induced Arrian to put together the leading principles of his master's teaching in that inestimable little work known as the Encheiridion, or Handbook, of Epictetus.
The result has shown how wisely Arrian judged of the means necessary to make Epictetus' influence widely felt, and to give him a permanent hold upon the human mind. For the Encheiridion, as the saying is, took; offering, as it did, an easy means of approach to the mind of a great thinker and an excellent subject for commentators and translators who wished to spread his views.[4] With its richness in illustration and in practical application, together with its unfailing grasp of principles, it has the merits at once of an abstract, and of a detailed work, and may well be regarded as holding a central position with respect to everything else that goes under the name of Epictetus. The reasons for which Arrian first produced the Encheiridion are those which have induced me to bring out this translation of it. There is no other English translation of it at present in print in a separate form, although the late Mr. Long translated it in the Bohn Series, where it appears bound up with the Discourses and Fragments. Reading it for the first time a year ago, it appeared to me that it ought to exist in English in the form which its name denotes—that of a Handbook, and that in this form it might chance to reach and to serve many who are no students of philosophy, who would never care to purchase Epictetus in his entirety, but who might be glad, nevertheless, to have a guide to plain living and high thinking which can find room in a traveller's knapsack or a sailor's chest.
The value of the Encheiridion, like that of every book which contains a revelation and a doctrine, must be tested, to a large extent at least, by the proveable reality of the facts which it declares and on which it builds. If these facts, in the case of Stoicism, are, as many seem to think, mere philosophic fancies, incapable of being widely verified in common experience, then let not all the lives which it has influenced and ennobled persuade us to take Stoicism, as a system, into any serious consideration. But is this so? or is not rather the main thesis of Stoicism a genuine and profound discovery of capacities which really exist in average humanity, and of paths which it can naturally and happily follow?
Without here noticing what is limited or mistaken in the teaching of the Encheiridion, let me devote a few pages towards offering a mere suggestion of its basis and drift, as they appear to me.
In the first place it must be understood that Epictetus is not a philosopher in the sense in which that word is generally used now. About the origins and destinies of things he is strictly silent, no shadow of an explanation of any metaphysical problem is to be found in him. The end of his teaching is simply to take the sting from human misery by showing that man is not, as was believed, the plaything of Fortune—that there is a way in which he can set his well-being beyond the reach of all forces which he cannot control. Stoicism, as represented by Epictetus, makes no attempt. to transcend the limits of what can be actually felt, now and here. It rests upon a profound appreciation of the distinction between what we may call a man's real and permanent, and his transitory or phantasmal self. The first man who was ever consciously a Stoic (there have been and are many unconscious ones) was he who first looked upon the world and his own nature, and observed that the things wherein he was subject to fatality and chance, which he was unable to order at his own will, were just those which either did not affect him, his real self, at all; or affected him only as he desired they should. The question, then, about Stoicism, is this, Is this distinction between the real and phantasmal self a valid one—is it founded upon natural truth? Now, let no friend of the Association philosophy imagine that in this 'real self' of Epictetus he is being confronted with his ancient enemy, the Ego. To say that there is a real self and that there is a phantasmal self need imply no more than this—that among all the things which give pleasure there are some which afford a deeper, fuller, more permanent enjoyment than others; an enjoyment of such a kind that he who has felt it knows it to be more worth having than anything else in the world. The real self, then, is simply the soul delighting in these things, and to pursue them is said to be, in the words of the old, yet never outworn formula, 'to live according to Nature'—to follow the course suggested to the conscious mind by experience (its own or others') of the facts of life. And what does this experience tell us? Universally it tells us that in Righteousness and Love lie the paths of our peace. That this is so every man must verify for himself. 'The gods' with Epictetus are the sources of this law, and, so far as explicit statement goes, they are little more.
Now, keeping this notion of the real self before us, let us turn to Epictetus and see how he applies it. 'Of things that exist,' he says, 'some depend upon ourselves (ἔστιν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν), others do not depend upon ourselves.' That is to say, some things centre upon the real self, are within its domain and power, and have their existence through it; while others are independent of it, are outside the sphere of its action, as it is outside the sphere of theirs. What, then, are the former things? 'Opinions and impulses, desires and aversions'—briefly, that which a man does as opposed to that which he suffers. 'And these things,' he adds, 'are, in their nature, free, not liable to forbiddance or embarrassment.' So that Epictetus starts with announcing that the business and concern of the real self is with matters absolutely subject to its own control, absolutely uninfluenced by external chance or change. How important this announcement is will only appear by meditation and realisation: that it is true there can be no doubt—there is nothing essentially good for us which we cannot have if we only desire it strongly enough.
Again, in Ench. i. ε he teaches that when we are tried by misfortune we should never let our suffering overwhelm the sense of inward mastery and freedom expressed in the thought, 'It is nothing to me'—it has no power to close the sources of true happiness, the happiness which satisfies the real self, against me.
And, again, in Ench. xliv., one man is said to be superior to another, not for his possessions or for his talents, but (since you are not wealth, you are not language) for the predominance in him of his real self, for his hold of such things as truth, soberness, justice, love of God and man.
Such ideas as these seem, when their bearing on practice is first realized, so profoundly discrepant with human life as it is, that most people are inclined to regard them, though not without admiration, as being merely unpractical and fantastic. But, apart from the fact that this discrepancy is probably far less great than is generally supposed (many persons, especially in great crises, showing themselves true Stoics who might be incapable of reading a chapter of Epictetus with sympathy), it must be remembered that what I have called the 'discovery' of Stoicism is a discovery rather of capacities than of actualities; of capacities as yet undeveloped, but which it is for man's good to develop; which must indeed sooner or later be developed, on the principle that the growth of the human spirit will follow the line of least resistance. So when Epictetus declares that the things wherein we are subject to powers outside of ourselves and uncontrollable by our will are not matters of vital concern to us, he does not mean to say that the majority of mankind do not feel themselves vitally and almost exclusively concerned in those very things. He merely asserts that to lose this overpowering concern in things beyond our control is possible to human nature, and is for our good; and this being so, the fact that certain men have realised this possibility in their lives and proclaimed it to the world cannot but make it easier for other men to realise it also.
But while to some minds the teaching of the Encheiridion might present itself as unpractical, to others it might seem to be quite sufficiently practised already. For Stoicism is often taken to be merely a synonym for intellectual self-sufficiency and heartlessness, for scorn of human affection and an ascetic disregard of at any rate the material welfare of others as well as of oneself. It is no answer to this accusation to point out passages in Epictetus (such as Ench. xxx. xxxii. xliii.; Frag. ii. xvii.), which are full of a quite different spirit; they would only prove that the philosopher may have been better than his creed. But the creed itself is a more profound and a more expansive one than is commonly supposed; for, its fundamental principle being merely to place Good and Ill in the things dependent on the will, it leaves room for any doctrine as to right living which can establish itself upon this basis. Thus it leaves room for asceticism, or for indifferentism; and many Stoics were, as a matter of fact, ascetics or indifferentists. But it leaves room also for a view of life very different from these, a view entirely opposed to the doctrine that a man should aim at insulating himself in the world by deadening his mind, as far as possible, to the attractions and impressions of external things. In this view the pleasures of the senses and affections are regarded as energies of the soul which supply just as needful and just as worthy a part of our total humanity as, for instance, moral conscientiousness and religious adoration. And this is not a lowering of things deemed high; it is a raising of things which too many deem common and unclean. 'I make holy,' says Walt Whitman, 'whatever I touch, or am touch'd from.' Only, in order that the things which are called secular, and which it is often thought right to despise or dread, may be discerned in this their true character, they must be seen in the light of the ever-present thought of unity; and Whitman's saying must be borne mind—
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete;
I swear the earth shall remain jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
And in order to be 'complete,' be it remembered, it may often be necessary for us to sacrifice a gratification to a duty, while to sacrifice a duty to a gratification is quite another matter. For to do the duty at the expense of the gratification leaves, so far, our capacity for the gratification just where it was; while to indulge a gratification at the expense of a duty undoubtedly injures our capacity for duty in general, and probably, in the end, for gratification also.
This view, I say, accords with Stoicism, for as long as we have any consciousness at all we are being impressed in some way or other through the senses and affections, and to use the pleasures of them with the mingled freedom and reverence only known to those whom all things have power to penetrate with a sense of the divine is not less satisfying to the real self than to deal patiently and nobly with their pains—'despising not the chastening of the Eternal.' It accords with Stoicism; but whether it accords with Epictetus is a different question, Asceticism was certainly a cachet of eminence among Stoics, and Epictetus says much that appears to favour it. 'In things that concern the body,' he says, 'you must accept only what is absolutely needful—all that makes for show and luxury you must utterly proscribe' (Ench. xxxiii. η). And, again, in Ench. xxxix. he makes the needs of the body the standard of gain, as the foot is for the shoe. And in various other places (as Ench. xxxiv.) he seems to advise the abstention from pleasure simply as pleasure. Yet to condemn the enjoyments of the senses in this strenuous way, to insist so emphatically upon the necessity of living in an environment of a certain special character, whether that character be one of enjoyment or of hardship, seems to me most contradictory to the spirit and tendency of the Encheiridion, as expressed, for instance, in chapter xli. There is no such thing as true self-mastery in one who is afraid of pleasure. There is a good deal of evidence, too, in the Discourses, that Epictetus cared for the outward seemliness of life; on one occasion he even said (of a pupil who came to him in foul and disordered garments) that when a man had no feeling for external beauty there was little chance of his being able to rouse him to a sense of the spiritually beautiful. Briefly, then, I incline to think that the doctrine which I put forward as that opposed to the ascetic doctrine is the one which Epictetus' works imply, and are likely, on the whole, to foster; and that contradictions to that doctrine which may appear in them are to be explained in three ways, by supposing: 1. That Arrian did not fully grasp or accurately report his master's views on this subject. 2. That Epictetus, speaking of what was needful and proper for the body, had in his mind an ideal of the σεμνὸν καὶ πρέπον such as would naturally occur to a Greek, and did not judge by the merely materialistic standard to which alone, to us, his words seem applicable. 3. That though he may not have condemned the pleasures of the senses in themselves, he advised abstinence, ἄσκησις, especially in one who is only 'making advance,' as a means of helping him to realise the fact that, if occasion should require, he could cheerfully do without them. So, too, a little consideration will clear away the impression which chapters iii., xxvi., &c, of the Encheiridion might leave on the mind—the impression, namely, that Epictetus regarded the natural affections and the griefs which inevitably accompany them as being unworthy of a philosopher. He is so full of the conception that the wise man, by the aid of philosophy, may reap benefit from every experience in life, that I do not think he could have meant to present it, in the cases where we most need its aid, as a mere anodyne. For an anodyne is of no positive benefit in itself, being merely the annihilation of experience; while to master the pain, to recognise that through it we are more fitted to be helpful, to let it strengthen and deepen our sense of the reality of things, is to have made it a blessing. But that it should be so it is needful to have felt it as a pain. Now, note that Epictetus does not say, 'If your wife or child should die, you are not to be grieved.' He says 'you are not to be confounded,' ταρασσόμενος. There is a kind of grief (who has not seen it?) which is really a self-indulgence, which is mingled with something like pride in its own intensity and absorbingness, and in the paralysis and confusion it causes. This is barren grief, the grief which Epictetus scorned. But there is another grief, which I think he was far from scorning, in which suffering is not allowed to isolate us from the living activities around us, in which it is possible to say with real and full assent, 'Whatever harmonises well with thee, O universe, harmonises well with me.'[5] That this feeling can hardly arise except when the love of the individual is embraced in the vaster love of the All, of God, we may readily admit. For the pantheistic faith, giving full place to such a feeling, which was actually held by most of the old Stoics, is but the natural outgrowth of their analysis of our daily experience.
Here we touch upon greater issues than those which concern the mere safe-conduct of our moral life. But, in this place at least, these issues shall be pursued no further. Everywhere in Epictetus his faith in transcendental religion may be discerned, but that religion is never formulated; it exists as in a state of solution; and if it should ever be desirable to crystallise it into a system, a preface to the Encheiridion is not the place for such an attempt. Here, then, on the threshold, as it were, of the Real World, I take leave of all who may have gone thus far with me, hoping that the words which follow may do that which Arrian said, as the words of a philosopher, they ought to do—stir the minds of some towards the best things; knowing, too, how much it may be my own fault if they have not this effect.
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑ Besides the Encheiridion and the Discourses we have also of Epictetus a large number of sayings and maxims, preserved for us in certain philosophic anthologies compiled by monks in the sixth to the ninth centuries. A selection from these will be found translated in this book at the end of the Encheiridion.
- ↑ It appears to have been considered fashionable, among Roman nobles of the time, to possess philosophers and men of culture as slaves. A curious modern illustration of this whim will be found in About Some Fellows, by an Eton Boy, p. 179.
- ↑ Epictetus never will be a favourite author with those who take a mere literary pleasure in hearing fine things finely said about morality and inward freedom. I have noticed that in Montaigne (who has Seneca always on his lips) there are very few references to Marcus Aurelius, and I think only one to Epictetus (Ench. vi.).
- ↑ One remarkable feature of its history is the exhaustive Commentary written on it by Simplicius in the sixth century, wherein chapter after chapter of the Encheiridion is dissected, discussed, and its lessons of edification drawn out with a rather unprofitable laboriousness. Simplicius was a pagan; but Christians, too, paid honour to this 'king of old philosophy.' Adaptations of the Encheiridion were made especially for their use in which the name 'Socrates' in Ench. li. γ was changed to 'Paul.'
- ↑ Marcus Aurelius, Mr. Long's translation.