Moral Letters Vol II by Seneca

Moral Letters Vol II continues Seneca's correspondence with his friend Lucilius, and it is where he makes his most sustained case for a claim that sounds strange on first hearing: all virtues, and all the goods that come from them, are equal. A soldier who dies bravely and a philosopher who dies at peace in his bed have achieved the same good. This is not a book of comfortable advice. It is Seneca working out, letter by letter, what follows if only the honorable is good.

The popular misreading of Seneca is that he is a dispenser of consoling maxims, a man who tells you to relax and take the long view. This volume corrects that image directly. Seneca insists that ease is not what makes a good desirable, and he goes further than most Stoics in saying that hardship can make a good more praiseworthy, not less. He tells Lucilius plainly that he would rather have the harsh goods than the mild ones, because "it is more of an accomplishment to break one's way through difficulties than to keep joy within bounds" (Moral Letters 66.49).

The argument runs through Letter 66, addressed after a visit from Seneca's old friend Claranus, a man weak and misshapen in body but strong in mind. From this occasion Seneca builds the claim that a great soul can spring from an ugly and insignificant body (Moral Letters 66.3), and that virtue is untouched by the material it happens to work with. Joy and the brave endurance of torture are, on this view, equal goods, because both express the same greatness of soul, relaxed in one case and braced for action in the other (Moral Letters 66.12). The reasoning is geometric: reason is equal to reason as one straight line to another, so virtue is equal to virtue, since virtue is nothing else than right reason (Moral Letters 66.32). And because virtue is already superlatively great, it cannot be increased. Nothing is straighter than the straight, or truer than the truth (Moral Letters 66.8).

Seneca even recruits an unlikely witness. He cites Epicurus, no Stoic, who called his last day happy despite the agony of a diseased bladder and an ulcerated stomach (Moral Letters 66.47). If a philosopher from a rival school can find that day happy, Seneca argues, it is because he possessed the one thing that made it so, and that thing is not bodily comfort.

Letter 67 sharpens the point Lucilius had apparently pressed on him: is torture itself desirable? Seneca answers no. He does not crave illness or war, but if they come, what he desires is to endure them well, to do nothing that shows lack of restraint (Moral Letters 67.4). The hardship is not the good. The virtue that meets the hardship is the good. This is the distinction the whole volume turns on, and Seneca states its conclusion without hedging: "not that hardships are desirable, but that virtue is desirable, which enables us patiently to endure hardships" (Moral Letters 67.4). Regulus, walking back to Carthage and to death, becomes the image of what this looks like in a life. Seneca tells Lucilius to form a proper conception of virtue, "a thing of exceeding beauty and grandeur," worshipped not with incense but with sweat and blood (Moral Letters 67.12).

The later letters in the volume turn from theory to practice: how to use retirement, how to examine oneself honestly in solitude, and how to think about the length of a life against its quality. Seneca advises that withdrawing from the world means talking honestly with yourself, including speaking ill of yourself when you deserve it, so that you get used to hearing the truth (Moral Letters 68.6).

What a reader gains from this volume is not comfort but clarity about what comfort is worth. If you accept Seneca's claim that only the honorable is good, then a painful life lived well and an easy life lived well are not different in kind. The letters ask you to locate your idea of a good outcome in what you did, not in what happened to you.