In Pursuit of Wisdom #6: Becoming a God?
Lucius Annaeus Seneca — Roman philosopher, statesman, playwright, and intellectual whose name has not ceased leaving the lips of scholars for more than two thousand years — but still a man.
After months of close reading, I have finally completed his Letters From a Stoic, a text that is still read today for its words of wisdom and inspiration with timeless applicability. Here are my thoughts!
Despite being thought of as “enlightened” for his time, a paragon of virtue and equanimity, Seneca is in philosophical circles given a distinct badge of “humanness” compared to other philosophers of his day. The reason? He was seen not “practicing what he preached.” He was notorious for savagely attacking the wealthy through his rhetoric while hoarding wealth himself, and disparaging the Roman Empire whilst being tutor to Emperor Nero.
When we think of the Buddha, Christ, or even Socrates and Plato, I don’t think of people, but especially in the case of the former two, I think of Gods, legends. Figures that have finally arrived at perfection, perfection being eternal peace and the cessation of suffering, whether that’s through the mastering of nature through the mind, or by the strength of humility. Some of us look to their pure example of goodness and truth and we feel compelled to give up. After all, they aren’t people, but Gods, or at least brought to the level of such through myth and legend. How can we hope to follow their example?
Seneca said that we have the seed of a wise man or woman inside all of us. Seneca admits that none of us are born with virtue, but that we can cultivate it through constant study. Through studying great thinkers, analyzing and pondering life itself, we can all conquer the afflictive emotions of anger, cowardice, jealousy, and sadness. We can rise above the petty problems of the “simple people” who burst a blood vessel during a family argument of where to go out for dinner, or which color sofa should be placed in the living room. We can see through the illusion of material into the happiness of the simple life: food in one’s belly, a spot on the ground to sleep on, and people to love.
But his discipline and his self-chastisement are so unrelenting, that it seems, in reality, the goal of Seneca is human perfection, to literally become as a God, to actually live the myth of enlightenment, of finally arriving at a place of no suffering on this Earth.
Give your whole mind to her [philosophy]. Sit at her side and pay her constant court, and an enormous gap will widen between yourself and other men. You’ll end up far in advance of all mankind, and not far behind the gods themselves. Would you like to know what the actual difference between yourself and the gods will be? They will exist for longer.
When I first read this, it imbued me with power. To be a God, in a metaphorical sense, means to be free from all the cares in the world and to feel tangibly the power to affect your life, in whatever way you see fit. Everyone deserves to feel what it’s like to step into their own power.
It’s true: I have fantasized about becoming so smart and wise that I could just become a hermit and run off to a secluded wood and live the rest of my days breathing clean air and getting all the nourishment I need from the breaths alone. After being hurt by people that I have loved, there has been a part of me that wishes more than anything the power to be alone — and to be okay with it. But deep down, I know that I love the world too much. I know that other people are all we’ve really got. I can love the trees, the rocks, and the animals and I can feel them loving me back as part of the same beautiful world, but if in the words of spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle, “To love is to see the self in another,” we will never share in a greater love than what takes place between two human beings.
Seneca towards the end of the work shows us some of what he has in mind by “widening the gap”:
With all such people you should avoid associating. These are the people who pass on vices, transmitting them from one character to another. One used to think that the type of person who spreads tales was as bad as any: but there are persons who spread vices. And association with them does a lot of damage. For even if its success is not immediate, it leaves a seed in the mind, and even after we’ve said goodbye to them, the evil follows us, to rear its head at some time or other in the future.
Seneca, if your wisdom and power over your mind are so great, why can you not steel yourself against their “vice?” And if their vice is so plague-like, what about your wisdom? Is your wisdom so bottled up inside that it does not billow out of your eyes in the way you look upon another, or from your speech when you dispense a kind or truthful word?
I refuse to abandon people. There are people close to me that are incredibly flawed, as people can tend to be. There are times when I heed Seneca’s advice when I can feel their greed, their fears, and their insecurities, and to be frank, their rudeness get into my head. I have to retreat. But then there are times when the strength of my character and the love of all people is so great, that I sit with them and enjoy them exactly as they are. For they are not greed, they are not fear, they are not insecurity. They are people — maybe sick — but they are people. They are not a burden. Their existence is just as worthy as mine, no matter its character.
Seneca, were you abandoned in times of woe? Were there those that thought your suffering contagious, running to save their spirit? No, you were healed, by unconditional love. Seneca was severely ill for most of his life, particularly due to asthma. His agony was so overwhelming that:
On many an occasion I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, and was only held back by the thought of my father, who had been the kindest of fathers to me and was then in his old age. Having in mind not how bravely I was capable of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss, I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
I would like to assume that if he was “the kindest of fathers,” that he never thought your debilitating illness a burden. His kindness and love for you were so full, that you found the strength to live, for the sake of his love. Love triumphed over death, over suicidal ideation.
His wife Paulina’s devotion and love for Seneca in his old age proved to be just as life-giving, and even life-enriching:
She is forever urging me to take care of my health; and indeed as I come to realize the way her very being depends on mine, I am beginning, in my concern for her, to feel some concern for myself…for can anything be sweeter than to find that you are so dear to your wife that this makes you dearer to yourself? So it comes about that my Paulina succeeds in making me responsible for anxiety of my own as well as hers on my behalf.
I feel that I could only be so lucky to experience the restorative, anxiety-purging, life-affirming love that Paulina had for Seneca. Love disperses as much as vice, transforming people and things as it travels. The love she felt for him became love he began to feel for himself.
To widen the gap between yourself and other people through the pursuit of wisdom is to reduce the acuteness of your own suffering, yes. But you will at the same time intensify the chronic, underlying pain of knowing that while you as a God sit up on Mount Olympus, there are still swathes suffering beneath you, begging you to come back down.
We do not need to become perfect, or approach the level of a God, to be worthy of this life, to have our lives be meaningful. Really, how can we become as a God and still be loved as a person, as a husband, as a son? Love is all the more beautiful when it is in spite of our flaws.
There is a distinct contradiction between striving for virtue and believing all people are capable of it, and then proceeding to derisively judge those that are not at the same place that you are. Seneca, you could not help your physical disease; perhaps they are besieged by just as strong of mental ones.
My only responsibility is to live my own life fully and without abandon, and in the process, to love others doing the same. This love might hurt. I might feel my own wisdom wavering. But to love others, to feel compassion for another, necessitates taking a risk. Breaking the word “compassion” down into its roots reveals the word actually means, “to suffer with.” This is the burden of love: to take your suffering as my own, in hopes that you do the same for me.
In this present moment, we cannot be anything other than what we are. In this moment, the only logical course of action is to love. Change cannot occur in a single moment. Seneca, did you ever consider, that those rich, vice-filled socialites that you despise were simply never taught the proper course? That they were raised by rich, vice-filled parents in a rich, vice-filled environment? Paying closer attention to these people, I do not judge them, but feel compassion for them, that they were not properly shown what was right. We do not need to become as Gods, Seneca: the present condition of our humanity at this moment is enough, and it always will be.
What makes me chuckle Seneca, you walking contradiction, is that you too recognize this despite your other claims to the contrary:
Speak out against the love of money. Speak out against extravagance. When you see that you’ve achieved something and had an effect on your listeners, lay on all the harder. It is hardly believable how much can be achieved by this sort of speech, aimed at curing people, wholly directed to the good of people listening. When the character is impressionable it is easily won over to a passion for what is noble and honourable; while a person’s character is still malleable, and only corrupted to a mild degree, truth strikes deep if she finds the right kind of advocate.
“It is hardly believable how much can be achieved by this sort of speech.”
I feel that there is common rhetoric of keeping to yourself today, that we are the only people that can save ourselves, and that the journey towards happiness is in our hands alone.
But to me, I think it’s like we are all walking the same highway while believing that the white paint lane-markers are representative of walls. At times, it feels absurd. Why am I walking? Why on this road? God, this is really boring.
Then I look to my left, to my right. I see others feeling the same way about the road we all walk. I see the walls as mere white paint on asphalt. I see someone stumble and collapse into the hot road. Without hesitation, I change lanes. I lose energy from the run, I lose energy from struggling to heave them back onto their feet. I almost reach the point of falling myself. But as they rise, they grab me too. What vitality I have lost momentarily, more than doubles as we become one life together marching onward. The world itself becomes improved. The pursuit of wisdom, morally, necessitates helping others with their own.
While it is our duty to practice the good life and to develop our own moral strength, it is imperative that we look upon the evil and broken as students of philosophy that have simply neglected to enroll in your academy up to this point. We do not know how far our love and acceptance could go to reversing their nature. For this is how we master a world of difference, of highs and lows, good and bad: by embracing that difference.
There are even moments when our flaws are only so because we believe them to be; they are holes in ourselves where love could fill in the gaps. Seneca, I believe the control over your body and mind that you seek can be found paradoxically through giving up said control — and making the choice to love. Its power is enough to sustain life, as you yourself have proved. Whether it’s in our spirit or in the world, chaos embraced has the potential to be a kind of order all its own.
I love you all, as you are. I won’t give up on you.
