INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
BY IRWIN EDMAN
THROUGH the centuries certain books have been sources of consolation and fortitude for troubled spirits in troublous times, in personal crisis or in public calamity; they have been both anodyne and refreshment. Notable in such wisdom literature are the three classics included in this volume. Each has served again and again as a resource for men shaken by inner scepticism, or by outer violence tempted to despair. They all three exhibit, in different forms and in different accents, the Ueonsolation of philosophy."
The philosophy in each case is close to religion, for all three authors believed in God. But the God they believed in was
in each instance the God whom reason might assent to as well as faith credit. The consolation each book affords is to the mind as well as to the heart. All three authors lived in troubled times, though only Boethius lived a troubled life,
All three still speak with curiously timely, curiously timeless, directness to those perplexed about the future or anxious about the perpetual issues of life and destiny.
The "consolation" in each of these books is not solely, or perhaps primarily, a matter of argument. Indeed it is only the first, The Consolation of Philosophy, that argues on the basis of a considered dialectic.
The healing is communicated not least by what one might call the "music" of the discourse and the enchantment of mood shining through the discussion.
It is not without point that the second of the three books here included, The Imitation of Christ, had as an alternative title "Musica Ecclesiastica"—'Ecclesiastical Music," and music did not refer to the mere sound; it connoted the melody of the doctrine itself.
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introduction FE WS In each case it is as if, or rather it is in fact that, a composed spirit by the contagion of his own native rhetoric soothes and edifies our own psyches. Boethius, a scholar and public official, Thomas à Kempis, a retiring monk, Sir Thomas
Browne, a comfortable soliloquizing physician, keep on | rhythmically whispering in the ears of each generation that it is possible during distraction or defeat or despair, in the face
— of public violence or private uncertainty, in the face of inner — turbulences or external disasters, to achieve equableness of life and serenity of spirit.
Boethius speaks in the sixth century from the prison near Rome where he actually writes the Consolation several months before his execution as a traitor. Thomas 4 Kempis in the fifteenth century writes The Imitation of Christ from a mo- — nastic retreat in the Low Countries in the midst of the barbarities and violences of the religious and secular wars.
Thomas Browne, in the seventeenth century in England, fortunate in his personal circumstances of wealth and position, stands aside and half quizzically dreams his bravura prose meditations, the Religio Medici, while a revolution is going on.
The times and the tempers of each are different. But what each says in the way each says it has a perennial appeal to men trying to find stability in other crises in civilization or in their own souls.
It is hard to say whether any one of these three books ought to be classified primarily as religion or philosophy. All three authors were Christians, but none of them could be classed as simple or conventional in his piety. Boethius had a belief that was buttressed by, and indeed almost made possible by, the pagan philosophies he was humanistically interested in preserving and transmuting. Thomas 4 Kempis was a subtle mystic rather than an orthodox routine theologian.
Sir | Thomas Browne himself acknowledges that the "scandal of his profession" (his book is the "religion of a physician'') made his piety suspect, but his piety, about which there is
Introduction ix: no doubt, has a deliberate complexity; he likes to believe not least what is mysterious and paradoxical.
All three books are in different fashion philosophical. The Consolation of Philosophy is the most professional in tone and in organization, though cast in the graceful form of a - dialogue between Boethius, the doubting and downcast prisoner, and the Lady Philosophy appearing to him in his cell.
The arguments are by no means original with Boethius. The trained student recognizes Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus. Themes familiar in the Greek and Roman schools of philosophy, down even to detailed turns of arguments, echo in Boethius' pages.
There are passages almost plagiarized from Plato and from Cicero. But the note remains Boethius' own. And the note is that of a passionate brief for the identity of goodness with God and the omnipresence of God in the universe, whatever the embittering appearances of evil may seem to be.
Thomas à Kempis' work, too, despite its specifically religious title, its identifying Christian name, The Imitation
(or the following) of Christ, is a philosophical tract. It is philosophy in the sense not of sustained objective argument but of an uttered spiritual mood, of an inner soliloquy. It is philosophy as meditation. It is the lyric thought of a soul which, in monastic walls, has renounced the world and sought the quiet eventual ecstasy of union with God. It is philosophy, too, in the sense of considered reflections upon the inroads upon serenity, the distractions of worldliness and the world, which hinder such a union. It is, finally, a reflection on the inner armor we have against worldliness and the world.
Sir Thomas Browne, too, is a philosopher in almost a quaint sense. He has no system; he has no fixed order of principles.
But he is a roving mind, curiously exploring all the oddities and paradoxes of faith and feeling. He has no hierarchy of ideas, but his miscellany of notions is fused in a genial, sceptic
) _and tolerant faith. In his circuitous and mouth-filling phrases he touches depths and scales altitudes. An oddly engaging
{mixture of the simple and the sophisticated, he, too, suggests, es N aN
x Introduction though by an eccentric path, the union of the meditative soul with its God. i Here, then, are three writers, one in the sixth century, writing in a prison near Rome, another in the fifteenth, presumably writing in a monastery in the Low Countries, one in the seventeenth century privately scribbling in the retired residence of a wealthy physician in the English countryside town of Norwich. Boethius is a cultivated semi-expert in the philosophies of Greece and Rome, Thomas à Kempis is a meditative poet and mystical psychologist, Sir Thomas Browne, a man of wide and curious learning with a taste for the singular and the intellectually perplexing. They are different in culture, temper and training. But they are all members of that timeless sodality who turn the minds of men from "the politics of time
— to the politics of eternity" and by so doing bring them peace.
Each of them has his own secret of charm and persuasion.
In the case of The Imitation of Christ, the magic is almost inexpressible in other than the mystical sentences of the writer himself. Each wrote a book which says more about itself than anything that could be said about it. But an introduction can perhaps help to place each book for the modern reader and define the region iñ which each makes its timeless appeal. It can indicate the time and place out of which, and the person out of whom, each of these consoling classics arose.
It is. fitting that Boethius should have been so long a favorite book not only among professional philosophers and ecclesiastics, but among men of the world. For he was not a | recluse philosopher. He was a man of affairs, of an aristocratic family, an ardent humanist and an active Roman official. He wrote philosophy by snatching moments of speculation from a busy life devoted to the state. Though neither. Christ nor the Holy Bible is mentioned in The Consolation of Philosophy, there is every presumption that, as an official in the sixth century in the reign of the pagan-hating Theodoric, he was a Christian. He is assumed, indeed, to have written a few theological tracts. He is a man of the world who is a philosopher, and a Christian whose real religion is philosophy.
Introduction xi / He was apparently an adviser to Theodoric on the most varied matters: the construction of a water clock, the appointment of a harpist; he was even—it is suggested by some scholars—for a time director of the mint. In 510 he was made a consul. In 522 his two sons were made consuls.
In 523 he was created magister officiorum, a position involving constant attendance upon the king. In 524 he was convicted of high treason. In the following year he was put to death.
In the dungeon of Alvanzano, near Milan, during his imprisonment, he composed, as a kind of singing in the dark,
The Consolation of Philosophy. It has been a saving music for many others, in actual prisons or the prisons of their own doubts. It saved Boethius' faith (and possibly his reason), if it did not save his life. He was executed a year later. The charges that he had communication with the Eastern Empire seem highly dubious. It is more probable that his Catholic conservatism made him suspect to Theodoric who had espoused the Arian heresy.
Boethius' imprisonment was a misfortune for Boethius:
But the very fact of it is responsible for a remarkable piece of prose literature as well as philosophy. It is doubtful whethe1 anything less than the agony of incarceration, under what seemed the most unjust charges after the most honorable public life, could have evoked in him the intimate sense of evil in the world with which the Consolation begins. Out of this sense emerged reflection on fortune and misfortune, on justice and injustice, on good and evil, which are the central themes of the book. It is doubtful, too, that the form of the book would have been just what it is, or that, though these things are of course pure speculation, this particular work would have been undertaken. For Boethius, who had planned a complete translation of Plato and Aristotle, was a professional scholar. He had as his ambition the reconciliation of Platonism and Aristotelianism. He wrote a commentary on Porphyry's introduction to the Categories of Aristotle. He wrote a treatise "on Music," used for hundreds of years at
xii ; Introduction eI Eu Oxford. He wrote long leiteis to friends, fication', in the form of letters, on theology.
The Consolation of Philosophy, though it is full of evii dences of philosophical learning (learning, by the way, rememi y bered by a scholar parted from his library) , is not an academic philosophical work. It is a work of belles lettres. Though it raises some of the most 'persistent technical questions inphilosophy, it is completely free of technical jargon. It is in the style of an urbane essayist. It is a Platonic dialogue, or, more strictly, a Ciceronian dialogue, for it has the qualities of Roman elegance rather than of Greek feeling. It is a long conversation between Lady Philosophy and the writer.
Philosophy appears to recall him from his doubts and despairs by reminding him of her own teaching, of which his doubts and despairs are betrayals and forgetfulness.
The dialogue is interrupted, or, more accurately, carried forward, by short poems which are both summaries and intellectual choruses. They are celebrations of points that have been or are about to be argued. The book is, as Dr. E. K.
Rand points out, prison literature. It is also consolation literature, and in the category also of those introductions and encouragements to philosophy such as had been written by ~ both Aristotle and by Cicero. But it is also an attempt to answer in terms of the whole system of the universal good those doubts as to goodness which arise in the mind of the imprisoned and mistreated philosopher, or of any imprisoned or mistreated human being. Where fate seems unkind, where
Providence seems to bless the wicked, where deserved happiness is snatched away, where violence triumphs over reason: under such circumstances nothing less will answer these horrors to the mind and heart than a theory of the universe in which all adds up to a system of good, a system of God. It is toward a demonstration of this that Boethius' compact work is designed, and for all the passion animating the whole and the poetry interrupting the parts, the argument is closely knit.
It is increasingly tightly woven as it progresses, when philosophy feels that her patient is sufficiently recovered to
Introduction xii __ bear her more stringent discipline of dialectic. What begins as persuasive medicine ends as severe demonstration. The patient, Boethius, is ill. He is broken down by the weight of his unintelligible misfortunes. Like Job he feels himself to be a good man badly wronged. He is bemoaning his miseries, surrounded by the Muses echoing his miseries. Lady Philosophy enters and drives away the false comforters. More is needed than poetry; philosophy must clear the vapors of sentiment from the patient's mind. Fortune has treated him un_ justly? Philosophy has deserted him?
Fortune is by nature fickle; other men before him have suffered for the truth. Reason would teach to him to scorn what he has lost, to cease to pine for what most men, misled by passion, hold dear. Philosophy listens to Boethius' complaints: he protests at the fickleness of human chance in a world of nature where all is order. Philosophy seizes upon the fact that though he thinks chances are randomly disposed in _ this world, there is an ordered governance in nature. It is a sign, this recognition of reasonableness in things, that there is a spark of reason in Boethius. By this he may be cured of his confusions and despairs; the poem with which Book I closes is characteristic:
"When the stars are hidden by black clouds, no light can they afford. When the boisterous south wind rolls along the sea and stirs the surge, the water, but now as clear as glass, bright as the fair sun's light, is dark, impenetrable to sight, with stirred and scattered sand. The stream, that wanders down the mountain's side, must often find a stumbling-block, a stone within its path torn from the hill's own rock. So too shalt thou: if thou wouldst see the truth in undimmed light, choose the straight road, the beaten path; away with passing joys! away with fear! put vain hopes to flight!. and grant no place to grief! Where these distractions reign, the mind is clouded o'er, the soul is bound in chains."
Boethius makes Philosophy (in the second book) suggest one of the resources the mind can have when the chances of Fortune turn fickle or hostile. The nature of Fortune itself is
xiv Introduction Sf fickleness. One who knows her nature should not have expected more. This is hardly consolation in real trouble and - Philosophy gives warmer comfort in reminding Boethius of the goods that remain: his wife, his sons, his friend Symmachus. But it is hardly a distinctively philosophical consolation to be told that one still has something good left. The really speculative reassurance begins when Philosophy questions the absoluteness of the goods which men enjoy (or think they enjoy) when they possess them, which they mourn when they lose them. One of the uses of Fortune is indeed her very fickleness. By taking away illusory goods she shows us how illusory they are. Relieving the mind from immersion in false attachments, she shows it where its true devotions lie. The mind discovers that what it truly loves is the good.
Boethius is neither the first nor the last to indicate with mournful exactitude the transiency, the precariousness and the vanity of earthly goods, riches, luxurious objects that delight the senses, and above all, fame; a deception to desire which the ancients were all fond of analyzing because it was so favorite an object of ancient ambition.
Men, at least not philosophically-minded men, have never been satisfied to be told merely that the usual goods were illusions. They will not, without bitterness or regret, give
these up without some proof that there is another, less deceptive, good. Philosophy attempts to prove to the imprisoned
Boethius that such true good does exist. For what all men desire, even when they err, is the good; all that zs good in the illusory goods of fame, and riches, power and sensual satisfaction, is the highest good of which these are at best "broken lights," when they are not obscuring darkness. It is to the highest goods of which all other goods are aspects or of which they are instruments or precursors, toward which men aspire.
This highest good exists, it is unified, it is perfect, it is God.
One addresses it by prayer and analyzes it by reason. One prays to the Good, for it is the Good which one longs for. One prays to it also because it is the very source of all other goods and of one's own being. One analyzes it to define its reality
Introduction XV and distinguish it from the illusions to which emotion rather than understanding, passion unenlightened by reason, lead mortal man.
Parts of the argument of the Consolation read like Marcus Aurelius or any Stoic arguing away the importance, demonstrating the illusoriness, of pleasure and wealth and fame.
Succeeding parts read, especially in Boethius' complaints, like Job. The answers made are those that convinced faith has always tried, when it resorted to argument, in answer to the question: Why does a good God permit evil in the world; why, if the universe is all good, is there evil in it?
The traditional theological answer is that, completely understood, evil is but a partial aspect of the good. There is order, unity, goodness in Providence; they are, indeed, its other name. Fate, which is Providence, as it were, operative in the world, seems to be helter skelter, willful and random.
The chances it distributes are, however, only apparently without reason. They are the only half-understood manifestations of good itself.
The answers that Boethius the writer makes Philosophy give Boethius the prisoner are not altogether satisfactory.
Theological answers never have been quite conclusive even to the faithful but inquiring spirit. There are neat apparent solutions, such as that God can foresee all although at any moment man has free choice. Boethius pictures Philosophy as giving none of these. But the dialogue is not cherished these hundreds of years because it successfully argues evil out of the world. It has been welcomed because it breathes, in the face of adversity, a sense of the relativity of both goods and evils in life. It communicates a profound sense of the good at the heart of the things and the love which can bring us back to union with the principle of love itself from which all else flows. It is the human spirit committed in prayer and virtue to the highest good it can envisage, convinced, even when evil seems to triumph, that good is ultimately and eternally triumphant in the nature of things. Without such conviction it would be difficult for good men to go on struggling
Xvi wi ANTE against chaos and the dark. Fortified by such a conviction, in — 'Boethius' cionag words, one may "possess one's mind with worthy hopes."
The author of The Imitation of Christ was not a prisoner.
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471) was, one has good reason to believe, a priest and a monk. He lived in an order such as that of the Brothers of the Common Life, free from most of the complications of theology and elaborate organization. His voice is that of a man who has renounced the world but feels no loss because he has found a vocation and a goal: the union of the soul with God.
The world is almost absent from Thomas a Kempis' pages, that is, the "great world," the marketplace, the sphere of major events. Such events as there are, are interior ones, and — the world is bounded by the relations of confederates in piety, members of a free society of simple, godly men. It is the book of a man dreaming of a "world elsewhere," a realm to be discovered by interior meditation.
Like' Augustine, Thomas à Kempis finds his union with God through the exploration of his own soul, which derives its very being from God.
It is not hard to see why this unaffected little masterpiece has had its devotees not only among pious mystics but among meditative men everywhere. Philosophers and theologians may argue away the evil of the world. But it may be that the evil is existence itself and our absorption in it, our distraction by it. Men everywhere, not least men who, like the author of the Imitation, seem once to have known the outside world, have sought, at one time or another for interior quietude, for the peace that is the avenue to rapture. "Blessed are those eyes that are closed to outward things and attend to the inward things. Blessed are they that pierce to inward things and study to make themselves ready by daily exercise, more and more to take heavenly secrets. Blissful are they that take heed to God and cast themselves out from all impediments of the world."
This is what the Imitation is really about: the way (to use
of .
Me Introduction xvii Perts closing phrase) to "the land of everlasting clearness." The _ book consists of audible meditations, musing confessions and enraptured exhortations. The confessions are of distractions
, from the path, from the "upward way." The exhortations are reminders of what man's felicity is, the direction one must take toward grace. The author is content to be God's fool, but he is no man's fool. It is clear that he recognizes quite candidly the assaults of lust, the insistence of ambition, the 'corruptions of petulance, pride of impatience. Even in a monastery he is aware that these and subtler things are distractions from "the everlasting clearness": private loves, for instance, self-absorption or absorption in this one object, that one person; busyness, too, and preoccupation. We are constantly lost among things; we are mastered by the external; we are blinded by the immediate. We do not see the eternal vision; we do not hear the eternal music because we are blinded by the here and now, deafened by loud and alien noises. And it is our lusts, our little loves, our small ambitions, our trivial irritations, our pains and our pleasures even, that prevent us from being filled with the lucidity of Heaven, that keep us from the rapture of clear union with the Divine.
Thomas à Kempis counsels obedience, patience, continence, poverty, not for their own sake, but because they free the spirit for its sheerest joy. Like all mystics he does not counsel these things because he cannot have wealth, power, luxury, but because he profoundly distrusts them. It is not that the world fails to satisfy him, but that at its best it cannot satisfy the spirit. It can only distract the soul; hence the necessity of a "rule" by which these distractions may be conquered.
Distraction once conquered, the joy of vision will follow. That vision will be peace. To "keep holiday and rest from every external care" is to find felicity added to us.
Tt is the fashion in the modern world to decry this kind of mysticism as a form of escape, as if escape itself were necessarily evil. Escape may be an avenue to good. It is wisdom to escape from evil. Thomas 4 Kempis is simply one of that long line of quietists who feel that it is external existence itself
xviii _ Introduction that is the great disaster. We are but strangers here; heaven " is our home. No improvement in temporal conditions can overcome the essential disease of time itself.
The Imitation is the little Bible of those who would go home, and find themselves in the quiet ecstasy of union with the eternal. All this monk's comments on life and the world are simply suggestions as to how to overcome the obstacles that hold us here, that hold us back, that keep us blindfolded.
We know much more about Sir Thomas Browne than we do about Thomas à Kempis. Furthermore, unlike The Imitation of Christ, the Religio Medici is not the only great book he wrote. It happens to be the one that, in this connection, concerns us. It is not the book of a schematically trained thinker like Boethius, nor does it have the simple mystical piety of Thomas à Kempis. It is the meandering and meditative credo of a half credulous, half sophisticated mind.
It was written by its author when he was thirty years old, and intended for private circulation among his friends. When news of its printed publication reached the good doctor, he published a corrected version himself. The book has been persuasive for rather different reasons than the two others included in this volume. It is, in the first place, of course, a classic in its own right in its deliberately towering and grandiose prose. It is secular church music. It is also a secular piece of theology which its author himself knew could well be suspect _ to orthodox believers. It is subtle and simple all at once. It is full of philosophical insight and of current superstition. It is packed with curious and also with debatable learning. It is both tolerant and impatient.
But what gives it an appeal more than that of quaintness or meditative music is the sense it communicates of a genuinely religious mind, too religious to be the slave of any narrow orthodoxy, too sophisticated to condition its faith on the demonstration of logic. Finally, the book has both an urbane tolerance of rival sects and, particularly strange in the England of the period, of Catholicism, and of infidels. It has also
Introduction xix an almost smug Anglicanism, and Sir Thomas Browne (though rather more so in his other works) reveals the most childish superstitions. Yet he can also rise, in his own phrase, to an O Altitudo! There are a plumbing of mystical depths, a scaling of heights of speculation, a range of cosmic imagination that are an elevation to the soul of the reader carried along by the glories of the latinized and long-cadenced prose.
Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is read for many reasons. Some read it, and justly enough, for the sheer magic of its prose sublimities, full of idiosyncrasy, but as grand and moving rhythms as exist in the English language. They remind one, with their swellings of passion, their modulations of tone and of feeling, of something that belongs almost more to the history of music than to the history of literature.
But the Religio Medici is read, too, for its enlightening intellectual eccentricity. It follows no marked line of orthodoxy or of scepticism. It explores the paradoxes familiar to all human beings who have felt they cannot be taken in by reason any more than they can by superstition. Thomas
Browne was a physician and had caught the experimental habit of mind current in that Royal Society which never quite trusted his experimental habit of mind sufficiently to make him a member of it. For he realized that what reason can explore is a narrow land bounded by the oceans of mystery which it cannot fathom. A less agonized Pascal, he was not so much frightened by the finite as intrigued by it. Like
Tertullian, he says he wishes to believe because it is impossible. And his soul is delighted with the mysteries transcending common sense.
It is not often that one finds in one personality the mystic and the man of the world, the tolerant sceptic and the almost conventional pietist. Perhaps the combination could have occurred nowhere save in England, and in no circumstances save in those of a man as fortunately placed in life as Sir
Thomas Browne. Englishmen have recurrently displayed a conventional acceptance of the Anglican forms of religion and religious practice, and privately uttered or espoused a
i ve ee he Gee eo) ACR sees pE Ale ae i oe E a} AUNE
xX Introduction ; mystical intensity not native to English church mores. Tolerance is bred by happy personal circumstances. Where one is free, intellectual scepticism can almost amusedly consort, as it does in Sir Thomas Browne, with the greatest regularity 4 of outward, and even considerable inward, conformity.
Sir Thomas Browne was born in 1605, and lived until 1682.
Through the Civil War he lived in retirement (his strong royalist sentiments never actively expressed) in the country town of Norwich. In his youth he was a student in France and Italy, studied medicine at Montpellier and Padua, and took his medical degree at Leiden. He lived for most oe his life at Norwich and practised medicine there. He devoted his leisure to the exploration of the antiquities of the city, and also, in Baconian fashion, of the fauna of the district. Like
Bacon, he mixed "science" with the oddest superstitions, which are evident in him even when he is presumably critically examining the Vulgar Errors (the title of one of the most famous and characteristic of his works). He corresponded with many of the learned of the time both in England and abroad, but he himself did not make, and was not by his competent contemporaries thought to have made, any real contribution to science. He married and had ten children, one of whom became a distinguished physician. There seem to be no dramatic or tragic events in his life, and the history of his being is largely the history of his mind as revealed in his books.
That mind is an amalgam whose elements are noted above.
But the quality of it can hardly be identified by its elements, and the contagion of it is the temper of the expression, the range of the metaphors and associations, the curious paradox and the musing "agreeable melancholy," as one contemporary
French critic put it, of the whole. There have been better statements of both piety and scepticism, or even of the possible reconciliation of the two. But there have been few books which, like the Religio Medici, so convey the sense of mystery, the insistence of paradox, the intimations of both eternity and of oblivion in the most ordinary of human ex-
a ey Ly a amarg
. a '
E tg SVN g = i f REN i Introduction j xxi periences. Even the "music of taverns" carries him—and the reader—off into cosmic dimensions:
There is in it something of divinity, more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson on the whole world, and creatures of God, such a melody to the ear as the whole world, well understood, would afford to the understanding.
Tt is for this note of mystical sublimity, harmonized somehow with a humorous curiosity and worldliness, that Browne is most cherished. We know that he was an obstinate antiCopernican, that he believed in witchcraft, that, in the light of that belief, he gave testimony at a trial which sent two women to their deaths. One forgets the eccentric and the reactionary in the mystical soliloquist, in the rhapsodist of the infinite. In the Garden of Cyrus and Urn Burial he has much to say about tombs and about oblivion. He is forever, like John
Donne (of whom in some respects he is a prose analogue), meditating on the singular connections and interweavings of death and immortality.
This is that mystical philosophy, from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but from the visible effects of nature grows up a real divine, and beholds, not in a dream, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object, the types of his resurrection.
The writers of mystical philosophy generally fly off in their prose to the most abstract regions of the empyrean. But what makes Sir Thomas Browne so engaging is that he can connect the grandest reaches of cosmic speculation with the minutiae of creation, and loves to watch the habits of bees and ants and spiders. He finds that "in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematics and that the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their maker."
What makes the book most endearing is that Browne furthermore finds (not altogether unlike
Thomas à Kempis)
xxii Introduction the lesson of Heaven in the text of himself. Emerson and St.
Augustine could both have written the following sentences:
We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature he that studies wisely learns in a compendium that others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume.
And the compendium of his own soul is wonderfully attractive in its whimsical tolerance, its oddities of lore and learning, its revelation of an equable, exploring, and sensitive mind:
I perceive [says our author] that every man is his best Oedipus, and will find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the subtleties of error have enchained more flexible and tender judgments.
The rotund phrases do not conceal a generosity of temper that is no less attractive now when new fanaticisms have assailed the world. In the very orotundity, too, is an escape into a grand and retrieving music.
Here, then, are three books, of three different periods, by different personalities. One is an argument; the second a set, almost, of spiritual exercises; the third the diary of a serene but acute spirit. Each in its own way provides the "consolation of philosophy''—of philosophy not in the sense of professional argument, but that wisdom the soul finds when it succeeds in speaking to itself with clarity and candor. Our three authors each succeeded in thus speaking to himself and therefore to all and for all troubled spirits everywhere, in their times and in ours. The beauty of their expression, moreover, illustrates the comment Socrates makes in the Phaedo, that philosophy is perhaps "a finer kind of music." That music amid the terrifying clamors of war has its special healing power.
New York December, 1942