S. Augustine. Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control.
Petrarch. Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself.[42] In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.[43] It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high—what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil's words—
"There, in a cave profound, King Æolus
Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind,
Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls
Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side
Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top
Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand."[44]
So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,—who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line—
"And calms their passion and allays their wrath."[45]
S. Augustine. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth.
But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away.
By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero—
"The fount and head of all miseries."[46]
Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins—always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair—then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain.