Zenobia; or, the Fall of Palmyra

by William Ware

'We do.'

'I grant it thus much; that it steels the mind against pain; that it is unrivalled in its power to sear and harden the soul; and that if it were man's common lot to be exposed to evil, and evil chiefly, it were a philosophy to be greatly coveted. But it is benumbing, deadening in its influences. It oppresses the soul and overlays it; it delivers it by rendering it insensible, not by imparting a new principle of vitality beyond the reach of earthly ill. It does the same service that a stupifying draught does to him who is about to submit to the knife of the surgeon, or the axe of the executioner. But is it not nobler to meet such pains fortified in no other way than by a resolute purpose to bear them as well as the nature the gods have given you will allow? And suppose you shrink or give signs of suffering? that does not impeach the soul. It is rather the gods themselves who cry out through you: you did not; it was your corporeal nature, something beside your proper self. It is to be no subject of humiliation to us, or of grief, that when the prospect of acute suffering is before us; or, still more, when called to endure it, we give many tokens of a keen sensibility; so it be that at the same time we remain unshaken in our principles, and ready to bear what we must.'

'And what,' asked the young Cleoras, a favorite disciple of the philosopher, 'is it in your case that enables you to meet misfortune and death without shrinking? If you take not shelter behind indifference, what other shield do you find to be sufficient?'

'I know,' said Longinus, 'that you ask this question not because you have never heard from me virtually at least its answer, but because you wish to hear from me at this hour, whether I adhere with firmness to the principles I have ever inculcated, respecting death, and whether I myself derive from them the satisfactions I have declared them capable to impart. It is right and well that you do so. And I on my part take pleasure in repeating and re-affirming what I have maintained and taught. But I must be brief in what I say, more so than I have been in replying to your other inquiries, Cleoras and Bassus, for I perceive by the manner in which the rays of the sun shoot through the bars of the window, that it is not long before the executioner will make his appearance. It affords me then, I say, a very especial satisfaction, to declare in the presence of so many worthy friends, my continued attachment and hearty devotion to the truths I have believed and taught, concerning the existence of a God, and the reality of a future and immortal life. Upon these two great points I suffer from no serious doubts, and it is from this belief that I now derive the serenity and peace which you witness. All the arguments which you have often heard from me in support of them, now seem to me to be possessed of a greater strength than ever--I will not repeat them, for they are too familiar to you, but only re-affirm them, and pronounce them, as in my judgment, affording a ground for our assurance in the department of moral demonstration, as solid and sufficient as the reasonings of Euclid afford in the science of geometry. I believe in a supreme God and sovereign ruler of the world, by whose wisdom and power all things and beings have been created, and are sustained, and in whose presence I live and enjoy, as implicitly as I believe the fifth proposition of Euclid's first book. I believe in a future life with the like strength. It is behind these truths, Cleoras, that I entrench myself at this hour; these make the shield which defends me from the assaults of fear and despair, that would otherwise, I am sure, overwhelm me.'

'But how do they defend you, Longinus,' asked Cleoras--'by simply rendering you inaccessible to the shafts which are directed against you, or by any other and higher operation upon the soul?'

'Were it only,' replied the philosopher, 'that truth made me insensible and indifferent, I should pray rather to be left to the tutelage of nature. I both despise and abhor doctrines that can do no more than this. I desire to bless the gods that the philosophy I have received and taught has performed for me a far more essential service. This elevates and expands: it renders nature as it were superior to itself and its condition: it causes the soul to assert its entire supremacy over its companion, the body, and its dwelling-place the earth, and in the perfect possession of itself to inhabit a better world of its own creation: it infinitely increases all its sensibilities, and adds to the constitution received from nature, what may be termed new senses, so vividly does it come to apprehend things, which to those who are unenlightened by this excellent truth, are as if they had no existence, their minds being invested with no faculty or power whereby to discern and esteem them. So far from carrying those who embrace it farther toward insensibility and indifference, which may truly be called a kind of death, it renders them intensely alive, and it is through the transforming energies of this new life that the soul is made not insensible to pain, but superior to it, and to all the greater ills of existence. It soars above them. The knowledge and the belief that fill it furnish it with wings by which it is borne far aloft, even at the very time that the body is in the deepest affliction. Gracchus meets death with equanimity, and that is something. It is better than to be convulsed with vulgar and excessive fear. But it is a state of the soul very inferior to what exists in those who truly receive the doctrines which I have taught. I, Cleoras, look upon death as a release, not from a life which has been wholly evil, for I have, through the favor of the gods, enjoyed much, but from the dominion of the body and the appetites which clog the soul and greatly hinder it in its efforts after a perfect virtue and a true felicity. It will open a way for me into those elysian realms in whose reality all men have believed, a very few excepted, though few or none could prove it. Even as the great Roman could call that "O glorious day," that should admit him to the council of the gods, and the society of the great and good who had preceded him, so can I in like manner designate the day and hour which are now present. I shall leave you whom I have known so long; I shall be separated from scenes familiar and beloved through a series of years; the arts and the sciences, which have ministered so largely to my happiness, in these forms of them I shall lose; the very earth itself, venerable to my mind for the events which have passed upon it, and the genius it has nurtured and matured, and beautiful too in its array of forms and colors, I shall be conversant with no more. Death will divide me from them all: but it will bear me to worlds and scenes of a far exceeding beauty: it will introduce me to mansions inconceivably more magnificent than anything which the soul has experience of here; above all it will bring me into the company of the good of all ages, with whom I shall enjoy the pleasures of an uninterrupted intercourse. It will place me where I shall be furnished with ample means for the prosecution of all those inquiries which have engaged me on earth, exposed to none or fewer of the hindrances which have here thronged the way. All knowledge and all happiness will then be attainable. Is death to be called an evil, or is it to be feared or approached with tears and regrets, when such are to be its issues?'

'By no means,' said Cleoras; 'it is rather to be desired. If my philosophy were as deep and secure as yours, Longinus, I should beg to exchange places with you. I should willingly suffer a brief pain to be rewarded so largely. But I find within me no such strong assurance.'

'That,' replied Longinus, 'is for want of reflection. It is only by conversing with itself that the soul rises to any height of faith. Argument from abroad is of but little service in the comparison. I have often discoursed with you concerning these things, and have laid open before you the grounds upon which my convictions rest. But I have ever taught that consciousness was the true source of belief, and that of this you could possess yourselves only through habits of profound attention. What I believe I feel. I cannot communicate the strength of my belief to another, because it is mysteriously generated within, interweaving itself with all my faculties and affections, and abundantly imparting itself to them, but at the same time inseparable from them in such a sense that I can offer it as I can a portion of my reason or my knowledge, to any whom I might desire to benefit. It is in truth in its origin the gift of God, strengthened and exalted infinitely by reflection. It is an instinct. Were it otherwise, why could I not give to you all I possess myself, and possess because I have by labor acquired it? Whereas, though I believe so confidently myself, I find no way in which to bestow the same good upon you. But each one will possess it, I am persuaded, in the proportion in which he prepares himself by a pure life and habitual meditation. It will then reveal itself with new strength every day. So will it also be of service to contemplate the characters and lives of those who have lived illustriously, both for their virtue and their philosophy. To study the character of Plato will be more beneficial in this regard than to ponder the arguments of the Phoedo. Those arguments are trivial, fanciful, and ingenious, rather than convincing. And the great advantage to be derived from the perusal of that treatise is, as it shall be regarded as a sublime expression of the confidence with which its author entertained the hope of immortality. It is as a part of Plato's biography--of the history of his mind--that it is valuable. Through meditation, through inward purity, through the contemplation of bright examples, will the soul be best prepared for the birth of that feeling or conviction that shall set before you with the distinctness and certainty of actual vision the prospect of immortality.'

'But are there, Longinus, after all, no waverings of the mind, no impertinent doubts, no overcasting shadows, which at all disturb your peace, or impair the vividness of your faith? Are you wholly superior to fear--the fear of suffering and death?'

'That is not, Cleoras, so much to ask whether I still consider my philosophy as sufficient, and whether it be so, as whether or not I am still a man, and therefore a mixed and imperfect being. But if you desire the assurance, I can answer you, and say that I am but a man, and therefore notwithstanding my philosophy subject to infirmity and to assaults from the body, which undoubtedly occasion me some distress. But these seasons are momentary. I can truly affirm, that although there have been and still are conflicts, the soul is ever conqueror, and that too by very great odds. My doubts and fears are mere flitting shadows; my hope, a strong and unchanging beam of light. The body sometimes slips from beyond my control and trembles, but the soul is at the very same time secure in herself and undaunted. I present the same apparent contradiction that the soldier often does upon the field of battle; he trembles and turns pale as he first springs forward to encounter the foe, but his arm is strong and his soul determined at the very same moment, and no death nor suffering in prospect avails to alarm or turn him back. Do not therefore, although I should exhibit signs of fear, imagine that my soul is terrified, or that I am forsaken of those steadfast principles to which I have given in my allegiance for so long a time.'