Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book II. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.
The non-theoretical “branches in the body of philosophy” are “the practical and the logical, which teach man what he must do and what he must not do, and why he must do some things and not others.” Because these branches “are so intertwined that they can hardly be separated,” Latini will “present [them] together” in both Book II and Book III. In Book II he addresses morality, “vices and virtues.” Consistent with his book’s title, the Treasure, he compares the four “active virtues” to “precious stones,” “each of which is valuable for the life of men, for beauty, for delight and for virtue” as a whole. Prudence is “represented by the ruby, which lights up the night and shines brighter than all other precious stones”; temperance is “represented by the sapphire, which is of a celestial color,” the stone “most filled with grace of all the precious stones of the world”; courage is “represented by the diamond, which is so strong that it breaks and pierces all stones and metals,” fearing nothing; justice is “represented by the emerald, which is the greenest and most beautiful thing human eyes can behold.”
Although these are the virtues enumerated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Latini devotes the first fifty chapters of Book II to a summary of Aristotle’s more complex account of the virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics. Whether it is an art, an inquiry, an action, or a choice, “what all things seek is some good.” “Each art,” for example, has “a final goal,” a telos, which guides its works.” The master art is politics, “the art which teaches how to govern a city,” the “most important and the sovereign and the mistress of all arts, because under it re contained many honorable arts, such as rhetoric and military science and governing one’s household.” The art of politics “is noble because it gives order and direction to all those arts which are under it and which bring about its fulfilment, and its end is also the end and fulfillment of the others; therefore, the good produced by this science is man’s good, because it constrains him to do good and to avoid evil.” The sections on human history in Part I have already confirmed the necessity of such constraint. Latini does not, however, remark Aristotle’s argument that the political community produces a certain energeia or ‘being-at-work’ which brings out the humanness of the citizens. He does not follow Aristotle in calling man the political animal, perhaps because Christianity revises or qualifies that claim.
He does follow Aristotle in saying that “the science of protecting and governing a city is not for a child or for a man who follows his inclinations, because both are unfamiliar with the things of the world; for this art requires a wise man, and it does not require a man’s knowledge, but rather that he turn to goodness,” to have “a soul suitably attuned to this science,” having made “use of things which are just, good, and honest.” Making use of such things habituates the soul to them, and such activity teaches the soul to become virtuous by means of that rightly-directed activity. “He who does not know anything on his own and who cannot learn what he is taught is altogether unsuitable” for political life.
If politics aims ultimately at all the goods aimed at by action, and if the sovereign good is eudaimonia or happiness—Latini calls it “beatitude”— what is happiness? The answer men give to that question lead them into one of three principal ways of life: the life of sensual pleasure, what Latini calls “concupiscence and covetousness,” an animal-like way; the “civic life” of common sense, prowess, and honor; or the life of contemplation. There are three powers of the soul: vegetative (seen in plants, animals, and human beings), sensitive (seen in animals and human beings), and reasonable (seen in human beings only). This distinctively human, “reasonable power is sometimes in deed and sometimes in potential, but beatitude is when it is in deed and not when it is potential alone, for if one does not do it, it is not good.” (As Aristotle puts it, the distinctively human energeia is the “life that puts into action that in us that has articulate speech,” speech involving reason, the power that enables us to ‘articulate,’ to make distinctions, to identify kinds or species of things [NE 1098a5].) The reasonable way of life is the genuinely human way, found in both the civic and the contemplative way; the way of sensual pleasure is the way of an animal, the “sensitive” or sensual way.
Which way or ways achieve the good? There are three types of good: that of the soul, that of the body, that of things outside the body. “The beatitude which is on earth needs good things from the outside, for it is a difficult thing to perform good deeds if one does not partake of what befits a good life, abundance of wealth and friends and relatives and the blessings of fortune, and for this reason wisdom needs something which reveals its worth and its honors.” As a Christian, Latini adds God to Aristotle’s list of necessary goods outside of ourselves. “We must revere and magnify and glorify God above all things, and we must believe that in Him are all good things and all felicities, for He is the beginning and end of all good things.” This again, is why Latini does not emphasize the political character of the good life to the extent Aristotle does. Latini needs to leave room for the ‘city’ of God.
Since “happiness is thing which comes from the virtue of the soul, not of the body,” Latini again enumerates the powers of the soul, but this time the powers of the human soul, only. The human soul possesses vegetative powers (we might call them ‘autonomic’ powers); it has the intellectual or reasoning power and also the “concuscible” power, whereby the body obeys the commands of the intellect. Rightly exercised, these powers generate two kinds of virtue: understanding, consisting of wisdom, knowledge, and common sense, and morality, exemplified by generosity, chastity, and the several other virtues ‘of the heart.’ “The virtue of understanding is born and increases in men through doctrine and instruction, and for this long experience is needed. The virtue of morality is born and increases by good and honest use, for it is not in us naturally, because a natural thing cannot be changed in its order by contrary usage.” So, for example, by nature fire burns upward; that is its nature. It cannot be taught or habituated to burn in that direction. As Aristotle puts it, “we are predisposed by nature, but we do not become good or bad by nature” (NE 1106b). What human beings do have by nature isn’t virtue but “the power to learn” it. That “is why I say that these virtues are not at all in us without nature and not at all according to nature, but the root and the beginning of receiving these virtues are in us by nature, and its perfection is in us by usage.” As Aristotle teaches, one ‘works’ to achieve virtue, which is why he says that “lawmakers make the citizens good by habituating them, and since this is the intention of every lawmaker, those that do not do it well are failures, and one regime differs from another in this respect as a good one from a worthless one” (NE 1103b). Deploying Christian language, Latini writes, “A man is good through doing good and evil through doing evil.” Considering the three things human beings desire—the profitable, the delightful, and the good—and given the fact that “delight is a part of us from the time we are born,” that it is a thing naturally ‘given’ and not by itself inclined toward “moderation or justice,” ethics concerns the government of delight, and “the whole purpose of the governor of cities is to bring delight to its citizens in the appropriate things and at any appropriate time and place.” How can this be done? After all, as Latini warns his young gentleman, “Good can only be done in one way, but man does evil in many ways; for this reason, it is a hard and painful thing to be good and an easy thing to be bad, and this is why it happens that more people are bad than good.” How can the knowledge of virtue be made consistent with the practice of it, that is, with virtue itself? If virtue is, as Latini calls it, a state of character, what is the character of that state?
Here Aristotle introduces his celebrated definition of virtue as the middle or “mean” between two extremes. Latini cuts through Aristotle’s complex and subtle discussion of virtue as a mean with respect to a thing, the soul’s holding a position equally apart from either extreme of excess and deficiency, and a mean with respect to an individual, arising from the soul’s awareness of the fact that for Milo the wrestler, a few pounds of meat is not too much, and it might be too little. Nor does he trouble his young gentleman with Aristotle’s formal, philosophic definition of virtue as “an active condition that makes one apt at choosing, consisting in a mean condition in relation to us, which is determined by a proportion and by the means by which a person with practical judgement would determine it” (NE 1107a). Latini does follow Aristotle in saying that there are some actions and feelings that do not admit of the middling condition, such as adultery, stealing, and murder. They are wrong, simply. Generally, Latini for the most part ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of circumstance in making right choices, his insistence on considering who is acting, what the act is, what the is affected by the act, with hat the act is done, what it’s done for, and the manner in which it’s done. “No one could be ignorant of all these things without being insane” (NE 1111a), Aristotle insists, but Latini confines himself to a simplified version, distinguishing intentional acts from natural ones, and both from acts combining intention and natural necessity, such as obeying the command of a tyrant. He highlights moral responsibility: “If every man is responsible for his state of mind and for his imagination, there must necessarily be, and it does not have to be tested, a natural beginning and awareness of good and evil which makes him desire good and avoid evil.” This parallels Aristotle’s observation that “the targeting of the end [of an action] is not self-chosen; instead, one needs to be born having something like vision, by which to discern rightly and choose what is truly good” (NE 1114b). But for Aristotle, this is only true for a person who has “a fortunate nature,” one “born with” “such a condition.” And even then, aiming at the “mean” or middle between extremes, moral energeia, with mindfulness of circumstances, determines a right choice more than the natural blessings of character. That is, in Latini the Christian conscience to some degree anchors prudential reasoning or deliberation, aiding in the Aristotelian task of finding “the middle ground” in character and in actions. Whereas Aristotle calls the beautiful “the end that belongs to virtue” (NE 1115b), the mean only the apparent aim, Latini describes the “beautiful and good and deserving of merit” as a description of the mean, not as its purpose.
Latini follows Aristotle closely in describing the virtues which arise in finding that ground between the extremes of deficiency and excess—courage being the mean between fear and rashness, temperance or moderation respecting pleasure and pain being the mean between insensibility and dissipation, generosity or liberality being the mean between stinginess and wastefulness, and so on. (He adds an occasional aperςu of his own, for example, “there are some men who are cowards in battle and bold in spending money.”) Unlike many Christians, Latini does not hesitate to classify magnanimity or greatness of soul with the virtues, giving as an example of it “serving our Sovereign Father” (he does not specify whether this means God or the pope), from which “great honor arises,” the kind of honor worthy of the magnanimous man. And again, now aligning Aristotle with Jesus’ central command: “Magnanimity is the crown and the beacon of all virtues, for it exists through virtue alone, and for this reason it is not an easy thing to be magnanimous, but rather it is a very difficult thing, for one has to be good for oneself and for one’s neighbor.”
Accordingly, Latini regards justice as “the noblest of virtues and the strongest.” Indeed, closely paraphrasing Aristotle, “justice is not just a part of virtue, rather it is all virtues, and wrongdoing is not a part of vice, rather it is all vices.” Both men consider justice as a preeminently political virtue, aiming at “someone else’s good” (NE 1130a), being “good to oneself and to one’s friends” (Latini). Both associate justice with equity, with equalizing things in terms of desert or merit, since the person who is rightly rewarded more money than another because he does better work is being rewarded ‘equally’ or proportionately, evaluated according to the same standard. (This is why “money was first invented, because it brought equality to unequal things; money is like justice without a soul, because it is a middle ground through which unequal things become unequal.”) In addition to such distributive justice, there is also corrective justice, in which the innocent and the guilty are treated differently because they are judged ‘equitably,’ i.e., by the same standard. Latini leaves no doubt that corrective justice may be harsh. Because “the lord of justice tries to bring equity to unequal things, it is therefore necessary to kill some, wound others, chase some into exile, until satisfaction is given to the one who has been wronged.” But whereas Aristotle notes that “not all people mean the same thing by merit but those who favor democracy mean freedom, those who favor oligarchy mean wealth, others mean being well born and those who favor aristocracy mean virtue” (1131a), Latini simply points to the Ruler of all: “True justice is not the one which is in the law; rather it is God our Lord, and it is given to man, and through justice man resembles God.” Whereas Aristotle calls the human judge as a person “meant to be a sort of ensouled justice,” the ruler who “evens things up” (1132a) when the letter of the law fails fully to deliver justice, Latini has recourse to the infallibly just and equitable Judge.
In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to turn from ethical to intellectual virtue, toward sophia instead of phronēsis. Later, he will introduce the theme of friendship, which registers several types of friendship, some of them consonant with the philosophic life, others to political life. Latini will treat the intellectual virtues differently than Aristotle does (again, his young gentleman is no potential philosopher), concentrating more of his attention on friendship and happiness. He does follow Aristotle in concluding with a transition from ethics to politics.
Preparatory to his discussion of friendship, Aristotle revisits moderation or temperance and introduces the virtue of “standing firm” or constancy—both virtues without which true friendship would be impossible. Latini follows Aristotle on this. As Aristotle classifies self-restraint as the mean between unrestraint and insensibility Latini puts temperance between unrestraint and abstinence. Latini identifies constant man as one “who is steadfast in goodness but changeable with respect to evil”; this is the mean between stubbornness (exhibited by a man who is “steadfast and firm in all his opinions, whether they are true or false”) and inconstancy, “when there is no firmness or constancy” at all.
Aristotle and Latini identify three kinds of friendship; friendship based on pleasure, characteristic of the young, who “live according to feeling” (NE 1156a), friendship based utility or profit, and friendship based on alikeness in virtue, goodness. The last sort of friendships “are likely to be rare,” observes, “for such people are few” (NE 1156b). Latini concurs, saying that “men who are well chosen and virtuous and who do good are few in number, but those who seek profit and pleasure are many in number.” Latini writes that “those who love one another for profit or pleasure do not love truly; rather, they love the things on which the friendship is based, that is, pleasure and profit, and for this reason their friendship lasts only as long as the pleasure and the profit do.” By contrast, “true friendship which is good and full exists between two good men who are similar in virtue and who love one another and care for one another because of the similarity of the virtues they possess.” Indeed, a certain equality must prevail for true friendship to exist, as friendship among husbands and wives, fathers and children, kings and subjects, gods and men, must differ from that among equals, even when the unequal persons are both virtuous.
If one were to aim at adding to the number of true friendships, education is needed. “People educate the young by steering them by means of pleasure and pain”; “what is most conducive to virtue of character is to enjoy what one ought and hate what one ought” (NE 1172a). As Latini puts it, “delight is born and nourished with us from the moment we are born, and for this reason we should teach children to be pleased and angered appropriately,” as “this is the basis of moral virtue, and afterwards the increase in time increases the goodness of the child’s life, for each one takes what pleases him and avoids what saddens him.” Both Aristotle and Latini distinguish pleasure from happiness; we choose both pleasure and happiness for themselves, not as instruments to some other good, but “not every pleasure is choiceworthy” (NE 1174a), whereas happiness is always choiceworthy. Choiceworthy pleasure “brings the activities to completion and hence brings living to completion, which is what they [i.e., the activities] all strive for” (1175a), but, as readers have seen, some lives are more choiceworthy than others because they are more fully human. “The measure of each thing is virtue” (NE 1175b). And this leads to the consideration of happiness, “the end at which human things aim” (NE 1176a).
Aristotle defines happiness as “being-at-work [energeia] according to virtue,” the most power virtue being contemplation, “since the intellect is the most powerful of the things in us” (NE 1177a). Latini writes, “happiness is the firmness, and constancy of the works of virtues themselves, and we have been told”—by Aristotle—that “the rule of this power is continual, because the work of the intellect goes on continually.” Therefore, “the most perfect and most pleasurable work of all is happiness, but the very best pleasures are found in philosophy because of the quest for eternity and the subtleties of truth found in its works.” Among citizens, the happiness resulting in the exercise of “moral and civic virtues” is “more difficult” to achieve than happiness resulting from the intellectual virtues because the latter are self-sufficient, whereas “the great and liberal man must have wealth so that he can perform works of generosity.” As a Christian, however, Latini adds another telos to human life: “beatitude.” Agreeing with Aristotle that “the full and perfect work of speculative intellect is the goal of life,” he considers happiness “an example of the real beatitude,” seen in “God and his angels.” We have a portion of this “noblest work of all, that is, the life of the intellect,” because “we are similar to God and his angels” in exercising intellect. “Those who most resemble God,” the ones who most nearly live up to man’s creation in His image, “are the ones who have this beatific life most completely, God being truly beatific,” understanding “continually without any effort.” God’s “concern is greater for the man who strives to be similar to Him, and He bestows a better reward upon him, and delights in him as one friend does in another.” And in fact, Aristotle himself calls the one who lives the contemplative life as having “something divine present in him” (NE 1177b). “This is the life in accord with the intellect, if that most of all is a human being” (NE 1177b).
For both, this is a way of life, not something to be acknowledged ‘in principle.’ “It is not sufficient to know about virtue, but one must tr to have it and use it, unless there is some other way that we become good” (NE 1178a). And Latini, more emphatically: “It is not enough for the one who wishes to be happy to know what is written in this book; he must practice all the things described above, because with respect to things which must be done through deeds it is not enough for a person tow know about them or tell about them, but rather he must perform them; in this way the goodness of man is fulfilled, that is through knowledge and through deeds. The knowledge of virtue guides a man, and that man performs virtuous deeds, I say, who is well-born and truly loves goodness.” He adds, as a matter of course, that “it is by the grace of God” that those who are “good by nature” are “truly blessed.”
Since most men are not born with such good natures, what Aristotle calls “rearing and exercising by laws” aiming at habituating such men to good behavior are necessary (NE 1179b). In Latini’s words, “one must not stop this training instruction once childhood is past.” “Some men can be governed by instruction with words, and there are others who are taught not with words but with threats and torments; but there are some men who cannot be instructed in either way, and such men must be expelled so that they do not dwell with the others.” This leads to “the government of the city,” wherein “a noble government…makes the citizens noble, and it makes them do good works and abide by the law and oppose those who do not.” In so saying, he omits Aristotle’s cautionary observation, “among human beings, those who oppose the people’s impulses are hated, even when they do rightly, but the law is not hated when it orders what is decent” (NE 1180a). Latini does, nonetheless, remark the importance of “the master of the law,” who understands “all human matters on the basis of philosophy” while “first of all call[ing] upon the sayings of the wise men of old,” the “good customs of the cities and how good ways uphold them.” By contrast, Aristotle relates the philosophic standard to the political standard, the regime, which then uses “laws and customs” (NE 1181b).
Calling upon the sayings of the wise men of old is of course exactly what Latini does in this compendium. Ending his tracing of the Nicomachean Ethics, he thus embarks on a more wide-ranging survey of moral wisdom, confirming and supplementing what he has presented from the Ethics with teachings from Scripture and the writings of other classical philosophers.
Restating the distinctions between soul, body, and fortune, Latini further distinguishes the soul’s reason from its will, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, who says, “virtue is the exercise of will, according to the judgment of reason,” which implies that “virtue proceeds from nature.” Nature proceeds from God and human nature has been marred by sin, which is why “Jesus Christ sent his disciples to suffer great perils after his passion, before the diminution of their virtue” could occur, as it would have done had they delayed their missions. Sin (Augustine remarks) enables “evil men to have all the beautiful things,” although they themselves are ugly; over time, this alone will tempt even a good man, well-instructed. Accordingly, “Jesus Christ came to show humility and charity,” and “because virtue had such a good instructor and because its fruits are profitable…all wise men say” that “the soul which is filled with [virtue] is completely in the joy of the earthly paradise,” having the means to resist “the desires of the flesh.” The human soul is “the house of God,” a place of brightness, illuminating the right path, and of happiness, “as Solomon says.
Why are all wise men so confident that virtue can triumph in this life? For one thing, “the conscience of the evildoer is always in pain, because the works of virtue are moderate things, and nature itself takes comfort in moderation and becomes upset at excess and lack, just as sight takes comfort in the color green which is midway between white and black.” Indeed, “just as the good woman rejoices when she gives birth to a good-looking son and would be distressed if it were a cat or something else against nature, so too does the soul rejoice in the works of virtue, as if it were its own fruit, and is dismayed at the vices which are against it.”
Regarding the reasoning part of the soul, “I say that the contemplative virtue prepares thee soul for the highest end, that is, the supreme good, but moral virtue prepares the heart for contemplative virtue”; it is “the material by means of which we reach the contemplative virtue.” Therefore, the cultivation of moral virtue precedes the cultivation of contemplative virtue in time if not in rank. “Each of us must choose the active life which is acquired by moral truth in order to govern oneself among corporeal things, for afterwards he is inclined and prepared to love God and to follow his divinity,” the being-at-work of Christian contemplation. The virtues of such contemplation are faith, hope, and charity, whereas the moral virtues consist primarily of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice, with prudence being “the foundation of all others.”
According to Cicero, prudence is “knowledge of good and evil,” which suggests that the first sinful act of man also gave him the means of counteracting sin in the post-lapsarian world. As the prolific theologian Alain de Lille writes, “we need the knowledge of good to protect ourselves, for no one can know good except through the knowledge of evil, and each person avoids evil through knowledge of good.” Prudence enables us not only to distinguish between good and evil but to reason about the better course of action; “the nature of a wise man is to take thoughtful counsel before running after a false thing on a sudden whim.” Latini advises his young gentleman, “Do not give any judgment on things which are doubtful; withhold your judgment and do not take a firm decision, because all things which seem true are not true, and each thing which does not seem believable is not false.” To avoid deceiving others and being deceived yourself, don’t talk too much, confusing things with verbiage. “Let your opinions be like proverbial statements,” Latini writes, taking his own advice. “If you are a wise man, you must dispose your heart according to three times, as follows: organize those things which are present, prepare yourself for those things which are to come, and recall those which are past, for the one who does not think of things gone by and past loses his life, like an unwise person, and the one who does not prepare himself for future things fails in all things like an unwise person and like a man who is not on his guard.” When listening instead of speaking, follow the Scriptural advice to be no respecter of persons: “pay attention to what he has said, not to the one who is talking.”
The four components of prudence are preparation, caution, awareness, and instruction. Boethius writes that “prudence measures the outcome of things.” (The fact that he was executed demonstrates that this is hard to do.) To prepare for “all that can happen,” one first sees and considers present things, “guard[ing] himself against false words and flattery which deceive through gentleness, like the sweet sound of the flute which tricks the bird until it is caught.” Caution puts us “on guard against the contrary vices”—the opposing extremes of excess and deficiency—its “duty” being “to pursue moderation in all things.” This moderation includes moderation in preparation, as preparedness consists neither in ignorance nor in the vain desire to know everything.
Before moving to the next components of prudence, Latini adds several chapters on preparation and caution in speech—which, as will become evident in Part III, he considers central to political life. Before speaking, he advises, consider six things: who you are; who you want to be; for whom you want to be it; how you will achieve that purpose; and at what time. So, “before you say a word, consider in your heart who you are who wish to speak, and be careful first of all to see if the thing pertains to you or to someone else”; in a word, mind your own business. “Solomon says: the person who gets involved with another’s conflicts is like the one who takes a dog by the ears.” As Latini himself puts it, “the person who does not know how to be quiet does not know how to speak,” as “no harm comes to a silent man, but bad things happen to one who talks a lot.”
When it comes to who you want to be, be a truth-teller. “If it is necessary for you to redeem the truth through a lie, do not lie, but rather withdraw when the proper occasion presents itself, for a good man does not conceal his secrets: he withholds what should not be said and says what is appropriate,” speaking truths, to be sure, but only such truths as are believable. Do not be a habitual critic or mocker; “Solomon says, the man who is accustomed to words of reproach will not get better in all the days of his life,” and “the Apostle says, let your speech always be seasoned with the salt of grace, so that you might know how you must reply to each person” with words (Latini adds) that are not “obscure, but rather understandable.” This consideration requires the third piece of advice to a speaker: knowing “to whom you are speaking.” “As long as you keep your secret, it is as if you kept it in prison, but when you reveal it, it keeps you in its prison, for in this world it is a safer thing to be silent than to ask another to be silent.” Never trust a former enemy, as his resentment is likely to be lasting, or a complainer, or a fool, or “a drunk man or a wicked woman.” The audience for the speech forms part of “the circumstances in which you speak”—the conditions under which the action you urge will be performed, the material with which the act will be performed, how it will be done, and the purpose for which it will be done.
As a speaker, how will you speak in order to convince? “You should shape and temper your voice and your spirit and all the movements of your body and tongue,” changing “all these things” as the circumstances warrant. Finally, be careful about the time to speak and how long you take. “The fool pays no attention to the time.”
Returning to the components of prudence, Latini next addresses awareness, knowledge. Call things by their right names in your own mind. “As Seneca says, vices enter under the guise of virtue,” “mad boldness…under the guise of courage,” evil under that of temperance, cowardice under that of wisdom. Recall that the Trojan Horse “fooled the people of Troy” because it was said to be a propitiatory offering to Athena, goddess of wisdom. This leads to the final component of prudence, teaching, which aims first to “give instruction to oneself,” only then “to the ignorant.” In so instructing yourself, “it causes you no harm to pass over knowledge which you do not need, and which does not bring you profit”—a ruling principle of the Treasure. As for teaching others, do it “without reproaching, in such a way that the person is pleased with your criticism.”
Latini proceeds to review and restate Aristotle’s list of the virtues, with temperance preceding courage because “temperance gives strength to the heart for things which are with us, that is, the good things which help the body,” whereas “courage gives strength for contrary things”; moreover, “through temperance man governs himself, and through courage and justice he governs others, and it is better to govern oneself than others.” Temperance, “the control we have over luxuriousness and other evil inclinations,” has five dimensions, each governing the five senses, which produce pleasure. Of these, moderation is the overseer of all “our drives and all our affairs” respecting the body. For example, “one should reduce the amount of physical work for the old and increase the intellectual work, either by teaching or guiding or serving God.” (One may recall Aristotle’s recommendation that priesthood be reserved for the elderly.) Decency means honor in word and deed, avoiding “things which bring shame afterwards.” “Nature itself, when she created man, wanted to keep him honest” by making “his face clearly visible” and by “conceal[ing] the parts which are given to man for his needs, because they were ugly to behold.”
Temperance narrowly defined “consists in overcoming the pleasures of the sense of touch by the restraints of reason”—touch, along with taste, being “more powerful in man than in any other animal,” even as our senses of seeing, hearing, and smelling are weaker. “A wise and strong man always remembers how much man’s nature surpasses that of beasts, for they love nothing except pleasure, and they direct all their energies to this; but a man’s heart aspires to something else, that is, to thinking or understanding.” “Luxuriousness and wine,” stimulants of touch and taste, “trouble man’s ability to reason and make him stray from the faith.” The pleasure lust aims at is the other “great danger to a good life if it is not practiced chastely,” by which Latini means that “the union should be of a man with a woman,” not “with a relative,” within a lawful marriage, intended to “produce children,” and “done according to human nature.” Lust or sexual desire gratified under these conditions “is pleasing to God and to men,” as the Bible teaches and because it benefits “the soul and the body” alike.
Sobriety governs “the pleasures of taste and of the mouth through the temperance of reason.” Nature “gave us a small mouth for such a large body” for a reason, namely, to “restrain the mad desire to eat.” Indeed, “it is a more honorable thing for you to complain of thirst than of drunkenness.” “Refrain therefore from going to taverns and from all great preparation in food, except for your wedding or for your friends or to increase your honor, according to the instructions of magnificence.” Finally, restraint “limit[s] the pleasures of the other three senses”—seeing, hearing, smelling—in “all areas of vice.”
Latini is now ready to discuss courage. Twelve things “give us strength in virtue”: “the true faith in Jesus Christ,” in whom we know we shall be brought to salvation, not matter what happens to us in this life; “the admonishment of important people and our elders,” a point Latini evidently expects not to be lost on his young gentleman; “the memory of valiant men and their works,” which furnish our souls with noble examples; “inclination and usage,” as Latini has shown in his summary of the Nicomachean Ethics; reward; fear; hope; good company, especially friendship, again as taught by Aristotle; truth and justice; good sense; “the weakness of your enemy; and “the strength itself,” virtue meaning strength of soul. Fear of future or present harm and “a cowardly heart”—inborn timidity—are the “sources of cowardice.” Cowardice can be counteracted, even in “weak hearts,” by the “six parts” of courage: magnificence, trust, safety, magnanimity, patience, and constancy.
Magnificence forms part of courage in the sense that it is “called courage,” although it is really a separate virtue and more, the crown of the virtues. The great-souled man scorns the petty; fear appeals to smallness of soul, and so earns his contempt. “Trust is a virtue which has to do with the hope of the heart, that it can carry to conclusion what it undertakes.” Self-assurance is the opposite side of the same coin, fearing neither “the harm which might come, or the result of actions undertaken.” “Fear says to man: you will die, and self-assurance says: this is human nature, not pain. I came into the world with this understanding, that I would leave it. The law orders that we repay what we have borrowed.” Being a “reasonable animal,” I know that I must die, and do not sorrow over the prospect, as death is “the end of evils.” “Fear says: you will die young; self-assurance says: death comes to a young man as it comes to an old one; it makes no distinction, but I can state with certainty that it is best to die when it is a pleasure to live, and very good to die before you desire death.” Fear also says, “you will be chased into exile,” but self-assurance replies, “the country is not forbidden to me, but rather the place, for everything under the sky is my country, “all lands ae his country to the good man, as the sea is for the fish.” “Fear says: you will be poor; self-assurance replies: vices are not in poverty but in poor people; he is poor because he believes he is. Fear says: I am not powerful; self-assurance replies; be happy; you will be.” You have lost your children? “God did not remove them, he received them.” In fact, even “God died,” after the agonizing night at Gethsemane and the ordeal of the Cross. Thus fear “never gave good counsel” but self-assurance, if guided by prudence, does.
Magnificence contributes to courage, as well, this virtue “makes us accomplish difficult and noble things of great importance. In peace, it defends the interests of citizens rather than one’s own interest by providing necessities for the people and maintaining justice with a generous hand. In war, magnificence contributes to thorough preparation, preparation without false economies. In general, courage in war also entails beginning the war with the intention of achieving peace, making war without greed, “fearing weak cowardice more than death,” since “it is better to die than live in disgrace,” proceeding with diligence and justice, reinforcing weakened troops, sustaining wavering or fleeing troops, clemency in victory for “those who were not cruel enemies,” and, finally, establishing peace and maintaining it. Latini teaches “that peace and the affairs of the city are maintained by sense and by counsel of courage, but most people have done battle because of greed. But to tell the truth, armor is of little value outside when there is no sense inside,” and it is “more just to seek glory through intelligence than through force.”
Constancy forms part of courage because the heart “holds firm in its resolution.” “How can I hold Proteus to anything when he is always changing expression?” Patience is “a virtue which makes our heart withstand the assaults of adversity and wrongdoing,” although only (again) if governed by prudence, as “some things are suffered willingly and others not, and suffering undertaken willingly is laudable and worthy of merit,” as supremely exemplified by Jesus Christ.
Justice is the virtue Latini considers after temperance and courage as governed by prudence. “Temperance and courage put man in the seat of justice, and they hold him so strongly that he does not become proud through prosperity, or fearful through adversity.” Justice is the virtue which “gives each person his due.” “Justice comes after all the other virtues, and indeed justice could do nothing if it ignored the other virtues,” considering that “at the beginning of the world,” when “the people lived according to the law of bests,” “without laws and without communities”—like the cyclops, as Aristotle puts it—they “would not have submitted their necks to the yoke of servitude if it were not for the fact that evil deeds multiplied dangerously and the evildoers went unpunished.” Only because “a few good sensible men”—men of temperance and courage—banded together and “ordered the people to live together and to keep human company” did justice become established, the virtue that “overcomes harsh things” to “protect and defend the communal life.” As Aristotle also remarks, even “thieves who steal together want justice among them, and likewise if their master does not divide up what they have stolen justly, their companions either kill them or abandon them.” This sense of justice, which shines however dimly even in darkened souls, manifests itself “because almost everything which pertains to justice is written in our hearts as if by nature.” It is even fundamental to nature itself, as “all other animals keep justice and love and pity among themselves.”
Thus, “justice is joined to nature”; what later thinkers called the ‘state of nature’ isn’t natural for human beings, does not conduce to their flourishing. Justice “is not an arrangement of men,” even if men are its proximate arrangers; “rather it is the law of God and the bond of human company.” “If you truly want to follow justice, love and fear the Lord Our God so that you will be loved by him; and this is the way you can love him: do good to every person and harm to no one, and then they will call you just, and will follow you and revere you and honor you.” Latini’s young gentleman is thereby invited to suppose that God loves human beings in exchange for their love, and that human beings obey, revere, and honor other human beings in exchange justice. This is a rather ‘transactional’ version of the command to love God and neighbor.
Justice has two parts, rigor and clemency, which Latini understands as liberality in meting out justice. Rigor is “a virtue which restrains wrongdoing by a suitable punishment.” Its three “precepts” are: do not harm others if you have not previously been wronged; you communal things in common, private things “as if” they are your own (“as if,” perhaps, because God is their real owner); and remove evil from the community of men, as “wounds for which no medicine can effect a cure should be cut out with iron, and likewise one should not forgive such men.” Although lawyers sometimes do not “follow the truth,” a rigorous judge always will.
Liberality is “a virtue which gives and creates benefits.” When in the will, it is kindness, exhibited by rulers in their clemency; when in fact and deed, it is generosity. Latini discusses seven parts of liberality: giving, rewarding, religiosity, pity, charity, reverence, and mercy. All of these parts of liberality show liberality as a part of justice because each “contributes what it owes,” gives what is due. With respect to giving, Latini advises his young gentleman to “be careful not to delay your gift, for you are mistaken if you think you will get a reward for something delayed and long awaited”; it is noteworthy that, here again, Latini encourages one to expect reward for reward, punishment for punishment, staying within the confines of justice even in areas where one might expect a statement of Christian grace. “Be careful not to be reproached about what you give, for you must forget it” but “it is the one who receives it who must remember.” When giving money, give it “temperately”: “there is no greater madness than to do so much that you cannot continue to do what you willingly do,” being forced thereby into a life of crime. Somewhat more, well, generously, Latini teaches, “In liberality we must follow the gods, who are lords of all things: they give to those who are not grateful, and they do not stop giving”; “the sun shines on excommunicated people,” too. And “virtue consists in giving without waiting for something in return; I would rather not receive than not give.” But lest one think Latini too otherworldly, he continues, when it comes to rewarding, “be careful not to forget the good things which somebody has done for you: all hate the one who forgets the good others have done for him, for this they think that he would also forget the good if they did it.” If you receive, you are obliged to give back, “will for will, and things for things, and words for words.”
Religiosity is “that virtue which makes us want to know God and render service to him; this virtue is called the faith of Jesus Christ, that is, the belief in God.” It has four requirements: to repent of all one’s misdeeds; to “give little value to the bad aspects of temporal things”; to “commit one’s life completely to God,” and to “keep truth and loyalty,” particularly in fulfilling promises. This might be termed Christian liberality, generosity with oneself or selflessness. It is related to pity, “a virtue which makes us love and serve diligently our relatives and our country, and this comes to us through nature, for first of all we are born for God and then for our parents and our country.” Latini’s Christianity thus leaves room for patriotism. Civil concord is “a virtue which links in one law and one dwelling place those who are in the same city and country,” and “does much good,” even as “war destroys” good.
Latini now introduces an unlisted part of liberality, which is innocence—pureness of heart “which hates all wrongdoing.” It helps many, harms no one, and refrains from taking vengeance. It therefore goes a bit beyond justice, strictly defined. In this, it comports with the listed virtue of charity, which is more than a virtue but also “the goal of virtue,” encouraged by the Church, by nature (we are all of the same species), kinship (“we are all children of Adam and Eve”), kinship of spirit (sons of our “mother,” the Holy Church), born in the image of God. Charity also brings the profit that “comes out of live and companionship,” avoiding the injuries inflicted by war and hatred. Latini then returns to the topic of friendship, seen in the Nicomachean Ethics, and considers how Christian charity inflects it. “There are many things which help us to be loved,” to be befriended. These are moderation in speech, “virtue and goodness,” humility, loyalty, loving (“Seneca says: love if you want to be loved”), and “serving wisely, for wisdom is the mother of good love.” Quoting Seneca again, Latini writes, “the person who puts his faith only in his own services is dangerously deceived; there is no more perilous evil than for a person to think that people he does not love are his friends.” They may be taking unjust advantage of your liberality, a point that keeps Latini’s understanding of liberality, even of Christian liberality, within the bounds of justice. He elaborates on “true friendship,” which is animated through faith and true benevolence, “good will directed towards people for their own sake.” Such friends reprimand in private, praise in public; they don’t try to find out what their friends want to keep hidden; they do not waver from friendship in misfortune; they establish a community of possession; they “maintain equality”; they keep their friendship going; they do not reveal the secret of a friend; they “do what he asks quickly”; and they tell him “what will be of profit for him rather than what is pleasing” to him. In contrast, “the person who loves you for his profit is like the crow and the vulture which always follow carrion; he loves you as long as he can get something that belongs to you, and therefore he loves your belongings, not you.” As for the friend who is a companion in pleasures, he resembles “the tercel with his mate who, once he has satisfied his carnal desires, flies away as fast as he can and loves her no more.” Such persons, ruled by passion not prudence, receive a sort of rough justice when “they abandon themselves body and soul to the love of a woman; in this way they lose their sense, so that they become blind, as happened to Adam with his wife, for which reason the whole human race is in peril and always will be so.”
By reverence, Latini means the honor given to noble persons, rulers, and elders. “The man who serves must indeed serve and obey willingly,” laudably obeying even “hard commandments.” “One must serve gladly,” as “God loves the one who gives gladly.” Reverence is liberality with respect to obedience, as when Peter “immediately left his nets and followed Jesus Christ.”
Latini concludes his account of liberality/clemency with the virtue of mercy. Through it, “the heart is moved by those who suffer and by the poverty of the tormented.” That is, mercy remains within the confines of justice because it responds to those in desperate condition by giving them their due, supplying their just needs, the things which they lack, whether goods or services.
By contrast, wrongdoing or injustice consists of cruelty and/or negligence. “Hands which are dedicated to selling alone believe that justice lies where there is more money,” and their cruelty extends beyond the marketplace to the king’s court, “the mother and nurse of evil deeds” (writes the exile from the Florentine court), “for it receives men who are bad as well as just, and honest as well as dishonest.” There are two types of cruelty; “one is strength, the other is deception.” Taking up metaphors his fellow Florentine, Machiavelli, would ‘borrow’ in the act of breaking with classical and Christian virtue, Latini writes that “strength is like that of a lion; deception is like that of a fox.” While “each is a terrible and inhuman thing,” deception “should be hated more, for in all disloyalty there is no greater pestilence than that of those persons who seem good when they receive; no trap is as perilous as the one which is concealed under the guise of service.” Therefore, young gentleman, “beware of the smooth water, and go into the rapids with confidence.”
As for negligence, it consists either of “not preventing wrongdoing” (“there are some who do not want to suffer hatred or trouble or expense in defending”) or of excess busy-ness, or hatred towards those who deserve defense. “It is better to be negligent towards the rich than towards the poor and afflicted.” Insofar as justice can be understood as a mean between extremes, it is the middle ground between excessive kindness and cruelty.
Summarizing his account of the virtues, Latini reminds his reader that prudence “must always go before the other works, and that the other three virtues are for doing the works.” This puts a limit on the best life, the contemplative way of life, the life devoted to philosophizing. “If someone is very desirous of knowing the nature of things, and he puts all his sense into this knowledge”—putting prudence at the service of contemplation—and if “another person comes to him and suddenly brings him news that his city and his country are in peril if he does not help them, and that he has the power of helping, it is a more honest thing that he abandon his study and go defend his country.”
After prudence comes temperance; “it is better for a man to have control himself than over another,” for, as Seneca advises, “if you want to submit all things to yourself, submit yourself first of all to reason for if reason governs you, you will be governor of many, but nothing is good for a man if he is not first good.” Having fortified his prudence and temperance with courage, one has readied himself for doing justice, owing duty first to God, then to his country, then to his parents, and then to all others.
If the virtues are blessings of the soul, what are the blessings of the body and the blessings of fortune, things external to soul and body? The bodily blessings—beauty, nobility of bearing, agility, strength, stature, and health—find their limit in “the darkness of death,” which “shows what human bodies are like and how they are perishable.” The blessings of fortune—wealth, lordship, glory—must be understood as meted out unreasonably, as fortune’s course “is neither just nor reasonable,” even though controlled by God. Perhaps the arbitrary acts of fortune may be permitted by God to test the fidelity of human beings, even as evil exists as a necessary contrast to the good. As Latini himself writes, subsequently, “I would say as Augustine says, that God wishes it, so that the good things bad people have might not be too desired, and that the evils which happen to the good people not be too scorned.” And again, “for this reason God gives beauty to bad people, so that the good people will not believe that this is a great blessing.”
Although we cannot govern fortune itself (as Machiavelli would later claim), we can govern ourselves in relation to its blessings. Wealth, for example, is a substantial blessing, but remember that the “black death attacks equally the small houses of poor people and the great towers of kings.” If you are wealthy, while you are, do not lord it over your servants. “You must live…with the one who is lower than you, as you would want a superior to live with you; every time that you remember how much power you have over your servant, remember that your lord has a similar power over you.” When it comes to wealth in money, remain mindful that covetousness “destroys virtue.” “If someone asked me what moderation in wealth is, I would say that the first thing is what necessity requires; the second is that you be satisfied with what is sufficient.”
Respecting lordship, the worthiest of this kind of blessing “is that of kings and of governing cities, and peoples,” the “worthiest profession there can be in the world.” Latini confines himself to “tell what is appropriate to lordship and the government of a city, according to what is required by the customs of the country and the law of Rome”—state and Church. As with wealth, “one must temper the desire for lordship,” as “great things fall of themselves, and it is the point up to which the gods allow happiness to increase; they give great things easily, but they hardly guarantee them.” Once again anticipating the temptation to be offered by Machiavelli, the desire for lordship “reveals pretense and hypocrisy.” The true “duty of lordship is to lead people to their profit,” broadly defined, and Latini sides with Cicero against Machiavelli in teaching that “there is nothing which is more appropriate to lordship than to be loved, and nothing more inappropriate than to be feared.” Machiavelli will say that the prince should take care to be feared more than to be loved, but not to be hated. Latini replies in advance, with Seneca, that “oppressed people hate those they fear, and people want the one they hate to perish.” Tyrants die young. “Alexander, when he wanted to sleep with his wife, first ordered servants to search her chests and her clothing to see if there was not a knife hidden there; this is a bad thing, to trust a servant more than he did his wife; and in spite of this he was not betrayed by is wife but by one of his servants,” not by one who loved him but by one who feared him.
Finally, as to glory, a “good reputation, known in many lands, of men who have accomplished great things, or know their art well,” ranks as genuine glory. Glory based on appearance or fraud is as vain as lordship based on force aimed at inspiring fear. And “if you want to compare the blessings of fortune with one another, I say that glory is worth more than wealth”—a blessing to the honor-loving part of the soul, not to the appetites—that sanctity is also “better than wealth”—Latini is a son of the Church—that, among kinds of wealth, “income from cities is worth more than that which comes from fields”—Latini being a man of civil and commercial life, an urbane man—and that “wealth is worth more than strength of the body,” being the more wide-ranging form of strength. Against Machiavelli’s future valorization of men’s desire to acquire, Latini insists that “honesty is so profitable that nothing can be profitable if it is not honest,” as “nothing is profitable which does not harmonize with virtue.” “If someone asked me if some wise man is dying of hunger, should he not take the food of another who is worthless”—after all, he outranks him in virtue—I say “no, because life is not more worthwhile to me than my will, through which I refrain from doing harm to another for my profit.” “When a man loses his life, his body is corrupted by death; but if I forsook my will I would fall into vices of the heart,” which being “more serious than [vices] of the body,” would be far more damaging to lose. “Similarly, the good of the heart is better than that of the body, for virtue is worth more than life.”
How does Christianity affect the philosophic way of life, the life of contemplation? Whereas “the active life is in the innocence of good works,” the “contemplative life is in thinking of celestial things,” “taking delight in God alone.” The “saintly man” must “occasionally turn towards the active life because it is necessary to man,” in that sense the more important of the two. Indeed, “the two eyes of a man signify these two lives, and therefore, when God orders that the right eye which is causing scandal be removed and thrown out, he refers to the contemplative life, if it should be corrupted by error”; contrary to Scripture, Latini claims that a contemplatively blind man might “through his works achieve everlasting life, rather than go to the fire of hell because of error in the contemplative life.” There is of course no suggestion in Scripture that one can achieve salvation through works. If Latini had written that a faithful if the not contemplative Christian may achieve salvation, and that such a Christian would likely pursue good works, he would have guided the young gentleman better, and he begins to do so almost immediately.
Faith, hope, and charity, he writes, are the three contemplative virtues. “No man can reach beatitude except through faith,” as “God is praised and glorified when he is truly believed.” God knows when He is truly believed because he “looks at the faith within the heart.” Not wanting his reader to rest content with that, he adds that “faith is empty which is without works.” He refers to the second of Christ’s commandments, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, since even as faith without works is empty, so works without charity will bring no salvation to the worker, even if his works are good and his beliefs are correct. “The virtue of charity” is “mistress and queen of all virtues and the bond of perfection, for it binds the other virtues.” This corrects his earlier claim that salvation is available through works, inasmuch as two contemplative virtues are necessary to give good works merit in the eyes of God. As for hope, Latini is most concerned that one not misunderstand and therefore misuse it. True, a Christian “must have hope in God, so that he will forgive our sins, but we must take care that because of the assurance we have in God’s promise of forgiveness we do not persevere in sin.”
What in us receives Christ’s Great Commandment to love God and neighbor? “The commandment of God is not written in us with letters of ink; rather it is set in our hearts by the divine spirit,” as “the notion of what is good and evil comes into us in which a way that we know naturally that we have to do good and avoid evil.” Conscience serves as the judge of a man inside himself. We reinforce conscience when we “follow three tracks of the best people and do what they do, for just as the wax receives the form of the seal, so too the morality of men is formed by a model.” Ultimately, the best model is Christ, Latini may imply, but he has provided many lesser but still good models serviceable for one’s efforts at moral formation.
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