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33. On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life

[This chapter shows how Christianity in early times was closer to Stoicism than many realized. The anecdote of St Hilary derives from the Annales d’Aquitaine of Jean Bouchet (a friend of Rabelais and a fluent moral poet and historian of the generation before Montaigne).]

[A] I had already noted that the majority of ancient opinions agree on the following: that it is time to die when living entails more ill than good, and that preserving our life to our anguish or prejudice is to infringe the very laws of Nature – as these old precepts put it:

[Either a quiet life or a happy death. It is good to die for those who find life a burden. Better not to live than to live in wretchedness.]1

But to carry contempt for death to the point of using it to dissuade us from honours, riches, great offices and the rest of what we call Fortune’s goods and favours, as if reason did not already have cause enough to persuade us to abandon them without adding this fresh attack, is something I had never seen enjoined or practised until I happened upon a passage in Seneca; in it he advises Lucilius, a man of power and of great authority in the Emperor’s court, to renounce his life of pomp and pleasure and to withdraw from such worldly ambition into a solitary life, tranquil and philosophical. When Lucilius cited some of the difficulties, Seneca said: ‘My counsel is that either you should quit that life or life itself; I do indeed advise you to adopt the easier course of slipping the bonds which you have wrongly tied rather than breaking them, providing that you do break them if you cannot do otherwise. No man is such a coward that he would not rather make one fall than to be forever on the brink.’2

I would have found that counsel in keeping with the asperity of the Stoics, but it is rather odd that Seneca could borrow it from Epicurus, who on this subject writes to Idomeneus in the very same way.3 Nevertheless I think I have noted a similar precept among our own people, but with Christian moderation. St Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers and a famous enemy of the Arian heresy, was in Syria when he was told that his only daughter Abra, whom he had left overseas with her mother, was being courted by some of the most notable lords of the land since she was very well brought up, a maiden fair, rich and blooming. He wrote to her (as we know) that she should get rid of her love of the pleasures and favours that were being offered her, saying that he had found for her during his journey a Suitor who was far greater and more worthy, a Bridegroom of very different power and glory, who would vouchsafe her a present of robes and jewels of countless price. His aim was to make her lose the habit and taste of worldly pleasures and to wed her to God; but since the most sure and shortest way seemed to him that his daughter should die, he never ceased to beseech God in his prayers, vows and supplications that he should take her from this world and call her to Himself. And so it happened: soon after his return she did die, at which he showed uncommon joy. He seems to have outstripped those others in that he had immediate recourse to a means which they keep in reserve; and besides it concerned his only daughter.

But I would not omit the end of this story: when St Hilary’s wife heard from him how the death of their daughter had been brought about by his wish and design, and how much happier she was to have quitted this world than to have remained in it, she too took so lively a grasp on that eternal life in Heaven that she besought her husband, with the utmost urgency, to do the same for her. Soon after, when God took her to Himself in answer to both their prayers, the death was welcomed with open arms and with an uncommon joy which both of them shared.4