As if we had a vile touch, we corrupt by our manner things which of themselves are beautiful and good. We can seize virtue in such a way that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it with a desire that is too strong and violent. Those who say that there is never any excess in virtue, inasmuch as it is no longer virtue if there is excess in it, are playing with words:
Let the wise bear the name of the insane, the just bear the name of the unjust; It is more than enough if he seeks virtue itself. (Horace)
This is a subtle consideration of philosophy. One can both love virtue too much, and be excessively inclined towards a just action. From the divine voice: Do not be wiser than you need to be, but be soberly wise. I have seen such a great man hurt the reputation of his religion to show himself religious beyond all example of men of his kind. I like temperate, average natures. Immoderation towards the good itself, if it does not offend me, it astonishes me and makes me reluctant to baptize it.
Neither the mother of Pausanias, who gave the first instruction and laid the first stone at the death of her son, nor the dictator Posthumius, who caused the death of his own son, whom the ardor of youth had happily driven over the enemies, a little before his rank, seems to me to be just as strange.
And I don’t like to advise or follow such a wild and dear virtue. The archer who misses the target too high misses just as much as the one who doesn’t reach it. And the eyes trouble me to go up suddenly to a great light also as to devalue in the shade. Calliclez, in Plato, says the extremity of philosophy is harmful, and advises not to sink into it beyond the bounds of profit; that, taken with moderation, it is pleasant and convenient, but that in the end it makes a man savage and vicious, disdainful of religions and common laws, an enemy of civil conversation, an enemy of human voluptuousness, incapable of all political administration and of helping others and helping oneself, fit to be slapped with impunity. He says this is true, because in its excess, it enslaves our natural frankness, and by an importunate subtlety leads us astray from the beautiful and plain path that nature has laid out for us.
The warmth we feel for our wives is very legitimate: yet theology does not let it restrain us. It seems to me that I once read in Saint Thomas, in a place where he condemns the marriages of relatives within forbidden closeness, this reason among others, that there is a danger that the affection we bear to such a woman will be immoderate: for, if marital ardor is found to be complete and perfect, as it should be, and if it is further overloaded with that which is owed to the family bonds, there is no doubt that this overload will carry such a husband beyond the barriers of reason.
The sciences that regulate the lives of men, such as theology and philosophy, are concerned with everything. There is no action so private and secretive, which is disguised from their recognition and jurisdiction. Those who syndicate their freedom are well learned. It’s the women who expose their body parts as much as we want; but when it comes to receiving medical treatment, shame forbids it. On their behalf, therefore, I want to teach husbands this: If there are any who are still too relentless, that the very pleasures they have at their wives’ side are repressed, if moderation is not observed; and that there is reason to fail in license and disobedience, as in an illegitimate subject.
These dishonest excesses that the first heat suggests to us in this game, are, not only indecently, but damagingly employed towards our women. Let them learn impudence at least from another hand. They are always awakened to our needs. I have only used natural and simple instruction. Marriage is a religious bond and devotion: that’s why the pleasure we derive from it must be a restrained, serious pleasure, measured by a certain severity; it must be a pleasure that is in no way prudent or conscientious.
And, because its principal end is generation, there are some who doubt whether, when we are without the hope of this fruit, as when they are out of age, or pregnant, it is permissible to seek its embrace. This is homicide after the fashion of Plato. Some nations, such as in Islam, abominate consorting with pregnant women or even those menstruating. Zenobia only received her husband for a charge, and when this was done, she let him run for the duration of his conception, giving him only then the loyalty to begin again: a brave and generous example of marriage.
Plato borrowed this tale from some starving and destitute poet, that Jupiter made his wife such a hearty charge one day that, unable to wait until she had reached the bed, he poured her out on the floor, and, in the vehemence of pleasure, forgot the great and important resolutions he had just taken with the other gods in his celestial court, enjoying her as much at that time as he did in youth when they had to hide from her parents.
The kings of Persia called their wives to the company of their feasts; but when the wine warmed them up and it was time to let go of the bridle of voluptuousness, they sent them away in their private life, so as not to make them participate in their immoderate appetites, and brought to their place women to whom they did not owe this obligation of respect. All pleasures and gratifications are not well accommodated in all people: Epaminondas had a disobedient boy imprisoned; Pelopidas begged him to set him free on his behalf: he refused, and granted it to a bitch of his, who also begged him: saying that it was a gratification due to a friend, not to a captain.
Sophocles, being a companion in the Preture with Pericles, seeing a handsome boy passing by, said to Pericles: “What a handsome boy I see! That would be good for another than a Praetor, Pericles told him, who must have, not only hands, but also chaste eyes. Aelius Verus, the Emperor, replied to his wife, as she complained of his indulgence in the love of other women, that he did so out of conscientious occasion, inasmuch as marriage was a name of honor and dignity, not of folly and lascivious concupiscence. And our ancient ecclesiastical authors honorably mention of a woman who repudiated her husband for not wishing to second her too lascivious and immoderate loves.
In short, there is no pleasure so just, in which excess and intemperance are not reproachable. But is man not a miserable animal? It is hardly in his power, by his natural condition, to taste a single pure and whole pleasure, and he still struggles to cut it off with words: he is not wretched enough, if by art and study he does not increase his misery:
We have increased the miserable ways of fortune with art. (Propertius)
Human wisdom is very foolishly ingenious in exercising itself to reduce the number and sweetness of the pleasures that belong to us, just as it does favorably and industriously in employing its artifices to paint and make up the evils and lighten the feeling of them. If I had been in charge, I would have taken another, more natural path, which is true, convenient and healthy; and perhaps I would have been strong enough to limit it.
Although our spiritual and physical doctors, as if in collusion, find no way to heal, nor remedy for the diseases of the body and soul, other than through torment, pain and suffering. Vigils, fasts, hates, distant and solitary exiles, perpetual prisons, rods and other afflictions have been introduced for this purpose; but in such condition that they are truly afflictions and that there is poignant bitterness; and that it does not happen as to a Gallio, who having been sent into exile to the isle of Lesbos, was told in Rome that he was having a good time there, and that what he had been enjoined to do as a punishment, was turning to his convenience: so they decided to call him back to his wife and home, and ordered him to stay there, to fit their punishment to his resentment.
For to whom the fast would sharpen health and alertness, to whom the fish would be more appetizing than the flesh, it would no longer be salutary reception; not more than in the other medicine the drugs have no effect to the place of one who takes them with appetite and pleasure. Bitterness and difficulty are circumstances that serve their operation. The natural person who accepts rubarb as familiar, corrupts its use: it must be something that hurts our stomach to heal it; and here the common rule is that things are healed by their opposites, because evil heals evil.
This impression is in no way related to the other, so ancient, to think of gratifying Heaven and nature by our massacre and homicide, which was universally embraced in all religions. Still in the time of our fathers, Amurat, in the prince of Isthmus, immolated six hundred young Greek men to the soul of his father, so that this blood might serve as propitiation for the expiation of the sins of the deceased.
And in these new lands, discovered in our age, still pure and virgin to our own, the custom is accepted by all: all their Idols drink human blood, not without various examples of horrible cruelty. They are burned alive, and, half roasted, they are taken out of the inferno to rip out their hearts and entrails. Others, even women, are escorted alive, and their bloody skin is used to cover and mask others. And no less examples of constancy and resolution. For these poor sacrificial people, old men, women and children, go a few days beforehand to collect alms themselves for the offering of their sacrifice, and come to the slaughter singing and dancing with the assistants.
The ambassadors of the King of Mexico, making Ferdinand Cortez understand the greatness of their master, after having told him that he had thirty vassals, each of whom could assemble a hundred thousand combatants, and that he stood in the most beautiful and strongest city under heaven, added that he had to sacrifice fifty thousand men a year to the Gods. In fact, they say that he waged war with certain large neighboring peoples, not only for the exercise of the country’s youth, but mainly to provide his sacrifices with prisoners of war. Elsewhere, in a certain village, they sacrificed fifty men at a time for Cortez’s arrival. I’ll go on with this account. Some of these peoples, having been beaten by him, sent to recognize him and seek his friendship; the messengers presented him with three kinds of gifts, in this manner: “Lord, see here five slaves; if you are a proud God, who feeds you with flesh and blood, eat them, and we will make you more bitter; if you are a debonair God, see incense and feathers; if you are a man, take the birds and fruit that you see here.”