[8] So much for the wealth that is the guardsman of the body, the happy gift of nature, but we must mention also the higher, nobler wealth, which does not belong to all, but to truly noble and divinely gifted men. This wealth is bestowed by wisdom through the doctrines and principles of ethic, logic and physic, and from these spring the virtues, which rid the soul of its proneness to extravagance, and engender the love of contentment and frugality, which will assimilate it to God.
[9] For God has no wants, He needs nothing, being in Himself all-sufficient to Himself, while the fool has many wants, ever thirsting for what is not there, longing to gratify his greedy and insatiable desire, which he fans into a blaze like a fire and brings both great and small within its reach. But the man of worth has few wants, standing midway between mortality and immortality. Some wants he has because his body is mortal, many he has not in virtue of his soul, which desires immortality.
[10] This is the way in which the wise pit riches against poverty. Against disrepute they pit good fame, for the praise which has its fountain head in noble conduct, flowing thence as from a perennial spring, has no currency among the unthinking masses, whose habit is to expose the inconstancies of their souls by random talk, often in order to purchase some shameful reward unblushingly directed against these men of choicest merit. But the number of these is small, for virtue is not widespread among mortal kind.
[11] Again there is disablement of the senses. To live with this has been premature death to thousands, because they can find no medicine to protect them against its ills. Its opponent is wisdom, the best quality we have, which plants eyes in the mind, and the mind in keenness of vision excels the eyes of the body so that they, as people say, are a “mere nothing” in comparison.
[12] The body’s eyes observe the surfaces of things visible and need the external help of light, but the mind penetrates through the depth of material things, accurately observing their whole contents and their several parts, surveying also the nature of things immaterial, which sense is unable to descry. For we may say that it achieves all the keenness of vision, which an eye can have, without needing any adventitious light, itself a star and, we may say, a copy and likeness of the heavenly company.
[13] Again diseases of the body, if the soul is healthy, do very little harm. And the health of the soul is to have its faculties, reason, high spirit and desire happily tempered, with the reason in command and reining in both the other two, like restive horses.
[14] The special name of this health is temperance, that is σωφροσύνη or “thought-preserving,” for it creates a preservation of one of our powers, namely, that of wise-thinking. For often when that power is in danger of being submerged by the tide of the passions, this spiritual health prevents it from being lost in the depths and pulls it up and lifts it on high, vitalizing and quickening it, and giving it a kind of immortality.
[15] All the above are lessons and instructions, which stand recorded in many places of the law, urging the tractable in gentle, the intractable in sterner terms to despise the bodily and external goods, holding the life of virtue to be the one sole end and pursuing after everything else that is conducive to it.
[16] And if I had not in my earlier writings dealt fully with each of the rules which promote simplicity, I would attempt to dilate on them at this point, and embrace in a collected list the scattered precepts which appear in different places. But as I have said all that occasion required, I think it better not to repeat myself.
[17] Still those who do not shrink from the task but are at pains to study the books which precede these, ought to perceive that practically everything there said about simplicity includes the thought of courage, since it is the mark of a soul, vigorous, gallant and full of mettle, that it despises everything which vanity is wont to glorify to the destruction of life in any true sense.