Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

178 JOSEPH TORCHIA
We are beset by evils, and we have to endure them steadfastly
until we reach those goods where there will be everything
to supply us with delight beyond the telling, and there will be
nothing any longer that we are bound to endure. Such is the salvation
which in the world to come will also be itself the ultimate
bliss. 29
But while the assurance of an eternal reward generates at
least some hope in our present trials, it provides little comfort
for those who must still undergo them. Augustine is fully cognizant
of the scope and extent of human hardship. In contrast to
the Stoics (who downplay the importance of externals in the life
of the rational being), he never minimizes the evils confronting
human existence. From his standpoint, the failure of the Stoic
position lies in its paradoxical claim that the “wise man” can
somehow be happy, even when his misery prompts him to commit
suicide.
I am astounded at the effrontery of the Stoics in their contention
that those ills are not ills at all, when they admit that if
they should be so great that a wise man cannot or ought not to
endure them, he is forced to put himself to death and to depart
from this life. Yet so great is the stupefying arrogance of those
people who imagine that they find the Ultimate Good in this life
and that they can attain happiness by their own efforts, that
their ‘wise man’...even if he goes blind, deaf, and dumb, even if
enfeebled in limb and tormented with pain...and thus is driven
to do himself to death...that such a man would not blush to call
that life of his, in the setting of all those ills, a life of happiness! 30
An implication of the Stoic emphasis upon the autonomy of
the individual was an endorsement of suicide (under certain
conditions) as a means of avoiding excessive pain and the infirmities
of old age. 31 For the Stoics, the moral admissibility of sui-
29
De Civitate Dei xix,4, 196-200: CC xlviii, 668-669.
30
De Civitate Dei xix,4, 105: CC xlviii, 666.
31
Cf. MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations V,29; VIII, 47; X, 8; EPICTETUS,
Discourses I, 9; 24; III, 24.