The One Thing Necessary

Dedication to Prince Rupert

To the most exalted prince and lord, Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine.

Most Serene Prince,

The whole world violates the counsel Varro gave to a prudent head of a household, or to anyone going to market: “Buy what is necessary, not what you could use.” The world is a marketplace, full of wares and of people selling, buying, and looking at them. Yet few know how to distinguish necessities from things that are not necessary. Good and bad things, necessities and excesses, useful and harmful things, precious and worthless things are displayed, praised, sold, and bought indiscriminately. More astonishing and more grievous still, excesses are offered, praised, sold, and bought more often than necessities; harmful things are offered, praised, sold, and bought more often than useful ones; and bad things are offered, praised, sold, and bought more often than good ones. Hence the saying, “The world wants to be deceived.” Deception and fraud fill it on every side. Even Solomon, the wisest of mortals, did not escape its mockeries and illusions. He became a spectacle of vanity, folly, and, at last, belated repentance.

An unexpected occasion recently led me, an old man, to consider this matter, so I thought it right to write something down. I hope it will help me first, as I look toward the end of life, to struggle free of vain things even in extreme old age. I hope it will also help others who are entangled in the world’s secondary concerns and willing to heed a warning. Perhaps it will help you too, magnanimous Prince. You have been no more fortunate than Samson, David, Solomon, and other men of lofty spirit. They were swept up in the whirlpool of worldly affairs, caught in the circles of things that were not necessary, and escaped only with difficulty. Your lineage, your name, and the varied fortunes that have tested you throughout life already give you ample encouragement toward heroic virtue. Yet why should I not call out encouragement to one who is running and already nearing the finish?

O Rupert, descended from kings, indeed from emperors! Nothing lowly, much less frivolous, befits you at your present age and in your present circumstances. Everything should be lofty and worthy of your high station. Your ancestor Rupert, whose name you bear, was a prince elector of the Palatinate. Elected emperor of the Romans in the year of Christ 1400, he governed the empire so well for a full decade that historians praised him as a wise and magnanimous prince. He brought peace throughout Germany, which he had found torn apart by disputes. Thus he lived up to the meaning of his name, much as Solomon did: Solomon means “peaceful,” while Rupert means “restorer of quiet” (Ruhebrecht, from Ruhebringen, “bringing quiet”). The names of your father the king and of your great-grandfather Frederick the Great accord with this. Friedreich means “rich in peace” and recalls the peaceful times of Solomon.

But the times in which your father was called to rule were not peaceful. Bohemia, Germany, and Europe were to be chastened by wars. The Fates therefore only showed him to the world, postponing to another time what his very name signified. May we at last see peaceful times after so many winters, rains, and storms! May we have a part in bringing them back! They could come if Christians of every party would appease, through universal repentance, the wrath of God justly kindled by the sins of every party; if kings would lay down their arms and consider plans for peace; if subjects would serve God and their kings more faithfully; and if all would put aside trifles, attend to the serious business of life, and devote themselves to what is necessary for salvation instead of the vainest occupations.

Most Serene Prince, the predictions astrologers made for you from the favorable position of the stars still exist, as do poets’ verses about you. They hold favorable omens for your future. You were crowned beneath your mother’s heart before you were born and received the name Rupert at baptism. Yet the power of the stars and of fate rests in the hand of the Lord, who made heaven and earth and directs all things wisely and powerfully toward the ends he has appointed. In this little work, guided by sound reason and divine oracles, I have wished to set before us what is most necessary for anyone to pass carefully through this mortal life.

Read this old man’s writing, excellent Prince. You too have passed beyond youthful exuberance and hasten to leave the world’s labyrinths behind, fix the rocks of Sisyphus in place, and exchange the illusory delights of Tantalus for true delights that bring real satisfaction.

I shall pray to God that, in this very year we have begun and in the very kingdom to which kindly Fates have brought you, a true beginning may be made toward peace in the Christian world. May it come through a solemn beginning of the practice of the one thing necessary, with your own pious, prudent, and heroic cooperation. Amen!

An old man who devoutly wishes every true happiness to Your Serene Highness.

Amsterdam, from my study, March 1, 1668.

J. A. Comenius, Moravian.

1. The World’s Excess, Trouble, and Frustrated Aims

Repeated examples show that excess overwhelms the whole world, trouble exhausts it, and its aims end in frustration.

1. God made human beings in his image and made them lords over created things. We have three occupations concerning them: to observe and understand them, to work with them for our use, and to use and enjoy them. The creation account shows all three. God planted a garden of delight (Gen 2:8) and placed the man there to work and keep it (Gen 2:15). He then brought the animals to him so that, by observing them, he might name them (Gen 2:19). Human happiness therefore has three parts. We understand clearly enough to distinguish things rightly; our actions succeed in producing lasting work; and we enjoy good things securely, with true satisfaction and peace of mind.

2. Unhappiness has a corresponding threefold form. In understanding, there are confusion, error, and falsehood. In action, there are hesitation, mistakes, and instability. In enjoyment, there is frustration: a distressing hunger and thirst that returns whenever we desire something. Errors of mind, mistakes in action, and frustrated desires have troubled the whole human race since our first ancestor. Through his shameful misuse of things and of himself, he deserved expulsion from Paradise to the earth, which had been struck by a curse on account of sin. He was condemned to exchange pleasure for labor and sweat, thorns and thistles, throughout his life and up to death itself (Gen 3:17, etc.). We, his descendants, all experience these penalties of sin.

3. In every age, godly and wise people have complained that human affairs are confused, labor is troublesome and fruitless, and pleasures give way to pain and continual distress of spirit. Solomon, wisest of mortals, filled his books with these laments and his life with examples of errors, hardships, and regrets. He complained that he could discover neither the beginning nor the end of God’s works (Eccl 3:11). He could not fathom the reason for anything under the sun: the harder he searched, the less he found (Eccl 8:17). He found only this: God made the human being upright, but people entangle themselves in countless schemes and are lost in vanity (Eccl 7:29). He also complained that labor brings a person nothing but weariness, for what is crooked cannot be made straight, and deficiencies cannot be counted (Eccl 1:14-15). When he considered everything his hands had made, works outstanding even among those of other mortals, he found his exertions vain because nothing under the sun endures (Eccl 2:11). He had labored in vain and for the wind (Eccl 5:15). Speed does not ensure success in a race, strength in battle, wisdom bread, prudence riches, or skill favor (Eccl 9:11). Labor often does harm instead: a person moving stones is hurt by them, and a person splitting wood is wounded by it (Eccl 10:9). Finally, Solomon complained that even pleasant things bring no satisfaction (Eccl 1:8). He allowed himself every pleasure he could imagine and denied himself nothing. Yet he found such vanity in everything under the sun that he grew weary of life and came to loathe all he had (Eccl 2:1, 6-8, 10, 17). He judged those not yet born, who had not seen the evils under the sun, happier (Eccl 4:3), and judged stillborn children happier too (Eccl 6:3). Anyone who wishes to look can find similar complaints throughout Scripture.

4. The wise Greeks meant much the same thing when they wrapped their teachings in fables and told the people of their age about labyrinths, the stones of Sisyphus, and the delights of Tantalus. Their stories were as true as they were ingenious. Let us pause over them so that we may understand our troubles better and accept their remedies more readily.

5. Here is the story of the labyrinth. Minos, the powerful king of Crete, had a wife named Pasiphaë, a woman of monstrous lust. From her adulterous union with a bull she bore a monster, half human and half ox, called the Minotaur. With the help of the ingenious craftsman Daedalus, the king had a labyrinth built: a bewildering structure filled with countless winding paths, courts, passages, and ways ascending and descending. Anyone sent inside would wander forever without finding the exit. Minos confined the offspring there and ordered other condemned criminals thrust inside, either to be devoured by the monster or to die of hunger. Theseus alone, the son of the Athenian king, escaped. Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, took pity on him and, on Daedalus’s advice, supplied him with a ball of thread, and so forth.

6. That is the ancient tale. Interpreters of myth say the labyrinth represents human life, so beset with difficulties on every side that no mortal can find a way out unless God instructs that person in wisdom. Its meaning becomes clearer still if Minos, king of Crete, represents God, king of the universe, and Pasiphaë represents the human being, made in God’s image as his companion. The infernal bull, Satan, corrupted her, and from that unhappy union came the Minotaur: a monstrous wisdom mixed from divine and satanic seed. Its upper part had something fair and heavenly, a likeness of God; its lower part was earthly and deformed, the very likeness of Satan. We want to be gods, but in a devilish way: like God in possessing all knowledge, yet like the Devil in breaking obedience. To punish us, the king of the universe transformed this world, made for our sake as the theater of his wisdom, into a labyrinth. Placed in it, we all wander without end. Solomon, every wise observer, and our own continual, sorrowful experience bear witness to this. The great world is one labyrinth containing countless smaller ones. Everyone wanders in some labyrinth, and one person may wander in several. If we could inspect every mind, we would see intricate turns of thought and imagination, including monstrous ones. If we could inspect the languages of nations, we would find an endless chaos of confused sounds and concepts. If we could inspect the labors that occupy everyone under heaven, we would find tangled paths without number, circling, rising and descending, going forward and back, right and left, all in blind wandering. Solomon was the wisest of men and prospered in his kingdom, yet his occupations became a labyrinth. His repeated mistakes and sorrowful complaints show it, as does the experience of his descendants. What king, prince, or noble, let alone a private person, would dare promise himself freedom from continual errors and weariness?

7. What of Sisyphus? The story says that the gods condemned him for certain rash deeds to roll a great stone up a mountain in the underworld. Whenever he pushed it to the summit, it slipped back to the bottom, and he had to begin again, without end. What does this mean? Change the name, and the story is about us. It describes the exhausting labors with which we continually wear ourselves out, scarcely ever finding an end, because the end of one task begins another. The sun sets only to rise again. Rivers enter the sea as though reaching their destination, only to return to their sources and flow again. So each person lies down to rest only to rise again for work. Every year a farmer harvests a field, and every year the same field must be sown again. It is so with everything. Someone thinks a task is finished with the desired success, then soon sees its fruit disappear. Another person destroys what was built; or the builder, displeased with the work, builds something else or builds it differently; or the work perishes on its own and must be replaced. How many disputes, lawsuits, and wars that seemed happily settled return as new disputes and wars? Even the world’s most splendid works, accomplished to great public acclaim and soon undone, testify to this. Where are the many empires founded by so many heroes, empires that seemed firmly established? They have fallen so far that scarcely a memory remains. See, we have all become Sisyphus! All our labors are stones of Sisyphus!

8. Finally, Tantalus was said to have been condemned to everlasting hunger and thirst for the intemperance of his appetite, though others say it was for the intemperance of his tongue. He stood among the most flavorful fruits, with the clearest water at his lips, but could enjoy neither: both fled from his mouth. Thus Ovid wrote: “Tantalus seeks water amid waters and grasps at fleeing fruit; his chattering tongue brought this upon him.” Here again is a true picture of the human lot. Those who desire wealth, honors, pleasures, or other things in life most eagerly hunger and thirst the most, because pleasure and desire know no satisfaction. They eat only to eat again and drink only to drink again. As a person with an itch never finishes scratching, so the pleasure seeker never finishes seeking pleasure, the ambitious person pursuing honors, or the rich person scraping together wealth. Every desire hungers insatiably for its own object. As the earth is never satisfied with water and fire never says, “Enough,” as Solomon observes (Prov 30:16), so it is with the human mind in all it longs for. All the pleasure seekers, the ambitious, and the greedy whom the world sustains are Tantali condemned to everlasting hunger and thirst. And because we all struggle with desires, though to differing degrees, and no one satisfies them in this life, we are all wretched Tantali.

9. These figures have a more particular application too: the labyrinth to our present life, the stones of Sisyphus to death, and the feast of Tantalus to the condition awaiting each person after death. While we live, each of us has a labyrinth of troublesome occupations, one arising after another. At death, the supreme task of conscience is whether one knows how to lay down the burden and find eternal rest, or does not know how and fails to find it. After death awaits either everlasting satisfaction in the pleasures of God’s Paradise or everlasting hunger and thirst for those shut out from it. Woe to the one who has not escaped worldly labyrinths before life ends! Woe to the one who does not know how to lay down the burden of sins at death! Woe to the one who finds himself carried after death into the company of Tantalus!

10. Returning to the weariness of this life, I say that anyone who passed through all human ages, sexes, conditions, and ranks would find nothing but labyrinths and stones, with desires continually frustrated. The young have their labyrinths, and so do the old. Men have them, and so do women. Farmers, craftspeople, merchants, and soldiers all have their troubles. Who passes through life without them?

11. Philosophers and others devoted to wisdom seek remedies for errors of mind and the troubles of life. Their own complaints and endless quarrels tell the world how much they have found. Aristotle refuted all who had philosophized before him. He hoped to establish a sound philosophy by setting everything out systematically, but he found opponents, and they remain to this day. Others tried to establish everything in different ways, even in our own age: Patrizi, Telesio, Campanella, Bacon of Verulam, and Descartes. What progress has been made in the matter as a whole? The disputes remain unsettled, with no one to decide them. Descartes did seem to have found a convenient way out of the endless labyrinths of error. He advised setting aside prejudgments about truths supposedly already possessed, examining everything anew, and accepting nothing unless it was so plainly true that it could not be overturned. Many applauded his advice. But calling everything into doubt, divine as well as human, seemed dangerous; examining everything seemed an immense task. Most therefore complain that he built only a new labyrinth, one so perplexing that Daedalus himself found no way out and showed no one else a thread to follow. For example, Descartes constructed a system of the bodily world from certain vortices, but could show neither their beginning nor their end, form, number, or use. In the end he did not even dare affirm that things are this way, only that they appear so. Following a certain metaphysical speculation, he described the form of worldly matter in terms of density or rarity. Yet the nature of all the elements, whatever experiments one uses to examine them, cries out that things are not as he described. Ingeniously made instruments of various kinds also show that this new invention is vain.

12. Dialectic is regarded as the keeper of philosophy’s key and the guide of human reason as it ranges through everything. People have cultivated it so diligently and praised it so highly that they believe nothing can be understood rightly without it. They treat it as Ariadne’s thread, able by itself to lead the wandering mind out of every labyrinth. But whoever examines the dialecticians’ immense tangles and their disputes about them can testify that dialectic, as it now stands, is itself a labyrinth.

13. Who can count the labyrinths of astronomers, geographers, historians, chronologists, medicine, chemistry, alchemy, and the rest? Enter any one of these fields, and you have entered circles from which you cannot find a way out.

14. Politics is the prudence used to govern human societies, with jurisprudence as its adviser. Their aim is to keep human affairs and the human race itself in order, peace, and tranquility. How well they succeed is shown by every court, tribunal, and council, never idle and always resounding with lawsuits and disputes. The perpetual wars between peoples and kingdoms proclaim it still more loudly, as the world devastates itself in a dreadful manner.

15. Religion, the bond between the created mind and the uncreated, ought to bring comfort amid all worldly perplexities. It ought to show us a safe harbor from the storms of earthly affairs and lead us into it. How does religion perform this task? It has now become a labyrinth more perplexing than any other in the world. Instead of one religion, there are countless religions, each divided again within itself. This is so plain, especially to keen political minds, that many suspect no religion is true and that all are fables. They cast aside even God and the fear of God and slip into atheism, seeking light in darkness, security in a numb conscience, and life in death. Alas!

16. Paganism was indeed a fable, raging amid its multitude of gods and idols. Judaism, though it originated with the true God, the creator of us all, degenerated through corruptions into Pharisaism, a chaos of superstitions, and can scarcely be judged much better. So too Islam, mixed from Judaism and Christianity, is a dark cave of errors.

17. Christianity alone has as its guide the one who is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). It is believed to be, and certainly ought to be, that holy way of Zion promised through the prophets, so direct that not even fools can go astray on it (Isa 35:8). But is it? Alas, alas! One can scarcely find a more intricate labyrinth in the whole world than the Christian religion as it has now become. It is divided into so many sects, cut into so many thousands of questions about faith, then into opinions on each question and battles over those opinions, that nothing else in the world is comparably tangled. Stranger still, nowhere do religious divisions bring such bitter hatreds, stubborn quarrels, bloody persecutions, cruel punishments, and savage wars.

18. One group of Christians believes, and boasts, that it stands outside the labyrinth. Everyone is subordinated to everyone else under one head, so that the divisions seen among other sects cannot easily arise. Yet whoever looks more closely at the rules of that concord will see a skillfully constructed labyrinth, more artful than any other, but a labyrinth nonetheless, and indeed a vaster one than can be found anywhere else. Thus one of their own said, not without reason, whether in jest or in earnest, that no one could wish anything worse on his worst enemy than that he become pope. He would face a dreadful multitude of affairs, a mass of stones to be rolled, and delights hoped for in vain.

19. What under the sun, then, will be free from labyrinths, the stones of Sisyphus, and the deceptions of Tantalus? So far, nothing anywhere. These three evils are as old as the world and have always accompanied humanity: errors of understanding without end, exhaustion of strength without end, and frustrations of desire that seem perpetual. Yet human impatience always seeks an end to them, and human diligence, with God’s help, ought to seek it until it is found. Solomon’s mind and ours were not given the desire for better things in vain. Nor is our unceasing effort to struggle out of labyrinths, overcome stones, and at last, at last, at last attain what we desire an empty effort, though only death can stop it.

20. Consider the thoughts, speech, writings, and deeds of all the godly, prudent, and wise people who have lived since the beginning. Their endeavors have aimed at one of three things: escaping some labyrinth, bringing some labor to an end, or securely enjoying the good things they had gained. The rest of humanity does no more than this, though most people do not understand what they are doing. No one wants to be mistaken or deceived in understanding, to spend strength without benefit, or to be denied what the will desires. Yet everyone repeatedly experiences a deceived understanding, strength spent in vain, and wishes left unfulfilled. Still, they continually return to their hopes: to avoid error, to find rest after exertion, and at last to obtain what they desire.

21. Why should we despair that these inborn desires for better things, and our continual attempts to attain them, will someday succeed? Philosophers observe and take as an infallible principle that God and nature do nothing in vain. Why, then, would God implant such deeply rooted desires in the human heart if he never intended them to be fulfilled? The thought is absurd. It would mean that God either does not understand the ends of our desires or cannot, does not know how to, or does not wish to bring us to them. We cannot suppose any of these without denying God the praise due his omnipotence, omniscience, or absolute goodness. Shall we deny immortal God what we grant a mortal man? Daedalus made the maze in which people went astray, yet he wished, knew how, and was able to show a means of avoiding error, displaying his ingenuity in both directions. How could God be unwilling or unable to display his eternal wisdom gloriously by freeing us from continual errors? Daedalus readily gave Theseus a very simple means against many errors: a thread. How could it be difficult for God to give us a strong impulse and show us a level path back to the uprightness and simplicity with which he made us? The human being was made upright and simple, but rashly took up countless matters and became entangled in labyrinths of error (Eccl 7:29). I mean a path which, once rightly understood and entered, would let anyone escape continual errors as swiftly as Theseus did. Archimedes, a mortal man, showed King Hieron how to launch a ship into the sea with one hand when the strength of thousands had seemed insufficient. Shall we imagine that God lacks the skill to fix our stones of Sisyphus in place? Or that he lacks the wisdom or merciful will to bring us back into his Paradise, where streams of pleasure flow and good things bring everlasting satisfaction? Away with the blasphemous thought.

22. All the more so because God has never ceased to instill this hope in humanity through his most solemn promises, repeated through the ages. Therefore, the more we believe the end of the ages and the fulfillment of all the promises to be drawing near, the more fitting it is to lift our heads, look for a way out of our labyrinths, and attend carefully to any threads of Ariadne that may be offered.