Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 41: On the god within us
Letter 41 places the divine within the good man rather than in temples: a holy spirit dwells in us and keeps watch over our deeds.
What deserves praise in a man is what is his own, his reason brought to its end, not the slaves, the house or the income that surround him.
From the letter
This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian.
If you see a man who is unterrified in the midst of dangers, untouched by desires, happy in adversity, peaceful amid the storm, who looks down upon men from a higher plane, and views the gods on a footing of equality, will not a feeling of reverence for him steal over you?
When a soul rises superior to other souls, when it is under control, when it passes through every experience as if it were of small account, when it smiles at our fears and at our prayers, it is stirred by a force from heaven.
Suppose that he has a retinue of comely slaves and a beautiful house, that his farm is large and large his income; none of these things is in the man himself; they are all on the outside.
Praise the quality in him which cannot be given or snatched away, that which is the peculiar property of the man.
Coverage
Our editions hold 30 letters of 124 in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation (1917–1925); 29 of them have a page here, those that Joseph Baillard’s French translation (1861) also contains.
Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+ — 1 passage of this letter, with its reference; Marcus Aurelius is free in the app.