- Misfortunes are not punishments but rather divine trials designed to strengthen good people, enhancing their virtue and making them more akin to gods.
why good people face misfortunes:
- Divine Training and Testing: God acts like a strict but loving father or a demanding schoolmaster, not petting the good man but instead "tries him, hardens him, and fits him for Himself". Just as athletes are tested against the strongest opponents or Lacedaemonian children are flogged to prove their mettle, God "exercises" good men with "labours, sufferings, and losses, that so they may gather true strength". The "most hazardous services are assigned to the bravest soldiers" in God's army, indicating that challenges are a mark of esteem, not punishment.
- Opportunity for Virtue and Self-Knowledge: Misfortune is "virtue's opportunity". Without challenges, a man "cannot know himself without a trial", and his powers would remain "unknown" even to himself. It is through struggle that virtue is displayed and strengthened.
- Demonstrating the Neutrality of External Circumstances: God allows both good and bad men to experience prosperity and adversity to prove that external conditions like riches, poverty, health, or illness are "neither good nor bad in themselves". By bestowing "objects of desire" upon the "worst of men, and removing them from the best," God effectively "discredit[s] objects of desire", showing their moral indifference.
- Serving as Patterns for Mankind: Good people are "born as patterns" to teach others how to endure suffering, thus benefiting "all mankind".
- How to endure misfortune
- "God bears a fatherly mind towards good men, and loves them in a manly spirit. ‘Let them,’ says He, ‘be exercised by labours, sufferings, and losses, so that they may gather true strength.’”
- "Unbroken prosperity cannot bear a single blow; but he who has waged an unceasing strife with his misfortunes has gained a thicker skin by his sufferings, yields to no disaster, and even though he fall yet fights on his knee.”
- "For a man cannot know himself without a trial; no one ever learnt what he could do without putting himself to the test.”
- "Let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness."
- "To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”
- "It is not what you bear, but how you bear it, that matters.”
- "Despise poverty; no man lives as poor as he was born: despise pain; either it will cease or you will cease: despise death; it either ends you or takes you elsewhere."
- "No evil can befall a good man; opposites do not mingle."
- "For an enemy’s arrival too scatters those whom it catches off guard; but those who have prepared in advance for the coming conflict, being properly drawn up and equipped, easily withstand the first onslaught, which is the most violent."
- "Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace."
- "Submit himself to fate". It is a "great consolation to be swept away together with the entire universe" by an "unchangeable stream" that bears along both men and gods.
- Recognize that "everything is ordained and proceeds according to a law that endures forever".
Embrace misfortune as a divine tests and trainings
Meet adversity with courage
Understand that poverty, pain, or death are external circumstances and cannot touch the virtuous mind
Be prepared
Willingly accept fate and universal law
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