PHILOSOPHY--STOICS AND EPICUREANS
With such an unsatisfactory equipment of science, and with such a
vague and morally inoperative religion, it was no wonder that the
higher minds of the contemporary world turned to the study of
philosophy. Of such studies there had been many schools or sects, but
at this date we have chiefly to reckon with two--the Stoics and
Epicureans. There were, it is true, the Academics, who disputed
everything, and held no doctrine to be more true than its contrary.
There were Eclectics, who picked and chose. But the majority of those
who affected a positive philosophy attached themselves either to the
Stoic or else to the Epicurean system, not necessarily with orthodox
rigidity on every point, but as a general guide--at least in
theory--to the conduct of life. Where we belong to a certain religious
denomination or church, and "sit under" a certain class of preachers,
they belonged to a certain school of philosophy, and attended the
lectures of certain of its expounders. Instead of a chaplain or parish
clergyman they engaged or associated with an expert in their special
system. But just as the Frenchman remarked, "_Je suis catholique, mais
je ne pratique pas_," so might one be in principle a good Stoic
without much exercise of the accepted doctrines. The distinction
between the tenets of the two great schools was wide, but within each
school itself individuals might differ as widely as "Broad Church"
from whatever its opposite may be called. The choice between the two
schools was mainly a matter of temperament. Persons of the sterner
type of mind, caring comparatively little for the physical comforts
and gracious amenities of life, and possessed of a strong sense of
duty and decorum--inclined, perhaps, not only to piety and
self-abnegation, but also to be somewhat dour and uncompromising--were
naturally attracted to Stoicism. Those of the complementary character
preferred the doctrines of Epicurus. The Stoics were the Pharisees,
the Epicureans the Sadducees, of pagan philosophy. As the Pharisees
were the most Hebraic of the Hebrews, so it was Stoicism that came to
be the characteristic Roman creed. The ordinary Roman had been brought
up in the tradition of obeying the law of the state and the claims of
duty; he had high notions of personal dignity and a leaning to the
heroic virtues. Give him a strong, consistent, and elevating religion
and he would be normally a pious man. Stoicism supplied him with a
standard which was in keeping with such tendencies. About Epicureanism
there was nothing heroic or elevating.
Put briefly, and therefore crudely, the Epicurean doctrine was that
happiness is the end of life. What men seek, and have a right to seek,
is the most pleasant existence. Our conduct should secure for us as
much real pleasure as possible. Now at first sight this looks like
what it was opprobriously called by its enemies, "the philosophy of
the pig-sty." It by no means meant this to its founder. For what is
"pleasure"? Not by any means necessarily the gratification of the
moment, physical or otherwise. A present pleasure may mean future
pain, either of body or of mind. Wrong actions and bestial enjoyments
bring their own penalty. You must choose wisely, and so direct your
life that you suffer least and enjoy most consistently. Temperance and
wisdom are therefore virtues necessary to a true Epicurean. You desire
health; therefore you will live, as Epicurus lived, on simple and
wholesome food. You desire tranquillity or peace of mind; therefore
you will abstain from all perverse acts and gratifications, desires
and emotions, which disturb that peace. In short the thing to be
sought is nothing else but this grateful composure of mind--a thing
which you cannot have if you are always wanting this or that and
either abusing or misusing your bodily or mental functions, or
needlessly mortifying yourself. To the plain man this apparently meant
"Take life easily and keep free of worry." Naturally the plain man's
ideas of taking life easily became those of taking pleasures as they
come, indolently accepting the agreeables of life and feeling no call
to make much of its duties. It is all very well for a high-minded
philosopher to avoid a pleasure in order to avoid its pain, and to
realize that a pleasure of the mind is worth more than a pleasure of
the body, but one cannot expect the ordinary pupil--the _homme moyen
sensuel_--to comprehend this attitude with heartiness sufficient to
put it into practice. It followed therefore that the Epicurean tended,
not only to become lazy, but to become vicious, or to make light of
vices. This was not indeed true Epicureanism, and Epicurus is not to
blame for it; it simply shows that Epicureanism, whatever its logical
or other merits, provided no sufficient stimulus to a right life. As
regards theology the position of the school was that there might very
well be such things as higher beings--there was nothing in physical
philosophy to make them any more impossible than a man or a fish--but
that, if they existed, they were not concerned with man's affairs; his
moral conduct, like his sacrifices and prayers, was not matter for
their consideration. No need, therefore, to let superstition worry
you, or to trouble about future punishment. Conduct your life
according to the same principles laid down, and let the gods--if there
be any--look to themselves. Naturally the result of such a position is
that ceasing to regard the gods means ceasing to believe in them, and,
as a Roman writer says: "In theory it leaves us the gods, in practice
it abolishes them."
The other school--that of the Stoics--is perhaps less easily
comprehended, nor can it be said that its doctrines were always quite
so coherent. Again we may put the position briefly, and therefore,
perhaps, only approximately. The rule of life is to live as "nature"
directs. Nature has its laws, which you cannot disobey with impunity.
The law of nature is the mind of God. The material universe is the
body, God is its soul, and He directs the workings of nature with
foreknowledge and perfect wisdom. If man can only be brought to act in
strict accordance with the mind of God--or law of nature--he is sure
of perfect well-being, because he can do nothing as it should not be
done. If he can only arrive at such perfect operation of his mental
processes, he will necessarily be the perfect speaker, the perfect
ruler, the perfect craftsman, the perfect performer of every task,
including the securing of his own happiness. Doubtless this is logical
enough, but how is one to attain to such right mental operations, and
to become what was called a "sage"? Only by acting always according to
reason and not according to passion. That and that alone is "virtue."
The divine mind is not swayed by passion--by hope, fear, exultation,
or grief--but only and always by reason. Learn therefore to obey
reason and reason only. Do not permit yourself to be drawn from the
true path by fear of threats, even of death, nor by grief, even for
your dearest friends. Such feelings warp your reason, distract
your judgment, and deflect you from the right course. When
passion--feeling--comes in conflict with reason, you must drive
feeling away. Your reason may not always be right; nevertheless it is
the best guide you have, and you must cultivate it to act as rightly
as possible. Remember that the power to act in accordance with the
divine mind--the law of nature--lies in your own will; things external
have nothing to do with that straight-forward proceeding--they cannot
help you, and you must not let them hinder you. The condition of your
mind is everything; as long as its operation is right, you are living
in the right way. Your mind may act as rightly in poverty as in
riches; you may be equally wise and virtuous whether you have the
external advantages or not. You must therefore learn to ignore these
things--pain, grief, fear, joy, and all the other perturbing
influences. Cultivate, therefore, right reason and the absence of
emotions.
This, you will say, is a very high, unattainable, if not inhuman,
standard. Quite so, and therefore, while Epicureanism often produced
vicious men, this often produced pretenders and even hypocrites.
Nevertheless it is better to set oneself a high standard than a low
one, and a Roman who endeavoured to control himself by reason, and to
place himself above fear and pain, was thereby on the way to be brave,
patient, truthful, and just. Those who would see what high character
could be associated with Stoicism--whether as the result or as the
motive of the choice of the school--should read Epictetus, whose text,
written early in the next century, was "sustain and abstain," and also
the great-minded gentle Emperor Marcus Aurelius. A logical outcome of
Stoicism was that you should say only the thing which reason approved,
and say it unafraid. A good republican virtue, this, but under the
emperors a dangerous one, as an honest Stoic like Thrasea found out.
In practice there was naturally much qualifying or mellowing of the
rigid Stoic attitude: the exigencies of actual life had to be met part
of the way, and both Greek and Roman Stoics were often only Stoics in
part--the complete "sage" was of course impossible.
As for the gods, it is obvious that the Stoics were pantheists; there
was one God, and He was the soul of the universe. They also, of
course, recognised His providence. What then of the gods of the state?
Some did not attempt to discuss them. Others treated the various
so-called separate deities in the list as being only so many
manifestations or avatars of the same divine power, and whether they
were content or not with that attempt at harmonisation, who shall say?
Meanwhile, at least in the eastern part of the empire, you might meet
with another type of philosopher, the Cynic, belonging to the same
school as the famous Diogenes, who had lived in that large earthenware
jar commonly known as his "tub." Like the Stoic, the Cynic held that
externals were of no value, and therefore he contented himself with a
piece of bread, a wallet full of beans, and a jug of water. Like the
Stoic, he believed in perfect freedom of speech, and therefore he
spoke loudly and often abusively of all and sundry who appeared to him
to deserve it. Some such men doubtless were sincere enough, like the
earlier hermits or preaching friars, but many of them were simply idle
and virulent impostors who thoroughly deserved that name of the "dog"
which was commonly given to them, and which came to designate their
school.
The mention of impostors and hypocrites brings us naturally to a point
which may have been foreseen. To the ancient world the professional
philosophers were the nearest approach to our professional clergy.
They affected an appearance accordingly; and the philosopher was
regularly known by his long beard, his coarse cloak, and his staff.
But, alas! there were many who disgraced their cloth. There were Stoic
teachers who practised all manner of secret vices, and whose behaviour
was in outrageous contradiction to their creed of the "absence of
emotions." There were not only many Honeymans, there were many
Stigginses. There were idlers and vagabonds on a level with the
mendicant friars and pardon-sellers of the time of Chaucer. There were
pompous hypocrites. Also side by side with the serious and earnest
philosopher, as deeply learned in the books of his sect as a modern
divine, there were charlatans and dabblers. It is unfortunately in
this last light that the Apostle Paul appeared to the professional
Stoic and Epicurean teachers of Athens. They were the finished
products of the philosophic schools of the most famous universities,
while he was supposed by them to be teaching some new kind of
philosophy. Philosophers were apt to be itinerant, and St. Paul was
looked upon as but another of these new arrivals. In his language they
detected what seemed to be borrowed notions not consistently bound
together, and they therefore called him by a name which it is not easy
to translate. Literally it is "a picker up of seeds"--that is to say,
a sciolist who gathers scraps from profounder people and gives them
out with an air. Perhaps the nearest, although an undignified, word is
"quack." That Paul possessed a knowledge of Greek philosophy, and
particularly of Stoicism, is practically certain. He came from Tarsus
in Cilicia, and Cilicia was the native home of many leading Stoics,
including its greatest representative in all antiquity. He had been
taught by Gamaliel, who was versed in "the learning of the Greeks."
His address at Athens was deliberately meant to bear a relation to the
philosophy of the experts who were present, but necessarily it could
only introduce a few salient allusions, such as even a dabbler could
have picked up, and we can hardly blame the specialists for their
erroneous judgment. As he says himself: "The Greeks demand philosophy;
but we proclaim a Messiah crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block,
and to the Greeks a folly."
To discuss further the moral ideas of the Roman world would consume
more space and time than can be afforded here. It may, however, be
worth while to mention that suicide was commonly--and especially by
the Stoics--looked upon as a natural and blameless thing, when calm
reason appeared to justify the proceeding, and when due consideration
was given to social claims. To seek a euthanasia in such cases was an
act of wisdom. Belief in an underworld or an after life was not rare
among the common people, but it certainly did not exist in any force
among the cultivated classes. It was taught neither by philosophy nor
by the religion of the state. Yet the sense that rewards or
punishments are unfairly meted out in this world was strong in many a
mind, and this is one of the facts which account for the hold taken
upon such minds, first by the religion of Isis, and then in a still
greater and more abiding measure by Christianity.