first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists
who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the
denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations,
have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are
mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural
impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional
wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of
any age. It is questionable whether the average morality of civilized
ages has largely varied: it is possible that if the satirists of our own
time were equally outspoken, the vices of ancient Rome might be found to
have a parallel in modern London; and it is probable, not on merely _à
priori_ grounds, but from the nature of the evidence which remains, that
there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating
mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were good
neighbours and faithful friends, who conscientiously discharged their
civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word “moral”
men.[230]
It has also been common to frame statements of the moral philosophy
which dominated in those centuries, entirely from the data afforded by
earlier writers, and to account for the existence of nobler elements
in contemporary writers by the hypothesis that Seneca, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius, had come into contact with Christian teachers. In the
case of Seneca, the belief in such contact went so far as to induce a
writer in an imitative age to produce a series of letters which are
still commonly printed at the end of his works, and which purport to be
a correspondence between him and St. Paul. It is difficult, no doubt,
to prove the negative proposition that such writers did not come into
contact with Christianity; but a strong presumption against the idea that
such contact, if it existed, influenced to any considerable extent their
ethical principles, is established by the demonstrable fact that those
principles form an integral part of their whole philosophical system, and
that their system is in close logical and historical connection with that
of their philosophical predecessors.[231]
* * * * *
It will be found on a closer examination that the age in which
Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral reformation. There
was the growth of a higher religious morality, which believed that God
was pleased by moral action rather than by sacrifice.[232] There was
the growth of a belief that life requires amendment.[233] There was a
reaction in the popular mind against the vices of the great centres
of population. This is especially seen in the large multiplication of
religious guilds, in which purity of life was a condition of membership:
it prepared the minds of men to receive Christian teaching, and forms not
the least important among the causes which led to the rapid dissemination
of that teaching: it affected the development of Christianity in
that the members of the religious guilds who did so accept Christian
teaching, brought over with them into the Christian communities many of
the practices of their guilds and of the conceptions which lay beneath
them. The philosophical phase of the reformation began on the confines
of Stoicism and Cynicism. For Cynicism had revived. It had almost faded
into insignificance after Zeno and Chrysippus had formed its nobler
elements into a new system, and left only its “dog-bark”[234] and its
squalor. But when the philosophical descendants of Zeno and Chrysippus
had become fashionable _littérateurs_, and had sunk independence of
thought and practice in a respectability and “worldly conformity” which
the more earnest men felt to be intolerable, Cynicism revived, or rather
the earlier and better Stoicism revived, to re-assert the paramount
importance of moral conduct, and to protest against the unnatural
alliance between philosophy and the fashionable world.
It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that
I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was
Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal
philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.[235] In him, whether he be
called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once
their loftiest expression and their most complete realization: and it
will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite
and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our
view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his
sermons speak for themselves.
The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in
relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching.
1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had
come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of
ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic,
which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant,
was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it
into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of
philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such
study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could
construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but
they were ceasing to regard the actual “living according to nature”
as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a
re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over
literary knowledge. It was at first crude and repulsive. If the Stoics
were “the preachers of the _salon_,” the Cynics were “the preachers of
the street.”[236] They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They
were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence,
the squalor was accidental. The former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave
it a new impulse: the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism
was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics
were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed
the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they
said.[237] Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a
prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility
of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come
to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether
disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and
the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore
Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic
philosophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And
moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract
system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual
conditions of the world as it is. The state of human nature is such, that
to linger upon the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor.
The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has
to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to
his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped
already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits,
and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and
evil. While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which
it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old
familiar names of “good” and “evil,” with all the false ideas which they
suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and
wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the
very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end,
with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns
the theory of them. His progress in philosophy must be measured by his
progress, not in knowledge, but in moral conduct.
This view, which Epictetus preaches again and again with passionate
fervour, will be best stated in his own words:[238]
“A man who is making progress, having learnt from the
philosophers that desire has good things for its object and
undesire evil things,—having learnt moreover that in no
other way can contentment and dispassionateness come to a man
than by his never failing of the object of his desire and
never encountering the object of undesire,—banishes the one
altogether, or at least postpones it, while he allows the
other to act only in regard to those things which are within
the province of the will. For he knows that if he strives not
to have things that are without the province of the will, he
will some time or other encounter some such things and so be
unhappy. But if what moral perfection professes is to cause
happiness and dispassionateness and peace of mind, then of
course progress towards moral perfection is progress towards
each one of the things which moral perfection professes to
secure. For in all cases progress is the approaching to that to
which perfection finally brings us.
“How is it, then, that while we admit this to be the definition
of moral perfection, we seek and show off progress in other
things? What is the effect of moral perfection?
“‘Peace of mind?’
“Who then is making progress towards it? He who has read many
treatises of Chrysippus? Surely moral perfection does not
consist in this—in understanding Chrysippus: if it does, then
confessedly progress towards moral perfection is nothing else
than understanding a good deal of Chrysippus. But as it is,
while we admit that moral perfection effects one thing, we make
progress—the approximation to perfection—effect another.
“‘This man,’ some one tells us, ‘can now read Chrysippus even
by himself.’
“‘You are most assuredly making splendid progress, my friend,’
he tells him.
“Progress indeed! why do you make game of him? Why do you lead
him astray from the consciousness of his misfortunes? Will you
not show him what the effect of moral perfection is, that he
may learn where to look for progress towards it?
“Look for progress, my poor friend, in the direction of the
effect which you have to produce. And what is the effect which
you have to produce? Never to be disappointed of the object
of your desire, and never to encounter the object of your
undesire: never to miss the mark in your endeavours to do and
not to do: never to be deceived in your assent and suspension
of assent. The first of these is the primary and most necessary
point: for if it is with trembling and reluctance that you seek
to avoid falling into evil, how can you be said to be making
progress?
“It is in these respects, then, that I ask you to show me
your progress. If I were to say to an athlete, ‘Show me your
muscles,’ and he were to say, ‘See here are my dumb-bells,’ I
should reply, ‘Begone with your dumb-bells! What I want to see
is, not them, but their effect.’ (And yet that is just what you
do:) ‘Take the treatise _On Effort_’ (you say), ‘and examine me
in it.’ Slave! that is not what I want to know; but rather how
you endeavour to do or not to do—how you desire to have and not
to have—how you form your plans and purposes and preparations
for action—whether you do all this in harmony with nature or
not. If you do so in accordance with nature, show me that you
do so, and I will say that you are making progress; but if not,
begone, and do not merely interpret books, but write similar
ones yourself besides. And what will you gain by it? Don’t you
know that the whole book costs five shillings, and do you think
the man who interprets the book is worth more than the book
itself costs?
“Never, then, look for the effect (of philosophy) in one place,
and progress towards that effect in another.
“Where, then, is progress to be looked for? If any one of you,
giving up his allegiance to things outside him, has devoted
himself entirely to his will—to cultivating and elaborating
it so as to make it at last in harmony with nature, lofty,
free, unthwarted, unhindered, conscientious, self-respectful:
if he has learned that one who longs for or shuns what is not
in his power can neither be conscientious nor free, but must
be carried along with the changes and gusts of things—must be
at the mercy of those who can produce or prevent them: if,
moreover, from the moment when he rises in the morning he keeps
watch and guard over these qualities of his soul—bathes like
a man of honour, eats like a man who respects himself—through
all the varying incidents of each successive hour working out
his one great purpose, as a runner makes all things help his
running, and a singing-master his teaching:—this man is making
progress in very truth—this man is one who has not left home in
vain.
“But if, on the other hand, he is wholly bent upon and labours
at what is found in books, and has left home with a view to
acquiring that, I tell him to go home again at once, and not
neglect whatever business he may have there: for the object
which has brought him away from home is a worthless one. This
only (is worth anything), to study to banish from one’s life
sorrows and lamentations and ‘Alas!’ and ‘Wretched me!’ and
misfortune and failure—and to learn what death really is, and
exile and imprisonment and the hemlock-draught, so as to be
able to say in the prison, ‘My dear Crito, if so it please the
gods, so let it be.’”
This new or revived conception of philosophy as the science of human
conduct, as having for its purpose the actual reformation of mankind,
had already led to the view that in the present state of human nature
the study and practice of it required special kinds of effort. It was
not only the science but also the art of life.[239] It formed, as such,
no exception to the rule that all arts require systematic and habitual
training. Just as the training of the muscles which is necessary to
perfect bodily development is effected by giving them one by one an
artificial and for the time an exaggerated exercise, so the training of
the moral powers was effected, not by reading the rules and committing
them to memory, but by giving them a similarly artificial and exaggerated
exercise. A kind of moral gymnastic was necessary. The aim of it was to
bring the passions under the control of reason, and to bring the will
into harmony with the will of God.
(1) This special discipline of life was designated by the term which
was in use for bodily training, _askesis_ (ἄσκησις).[240] It is
frequently used in this relation in Philo. He distinguishes three
elements in the process of attaining goodness—nature, learning,
discipline.[241] He distinguishes those who discipline themselves in
wisdom by means of actual works, from those who have only a literary
and intellectual knowledge of it.[242] He holds that the greatest and
most numerous blessings that a man can have come from the gymnastic of
moral efforts.[243] Its elements are “reading, meditation, reformation,
the memory of noble ideals, self-restraint, the active practice of
duties:”[244] in another passage he adds to these _prayer_, and the
recognition of the indifference of things that are indifferent.[245]
In the second century, when the idea of moral reformation had taken a
stronger hold, this moral discipline was evidently carried out under
systematic rules. It was not left to a student’s option. He must undergo
hardships, drinking water rather than wine, sleeping on the ground rather
than on a bed; and sometimes even subjecting himself to austerities,
being scourged and bound with chains. There was sometimes no ostentation
of endurance. Marcus Aurelius says that he owed it to Rusticus that he
did not show off with a striking display either his acts of benevolence
or his moral exercises.[246] “If you drink water,” says Epictetus in his
Student’s Manual,[247] “don’t take every opportunity of saying, I drink
water.... And if you resolve to exercise yourself in toil and hardship,
do it for yourself alone, and not for the world outside. Don’t embrace
statues (in public, to cool yourself); but if ever your thirst become
extreme, fill your mouth with cold water and put it out again—_and tell
no one_.” Epictetus himself preferred that men should be disciplined, not
by bodily hardships, but by the voluntary repression of desire. The true
“ascetic” is he who disciplines himself against all the suggestions of
evil desire:[248] “an object of desire comes into sight: wait, poor soul;
do not straightway be carried off your feet by it: consider, the contest
is great, the task is divine; it is for kingship, for freedom, for calm,
for undisturbedness. Think of God: call Him to be your helper and to
stand by your side, as sailors call upon Castor and Pollux in a storm:
for yours is a storm, the greatest of all storms, the storm of strong
suggestions that sweep reason away.” In a similar way Lucian’s friend
Nigrinus condemns those who endeavour to fashion young men to virtue by
great bodily hardships rather than by a mingled discipline of body and
mind: and Lucian himself says that he knew of some who had died under the
excessive strain.[249]
This moral gymnastic, it was thought, was often best practised away from
a man’s old associations. Consequently some philosophers advised their
students to leave home and study elsewhere. They went into “retreat,”
either in another city or in solitude. Against this also there was a
reaction. In a forcible oration on the subject, Dio Chrysostom argues, as
a modern Protestant might argue, against the monastic system.[250] “Cœlum
non animum mutant,” he says, in effect, when they go from city to city.
Everywhere a man will find the same hindrances both within and without:
he will be only like a sick man changing from one bed to another. The
true discipline is to live in a crowd and not heed its noise, to train
the soul to follow reason without swerving, and not to “retreat” from
that which seems to be the immediate duty before us.
The extent to which moral discipline and the system of “retreats” went
on is uncertain, because they soon blended, as we shall see, with
Christianity, and flowed with it in a single stream.
(2) But out of the ideas which they expressed, and the ideals which they
held forth, there grew up a class of men which has never since died
out, who devoted themselves “both by their preaching and living” to the
moral reformation of mankind. Individual philosophers had had imitators,
and Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school, but neither the one nor
the other had filled a large place in contemporary society. With the
revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it
was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out
from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as
well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,”
says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very
dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed
and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none
of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them,
though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens
or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings.”[251]
The distinction was marked in two chief ways:
(1) A philosopher let his beard grow, like the old Spartans. It was a
protest against the elaborate attention to the person which marked the
fashionable society of the time.
(2) A philosopher wore a coarse blanket, usually as his only dress. It
was at once a protest against the prevalent luxury in dress and the badge
of his profession. “Whenever,” says Dio Chrysostom, “people see one in
a philosopher’s dress, they consider that he is thus equipped not as a
sailor or a shepherd, but with a view to men, to warn them and rebuke
them, and to give not one of them any whit of flattery nor to spare any
one of them, but, on the contrary, to reform them as far as he possibly
can by talking to them and to show them who they are.”[252]
The frequency with which this new class of moral reformers is mentioned
in the literature of the time shows the large place which it filled.
2. The moral reformation affected the contents of ethical teaching
chiefly by raising them from the sphere of moral philosophy to that of
religion. In Epictetus there are two planes of ethical teaching. The one
is that of orthodox and traditional Stoicism: in the other, Stoicism is
transformed by the help of religious conceptions, and the forces which
led to the practice of it receive the enormous impulse which comes from
the religious emotions. The one is summed up in the maxim, Follow Nature;
the other in the maxim, Follow God.
On the lower plane the purpose of philosophy is stated in various
ways, each of which expresses the same fact. It is the bringing of the
will into harmony with nature. It consists in making the “dealing with
ideas” what it should be, that is, in dealing with them according to
nature.[253] It is the thorough study of the conceptions of good and
evil, and the right application of them to particular objects.[254] It
is the endeavour to make the will unthwarted in its action,[255] to
take sorrow and disappointment out of a man’s life,[256] and to change
its disturbed torrent into a calm and steady stream. The result of the
practice of philosophy is happiness.[257] The means of attaining that
result are marked out by the constitution of human nature itself and the
circumstances which surround it. That nature manifests itself in two
forms, desires to have or not to have, efforts to do or not to do.[258]
The one is stimulated by the presentation to the mind of an object which
is judged to be “good,” the other by that of one which is judged to be
“fitting.” The one mainly concerns the individual man in himself, the
other concerns him in his relations with other men. The “state according
to nature” of desire is that in which it never fails of gratification,
the corresponding state of effort is that in which it never fails of its
mark. Both the one and the other are determined by landmarks which nature
itself has set in the circumstances that surround us. The natural limits
of desire are those things that are in our power: the direction of
effort is determined by our natural relations.
For example:[259]
“Bear in mind that you are a son. What is involved in being a
son? To consider all that he has to be his father’s property,
to obey him in all things, never to disparage him to any one,
never to say or do anything to harm him, to stand out of his
way and give place to him in all things, to help him by all
means in his power.
“Next remember that you are also a brother: the doing of
what is fitting in this capacity involves giving way to him,
yielding to his persuasion, speaking well of him, never setting
up a rival claim to him in those things that are beyond the
control of the will, but gladly letting them go that you may
have the advantage in those things which the will controls.
“Next, if you are a senator of any city, remember that you are
a senator: if a youth, that you are a youth: if an old man,
that you are an old man: if a father, that you are a father.
For in each of these cases the consideration of the name you
bear will suggest to you what is fitting to be done in relation
to it.”
This view of right moral conduct as being determined by the natural
relations in which one man stands to another, and as constituting what is
Fitting in regard to those relations, had overspread the Roman world. But
in that world the philosophical theory which lay behind the conception
of the Fitting was less prominent than the conception itself, and two
other terms, both of which were natural and familiar to the Roman mind,
came into use to express it. The one was borrowed from the idea of the
functions which men have to discharge in the organization of civil
government, the other from the idea of a debt. The former of these,
“_officium_,” has not passed in this sense outside the Latin language:
the latter, “_debitum_,” is familiar to us under its English form “duty.”
On the higher plane of his teaching Epictetus expresses moral philosophy
in terms of theology. Human life begins and ends in God. Moral conduct
is a sublime religion. I will ask you to listen to a short _cento_ of
passages, strung loosely together, in which his teaching is expressed:—