no remedy, and as a consequence it could provide no religious sanction
for his conduct in life. What power it had upon conduct as a system of
ethics is a question outside the range of my subject. No doubt a certain
type of mind, naturally pure and good, and apt to retire upon itself,
might find in Epicurism not only no harm but even positive help; perhaps
the best way to appreciate this fact, too often overlooked, is to read
the defence of the Epicurean ethics put into the mouth of Torquatus, in
the first book of the _de Finibus_,[768] by one who was far from being
in sympathy with the creed. But for the Roman of that age, when ideas of
duty and discipline were losing strength, this enticing faith, with
pleasure as its _summum bonum_, and with quietism as its ideal of human
life,[769] could hardly be a real stimulus to active virtue; the Roman
needed bracing, and this was not a tonic, but a sedative. Far more
valuable in every way, and far better suited to the best instincts of
the Roman character, was the rival creed of Stoicism, and I must devote
the rest of this lecture to the consideration of its religious aspect.
It was most fortunate for Rome that her best and ablest men in the
second century B.C. fell into the hands, not of Epicureans, but of
Stoics--into the hands, too, of a single Stoic of high standing, fine
character, and good sense. For destitute as the Roman was both in regard
to God and to Duty, he found in Stoicism an explanation of man's place
in the universe,--an explanation relating him directly to the Power
manifesting itself therein, and deriving from that relation a _binding_
principle of conduct and duty. This should make the religious character
of Stoicism at once apparent. It is perfectly true, as the late Mr.
Lecky said long ago,[770] that "Stoicism, taught by Panaetius of Rhodes,
and soon after by the Syrian Posidonius, became the true religion of the
educated classes. It furnished the principles of virtue, coloured the
noblest literature of the time, and guided all the developments of moral
enthusiasm." To this I only need to add that it woke in the mind an
entirely new idea of Deity, far transcending that of Roman _numina_ and
of Greek polytheism, and yet not incapable of being reconciled with
these; so that it might be taken as an inpouring of sudden light upon
old conceptions of the Power, glorifying and transfiguring them, rather
than, like the Epicurean faith, a bitter and contemptuous negation of
man's inherited religious instincts. But before we go on to consider
this illumination more closely, let me say a few words about Panaetius
the Stoic missionary, and Scipio Aemilianus, his most famous disciple.
Scipio, born 184, was a happy combination of the best Roman aristocratic
character and the receptive intelligence which for a Roman was the chief
result of a Greek liberal education. He had been educated by his famous
father, Aemilius Paulus, in a thoroughly healthy way; he was no mere
book-student, but a practical courageous Roman, with a solid mental
foundation of moral rectitude (_pietas_) fixed firmly in the traditions
and instincts of his own family. On this foundation, as has been well
said,[771] a superstructure of intellectual culture might be built
securely without destroying it, and this was exactly what did take
place, both for Scipio and for that circle of friends of his which has
become so famous in Roman history. In very early life he became the
intimate friend of Polybius, whose account of their first unreserved
intercourse is one of the most delightful passages in all ancient
literature;[772] and from Polybius he doubtless learnt to think. He must
have learnt to understand the real nature of the Roman empire, to
appreciate the forces which had called it into being,[773] the qualities
which had preserved it through the fearful struggle with Hannibal, and
the duty of a noble Roman in regard to it. From Polybius, indeed, it is
not likely that he gained much light on matters either of religion or
morality; but that statesman and historian must inevitably have
accustomed him, in the course of their long intercourse, to think more
deeply than Roman had ever yet thought, about the world in which he
lived and was to act for many years the leading part. Thus he was well
prepared for the friendship of a more spiritual guide.
Panaetius, who was probably about the same age as Scipio, had the
advantage, as a visitor at Rome, of being a Rhodian, _i.e._ a citizen of
the one Greek State which had been almost continuously on good terms
with Rome, and of great value to her. He was also a scion of an old and
honoured family in that city, and was thus in every way a fit friend and
companion for a great Roman noble. When their friendship began we do not
know for certain; but it is a fact that he lived for some two years,
together with Polybius, in the house of Scipio, and these years were
probably between 144 and 141 B.C., after Scipio's return from the
conquest of Carthage.[774] When Scipio in 141 was commissioned by the
Senate to go and set things in order in the eastern Mediterranean, he
took Panaetius with him,[775] and brought him home to live with him
again as a guest, perhaps until he left for the Numantine war in 134,
after which it is not likely that they met again before Scipio's sudden
death in 129. I am particular about the extent of their intimacy,
because I wish to make it clear that this was no ordinary or fleeting
friendship between a commonplace Greek philosopher and an average Roman
statesman. Both statesman and philosopher were far above the usual level
of their kind, and in the course of this long intimacy must have had
full opportunity of learning from each other. From Scipio Panaetius
would learn the secrets of the Roman temperament, and divine the right
methods of dealing with it, and the result of this was a happy
modification of the old rigidity of the Stoic principles--an adaptation
of them to the Roman character which had far-reaching consequences. From
Panaetius Scipio and his friends would learn a new and illuminating
conception of man's place in the universe, and of his relation to the
Power manifested in it. To understand the power of Stoicism on the mind
of these Romans and their intellectual successors, it is necessary to
have a clear idea of this illumination.
Hitherto there had been nothing in the religion of Rome, or of any other
city-state, to make it inevitable, reasonable, that man should worship
the Power, except tradition and self-interest, involved in the tradition
and self-interest of the family and the city. The gods belonged, as we
saw, to family or city as divine inhabitants, and if you neglected them
they would show their anger against you. Originally it was _religio_,
the feeling of awe for something distinct from man and unknown to him,
which forced him to propitiate that which he might fear, but had no
reason, except the instinct of self-preservation, to reverence; and
later on, as he came to know his _numina_ better, to make them, so to
speak, his own, and to formulate the methods of propitiating them, he
gradually came also to take them for granted, and to worship them as a
matter of traditional duty. The idea of conforming his life to the will
of any of these _numina_ would, of course, be absolutely strange to
him--the expression would have no meaning whatever for him. The help
which he sought from them was not moral help, but material.[776] But
now, when the _religio_ has been hypnotised and soothed away, and when
the tradition of ceremonial observance was growing dim and weak, when he
is left alone with his fellow-men, and without any binding reason for
right conduct towards them, he may learn from Stoicism that there is a
Power above and beyond all his _numina_, yet involving and embracing
them all, to which, and by the help of which, as a man endowed with
reason, he _must_ conform his life.
The theology held and taught by Panaetius, in common with all Stoics at
all periods, was based upon two leading thoughts, in the correlation of
which lay the kernel of the Stoic ethical system. The first of these
thoughts is this: the whole universe, in all its forms and
manifestations, shows unmistakably the work of Reason, of Mind; without
mind, reason, _spiritus_, as Cicero calls it,[777] the universe could
not exist. I need not go here into the origin and history of this
thought; what is important for us is to make clear the theological
consequences of it. Obviously it was natural that the Stoic should be
led on to the conviction that this universe endowed with Reason--with a
Reason far transcending all human capacity--must itself be God. The
Stoic arguments in support of this further step are indeed lame, as they
inevitably must be; they are well set forth at the beginning of Book ii.
of Cicero's work _de Natura Deorum_ (based upon one by Posidonius, the
successor and disciple of Panaetius), where they seem to us rather cold
and formal. That step is indeed incapable of being made convincing by
any syllogism; it is only when we try to think with the minds of those
old thinkers, living in a world of unmeaning worship, that we begin to
realise the nobility of a conviction which they tried in vain to reduce
to a syllogism. _Sapiens a principio mundus, et deus habendus est_;[778]
these words, which sound like an article of a creed, suffice for us
without the laborious arguments of Cleanthes and Chrysippus which we may
read in the fifth and sixth chapters of Cicero's book. Cicero has added
to these a characteristic illustration from city life, which I may quote
as more useful for us. "If a man enters a house or a gymnasium or a
forum, and sees reason, method, and discipline reigning there, he cannot
suppose that these came about without a cause, but perceives that there
is someone there who rules and is obeyed: how much more, when he
contemplates the motions and revolutions to be seen in the universe
(_e.g._, in the heavenly bodies), must he conclude that they are all
governed by a conscious Mind!" And this Mind can be nothing else but
God.
This sounds like the Deism of the eighteenth century, and might be
described as "natural religion"; but the Stoics took yet another step,
and developed their thought into Pantheism. The idea of a personal
Deity, distinct from the universe and its Creator, was obnoxious to
them; it would have committed them to a dualism of Mind and Matter
which, from the very outset of their history, they emphatically
repudiated; their conviction was of a Unity in all things, and to this
they consistently held in spite of constant and damaging criticism. The
theological result of this conviction has lately been well expressed by
Dr. Bussell.[779] He is speaking of Seneca in particular, but what he
says applies to all Stoics equally well: "Though he yearns to see God
in 'the moral order of the Universe,' he is forced in the interests of
Unity to identify Him with every other known force. As He is everything,
so any name will suit Him. He is the sum of existence: or the secret and
abstract law which guides it: He is Nature or Fate. The partial names of
special deities are all His, and together they make up the fulness of
the divine title; but _they disappear in the immense nothingness_,
rather than colour or qualify it." This is a point of immense importance
for the study of Stoicism at Rome; it was fully developed by Posidonius,
and copied from him both by Cicero and Varro. "God," says Cicero in the
book I have been quoting, "pervading all nature (_pertinens per naturam
cuiusque rei_), can be understood as Ceres on the land, as Neptune on
the sea, and so on, and may be and should be worshipped in all these
different forms;" not in superstitious fear and grovelling spirit--the
mental attitude which Lucretius had condemned years before this treatise
was written--but with pure heart and mind, following the one and true
God in all his various manifestations.[780] Thus the Stoic Pantheism, in
spite of its weak points, could find room for the deities of the
city-state, and put new illuminating life into them. To us it may seem,
as it seems to Dr. Bussell, that they would disappear in an immense
nothingness; but to the Roman mind of Scipio's age, if I am not
mistaken, they might, on the contrary, save the great Pantheistic idea
from so itself disappearing. I cannot but think that the Roman's idea of
divinity, the force or will-power which he called _numen_,[781] would
find here a means of reviving its former hold on the Roman mind, and
enabling it to grasp as a concrete fact, and not merely as an abstract
idea, the "deus pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei." In particular the
Roman conception of the great Jupiter, the father of heaven, might gain
new life for the people who had so long been used to call him "the Best
and Greatest." Almost from the very beginning of Stoicism the school had
seized upon Zeus to convey, under the guise of a personality and a name,
some idea of the Reason in the universe;[782] and the same use might
just as well, perhaps even better, be made of the great deity of the
Capitoline temple, whom his people recognised as the open heaven with
all its manifestations, the celestial representative of good faith and
righteous dealing, and the special protector of the destinies of Rome
and her empire.
The second thought which lies at the base of the religion or theology of
Stoicism, is this: that Man himself, alone in all the Universe, shares
with God the full possession of Reason. In other words, Man alone,
besides God, is strictly individual, self-conscious, capable of
realising an end and of working towards it; he is so utterly different
from the animals, so far above them (or if we call him an animal, he is,
in Cicero's language,[783] _animal providum, sagax, multiplex, acutum,
memor, plenum rationis et consilii_), that he must surely be of the same
nature as God. And this is what, in strict conformity with all Stoic
teaching, Cicero in this same passage expressly says--man is _generatus
a deo_. So too in the famous hymn of Cleanthes,[784] quoted by St. Paul
at Athens ("For we are also his offspring,"):--
Chiefest glory of deathless Gods, Almighty for ever,
Sovereign of Nature that rulest by law, what name shall
we give thee?
Blessed be Thou, for on Thee should call all things that are mortal.
For that we are Thy offspring: nay, all that in myriad motion
Lives for its day on the earth bears one impress, Thy likeness,
upon it;
Wherefore my song is of Thee, and I hymn Thy power for ever.
In these splendid lines it is plain that not Man only is thought of, but
all living things, animals included with Man; and this is in accordance
with the true Stoic Pantheism. But none the less on this account did
the Stoics believe Man to be the one living thing in the universe
comparable with God, and capable of communion with him by virtue of the
possession of Reason. As Cicero says, a few lines farther on in the work
I am quoting, "virtus eadem in homine ac deo est, neque ullo alio
ingenio praeterea." And since every creature seeks to maintain and
augment its own being, to bring it to perfection, to express it fully,
by an innate law of its nature, Man being endowed with Reason above all
other creatures, strives, or should strive, to bring himself to a
perfect expression, by identifying himself with the divine principle
which he shares with God. As Dr. Caird puts it,[785] "the ruling power
of Reason so dominates his nature that he cannot be described as
anything but a self-conscious _ego_ (_i.e._ in contrast with other
animals); and just because of this, all his impulses become concentrated
in one great effort after self-realisation." But the self that he tries
to realise must be his true self, not his irrational impulses: the self
which is a part of the divine principle. He must desire to realise
himself as having Reason, and so to come into close communion with God,
the Reason of the universe. Those who are at all familiar with the later
Roman Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, if we may
include him among them, will recognise in this inspiring thought, vague
and impalpable as it may seem, the germ of many beautiful expressions of
the relation of Man to God, which seem to bring Stoicism into closer
spiritual connection with Christianity than any other doctrine of the
ancient world.
The work of Cicero from which I have been quoting, the first book of his
treatise on the Laws, _i.e._ the Roman constitution, is very probably
based on one by Panaetius himself,[786] of whom we are expressly told
that he used to discuss that constitution together with Polybius and
Scipio in the days of their happy intimacy at Rome.[787] In any case we
may find it helpful, taken together with the earlier fragmentary work
_de Republica_, in trying to form some idea of the effect of this second
leading Stoic thought on the best Roman minds of the last ages of the
Republic. We find, as we might expect, that it is not on Man simply as
individual that stress is here laid. Man is not thought of as hoping to
realise his own Reason in isolation; the Stoics, though, like their
rivals, they represent a reaction of the individual against the State,
were all along perfectly clear that man in isolation would be helpless,
and that his own reason bade him realise himself in association with his
fellow-men.[788] It is the position of Man, as associated, 1, with God,
2, with other men, that is here made prominent; and the bond of
connection is in each case Law, which is indeed only one name for the
Supreme Reason and the highest Good. I must say a word about these two
aspects of Man's position in the world, in order to explain what I
believe to have been the effect of this teaching on the Roman mind.
1. In explaining the relation of Man to God Cicero uses an expression
which some years before he had developed in a fine passage in the
Republic: _true law_, he says, _is right reason_.[789] In the Laws he
takes it up again, and argues that as both God and Man have reason,
there must be a direct relation between them.[790] And as Law and right
reason are identical, we may say that Law is the binding force of that
relation. And again, this means that the universe may be looked on as
one great State (_civitas_), of which both God and Man (or gods and men)
are citizens, or in another way as a State of which the constitution is
itself the Reason, or God's law, which all reasonable beings must obey.
Such obedience is itself the effort by which Man realises his own
reason: he is a part of a reasonable universe, and he cannot rebel
against its law without violating his own highest instinct. It is not
hard to see how this way of expressing the Stoic theological principle
would appeal to the Roman mind. That mind was wholly incapable of
metaphysical thinking; but it could without effort understand, with the
help of its social and political principles and experience, the idea of
supreme intelligent rule--a supreme _imperium_, as it were, to rebel
against which would be a moral _perduellio_, high treason against a
supreme Law, unwritten like his own, and resting, as he thought of his
own as resting, on the best instincts, tradition, reason, of his
community; from his own constitution and laws he could lift his mind
without much difficulty to the constitution and law of the _communis
deorum et hominum civitas_. The idea of God in any such sense as this
was indeed new to him; but he could grasp it under the expression
"universal law of right reason" when he would have utterly failed, for
example, to conceive of it as "the Absolute." He can feel himself the
citizen of a State whose maker and ruler is God, and whose law is the
inevitable force of Reason; he can realise his relationship to God as a
part of the same State, gifted with the same power of discerning its
legal basis, nay, even helping to administer its law by rational
obedience.
2. Reason as thus ruling the universe can also provide a basis for Man's
reasonable association with his fellow-men, and a religious basis if
conceived as God; for Man's recognition of the divine law, the _recta
ratio_, as binding on him, is followed quite naturally by his
recognition of the application of that law to the world he lives in.
"Human law comes into existence," says Zeller, explaining this
point,[791] "when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises
its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would
be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the
Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it)[792] had
been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment,
destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which
lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in
these dry bones, and started Roman lawyers, many of whom were Stoics
more or less pronounced, on a career of enlightened legal study which
has left one of the most valuable legacies inherited by the modern
world from ancient civilisation. In another way too it had, I think, an
immediate effect on Scipio himself and his circle, and on their mental
descendants, of whom Cicero was the most brilliant: it made them look on
the law and constitution of their State as eminently reasonable, and on
rebellion against it as unreason, or as the Romans call it, _lascivia_,
wanton disregard of principle. So far as I know, no great Roman lawyer
was ever a revolutionary like Catiline or Clodius, nor yet an obstinate
conservative like Cato, whose Stoicism was of the older and less
Romanised type; the two of whom we know most in the century following
the arrival of Panaetius were both wise, just, and moderate men, Mucius
Scaevola and Servius Sulpicius, of whom it may be truly said they
contributed as much to civilisation as the great military and political
leaders of the same period.[793]
There now remains the question whether this noble Stoic religion, as we
may fairly call it, with its ideas of the relation of Man to God and to
his fellow-men, had, after all, sufficient definiteness for a Roman to
act as a grip on his conscience and his conduct in his daily dealings
with others. It could deduce the existence and beauty of the social
virtues from its own principles; if Man partakes of the eternal Reason,
or, as they otherwise put it, if he is through his Reason a part of God
himself in the highest sense, and if God and Reason are in the highest
sense good, then in realising his own Reason, in obeying the voice of
the God within him,[794] he must be himself good by the natural instinct
of his own being. Accordingly, these social virtues, duties, _officia_,
as the Romans called them, were set forth by Panaetius in two books,
which in a Latinised form we still fortunately possess,--the first two
of Cicero's work _de Officiis_,--and without the uncompromising rigidity
which characterised the original Stoic ethical doctrine inherited from
the Cynics.[795] In the first book he treated of the good simply
(_honestum_), in the second of the useful (_utile_), and in a third,
which it was left for Cicero to execute, of the cases of conflict
between these two. In this charming work there is much to admire, and
even much to learn: the social virtues--benevolence, justice,
liberality, self-restraint, and so on, are enlarged upon and illustrated
by historical examples[796] in perfect Latin by Cicero; and as we read
it we cannot but feel that the influence of Panaetius upon his educated
Roman pupils must have been eminently wholesome.