Chapter VIII: Appendix: I (bibliographies) 361 (6)

The Absolute in Plato’s thought had not only life and intelligence but also creative activities; and the acts of creation consisted in imposing on the formless material principle the ideas which the Absolute comprehends in itself, or, as perhaps he would have preferred to say, in making the material principle partake of the appropriate idea. In the Cratylus he illustrates the relation of matter to the idea by the way in which the artisan makes a shuttle out of wood, always forming his material with reference to the true or ideal shuttle.[211] We may illustrate further by examples modelled on Plato’s own. Think for a moment of the potter and his clay. The clay is formless matter which the potter takes and places on the wheel, and there imposes upon the clay the idea of the pot which is in his own mind; so the pot acquires a real existence in so far as it partakes of or embodies the idea which exists in the potter’s mind. Or we may think of the sculptor and the shapeless block of marble. By imposing his idea upon the marble, by making the shapeless block embody his idea, the sculptor brings the statue into being. These illustrations, both Plato’s and my own, are of course misleading, for the wood, clay, and marble from which the several objects are made are far from being the negative substance which Plato would have us believe his material principle to be. But they may serve to suggest the way in which he conceived the varied world about us to come into its temporary existence.

Now to Plato’s mind the Absolute and the ideas are perfect; yet we know that the phenomenal world is imperfect, and imperfection is evil; therefore, he says, evil must be found in the negative substratum, since as we have already seen, this was regarded by Plato as in every way the opposite of the perfect ideas. This imperfection, inherent in the material principle, is the “necessity” of which he speaks in the Theaetetus as causing evils—the opposite of the good.[212] Evil, therefore, is eternal, but, as we have earlier learned, the individual may escape, if he will take the deliverance which philosophy offers him.

As I have said, the course of creation is explained through myth in the Timaeus and the Statesman.[213] In the former God is represented as creating first the gods of heaven which are the fixed stars and planets, from whom sprang the gods of popular mythology. The Creator had already conceived of creatures of the air, sea, and land; but these he did not himself create, for then they would have been on equality with the gods; he rather commissioned the gods to create man and the lower animals, while he furnished the divine part, the soul. Man’s soul therefore is of the same nature as the universal soul, but his body is material, made of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and it is imperfect, being subject to the passions. In the Statesman Plato sets forth his theory of the development of man from an earlier stage to the present: the significant thing for us at the moment is his explanation of man’s falling away from virtue as due to the admixture of matter in him, that this fall was “inherent in the primal nature which was full of disorder.”

This, then, will at least suggest Plato’s view as to the origin of evil in the world. His language is that of myth, and it seems evident that he did not formulate his explanation perfectly even in his own mind. We shall best regard it as one of his guesses at truth. It is, of course, easy to find weaknesses in his thought on this question and to show that the explanation which he suggests is not satisfactory. But we shall do better to remember the difficulty of the problem and to recognize the value of his attempt to reach its solution.

The greatest service, however, which Plato did was to establish by means of his doctrine of ideas a rational relation between the invisible world of reason and the visible world of the senses; and by pointing out that the rational part of man’s soul is of the same substance as the ideas and therefore of the same substance as the Absolute, to give an intellectual basis to the doctrine of a natural striving on the part of man after the supreme Good. Hardly second to this was his service in the field of ethics, where he showed that man’s spiritual advance depends upon the constant curbing of the passions and the body. The greatness of his genius is shown by the fact that throughout antiquity the highest religious thought of paganism had its source in his work and was only a development of it. Before we have finished these lectures we shall gain some hints of his profound influence on Christianity.

* * * * *

Platonic philosophy by attributing to the ideas an existence apart from things, and conversely by denying all existence to anything but the ideas, had removed all reality to the supernatural world. It was inevitable that this view should be promptly attacked. The challenge came from Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle.

Aristotle, born at Stagira in Thrace about 384 B.C., by inheritance and early training had a strong bent toward natural science, since he was descended from a line of physicians who, according to Galen, taught anatomy by dissection. For twenty years he was the pupil and assistant of Plato in the Academy. After the death of his master he went to the court of Hermias, a prince of Mysia, and in 343 he was appointed tutor to the son of King Philip of Macedon, Alexander, then thirteen years of age. About 335 he opened a school in the Lyceum at Athens, where he taught for some thirteen years. Then, being accused of impiety after Alexander’s death, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, as he said, that the Athenians might not sin a second time against philosophy; there he died about 322.

Into Aristotle’s encyclopedic knowledge and enormous scientific activities we may not now go; and indeed we need not dwell at very great length upon him, for his influence in religion was less potent than Plato’s through antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages. The chief cause of the elder philosopher’s greater influence is to be found in the fact that Plato’s thought centered on man, his morality, and his relation to God, while Aristotle was concerned primarily with the universe of which man was to him only a part; to Plato virtue was inseparably connected with religion, and was therefore something to be sought with fervent spirit as well as with cool reason; to Aristotle virtue was rather an intellectual matter, an even balance of the soul, that natural perfection of the whole organism on which the well-being and happiness of man depended—a state which was to be attained by right calculation, choice, and habit. So it came to pass that although Aristotle’s works on logic were continuously studied in one form or another, his great sway in many realms of human thought, including theology, began in the thirteenth century, when, learning first from Arabic scholars, later aided and stimulated by the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the western intellectual world eagerly studied his works anew. Then Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon raised him to the supreme position in philosophy and theology, so that he became for that age indeed “the master of those who know.”

Let us now consider some parts of his philosophy. He criticized Plato’s doctrine that ideas have an existence apart from things, and not unjustly charged that Plato had taken the universals, which we arrive at by abstraction, and had elevated these general concepts into eternal and immortal elements, claiming for them that they were anterior to the things of sense and alone had real existence. In his own philosophy he took a position fundamentally opposed to that of Plato, for he insisted that “ideas,” “forms” and the phenomenal world could not exist apart, for if they did, then we should be obliged to postulate a third world beyond them; that is to say, that if the idea of man, for example, had a substantial existence apart from individual men, then there would have to be an idea antecedent to both the idea of man and the individual men, the model of both, and this idea would be a “third man.” He further pointed out that men know the ideas only in the concrete objects, never apart from those objects of which they are the ideas, that the essence can never be separated from that of which it is the essence, since then both thing and essence would cease to exist. So he charged Plato with using meaningless poetic metaphors when he said that ideas, forms, existed apart from things. Reality to Aristotle was always in the individual object, itself an indissoluble union of matter and form. Of course he recognized that the human mind could abstract these two elements each from the other and could think of the matter and the form as separate, but he would not allow that these abstractions had substantial reality in the sense that they could ever exist by themselves.[214]

Since then to him the Platonic ideas were nothing apart from the individual objects, Aristotle could find no principle of movement or change in them; so he claimed that the doctrine of ideas was sterile and came to naught. In his own system he enumerated four principles or causes, which he insisted, however, are only known to us from individual things: the material cause (τὸ ἐξ oὗ γίνεταί τι, ἡ ὓλη), the formal cause (τὸ εἶδος, ἡ μορφή), the efficient cause (τὸ ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχή), and the final cause (τὸ oὗ ἕνεκα, τὸ τέλος). To make his meaning clear let us use in part his own illustrations: the material cause of the statue is the bronze of which it is made, just as in the example of the pot which we used a little while ago, the clay was its material cause; the formal cause is the idea of the statue, or of the pot, or of the octave in music, which the artist has in mind; the artist himself is the efficient cause; and the object of the action, the completed pot, statue, or whatever it may be, is the final cause.[215] That is to say the statue exists potentially in the bronze, the pot potentially in the clay, the octave potentially in the musical sounds, but these things can be called in actual existence only by the operation of the other three causes; and the same thing holds true in animate nature. It is possible therefore to state the matter generally and to say that in every case the individual is produced by the operation of the formal, efficient, and final causes on the material cause, bringing to actuality the potentiality in matter. Of course we may regard the formal, efficient, and final causes as different aspects of the same formal cause—a thing which Aristotle himself does in more than one passage,[216] so that in the last analysis he regards matter and form as the two causes or principles of things. These two are to him correlatives, each completing the other, although he gives greater importance to the formal than to the material cause. These two causes, he says, attract each other; and their union brings about movement, which is always the evolution of something from something else.

From these considerations I trust that it is evident that Aristotle regarded every object of nature, whether animate or inanimate, as the product of causation; behind each individual he found another individual, and he saw that each object was the result of conscious causal activity. So, looking on the world with scientific eyes, he found therein continuous movement dependent on a chain of causes, and he pointed out that such a chain requires a first cause which must be the source of all activity. This first cause was to him Mind, pure Thought, God, conscious, eternal, and good. But his First Cause was at the same time the Final Cause, for the supreme Mind conceives the end toward which all creative activity is tending, that is, it acts with intelligence so that the world is the creation of intelligence and is directed toward wise ends.[217] The order of the universe bears witness to the Mind which set it in order, and which keeps it in motion, all for intelligent ends; for to use Aristotle’s own expression, “God and Nature do nothing without a purpose.”[218] Thus Aristotle introduced into theology cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God.

But when Aristotle defines God as pure Thought, the supreme Idea or Form, with no admixture of matter, it might seem that he had contradicted himself. It will be remembered, however, that in his system matter and form do not stand quite on an equality—matter is somewhat subordinate to form. He regarded matter as the point of departure for something higher—the clay being antecedent and lower than the pot, the bronze than the statue—for the higher product always results from the operation of the formal cause on the material. Of course in our illustrations the bronze and the clay are not absolute matter, but only matter with reference to the higher products evolved from them—the pot and the statue. Indeed Aristotle did not suppose that there was such a thing as absolute matter existing by itself, but he rather thought of his material cause as matter not yet formed, the germ from which the actual object was to be developed by the operation of the formal cause. Now he saw in the universe an ascending scale of existence, just as today we recognize such a scale in the animal world, each stage being more perfect than that below it; he pointed out that with reference to the lower, each higher stage was ideal, but material with reference to that which was still higher. So in every stage the idea, the form, preceded and conditioned the material element, and in a sense we may correctly say that Aristotle gradually refined away his material element in the ascending scale. At the summit Aristotle placed the perfect and supreme Idea, God, the eternal antecedent of all activity, the prime mover of the universe. So in the end he identified God and Form. Strictly speaking in his system God could not be a resultant of form and matter, for then God would not be the ultimate being, but some cause would lie behind him; and he would not be perfection, since some potentiality, the characteristic of matter, would still reside in him. As a matter of fact Aristotle in a number of passages identifies his ultimate material and form (ἡ ἐσχάτη ὔλη καὶ ἡ μορφὴ ταὐτό);[219] not that he would have granted that there was a material element in the Supreme Being; but in the light of what we have just said we can understand how he might have held that the ultimate material and God were identical.[220]

It readily follows from Aristotle’s concept of God as the prime mover, the source of all activity in the world, that God can be but one. Monotheism is the logical result of the Aristotelian reasoning. Moreover it was inevitable that Aristotle should make God transcendent, that is, that he should place him above all objects of the natural world, since if the First Cause is pure thought unmixed with matter, he cannot be immanent in material things. The immateriality which Plato gave to his ideas, his pupil transferred to God.

Midway between the natural and the supernatural worlds Aristotle placed man, whom he regarded as bound to the world of nature by his body and the lower elements of his mind, but connected with God through his reason, for he held that the human mind possessed attributes of the divine intelligence. Aristotle’s psychology was based on his belief that there was a purpose in all nature, and on his view that in the individual were always united form and material. With reference to animate beings he showed that they had their formative principle within them, which brought to actuality the material which had the potentiality of life, and which determined the purpose for which the individual creature existed. This formative principle was then for him the soul of the animate being, whether plant, lower animal, or man; it was the internal principle which determined the processes of nutrition, growth, and decay common to all animate creatures, and no less the functions peculiar to the lower and the higher animals throughout the scale of life. The soul of a plant, then, he defined as the assimilative principle (τὸ θρεπτικόν) But creatures of the next, higher stage, the so-called lower animals, he saw had senses, desires, and self-movement; to their souls therefore he assigned the additional elements of sensation (τὸ αἰσθητικόν), appetite (tὸ ὀrektikόn), and motion (τὸ κινητικόν). Finally, he said, the human soul had mind (νοῦς) in addition to the elements possessed by the lower animals and plants, for man has the power of thought and reflection. Therefore man is the highest creature, the most perfect organism in the natural order.

But the human mind, as Aristotle pointed out, has two activities: it concerns itself with knowing and with reasoning; it is passive, receptive, in that it receives ideas from without, and creative in that it can reflect on its own ideas and so create new ideas which are in no sense dependent on material objects—are, as we say, abstract ideas. To this creative part of man’s soul, to his reason alone, did Aristotle grant eternal existence and immortality. All other activities of the soul—knowing, moving, seeking, feeling, and assimilating—he held to be bound to the body and hence to perish with it; but the reasoning element he maintained was in no way dependent on the material world, was always active, and therefore it alone was immortal and eternal.[221] Yet after establishing the immortality of the reasoning element Aristotle failed to define the fate of the immortal human reason after death; of joys or pains beyond the grave he gave no description.

In ethics Aristotle taught that the highest human good was that happiness which results when man’s mind under the direction of reason is active toward virtuous ends; that moral virtue is a habit which is acquired by cultivation, a condition which is attained when the appetites are controlled by the will and guided by the reason. Now in the Aristotelian system man alone was regarded as capable of moral action. The animals are guided by appetite and lack intelligence to direct them; God is pure reason and therefore we cannot attribute to him any moral qualities; but man possesses the characteristics of the lower creatures and has at the same time the divine element, the reason, which connects him with God. Therefore since man is endowed with reason which can either prompt the will to check the appetite or bid the will let appetite go its way, he is capable of choice and so of morality. By thus emphasizing the controlling function of the will Aristotle prepared the way for the Stoics, as we shall see in our next lecture. Virtue in the active life of society was to him always the mean between two extremes, both of which were themselves vices. Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance between indulgence and abstinence; and so on through the whole range of the ethical virtues. Above these virtues of the active life, Aristotle placed a higher rank—the intellectual virtues of wisdom, knowledge, good-sense, practical insight, etc., which result from a harmony of the active and the receptive parts of the intellect. Highest of all he put the speculative activities of the intellect, which he regarded as its proper and most constant function. This “theoretical” or “contemplative” life (θεωρητικὸς βίος) he said brought man his highest happiness just because it was his highest activity. Yet Aristotle could not hold out the hope that men could attain this joy fully or in great numbers; he saw that the greater part of human life was concerned with practical virtues, with good character; and he believed that only when man was good in everyday life could he hope to rise to the contemplative life, but that in that life, at moments, he might catch glimpses of the happiness which belonged continuously to God.[222]

Unquestionably Aristotle did a large service in putting ethics on a more scientific basis than his predecessors had done, but his chief contributions to the subject with which we are now concerned were in the field of theology. There, as we have already noted, he established the cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God; and he also introduced a clearly defined transcendentalism, thus making explicit what had been implied in parts of Plato’s teachings. Yet he failed to provide that satisfaction for religious hopes and fears which men desired, and so, as I have said, the cold scientific reasoning of the Stagirite had far less influence in religion than the enthusiastic thought of his teacher until after many centuries had passed.

* * * * *

Although we may readily recognize that the influence of philosophy on the religious belief of the most enlightened in this time was great, we may still question whether it had any considerable influence on the religious customs of the people. Practice is always more conservative than thought, and we find that the thinkers who did most to destroy traditional theology frequently conformed to the traditional worship of the common man. So Socrates sacrificed in the usual way to the gods, although he held advanced ideas with regard to prayers and oaths. No doubt Plato and Aristotle passed for pious so far as their religious practices were concerned, in spite of the fact that they put new content into ancient forms. The former frequently made the speakers in his dialogues refer to the gods in quite the traditional way, and in his Timaeus he set forth a kind of systematic theology; in his Laws, written in his old age as a supplement to his Republic, he planned for his ideal state a religious organization, involving a plurality of gods, not dissimilar to that of the actual Athenian state; he represented his chief spokesman as proving the existence of the gods, giving warrant for the familiar practices of religion, and justifying the ways of gods to men; moreover he proposed to have statutes against impiety and the introduction of religious rites not recognized by law.[223] Aristotle clearly had slight respect for the common notions as to the gods, but for all that he regarded the worship of many gods as natural, and he thought that worship was indispensable for the existence of a state; therefore in his Politics he made a place for a polytheistic religion, defined the duties of priests and other sacred officials, and provided that all the expenses of public worship should be borne by the state.[224] The charge, prompted by political passion, brought against Aristotle for impiety in deifying Hermias, the prince of Mysia, shows that he was not regarded as atheistic.

As a matter of fact with all the changes in religious thought which the centuries brought in Greece, sacred customs and practices remained but little altered down to the end of antiquity. Theology has small interest for the common man. He must depend for his assurance on the performance of those acts which immemorial custom has sanctioned as the proper means of securing the favor of the gods, rather than on the speculations of some theologian or on his own poor reflections. Sacrifice and prayer before the sacred statue or symbol, community worship at the great festivals, private devotion at the shrine within the home, rites of riddance and appeasing, the promise and payment of vows, remained the practices of the mass of men for many centuries after the prophet of Nazareth delivered his message—indeed Christianity took over many of these things and has kept them to the present day. Then too we must remember that the civic character of the common Greek religion had a higher side, for it strengthened the bond of family and of city-state; and through the great festivals at Olympia, Delphi, and Nemea it helped to form a dim concept of a Greek nation. Thus it elevated men’s notions of responsibility to the social units, both small and great. Furthermore, apart from the civic and national sides of Greek religion, the general religious thought of the mass was gradually ennobled with the passage of the centuries; in spite of the survival into later antiquity of certain rude and primitive elements, religion became more moral and more spiritual, as we have already seen was the case with the Eleusinian Mysteries. Plato and Aristotle in the very nature of the case could have little influence on the many in their day; but when their thoughts had been transmuted into terms which the common man could comprehend and express in living, philosophy became for the many a guide of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[190] It is sometimes said that Plato does not identify the Idea of the Good with God, but I cannot interpret the following passages save as I have done above: _Phil._ 22 C; _Tim._ 28 A-29 E; 37 A; 92 C.

[191] _Phaedrus_, 245; cf. _Laws_, 10, 894 B ff., 12, 966 E.

[192] _Phaedo_, 72 ff.

[193] _Meno_, 81 ff.

[194] _Phaedo_, 86 ff.

[195] _Phaedo_, 105.

[196] _Rep._ IV, 427 ff., esp. 440 E-441 A; VI, 504; VIII, 550; IX, 580-581; cf. _Timaeus_, 69-72.

[197] 246 f.

[198] 69 ff.

[199] _Rep._ VI, 484 ff.

[200] _Theaet._ 176.

[201] X, 613.

[202] _Phaedo_, 82 f.

[203] _Phaedo_, 66 E ff.

[204] 399 f.

[205] 492 E-493 A.

[206] _Phaedo_, 63 ff.

[207] _Rep._ X, 614 ff.; cf. _Phaedrus_, 248 f.

[208] _Theaet._ 176.

[209] _Statesman_ 272 ff.; _Tim._ 42 ff.

[210] _Tim._ 49 E-52 B; cf. Aristot. _Phys._ 1, 9, 192 a, 3 ff.; 4, 2, 209 b, 11 ff.

[211] _Crat._ 389 f.

[212] _Theaet._ 176.

[213] _Tim._ 29 E ff.; _Statesman_, 272 B ff.

[214] _Met._ I, 9, 990 b ff.; VI, 8; XII, 10; XIII, 3.

[215] _Phys._ II, 3, 194 b, 16 ff.; cf. _Met._ I, 3, 983 a, 24 ff.; VI, 7, 1032 a, 13 ff.; VII, 4, 1044 a, 32 ff.; _et passim_.

[216] E. g. _Phys._ II, 7, 198 a, 22 ff.

[217] _Phys._ VIII, 6, 258 b, 10 ff.; _Met._ XI, 7 (entire).

[218] _De caelo_, I, 4, 271 a, 33.

[219] E. g. _Met._ VII, 6, 1045 b, 18 f.

[220] Cf. the whole discussion of God in _Met._ XI.

[221] On the foregoing see the _De anima_ in general and especially II, 1; III, 4 and 5.

[222] Cf. on the foregoing the two ethical works, the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics, entire.

[223] _Laws_, VI, 759 and X entire.

[224] _Politics_, VI, 8, 1322 b, 18 ff.; VII, 8, 1328 b, 12 ff.; 1329 a, 27 ff.; 1330 a, 8 f.; 1331 b, 4-6, 17 f.

VI

LATER RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES

Plato and Aristotle mark the culmination of a great period in Greek thought. After them metaphysical speculation made little if any advance in antiquity. Indeed we are all aware of the fact that the greater part of the thinking world has been divided between Platonists and Aristotelians ever since, although in our own time we are seeing a return by some to the philosophic position of the Sophists and Heraclitus.

Now in our discussion of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle you must have felt that their systems were for the intellectual élite. The large demands which they make upon the reason and the habit of reasoning unfit them for the great majority of mankind, since the average man desires a practical guide in life which he can readily follow, rather than a philosophical system which he can grasp only by the careful use of his intellect. Furthermore, in the period after Alexander, when national life and interests were weakened or destroyed by the Macedonian’s conquests and the struggles of his successors, the individual was forced to withdraw from public life; he lost the satisfactions which the politics of his community had once furnished, felt himself without the social supports which the compact life of his city-state had formerly given, and so, turned in on himself, he naturally sought for a sure rule of life and a guarantee of individual happiness. We shall now consider first a school of practical philosophy which followed Aristotle—that of the Stoics, and then some mystic philosophies of the early centuries of our era.

Socrates, the great teacher and the dramatic spokesman of Plato’s dialogues, gave the impulse to many philosophic systems. The only one we need to glance at now is that of the Cynics founded by Antisthenes, who had been one of Socrates’ many pupils. It was continued by the whimsical and notorious Diogenes of Sinope, whose name is familiar to us all. The founder of Cynicism emphasized the Socratic aim of individual virtue to the neglect of all else, for like his master he maintained that virtue was the only good, the sole aim in life, and that it was sufficient in itself for happiness. But he also went to the extreme of declaring that all external relations and obligations were to be neglected, and that there was no middle ground of the slightest importance between virtue and vice. Antisthenes also taught that whoever possessed virtue was wise, the rest of the world foolish; and that virtue was a thing which could be taught, and which once learned could never be lost. To the Cynic all pleasure was vicious, but sweat and toil blessings if associated with the individual freedom which was the aim of the school. Although the Cynics were concerned only with practical virtue in this world here and now, their puritanical and doctrinaire system deserves this place in our consideration, because it was the first to attempt to make philosophy a practical guide for the common man in everyday life. It is quite true that this was also Socrates’ position, but his mind and common sense took so large a view of the relations of man that he never fell into the narrow exclusiveness of the Cynics. With them philosophy was not speculative, but became the art of virtuous living; it easily degenerated into insolent and ostentatious show, and doubtless deserved many of the jibes which the later satirists threw at it. Within the sect, strictly speaking, the doctrine of virtue as man’s chief good came to little because it lacked the principle of moral activity. The will of man was not challenged to act in advancing him along the path of virtue. But Stoicism took over the doctrine, gave it life by insisting on the exercise of the will in the practice of virtue, and made thereby such a contribution to the practical life of virtue that we are still the Stoics’ heirs.

It was toward the close of the fourth century that Zeno of Citium in the island of Cyprus established a school in the Painted Porch (Στοὰ ποικίλη) at Athens. Zeno had been an adherent of no one school or philosophical sect: he had listened to both Cynic, Megarian, and Platonic teachers. It was natural, therefore, in view of the training of the founder and of the fact that he was born in a place distant from the great centers of the Greek world, that the Stoic school from the beginning should draw its tenets from many sources and that it should have a cosmopolitan character.

Furthermore the time in which it was founded had a potent and direct influence upon it. Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C., after carrying his arms to the banks of the Indus and enlarging the Greek world far beyond even his own vast dreams. The ideal state, even in the mind of Alexander’s great teacher Aristotle, was at this time thought to be one which corresponded closely to the actual Greek state, a community of limited size, whose free population should be all of the same stock, and one in which the manual toil should be performed by slaves. A sharp contrast to this was the mighty empire which Aristotle’s pupil carved in an incredible fashion out of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is not to be wondered at that a philosophy, the principles of which were drawn from various Athenian schools, as I have just said, and which was developed by men like Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus of Soli in Cilicia should have a character which made it appeal to the enlarged and varied world of Hellenism, and to the Roman Empire which succeeded that of Alexander.

The development of Stoicism corresponded to its eclectic origin. The system established by Zeno was enlarged and rounded out by Chrysippus. It was welcomed by the Romans in the second century B.C. when Panaetius of Rhodes transplanted the system to Rome. In the hands of its earliest leaders the school had held to a severe and uncompromising doctrine, not dissimilar to that of the Cynics. But Panaetius greatly modified this teaching, and accommodated the school to the other great philosophic systems of the time, especially to the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle; and thus he made Stoicism suited to the educated Roman world. Among his disciples he numbered many of the Roman aristocracy of the second century B.C., the most famous of whom were Laelius and the younger Scipio. That unyielding dogmatism of the older school which had paralleled Cynicism in teaching that between virtue and vice there was no intermediate position, that the philosopher was the perfectly virtuous man, and that he and the vicious were absolutely separated, was replaced by a doctrine of the possibility of gradual progress in virtue. Indeed some with good sense held that this was the most to which man could attain, that he could never hope to reach perfection, but that his duty was to accomplish a daily advance toward excellence. Panaetius did a great service in adapting Stoicism to life. A famous pupil of Panaetius was Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, who drew many Romans to hear him at his school in Rhodes, among them Cicero and Pompey. He carried still further the synthesis of Stoicism with Platonism and Aristotelianism, and by the astounding range of his learning and the brilliancy of his style acquired a large influence. He seems also to have given Stoicism a strong religious cast.

Like other philosophies Stoicism had embraced many subjects—logic, including dialectic and rhetoric, physical science, including cosmology and theology, and ethics. But by the first century of the Roman Empire it had become almost exclusively a philosophy of moral and religious edification, well calculated to steel men against the distress and trouble of that age. Its great representatives in this last period were Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, whose works are still a source of strength for many thoughtful men.

Let us now consider briefly the system of the Stoics. Our theme confines us chiefly to the moral and religious sides of their philosophy; but this is only a slight limitation, for true to the teachings of the Cynics, who had greatly influenced the founder of the school, throughout their history the Stoics laid much emphasis on ethics, that is, on the art of a righteous and virtuous life. They were never so much concerned with speculation as to the nature of virtue as with its practice. To them virtue was man’s highest aim, and by it they meant righteousness in the practical relations of life. They defined it as a condition of the soul in which the soul is in continuous harmony with itself. Virtue they subdivided into the four chief elements of intelligence, discretion, courage, and justice. Some also recognized subordinate virtues, but these I name were the four that made up the supreme excellence. Furthermore the Stoics, like Socrates and the Cynics, identified virtue with knowledge and regarded the ideal philosopher as the one who had attained to true and complete wisdom and consequently to perfect virtue. Therefore the ideal of the wise man became the very center of the Stoic doctrine. He was thought to combine in himself all perfection, and as Seneca says, differs from God only by being mortal. As I have already observed, the early Stoics had fixed an absolute gulf between the perfect wise man and the unwise; like the Cynics they had declared that virtue once attained could not be lost; but the practical good sense of a later age modified these extreme views and taught that there were degrees in virtue, and that the most that the ordinary man could do was daily to advance and make progress toward his goal. As Seneca says: “I am not yet wise, nor shall I ever be. Do not ask me to be equal to the best but rather to be better than the base. This is enough for me—to take away daily something from my faults and daily to reject my errors.”[225] That man might attain to virtue, according to the Stoic, he must free himself from the world and its influences, through the exercise of his will he must strive to attain to freedom from all excess of feeling and passion. The extremist said that he must raise himself to a position where he was entirely free from passion, where he had attained to complete ἀπάθεια. The milder Stoics held the view that the wise man would not be one who felt no passion or desire, but rather one in whom virtue overmastered the passions. The mastery, whether complete or partial, all agreed was to be attained by the exercise of the will; therefore man must regard as wholly indifferent to him all things that are not within the control of that faculty. On this point Epictetus discourses most interestingly.[226] He points out that the materials we employ in life are indifferent to us, neither good nor bad; they are like the dice with which we play our game. But like the gamester we must try to manage life dexterously; whatever happens we must say: “Externals are not within my power; choice is. Where then shall I seek good and evil? Why, within, in what is my own.” And then he continues, pointing out that we must count nothing good or evil, profitable or hurtful, or of any concern to us, that is controlled by others. In tranquillity and calm we must accept what life brings, concerned only with what actually depends on the will of each one of us. We must act in life as we do in a voyage: the individual can choose the pilot, the sailors, and the hour of his departure; after that he must meet quietly all that comes, for he has done his part; and if a storm arise, he must face with indifference disaster or safety, for these matters are quite beyond the control of his will. So sickness and health, abundance and need, high position or the loss of station are things which my will cannot control. Therefore to me as a philosopher they are indifferent; I must have no anxiety about them; they really are not my affair. But my thoughts and my acts are matters that I can control, and in them I must find all my concern. The external circumstances, the acts of others, do not touch me, but my own acts, my own relations, my own inner life are things to which I must give all of my attention. So the Stoic reasoned, holding that virtue was quite sufficient for happiness, and that it made man master of his world. Thus we see that to the doctrine of virtue, which the Cynics had magnified, the Stoics had added the vitalizing principle of the operation of man’s will, and thereby had made the pursuit of wisdom, which to them was identical with virtue, a powerful means of moral and spiritual edification.

But when the Stoic discoursed of virtue and wisdom, what did he conceive the highest aim of man to be? “To live in accord with Nature,” was the answer which the followers of Zeno usually gave. By that they meant that man must bring himself into accord with that Nature which rules all things; that he must make his will and reason agree with the universal will and reason of which in truth they are a part. Others said that one must live in harmony with himself. But as we shall presently see, their definition was essentially the same as that of their fellows, for to the Stoic man was in himself an epitome of the cosmos.

In their explanation of the universe the Stoics held to a materialism which they borrowed from the teachings of Heraclitus, who had maintained that only matter had any existence whatever; therefore their system was in theory a materialistic monism, but with their monistic principle they combined an idea which in reality they had derived from Aristotle, apparently without realizing the possible consequence to their view that matter alone exists. Although holding that everything is material, they recognized in all things the presence of an active and a passive principle, the active principle forming and directing, the other being formed and directed, so that by the operation of the active principle upon the passive all the phenomena of the world come into being. The passive principle corresponded to Aristotle’s material, while the active principle included both his efficient and final causes. To their active principle the Stoics gave all the characteristics that Heraclitus had given to his λόγος, reason, or Anaxagoras to his νοῦς, mind. In short they attributed to it all the characteristics of reason and intelligence, so that in spite of their argument that the active principle was no less material than the passive, that it was the element of fire or vapor or both, it was inevitable that in practice their philosophy should ultimately tend toward a dualism and that the ancient conflict of matter and mind, of body and soul, should have its place in their teaching. They thought that the operative principle, fire, the divine reason, expresses itself in every part of the universe, that everything which exists is permeated by this divine spirit and directed by it. It is nothing less than the world-reason, God, which begets all things; so that they called it λόγος σπερματικός, that is, the reason that contains within itself the germs of all things that are to be. Now since man is of course a part of the cosmos, the Stoic argued that in him the world-reason naturally expresses itself; it is that which guides him, in fact it is his reason, the directing portion of his soul. And it is the possession of this soul, itself a part of the universal reason, which makes it possible for man to live in accord with Nature, for he attains that aim whenever his soul is in agreement with the universal soul which is its source. In this way the Stoic, for all his materialism, emphasized the divine nature of man and the community of human reason with God.

The pantheistic character of this philosophy is now evident. The world-reason, God, whatever the Stoic might call it, is all, embraces all within itself, and permeates all. This conception is in marked contrast to the teachings of Aristotle and the later Platonists, who conceived of God as transcendent, removed from the world about us. We have here the doctrine of the immanence of God, in whom all things live and move and have their being, because the world-reason is the principle on which all life and action directly depend. In this doctrine of the immanence of God the Stoics brought together again the worlds of matter and of reason which Plato had separated; and in the pantheistic character of this teaching they established a belief which later fitted in with the general course of pagan thought under the Roman Empire, when philosophy and religion were at one in recognizing the existence in the world of but a single divine principle, although all systems, including Stoicism, found a way to provide for the multitude of gods which popular belief demanded.

The Stoic theology then is in technical language a materialistic pantheism, and the world is only a mode of God. Such abstractions are difficult to grasp and have no personal meaning for the common man. But in practice the Stoic thought and spoke of God as a personality. Nowhere is this feeling expressed with so much devotion as in Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus; the language is largely that of poetic tradition, but the thought is not that of common polytheism:

Most glorious of immortals, many named, powerful over all,
Zeus, thou author of all nature, guiding all with law,
Hail to thee. Thee ’tis right all mortals should address,
For from thee men derive their race, they who alone
Of all things mortal, living, creeping on the ground,
Have gift of speech. So will I hymn thee, and thy power forever sing.
For thee this entire cosmos, circling earth around,
Obeys where’er thou leadest, and ’tis gladly ruled by thee.
Such servant hast thou in thy hands invincible,
The two-edged thunderbolt, ever living flame.
For by its strokes are all things in nature wrought;
With it thou dost direct the common law, which throughout all
Forever moves, with every gleam commingled, great and small.
’Tis this hath made thee supreme king o’er all;
For naught e’er comes to pass on earth apart from thee, O God,
Nor in the sacred pole of ether above nor in the deep,
Save all the sin men do with folly cursed.[227]

But some of you have doubtless remembered that Fate (εἱμαρμένη) plays a large part in Stoicism, that the Stoic writers describe it as the cause that works through all things and brings all things to pass.[228] We must therefore consider what the Stoic meant by Fate, how he explained the existence of evil, and what provision he made for the freedom of the will. Fate was identified with reason or with what we call natural law; and since the Stoic held that it does not operate in a mechanical way, but is directed by reason to the best possible ends, it followed that Fate became identical with Providence (πρόνοια).[229] This world then for the Stoic is the best of all possible worlds. Yet the question will inevitably be asked as to why it is that evil can exist in such a world, in which a particular Providence rules all things for the best. We have already seen that Cleanthes held that God directed all things but the deeds of the wicked:

Naught e’er comes to pass on earth apart from thee, O God,
Nor in the sacred pole of ether above nor in the deep,
Save all the sin men do with folly cursed.

For the most part however the Stoics did not attempt to place evil outside the domain of Fate, but boldly maintained that the existence of good is inconceivable without the existence of its opposite, evil. They taught that many of the things which are ordinarily reckoned evils by men were nothing of the sort; what we call physical evils, for example, were for them not evils, because they could not affect the wise man, the philosopher; or if they affected him, they could serve only as discipline, and therefore contribute to good ends. Man has within him the possibility of good; he must also have the possibility of evil, and therefore he must possess the freedom of choice without which goodness or evil has no moral value. Evil therefore like the good must be part of a world in which God rules all things to the best and wisest ends.

Still there remains the difficulty that if man can determine his own choice, how can we still speak of Fate as directing the world. The answer is found in the nature of man, whose body is properly directed by his soul. This soul through experience develops reason, and the reasoning soul, as we have already seen, is a part of the universal reason, God. When the reason rules a man’s impulses and directs his will to follow the right course, it leads him into the path of freedom, for freedom consists in the complete subjugation of the impulses to reason. The Stoic had only to appeal to common experience to show that if the body and its impulses prevail, man obviously is a slave; but if reason dominates he is free. As Epictetus taught: “Freedom and slavery, the first is the name of virtue, the other of vice, but both are the effects of choice. Those who do not have the power of choice are touched by neither of these things. But the soul is accustomed to be master of the body, and the things of the body have properly nothing to do with the will to choose; for no man is a slave if he is free in his power to choose.”[230] The perfect philosopher, then, is wholly free, for his every act is guided by reason, and therefore he lives perfectly in accord with Nature and himself. Freedom lies in choice, but the choice once made, the consequences inevitably follow. So the freedom of the individual was reconciled with the rule of a determining Fate.

We have thus far seen that Stoicism was a philosophy for the individual; that it demanded that man, being a free agent, recognize his high calling as a reasonable being and put himself by the exercise of his will into accord with Nature and himself, and so attain or at least advance toward perfection. But in contrast to Cynicism Stoicism did not demand that its sectaries should cut themselves off from society; on the contrary it recognized that man is normally a member of a social group. If in its doctrine of personal edification it was strongly individualistic, it was no less cosmopolitan in its social philosophy. Although the earlier Stoics had not taken part in political life—probably because of the conditions of the time,—none had forbidden participation in public affairs, but on the contrary all favored it. Moreover the Stoic could not limit his view to the small political unit or to the society contained therein; but inasmuch as each individual possesses a soul that is a part of the cosmic reason, all mankind is a community of reasoning beings, and every man is a brother of every other.[231] Thus Stoicism gave a philosophic basis to the idea of the brotherhood of man. It taught also that external circumstances, birth, wealth, high position, physical freedom or slavery, are indifferent matters; that the slave if a philosopher is the equal of the philosophic emperor. Such doctrines as these gave a new dignity to the individual and were destined to produce great social effects in the course of time: they resulted toward the close of the first century of our era in a new humanitarian spirit which began to care for the poor and the weak. Ultimately the Stoic Roman jurists wrote into the great law-codes the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, distinguishing between natural law, according to which all men are brothers on an equal footing, and human law which has brought about distinctions. These law-codes saved the written doctrine for the later centuries, and Christianity on its part absorbed much of Stoic teaching; through these two channels we have inherited many of the ideas which are moving forces in modern democracy.

These matters touch us so closely that we may well pause for a moment and listen to some ancient witnesses. On the question whether a slave could be said to confer benefits on his master, Seneca wrote that whoever denied the possibility of this was ignorant of the principles of all human law: “for the question is as to the spirit of the one who confers the benefit, not as to his position in life. Virtue is closed to no man; but she is open for all, admits all, invites all, both freeborn and freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles all alike. She does not choose house or wealth; she is satisfied with the bare man and asks nothing more.”[232] Again he points out that only the body can be enslaved; that no prison can hold the mind and keep it from consorting with the divine.[233] He sums up: “All of us have the same origin, the same source; no man is nobler than another save he who has a more upright character and one better fitted to honorable pursuits.”[234] The great jurists speak no less plainly than the philosopher. Julius Paulus, at the beginning of the third century of our era, laid down the principle that nature has established between men a certain relationship; this his contemporary Ulpian expressed more plainly in these words: “By natural law all men are equal.” And Florentinus wrote: “Slavery is a provision of the law of nations, by which one man, contrary to the law of nature, is subject to the domination of another.”[235]