The soul of man is a body made out of the finest round and fiery atoms; a body which, like heated air, most rapidly penetrates the whole material frame. The finest portion of the soul, the feeling and thinking spirit, which as a fourth element is added to the fiery, aerial, and vaporous portions, dwells in the breast. In these elements all the soul's passions and impulses are rooted. When death destroys the body, the sheltering and protecting home of the soul's atoms, these evaporate at once. It was clear that in such a system the soul could not outlive the body, but Epicurus laid a special stress on this, since thereby only could men be delivered from the greatest impediment to repose and undisturbed enjoyment of life, the torturing fear of the world below, and of punishments after death. It was the crown of his system, to which ethics, physics, and such logic as he admitted were entirely subordinate, to emancipate men from four fears, the fear of death, the fear of natural things, the fear of the gods, the fear of a divine Providence, which was the same thing as fate.433 Nevertheless, the followers of Epicurus had no scruple, after the manner of their master, who had spoken of the worship of the gods like a priest, to visit temples and take part in religious ceremonies. These, it is true, were useless, since they had nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the gods, but it was an act of reason, and could do no harm, to honour beings naturally so high and excellent.434
Of this school we learn that it gradually became the most numerous of all. Its social force really lay in setting forth as a model the undisturbed security of individual life. It agreed at the bottom with stoicism that man's wisdom and highest end was to live in accordance with nature. Zeno, it is true, called this living in accordance with nature, virtue, man's highest and only good; Epicurus called it pleasure; but Zeno's virtue consisted essentially in the absence of passions, the pleasure of Epicurus in the mind's undisturbedness.435 The Epicureans were more attached to their master's memory than any other school. They were renowned for their friendship with each other. Epicurus's Garden at Athens meant the highest refinement of Athenian life, the enjoyment of everything that was pleasant in the society of likeminded men.436 It was this side of his philosophy which made it popular.
While the schools of Zeno and Epicurus seated at Athens were powerfully influencing Grecian thought, the former especially drawing to it the stronger and more thinking minds, resistance arose to them both in the chair of Plato. First Arcesilaus and then Carneades, who had succeeded to this office, set up in the middle Academy the school of Scepticism. While Stoics and Epicureans alike sought peace of mind through knowledge of the world and its laws, they on the contrary maintained that this same peace of mind could only be attained by renouncing all such knowledge.437 They held that no truth and no certainty were given to man by the representations of his senses, by his feelings, and by his consciousness of these, which do not enable him to know the real being of anything.438 Those who held this view would not say downright that what they contradicted was untrue: they were of opinion that it might be true, only there was no certitude of this, and therefore it must be left undetermined. The uncertainty was as great on the one side as on the other. Sextus Empiricus defined the state of skepsis to be “skilfulness in so setting forth appearances and reflections against each other, as to be brought through the equilibrium of opposing facts and grounds in their favour first to a suspension of judgment, and then to imperturbable tranquillity.”
Carneades, whose life occupied the greater part of the second century before Christ, and who is extolled by Cicero as the keenest and most copious of disputants, was the man in whom this school of thought reached its highest point. He had appeared at Rome among a deputation of philosophers in the year 155, when his eloquence and earnestness made a great impression on his Roman hearers. This scepticism of the younger Academy however ran in accordance with the direction which the collective philosophy of the Greeks naturally took, and was carried out with an acuteness and a scientific ability which makes us recognise in it an important member of philosophical development.439 Carneades subjected the stoic doctrine as to God in particular to a criticism the range of which went far beyond the dogmas of this school, and in fact tended to represent every conviction as to the existence of the godhead, and every religious belief, as something impossible and untenable.440 This, however, as Cicero repeatedly assures us, was not done for the purpose of destroying belief in the gods, but only to point out the weakness and groundlessness of stoic doctrines. It is chiefly in his assaults on the assertions and assumptions of his adversaries that Carneades is victorious: when he attempts anything positive on his own side, it amounts to this, that a rational man will take probability for his guide, when he cannot be assured of truth: and his chief merit appears to have been in more accurately determining the degrees of probability.441
The contests of these schools bring us down to the middle of the second century before Christ, when Greece fell under the dominion of Rome. From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. As a rule he was anything but an original thinker. He was an essentially practical man: he had a steady instinct which led him to distrust first causes and general principles. The Greek schools were to him of value only as they might fit into his daily life, not as coherent systems of thought. The spirit therefore in which he regarded their differences was to select from them what best suited his tastes and feelings. If he had no power to originate, he could choose. But such likewise had been the result among the Greeks themselves of two centuries of conflict, in which the rival systems of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism had stood over against each other. They sprung from the same soil; they might even be termed three branches of one stem,442 inasmuch as their common root was the desire to find for the individual man something which would give him tranquillity of mind, happiness in fact, independent of his civil circumstances. In this they all took up a practical rather than a theoretical ground, the ground indeed which is now assigned to religion. Utterly opposed, then, as they were in their means, they sought the same end, and it was not in nature that the collision of their various arguments should not at length kindle the spirit of eclecticism. Thus the temper of the Roman statesman and noble, and the course of Greek philosophy itself, combined to produce this spirit, which from the beginning of the first century before Christ pervaded the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world.443 But eclecticism betokens a weakening of the philosophic mind, that weariness which is unable to take a firm grasp of truth, an absence of the keen aim and high desire which such a grasp betokens. It is a confession that no one system possesses the truth: in which state of things nothing remains for the individual but to choose for himself out of different systems those morsels of truth which approve themselves most to his taste or tact, or, as he would term it, his truth-seeking sincerity.
But it is not too much to say that the whole spirit of later antiquity, so far as it interested itself in the discovery of truth, from the time that Greek philosophy was diffused over the Roman world, leant more or less to eclecticism. Its most able, most distinguished, and most interesting representative is Cicero.444 He lived at a time when rival criticism had searched out and exposed every weak point in the different systems of thought. To found new systems there was no further creative force; his eclectic position was the necessary result. His genius supplied him with no means to overcome it. His philosophical writings are scarcely more than transcripts from various Grecian sources, wherein he uses his skill as a rhetorician and his unfailing wealth of words to set forth with lawyerlike balancing the arguments of different schools. We can yet detect the originals, from which in the short intervals of enforced absence from political life before and after the death of Cæsar he transfused with such rapidity into a Latin shape the products of Greek discussion.445 Thus his treatise on the Republic and on Laws are in form imitations of Plato's writings with the same title, while for their contents Cicero applies Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines to his own political experiences, making also much use of Polybius. His Paradoxa explain Stoic propositions. The groundwork of his Consolatio is Crantor's writing upon Grief. The Lost Hortensius is drawn from an exhortation of Aristotle to Themison, a prince of a city of Cyprus, or from a similar work of the academician Philo of Larissa; his books De Finibus from works of Phædrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as well as the studies which Cicero himself in his youth made while attending lectures; his Academica from the writings and partly also from the lectures of the best-known Academicians: his Tusculan Disputations from Plato and Crantor, from Stoics and Peripatetics. The first book on the Nature of the Gods from the writing of an Epicurean, which has been discovered in the rolls of Herculaneum, and was first supposed to be a treatise of Phædrus, but is now known to be a work of Philodemus: his critique on the Epicurean standing-point is drawn from the stoic Posidonius; the second book from Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third from Carneades and Clitomachus. Of his books on Divination, the first is taken from Chrysippus, Posidonius, Diogenes, and Antipater; the second from Carneades, and the stoic Panætius. His treatise on Fate from the writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Carneades: his Elder Cato from Plato, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristo of Chius: his Lælius mainly from a writing of Theophrastus on Friendship. His main authority for the first two books on Offices is Panætius; and for the third Posidonius; while besides Plato and Aristotle he has made use of Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato.
Now in this selection from rival and antagonistic schools – this oscillation between the positive and sceptical tone of thought, this sitting as a judge rather than obeying as a disciple – Cicero very exactly represented the tone and attitude of the cultivated classes in his own time and in the century following his death. Originality of mind in philosophic studies was gone; nor was any system as a whole believed in. The sceptic and eclectic turn of mind are but the reverse sides of the same mental coinage: he who selects from all is convinced by none. Neither his doubts nor his choices satisfied Cicero, or any one of those who followed him in that most important century, the eighth of the Roman city, fifty years of which preceded and fifty followed the coming of Christ. In its philosophical productions no preceding century had been so poor as this. It had only to show the school of the Sextii, which arose at Rome about the beginning of our era, and took a sort of middle standing between Pythagorean, Cynic, and Stoic principles.446 This school was of small importance, and soon became extinct. With this exception from Cicero to Seneca no names of distinction appear. There is a gap in philosophical thought. A period so influential on the destinies of man in its events, so celebrated for its polite literature, on which the world has since been feeding, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry. For this reason there is a particular justice in taking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thought and spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuch as he is the last philosophic writer before Christian thought appears in the world, and chose for himself the function of summing up what he thought of value in the ages before him.
We omit therefore nothing in our review if we place ourselves at the end of this century, in the reign of Claudius, and cast a glance backward over that prodigious labour of human reason through which we have hastily travelled, and which had then lasted six hundred years. The problem was, given the universe, what will man's reason in the most gifted, cultivated, inquiring, dialectic race of the ancient world do with it? And more particularly, to what results will reason come as to the power which has formed, or which rules it: as to its chief inhabitant, his nature, and the purpose for which he exists, and the end to which he is ever advancing: as to the duties by which he is bound to this creating, or at least maintaining and ruling power: as to those offices which he owes to his fellow, the individual to the individual, the civil community to the community. It was to these points especially that the greatest character in the whole movement – the single heathen who knew how to die for his convictions – turned the thoughts of those who followed him. Again, at the very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct, gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have been the original and even the only form of teaching which they recognised. What was the result in this respect also? In the four hundred and forty years following the death of Socrates had reason produced a consistent doctrine, and a society of which that doctrine should be the law and bond, a fitting body for its soul to tenant, the immortal race of that living word which Plato contemplated? Time there had been enough, and even a superfluity of genius: but there were also two great outward events which might be expected to favour and advance such a result.
The first of these was the subjection of the whole East to the influence of the Greek mind by the conquest of Alexander, the effect of which continued in the kingdoms carried on by his successors. Originally the civil position of the Greek, as the free citizen of a free state, had been all in all to him. His country was his single measure. But during the lifetime of Plato and Aristotle this position had been more and more altering. The philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus was set up by men who had lost it altogether, who were thrown back on themselves, on the intrinsic nature of man, for support. Their inmost thought was how to produce tranquillity of mind, and so far as might be, happiness, for man, in something independent of his civil position. The loss of self-government had opened to them perforce a field far wider than the narrow confines of a provincial citizenship. Henceforth the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus issued their mental legislation not for the inhabitant of Attica, but for all that fusion of races which occupied the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, was ruled by Greek potentates, and spoke the Hellenic tongue. Thus the ground taken up by philosophy was at once religious and cosmopolitan; the former because it attempted to deal with the nature of man as man, and to give him inward contentment, the latter because the mind, which used as its organ the Greek language, swayed large and independent empires, embracing various races of men. Then, if ever, it might have been expected that heathenism would make a great spring,447 would cast aside what was local and accidental in the various customs, races, and beliefs brought under the fusing influence of one spirit, and idealise out of them a religion bearing the stamp and showing the force of that human reason of which Greece was the great representative. But the three centuries which witnessed the birth, the vigorous growth, and the incessant contests of the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, together with the scepticism which from Plato's chair passed judgment on them both, produced no such result, but rather terminated in that balancing of opposite systems, and the selection of fragments from each, which we have seen in Cicero.
The second great event which we have to note is that when the Greek mind had thus been for three hundred years in possession of society throughout the East, the Roman empire came to bind in unity of government not only all those races which the successors of Alexander had ruled, but the wide regions of the West as well, and their yet uncivilised inhabitants. Here, again, the Greek mind was not dethroned, but married, as it were, to Roman power. Philosophy made a sort of triumphal entry into Rome in spite of Cato and all the conservative force of the old Roman spirit. And if fusion had been the thought, the desire, and the attempt of the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ, even more certainly was it the only spirit by which Augustus and Tiberius could hope to rule in peace the world made subject to them. And not less than the extinction of Greek autonomy did the loss of self-government accompanying the institution of the empire force the Roman also back upon himself. When Cicero could no longer sway the senate, he studied philosophic systems at Tusculum: and certainly his book of Offices has been more valued by all posterity than his speeches against Catiline or his defence of Milo. A long train of writers from the Fathers downwards have seen in the civil unity of the Roman empire a providential preparation for a great religion. But the field on which that empire arose had already, so far as concerns the thinking classes, long been occupied by the Greek philosophy. The two forces come into operation now together: and seventy years after the battle of Actium, when Augustus and Tiberius had completely established one ruling authority, and when this second outward revolution had had full time to give its impulse to thought, and had set before the eyes of men for two whole generations the vision of an empire which seemed conterminous with civilisation itself, we may fairly ask what philosophy had done towards producing a corresponding unity of doctrine, and a society sustaining and propagating it.
If, then, we take our stand at the moment when Claudius began to reign, and count a century backwards, it is impossible to mention a time when philosophy was more impotent for good, and when the higher classes of the Roman empire were more thoroughly irreligious and unbelieving. To understand the reason of this we must take into account first the negative and then the positive action of philosophy up to that time. As to the former, there can be no doubt that the effect of philosophy in all its schools and through all its shades of thought had been hostile to a simple belief in polytheism and its mythology. Human reason had been turned with pitiless severity on its mass of fables, its discreditable stories, its manifold contradictions. As early as the sixth century before Christ it had used the key of allegory in order to infuse into these some better meaning, and this was carried out into full detail by Metrodorus, a follower of Anaxagoras. Thus if Homer, the mirror in which the Greek saw his religion reflected, described Jupiter as suspending Juno between heaven and earth, Heracleitus was indignant with the atheists who did not see that it meant how the world and the elements were formed.448 By this process indecent personal agencies melted away into physical effects, or were even sublimated into moral lessons. Men were told that only soft Phæacians could see in the loves of Mars and Venus a consecration of adultery: to the man of sense it meant that valour and beauty were worthy of each other. Through all the following centuries this tone of mind continued. As to the stoical philosophers in particular, this physical allegorising was the perpetual instrument by which they reconciled their stern system of material Pantheism with all the stage scenery of the poet's Olympus. Epicurus, on the contrary, recognised the existence of gods in countless numbers, but they were beings who lived in the enjoyment of his philosophy, far removed from the cares of providence and the thought of human things. On the other hand, Plato's attempt to purify, while he recognised, polytheism, and to sweep away all its fables as purveyors of evil thoughts and desires, found little success, though his conception of the godhead as the Idea of goodness, remained the highest ever reached in that long process of thought; and through all this period the best and purest minds found in him a support against that bewilderment of the reason which the vulgar religion inflicted on them. But few and far between were those who followed Plato in this his highest conception, while the literature of that last century, in the midst of which Christ appeared, remains an abiding proof that the critical, scoffing, negative spirit of philosophy had spread itself over all the cultured classes. We seek in vain in Julius Cæsar and Cicero, in Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Manilius, Horace, Ovid, in Polybius, Dionysius, Diodorus, or Strabo, for any real belief in the immortal gods whose names appear in their writings. The poets use them for stage-effect, the statesmen as part of the machinery of government, the historians as names interwoven with the events which they recount: yet the life of all these men was filled with the frequentation of rites and ceremonies, as a matter of law and custom, having reference to a multitude of gods, concerning whom they had a contemptuous disbelief, though none of them were without many a dark superstition.
Such was the negative influence of philosophy; but what inward support had it given to minds whose ancestral belief, still entertained by the mass of men all around, was thus eaten out? What substitute had it provided for this discredited polytheism with its ridiculed mythology?
1. First, did the Greek philosophy teach the unity of the Godhead? If by this question be meant, did philosophy ever go forth into the midst of the temples and smoking sacrifices with which every city teemed, and proclaim, These gods which you worship are no gods: there is one Maker and Ruler of the universe, and the homage due to him alone is usurped by a multitude of pretended deities; – then there is no doubt about the answer, that this is what neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno, nor any other philosopher thought of doing. The philosophic god was never set in the forefront of the battle after this fashion. He dwelt in the most secret shrine of Plato's mind, hard to be discovered, and to be confessed, if at all, in secret. If with Aristotle he was a pure spirit, yet he abode apart from the world, working on it indeed, as the magnet on the iron, but unconscious of it, not ruling it with free will.449 And, save so far as this is an exception, the Greek mind from beginning to end never succeeded in absolutely separating God from matter. And as time went on, this original defect showed itself more and more, until in the stoic system, which, as to the conception of the power ruling the world, prevailed over all the rest, that which was called God was simply a force pervading all matter.450 The Stoics could, indeed, as in the hymn of Cleanthes, invest this god of theirs with many beautiful, grand, and attractive attributes. His was almighty power;451 he was the author of nature; he ruled all things with law; and the world willingly obeyed his will. And this common law passed through all things, so that evil mixed with good resulted in a general order. Thus they could address him as Father and as King, guiding all things with justice; and this being they termed Jupiter. But this is only a poetic452 exhibition of their genuine thought and meaning, which was, that “all which was real was corporeal; matter and force are the two chief principles; matter in itself is motionless and formless, but capable of assuming every motion and every form. Force is the active, moving, and forming principle; it is indivisibly joined with matter: the operating force in the whole of the world is the Godhead.”453 “By the names World-soul, World-reason, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Fate, the same thing is indicated, the one Primal Force determining everything with absolute regularity, interpenetrating the whole world.” And even the opposition between the material and the spiritual description of the Godhead disappears upon closer examination, for on Stoic principles the Godhead can only then be considered as real when considered as body.454 It was to such a unity that Greek philosophy advanced, receding more and more from that imperfect conception of personality with which it had started. Further, the idea of creation is wanting to Greek philosophy from its beginning to its end. The power which it contemplates is evermore confronted with matter, which it can permeate, fashion, move through a natural alchemy of endless changes, but in face of which it is not free to create or not to create, not even free to prevent the evil which lies therein as a sort of blind necessity. As there was always Force, so was there always Matter. To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the conception of personality – that is, of self-consciousness and moral freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness – was imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the polytheistic worship. And again, neither he, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno showed any inclination to suffer for their doctrines. This philosophic god, gradually evolved by the reasoning mind, produced the very smallest effect upon the unphilosophic world. The stoic argument from final causes, which Cicero has preserved for us, and the force of which he has acknowledged in very remarkable words,455 generated no martyrs. Was it merely from want of earnestness that the philosophers tolerated and practised the polytheism which surrounded them, and avoided all suffering for their opinions by compliance with a worship which they disbelieved? or was it that their standing-ground, in all more or less pantheistic, was identical with that which they impugned?456 that the gods of Olympus were powers of nature personified, while their god was simply one power inhabiting nature? that they never reached the one personal creating God, and were consequently unable to maintain his absolute distinction from the world together with his relation to it as Creator and Ruler? That which they cherished as a private philosophical good, which they cared so little to exhibit to the world, was in fact incapable of conquering the world, for the human heart cannot live upon an impersonal god, and will not suffer for a conception of the reason. But it was in this conception that philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked, and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems.
2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and which that reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably bound up with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the philosophic mind was dark and confused.