But if the Greek's physical theory stood in the way of his conceiving clearly the human personality in this life, much more did it impede his conception of that personality as continuing after death. For as the union of a portion of the divine reason with matter constituted man, and as death put an end to that union, the compound being ceased to exist, the portion of the divine reason reverted to its source, but the sensitive soul, as well as the body, was dissolved and came to nothing. There was in his mind no “individual substance of a rational nature” to form the basis of identity, and maintain the conception of personality. In the absence of this, he who had felt, thought, and acted, was no more. He could not therefore receive retribution for his deeds, since there was no personal agent on whom the retribution was to fall.
3. A god who was not personal and did not make man, – man in whom freewill, the mark of personality, was not recognised, so long as he lived, and in whom after death no personal agent continued to exist, – these correspond to each other, and these were the last result of Græco-Roman philosophic thought up to the time of Claudius. But what sort of duty did man, being such, owe to such a god? Cicero's book on Offices had been written upwards of eighty years, but nothing that followed it during that time equalled it in reputation or ability. It was the best product that his Roman thought could draw from all the preceding Grecian schools: and it was accepted for centuries as the standard of heathen morality. Let us, then, first note that in this book457 there is nothing like a recognition of God as the Creator and Common Father; no call upon the human soul to love him as such, and for his own perfections; no thought that the duty of man consists in becoming like to him, nor his reward in attaining that likeness. The absence of such a thought gives its character to the whole book, and measures its level. The second point to be noted is, that the happiness of man consists not in being like God, and consequently, in union with him, but in virtue, which is living according to nature. In his reasonable nature everyone possesses a sufficient standard of moral action under every circumstance which may arise. Thirdly, throughout the whole of his treatise Cicero makes no use of the doctrine of man's immortality. His happiness, then, is left to consist in virtue – life according to reason, which again is life according to nature – without respect to any future state of existence. Now, if Cicero stood alone in these three points, his book would only represent his own authority, but he is in fact the mouthpiece herein of that whole preceding heathen philosophy which he criticised, and from which he selected. Even Plato himself, by far the highest and best of Greek philosophers in this respect, though he had in single expressions indicated that the happiness of man was to be made like to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception, which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe. Plato's ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;” and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”458 but then this God is but a name for the sternest and most absolute system of material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero's statement that man's happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.
4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds of any particular nation, and man's civil position therein, philosophy grasped the moral life as the relation between man as man,459 and conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men, it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the proper merit of the Stoics.460 Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns, each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for instance:461 “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is the common possession of reason,462 “in which consists the primal society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to belong to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.463
Greek philosophy has undoubtedly the merit of bringing out into clear conception this purely human and natural society. It thus expressed in language the work of Alexander, and still more the work of the Roman empire, as it was to be; and more than this, it herein supplied a point of future contact with Christian morality. The advance from the narrowness of the Greek mind in its proud rejection of all non-hellenic nations, and no less from the revolting selfishness of Roman conquest, is remarkable. And it is an advance of philosophic thought. As the older thinkers considered the political life of the city to be an immediate demand of human nature, so the Stoics considered the unitedness of man as a whole together, the dilatation of the particular political community to the whole race, in the same light. Its ground was the common possession of reason. The common law which ruled this human commonwealth was to live according to the dictation of reason, that is, according to nature, in which therefore virtue consists,464 being one and the same in God and in man, and in them alone.465 Such virtue branches into four parts, the prudence which discerns and practises the truth; the justice which assigns his own to each; the courage which prevails over all difficulties; the self-restraint and order which preserves temperance in all things. These being bound up together cover the whole moral domain, and embrace all those relations within which human society moves, and, as having their root in the moral nature of man, are a duty to everyone.
This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man's obedience to nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be complete in itself; it was the work of man without any assistance on the part of God.466 It made man equal to God. It found its reward in itself. If it was objected that the highest virtue in this life sometimes met with the greatest disasters, sorrows, pains, and bereavements, the system had no reply to this mystery. It did not attempt to assert a recompense beyond the grave.
As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between man's reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better and choice of the worse part stood before the Stoic as before us all. He admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why, if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature; why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every individual.467
The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme: but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism which requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man's conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of self-destruction. They termed it in truth The Issue,468 when disease, or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.
While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the whole earth as one city469 was a true result of Greek thought, and at the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved suffering so often falling upon virtue in the present life. When that conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete realisation in another.
The human commonwealth, however, extended in idea to the race itself, as possessing reason in common, and individual man therein, as well as the whole aggregate, viewed as being ruled by the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but both the commonwealth and the individual terminating with this life, was the last word of heathen philosophy up to the time of Claudius.
We have seen that from the time the Greek race was absorbed in the Roman empire the systems of philosophy were broken up by the eclectic spirit, which, engendered within already by the ferment of opinions, was strengthened and developed by the accession of the practical Roman mind. Variety of belief is indeed marked as “the essential feature of Greek philosophy” from its outset, and “the antagonist force of suspensive scepticism” as including some of its most powerful intellects from Xenophanes five hundred years before to Sextus Empiricus two hundred years after the Christian era. One of its historians stamps it as “a collection of dissenters, small sects each with its own following, each springing from a special individual as authority, each knowing itself to be only one among many.”470 It is therefore no wonder that if Plato's grand conception of an immortal line of the living word thus came to nought, philosophy proved itself much more incapable of founding a society impregnated with its principles than it had even been of constructing a coherent doctrine which should obtain general reception. And to judge of the actual impotence of philosophy in the century ending with the principate of Claudius, we must rest a moment on this second fact. Philosophers calling themselves Platonic, Peripatetic, Sceptic, Stoic, Epicurean, or these in various mixtures, were to be found at the various seats of learning, Athens, Rhodes, Alexandria, for instance, or at Rome as the seat of empire, or travelling like wandering stars over her vast territory, but these scattered, nebular, and disjointed luminaries shone with a varying as well as a feeble light, which rather confused than satisfied human reason. They were utterly powerless to transfer their doctrine into any number of human hearts living in accordance therein. The only exception to this statement seems to prove its real truth. By far the most united of the sects was that of the Epicureans, who held with great tenacity to their founder's views and mode of life, which may be summed up in denial of God and Providence, and enjoyment to the utmost of this world's goods; the fair side of it being a general benevolence, courtesy, friendship, in short, a genial appreciation of what we understand by the word civilisation. These antagonists of Stoic principles and of the highest morality which heathen thought had constructed were the most numerous of existing sects, and we are told that hundreds of years after their founder's death they presented the appearance of a well-ordered republic, ruled without uproar or dissension by one spirit, in which they formed a favourable contrast to the Stoics. With the exception of a single fugitive, Metrodorus, never had an Epicurean detached himself from his school.471 We must give philosophy the credit of this single instance of a capacity to create a social life in accordance with its tenets in a sect whose doctrines were a reproach among the heathens themselves. The failure of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno, was the success of Epicurus, and at the same time the announcement that the age of Augustus and Tiberius was ready to expire in sensuality and unbelief, and even in exhaustion of the philosophic mind, for no period is so barren of scientific names, which carry any weight, as the fifty years preceding Claudius.472 We have seen above that all these philosophers aimed at forming a society which should carry out their principles; that this was their original and their only idea of teaching; that with a view to make it permanent they created a chair of teaching, a living authority who was to continue on their doctrine. But the chair of Plato alone presented473 five Academies with dissentient doctrines; and a Platonic or Stoic city no one had seen. Thus viewing their united action upon the polytheistic idolatry we may say that while they could discredit its fables in reflecting minds, while they could even raise an altar in their thoughts “to the unknown God,” they left society in possession of the temples and observant of a worship which they pronounced to be immoral, monstrous, and ridiculous. They had destroyed in many the ancestral belief; they had awakened perhaps in some a sense of one great Power ruling the universe; but having taken up the religious ground and professed to satisfy man's desire for happiness, they had been utterly powerless to construct a religion. They failed entirely in the union of three things,474 a dogma and a morality founded on that dogma, both of which should be exhibited, brought before the eyes and worked into the hearts of men by a corresponding worship. To unite these three things was needed an authority of which above all they were destitute. Their dogma was without the principle of faith; their morality without binding power; but the worship which should blend the two they had not at all. And so they presented no semblance of the society which should carry these three things in its bosom, and they could not in the least satisfy the doubts or the yearnings which they had raised.
But the period beginning with the rise of Greek philosophy and ending with the principate of Claudius will ever remain of the highest interest and importance as showing what human reason, putting forth its highest powers in the race in which it culminated, but at the same time more thoroughly separated from belief, tradition, and authority than anywhere else, did actually achieve. It is in this respect that the heathen philosophers, together with the poets and historians who precede the publication of the Christian religion in the Roman world, possess a value far beyond any intrinsic merit of their own. It is a study of pathology the results of which are far as yet from being gathered in. It is only by carefully examining what the philosophers taught in theology and morals – for they aspired to be and were both the theologians and the moralists of those ages – that we can at all form an adequate judgment of the real work which the Christian Church has wrought in the world. It is only by using the historians and poets as a mirror of that general society to whose cultured classes the philosophers spoke, that we can estimate what the great mass of mankind then was, and what effect the philosophers produced on them. The difference between their world and their society and ours is the measure of Christian work. The hundred years preceding Claudius, which include in them almost all the greatest names of Roman literature, are the most important of all in this point of view, both as containing the result of scientific thought in the five preceding centuries, and as giving the depth of the moral and intellectual descent. We learn from this whole long period the fulness of the truth conveyed in those words of the angelic doctor at the commencement of his great work: “Even for those things which can be investigated concerning God by the force of human reason, it was necessary for man to be instructed by a divine revelation, because few only, and they after long inquiries, and with the admixture of many errors, would convey to man the truth concerning God as searched out by reason.”475
What the philosophers from the time of Thales had taken as their special work was to measure and estimate the visible world. And for the last four centuries of this period especially they made the nature and the needs, the supreme good and the happiness of man their chief concern, in subordination to which they continued their physical inquiries. And surely the judgment which an inspired writer formed of their travail must recur to the mind with great force at the end of the preceding review: “If they knew so much as to be able to estimate the visible world, why did they not more easily discover its Lord?”476 Why from the goods which they beheld had they not power to know the sole possessor of being, nor when they gave attention to his works, recognised their artificer? Why did they esteem fire or breath, rapid air or circling stars, or the force of water, or the lights of heaven rulers of the universe? For if the visible beauty of these delighted them so that they conceived them to be gods, how did they not draw the conclusion that the Lord of these was so much better than they? for it was the Author of beauty who created them. If they were struck dumb with the sense of their power and operation, why did they not conceive how much more powerful He who made them was? For from the greatness and the beauty of creatures the parent of them is by the force of reason discerned.477
From their capital error in this – which the same writer declares to be inexcusable478– proceeded their other errors concerning man, his nature, his supreme good, and his final end. It is here sufficient to note that down to the age of Claudius there is no appearance that either of these great errors would be corrected: and still less any appearance of the rise of a great religion which would cause the multitudinous altars of heathenism to disappear before the altar of the unknown God, and would construct a City of God in the midst of that population in the thinking minds of which divergent systems of philosophy had eaten out belief in the babel of false gods without implanting belief in a personal Creator, the author and the end of man.