The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

As to the generation[363 - Ueberweg, i. 120, from Aristotle, Metaph. i. 6 and 9, and xiii. 4.] of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle states it as the common product of the doctrine of Heracleitus that everything which meets the senses is subject to change and flux, and of the Socratic view of the conception. From Socrates Plato learnt that when once this is rightly formed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he would not then apply it to anything which meets the senses, but inferred that there must be other beings which are the objects of the knowledge acquired by the conception, and these objects he named Ideas. The filiation,[364 - Zeller, i. 119.] then, between Socrates and Plato is this: Socrates was the first to require that all knowledge and all moral dealing should proceed from the knowing of the conception, and endeavoured to execute this by his inductive process, while with Plato the same conviction formed the starting-point of a philosophical system: so that what with Socrates was simply a rule of scientific procedure was carried out by Plato to an objective intuition, and when Socrates said, Only the knowing of the conception is true knowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conception is true being.

Thus in Plato we have a man of great original mind attempting with this instrument of induction and definition to form a scheme of the universe, which divides under his hand into a triple aspect of ethics, physics, and dialectics.[365 - Ueberweg, i. 120, remarks: “Die Eintheilung der Philosophie in Ethik, Physik und Dialektik (die Cicero Acad. pos. i. 5, 19, Plato zugeschreibt), hat nach Sextus Empir (adv. Math. vii. 16) zuerst Plato's Schüler Xenocrates förmlich aufgestellt: Plato aber sei, sagt Sextus mit Recht, δυνάμει ihr Urheber, ἀρχηγός.”] No doubt his main intention was to offer to the cultured and reflective few, – that inner circle to which his teaching and his writings were directed, – a philosophy which should serve them as a religion,[366 - See Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 599. Döllinger, p. 299, sec. 122; p. 279, sec. 87.] which should fill up the gaps and remove the anomalies of the existing worship, purifying and restoring it, while it preserved amity with it notwithstanding. Such being his intention, the manner in which he treats the doctrine of the Divine Being is the more remarkable. Instead of basing his philosophy upon it, and showing its relation as a part of his system of physics, ethics, and dialectics, he speaks of it frequently indeed, but always incidentally.[367 - Zeller, ii. part 1, p. 598. “Ueber diese beiden Gegenstände (die Religion und die Kunst) hat sich Plato ziemlich häufig, aber immer nur gelegenheitlich geäussert.”] It is not so with other doctrines which he has at heart. Three of his finest dialogues are dedicated to setting forth as many aspects of his doctrine as to the soul's immortality; the Phædrus treats of its preëxistence; the Banquet of the influence of immortality on the relations of the present life; the Phædo of death as the means of a happy futurity.[368 - Döllinger, p. 290, sec. 110.] But no one collects together and lucidly exhibits his view of the divine nature. This has to be picked out of his writings, a bit here, and another there, and put together by the student. No doubt he felt, as he has said,[369 - Timæus, 28.] “with regard to the Maker and the Father of this universe it is hard to find him out, and when you have found him impossible to describe him to all men.” He was intimately convinced that the great mass of mankind was quite unsuited to receive the conception of the Divine Being which he had formed. But I believe there to have been another reason of greater force with him for his not having presented as a whole his conclusions on this central doctrine of all. It was not merely that the fate of his master Socrates was ever before him,[370 - Thus Grote, Plato, i. 230, speaks of “the early caution produced by the fate of Socrates,” and believes “such apprehension to have operated as one motive deterring him from publishing any philosophical exposition under his own name, any Πλάτωνος σύγγραμμα,” p. 231.] but the singular position which he held with regard to the established worship. He wished to correct, not to destroy it; he wished to reduce it to monotheism, and yet to preserve polytheism. The two are bound together in his mind. If then his writings be carefully analysed, and every reference to the Supreme Being put together into a sort of mosaic,[371 - This has been done by Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 599-602, from whom I take it. He supports his analysis with a great number of references to various works of Plato.] we should find the following picture. The everlasting essence of things, with which Philosophy deals, is the highest object. Ideas are those everlasting gods after the pattern of which the world and all things which are in it are formed, and the Godhead, taken absolutely, is not distinct from the highest Idea. Plato sets forth the causality of Ideas and the sway of reason in the world together with the impossibility to explain what is generated save by an Ingenerate, motion save by a soul, and the ordered disposition of the world, working out a purpose, save by reason; and in all which he declares respecting the Godhead, the Idea of Good, of the highest metaphysical and ethical perfection, is his guiding-point. As this highest Idea stands at the head of all Ideas as the cause of all being and knowledge, so the one everlasting invisible God, the Former and Father of all things, stands at the head of all the gods, alike difficult to find and to describe. Just as the above Idea is distinguished by the conception of the Good, so Plato selects goodness as God's most essential attribute. It is on this ground that he maintains the Godhead to be absolutely good and upright, and its operation to be merely good and upright; against the old notion which imputed envy to it, and derived evil from it. Again, in opposition to the fabulous appearances of the gods, it is from the goodness of the Godhead that he deduces its unchangeableness, inasmuch as what is perfect can neither be changed by anything else, nor change itself, and so become worse. He adds, the Godhead will never show itself to men other than it is, since all falsehood is foreign to it; inasmuch as to falsehood in the properest sense, that is, ignorance and self-deception, it is not exposed, and has no need to deceive others. He extols the divine perfection, to which no beauty and no excellence is wanting; the divine power, which embraces everything and can do everything which is possible, that is, which does not involve a moral or a metaphysical contradiction: for instance, it is impossible for God to wish to change Himself, for evil to cease, and from the doctrine respecting the forming of the world and matter it is clear that the divine activity in producing is limited by the nature of the finite.[372 - Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, p. 487, remarks of Plato's doctrine: “So far as things are the appearance and the image of the Idea, they must be determined by the Idea; so far as they have in themselves a proper principle in matter, they must be determined likewise by necessity: since, certain as it is that the world is the work of reason, it is as little to be left out of mind that in its formation beside reason another blindly working cause was in play, and that even the Godhead could make its work not absolutely perfect, but only so good as the nature of the finite permitted;” and he refers to many passages of the Timæus, of which one will suffice, wherein at the conclusion of a review of the physical causes of things Plato says: ταῦτα δὴ πάντα τότε ταύτῃ πεφυκότα ἐξ ἀνάγκης ὁ τοῦ καλλίστου τε καὶ ἀρίστου δημιουργὸς ἐν τοῖς γιγνομένοις παρελάμβανεν ἡνίκα τὸν αὐτάρκη τε καὶ τὸν τελεώτατον Θεὸν ἐγέννα, χρώμενος μὲν ταῖς περὶ ταῦτα αἰτίαις ὑπηρετούσαις, τὸ δὲ εὖ τεκταινόμενος ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς γιγνομένοις αὐτὸς; διὸ δὴ χρὴ δὔ αἰτίας εἴδη διορίζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν ἀναγκαῖον, τὸ δὲ θεῖον, καὶ τὸ μὲν θεῖον ἐν ἅπασι ζητεῖν κτήσεως ἕνεκα εὐδαίμονος βίου, καθ᾽ ὅσον ἡμῶν ἡ φύσις ἐνδέχεται, τὸ δὲ ἀναγκαῖον ἐκείνων χάριν, λογιζομένους ὡς ἄνευ τούτων οὐ δυνατὰ αὐτὰ ἐκεῖνα, ἐφ᾽ οἷς σπουδάζομεν, μόνα κατανοεῖν, οὐδ᾽ αὖ λαβεῖν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλως πως μετασχεῖν. p. 68. Compare p. 48. μεμιγμένη γὰρ οὖν ἡ τοῦδε τοῦ κόσμου γένεσις ἐξ ἀνάγκης τε καὶ νοῦ συστάσεως ἐγεννήθη; κ.τ.λ.] He extols the divine wisdom which disposes all things to its purpose; its omniscience, which nothing escapes; its justice, which leaves no transgression unpunished and no virtue unrewarded; its goodness, which makes the best provision for all. He rejects, as notions taken from man, not merely the Godhead's having a body, but likewise all those tales which impute passions, quarrels, crimes of every kind to the gods. He declares them to be exalted above pleasure and displeasure, to be untouched by any evil; and is full of moral indignation at the thought that they allow themselves to be won over, or rather corrupted, by prayers and offerings. Moreover he shows that everything is ordered and ruled by Divine Providence, which extends over the least as well as the greatest, and as regards men is especially convinced that they are a carefully-tended possession of the Godhead, and that all things must issue in good to those who through virtue gain its goodwill. If the unequal and unjust distribution of men's lot is objected, his reply is, that virtue carries its reward and wickedness its punishment immediately in itself; further, that both are sure of a complete retribution in the after-world, while already in this life as a rule in the end the upright goes not without recognition and thanks, nor the transgressor without universal hate and detestation. As to the general fact that there is evil in the world, it seemed to him so inevitable that it was not requisite expressly to defend the Godhead on that score. All these statements carry us back at last to one and the same point. It is the Idea of the Good by applying which Plato produces so exalted a doctrine of God. In the like spirit he will consider only the moral intention in acts of worship. He alone can please the Godhead who is like it, and he alone is like it who is pious, wise, and just. The gods cannot receive the gifts of the wicked; the virtuous alone have a right to invoke them. God is goodness; and he who bears not the image of that goodness in himself stands in no communion with him.

The doctrine here set forth is the highest ever reached by purely heathen Greek speculation; but we must remember that it is not thus collected into a head by Plato himself, still less is it put into such a relation to his physical, his logical, and his moral system as such a doctrine ought to bear. A man who had reached so lofty a conviction of the divine unity and moral perfection as this must, if he would make it effectual, give to it in his system the place which it really holds in the world. If there be indeed a Maker and Father of the universe by whom all things consist, all that Plato taught should have been subordinated to this its first principle, and the sum of his teaching to men should have been to set him forth. So far is this from the position which Plato really took, that in his ideal Republic no other religion but the traditional Greek religion was to subsist; he changes nothing in the very forms of the polytheistic worship; he refers the decision on many points to the Delphic Apollo.[373 - Döllinger, p. 297, sec. 119, quoted.] And when in his last book on the Laws[374 - So likewise Zeller remarks, vol. ii. part 1, p. 604: “Die Gesetze, welchen die philosophischen Regenten fehlen, behandeln die Volks-religion durchweg als die sittliche Grundlage des Staatswesens.”] he sets forth the notion of a second best state, one which can be realised under actual circumstances, wherein he gives a mass of practical directions for the needs of the lower classes, religion in its purely polytheistic dress is the soul of his teaching, the groundwork of his structure. Men are to worship first of all the Olympian gods, and the gods who are the patrons of the city; then the gods of the earth; then demons and heroes; and all these in the traditional way by offerings, prayers, and vows. All good in public life is their gift; everything is to be consecrated to them; to violate their shrines is the greatest of crimes. In fact, after all, but few of mankind are capable of understanding or receiving the philosophic God. However imperfect[375 - Ibid. p. 605.] the popular belief in the gods may be, and however unsatisfactory to him the allegorical interpretations of it then so much in vogue, yet is it in Plato's conviction indispensable to all those who have not had a scientific education. Men must first be taught with lies, and then with the truth: the popular fables and the worship grounded on them is therefore for all the first, and for most the only form of religion.[376 - Here Zeller remarks: “Diese Voraussetzung liegt der ganzen Behandlung dieser Gegenstände bei Plato zu Grunde… Dass die philosophische Erkenntniss immer auf eine kleine Minderheit beschränkt sein müsse ist Plato's entschiedene Ueberzeugung.”] The philosopher, it is true, sees deeper and despises them in his heart. Thus the monotheist in speculation is a polytheist in practice: as Socrates, the model and exemplar of Greek philosophy, with his dying breath, so Plato, its most inspired teacher with all the voice of his authority, sacrificed the cock to Æsculapius.

But moreover, this supreme God, who has to be disinterred from the recesses of the Platonic teaching, and conciliated with the worship practically paid to a host of subordinate gods, is in Plato's conception neither absolutely personal nor free, and he is not the Creator but only the Former of the world. In Plato's theory there is coeternal with him a first matter, without form or quality, which exists independently of him; which moreover is inhabited and swayed to and fro in disorderly heavings by a sort of soul, the token of that dark Necessity[377 - Döllinger, p. 293.] which rises behind the figures of gods and men in Greek poetry. It is indeed the work of the divine reason to come down upon this shapeless mass and its inborn mover, and out of them to construct the world-soul, with which and with his own reason he forms and maintains and vivifies the ordered universe. As he is by this operation the Father of the universe, so this First Matter is “the Mother of all generation,” the condition of the existence of corporeal things. But in this original matter lies the origin of evil, which, perpetuated in the corporeal structure of man, can indeed be tamed and schooled, and in a certain degree subdued, but never can be exterminated by the divine reason. The power, the wisdom, and the providence of Plato's God are encountered by this check, which stands eternally over against the Demiurgos in his world-forming activity, which limits his freedom, and impairs his personality, while it excludes the whole idea of creation. Students of this philosophy[378 - See Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 448-457.] attempt to associate together his highest Idea, that of the Good, with the supreme God, of whom he speaks with personal attributes, as the just, the wise, the true, the good, but admit that Plato has not attempted to solve the problem how the Idea, which by his hypothesis as it is the highest is also the most general, is at the same time the most individual, the one personal God. In fact, it is admitted that he fails – together with all the ancient Greek writers – in the strict conception of personality.[379 - “Wie es sich aber in dieser Beziehung mit der Persönlichkeit verhalte, dies ist eine Frage, welche sich Plato wohl schwerlich bestimmt vorgelegt hat, wie ja dem Alterthum überhaupt der schärfere Begriff der Persönlichkeit fehlt, und die Vernunft nicht selten als allgemeine Weltvernunft in einer zwischen Persönlichem und Unpersönlichem unsicher schwankenden Weise gedacht wird.” Zeller, p. 454.] As according to him individual beings are what they are only by participation of something higher, it is no wonder that in describing that one Reason, the Idea of the Good, the highest and most general of all, which forms and governs the world, his language oscillates between the personal and the impersonal. But if his philosophical reasons tend one way, it must be allowed that the heart and affections of the man, and the whole moral sense of the teacher, decide another.

The ethical system of Plato appears to be a strict deduction from his physical. As man in his view is a compound of matter, vivified by a portion of the world-soul, which the divine reason takes and unites with a portion of itself, so his virtues correspond to this threefold composition.[380 - Döllinger, p. 286, sec. 103. Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, p. 538.] For man has an immortal portion in his soul, the reason, the godlike, in him, but the divine reason, in joining a portion of the world-soul with matter, invests it with two mortal parts, one the courageous, or manly, the other, sensuous desire, or the female element, having their seat in the body's activity. To these answer respectively the virtues of prudence, of courage, and of temperance, while justice comes in afterwards as a right ordering of the three, or as prudence applied to practice. The seat of all irregular desires, of all evil, in fact, is to Plato in this union of the soul with matter. As this matter is primordial, evil in its origin does not indeed spring from God, but it is beyond his power: it springs from that state of things which existed before the action of God on chaos:[381 - Theætetus, p. 176. Σωκ. Ἀλλ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἀπόλεσθαι τὰ κυκὰ δυνατόν, ὦ Θεόδωρε; ὑπενάντιον γὰρ τι τῷ ἀγαθῷ ἀεὶ εἶναι ἀνάγκη; οὔτ᾽ ἐν θεοῖς αὐτὰ ἴδρυσθαι, τὴν δὲ θνητὴν φύσιν καὶ τόνδε τὸν τόπον περιπολεῖ ἐξ ἀνάγκης.] it must stand over against the good: and of necessity encompasses this mortal nature and the place of its habitation: and to man it lies not in the perverted use of free-will, but in his original composition, wherein his body is its seat. But in this triple composition of man Plato does not seem to have clearly apprehended a human personality at all: he has not even attempted to explain[382 - See Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 541-4, who points out a string of difficulties on the subject of personality, free-will, as maintained by Plato, and his doctrine that no one is willingly wicked.] in what the unity of the soul consists besides these its three portions, two of which, being tied to the body, drop off at death.

It is in the practice of Plato as a teacher that we can most fitly consider the conception which the Greek philosophers in general had concerning the method of studying and imparting philosophy altogether. It was about the fortieth year of his life, and twelve years after the death of his master Socrates, that Plato, having already travelled widely, settled at Athens.[383 - See Grote's Plato, i. pp. 133, 4.] Here he purchased a fixed residence at the Academia, which became from that time a philosophical school for study, conversation, oral lectures, and friendly meetings. Here he drew around him an inner circle of scholars to whom he addressed his unwritten doctrines,[384 - Ueberweg, i. p. 116.] especially his doctrine of Ideas, the key to his whole system, according as they were able, after preparation, to receive them: and here besides he gave lectures which might be attended not only by that inner circle of choice disciples but by studious persons in general. This residence of Plato served for three hundred years, from 387 before Christ until the siege of Athens by Sylla in 87, as the centre of Plato's philosophy viewed as a teaching power. Now in this Plato had before him the great example of Pythagoras, in the first age of Greek philosophy. Concerning the doctrines of that philosopher we know little with certainty,[385 - So Zeller sets forth at length, i. p. 206; and Ueberweg, i. p. 47.] but all are agreed as to his manner of teaching them. His attempt was to establish a community which should carry in its bosom, propagate, and perpetuate a doctrine in morals, politics, religion, and philosophy. His whole procedure was by oral teaching, for he left not a word written. It was in fact a religious order of life which he first practised in his own person, and then endeavoured to communicate to others. Into this order trial for everyone preceded reception.[386 - Ueberweg, i. p. 50. Plato calls it ὁδόν τινα βίου, for which Pythagoras αὐτός τε διαφερόντως ἠγαπήθη, καὶ οἱ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ νῦν Πυθαγόρειον τρόπον ἐπονομάζοντες τοῦ βίου διαφανεῖς πη δοκοῦσιν εἶναι. Polit. x. p. 600.] His scholars were for a long period required to practise silent obedience and unconditional submission to the authority of the doctrine delivered to them. Severe daily examination was imposed upon all. The publishing of his doctrine, especially his speculation as to the nature of God, was strictly forbidden. The upright life, the learning which then could only be attained by personal inquiry, the persuasiveness of Pythagoras, were together so effective that he succeeded in establishing such a community both in Crotona and in other cities of Southern Italy. It was persecuted and suffered continual disasters, but still this Pythagorean community, bearing on its founder's doctrines and manner of life, existed for several generations after his death, during which many of the most distinguished Greeks belonged to it. Such was the poet Æschylus, whose mind was formed on Pythagorean principles. In Plato's time the Pythagorean Archytas was at the head of the state of Tarentum: and Plato himself was largely imbued with Pythagorean tenets.[387 - Grote, Plato, i. p. 221.]

Now Plato, it is true, did not imitate the political part of the Pythagorean scheme. It was only upon paper that he set forth his ideal republic. But the same conception as to the manner of communicating a doctrine lay in his mind as in that of Pythagoras. He did not look to writing as a primary instrument of communicating thought. He places it himself in a relation of dependence upon oral dialectic instruction. It is only to serve as a reminder of what had been otherwise taught: and, moreover, it is quite subordinate to his first postulate, the earnestness of a life devoted to inquiry and education.[388 - Ueberweg, i. 115.] These principles are set forth with great lucidity in his dialogue Phædrus, where he introduces by the mouth of Socrates the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, drafts and dice, and also of letters. With these inventions in his hand the god approached the then king of Egypt Thamous, recommending him to make them known to his subjects. But Thamous was by no means inclined to receive these inventions unconditionally: he praises or blames them, as he judges of them, and at last he comes to the letters.[389 - Phæd. sec. 135, p. 274.] “This discovery,” says Thoth, “O king, will make the Egyptians wiser, and improve their memory. It is of sovereign effect in both things.” “Most ingenious Thoth,” replies the king, “one man is made to give birth to art, and another to judge what good or what harm it will do to those who use it. And now you, being the father of letters, out of natural affection assert of them that which is just the contrary to their real office. For they will breed forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn them, who will slight the faculty of memory, inasmuch as relying on what is written externally in the types of others they do not exercise remembrance by an inward act of their own. The spell you have found is good not for fixing in the mind, but for reminding. And as to wisdom, you offer to those who learn them not its reality but its appearance. For they will indeed hear much, but as this will be without teaching, they will seem to have many minds but generally no judgment, and be hard to comprehend, having become wiseacres instead of wise men. O Socrates, says Phædrus, you are one who can easily tell stories from Egypt or any other country. My dear Phædrus, it was in the temple of Dodonean Jupiter that they made the first oracular words to proceed from an oak. The men of that day, not being wise as you young men, were satisfied in their simplicity to listen to an oak or a rock, if they only spoke the truth. Perhaps it makes a difference to you who the speaker is, and from what country; for you do not look merely whether it is true or not. Your rebuke, says Phædrus, is just, and what the Theban says about letters seems to me to be right. Well then, says Socrates, the man who thinks to leave an art in writing, and he also who receives it as being, when written, something clear and certain, must be very simple, and be really ignorant of Ammon's oracle, when he thinks that written words are something more than a reminder to one who knows the subject of the matters about which they are written. Exactly so, Socrates. For surely, Phædrus, writing shares this troublesome characteristic with painting. The productions of painting stand there as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question, preserve a solemn silence. Just so it is with writing. You may think that they speak with some meaning, but if you ask what that meaning is, there they stand with just the same word in their mouth. When once a thing is written, it is tossed over and over by all who take it in, whether it concerns them or not, and is unable to speak, or to be silent with the proper persons. And if it is maltreated or slandered, it wants its father always to help it, for it can neither defend nor help itself. What you say now is also very true indeed. But, says Socrates, can we not find another word, this one's lawful brother, and see the process by which it arises, and how much better and abler than the former it is? What word is this, and how does it arise? The word which is written on the disciple's soul together with true knowledge, which is able to defend itself, and knows how to speak and to be silent with the proper persons. You mean the living and animated word of one who has knowledge, whereof the written word may justly be called the shadow.[390 - τὸν τοῦ εἰδότος λόγον λέγεις ζῶντα καὶ ἔμψυχον, οὗ ὁ γεγραμμένος εἴδωλον ἄν τι λέγοιτο δικαίως.] I mean that indeed. Tell me now; an intelligent gardener, who had seeds that he cared for, and wished to bear fruit, would he hurry with them in summer to the gardens of Adonis, plant them, and rejoice to see them springing up with a fair show in a week? or would he do this for amusement, and in festival-time, if he did it at all, but when he took pains would use his gardener's art, sow them at the fitting time, and be too glad if, seven months afterwards, he saw them coming to perfection? Certainly, Socrates, that would be the difference between his sport and his earnest. Shall we, then, say that he who possesses the science of justice, honour, and goodness, has less intelligence than the gardener for his own seeds? Surely not. He will not, then, hurry to write them with a pen in ink with words, which cannot on the one hand help themselves with speech, and on the other hand are incapable to teach the truth sufficiently. I should think he would not. He will not; but as for these written flower-borders, he will sow and write them, when he does write them, for amusement, storing up reminders for himself, should he come to a forgetful old age, and for every one who pursues the same footsteps, and he will take pleasure in seeing them springing up tenderly: so when other men fall to other amusements, lubricating themselves at the banquet, or other such things, he will take his amusement here. In this, Socrates, you would substitute a very seemly amusement for a bad one, when the man who can play with words sports upon the subject of justice and suchlike. So it is, my dear Phædrus, but it is, I take it, earnest in a far higher sense, when one, using the art of dialectics, takes hold of a fitting soul, and plants and sows with true knowledge words able to help both themselves and their planter, not fruitless, but having seed, whence growing up in a succession of minds they will from age to age produce an immortal line,[391 - ἔχοντες σπέρμα, ὅθεν ἄλλοι ἐν ἄλλοις ἤθεοι φυόμενοι τοῦτ᾽ ἀεὶ ἀθάνατον παρέχειν ἱκανοί.] and will make their possessor happy as far as man can be.”

In these words, put in his master's mouth, Plato, if I mistake not, has given us the whole purpose of his life, and the manner in which he hoped to accomplish it. It was in the Academia that he sought to establish that immortal line of living words, who should speak as the possessors of real knowledge upon justice, truth, and goodness. He is describing a living culture by living teachers, of whom he aspired to be himself the first; and the written dialogues which he has left are in his intention, and so far as they enter at all upon the higher points of his doctrine,[392 - See his averseness to write on such doctrines at all set forth in his 7th epistle.] reminders of that which he had set forth to chosen auditors by word of mouth, the word which was able, as he says, to explain and defend itself, and to answer a question put to it.

This, then, was the relation existing in the mind of the prince of Greek philosophers between the written and the spoken word as instruments in imparting true knowledge, or science. The written word he regarded as subsidiary, as presupposing instruction by question and answer, and still more the moral discipline of a life earnestly given up to the study of the subjects in question. Without this a writing by itself was like a figure in a picture, which makes an impression on the beholder, but when asked if it is the true impression keeps, as he says, a solemn face, and makes no reply; which is the same to all, the earnest and the indifferent, and cannot treat them according to their merits. He laughs at the notion of such a writing being by itself any more than sport. And let us remember that he who said this has enshrined his own philosophy in the most finished specimens of dramatic dialogues which the Greek mind produced. These are the statements of the man who wrote Greek in his countrymen's opinion as Jupiter would have spoken it. There are, then, in Plato's mind three constituents of teaching: first, the choice of fitting subjects for it, and what is therein implied, the imposition of a moral discipline upon them regulating their life to the end in view; secondly, the master's oral instruction conveying gradually and with authority to minds so prepared the doctrine to be received; and thirdly, the committing such doctrine to writing, which shall serve to remind the disciple of what he has been taught. And this was what he carried into effect.[393 - Grote observes, Plato, i. 216: “Plato was not merely a composer of dialogues. He was lecturer and chief of a school besides. The presidency of that school, commencing about 386 b. c., and continued by him with great celebrity for the last half (nearly forty years) of his life, was his most important function. Among his contemporaries he must have exerted greater influence through his school than through his writings.”] He fixed himself at the Academia, over which he presided for forty years: he was succeeded therein by his nephew Speusippus, who held his chair for eight years; Xenocrates followed in the same post during twenty-five years; and the line was continued afterwards by Polemon, Crantor, Crates, Arcesilaus, and others in uninterrupted series. Plato thus established the method of Greek philosophy, and his example herein was followed by Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus.

His great disciple Aristotle came to him at the age of seventeen, and studied under him during twenty years. At a later age, when, after completing the education of Alexander, he fixed himself in middle life at Athens, he set up there a second philosophical school at the Lyceum on its eastern side, and on the model of that of Plato. Attached to this museum were a portico, a hall with seats, one seat especially for the lecturing professor, a garden, and a walk, together with a residence, all permanently appropriated to the teacher and the process of instruction.[394 - Grote, Plato, i. p. 138.] When Aristotle died in the year 322 b. c., his friend Theophrastus presided over his school during five and thirty years, and the line continued on. We learn that there were periodical meetings, convivial and conversational, among the members both of the Academic and Peripatetic schools, and laws for their regulation established by Xenocrates and Aristotle. It was in the shady walks of his garden that this great philosopher taught by word of mouth the choicer circle of his disciples: for the more general hearers he gave lectures sitting.[395 - Ueberweg, i. p. 140, from Diogenes.] His instructions were divided into two classes, those which he gave on rhetoric, the art of discussion, knowledge of civil matters, and suchlike, which were exoteric, and those which touched the finer and more subtle points of philosophy, which were termed acroatic, as addressed to the ears.[396 - Aulus Gellius, N. A. xx. 5, quoted by Ueberweg.] Again, his dialogues he called “public” or “issued” discourses, things made over to the general public, in distinction from what was not so disclosed, but reserved for the philosopher's own meditation, to be subsequently communicated either by oral lecture or by writing to the private circle of scholars who gave themselves up entirely to his philosophy. These Aristotle called “philosophical” or “teaching” discourses, proceeding, that is, from the principles proper to each branch of learning, and not from the opinions of the lecturer. These latter were termed “tentative,” as belonging to the exoteric. Simplicius, one of the latest writers on Greek philosophy, defines exoteric as “the common, and what concludes by arguments which are matter of opinion;” and Philoponus, as discourses “not of strict proof, and not directed to lawfully-begotten hearers,” that is, trained and prepared, “but to the public, and springing from probabilities.”[397 - Ἐν κοινῷ γιγνόμενοι λόγοι … ἐκδεδομένοι λόγοι; οἱ κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν λόγοι, or διδασκαλικοὶ λόγοι, οἱ ἐκ τῶν οἰκείων ἀρχῶν ἑκάστου μαθήματος καὶ οὐκ ἐκ τῶν τοῦ ἀποκρινομένου δοξῶν συλλογιζόμενοι, which last are λόγοι πειραστικοὶ. Simplicius calls τὰ ἐξωτερικὰ, τὰ κοινὰ καὶ δι᾽ ἐνδόξων περαινόμενα; Philoponus, λόγοι μὴ ἀποδεικτικοὶ, μηδὲ πρὸς τοὺς γνησίους τῶν ἀκροατῶν εἰρημένοι, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς, ἐκ πιθανῶν ὡρμημένοι. Quoted by Ueberweg, i. p. 146.] Thus in Aristotle, the largest in grasp of mind, the most observant of facts, the most accurate in definition among Greek writers, the philosopher in fact and “master of those who know,”[398 - Vidi il maestro di color che sanuoSeder tra filosofica famiglia.Dante, Inf. iv. 131.] for all future ages, we find the same three constituents of teaching as in Plato, and in the same order of importance: first, hearers selected for their natural aptitude, and then submitted to a moral discipline and a common life; secondly, the instruction of such hearers by word of mouth, question and answer, discussion and cross-examination; and lastly, the committing of doctrines to writing. With him too his written philosophical discourses were reminders of his oral teaching, which they presupposed and required as a key to their full meaning, and especially for the comprehension of their harmony as a system.

The order of teaching which I have thus sketched as being followed in practice by the two most eminent Greek philosophers belonged to them all. They had no other conception respecting the method of communicating a doctrine efficiently to men. None of them considered philosophy merely or chiefly as a literature: none of them attributed to a book the power of teaching it. Their conception was, a master and his scholars, and the living together, the moral subordination and discipline which this involved. This school of education or training in knowledge[399 - διδασκαλία.] was their primary thought: the committing of their doctrine to writing was both subsequent and secondary. Their writings were intended, as Plato says, to be recollections[400 - ὑπόμνησις.] of their teaching, and failed to convey the real knowledge to those who had not the stamp of this teaching impressed on their minds.

As Plato made a local habitation for himself and his doctrine in the Academia, and Aristotle in the Lyceum, so Zeno, the founder of the third great philosophic school, took up his abode in the Portico at Athens, a court surrounded with pillars, and adorned with the paintings of Polygnotus. Here he began to teach about 308 b. c., and here he continued teaching as some say for fifty-eight years. It is said that the character of Socrates, as drawn by Xenophon and by Plato in his Apology, filled him with astonishment and admiration:[401 - Ueberweg, i. p. 188, from Diogenes and Themistius.] and the Stoics afterwards drew their doctrine of the wise man, which they endeavoured to image out and realise, from that living example of it,[402 - Ibid, from Noack, Psyche, v. i. sec. 13.] an instance of the connection of doctrine with person which is full of interest and suggestion. Zeno was succeeded in his office of teaching by Cleanthes, and Cleanthes by Chrysippus and a long line of teachers, who for several hundred years continued, with variations, the same general doctrine of ethics.

Just in the same way and at the same time Zeno's great rival Epicurus fixed the seat of his school in the Garden at Athens, which thenceforth became for thirty-six years the central point of the teacher's activity. About him gathered a circle of friends whom similarity of principles and the enjoyment of cultivated intercourse bound together with unusual intimacy. It speaks for the special character of his philosophy that from the beginning women and even hetæræ formed a part of this society. But he succeeded during this long period of teaching in impressing upon his school so strong a character that it is recognised without essential change during hundreds of years.[403 - Zeller, vol, iii. part 1, p. 343.]

We should do injustice to the character and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, the founders of the four great schools of Greek philosophy, if we did not take into account what was in their day no doubt of greater influence than their writings, that is, their function as teachers, their oral teaching itself, and those fundamental principles of philosophic education which lay at the bottom of it. Plato has left us very little of doctrine put out in his own name. He is not a speaker in his dialogues. He puts what he would say in the mouth of others, especially of Socrates. He tells us that he has purposely done this in order that men might not say, here is Plato's philosophy:[404 - Ep. vii. p. 341. οὔκουν ἐμόν γε περὶ αὐτῶν ἐστι σύγγραμμα, οὐδὲ μή ποτε γένηται; ῥητὸν γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἐστὶν ὡς ἄλλα μαθήματα, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ πολλῆς συνουσίας γιγνομένης περὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα αὐτὸ καὶ τοῦ συζῇν ἐξαίφνης, οἷον ἀπὸ πυρὸς πηδήσαντος ἐξαφθὲν φῶς, ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ γενόμενον αὐτὸ ἑαυτὸ ἤδη τρέφει and much more to the same effect; after which he says, ὧν ἕνεκα νοῦν ἔχων οὐδεὶς τολμήσει ποτὲ εἰς αὐτὸ τιθέναι τὰ νενοημένα, καὶ ταῦτα εἰς ἀμετακίνητον, ὃ δὴ πάσχει τὰ γεγραμμένα τύποις. So again in his second letter, p. 314. πολλάκις δὲ λεγόμενα καὶ ἀεὶ ἀκουόμενα καὶ πολλὰ ἔτη μόγις, ὥσπερ χρυσὸς, ἐκκαθαίρεται μετὰ πολλῆς πραγματείας… μεγίστη δὲ φυλακὴ τὸ μὴ γράφειν ἀλλ᾽ ἐκμανθάνειν; οὐ γὰρ ἔστι τὰ γραφέντα μὴ οὐκ ἐκπεσεῖν. Grote seems to me fully justified in counting these epistles as genuine, against the attacks of some modern German sceptics.] and the reason of this was that he utterly distrusted his own or any man's power to disclose to others such a system in a set form of words. It is, then, the more remarkable that he has said in his own person what were his most settled convictions as to intercourse by word of mouth, and continuous written discourse, viewed as instruments for attaining and communicating truth. He expresses his absolute disbelief that men can reach true conceptions by their being set forth in the immutable form of writing. It is a far other and more difficult work which has to be accomplished. In a word, not even aptness for learning and memory will give the power to see the truth as to virtue and vice to one who is not kin to the subject; nor, again, this kinship without such aptitude and memory: but when both are joined, then out of living together, after much time,[405 - Μετὰ τριβῆς πάσης καὶ χρόνου πολλοῦ, ὅπερ ἐν ἀρχαῖς εἶπον; μόγις δὲ τριβόμενα πρὸς ἄλληλα αὐτῶν ἕκαστα, ὀνόματα καὶ λόγοι ὄψεις τε καὶ αἰσθήσεις, ἐν εὐμενέσιν ἐλέγχοις ἐλεγχόμενα καὶ ἄνευ φθόνων ἐρωτήσεσι καὶ ἀποκρίσεσι χρωμένων, ἐξέλαμψε φρόνησις περὶ ἕκαστον καὶ νοῦς, συντείνων ὅτι μάλιστ᾽ εἰς δύναμιν ἀνθρωπίνην. Ep. vii. p. 344.] by the continual friction of name, definition, acts of sight and perception, by thought and meditation, the hearing and answering the objections of others, the process of mutual cross-examination discharged without envy or jealousy, and with sincere love of the truth, a sudden flash of fire kindles in the mind, and nourishes itself, disclosing the knowledge required. Thus it is that prudence and intelligence on each subject, shining out in this beam of light, go forward as far as man may reach. The view here propounded, if reflected upon, will convey to us what the living work first of Pythagoras, and then of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and their successors, was. Both the conception indeed and the realisation seem to have been most complete in Pythagoras. The philosophic living together was its basis. Instruction was oral. Learning was effected by the collision of mind with mind, by objection and answer. It was the Socratic principle inherited from these schools that nothing passed muster for knowledge which did not stand the test of cross-examination:[406 - Grote, Plato, i. 229. “When we see by what Standard Plato tests the efficacy of any expository process, we shall see yet more clearly how he came to consider written exposition unavailing. The standard which he applies is, that the learner shall be rendered able both to apply to others and himself to endure a Socratic Elenchus or cross-examination as to the logical difficulties involved in all the steps and helps to learning.” Without this “Plato will not allow that he has attained true knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη). Compare the system pursued in the mediæval schools and universities.] but an unchangeable text was utterly unsuited, according to Plato, to debate the question under treatment in such fashion, while on the other hand the mind of the reader was passive in receiving the impression which it conveyed. On neither side therefore did the conditions of knowledge exist, but this was reached under the circumstances of personal intercourse above mentioned, and might be recalled in the written form to the minds of those who had thus first attained it.

Down to the end of Greek philosophy the same conception as to the method of teaching prevailed. Ammonius Sakkas, the founder of Neoplatonism, delivered his doctrine only by word of mouth, which his chief disciples, Erennius, Origines, and Plotinus, engaged not to make public.[407 - Ueberweg, i. pp. 242, 3.] It was when one of them, Erennius, had broken this promise, that another, Plotinus, after delivering lectures at Rome, wrote down his philosophy; but his scheme was to carry it out by collecting his disciples together in one city, and thus realising Plato's republic.

Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II

The mind of the next great teacher who arose in Greece after Plato presented an almost complete contrast to that of the master under whom he had so long studied. Aristotle's power consisted in a parallel development of two forces which do not often coexist.[408 - Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 632.] He joined together a rare degree of consistent philosophic thinking with an equally rare degree of accurate observation. This double faculty is shown in what he effected. He made the sciences of logic, ethics, and psychology: he built up those of natural history and politics with the wealth of knowledge which his experience had accumulated.[409 - Döllinger, pp. 304, 305.] Thus his analytic and synthetic genius embraced the whole range of human knowledge then existing. As Plato threw his vivid fancy and imagination and his religious temper into everything which concerned the human spirit, so Aristotle fixed his gaze upon nature, which with him in all its manifestations was the ultimate fact. As Plato rose from the single being to his conception of the true, the good, the beautiful, of which the Idea to him was everything, so Aristotle, steadfastly discarding his master's doctrine of Ideas, took his stand on the single being, examining it with the closest observation and the subtlest thought, and the knowledge thus conveyed to him is everything. Plato's conception of God is that of the great world-former, orderer, and ruler: Aristotle's conception of God is that of a pure intelligence, without power, an eternal, ever-active, endless, incorporeal substance, who never steps out of that everlasting rest into action: who is the world's first cause, but is unconscious of it, his action upon the world being likened to the influence of the beloved object upon the lover. Plato's dualism is summed up in the expression, God and Matter; Aristotle's dualism, in God and the World. Plato represents the action of the Deity as the working-up of the original matter into the millions of forms which the world exhibits: but these millions of forms are taken by Aristotle as if they had existed for ever; the World, as it is, and the Deity, are coeternal.

Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul is that it exists only as that which animates the body, without which its being cannot be known.[410 - Döllinger, pp. 309, 310, sec. 137, 138.] It is the principle which forms, moves, and developes the body; the substance which only appears in the body formed and penetrated by it, and which works continuously in it, as the life which determines and prevails over its matter. Thus the body is of itself nothing; what it is, it is only through the soul, whose being and nature it expresses, to which it is related as the medium in which the purpose, which is the soul, realises itself. Thus the soul cannot be thought of without the body, nor the body without the soul: both come into their actual state together. In the soul Aristotle distinguishes three parts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the thinking. This last, the peculiar property of man, is further divisible into the passive and the active, of which the former is linked to the soul as the soul is to the body, as form is to matter, multiplies itself with individuals, and is extinguished with them. But the reason, or pure intelligence, has nothing in common with matter, comes from without into man, and exists in him as a self-consisting indestructible being, without multiplying or dividing itself. Accordingly this intellect or reason suffers the soul to sink back with the body into the nothing from which both have been together produced. It alone continues to subsist as what is ever the same and unchangeable, since it is nothing but the divine intelligence in an individual existence, enlightening the darkness of the human subject in the passive part of the understanding, and so must be considered as the first mover in man of his discursive thinking and knowing, as well as of his willing.[411 - Döllinger, p. 310, sec. 139.] As that which is properly human in the soul, that which has had a beginning, must also pass away, even the understanding, and only the divine reason is immortal, and as memory belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thinking only takes place by means of the passive intellect, all consciousness must cease with death. And again, clearly as Aristotle maintains that man is the mover and master of his own actions, and has it in his power to be good or evil, and thence repudiates the assumption of Socrates and Plato that no one is willingly evil, yet he cannot find a place for real freedom of the will between the motion which arises from sensitive desire, and that which proceeds from the divine intelligence dwelling in the soul. Necessity arises on both sides, from the things which determine the passive understanding, and from the divine intelligence.[412 - Ibid. p. 311, sec. 140.] Thus his physical theory, as in the case of Plato noted above,[413 - See p. 411 (#x_13_i42), above.] prevents a clear conception of the human personality. His notion of man in this point corresponds to his notion of God: he does not concern himself with questions respecting the goodness, justice, and freedom of God, inasmuch as his God is not really personal:[414 - Döllinger, pp. 307 and 311.] so with regard to man we find in him no elucidation as to the question of moral freedom, nor of the origin and nature of wickedness in man. Wickedness is with Aristotle the impotence to hold the mean between too much and too little: it presents itself therefore only in this world of contingency and change, and has no relation to God, since the first or absolute good has nothing opposed to it. He has not the sense of moral perversion with regard to evil. In accordance with which the end of all moral activity with him is happiness, which consists in the well-being arising from an energy according to nature; as virtue is the observing a proper mean between two extremes. And the highest happiness is contemplative thought, the function of the divine in man, the turning away from everything external to the inner world of the conceptions.

The religious character, which belongs conspicuously to Plato's philosophy, fails, it will be seen, in that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato strove to purify the popular belief, and urged as the highest point of virtue to become like to God by the conjunction of justice and sanctity with prudence,[415 - Διὸ καὶ πειρᾶσθαι χρὴ ἐνθένδε ἐκεῖσε φεύγειν ὅτι τάχιστα; φυγὴ δὲ ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν; ὁμοίωσις δὲ δίκαιον καὶ ὅσιον μετὰ φρονήσεως γενέσθαι. κ.τ.λ. Theætet. p. 176.] Aristotle divides morality from religion as his God is separated off from the world.[416 - Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 623.] His scientific inquiries have not that immediate relation to the personal life and the destiny of man in which the religiousness of Platonism most consists. His whole view of the world goes to explain things as far as possible from their natural causes.[417 - Zeller, ii. 2, p. 625.] Thus he admits in the whole direction of the world the ruling of a divine power, of a reason which reaches its purpose; he believes in particular that the gods care for men, take an interest in him who lives in accordance with reason; that happiness is their gift; he contradicts the notion that the godhead is envious, and so could withhold from man knowledge, the best of its gifts; but this divine providence coincides for him entirely with the working of natural causes. In his view the godhead stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it.

Religion[418 - Ibid. p. 629.] itself Aristotle treats as an unconditional moral necessity. The man who doubts whether the gods should be honoured is a subject fit not for instruction but for punishment, just as the man who asks whether he should love his parents. As the natural system of the world cannot be imagined without God, so neither can man in it be imagined without religion. But he can give us no other ground save political expediency for resting religion upon fables so apparent as the stories of the popular belief. He sometimes himself uses these fables, like other popular opinions, to illustrate some general proposition, as, for instance, Homer's verses on the golden chain show the immobility of the first mover: just as in other cases he likes to pursue his scientific assumptions to their least apparent beginnings, and to take account of sayings and proverbs. But if we except the few general principles of religious belief, he ascribes to these fables no deeper meaning, and as little does he seem to care about purifying their character. For his state he presupposes the existing religion, as in his personal conduct he did not withdraw from its usages, and expressed his attachment to friends and relations in the forms consecrated by it. But no trace is found in him of Plato's desire to reform religion by means of philosophy: and in his politics he allows in the existing worship even what in itself he disapproves, as the case of unseemly words, inscriptions, and statues. Thus the relation of the Aristotelic philosophy to the actual religion is generally a very loose one. It does not disdain indeed to use the points of connection which the other presents, but has no need of it whatever for itself: nor does it seek on its own side to purify and transform religion, the imperfection of which it rather seems to take as something unavoidable. The two are indifferent to each other; philosophy pursues its way without troubling itself about religion, without fearing any interruption from it.

In the seventy-seven years which elapsed from the death of Socrates, b. c. 399, to that of Aristotle, b. c. 322, Greek life had suffered a great change. That dear-loved independence which every state had cultivated, and which concentrated every energy of the mind in civil life, had vanished. During the forty years of Plato's work as a teacher it was becoming less and less: Chæronea gave it the death-blow; while Aristotle is the son of a time at which scientific study had already begun to take the place of active political life.[419 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 7.] But the conquest effected by his great pupil Alexander completed this change. He opened the East to the Greek mind, bringing it into close contact with Asiatic thought, beliefs, and customs. Under his successors Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, Tarsus, Pergamus, and Rhodes became great centres of Greek culture: but Greek self-government was gone. Athens with the rest of the Greek cities had lost its political independence, but it remained the metropolis of Greek philosophy. From the last decade of the fourth century before Christ four great schools, the Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean, all seated here, as embodied in the dwelling-place and oral teaching of their masters, stand over against each other. The point most interesting to our present subject is this, that all these schools take up a common ground, one which we consider to belong properly to religion, that is, the question wherein the happiness of man consists, and how to attain it.[420 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 14.] Thus the political circumstances of the land gave the tone to its philosophy. What the time required was something which would compensate men for the lost position of a free citizen and a self-governed fatherland. The cultivated classes looked to philosophy for consolation and support. The answers to this question which the various systems gave were very different from each other, but an answer they all attempted. What they have in common is, the drawing-back of man upon himself, his inner mind, his consciousness, as a being who thinks and wills:[421 - Ibid. p. 18.] while on the other hand the mental view was widened from the boundaries of a narrow state to that which touches man in general. The field of morality opened out beyond the range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy. Thus two hundred full years were occupied with the struggles of the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and the sceptical opposition to them of the middle and later Academy. At the very beginning of this time the man who sat first in Aristotle's chair after him, and therefore the head of the most speculative school, Theophrastus, had shocked the students of philosophy by declaring that fortune, not wisdom, was the ruler of the world. But it was precisely against the despondence which such a conviction would work in the mind that the Stoics struggled with their doctrine of apathy, Epicurus with his self-contentment, the Sceptics with their tranquillity of indifference.[422 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 12. Döllinger, p. 318.] These all sought to cure those whom the fables of the popular religion were insufficient to satisfy, those who felt the evils and trials of life and knew not whither to turn in their need. But the Stoic and the Epicurean cures stood in the strongest contrast to each other.

Zeno[423 - Döllinger, pp. 319-321.] of Cittium in Cyprus, after listening for twenty years to the teaching of various Socratic masters in Athens, founded a school himself, and wished it to be a school of virtuous men rather than of speculative philosophers. It was a system of complete materialism rigorously carried out. He admitted only corporeal causes, and two principles, matter, and a force eternally indwelling in it and shaping it. These two principles, matter and force, were in fact to the stoic mind only one eternal being viewed in a twofold aspect. Matter for its subsistence needs a principle of unity to form and hold it together: and this, the active element, is inconceivable without matter as the subject in which it dwells, works, and moves. Thus the positive element is matter viewed as being as yet without qualities, while the active element which runs through and quickens everything is God in matter. In real truth God and matter are one thing, or, in other words, the stoic doctrine is a pantheism which views matter as instinct with life.[424 - The doctrine of Hylozoismus.] God is the unity of that force which embraces and interpenetrates the universe, assuming all forms, and as such is a subtle fluid, fire, ether, or breath, in which are contained all forms of existence belonging to the world-body which it animates, and from which they develop themselves in order: it lives and moves in all, and is the common source of all effect and all desire. God, then, is the world-soul, and the world itself no aggregate of independent elements, but a being, organised, living, filled and animated by a single soul, that is to say, by one original fire manifesting itself in various degrees of tension and heat. If in Aristotle's theory the world is a total of single beings, which are only bound together unto a higher aim by a community of effort, in the stoic system on the contrary these beings all viewed together are members of a surpassingly perfect organisation, and as such, so bound in one, that nothing can happen to the individual being, which does not by sympathy extend its operation to all others. Thus on his physical side, God is the world-fire, the vital all-interpenetrating heat, the sole cause of all life and motion, and the necessity which rules the world: while on his moral side, inasmuch as the first general cause can only be a soul full of reason and wisdom, he is the world-reason, a blessed being, the originator of the moral law, ever occupied with the government of the world, being in fact himself the world. Thus everything is subject to the law of absolute necessity; everything eternally determined through an endless series of preceding causes, since nothing happens without a cause, and that again is the working of a cause before it. What, then, is called, or seems to be, chance, is merely the working of a cause unknown to us. The will of man is accordingly mere spontaneity. He wills, but what he wills is inevitable: he determines himself, but always in consequence of preceding causes. And since here every cause is something subject to the conditions of matter, something purely inside the world, it becomes unalterable destiny. But inasmuch as the series of causes leads back to the first, and this first cause has not only a physical side, but includes intelligence with it, and so everything in it is foreseen and predetermined, therefore that which considered under the aspect of inevitable necessity is called fate or destiny, viewed as thought may be termed Providence, a divine arrangement.

With such a doctrine it is evident that all morality was reduced to a matter of physics: and yet no sect of Greek philosophers struggled so hard to solve the great problem of moral freedom as the Stoics.[425 - Döllinger, pp. 322-324.] But the iron grasp of their leading tenet was ever too much for them. Man's soul is of the same substance as the world-soul, that is, breath or fire, of which it is a portion: in man it manifests itself as the force from which knowledge and action proceed, as at once intelligence, will, and consciousness. It is, then, closely allied with the Divine Being, but at the same time corporeal, a being which stands in perpetual action and reaction with the human body. It is that heat-matter bound to the blood, which communicates life and motion: it is perishable, though it lasts beyond the body, perhaps to the general conflagration. It has therefore, in the most favourable view, the duration of a world-period, with the outrun of which it must return to the universal ether or godhead: its individual existence and consciousness end.

As to the popular religion,[426 - Ibid. p. 324.] the Stoics admitted that it was filled with pretended deities, false doctrines, and rank superstition; that its wilderness of fables about the gods was simply contemptible: but that it was well to retain the names of gods consecrated in public opinion, who were merely descriptions of particular incorporations of the one world-god.

The Stoics did not represent the component elements of human nature as struggling with each other, like Plato.[427 - Döllinger, p. 326.] With them nature and reason is one thing. Their virtue,[428 - ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν. Ueberweg, i. p. 198.] or highest good, is life in accordance with nature, that is, the concurrence of human conduct with the all-ruling law of nature, or of man's will with God's will. Thus it was that the Stoic sought to reach his doctrine of philosophical impassibility: and to this system the majority of earnest and thinking minds in the two centuries before Christ inclined.[429 - Döllinger, p. 340.]

At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from anxiety and disturbance.[430 - Ibid. p. 330.] If Zeno's world was an intelligent animal, that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies – and there are nothing else but corporeal things – have arisen originally from atoms moving themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise man's repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.[431 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 370.] Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional, rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations. Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent, indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.[432 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 398.] His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual opportunity of agreeable entertainment.

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 - Döllinger, pp. 331-333. Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 392.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 335.]

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 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 427. ἀπαθία and ἀταραξία.] 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 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, i. p. 107.] 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 - Ibid. p. 435.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 336, who quotes Sextus, Hypot. i. 8.] 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 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 477.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 338.] 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 - For a full account of the line of thought followed by Carneades, see Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, pp. 454-477.]

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 - Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 436.] 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 - Ibid. pp. 482, 492.] 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 - Ueberweg, i. p. 218; and Zeller, iii. part 1, p. 593, calls him “neben seinem Lehrer Antiochus den eigentlichsten Vertreter des philosophischen Eklekticismus in dem letzen Jahrhundert vor dem Anfang unserer Zeitrechnung.”] 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 - Ueberweg, i. pp. 221-2.] 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 - Ueberweg, i. 219, 223.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 313.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 254.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 307. “Er wirkt also zwar auf die Welt, aber ohne sie zu kennen, wie der Magnet auf das Eisen, und seine Action auf die Welt ist keine freiwollende.”] 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 - Ibid. pp. 340, 572.] 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 - Ζεῦ, φύσεως ἄρχηγε, νόμου μέτα πάντα κυβερνῶν; —Σοὶ δὴ πᾶς ὅδε κόσμος ἐλισσόμενος περὶ γαῖανΠείθεται ᾗ μὲν ἄγης, καὶ ἑκὼν ὑπὸ σεῖο κρατεῖται —Ἀλλὰ σὺ καὶ τὰ περισσὰ, ἐπίστασαι ἄρτια θεῖναι,Καὶ κοσμεῖς τὰ ἄκοσμα, καὶ οὐ φίλα σοὶ φίλα ἐστίν.Ὧδε γὰρ εἰς ἓν ἅπαντα συνήρμοκας ἐσθλὰ κακοῖσιν,Ὥσθ᾽ ἕνα γίγνεσθαι πάντων λόγον ἀὲν ἔοντα.] 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 poetic[452 - Cleanthes preferred expressly the poetic form; see the note in Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 289: for poetry and music are better suited to reach the truth of divine contemplation than the bare philosophical expression.] 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 - Ueberweg, i. p. 195.] “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 - Zeller, vol. iii. pp. 130, 131: see the many authorities he produces, pp. 126-131.] 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 - He says of the opposite theory of Epicurus, the construction of the world from the chance falling-together of atoms: “Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intelligo, cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formæ literarum, vel aureæ vel quales libet, aliquo conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis annales Ennii, ut deinceps legi possint, effici: quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna.” De Nat. Deor. ii. 37.] 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 - So Zeller remarks, iii. 1, p. 296: “A Pantheism, such as the stoic, could take up into itself the most boundless polytheism, a double liberty only being allowed, that of passing on to derived beings the name of deity, from the Being to whom alone originally and in the strict sense it belonged, and that of personifying as God the impersonal, which is an appearance of divine power.”] 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.

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 book[457 - See Hasler, Verhältniss der heidnischen und christlichen Ethik, p. 28; and Zukrigl's commentary on the same, Tübingen theol. Quartalschrift, 1867, pp. 475-482.] 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 - Zeller, iii. 1, pp. 288-9.] 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 - Zeller, iii. 1, 12.] 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 - Καὶ μὴν ἡ πολὺ θαυμαζομένη πολιτεία τοῦ τὴν Στωϊκῶν αἵρεσιν καταβαλλομένου Ζήνωνος εἰς ἓν τοῦτο συντείνει κεφάλαιον, ἵνα μὴ κατὰ πόλεις μηδὲ κατὰ δήμους οἰκῶμεν, ἰδίοις ἕκαστοι διωρισμένοι δικαίοις, ἀλλὰ πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἡγώμεθα δημότας καὶ πολίτας, εἷς δὲ βίος ᾖ, καὶ κόσμος, ὥσπερ ἀγέλης συννόμου νόμῳ κοινῷ τρεφομένης. Plutarch, Alex. M. Virt. i. 6, p. 329, quoted by Zeller, iii. 1, p. 281.] 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 - De Finibus, iii. sec. 19.] “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 - De Legibus, i. 7, 6.] “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 - Zeller, iii. 1, p. 278, from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, who here, however, only enlarge on Cicero's idea, or rather Zeno's.]

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 - “Jam vero virtus eadem in homine ac Deo est, neque ullo alio ingenio præterea. Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam in se perfecta, et ad summum perducta natura.” De Legibus, i. 8.] being one and the same in God and in man, and in them alone.[465 - De Officiis, i. 5.] 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 - Cic. de Nat. Deor. iii. 36. “Virtutem nemo unquam acceptam deo retulit. Nimirum recte. Propter virtutem enim jure laudamur, et in virtute recie gloriamur: quod non contingeret, si id donum a deo, non a nobis, haberemus.”] 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 - Champagny, les Césars, iii. 333.]

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 - “Ἐξαγωγὴ ist bei den Stoïkern der stehende Ausdruck für den Selbstmord.” Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 284 n. 2, who quotes Diog. vii. 130. Ἐλλόγως τέ φασιν ἐξάξειν ἑαυτὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ βίου τὸν σοφὸν καὶ ὑπὲρ πατρίδος καὶ ὑπὲρ φίλων, κὰν ἐν σκληροτέρᾳ γένηται ἀλγηδόνι, ἢ πηρώσεσιν, ἢ νόσοις ἀνιάτοις.] 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 city[469 - “Qui omnem orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducunt.” Cicero, Paradoxon 2.] 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 - Grote, Plato, vol. i. p. 87.] 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 - Döllinger, p. 315, from Numenius, quoted by Eusebius. Ueberweg, i. 205, says of them, that up to the rise of Neoplatonism they were the most numerous of all.] 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 - See Döllinger, pp. 341 and 572-584; so Champagny, les Césars, iii. 294.] 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 presented[473 - Ueberweg gives them thus: to the first Academy belong Plato's successor Speusippus, who taught 347-339 b. c.; Xenocrates, 339-314; Polemo, 314-270; Crates, a short time. The second Academy was founded by Arcesilaus, who lived 315-241, taking more and more a sceptical direction, which was carried out to the utmost by Carneades, 214-129, in the third: in the fourth, Philo of Larissa, about 80 b. c., returned to the dogmatic direction; and Antiochus of Ascalon, Cicero's friend, founded the fifth, in which he fused Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines together. S. Augustine, de Civ. Dei, viii. 3, puts his finger on the variations of the Socratici.] 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 - “Lier ensemble les dogmes, une morale, et un culte, c'est-à-dire donner à la société une foi, une règle, et des pratiques, c'était l'œuvre que le genre humain appelait de ses vœux, et sur laquelle pourtant tous les efforts humains semblaient échouer.” A. Thierry, Tableau de l'Empire Romain, p. 328.] 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.