Part 13

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

[192] _Phaedo_, 72 ff.

[193] _Meno_, 81 ff.

[194] _Phaedo_, 86 ff.

[195] _Phaedo_, 105.

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

[197] 246 f.

[198] 69 ff.

[199] _Rep._ VI, 484 ff.

[200] _Theaet._ 176.

[201] X, 613.

[202] _Phaedo_, 82 f.

[203] _Phaedo_, 66 E ff.

[204] 399 f.

[205] 492 E-493 A.

[206] _Phaedo_, 63 ff.

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

[208] _Theaet._ 176.

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

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

[211] _Crat._ 389 f.

[212] _Theaet._ 176.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

LATER RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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