Volume I Part 4 (1/2)

One of the first facts that must strike a student who examines the ethical teaching of the ancient civilisations is how imperfectly that teaching was represented, and how feebly it was influenced by the popular creed. The moral ideas had at no time been sought in the actions of the G.o.ds, and long before the triumph of Christianity, polytheism had ceased to have any great influence upon the more cultivated intellects of mankind.

In Greece we may trace from the earliest time the footsteps of a religion of nature, wholly different from the legends of the mythology. The language in which the first Greek dramatists a.s.serted the supreme authority and universal providence of Zeus was so emphatic, that the Christian Fathers commonly attributed it either to direct inspiration or to a knowledge of the Jewish writings, while later theologians of the school of Cudworth have argued from it in favour of the original monotheism of our race. The philosophers were always either contemptuous or hostile to the prevailing legends. Pythagoras is said to have declared that he had seen Hesiod tied to a brazen pillar in h.e.l.l, and Homer hung upon a tree surrounded by serpents, on account of the fables they had invented about the G.o.ds.(148) Plato, for the same reason, banished the poets from his republic. Stilpo turned to ridicule the whole system of sacrifices,(149) and was exiled from Athens for denying that the Athene of Phidias was a G.o.ddess.(150) Xenophanes remarked that each nation attributed to the G.o.ds its distinctive national type, the G.o.ds of the aethiopians being black, the G.o.ds of the Thracians fair and blue-eyed.(151) Diagoras and Theodorus are said to have denied, and Protagoras to have questioned the existence of the G.o.ds,(152) while the Epicureans deemed them wholly indifferent to human affairs, and the Pyrrhonists p.r.o.nounced our faculties absolutely incapable of attaining any sure knowledge, either human or divine. The Cynic Antisthenes said that there were many popular G.o.ds, but there was only one G.o.d of nature.(153) The Stoics, reproducing an opinion which was supported by Aristotle and attributed to Pythagoras,(154) believed in an all-pervading soul of nature, but unlike some modern schools which have adopted this view, they a.s.serted in emphatic language the doctrine of Providence, and the self-consciousness of the Deity.

In the Roman republic and empire, a general scepticism had likewise arisen among the philosophers as the first fruit of intellectual development, and the educated cla.s.ses were speedily divided between avowed or virtual atheists, like the Epicureans,(155) and pure theists, like the Stoics and the Platonists. The first, represented by such writers as Lucretius and Petronius, regarded the G.o.ds simply as the creations of fear, denied every form of Providence, attributed the world to a concurrence of atoms, and life to spontaneous generation, and regarded it as the chief end of philosophy to banish as illusions of the imagination every form of religious belief. The others formed a more or less pantheistic conception of the Deity, a.s.serted the existence of a Providence,(156) but treated with great contempt the prevailing legends which they endeavoured in various ways to explain. The first systematic theory of explanation appears to have been that of the Sicilian Euhemerus, whose work was translated by Ennius. He pretended that the G.o.ds were originally kings, whose history and genealogies he professed to trace, and who after death had been deified by mankind.(157) Another attempt, which in the first period of Roman scepticism was more generally popular, was that of some of the Stoics, who regarded the G.o.ds as personifications of the different attributes of the Deity, or of different forces of nature. Thus Neptune was the sea, Pluto was fire, Hercules represented the strength of G.o.d, Minerva His wisdom, Ceres His fertilising energy.(158) More than a hundred years before the Empire, Varro had declared that ”the soul of the world is G.o.d, and that its parts are true divinities.”(159) Virgil and Manilius described, in lines of singular beauty, that universal spirit, the principle of all life, the efficient cause of all motion, which permeates and animates the globe. Pliny said that ”the world and sky, in whose embrace all things are enclosed, must be deemed a G.o.d, eternal, immense, never begotten, and never to perish. To seek things beyond this is of no profit to man, and they transcend the limits of his faculties.”(160) Cicero had adopted the higher Platonic conception of the Deity as mind freed from all taint of matter,(161) while Seneca celebrated in magnificent language ”Jupiter the guardian and ruler of the universe, the soul and spirit, the lord and master of this mundane sphere, ... the cause of causes, upon whom all things hang.... Whose wisdom oversees the world that it may move uncontrolled in its course, ... from whom all things proceed, by whose spirit we live, ... who comprises all we see.”(162) Lucan, the great poet of stoicism, rose to a still higher strain, and to one which still more accurately expressed the sentiments of his school, when he described Jupiter as that majestic, all-pervasive spirit, whose throne is virtue and the universe.(163) Quintilian defended the subjugation of the world beneath the sceptre of a single man, on the ground that it was an image of the government of G.o.d. Other philosophers contented themselves with a.s.serting the supreme authority of Jupiter Maximus, and reducing the other divinities to mere administrative and angelic functions, or, as the Platonists expressed it, to the position of daemons. According to some of the Stoics, a final catastrophe would consume the universe, the resuscitated spirits of men and all these minor G.o.ds, and the whole creation being absorbed into the great parent spirit, G.o.d would be all in all. The very children and old women ridiculed Cerberus and the Furies(164) or treated them as mere metaphors of conscience.(165) In the deism of Cicero the popular divinities were discarded, the oracles refuted and ridiculed, the whole system of divination p.r.o.nounced a political imposture, and the genesis of the miraculous traced to the exuberance of the imagination, and to certain diseases of the judgment.(166) Before the time of Constantine, numerous books had been written against the oracles.(167) The greater number of these had actually ceased, and the ablest writers justly saw in this cessation an evidence of the declining credulity of the people, and a proof that the oracles had been a fruit of that credulity.(168) The Stoics, holding, as was their custom, aloof from direct religious discussion, dissuaded their disciples from consulting them, on the ground that the gifts of fortune were of no account, and that a good man should be content with his conscience, making duty and not success the object of his life.(169) Cato wondered that two augurs could meet with gravity.(170) The Roman general Sertorius made the forgery of auspicious omens a continual resource in warfare.(171) The Roman wits made divination the favourite subject of their ridicule.(172) The denunciation which the early Greek moralists launched against the popular ascription of immoral deeds to the G.o.ds was echoed by a long series of later philosophers,(173) while Ovid made these fables the theme of his mocking _Metamorphoses_, and in his most immoral poem proposed Jupiter as a model of vice. With an irony not unlike that of Isaiah, Horace described the carpenter deliberating whether he should convert a shapeless log into a bench or into a G.o.d.(174) Cicero, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, and Dion Chrysostom either denounced idolatry or defended the use of images simply on the ground that they were signs and symbols of the Deity,(175) well suited to aid the devotions of the ignorant. Seneca(176) and the whole school of Pythagoras objected to the sacrifices.

These examples will be sufficient to show how widely the philosophic cla.s.ses in Rome were removed from the professed religion of the State, and how necessary it is to seek elsewhere the sources of their moral life. But the opinions of learned men never reflect faithfully those of the vulgar, and the chasm between the two cla.s.ses was even wider than at present before the dawn of Christianity and the invention of printing. The atheistic enthusiasm of Lucretius and the sceptical enthusiasm of some of the disciples of Carneades were isolated phenomena, and the great majority of the ancient philosophers, while speculating with the utmost freedom in private, or in writings that were read by the few, countenanced, practised, and even defended the religious rites that they despised. It was believed that many different paths adapted to different nations and grades of knowledge converge to the same Divinity, and that the most erroneous religion is good if it forms good dispositions and inspires virtuous actions. The oracle of Delphi had said that the best religion is that of a man's own city. Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, who regarded all religions simply as political agencies, dilated in rapturous terms upon the devotion of the Romans and the comparative purity of their creed.(177) Varro openly professed the belief that there are religious truths which it is expedient that the people should not know, and falsehoods which they should believe to be true.(178) The Academic Cicero and the Epicurean Caesar were both high officers of religion. The Stoics taught that every man should duly perform the religious ceremonies of his country.(179)

But the Roman religion, even in its best days, though an admirable system of moral discipline, was never an independent source of moral enthusiasm.

It was the creature of the State, and derived its inspiration from political feeling. The Roman G.o.ds were not, like those of the Greeks, the creations of an unbridled and irreverent fancy, nor, like those of the Egyptians, representations of the forces of nature; they were for the most part simple allegories, frigid personifications of different virtues, or presiding spirits imagined for the protection of different departments of industry. The religion established the sanct.i.ty of an oath, it gave a kind of official consecration to certain virtues, and commemorated special instances in which they had been displayed; its local character strengthened patriotic feeling, its wors.h.i.+p of the dead fostered a vague belief in the immortality of the soul,(180) it sustained the supremacy of the father in the family, surrounded marriage with many imposing solemnities, and created simple and reverent characters profoundly submissive to an over-ruling Providence and scrupulously observant of sacred rites. But with all this it was purely selfish. It was simply a method of obtaining prosperity, averting calamity, and reading the future.

Ancient Rome produced many heroes, but no saint. Its self-sacrifice was patriotic, not religious. Its religion was neither an independent teacher nor a source of inspiration, although its rites mingled with and strengthened some of the best habits of the people.

But these habits, and the religious reverence with which they were connected, soon disappeared amid the immorality and decomposition that marked the closing years of the Republic and the dawn of the Empire. The stern simplicity of life, which the censors had so zealously and often so tyrannically enforced,(181) was exchanged for a luxury which first appeared after the return of the army of Manlius from Asia,(182) increased to immense proportions after the almost simultaneous conquests of Carthage, Corinth, and Macedonia,(183) received an additional stimulus from the example of Antony,(184) and at last, under the Empire, rose to excesses which the wildest Oriental orgies have never surpa.s.sed.(185) The complete subversion of the social and political system of the Republic, the anarchy of civil war, the ever-increasing concourse of strangers, bringing with them new philosophies, customs, and G.o.ds, had dissolved or effaced all the old bonds of virtue. The simple juxtaposition of many forms of wors.h.i.+p effected what could not have been effected by the most sceptical literature or the most audacious philosophy. The moral influence of religion was almost annihilated. The feeling of reverence was almost extinct. Augustus solemnly degraded the statue of Neptune because his fleet had been wrecked.(186) When Germanicus died, the populace stoned or overthrew the altars of the G.o.ds.(187) The idea of sanct.i.ty was so far removed from the popular divinities that it became a continual complaint that prayers were offered which the most depraved would blush to p.r.o.nounce aloud.(188) Amid the corruption of the Empire, we meet with many n.o.ble efforts of reform made by philosophers or by emperors, but we find scarcely a trace of the moral influence of the old religion. The apotheosis of the emperors consummated its degradation. The foreign G.o.ds were identified with those of Rome, and all their immoral legends a.s.sociated with the national creed.(189) The theatre greatly extended the area of scepticism. Cicero mentions the a.s.senting plaudits with which the people heard the lines of Ennius, declaring that the G.o.ds, though real beings, take no care for the things of man.(190) Plutarch tells of a spectator at a theatre rising up with indignation after a recital of the crimes of Diana, and exclaiming to the actor, ”May you have a daughter like her whom you have described!”(191) St. Augustine and other of the Fathers long after ridiculed the pagans who satirised in the theatres the very G.o.ds they wors.h.i.+pped in the temples.(192) Men were still profoundly superst.i.tious, but they resorted to each new religion as to a charm or talisman of especial power, or a system of magic revealing the future.

There existed, too, to a very large extent, a kind of superst.i.tious scepticism which occupies a very prominent place in religious history.

There were mult.i.tudes who, declaring that there were no G.o.ds, or that the G.o.ds never interfered with human affairs, professed with the same breath an absolute faith in all portents, auguries, dreams, and miracles.

Innumerable natural objects, such as comets, meteors, earthquakes, or monstrous births, were supposed to possess a kind of occult or magical virtue, by which they foreshadowed, and in some cases influenced, the destinies of men. Astrology, which is the special representative of this mode of thought, rose to great prominence. The elder Pliny notices that in his time a belief was rapidly gaining ground, both among the learned and among the vulgar, that the whole destiny of man is determined by the star that presides over his nativity; that G.o.d, having ordained this, never interferes with human affairs, and that the reality of the portents is due to this pre-ordainment.(193) One of the later historians of the Empire remarks that numbers who denied the existence of any divinity believed nevertheless that they could not safely appear in public, or eat or bathe, unless they had first carefully consulted the almanac to ascertain the position of the planet Mercury, or how far the moon was from the Crab.(194) Except, perhaps, among the peasants in the country districts, the Roman religion, in the last years of the Republic, and in the first century of the Empire, scarcely existed, except in the state of a superst.i.tion, and he who would examine the true moral influence of the time must turn to the great schools of philosophy which had been imported from Greece.

The vast place which the rival systems of Zeno and Epicurus occupy in the moral history of mankind, and especially in the closing years of the empire of paganism, may easily lead us to exaggerate the creative genius of their founders, who, in fact, did little more than give definitions or intellectual expression to types of excellence that had at all times existed in the world. There have ever been stern, upright, self-controlled, and courageous men, actuated by a pure sense of duty, capable of high efforts of self-sacrifice, somewhat intolerant of the frailties of others, somewhat hard and unsympathising in the ordinary intercourse of society, but rising to heroic grandeur as the storm lowered upon their path, and more ready to relinquish life than the cause they believed to be true. There have also always been men of easy tempers and of amiable disposition, gentle, benevolent, and pliant, cordial friends and forgiving enemies, selfish at heart, yet ever ready, when it is possible, to unite their gratifications with those of others, averse to all enthusiasm, mysticism, utopias, and superst.i.tion, with little depth of character or capacity for self-sacrifice, but admirably fitted to impart and to receive enjoyment, and to render the course of life easy and harmonious. The first are by nature Stoics, and the second Epicureans, and if they proceed to reason about the _summum bonum_ or the affections, it is more than probable that in each case their characters will determine their theories. The first will estimate self-control above all other qualities, will disparage the affections, and will endeavour to separate widely the ideas of duty and of interest, while the second will systematically prefer the amiable to the heroic, and the utilitarian to the mystical.

But while it is undoubtedly true that in these matters character usually determines opinion, it is not less true that character is itself in a great measure governed by national circ.u.mstances. The refined, artistic, sensual civilisations of Greece and Asia Minor might easily produce fine examples of the Epicurean type, but Rome was from the earliest times pre-eminently the home of stoicism. Long before the Romans had begun to reason about philosophy, they had exhibited it in action, and in their speculative days it was to this doctrine that the n.o.blest minds naturally tended. A great nation engaged in perpetual wars in an age when success in warfare depended neither upon wealth nor upon mechanical genius, but upon the constant energy of patriotic enthusiasm, and upon the unflinching maintenance of military discipline, the whole force of the national character tended to the production of a single definite type. In the absolute authority accorded to the father over the children, to the husband over the wife, to the master over the slave, we may trace the same habits of discipline that proved so formidable in the field. Patriotism and military honour were indissolubly connected in the Roman mind. They were the two sources of national enthusiasm, the chief ingredients of the national conception of greatness. They determined irresistibly the moral theory which was to prove supreme.

Now war, which brings with it so many demoralising influences, has, at least, always been the great school of heroism. It teaches men how to die.

It familiarises the mind with the idea of n.o.ble actions performed under the influence, not of personal interest, but of honour and of enthusiasm.

It elicits in the highest degree strength of character, accustoms men to the abnegation needed for simultaneous action, compels them to repress their fears, and establish a firm control over their affections.

Patriotism, too, leads them to subordinate their personal wishes to the interests of the society in which they live. It extends the horizon of life, teaching men to dwell among the great men of the past, to derive their moral strength from the study of heroic lives, to look forward continually, through the vistas of a distant future, to the welfare of an organisation which will continue when they have pa.s.sed away. All these influences were developed in Roman life to a degree which can now never be reproduced. War, for the reasons I have stated, was far more than at present the school of heroic virtues. Patriotism, in the absence of any strong theological pa.s.sion, had a.s.sumed a transcendent power. The citizen, pa.s.sing continually from political to military life, exhibited to perfection the moral effects of both. The habits of command formed by a long period of almost universal empire, and by the aristocratic organisation of the city, contributed to the elevation, and also to the pride, of the national character.

It will appear, I think, sufficiently evident, from these considerations, that the circ.u.mstances of the Roman people tended inevitably to the production of a certain type of character, which, in its essential characteristics, was the type of stoicism. In addition to the predisposition which leads men in their estimate of the comparative excellence of different qualities to select for the highest eulogy those which are most congruous to their own characters, this fact derives a great importance from the large place which the biographical element occupied in ancient ethical teaching. Among Christians the ideals have commonly been either supernatural beings or men who were in constant connection with supernatural beings, and these men have usually been either Jews or saints, whose lives were of such a nature as to isolate them from most human sympathies, and to efface as far as possible the national type. Among the Greeks and Romans the examples of virtue were usually their own fellow-countrymen; men who had lived in the same moral atmosphere, struggled for the same ends, acquired their reputation in the same spheres, exhibited in all their intensity the same national characteristics as their admirers. History had a.s.sumed a didactic character it has now almost wholly lost. One of the first tasks of every moralist was to collect traits of character ill.u.s.trating the precepts he enforced. Valerius Maximus represented faithfully the method of the teachers of antiquity when he wrote his book giving a catalogue of different moral qualities, and ill.u.s.trating each by a profusion of examples derived from the history of his own or of foreign nations.

”Whenever,” said Plutarch, ”we begin an enterprise, or take possession of a charge, or experience a calamity, we place before our eyes the example of the greatest men of our own or of bygone ages, and we ask ourselves how Plato or Epaminondas, Lycurgus or Agesilaus, would have acted. Looking into these personages as into a faithful mirror, we can remedy our defects in word or deed.... Whenever any perplexity arrives, or any pa.s.sion disturbs the mind, the student of philosophy pictures to himself some of those who have been celebrated for their virtue, and the recollection sustains his tottering steps and prevents his fall.”(195)

Pa.s.sages of this kind continually occur in the ancient moralists,(196) and they show how naturally the highest type of national excellence determined the prevailing school of moral philosophy, and also how the influence of the heroic period of national history would act upon the best minds in the subsequent and wholly different phases of development. It was therefore not surprising that during the Empire, though the conditions of national life were profoundly altered, Stoicism should still be the philosophical religion, the great source and regulator of moral enthusiasm. Epicureanism had, indeed, spread widely in the Empire,(197) but it proved little more than a principle of disintegration or an apology for vice, or at best the religion of tranquil and indifferent natures animated by no strong moral enthusiasm. It is indeed true that Epicurus had himself been a man of the most blameless character, that his doctrines were at first carefully distinguished from the coa.r.s.e sensuality of the Cyrenaic school which had preceded them, that they admitted in theory almost every form of virtue, and that the school had produced many disciples who, if they had not attained the highest grades of excellence, had at least been men of harmless lives, intensely devoted to their master, and especially noted for the warmth and constancy of their friends.h.i.+ps.(198) But a school which placed so high a value on ease and pleasure was eminently unfit to struggle against the fearful difficulties that beset the teachers of virtue amid the anarchy of a military despotism, and the virtues and the vices of the Romans were alike fatal to its success. All the great ideals of Roman excellence belonged to a different type. Such men as a Decius or a Regulus would have been impossible in an Epicurean society, for even if their actuating emotion were no n.o.bler than a desire for posthumous fame, such a desire could never grow powerful in a moral atmosphere charged with the shrewd, placid, unsentimental utilitarianism of Epicurus. On the other hand, the distinctions the Epicureans had drawn between more or less refined pleasures and their elevated conceptions of what const.i.tutes the true happiness of men, were unintelligible to the Romans, who knew how to sacrifice enjoyment, but who, when pursuing it, gravitated naturally to the coa.r.s.est forms. The mission of Epicureanism was therefore chiefly negative. The anti-patriotic tendency of its teaching contributed to that destruction of national feeling which was necessary to the rise of cosmopolitanism, while its strong opposition to theological beliefs, supported by the genius and enthusiasm of Lucretius, told powerfully upon the decaying faith.

Such being the functions of Epicureanism, the constructive or positive side of ethical teaching devolved almost exclusively upon Stoicism; for although there were a few philosophers who expressed themselves in strong opposition to some portions of the Stoical system, their efforts usually tended to no more than a modification of its extreme and harshest features. The Stoics a.s.serted two cardinal principles-that virtue was the sole legitimate object to be aspired to, and that it involved so complete an ascendancy of the reason as altogether to extinguish the affections.

The Peripatetics and many other philosophers, who derived their opinions chiefly from Plato, endeavoured to soften down the exaggeration of these principles. They admitted that virtue was an object wholly distinct from interest, and that it should be the leading motive of life; but they maintained that happiness was also a good, and a certain regard for it legitimate. They admitted that virtue consisted in the supremacy of the reason over the affections, but they allowed the exercise of the latter within restricted limits. The main distinguis.h.i.+ng features, however, of Stoicism, the unselfish ideal and the controlling reason, were acquiesced in, and each represents an important side of the ancient conception of excellence which we must now proceed to examine.

In the first we may easily trace the intellectual expression of the high spirit of self-sacrifice which the patriotic enthusiasm had elicited. The spirit of patriotism has this peculiar characteristic, that, while it has evoked acts of heroism which are both very numerous and very sublime, it has done so without presenting any prospect of personal immortality as a reward. Of all the forms of human heroism, it is probably the most unselfish. The Spartan and the Roman died for his country because he loved it. The martyr's ecstasy of hope had no place in his dying hour. He gave up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he believed, for ever, and he asked for no reward in this world or in the next. Even the hope of posthumous fame-the most refined and supersensual of all that can be called reward-could exist only for the most conspicuous leaders. It was examples of this nature that formed the culminations or ideals of ancient systems of virtue, and they naturally led men to draw a very clear and deep distinction between the notions of interest and of duty. It may, indeed, be truly said, that while the conception of what const.i.tuted duty was often very imperfect in antiquity, the conviction that duty, as distinguished from every modification of selfishness, should be the supreme motive of life was more clearly enforced among the Stoics than in any later society.

The reader will probably have gathered from the last chapter that there are four distinct motives which moral teachers may propose for the purpose of leading men to virtue. They may argue that the disposition of events is such that prosperity will attend a virtuous life, and adversity a vicious one-a proposition they may prove by pointing to the normal course of affairs, and by a.s.serting the existence of a special Providence in behalf of the good in the present world, and of rewards and punishments in the future. As far as these latter arguments are concerned, the efficacy of such teaching rests upon the firmness with which certain theological tenets are held, while the force of the first considerations will depend upon the degree and manner in which society is organised, for there are undoubtedly some conditions of society in which a perfectly upright life has not even a general tendency to prosperity. The peculiar circ.u.mstances and dispositions of individuals will also influence largely the way in which they receive such teaching, and, as Cicero observed, ”what one utility has created, another will often destroy.”

They may argue, again, that vice is to the mind what disease is to the body, and that a state of virtue is in consequence a state of health. Just as bodily health is desired for its own sake, as being the absence of a painful, or at least displeasing state, so a well-ordered and virtuous mind may be valued for its own sake, and independently of all the external good to which it may lead, as being a condition of happiness; and a mind distracted by pa.s.sion and vice may be avoided, not so much because it is an obstacle in the pursuit of prosperity, as because it is in itself essentially painful and disturbing. This conception of virtue and vice as states of health or sickness, the one being in itself a good and the other in itself an evil, was a fundamental proposition in the ethics of Plato.(199) It was admitted, but only to a subsidiary place, by the Stoics,(200) and has pa.s.sed more or less into all the succeeding systems.

It is especially favourable to large and elevating conceptions of self-culture, for it leads men to dwell much less upon isolated acts of virtue or vice than upon the habitual condition of mind from which they spring.

It is possible, in the third place, to argue in favour of virtue by offering as a motive that sense of pleasure which follows the deliberate performance of a virtuous act. This emotion is a distinct and isolated gratification following a distinct action, and may therefore be easily separated from that habitual placidity of temper which results from the extinction of vicious and perturbing impulses. It is this theory which is implied in the common exhortations to enjoy 'the luxury of doing good,'