A. The Greek Idea.
1. The idea of the unity of God had grown, as we have already seen, in a common growth with the idea of the unity of the world. But it did not absorb that idea. The dominant element in the idea of God was personality: in the idea of the world it was order. But personality implied will, and will seemed to imply the capacity to change; whereas in the world, wherever order could be traced, it was fixed and unvarying.
The order was most conspicuous in the movements of the heavenly bodies. It could be expressed by numbers. The philosopher of numbers was the first to give to the world the name Cosmos, the “order” as of a marshalled army.[381] The order being capable of being expressed by numbers, partook of the nature of numerical relations. Those relations are not only fixed, but absolutely unalterable. That a certain ratio should be otherwise than what it is, is inconceivable. Hence the same philosopher of numbers who had first conceived of the Cosmos, conceived of it also as being “invested with necessity,” and the metaphysicians who followed him framed the formula, “All things are by necessity.”[382]
This conception linked itself with an older idea of Greek religion. The length of a man’s life and his measure of endowments had been spoken of as his “share” or “portion.” Sometimes the assigning of this portion to a man was conceived as the work of Zeus or the other gods: sometimes the gods themselves had their portions like men; and very commonly the portion itself was viewed actively, as though it were the activity of a special being. It was sometimes personal, sometimes impersonal: it was, in any case, inevitable.[383] Through its character of inevitableness, it fused with the conception of the unalterableness of physical order. Hence the proposition, “All things are by necessity,” soon came to be otherwise expressed, “All things are by destiny.”[384]
Over against the personal might of Zeus there thus came to stand the dark and formless fixity of an impersonal Destiny.[385] The conception was especially elaborated by the Stoics. In the older mythology from which it had sprung, its personifications had been spoken of sometimes as the daughters of Zeus and Themis, and sometimes as the daughters of Night.[386] The former expressed its certainty and perfect order; the other, the darkness of its working. The former element became more prominent. It was an “eternal, continuous and ordered movement.”[387] It was “the linked chain of causes.”[388] The idea of necessity passed into that of intelligent and inherent force: the idea of destiny was transmuted into that of law.
This sublime conception, which has become a permanent possession of the human race, was further elaborated into the picture of the world as a great city. The Greek πόλις, the state, whose equivalent in modern times is not civil but ecclesiastical, was an ideal society, the embodied type of a perfect constitution or organization (σύστημα).[389] Its parts were all interdependent and relative to the whole, the whole was flawless and supreme, working out without friction the divine conception which was expressed in its laws. The world was such an ideal society.[390] It consisted of gods and men: the former were its rulers; the latter, its citizens. The moral law was a reason inherent in human nature, prescribing what men should do, and forbidding what they should not do: human laws were but appendages of it.[391] In this sense man was a “citizen of the world.”[392] To each individual man, as to every other created being, the administrators had assigned a special task. “Thou be Sun: thou hast the power to go on thy circuit and make the year and the seasons, to make fruits grow and ripen, to stir and lull the winds, to warm the bodies of men: go thy way, make thy circuit, and so fulfil thy ministry alike in small things and in great.... Thou hast the power to lead the army to Ilium: be Agamemnon. Thou hast the power to fight in combat with Hector: be Achilles.” To this function of administration the gods were limited. The constitution of the great city was unchangeable. The gods, like men, were, in the Stoical conception, bound by the conditions of things.
“That which is best of all things and supreme,” says Epictetus, “have the gods placed in our power—the faculty of rightly dealing with ideas: all other things are out of our power. Is it that they would not? I for my part think that if they had been able they would have placed the other things also in our power; but they absolutely could not.... For what says Zeus? ‘Epictetus, if it had been possible, I would have made thy body and thy possessions free and unhindered. But as it is, forget not that thy body is not thine, but only clay deftly kneaded. And since I could not do this, I gave thee a part of myself, the power of making or not making effort, the power of indulging or not indulging desire; in short, the power of dealing with all the ideas of thy mind.’”[393]
2. Side by side with this conception of destiny were growing up new conceptions of the nature of the gods. The gods of wrath were passing away. The awe of the forces of nature, of night and thunder, of the whirlwind and the earthquake, which had underlain the primitive religions, was fading into mist. The meaner conceptions which had resulted from a vividly realized anthropomorphism, the malice and spite and intrigue which make some parts of the earlier mythology read like the chronique scandaleuse of a European court, were passing into the region of ridicule and finding their expression only in burlesque. Two great conceptions, the elements of which had existed in the earliest religion, gradually asserted their supremacy. The gods were just, and they were also good. They punished wicked deeds, not by an arbitrary vengeance, but by the operation of unfailing laws. The laws were the expression of the highest conceivable morality. Their penalties were personal to the offender, and the sinner who did not pay them in this life paid them after death. The gods were also good. The idea of their kindness, which in the earlier religion had been a kindness only for favoured individuals, widened out to a conception of their general benevolence.[394] The conception of their forethought, which at first had only been that of wise provision in particular cases, linked itself with the Stoical teleology.[395] The God who was the Reason of the world, and immanent in it, was working to an end. That end was the perfection of the whole, which was also the perfection of each member of the whole. In the sphere of human life, happiness and perfection, misery and imperfection, are linked together. The forethought or “Providence” of God was thus beneficent in regard both to the universe itself and to the individual. It worked by self-acting laws. “There are,” says Epictetus,[396] “punishments appointed as it were by law to those who disobey the divine administration. Whoever thinks anything to be good that is outside the range of his will, let that man feel envy and unsatisfied longing; let him be flattered, let him be unquiet; whoever thinks anything to be evil that is outside the range of his will, let him feel pain and sorrow, let him bemoan himself and be unhappy.” And again: “This is the law—divine and strong and beyond escape—which exacts the greatest punishments from those who have sinned the greatest sins. For what says it? The man who lays claim to the things that do not concern him, let him be a braggart, let him be vainglorious: the man who disobeys the divine administration, let him be mean-spirited, let him be a slave, let him feel grief, and jealousy, and pity; in short, let him bemoan himself and be unhappy.”[397]
There were thus at the beginning of the Christian era two concurrent conceptions of the nature of the superhuman forces which determine the existence and control the activity of all created things, the conceptions of Destiny and of Providence. The two conceptions, though apparently antagonistic, had tended, like all conceptions which have a strong hold upon masses of men, to approach each other. The meeting-point had been found in the conception of the fixed order of the world as being at once rational and beneficent. It was rational because it was the embodiment of the highest reason; and it was beneficent because happiness is incident to perfection, and the highest reason, which is the law of the perfection of the whole, is also the law of the perfection of the parts. There were two stages in this blending of the two conceptions into one: the identification, first of Destiny with Reason;[398] and, secondly, of Destiny or Reason with Providence.[399] The former of these is found in Heraclitus, but is absent from Plato, who distinguishes what comes into being by necessity, from what is wrought by mind: the elaboration of both the former and the latter is due to the Stoics, growing logically out of their conception of the universe as a single substance moved by an inherent law. It was probably in many cases a change rather of language than of idea when Destiny or Reason or Providence was spoken of as God;[400] and yet sometimes, whether by the lingering of an ancient belief or by an intuition which transcended logic, the sense of personality mingles with the idea of physical sequence, and all things that happen in the infinite chain of immutable causation are conceived as happening by the will of God.
3. But over against the conception of a perfect Reason or Providence administering the world, was the fact of the existence of physical pain and social inequality and moral failure. The problems which the fact suggested filled a large place in later Greek philosophy, and were solved in many ways.
The solution was sometimes found in the denial of the universality of Providence. God is the Author only of good: evil is due to other causes.[401] This view, which found its first philosophical expression in the Timæus of Plato, was transmitted, through some of the Platonic schools, to the later syncretist writers who incorporated Platonic elements. In its Platonic form it assumed the existence of inferior agents who ultimately owed their existence to God, but whose existence as authors of evil He permitted or overlooked. In some later forms the view linked itself with Oriental conceptions of matter as inherently evil.
The solution was more commonly found in a denial of the reality of apparent evils. They were all either forms of good, or incidental to its operation or essential to its production. This was the common solution of the Stoics. It had many phases. One view was based upon the teleological conception of nature. The world is marching on to its end: it realizes its purpose not directly but by degrees: there are necessary sequences of its march which seem to us to be evil.[402] Another view, akin to the preceding, was based upon the conception of the world as a whole. In its vast economy there are subordinations and individual inconveniences. Such subordinations and inconveniences are necessary parts of the plan. The pain of the individual is not an evil, but his contribution to the good of the whole. “What about my leg being lamed, then?” says Epictetus,[403] addressing himself in the character of an imaginary objector. “Slave! do you really find fault with the world on account of one bit of a leg? will you not give that up to the universe? will you not let it go? will you not gladly surrender it to the Giver?” The world, in other words, was regarded as an economy (οἰκονομία), like that of a city, in which there are apparent inequalities of condition, but in which such inequalities are necessary to the constitution of the whole.[404]
“What is meant, then,” asks Epictetus, “by distinguishing the things that happen to us as ‘according to nature’ and ‘contrary to nature’? The phrases are used as if we were isolated. For example, to a foot to be ‘according to nature’ is to be clean; but if you consider it as a foot, a member of the body, and not as isolated, it will be its duty both to walk in mud, and to tread on thorns—nay, sometimes even to be cut off for the benefit of the whole body; if it refuse, it is no longer a foot. We have to form a similar conception about ourselves. What are you? A man. If you regard yourself as isolated, it is ‘according to nature’ to live until old age, to be rich, to be in good health; but if you regard yourself as a man, a part of a certain whole, it is your duty, on account of that whole, sometimes to be ill, sometimes to take a voyage, sometimes to run into danger, sometimes to be in want, and, it may be, to die before your time. Why then are you discontented? Do you not know that, as in the example a discontented foot is no longer a foot, so neither are you a man. For what is a man? A member of a city, first the city which consists of gods and men, and next of the city which is so called in the more proximate sense, the earthly city, which is a small model of the whole. ‘Am I, then, now,’ you say, ‘to be brought before a court: is so-and-so to fall into a fever: so-and-so to go on a voyage: so-and-so to die: so-and-so to be condemned?’ Yes; for it is impossible, considering the sort of body we have, with this atmosphere round us, and with these companions of our life, that different things of this kind should not befall different men.[405]
“It is on this account that the philosophers rightly tell us that if a perfectly good man had foreknown what was going to happen to him, he would co-operate with nature in both falling sick and dying and being maimed, being conscious that this is the particular portion that is assigned to him in the arrangement of the universe, and that the whole is supreme over the part, and the city over the citizen.”[406]
This Stoical solution, if the teleological conception which underlies it be assumed, may have been adequate as an explanation both of physical pain and of social inequality. But it was clearly inadequate as an explanation of misery and moral evil. And the sense of misery and moral evil was growing. The increased complexity of social life revealed the distress which it helped to create, and the intensified consciousness of individual life quickened also the sense of disappointment and moral shortcoming. The solution of the difficulties which these facts of life presented, was found in a belief which was correlative to the growing belief in the goodness of God, though logically inconsistent with the belief in the universality of His Providence. It was, that men were the authors of their own misery. Their sorrows, so far as they were not punitive or remedial, came from their own folly or perversity. They belonged to a margin of life which was outside the will of the gods or the ordinances of fate. The belief was repeatedly expressed by Homer, but does not appear in philosophy until the time of the Stoics: it is found in both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and the latter also quotes it as a belief of the Pythagoreans.[407] Out of it came the solution of a problem not less important than that from which it had itself sprung. The conception that men were free to bring ruin upon themselves, led to the wider conception that they were altogether free. There emerged for the first time into prominence the idea which has filled a large place in all later theology and ethics, that of the freedom of the will. The freedom which was denied to external nature was asserted of human nature. It was within a man’s own power to do right or wrong, to be happy or miserable.
“Of all things that are,” says Epictetus,[408] “one part is in our control, the other out of it; in our control are opinion, impulse to do, effort to obtain, effort to avoid—in a word, our own proper activities; out of our control are our bodies, property, reputation, office—in a word, all things except our proper activities. Things in our control are in their nature free, not liable to hindrance in the doing or to frustration of the attainment; things out of our control are weak, dependent, liable to hindrance, belonging to others. Bear in mind, then, that if you mistake what is dependent for what is free, and what belongs to others for what is your own, you will meet with obstacles in your way, you will be regretful and disquieted, you will find fault with both gods and men. If, on the contrary, you think that only to be your own which is really your own, and that which is another’s to be, as it really is, another’s, no one will thwart you, you will find fault with no one, you will reproach no one, you will do no single thing against your will, no one will harm you, you will not have an enemy.”
The incompatibility of this doctrine with that of the universality of Destiny or Reason or Providence—the “antinomy of the practical understanding”—was not always observed.[409] The two doctrines marched on parallel lines, and each of them was sometimes stated as though it had no limitations. The harmony of them, which is indicated by both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and which underlies a large part of both the theology and the ethics of Epictetus, is in effect this: The world marches on to its end, realizing its own perfection, with absolute certainty. The majority of its parts move in that march unconsciously, with no sense of pleasure or pain, no idea of good or evil. To man is given the consciousness of action, the sense of pleasure and pain, the idea of good and evil, and freedom of choice between them. If he chooses that which is against the movement of nature, he chooses for himself misery; if he chooses that which is in accordance with that movement, he finds happiness. In either case the movement of nature goes on, and the man fulfils his destiny: “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.”[410] It is a man’s true function and high privilege so to educate his mind and discipline his will, as to think that to be best which is really best, and that to be avoided which nature has not willed: in other words, to acquiesce in the will of God, not as submitting in passive resignation to the power of one who is stronger, but as having made that will his own.[411]
If a man realizes this, instead of bemoaning the difficulties of life, he will not only ask God to send them, but thank Him for them. This is the Stoical theodicy. The life and teaching of Epictetus are for the most part a commentary upon it.
“Look at the powers you have; and when you have looked at them, say, ‘Bring me, O God, what difficulty Thou wilt; for I have the equipment which Thou hast given me, and the means for making all things that happen contribute to my adornment.’ Nay, but that is not what you do: you sit sometimes shuddering at the thought of what may happen, sometimes bewailing and grieving and groaning over what does happen. Then you find fault with the gods! For what but impiety is the consequence of such degeneracy? And yet God has not merely given you these powers by which we may bear whatever happens without being lowered or crushed by it, but also, like the good King and true Father that He is, has given to this part of you the capacity of not being thwarted, or forced, or hindered, and has made it absolutely your own, not even reserving to Himself the power of thwarting or hindering it.”[412]
“What words are sufficient to praise or worthily describe the gifts of Providence to us? If we were really wise, what should we have been doing in public or in private but sing hymns to God, and bless Him and recount His gifts (τὰς χάριτας)? Digging or ploughing or eating, ought we not to be singing this hymn to God, ‘Great is God for having given us these tools for tilling the ground; great is God for having given us hands to work with and throat to swallow with, for that we grow unconsciously and breathe while we sleep’? This ought to be our hymn for everything: but the chiefest and divinest hymn should be for His having given us the power of understanding and of dealing rationally with ideas. Nay—since most of you are utterly blind to this—ought there not to be some one to make this his special function, and to sing the hymn to God for all the rest? What else can a lame old man like me do but sing hymns to God? If I were a nightingale, I should do the work of a nightingale; if a swan, the work of a swan; but being as I am a rational being, I must sing hymns to God. This is my work: this I do: this rank—as far as I can—I will not leave; and I invite you to join with me in this same song.”[413]