§ 3
The dogmatic teaching of the Stoics on the subject of the human soul is closely bound up with the materialistic pantheism by means of which they explained all the phenomena of life, of being and becoming upon earth. God is All, and divinity is nothing outside this “all”, which forms the world: the Universe is God. God is thus not only the matter but the form, the life and the power of the world. Divinity is the original matter, the etherial Fire, the fiery “breath” which maintains itself or changes and in innumerable metamorphoses creates the world. God is also what supplies a purpose to this world and is the purposeful force—the reason and law of the world. The universal deity which is thus at once matter, mind, and formative principle sends out from itself at varying periods the multiplicity of Appearance and then again at another time takes back the multifarious and the divided into the fiery unity of its own breath of life. Thus, in everything that has shape, in everything that lives and moves, the content and the unifying form is God: he is and works as their “state” in inorganic things, as “nature” in plants, as “irrational soul” in the other living things, as rational and thinking soul in man.[35] [498]
The soul of man, thus endowed with reason, is a fragment of the divine,[36] and is itself divine like everything else in the world but in a purer sense than all other things. It has remained closer to the first and original essence of the divine, conceived as “creative fire” (πῦρ τεχνικών), than the earthly fire which has lost much of its original purity and refinement. It is closer[37] than the lower matter that in all its changeful forms degenerates progressively as it gets farther and farther away from the divine fire by gradual loss of the tension (τόνος) that had once been living and active in the primeval fire; closer even than the material of its own body in which it dwells and rules. As something essentially distinct from the body, then, the individual soul comes into being among the elements of its body when that body is conceived, and it develops its full nature after the birth of the individual.[38] But even in its individual, separate existence it remains incompletely detached from the universal life that is present in it; it remains subject to the “universal Law” of the world, which is God, and fast bound by “fate”, the “destiny” (πεπρωμένη, εἱμαρμένε) which decrees the course of their existence for the totality of all Life and the individual lives.[39] Nevertheless, the soul has its special gifts and special task—it is capable of self-determination and is responsible for its own decisions and acts. Though it is a pure emanation from the universal Reason and bound down to no irrational elements, it has the power of irrational choice and can resolve upon what is evil. Though they have all sprung from one and the same original source the individual souls are of very different character, intellect, and propensity of will. Unreason in thought, will, and conduct is common in the world; those who have real insight are few; in fact, the Wise Man, the man who keeps his own will in complete harmony with the universal and divine direction of the world, is but a picture of imaginary perfection, naturæ humanæ exemplar, never fully and perfectly realized in actual life.
Ethical interests demanded the freedom and independence of the moral personality and its will, which can only fulfil the requirements of duty by self-mastery and the overthrow of base impulses; but this independence was in conflict with the essential principles of Stoic metaphysics. The Stoics taught that the world (and the soul included in it) is only the necessary self-development of a single and absolute Being that excludes all independent and separate multiplicity. Nor could they recognize any principle of Evil, an anti-rational principle answering to the purity of divine power, working [499] evil and suggesting it, and making the individual capable of wilful disobedience to the laws of all-embracing divinity. Pure pantheism, uniting God and the world in indissoluble unity, cannot imagine a real conflict between humanity and divinity; it cannot postulate a principle of Evil through the overthrow of which a lost unity with God is to be restored. Pantheism makes no claims of an ethical or religious kind. The ingenuity of the Stoic doctors was exercised in vain in the attempt to find a way out of this dilemma.[40]
From the very origin of the school two tendencies were discernible in the teaching of the Stoa, derived as that teaching was from such different sources. On the one hand, the ethical doctrine of the Cynics, to whom the Stoics owed the greater part of their practical teaching, threw the individual back upon his own resources and made everything depend upon the determination of his own will. It thus pointed in the direction of the most self-sufficient individualism—to an ethical atomism. The physical doctrine derived from Herakleitos, on the other hand, merged the individual completely into the omnipotence and omnipresence of the All-One; and therefore, as its ethical counterpart, demanded that this relation of the individual to the universal Logos of the world should find expression in a life lived completely ex ductu rationis, in unconditional abandonment of the individual will to the Universal Mind that is the World and God.[41] In actual fact it was Cynicism that had the profounder influence in ethical matters. The universal Law and order of the world, embracing both universe and individual in its absolute decrees, threw its net too widely to be able to answer closely enough to the needs of narrow and individual existence. No practical ethics could possibly unite this distant and final aim with the individual man in a single nexus of ordered self-determination. The intermediate link between the universe and its laws, on the one hand, and the individual with his private will, on the other, had formerly been the Greek polis with its law and custom. But it was a cosmopolitan age, and for the Stoics as well as for the Cynics before them the city-state had lost most of its educative force. The individual saw himself more and more left to his own devices and forced to depend upon his own strength—his life had to be ordered on self-erected standards and guided by self-found rules. Individualism, which gave its tone to the age more decisively than in any past period of Greek life, began to win a footing even in this pantheistic system. The “Wise Man” who is a law to himself in perfect [500] self-determination,[42] and feels himself bound only to those like himself,[43] is individualism’s fairest flower.
But the soul, thus elevated to a height where it was capable of much that was impossible for or only incompletely within the reach of its weaker sisters, began more and more to seem like something rather different from a mere dependent offshoot of the One divine power that is the same everywhere. It is, in fact, regarded as an independent, divine, and self-enclosed creature in those passages where in Stoic literature, as in the older literature of the theologians, the soul is called a “daimon”—the daimon dwelling within the individual man, and given to him as his associate.[44] Death, too, is regarded by this professedly monist system as a separation of soul from body[45] in accordance with what was really a naive or a conscious spiritualism. In death, then, this soul-essence whose independence had been so marked even in life, does not perish with the body—it does not even lose itself again in the One from which it had taken its origin. An infinitely extended individual life is indeed not attributed to the individual souls: only God, the one Soul of the World, is eternally indestructible.[46] But the souls which have arisen by separation from the one and all-embracing divinity, survive the destruction of their bodies: until the final dissolution, in the Conflagration that will make an end of the present period of world-history, they persist in their independent life; either all of them (as was the older teaching of the school) or, as Chrysippos, the master of Stoic orthodoxy, taught the souls of the “Wise” only, while the others have been lost in the general life of the Whole some time previously.[47] The stronger ethical personality is held together in itself for a longer time.[48]
From the point of view of physical science and materialist doctrine[49] it was also hard to see why the soul, composed of pure fire-breath, which even in life had held the body together and had not been held together by the body,[50] should disappear at once when that body was disintegrated. As it had once held the body together, so it might well and all the more easily hold itself together now. Its lightness carries it upwards into the pure air under the moon, where it is fed by the breath that rises upwards and where there is nothing that can put an end to it.[51] An “underworld” region like that of popular imagination and theological teaching, was expressly denied by the Stoics.[52] Their imagination preferred to exercise itself in an imaginary extension of life in the Aether, which was their region of [501] the souls;[53] but as a rule it appears that such flights of fancy were avoided. The life of the souls after death—that of the wise as well as of the unwise—remained indistinct and without content[54] in the imagination of those whose life was still upon earth.
Thus, the doctrine of the soul-personality and its continued existence (never simply expanded into personal immortality), which was in reality not required by the metaphysical principles of Stoicism, and could indeed hardly be reconciled with them, had in fact no serious significance for the general intention and substance of Stoicism—least of all for Stoic ethics and conduct of life. The philosophy of Stoicism is directed to the study of life, not of death. In this life on earth and only here can the purpose of human endeavour—the reproduction of divine wisdom and virtue in the human spirit—be fulfilled in manful contest with contrary impulses, fulfilled, that is, in so far as such a thing is possible for lonely and isolated fragments of divinity.[55]
But virtue is sufficient in itself for the attainment of happiness—a happiness which loses nothing through the brevity of its duration and to which nothing would be added by the prolongation of its span.[56] Nothing in the doctrine of Stoicism points man, or the Wise Man, to another world beyond the life of the body and outside this earthly theatre of conflict and duty, for the fulfilment of his being and his task.