§ 5
Stoicism had a long and vigorous life. More than ever during the first and second centuries of our era did it fulfil its real task of acting as a practical guide to conduct, not as a mere museum of dead erudition. It made good its claim to provide its adherents with the autonomous freedom and independence of a mind at peace with itself, whose virtue was proof against the tribulation and failure of life, and not corrupted by its plenty. It was not always blind imitation of a literary fashion or the love of displaying virtuous paradoxes that attracted the noblest of the higher Roman aristocracy to the doctrines of Stoicism. Not a few of them guided their lives in accordance with its principles and even died for their convictions. Not entirely “without tragic emotion”, as the Stoic Emperor would prefer it, but at any rate with conscious and deliberate purpose—not in mere unreasoning stubbornness[63]—did these Stoic martyrs go to their death. Nor was it the unquestioned certainty of a continued life in a higher existence that made them so ready to give up life upon this earth.[64] Each in the special manner dictated to him by his own temperament and the circumstances of his life, they still speak to us, these leaders of Roman Stoicism—Seneca the philosophic director of the world’s conscience, Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, and those instructors and patterns of the aspiring youth of Rome, Musonius and Epictetus. The eager and unswerving effort of these wise men to educate themselves to the attainment of freedom and peace, of purity and goodness of heart, wins our admiration—not least in the case of Seneca in whom the struggle for self-mastery and philosophic calm must have been a continual war with his own too-receptive and imaginative nature. But just as they looked for no supernatural helper and redeemer but trusted to the power of their own spirit for the assurance of success, so they required no promise of a future crowning of their labours in an after-life of the soul. The whole scope of their endeavour lies within the limits of this world. The old Stoic belief in the continued life of the individual soul until the annihilation of all separate creation in the World Conflagration[65] is regarded at the best as one possibility among many[66]—it is perhaps but a “beautiful dream”.[67] But whether death is a transition to another form of being or a complete termination of individual life—to the wise man it is equally welcome, for he measures the value of life not by the number [504] of its years but by the richness of its content. At bottom Seneca is inclined to the view that death is the end of all things for man, after which “everlasting peace” awaits the restless spirit.[68]
The Stoic Emperor is uncertain whether death is a dissipation of the elements of the soul (as the atomists teach) or whether the mind survives in a conscious or an unconscious existence that must yet disappear eventually in the life of the Whole. All things are in perpetual flux—so the Law of the universe has willed it—nor shall the human personality maintain itself untouched and unchanged. But even supposing that death is a “putting out” of his small individual candle, the wise man is not afraid: to the melancholy that is the prevailing mood of his gentle, pure, and high-strung character Death, the annihilator, seems to beckon like a friend.[69]
The tougher spirit of the Phrygian slave and freedman needed no conviction of personal survival to enable him to face the battle of earthly life with courage and intrepidity. What has been made must be unmade: without hesitation and without regret the wise man gives himself up to the laws of the rationally-ordered universe in which the present must make way for the future—not indeed to be lost entirely, but to be changed and to merge its individuality, its unimportant self in new manifestations of the creative stuff of Life. The Whole does not perish, but its parts change and alter their relations among themselves.[70] The pantheistic principles of the school which had been taken over from Herakleitos and which made it permanently inconceivable that the diminutive individual spark of life could achieve a lasting separation from the central fiery mass, had become a settled conviction. The passionate abandonment of the personal, short-lived self to the everlasting Whole and One had become a fixed habit of mind. No longer did it seem intolerable that the individual existence should pass away after a brief span of life; it was possible to remain a Stoic and yet assert expressly, like Cornutus the teacher of Persius, that with the death of its body there is an end, too, of the individual soul.[71]