It will be found on a closer examination that the age in which Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral reformation. There was the growth of a higher religious morality, which believed that God was pleased by moral action rather than by sacrifice.[232] There was the growth of a belief that life requires amendment.[233] There was a reaction in the popular mind against the vices of the great centres of population. This is especially seen in the large multiplication of religious guilds, in which purity of life was a condition of membership: it prepared the minds of men to receive Christian teaching, and forms not the least important among the causes which led to the rapid dissemination of that teaching: it affected the development of Christianity in that the members of the religious guilds who did so accept Christian teaching, brought over with them into the Christian communities many of the practices of their guilds and of the conceptions which lay beneath them. The philosophical phase of the reformation began on the confines of Stoicism and Cynicism. For Cynicism had revived. It had almost faded into insignificance after Zeno and Chrysippus had formed its nobler elements into a new system, and left only its “dog-bark”[234] and its squalor. But when the philosophical descendants of Zeno and Chrysippus had become fashionable littérateurs, and had sunk independence of thought and practice in a respectability and “worldly conformity” which the more earnest men felt to be intolerable, Cynicism revived, or rather the earlier and better Stoicism revived, to re-assert the paramount importance of moral conduct, and to protest against the unnatural alliance between philosophy and the fashionable world.
It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.[235] In him, whether he be called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once their loftiest expression and their most complete realization: and it will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his sermons speak for themselves.
The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching.
1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic, which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant, was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but they were ceasing to regard the actual “living according to nature” as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over literary knowledge. It was at first crude and repulsive. If the Stoics were “the preachers of the salon,” the Cynics were “the preachers of the street.”[236] They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence, the squalor was accidental. The former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave it a new impulse: the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they said.[237] Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic philosophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual conditions of the world as it is. The state of human nature is such, that to linger upon the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor. The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits, and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and evil. While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old familiar names of “good” and “evil,” with all the false ideas which they suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end, with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns the theory of them. His progress in philosophy must be measured by his progress, not in knowledge, but in moral conduct.
This view, which Epictetus preaches again and again with passionate fervour, will be best stated in his own words:[238]
“A man who is making progress, having learnt from the philosophers that desire has good things for its object and undesire evil things,—having learnt moreover that in no other way can contentment and dispassionateness come to a man than by his never failing of the object of his desire and never encountering the object of undesire,—banishes the one altogether, or at least postpones it, while he allows the other to act only in regard to those things which are within the province of the will. For he knows that if he strives not to have things that are without the province of the will, he will some time or other encounter some such things and so be unhappy. But if what moral perfection professes is to cause happiness and dispassionateness and peace of mind, then of course progress towards moral perfection is progress towards each one of the things which moral perfection professes to secure. For in all cases progress is the approaching to that to which perfection finally brings us.
“How is it, then, that while we admit this to be the definition of moral perfection, we seek and show off progress in other things? What is the effect of moral perfection?
“‘Peace of mind?’
“Who then is making progress towards it? He who has read many treatises of Chrysippus? Surely moral perfection does not consist in this—in understanding Chrysippus: if it does, then confessedly progress towards moral perfection is nothing else than understanding a good deal of Chrysippus. But as it is, while we admit that moral perfection effects one thing, we make progress—the approximation to perfection—effect another.
“‘This man,’ some one tells us, ‘can now read Chrysippus even by himself.’