This moral gymnastic, it was thought, was often best practised away from a man’s old associations. Consequently some philosophers advised their students to leave home and study elsewhere. They went into “retreat,” either in another city or in solitude. Against this also there was a reaction. In a forcible oration on the subject, Dio Chrysostom argues, as a modern Protestant might argue, against the monastic system.[250] “Cœlum non animum mutant,” he says, in effect, when they go from city to city. Everywhere a man will find the same hindrances both within and without: he will be only like a sick man changing from one bed to another. The true discipline is to live in a crowd and not heed its noise, to train the soul to follow reason without swerving, and not to “retreat” from that which seems to be the immediate duty before us.
The extent to which moral discipline and the system of “retreats” went on is uncertain, because they soon blended, as we shall see, with Christianity, and flowed with it in a single stream.
(2) But out of the ideas which they expressed, and the ideals which they held forth, there grew up a class of men which has never since died out, who devoted themselves “both by their preaching and living” to the moral reformation of mankind. Individual philosophers had had imitators, and Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school, but neither the one nor the other had filled a large place in contemporary society. With the revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,” says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings.”[251]
The distinction was marked in two chief ways:
(1) A philosopher let his beard grow, like the old Spartans. It was a protest against the elaborate attention to the person which marked the fashionable society of the time.
(2) A philosopher wore a coarse blanket, usually as his only dress. It was at once a protest against the prevalent luxury in dress and the badge of his profession. “Whenever,” says Dio Chrysostom, “people see one in a philosopher’s dress, they consider that he is thus equipped not as a sailor or a shepherd, but with a view to men, to warn them and rebuke them, and to give not one of them any whit of flattery nor to spare any one of them, but, on the contrary, to reform them as far as he possibly can by talking to them and to show them who they are.”[252]
The frequency with which this new class of moral reformers is mentioned in the literature of the time shows the large place which it filled.
2. The moral reformation affected the contents of ethical teaching chiefly by raising them from the sphere of moral philosophy to that of religion. In Epictetus there are two planes of ethical teaching. The one is that of orthodox and traditional Stoicism: in the other, Stoicism is transformed by the help of religious conceptions, and the forces which led to the practice of it receive the enormous impulse which comes from the religious emotions. The one is summed up in the maxim, Follow Nature; the other in the maxim, Follow God.
On the lower plane the purpose of philosophy is stated in various ways, each of which expresses the same fact. It is the bringing of the will into harmony with nature. It consists in making the “dealing with ideas” what it should be, that is, in dealing with them according to nature.[253] It is the thorough study of the conceptions of good and evil, and the right application of them to particular objects.[254] It is the endeavour to make the will unthwarted in its action,[255] to take sorrow and disappointment out of a man’s life,[256] and to change its disturbed torrent into a calm and steady stream. The result of the practice of philosophy is happiness.[257] The means of attaining that result are marked out by the constitution of human nature itself and the circumstances which surround it. That nature manifests itself in two forms, desires to have or not to have, efforts to do or not to do.[258] The one is stimulated by the presentation to the mind of an object which is judged to be “good,” the other by that of one which is judged to be “fitting.” The one mainly concerns the individual man in himself, the other concerns him in his relations with other men. The “state according to nature” of desire is that in which it never fails of gratification, the corresponding state of effort is that in which it never fails of its mark. Both the one and the other are determined by landmarks which nature itself has set in the circumstances that surround us. The natural limits of desire are those things that are in our power: the direction of effort is determined by our natural relations.
For example:[259]