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.
§ 4
The limited doctrine of immortality which, as we have seen, was not an essential part of the teaching of Stoicism, began to be called in question as soon as the rigid dogmatism of the school was subjected to the too-searching criticism of other schools of thought. In the clash of opinions Stoicism began to be doubtful of the absolute validity of its own teaching. The boundaries of orthodox doctrine once so firmly drawn now became more fluid; exchange and even compromise became common. Panaitios, the first writer among the pedantic professors of Stoicism to achieve a wider popularity for his writings, became the teacher and friend of those aristocratic Romans who found in Greek philosophy the impulse to a humanism that the barren soil of Rome could never have produced unaided. And Panaitios differed in more than one point from the strict orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. For him the soul is formed of two distinct elements[57]—it is no longer simple and undivided, but [502] compounded of “Nature” and “Soul” (in the narrower sense).[58] In death these two elements separate and change into other forms. The soul having had its origin at a particular point in past time now perishes in time. Being capable of grief and subject to the destructive influence of the emotions it falls a victim at last to its own pains. Panaitios, while remaining a Stoic, taught the dissolution of the soul, its death and simultaneous destruction with the death of the body.[59]
His pupil Poseidonios, who as a writer possessed an even greater influence than Panaitios with the great majority of cultivated readers who belonged to no special school of thought, returned to the older Stoic doctrine of the simple and undivided nature of the soul as fiery breath. He distinguished three faculties but not three separate and independent elements in the human soul, and as a consequence of this view had no further need to believe in the dissolution of the soul into its component parts at death. He also denied the origin of the individual soul in time, from which the doctrine of its destruction in time had seemed to follow by a logical necessity. He returned to the old theological idea of the pre-existence of the soul, its life since the beginning of the created world; and could therefore go on to assert its continued existence after death—at least till the time of the next destruction of the World at the hands of omnipotent Fire.[60]
It was not an inward and private necessity that led to this transformation of the old teaching of the School. Doubts and criticisms levelled at it from outside—from the Sceptics in particular—had necessitated the change. While some gave up the struggle, others sought refuge in a re-arrangement of the figures of the dialectical game and by the introduction of fresh characters.[61] Immortality might be abandoned to criticism or reaffirmed in either case with equal indifference. The Platonic and poetic version of Stoicism provided by Poseidonios may have found a wider response among the readers of a highly cultivated society who felt the need of a doctrine of immortality more as a satisfaction to the artistic fancy than from any deeper or more temperamental causes. Cicero, the most eloquent representative of the Hellenized Roman culture of the time, may perhaps give us a picture of the refined and æsthetic partiality with which these ideas were taken up. In the Dream of Scipio and the first book of the Tusculans, he gives an account, mainly based on Poseidonios, of the belief then held of a continued life of the soul in the divine element of the Aether.[62] [503]