A remarkable passage in Sir H. S. Maine's Rede Lecture for 1875 will force itself upon the attention of all who believe that there are still lessons to be learned from the Greeks by men of the nineteenth century. "Whatever may be the nature and value of that bundle of influences which we call progress," he writes, "nothing can be more certain than that, when a society is once touched by it, it spreads like a contagion. Yet, so far as our knowledge extends, there was only one society in which it was endemic; and putting that aside, no race or nationality, left entirely to itself, appears to have developed any very great intellectual result, except, perhaps, poetry. Not one of those intellectual excellences which we regard as characteristic of the great progressive races of the world—not the law of the Romans, not the philosophy and sagacity of the Germans, not the luminous order of the French, not the political aptitude of the English, not that insight into physical nature to which all races have contributed—would apparently have come into existence if those races had been left to themselves. To one small people, covering in its original seat no more than a hand's-breadth of territory, it was given to create the principle of progress, of movement onward and not backward or downward, of destruction tending to construction. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin. A ferment spreading from that source has vitalized all the great progressive races of mankind, penetrating from one to another, and producing results accordant with its hidden and latent genius, and results of course often far greater than any exhibited in Greece itself."
It may be difficult to form an accurate notion of what the eloquent lecturer meant by progress: it may be easy to object that the secret of progressive growth in politics, at least, was not possessed by the Greeks themselves, and that Christianity, which has certainly moved in this world far more efficiently than any other spiritual force whatever, was as certainly neither one of the blind forces of nature, nor yet Hellenic in its origin. Still, there is a truth in this passage which remains unimpaired. It expresses largely, and without due reservation, perhaps, what the students of the Greeks in relation to the universal history of civilization must feel to be a sweeping truth. The advance of the human intellect is measured by successive points of contact with the Greek spirit—in Rome before the birth of Christ, in Islam during the exhaustion of the Roman Empire, in the schools of Paris and Seville during the Middle Ages, when Averroes and Aristotle kept alive the lamp of science, in Italy at the period of the Renaissance, when Greek philosophy and poetry and art restored life to the senses, confidence to the reason, and freedom to the soul of man. All civilized nations, in all that concerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas. The flame that lives within our Prytaneia was first kindled on Athene's hearth in Attica; and should it burn dim or be extinguished, we must needs travel back to the sacred home of the virgin goddess for fresh fire. This we are continually doing. It is this which has made Greek indispensable in modern education. And at the present moment we may return with profit to the moralists of Greece.
At this point I feel that my former critics will exclaim against me: "This is the very same offence repeated—ignoring the moral inferiority of the Greeks, he holds them up as an example to nations improved by Christianity." I reply that I am far from forgetting the substantial advance made by the world in morality during the last eighteen centuries. The divine life and the precepts of Christ are as luminous as ever; and I, for one, have no desire to replant pseudo-paganism on the modern soil. I know full well that, in addition to its being undesirable, this is utterly impossible. I know, moreover, that new virtues, unrecognized by the Greeks, have been revealed to the world by Christianity, and that a new cogency and new sanctions have been given by it to that portion of ethics which it had in common with Greek philosophy. It is not the morality, but the moral attitude, of the Greeks that seems to my mind worthy of our imitation. In order to make this distinction clear, and to save myself, if that may be, from seeming to advocate a retrograde movement, through sentimental sympathy with impossible anachronisms, or through blind hostility to all that makes our modern life most beautiful, I must be permitted to embark upon a somewhat lengthy exposition of my meaning. With no desire to be aggressive or polemical, I want to show what, in my judgment, even Christians have still to learn from Greeks.
The three points in which the morality of the Greeks was decidedly inferior to that of the modern races were slavery, the social degradation of women, and paiderastia. No panegyrist of the Greeks can attempt to justify any one of these customs, which, it may be said in passing, were closely connected and interdependent in Hellenic civilization. An apologist might, indeed, argue that slavery, as recognized by the Athenians, was superior to many forms of the same evil till lately tolerated by the Christian nations. Mediæval villeinage and Russian serfdom, the Spanish enslavement of Peruvians and Mexicans, and the American slave-trade flourished in spite of the theoretical opposition of Christianity, and have only succumbed to the advance of rational humanity. The same advocate could show, as Mr. Mahaffy has already done, that in Greece there existed a high ideal of womanhood. All students of history will, however, admit that in relation to the three important points above mentioned the Greeks were comparatively barbarous. At the same time it cannot be contended that these defects were the necessary and immediate outcome of the Hellenic philosophy of life. It is rather proper to regard them as crudities and immaturities belonging to an early period of civilization. During the last two thousand years the world has advanced in growth, and its moral improvement has been due to Christian influences. Still the higher standing-ground we have attained, our matured and purified humanity, all that elevates us ethically above the Jews and Greeks, can be ascribed to Christianity without the implication that it is inextricably bound up with Christian theology, or that it could not survive the dissolution of the orthodox fabric. The question before us at the present moment is whether, admitting the comparatively rude ethics of the ancient Greeks and fully recognizing the moral amelioration effected for the human race by Christianity, we, without ceasing to be Christians in all essential points of conduct, may not profitably borrow from the Greeks the spirit which enabled them to live and do their duty in a world whose laws as yet are but imperfectly ascertained. Was there not something permanently valuable in their view of the ethical problem which historical Christianity, especially in its more ascetic phases, tends to overlook, but which approves itself to the reason of men who have been influenced by the rapidly advancing mutations of religious thought during the last three centuries? The real point to ascertain, with regard to ourselves and to them, is the basis upon which the conceptions of morality in either period have rested. Modern morality has hitherto been theological: it has implied the will of a divine governor. Greek morality was radically scientific: the faith on which it eventually leaned was a belief in φύσις, in the order of the universe, wherein gods, human societies, and individual human beings had their proper places. The conception of morality as the law for man, regarded as a social being forming part and parcel of the Cosmos, was implicit in the whole Greek view of life. It received poetical expression from the tragedians; it transpired in the conversations of Socrates, in the speculations of Plato, and in the more organized system of Aristotle. ζῆν κατὰ φύσιν could be written for a motto on the title-page of a collected corpus of Greek moralists. It may be objected that "to live according to nature" is a vague command, and also that it is easier said than done, or, again, that the conception of nature does not essentially differ from that of God who made nature. All that is true; but the ethics whereof that maxim is the sum have this advantage, that they do not place between us and the world in which we have to live and die the will of a hypothetical ruler, to whom we may ascribe our passions and our fancies, enslaving ourselves to the delusions of our own soul. Nor, again, do they involve that monstrous paradox of all ascetic systems, that human nature is radically evil and that only that is good in us which contradicts our natural appetites and instincts. Evil and sin are recognized, just as fevers and serpents are recognized; but while the latter are not referred to a vindictive Creator, so the former are not ascribed to the wilful wickedness of his creatures. In so far as we gain any knowledge of nature, that knowledge is something solid: the whole bearing of a man who feels that his highest duty consists in conforming himself to laws he may gradually but surely ascertain, is certainly different from that of one who obeys the formulas invented by dead or living priests and prophets to describe the nature of a God whom no man has either seen or heard. It makes no difference that the highest religious systems are concordant with the best-established principles of natural science, that the Mosaic ordinances, for example, are based on excellent hygienic rules. That the αἴσθησις of the great Nomothetæ should be verified is both intelligible and, a priori, highly probable. The superiority of scientific over theological morality consists meanwhile in its indestructibility.
The ethics of man regarded as a member of the universe, and answerable only to its order for his conduct, though they underlay the whole thought of the Greeks on moral subjects, did not receive their final exposition till the age of the Roman Stoics. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have, therefore, a peculiar retrospective value, owing to the light they cast upon the ethical perception of the Greek race, while at the same time they illustrate that which is unalterable and indestructible in the spirit of Greek morality. What Marcus Aurelius enunciated as an intuition is what must daily become more binding upon us in proportion as we advance in scientific knowledge. It will not, therefore, be out of place to sketch the main points of his system in a separate paragraph, keeping always in mind that this system was the final outgrowth of Greek speculation after prolonged contact with the Romans. Marcus Aurelius forces to the very utmost a view of human life and duty which could have been but unconsciously implicit in the minds of men of the Periclean age. Yet this view was but the theory logically abstracted from the conduct and the perceptions of a race which started with refined nature-worship, which recognized the duty to the State as paramount, and which put to philosophy the question, What is the end of man?
The central notion of Marcus Aurelius is nature. He regards the universe as a ζῶον, or living creature, animated by a principle of life to which he sometimes gives the title of θεός, or the deity. It is a body with a λόγος, or reason, attaining to consciousness in human beings. Every man participates in the κοινὸς λόγος, or common reason of the Cosmos, a portion of whose wisdom forms his intellect. In other words, our consciousness reflects the order of the universe, and enables us to become more than automatically partakers in its movement. To obey this reason is the end of all philosophy, the fulfilment of the purpose for which man exists. By doing so we are in harmony with the world, and take our proper place in the scale of beings. Nothing can happen to us independent of this order; and therefore nothing, rightly understood, can happen to our hurt. If disease and affliction fall upon us, we must remember that we are the limbs and organs of the whole, and that our suffering is necessary for its well-being. We are thus the citizens of a vast state, members of the universal economy. What affects the whole for good is good for us, and even when it seems to be evil, we must hold fast to the faith that it is good beyond our ken. Our selfishness is swallowed up in the complete and total interest. Our virtues are social and not personal. Our happiness is relative to the general welfare, not contained in any private pleasure or indulgence of an individual caprice.
The motto of this large philosophy is Goethe's often-quoted distich:
Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben.
If we seek a motto for the Imitatio Christi, which may be accepted here as the Christian encheiridion, we find it in the text, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." The author of that manual of conduct regarded the universe not as a coherent whole, good and sound in all its parts, to live in harmony with the laws whereof is the duty of man, but as a machine created out of nothing by the will of God, made fair at first, but changed to foul by sin, wherein men live an evil life, to escape from which brings happiness, to confound the existing laws of which is virtue, and a remedy against the anarchy and tyranny of which can only be found in the cross and death of Christ. To the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, man was not merely a citizen of the dear city of God, but a member, not merely a μέρος, but a μέλος, of the divine life of the universe. To the Christianity of the Imitatio, man was an exile from his home, a wanderer and out of place. It is not my present purpose to push to their ultimate and logical conclusions the divergences between the Stoicism of the Meditations and the Christianity of the Imitatio, but rather to recall attention to the philosophy developed by Marcus Aurelius from his conception of man's place in nature, and to show that the ethics resulting from it are specially adapted to an age in which the scientific habit of mind is the strongest. When the whole mass of new knowledge we are continually accumulating forces upon our consciousness the conviction that humanity is a part of the universal whole, it is impossible to cling to dogmas that start from the assumption of original sin and creation vitiated at the very moment of its commencement. So much of the Christian programme, whatever else is left as indestructible, must be abandoned. Nature, with all its imperfections in the physical and moral orders, both of them to be as far as can be conquered and eradicated, must be accepted as it is, as that which was intended so to be. Nor need we adopt the obsolete tactics of the French deists, or depreciate the essence of Christianity, because a great part of its mythology and metaphysics seems untenable. On the contrary, we may reasonably hold that the most perfect man would live the life of Christ in obedience to the maxims of the Roman emperor, and that Christianity provides us with precisely what was wanting in the Aurelian system. Faith, love, purity, obedience, humility, subordination of self, benevolence—all these are Christian virtues, raised to the height of passionate enthusiasm by their exemplification in the life of Christ. Stoicism stood in need of a criterion. What is reason? what is the true character of truth and goodness? Christianity appears with a criterion which approves itself to our intuitive apprehension. The life of Christ is the perfect life. Learn that, and follow that, and you will reach the height of human nature. To live in harmony with the universe is to live as Christ lived. It is the wrong done in the name of Christ, the figments falsely stamped with Christ's superscription, the follies of Bibliolatry and dogmatic orthodoxy, that must be abjured; and I maintain that in our present mood the best hope of not casting away the wheat together with the chaff, of retaining what is fit for human use in Christianity, consists in first assuming the scientific standpoint of Aurelius.
From this digression on the Aurelian system, regarded as the final word of Græco-Roman morality, I pass to a consideration of those urgent needs of modern thought which have to be met in the spirit and with the courage of Mark Antonine. Not his theism, nor his metaphysic, nor his detailed maxims for conduct, but his attitude and temper have to be adopted. And here it must be said once more, by way of preface, that however human progress is ruled by thesis and antithesis, by antagonism and repulsion in its several moments, still nothing can be lost that has been clearly gained. Each synthesis, though itself destined to apparent contradiction, combines the indestructible, the natural and truly human, elements of the momenta which preceded it, excluding only that in them which was the accident of time and place and circumstance. Thus the Greek conception of life was posed; the Christian conception was counterposed; the synthesis, crudely attempted in the age of the Renaissance, awaits mature accomplishment in the immediate future. The very ground-thought of science is to treat man as part of the natural order—not, assuredly, on that account excluding from its calculation the most eminent portion of man, his reason and his moral being—and to return from the study of nature with profit to the study of man. It does not annihilate or neutralize what man has gained from Christianity; on the contrary, the new points of morality developed by the Christian discipline are of necessity accepted as data by the scientific mind. Our object is to combine both the Hellenic and the Christian conceptions in a third, which shall be more solid and more rational than any previous manifestation of either, superior to the Hellenic as it is no longer a mere intuition, superior to the ecclesiastical inasmuch as it relies on no mythology, but seeks to ascertain the law.