(4) In Epicurus (B. C. 341–270) and his followers eudæmonism descended into hedonism. The supreme good is happiness in the sense of personal enjoyment, pleasure. The universe, without theistic ground, was regarded as eternal, forever evolving in fortuitous concourse of atoms. It is without rational order, design, or government. The human soul is material, and at death men cease to be. The good of life consists in the avoidance of pain and the securing of pleasure. The pleasure may be intellectual or sensuous and gross, as men may prefer. The pursuit of it is the highest virtue and best wisdom. Enjoyment is the end of life. The whole question of ethics thus came to be a calculation and balancing of pains and pleasures, and the cardinal virtue prudent selfishness. It was complete subjectivism.
(5) In Stoicism (founded by Zeno of Citium, about 308 B. C.) we have a view that, in its principal features, was in strong contrast with Epicureanism. It arose in close relation to the teaching of Socrates. But it taught that "happiness" was not necessary, and should never be made the end of endeavor. Virtue itself was the highest good, and to be sought for its own sake. Itself was sufficient for happiness—not because it could make men insensible to pain or pleasure, but because it made them superior to it. Virtue was immutably excellent in itself, a permanent reality for man's realization, and subordinated everything else. It consisted essentially in living "according to nature,"[47] i. e. not simply in harmony with one's self, but with the nature of the universe, with the whole constitution of the world as ordained and ruled by God, of which a man's own nature forms a part. The stress was not at all to be laid on self, but upon the great total of being. Man exists for society, and virtue is impossible apart from the social state. So Stoic teaching inculcated subordination of self to more general interests—to family, country, mankind. It taught that all creatures are "children of one father,"[48] and duty was owed to all. We may hardly, however, speak of this as "altruism," in the sense of unselfish benevolence or self-sacrificing goodness; since, in the general Stoic philosophy, not the sentiment of sympathetic helpfulness, but of victorious superiority to pain, was the temper fostered. Love was almost submerged in the stern spirit of duty. The blessedness of virtue was to stand independent of the sufferings which befell men. In fact the dreadful inexorableness of fate (εἱμαρμένῃ [Greek: heimarmenê]), conceived by the Stoic philosophy as eternally embracing the life of both God and nature, gave to virtue, not so much the temper of free, loving obedience to either God or righteousness, as the sternness of a proud intellectual resoluteness in yielding, for virtue's sake, to the inevitable in the fate-bound universe. Under this conception the Stoic moral obedience could never rise to the free joyousness that belongs to the obedient life under the light of the Christian truth that God is love—eternal love, ruling in absolute freedom and desiring to exalt His children to the perfect holiness to which alone happiness forever belongs.
All these Greek theories, except the Stoic, are thus seen to have been marked by two features. First, they dissolved "the right," which alone has direct authority and forms moral law, into "the good," which is simply something offered to us as an object of desire, but which has no "imperative" for the conscience, and may be innocently foregone. Secondly, despite the clear better implications supplied to them in their accepted theistic conceptions of the world, they failed to define distinctly any grounding of the moral law on anything higher or more permanent than the subjective elements of the human constitution. For, even Plato's objective basing of it, for citizen duty, on the law of the state, assumed only a subjective basis in the person of the ruler himself. The Stoic theory, however, had glimpses of some higher and broader ground, though it failed to see it truly.
Roman Teaching.
6. The Roman moralists adopted substantially the doctrine of the Greek Stoics. This was finely exhibited and commended, especially by Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But we have no new theory among the Roman philosophers.
After the establishment of Christianity, whose progress thenceforward determined and marked the intellectual activity and advancing philosophy and culture of mankind, the discussion of ethics became simply a part of theology. And according to the spirit and method of theology in the early Church and during the middle ages, even down to modern times, the discussion was not philosophical, but biblical. It was concerned simply to set forth human duty, especially the duties of the Christian life, as taught in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Resting the moral law upon revealed divine authority, it paid small attention to the question of its metaphysical validation. But when modern philosophy began its investigations, it of necessity soon came upon this point, and inquired after the natural basis or ultimate ground of the great law whose unique authority both the sacred Scriptures and the moral consciousness of men agreed in asserting.
Divine Absolutism.
7. Modern theories begin with that of Divine absolutism—making the moral law, like physical laws, only a product of God's will. It makes it rest absolutely optional in His sovereignty of choice. It not only seeks no ulterior reason, or logical prius, for his choice, but distinctly disconnects it from any. God's will is not the expression or revelation, but the originator, of the moral distinction, constituting it, with its obligatoriness, as He has done, when He might have constituted it otherwise, even the very contrary. He determined "the right" according to no norm, but as creating and establishing a norm. Whether there should be any moral distinction and what it should be, was a matter of the divine choice. The view is a one-sided conception of God's sovereignty. It was set forth by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and René Descartes (1596–1650), and has found prominent advocacy frequently since. But it collides with both sound theology and an adequate moral philosophy.
(1) It fails to recognize any eternal essential moral character in God Himself. The interests of both morality and religion require faith in Him as Himself eternally the righteous and holy creator and moral ruler, in His immutable nature. The morally good can not be something "contingent," but must be absolute, irrepealable and irreversible even by God. We need for both religion and character, to hold fast to the great truth which represents God in His moral will as choosing righteousness as righteousness, loving the "morally good as good"[49]—not as by mere will originating the moral distinction and fixing a code of conduct upon arbitrary ordination. For real moral character in God we must go even further and regard Him as loving righteousness, not simply as good in Himself, but as good in itself, good by the immutable quality of its own nature. For a moral government we must have a moral governor. And God can be such, not by enforcing responsibility to an arbitrary code, but by ruling according to distinctions that are per se supreme in eternal reason—enforcing not a mere rule of power but of essential rightness.
(2) Further, the action of the conscience itself, in discerning right and wrong where it has received no information as to the will of God, implies that the distinction is rationally based. To discern it is not always conditioned on such information. Reason itself—the human in the image of the divine—in some degree reveals the right. So clear is this discernment, and so independent of all "contingency" does the right appear, that even pagan writers have been wont to make virtue superior even to the displeasure of the gods, nobly standing self-approved.[50]