1. First, did the Greek philosophy teach the unity of the Godhead? If by this question be meant, did philosophy ever go forth into the midst of the temples and smoking sacrifices with which every city teemed, and proclaim, These gods which you worship are no gods: there is one Maker and Ruler of the universe, and the homage due to him alone is usurped by a multitude of pretended deities;—then there is no doubt about the answer, [pg 461] that this is what neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno, nor any other philosopher thought of doing. The philosophic god was never set in the forefront of the battle after this fashion. He dwelt in the most secret shrine of Plato's mind, hard to be discovered, and to be confessed, if at all, in secret. If with Aristotle he was a pure spirit, yet he abode apart from the world, working on it indeed, as the magnet on the iron, but unconscious of it, not ruling it with free will.[449] And, save so far as this is an exception, the Greek mind from beginning to end never succeeded in absolutely separating God from matter. And as time went on, this original defect showed itself more and more, until in the stoic system, which, as to the conception of the power ruling the world, prevailed over all the rest, that which was called God was simply a force pervading all matter.[450] The Stoics could, indeed, as in the hymn of Cleanthes, invest this god of theirs with many beautiful, grand, and attractive attributes. His was almighty power;[451] he was the author of nature; [pg 462] he ruled all things with law; and the world willingly obeyed his will. And this common law passed through all things, so that evil mixed with good resulted in a general order. Thus they could address him as Father and as King, guiding all things with justice; and this being they termed Jupiter. But this is only a poetic[452] exhibition of their genuine thought and meaning, which was, that “all which was real was corporeal; matter and force are the two chief principles; matter in itself is motionless and formless, but capable of assuming every motion and every form. Force is the active, moving, and forming principle; it is indivisibly joined with matter: the operating force in the whole of the world is the Godhead.”[453] “By the names World-soul, World-reason, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Fate, the same thing is indicated, the one Primal Force determining everything with absolute regularity, interpenetrating the whole world.” And even the opposition between the material and the spiritual description of the Godhead disappears upon closer examination, for on Stoic principles the Godhead can only then be considered as real when considered as body.[454] It was to such a unity that Greek philosophy [pg 463] advanced, receding more and more from that imperfect conception of personality with which it had started. Further, the idea of creation is wanting to Greek philosophy from its beginning to its end. The power which it contemplates is evermore confronted with matter, which it can permeate, fashion, move through a natural alchemy of endless changes, but in face of which it is not free to create or not to create, not even free to prevent the evil which lies therein as a sort of blind necessity. As there was always Force, so was there always Matter. To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the conception of personality—that is, of self-consciousness and moral freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness—was imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the polytheistic worship. And again, neither he, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno showed any inclination to suffer for their doctrines. This philosophic god, gradually evolved by the reasoning mind, produced the very smallest effect upon the unphilosophic world. The stoic argument from final causes, which Cicero has preserved for us, and the force of which he [pg 464] has acknowledged in very remarkable words,[455] generated no martyrs. Was it merely from want of earnestness that the philosophers tolerated and practised the polytheism which surrounded them, and avoided all suffering for their opinions by compliance with a worship which they disbelieved? or was it that their standing-ground, in all more or less pantheistic, was identical with that which they impugned?[456] that the gods of Olympus were powers of nature personified, while their god was simply one power inhabiting nature? that they never reached the one personal creating God, and were consequently unable to maintain his absolute distinction from the world together with his relation to it as Creator and Ruler? That which they cherished as a private philosophical good, which they cared so little to exhibit to the world, was in fact incapable of conquering the world, for the human heart cannot live upon an impersonal god, and will not suffer for a conception of the reason. But it was in this conception [pg 465] that philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked, and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems.
2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and which that [pg 466] reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably bound up [pg 467] with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the philosophic mind was dark and confused.
But if the Greek's physical theory stood in the way of his conceiving clearly the human personality in this life, much more did it impede his conception of that personality as continuing after death. For as the union of a portion of the divine reason with matter constituted man, and as death put an end to that union, the compound being ceased to exist, the portion of the divine reason reverted to its source, but the sensitive soul, as well as the body, was dissolved and came to nothing. There was in his mind no “individual substance of a rational nature” to form the basis of identity, and maintain the conception of personality. In the absence of this, he who had felt, thought, and acted, was no more. He could not therefore receive retribution for his deeds, since there was no personal agent on whom the retribution was to fall.
3. A god who was not personal and did not make man,—man in whom freewill, the mark of personality, was not recognised, so long as he lived, and in whom after death no personal agent continued to exist,—these correspond to each other, and these were the last result of Græco-Roman philosophic thought up to the time of Claudius. But what sort of duty did man, being such, owe to such a god? Cicero's book on Offices had been written upwards of eighty years, but nothing [pg 468] that followed it during that time equalled it in reputation or ability. It was the best product that his Roman thought could draw from all the preceding Grecian schools: and it was accepted for centuries as the standard of heathen morality. Let us, then, first note that in this book[457] there is nothing like a recognition of God as the Creator and Common Father; no call upon the human soul to love him as such, and for his own perfections; no thought that the duty of man consists in becoming like to him, nor his reward in attaining that likeness. The absence of such a thought gives its character to the whole book, and measures its level. The second point to be noted is, that the happiness of man consists not in being like God, and consequently, in union with him, but in virtue, which is living according to nature. In his reasonable nature everyone possesses a sufficient standard of moral action under every circumstance which may arise. Thirdly, throughout the whole of his treatise Cicero makes no use of the doctrine of man's immortality. His happiness, then, is left to consist in virtue—life according to reason, which again is life according to nature—without respect to any future state of existence. Now, if Cicero stood alone in these three points, his book would only represent his [pg 469] own authority, but he is in fact the mouthpiece herein of that whole preceding heathen philosophy which he criticised, and from which he selected. Even Plato himself, by far the highest and best of Greek philosophers in this respect, though he had in single expressions indicated that the happiness of man was to be made like to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception, which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe. Plato's ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;” and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”[458] but then this God is but a [pg 470] name for the sternest and most absolute system of material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero's statement that man's happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.
4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds of any particular nation, and man's civil position therein, philosophy grasped [pg 471] the moral life as the relation between man as man,[459] and conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men, it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the proper merit of the Stoics.[460] Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns, each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for instance:[461] “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is the common possession of reason,[462] “in which consists the primal society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to belong [pg 472] to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.[463]
Greek philosophy has undoubtedly the merit of bringing out into clear conception this purely human and natural society. It thus expressed in [pg 473] language the work of Alexander, and still more the work of the Roman empire, as it was to be; and more than this, it herein supplied a point of future contact with Christian morality. The advance from the narrowness of the Greek mind in its proud rejection of all non-hellenic nations, and no less from the revolting selfishness of Roman conquest, is remarkable. And it is an advance of philosophic thought. As the older thinkers considered the political life of the city to be an immediate demand of human nature, so the Stoics considered the unitedness of man as a whole together, the dilatation of the particular political community to the whole race, in the same light. Its ground was the common possession of reason. The common law which ruled this human commonwealth was to live according to the dictation of reason, that is, according to nature, in which therefore virtue consists,[464] being one and the same in God and in man, and in them alone.[465] Such virtue branches into four parts, the prudence which discerns and practises the truth; the justice which assigns his own to each; the courage which prevails over all difficulties; the self-restraint and order which preserves temperance in all things. These being bound up together cover the whole moral domain, and embrace all those relations [pg 474] within which human society moves, and, as having their root in the moral nature of man, are a duty to everyone.
This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man's obedience to nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be complete in itself; it was the work of man without any assistance on the part of God.[466] It made man equal to God. It found its reward in itself. If it was objected that the highest virtue in this life sometimes met with the greatest disasters, sorrows, pains, and bereavements, the system had no reply to this mystery. It did not attempt to assert a recompense beyond the grave.
As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between man's reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better and choice of the worse part stood before the [pg 475] Stoic as before us all. He admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why, if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature; why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every individual.[467]
The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme: but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism [pg 476] which requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man's conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of self-destruction. They termed it in truth The Issue,[468] when disease, or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.
While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the whole earth as one city[469] was a true result of Greek thought, and at the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved suffering so often falling upon virtue in [pg 477] the present life. When that conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete realisation in another.