Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

by T. W. Rolleston

Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,

and though the mark itself may, indeed must, shift and be transformed with the ripening insight of man, yet, as between it and the temptations of sense, conscience must always be obeyed. Now as nature is organically one, we should expect to find this truth not dependent merely on an intuitive perception but written in the experiences of life. And is not this exactly what we do find? The ethical ideals of Judaism, of Hinduism, and of Roman Catholicism, with their extreme reliance on external observance and ritual, are lower, no doubt, than those of Christianity as conceived, say, by St. Paul. Yet let a Jew or a Hindu turn Christian, or a Catholic turn Protestant or Freethinker, for the mere sake of material advantages or an easier way of living, and a general moral deterioration seems at once to set in.[149] Whenever a man allows his sense of personal ease and gratification to overpower his sense of what is due to his fellow man, to his own higher self, to his God, he weakens his will and his capacity for living the nobler life. Ultimately he destroys the capacity altogether, and with it vanishes even that for which he sinned, the capacity for pleasure itself. The poison of self-indulgence will slacken and corrupt every fibre of his moral and physical being. To grasp at pleasure indiscriminately, recklessly, greedily is a way that makes not for life but death. On the other hand, the capacity for renunciation and self-control, the following of the law of love, the passion for justice and equality, not only grow strong by exercise but, far from injuring the other capacities which it may, on occasion, be right to suppress for their sake, they rather intensify these. As self-indulgence corrupts and fatigues the whole man, even on the self-indulgent side, so duty and righteousness vitalize and brace the whole man, both on their own side and the other. For Nature is one—sweet and mighty are the powers which conspire to create the harmony she loves in the spirits faithful to her world-wide revelation.

Now since the moral faculties bear this common stamp upon them, that they are those which oppose to the temptations of personal gratification the sense of duty to something outside ourselves, and since, when these two clash, the claim of the moral law is always to be obeyed, it is inevitable that men will sometimes take the denial of personal gratification for an end per se and attach to it a notion of peculiar holiness and purity. And this error will be intensified by the ancient and inveterate habit of regarding the Supreme Being as a malignant Power, to be propitiated by suffering. Thus we get the false sanction with its Ascetic ideal which has appeared so often in history. It is the other extreme to licence, and rests equally on disregard for the rational ideal of Sophrosyne or Temperance which lies between them. Yet it may truly be said that asceticism has its due place in the world. The ascetic life cannot indeed be the ideal life for any one who holds that plenitude of life is the true ideal. But it may be the best life for this or that individual. A nature maimed or scathed from birth, or by unhappy fortune, may best be able to realize itself in complete withdrawal from the interests of ordinary social life. Such withdrawal may also be necessary for the pioneer or leader of a cause, for a great reformer, for a teacher absorbed in his mission.

Philosophy, in fact, has its saints and ascetics as well as any religion that rests on extra-natural sanctions. But in each case the ascetic ideal rests on quite a different basis.

Looking broadly at the part which religious Orders have played in the religious and intellectual history of Europe, it may well be doubted whether even the most gracious and human figure in the history of asceticism, Francis of Assisi, would not have better served his time and land by the natural development, in secular life and activity, of the beautiful if sometimes wildly ebullient character portrayed in the records of his youth, than by cutting away half his life in order to force the other half into a distorted rarity. In recognizing the beauty and sweetness of his nature let us not be misled into attributing it in any degree to the influence of that fatal miasma from a faith more ancient than any religion which has a name and place on earth to-day, the dim terror of the unseen which has embodied itself for ages in expiatory sacrifices and rites of blood and pain.

Had Francis not been a saint he would certainly have been one of his country’s greatest poets.[150] Different minds will probably estimate differently the loss and gain. As a poet he produced the ‘Canticle of the Sun’; as an ascetic, the Franciscan Order. Now it is fair to point out that this, like other Orders of his church, must not be judged by what it is like in times when it is surrounded by watchful and by no means adorant eyes. A Catholic religious Order in a Catholic country naturally lives and moves in an atmosphere of veneration. To preserve this atmosphere pure from the sceptical thought which, from the monastic point of view, would vitiate it so dangerously, is naturally a prime object of every religious community; hence the bigotries, superstitions, and tyrannies of which these communities have so often been the sources or agents, from the days of Hypatia to the days of Dreyfus. Such communities, developing themselves under such circumstances, cannot attract many men of intellect and character to join them. They rapidly deteriorate, and European literature from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Erasmus shows us the repute in which they come to be held by the uncloistered intellect. A false ideal may stimulate, but it poisons. St. Francis, dreaming that he serves God by making himself blind to God’s world through a course of pitiless austerities,[151] produces an Order whose licence in one generation after his death has become a scandal to Christendom.[152]

Let us turn now to the theory of asceticism as conceived by the humane and rational spirit of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus—to my mind the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity—has a valuable and carefully reasoned chapter on the subject in his Dissertations. In reading this after, let us say, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, one seems to pass from the drugged atmosphere of a mediæval church to the free air and sunlight of the world. The ascetic, or Cynic as he was called in Stoic phraseology, is painted for us as a man who adventures himself to the extreme limit of abnegation, not from any mystic sentiment of the holiness of pain and poverty, but simply to help himself and others to realize the soul’s independence of external things. It was a cardinal doctrine of Stoicism (as it was of the Christianity of Christ) that the things which a man wrought and thought, the things under the control of his will, were the only things that really mattered. What happened to a man from outside was, indeed, of great importance in regard to how he dealt with it; in itself it was of none; it was like a ball in a game which you have to do your best to catch, knowing well that you do so not for the sake of the ball but of the game. Such was the Stoic view of life, and the Cynic represented not the perfected Stoic, not an ideal towards which all should tend—for the ideal was that of citizenship and well-ordered social life—but simply the method of verification which consists in taking an extreme case and showing that one’s theory will fit in with it. And so Diogenes lived in a barrel instead of a house, and asked nothing of Alexander except to stand out of his light. It is not more pleasing to God, not better in any way, that a man should live in a barrel rather than in a house, that he should be single rather than married, poor rather than rich; yet in the chances and changes of this mortal life all these things may happen to a man, will he, nill he, and the point is to show that he may still be confident and cheerful, knowing that his true self is untouched by these calamities. And while St. Francis and the more devoted of his followers so tortured and wrecked the body which St. Paul had called the temple of the Holy Spirit that many of them perished or had to linger out their lives in the infirmary,[153] with the Cynic the cultivation of the body and its faculties was a part of his discipline.

“For,” says Epictetus,[154] “if he shall appear consumptive, meagre and pale, his witness hath not the same emphasis. Not only by showing forth the things of the spirit must he convince foolish men that it is possible, without the things that are admired of them, to be good and wise, but also in his body must he show that plain and simple and open-air living are not mischievous even to the body: ‘Behold, even of this I am a witness, I and my body.’ So Diogenes was wont to do, for he went about radiant with health, and with his very body he turned many to good. But a Cynic that men pity seems to be a beggar—all men turn away from him, all stumble at him. For he must not appear squalid; so that neither in this respect shall he scare men away; but his very austerity should be cleanly and pleasing.”

How sane and wholesome, how wisely adapted to the fundamental facts of life, is the Stoic ideal as compared with the monastic! In it we see that there is a place in a natural ethics for a rational asceticism. Of such there will always be need—we must admit, whatever we may think of the ‘spirituality’ of self-destruction, that there are, and are always likely to be, many more men and women who deteriorate in soul and body through petty acts of self-indulgence than who do so by an excess of austerity. And this makes it all the more necessary that the matter should be conceived rightly, reasonably, from the side of a reverence for life and its manifestations, not from that of disdain and repulsion; that we should take hold of it (to quote Epictetus again) by the handle by which it can be carried, not that by which theory and experience alike have shown that it never can. When Tennyson wrote “Move upward, working out the beast,” he was not so well inspired as in some of his other appreciations of modern science. The religious ascetic aims at working out the beast—not so Nature, who does not progress by substituting one form of living for another, but by growing from a central core and continually harmonizing the old radical elements of being with the new assimilations. One can, perhaps, work out the beast—what cannot the will achieve? But the beast surely avenges himself, and often in terrible fashion.