Hitherto there had been nothing in the religion of Rome, or of any other city-state, to make it inevitable, reasonable, that man should worship the Power, except tradition and self-interest, involved in the tradition and self-interest of the family and the city. The gods belonged, as we saw, to family or city as divine inhabitants, and if you neglected them they would show their anger against you. Originally it was religio, the feeling of awe for something distinct from man and unknown to him, which forced him to propitiate that which he might fear, but had no reason, except the instinct of self-preservation, to reverence; and later on, as he came to know his numina better, to make them, so to speak, his own, and to formulate the methods of propitiating them, he gradually came also to take them for granted, and to worship them as a matter of traditional duty. The idea of conforming his life to the will of any of these numina would, of course, be absolutely strange to him—the expression would have no meaning whatever for him. The help which he sought from them was not moral help, but material.[776] But now, when the religio has been hypnotised and soothed away, and when the tradition of ceremonial observance was growing dim and weak, when he is left alone with his fellow-men, and without any binding reason for right conduct towards them, he may learn from Stoicism that there is a Power above and beyond all his numina, yet involving and embracing them all, to which, and by the help of which, as a man endowed with reason, he must conform his life.
The theology held and taught by Panaetius, in common with all Stoics at all periods, was based upon two leading thoughts, in the correlation of which lay the kernel of the Stoic ethical system. The first of these thoughts is this: the whole universe, in all its forms and manifestations, shows unmistakably the work of Reason, of Mind; without mind, reason, spiritus, as Cicero calls it,[777] the universe could not exist. I need not go here into the origin and history of this thought; what is important for us is to make clear the theological consequences of it. Obviously it was natural that the Stoic should be led on to the conviction that this universe endowed with Reason—with a Reason far transcending all human capacity—must itself be God. The Stoic arguments in support of this further step are indeed lame, as they inevitably must be; they are well set forth at the beginning of Book ii. of Cicero's work de Natura Deorum (based upon one by Posidonius, the successor and disciple of Panaetius), where they seem to us rather cold and formal. That step is indeed incapable of being made convincing by any syllogism; it is only when we try to think with the minds of those old thinkers, living in a world of unmeaning worship, that we begin to realise the nobility of a conviction which they tried in vain to reduce to a syllogism. Sapiens a principio mundus, et deus habendus est;[778] these words, which sound like an article of a creed, suffice for us without the laborious arguments of Cleanthes and Chrysippus which we may read in the fifth and sixth chapters of Cicero's book. Cicero has added to these a characteristic illustration from city life, which I may quote as more useful for us. "If a man enters a house or a gymnasium or a forum, and sees reason, method, and discipline reigning there, he cannot suppose that these came about without a cause, but perceives that there is someone there who rules and is obeyed: how much more, when he contemplates the motions and revolutions to be seen in the universe (e.g., in the heavenly bodies), must he conclude that they are all governed by a conscious Mind!" And this Mind can be nothing else but God.
This sounds like the Deism of the eighteenth century, and might be described as "natural religion"; but the Stoics took yet another step, and developed their thought into Pantheism. The idea of a personal Deity, distinct from the universe and its Creator, was obnoxious to them; it would have committed them to a dualism of Mind and Matter which, from the very outset of their history, they emphatically repudiated; their conviction was of a Unity in all things, and to this they consistently held in spite of constant and damaging criticism. The theological result of this conviction has lately been well expressed by Dr. Bussell.[779] He is speaking of Seneca in particular, but what he says applies to all Stoics equally well: "Though he yearns to see God in 'the moral order of the Universe,' he is forced in the interests of Unity to identify Him with every other known force. As He is everything, so any name will suit Him. He is the sum of existence: or the secret and abstract law which guides it: He is Nature or Fate. The partial names of special deities are all His, and together they make up the fulness of the divine title; but they disappear in the immense nothingness, rather than colour or qualify it." This is a point of immense importance for the study of Stoicism at Rome; it was fully developed by Posidonius, and copied from him both by Cicero and Varro. "God," says Cicero in the book I have been quoting, "pervading all nature (pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei), can be understood as Ceres on the land, as Neptune on the sea, and so on, and may be and should be worshipped in all these different forms;" not in superstitious fear and grovelling spirit—the mental attitude which Lucretius had condemned years before this treatise was written—but with pure heart and mind, following the one and true God in all his various manifestations.[780] Thus the Stoic Pantheism, in spite of its weak points, could find room for the deities of the city-state, and put new illuminating life into them. To us it may seem, as it seems to Dr. Bussell, that they would disappear in an immense nothingness; but to the Roman mind of Scipio's age, if I am not mistaken, they might, on the contrary, save the great Pantheistic idea from so itself disappearing. I cannot but think that the Roman's idea of divinity, the force or will-power which he called numen,[781] would find here a means of reviving its former hold on the Roman mind, and enabling it to grasp as a concrete fact, and not merely as an abstract idea, the "deus pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei." In particular the Roman conception of the great Jupiter, the father of heaven, might gain new life for the people who had so long been used to call him "the Best and Greatest." Almost from the very beginning of Stoicism the school had seized upon Zeus to convey, under the guise of a personality and a name, some idea of the Reason in the universe;[782] and the same use might just as well, perhaps even better, be made of the great deity of the Capitoline temple, whom his people recognised as the open heaven with all its manifestations, the celestial representative of good faith and righteous dealing, and the special protector of the destinies of Rome and her empire.
The second thought which lies at the base of the religion or theology of Stoicism, is this: that Man himself, alone in all the Universe, shares with God the full possession of Reason. In other words, Man alone, besides God, is strictly individual, self-conscious, capable of realising an end and of working towards it; he is so utterly different from the animals, so far above them (or if we call him an animal, he is, in Cicero's language,[783] animal providum, sagax, multiplex, acutum, memor, plenum rationis et consilii), that he must surely be of the same nature as God. And this is what, in strict conformity with all Stoic teaching, Cicero in this same passage expressly says—man is generatus a deo. So too in the famous hymn of Cleanthes,[784] quoted by St. Paul at Athens ("For we are also his offspring,"):—
Chiefest glory of deathless Gods, Almighty for ever, Sovereign of Nature that rulest by law, what name shall we give thee? Blessed be Thou, for on Thee should call all things that are mortal. For that we are Thy offspring: nay, all that in myriad motion Lives for its day on the earth bears one impress, Thy likeness, upon it; Wherefore my song is of Thee, and I hymn Thy power for ever.
In these splendid lines it is plain that not Man only is thought of, but all living things, animals included with Man; and this is in accordance with the true Stoic Pantheism. But none the less on this account did the Stoics believe Man to be the one living thing in the universe comparable with God, and capable of communion with him by virtue of the possession of Reason. As Cicero says, a few lines farther on in the work I am quoting, "virtus eadem in homine ac deo est, neque ullo alio ingenio praeterea." And since every creature seeks to maintain and augment its own being, to bring it to perfection, to express it fully, by an innate law of its nature, Man being endowed with Reason above all other creatures, strives, or should strive, to bring himself to a perfect expression, by identifying himself with the divine principle which he shares with God. As Dr. Caird puts it,[785] "the ruling power of Reason so dominates his nature that he cannot be described as anything but a self-conscious ego (i.e. in contrast with other animals); and just because of this, all his impulses become concentrated in one great effort after self-realisation." But the self that he tries to realise must be his true self, not his irrational impulses: the self which is a part of the divine principle. He must desire to realise himself as having Reason, and so to come into close communion with God, the Reason of the universe. Those who are at all familiar with the later Roman Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, if we may include him among them, will recognise in this inspiring thought, vague and impalpable as it may seem, the germ of many beautiful expressions of the relation of Man to God, which seem to bring Stoicism into closer spiritual connection with Christianity than any other doctrine of the ancient world.
The work of Cicero from which I have been quoting, the first book of his treatise on the Laws, i.e. the Roman constitution, is very probably based on one by Panaetius himself,[786] of whom we are expressly told that he used to discuss that constitution together with Polybius and Scipio in the days of their happy intimacy at Rome.[787] In any case we may find it helpful, taken together with the earlier fragmentary work de Republica, in trying to form some idea of the effect of this second leading Stoic thought on the best Roman minds of the last ages of the Republic. We find, as we might expect, that it is not on Man simply as individual that stress is here laid. Man is not thought of as hoping to realise his own Reason in isolation; the Stoics, though, like their rivals, they represent a reaction of the individual against the State, were all along perfectly clear that man in isolation would be helpless, and that his own reason bade him realise himself in association with his fellow-men.[788] It is the position of Man, as associated, 1, with God, 2, with other men, that is here made prominent; and the bond of connection is in each case Law, which is indeed only one name for the Supreme Reason and the highest Good. I must say a word about these two aspects of Man's position in the world, in order to explain what I believe to have been the effect of this teaching on the Roman mind.
1. In explaining the relation of Man to God Cicero uses an expression which some years before he had developed in a fine passage in the Republic: true law, he says, is right reason.[789] In the Laws he takes it up again, and argues that as both God and Man have reason, there must be a direct relation between them.[790] And as Law and right reason are identical, we may say that Law is the binding force of that relation. And again, this means that the universe may be looked on as one great State (civitas), of which both God and Man (or gods and men) are citizens, or in another way as a State of which the constitution is itself the Reason, or God's law, which all reasonable beings must obey. Such obedience is itself the effort by which Man realises his own reason: he is a part of a reasonable universe, and he cannot rebel against its law without violating his own highest instinct. It is not hard to see how this way of expressing the Stoic theological principle would appeal to the Roman mind. That mind was wholly incapable of metaphysical thinking; but it could without effort understand, with the help of its social and political principles and experience, the idea of supreme intelligent rule—a supreme imperium, as it were, to rebel against which would be a moral perduellio, high treason against a supreme Law, unwritten like his own, and resting, as he thought of his own as resting, on the best instincts, tradition, reason, of his community; from his own constitution and laws he could lift his mind without much difficulty to the constitution and law of the communis deorum et hominum civitas. The idea of God in any such sense as this was indeed new to him; but he could grasp it under the expression "universal law of right reason" when he would have utterly failed, for example, to conceive of it as "the Absolute." He can feel himself the citizen of a State whose maker and ruler is God, and whose law is the inevitable force of Reason; he can realise his relationship to God as a part of the same State, gifted with the same power of discerning its legal basis, nay, even helping to administer its law by rational obedience.
2. Reason as thus ruling the universe can also provide a basis for Man's reasonable association with his fellow-men, and a religious basis if conceived as God; for Man's recognition of the divine law, the recta ratio, as binding on him, is followed quite naturally by his recognition of the application of that law to the world he lives in. "Human law comes into existence," says Zeller, explaining this point,[791] "when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it)[792] had been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in these dry bones, and started Roman lawyers, many of whom were Stoics more or less pronounced, on a career of enlightened legal study which has left one of the most valuable legacies inherited by the modern world from ancient civilisation. In another way too it had, I think, an immediate effect on Scipio himself and his circle, and on their mental descendants, of whom Cicero was the most brilliant: it made them look on the law and constitution of their State as eminently reasonable, and on rebellion against it as unreason, or as the Romans call it, lascivia, wanton disregard of principle. So far as I know, no great Roman lawyer was ever a revolutionary like Catiline or Clodius, nor yet an obstinate conservative like Cato, whose Stoicism was of the older and less Romanised type; the two of whom we know most in the century following the arrival of Panaetius were both wise, just, and moderate men, Mucius Scaevola and Servius Sulpicius, of whom it may be truly said they contributed as much to civilisation as the great military and political leaders of the same period.[793]
There now remains the question whether this noble Stoic religion, as we may fairly call it, with its ideas of the relation of Man to God and to his fellow-men, had, after all, sufficient definiteness for a Roman to act as a grip on his conscience and his conduct in his daily dealings with others. It could deduce the existence and beauty of the social virtues from its own principles; if Man partakes of the eternal Reason, or, as they otherwise put it, if he is through his Reason a part of God himself in the highest sense, and if God and Reason are in the highest sense good, then in realising his own Reason, in obeying the voice of the God within him,[794] he must be himself good by the natural instinct of his own being. Accordingly, these social virtues, duties, officia, as the Romans called them, were set forth by Panaetius in two books, which in a Latinised form we still fortunately possess,—the first two of Cicero's work de Officiis,—and without the uncompromising rigidity which characterised the original Stoic ethical doctrine inherited from the Cynics.[795] In the first book he treated of the good simply (honestum), in the second of the useful (utile), and in a third, which it was left for Cicero to execute, of the cases of conflict between these two. In this charming work there is much to admire, and even much to learn: the social virtues—benevolence, justice, liberality, self-restraint, and so on, are enlarged upon and illustrated by historical examples[796] in perfect Latin by Cicero; and as we read it we cannot but feel that the influence of Panaetius upon his educated Roman pupils must have been eminently wholesome.