THE system of thought and the way of life which go by the name of Stoicism constitute a phenomenon not less remarkable in its fashion than the ethical wisdom of the great Greek tragedians. Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the founders of the school of the porch, are in some respects as notable a triad as Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their distinction, however, lies, not like that of the three poets, in literary genius, but in moral intensity. Their thoughts of God, man, duty, and destiny, and the life in which these found practical embodiment, present the best religious product of Greek philosophy. There is room indeed for doubt whether that philosophy can be credited with the exclusive parentage of so worthy an offspring. The influence of Socrates is of course very manifest in the ethical spirit of the Stoics. But something more than Socrates seems to be discernible there: something new, foreign; a stern temper in striking contrast to Hellenic lightheartedness; a seriousness reminding us more of the gravity of a Hebrew prophet than of the gaiety of a Greek philosopher.

This first impression is seen to be more than a passing fancy when it is considered that the early masters and scholars of Stoicism were actually, for the most part, strangers from the East, and not a few of them natives of Semitic towns or colonies. Zeno, the first founder, was from Citium, a Phœnician colony in Cyprus, and he commonly went by the name of ‘the Phœnician,’ a fact which bears witness to his Semitic origin. Thus the hypothesis readily suggests itself that race enters as a factor in the genesis of Stoicism, that the peculiarities of this new phase of Greek philosophy are the unmistakable product of Semitic genius. This view has been adopted and earnestly advocated by such competent writers as Sir Alexander Grant1 and Bishop Light-foot.2 Their high authority cannot lightly be disregarded; but if we do not feel able to share their confidence as to the certainty of this racial theory, we shall do well at least to lay to heart the ethical affinity which it is adduced to explain. The Stoic temper and the Semitic temper are kindred. The Stoic philosophy is, so to speak, Hebrew wisdom transplanted into Greek soil; like the latter, intensely ethical in spirit, and practical in tendency. In both we discern the same leading characteristics: ‘the recognition of the claims of the individual soul, the sense of personal responsibility, the habit of judicial introspection, in short the subjective view of ethics.’3

Stoicism was at once intensely ethical and intensely individualistic. It contemplated the universe from the view-point of the individual man, and the thing of supreme interest for it in the individual man was his moral consciousness. The latter feature, as we have seen, may be traced partly to the influence of Socrates, partly to the influence of the Semitic spirit; the former was the natural result of the complete breakdown of the political life of Greece due to the Macedonian conquest. It is necessary to note the time at which the Stoical movement made its appearance. Like all great spiritual movements, it came when the world was prepared for it and needed it. It was the offspring of despair in more senses than one, but very specially of political despair. When public life offered no opportunities, what could a thoughtful man do but retire within himself, and concentrate his energies on the discipline of his own spirit? And yet the same circumstances which brought about this contraction of interest led also to a great expansion. If the glory of Greece had vanished, humanity remained; in place of the city, the philosopher had the wide world as a home for his soul. And so it came to pass that the system of thought which most worthily met the need of the time was cosmopolitan in spirit as well as individualistic. The Stoic, while intensely conscious of himself as a moral personality, was also not less conscious of belonging to a great human brotherhood. It has been reckoned among the contradictions of Stoicism that, ‘with the hardest and most uncompromising isolation of the individual, it proclaims the most expansive view of his relations to all around.’4 In reality, however, these two contrasted qualities are but complementary aspects of the same fundamental point of view. The ethical is universal; the ethical individual is but a particular embodiment of that which constitutes the essential element common to humanity. The same combination of individualism with universalism appears in the later prophetic literature of Israel under similar outward circumstances, national misfortune opening the eyes of Hebrew seers and Greek sages alike to the inner world of the soul and the outer world of mankind.

Stoicism was not the only philosophy in Greece at the beginning of the third century before the Christian era. Philosophic activity in the post-Aristotelian period gave rise to three rival schools—that of the Stoics, that of the Epicureans, and that of the Sceptics. All three had the same fundamental characteristic of subjectivity, retirement within the self, and the same general temper of self-sufficiency, or independence of outward things. The two first-named schools, to confine our attention to them, differed in their conception of the chief good. The Stoics placed it in virtue, the Epicureans in freedom from disagreeable feelings, or, in one word, in pleasure. The mere co-existence of a school having ‘pleasure’ for its watchword lends added emphasis and significance to the Stoic position. It is not necessary to judge severely the philosophers of the garden, and to impute to them all the abuses to which their leading tenet too easily gave rise. Epicurus did not undervalue virtue; he maintained that there could be no true pleasure dissociated from virtue. Seneca states the point at issue between him and the masters of the porch in these terms, ‘whether virtue be the cause of the highest good, or itself the highest good.’5 With the Stoics he espouses the latter alternative, and repudiates with indignation not merely the placing of virtue under pleasure, as a lower category and mere means to pleasure as an end, but the comparing of virtue with pleasure at all. ‘Virtue,’ he says, ‘is the despiser and enemy of pleasure; leaping away as far as possible from it, it is more at home with labour and pain than with that effeminate good.’6 The Roman representative of Stoicism may be accepted as a true interpreter of the respective attitudes of the two opposed systems. Taking them at his estimate, one cannot but feel that the Stoic, whatever his defects, has the nobler bearing. Much depends on what you put first. It is a great thing to say: virtue, duty, is first; especially when you know that others are saying something very different. Then your doctrine means: virtue first, all else, whatever is comprehended under enjoyment, second; virtue first and at all hazards, be the consequences what they may; pleasure or pain, it is all one. This is a heroic programme, and the man who is able to carry it out will certainly live to better purpose than the man whose programme is: enjoyment the summum bonum, but enjoyment obtained on the most rational and virtuous methods possible.

The Stoic, while sternly opposed to making pleasure the chief good, did not refuse it a place, under any form, in human experience. He held, however, that the only pleasure or happiness worth having was that connected with right conduct. Virtue, in his view, was its own reward, and vice its own penalty. Virtue is self-sufficient; nothing else is needed to make a wise man happy. This doctrine makes the wise man entirely independent of everything outside his own will. The good man is satisfied from himself, and perfectly free from all dependence on outward good. Outward goods, so-called, are really things indifferent. There is nothing good but the absolute good, a good will; nothing evil but the absolute evil, an evil will. Health, riches, honour, life, however much valued by ordinary men, fall under the category of the indifferent, for every one who knows the secret of the blessed life.7 This view of outward good kills passion. The passions are the result of wrong estimates of external good and evil. From the irrational estimate of present good arises the passion of pleasurable feeling, of future good that of desire; out of a false conception of present evil comes sorrow, and of future evil, fear.8 The wise man, subject to no illusions, is passionless. He feels pain, but, not regarding it as an evil, he suffers neither torment nor fear; he may be despised and evil-treated, but he cannot be disgraced; he is without vanity, because honour and shame touch him not; he is not subject to the passion of anger, nor does he need this irrational affection as an aid to valour; he is even devoid of sympathy, for why should he pity others for experiences which are matters of indifference to himself?9

Nothing is more characteristic of Stoicism than this doctrine of apathy as the distinctive mood of wisdom. Mr. Huxley tells us that he finds it difficult to discover any very great difference between the Apatheia of the Stoics and the Nirvana of Buddhists.10 The one does readily suggest the other to our minds, and the two words do denote states of soul essentially the same. But the calm retreat of passionless peace is reached by different paths in the two systems. It is a case of extremes meeting, a common result arrived at by entirely opposite interpretations of life, that of the Buddhist being pessimistic, while that of the Stoic was optimistic. Life is full of misery, said the Buddhist; from birth to death human existence is one long unbroken experience of sorrow and vexation of spirit, therefore extinguish desire and so escape finally and for ever from pain. The so-called ills of life, said the Stoic, do not deserve the name; the so-called goods of life are no better entitled to the designation: treat all alike with disdain and so possess your soul in serenity. The relation of the two systems to objects of desire is diverse. Buddhism is ascetic, ever engaged in the work of extirpating desire. Stoicism finds its inner satisfaction ‘in ignoring not in mortifying desires.’ The Stoic's attitude is ‘nonchalance, the charter of his self-sufficiency.’11 The diversity in temper goes along with a corresponding diversity of view in regard to the universe at large. The Buddhist deemed the existence of the world, as of the individual man, an evil. As a man is born because he has done wrong in a previous state of existence, so the world exists to afford scope for the law of moral retribution displaying itself in the apportionment of rewards and penalties. The Stoic, on the other hand, took an optimistic view of the world. He believed in the rationality of the universe. Therefore he defined virtue alternatively as living according to our own reason, or as living in accordance with the nature of things, in harmony with the laws of the cosmos. The Buddhist view of birth and death as evils, and penalties of sin, would never enter his mind, or seem other than an absurdity if suggested by another person. He would have said: birth and death both belong to the universal order, therefore they are not evil. The natural order was to be accepted loyally, without demur. The will of nature, said Epictetus, can be learned from what is common to all. How do we take the death of another man's wife or child? We say it is human. Say the same as to your own.12 Faith in nature, with frank submission to its appointments, was part of the piety of Stoicism.

This faith, as held by the Stoics, was associated with and buttressed by a physico-theological system of thought. Though before all things practical, ethical philosophers, they had their science of nature, which was at the same time their theology. Their physics were not original, being to a very large extent simply an appropriation of the opinions of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who taught that fire, or æther, was the original substance of the universe, identified this primæval fire with God, to whom he ascribed the properties at once of matter and of mind, and represented the history of the world as a gradual transformation of the primæval fire into the elements, and of the elements into the primæval fire; that is, as consisting in an endless alternation of world-making and world-burning. The theological aspect of this cosmological speculation is what chiefly concerns us. In the hands of the Stoics the resulting idea of God is a strange mixture of Materialism, Pantheism, and Theism. God, like all things that really exist, is material and the source of all matter. He is one with the world which is evolved out of His essence, as in the theory of Spinoza; God and Nature are the same thing under different aspects. Yet, unlike Spinoza, the Stoics introduced into their idea of God theistic elements reminding us of the characteristic conceptions of Socrates, who regarded the world ideologically, plied the argument from design for the existence of a good God, and asserted the reality of a benignant providential order, having man for the special object of its care. In these respects the Stoics were disciples of Socrates, as in their physics they were followers of Heraclitus.

Accustomed as we, in modern times, are to sharply defined contrasts between materialistic, pantheistic, and theistic theories, we are apt to wonder how such heterogeneous elements could ever have been brought together in even the crudest attempt to form an idea of God. Unless we be on our guard we may draw from the materialism of the Stoics very mistaken and prejudicial inferences as to their view of Deity, confounding them with those who cherish a purely mechanical idea of the universe and have no faith in the exceptional significance of man arising out of his spiritual nature; whereas, in truth, as to these vital questions their creed was the same as that held by modern theists. The two forms of materialism, as has been pointed out by a French writer on Stoicism, are not only distinct, but of opposite tendency. ‘While the materialism of our day wishes to recognise the existence of the corporeal and sensible only, to get rid for ever of the ideal realities and inaccessible essences, the physics of the Stoics made everything material in fear lest the spiritual realities should vanish. The modern materialist says: “All is body, therefore thought is nothing but a mode of body.” The Stoic said: “All is body, and thought being corporeal is a substance, more subtle without doubt, but as real as are the objects our senses perceive.” It is not to withdraw the world from the watchful authority of a sovereign intelligence, but rather to give to that supreme reason efficacious power everywhere present that the Stoics conceived God as co-extensive with the universe.’13

We must take ancient thought about God as we find it, looking indulgently on the materialistic dross, and giving full value to the theistic gold. If we keep in view the Semitic origin of the founders of Stoicism, we shall remember that speculative consistency was not to be expected of them, and that ethical wisdom was more in their line than cosmological theory. It is difficult to say in what precise relation such theory as they did promulgate stood to the ethical doctrines which constitute the chief ground of their claim to serious consideration at this date. Did the ethical system, first formulated, create a desire for a congruous and confirmatory theory of the universe, or did the masters of the school bring to their ethical studies such a theory cut-and-dried, and always at hand to give direction to thought in the answering of puzzling questions? Were ethical problems first solved and then God conceived in harmony with the solutions, or was the idea of God first fixed, then employed to control moral judgments? The question has special interest in reference to the Stoic doctrine concerning things indifferent. That doctrine seems a paradox, and it is natural to ask, Would the men who promulgated it have adopted so extreme a position as that pain, disease, privation, dishonour, are not evils, unless they had been required to do so by their theological creed? Was it not a case of a priori reasoning? ‘The soul of the world is just; the world in all its arrangements is rational, because the work of a Supreme Reason. The Providence of God, like God Himself, must be perfect; therefore it must ever be well with the good; therefore human happiness must depend on the state of the soul, not on outward experiences, which, whether pleasant or the reverse, are to be regarded as of no account.’ That they argued thus is not inconceivable. But it is against this view that in their doctrine of the indifferent the Stoics were not original any more than in their materialistic physics, or in their teleological conception of the world. In this, as in some other important respects, they were disciples of the Cynics. Speaking generally, the Stoics were original in the spirit rather than in the matter of their teaching. They borrowed freely from all preceding schools, and blended the separate contributions into a harmonious system under the inspiration of their characteristic moral enthusiasm. This fervour saved them from being pure eclectics, and converted what might otherwise have been a mere patchwork of opinions into a living organism of thought, in which all parts of the system acted and reacted on each other. When the body of Stoical doctrine is thus conceived, the question above formulated is superseded. It is no longer a question of exclusive action of the ethics on the theology, or of the theology on the ethics. Each in turn influenced the other. Belief in a benignant Providence confirmed the doctrine of the adiaphora, and this doctrine made that belief easier.

Assuming that such a relation of interaction existed between the doctrines of Providence and of things indifferent in the minds of the Stoical teachers, we may regard them as making an important contribution to the solution of the problem, How is the providential order to be justified in view of the facts of human experience? It is an anticipation of what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the Christian ‘method of inwardness’; the method, that is to say, of seeking happiness within, in the state of the heart, rather than without in the state of fortune. The Stoics taught: It must always be well with the good man; his felicity lies in a well-ordered mind, which is life and peace. The outward ills which befall him are of little account; at the worst, they are light, easily tolerable afflictions. This is obviously a decided advance upon the Old Testament view, whether we have regard to the more ancient theory championed by Eliphaz in the Book of Job, according to which outward lot and conduct uniformly correspond—no innocent person perishing—or to the modified conceptions of prophets like Jeremiah, which recognised suffering on the part of the righteous as a fact, but as a fact full of mystery and furnishing ground for surprise and complaint.14 It is equally an advance on the ideas of the elder Greek tragedians, Æschylus and Sophocles, which correspond respectively to those of Eliphaz and Jeremiah. It falls short, on the other hand, of the lofty thought enunciated in the oracles of the second Isaiah, and re-echoed by Euripides, that the sufferings of the good are not a dismal fate involuntarily endured, but the free self-sacrifice of love cheerfully offered for the benefit of others.15 Stoicism had not humanity enough to rise to such a conception. Even when recognising the existence of such instances of heroism, it would look rather to the benefit accruing to the hero himself than to that accruing to others. In discoursing on the benefits derivable from all external ills, even death, Epictetus uses as an illustration the story of Menœkeus, on which he makes this comment: ‘Think you, Menœkeus reaped little benefit when he devoted himself to death? Did he not preserve his piety towards his country, his magnanimity, his fidelity, his generosity? Had he preferred to live would he not have lost all these, and acquired instead the opposite vices—cowardice, meanspiritedness, lack of patriotism, ignoble love of life?’16 The point made is, in its own place, not unimportant. It is something to be able to say that outward ill, so far from robbing the good of happiness, may even promote the increase of that happiness by strengthening the virtue which is the sole fountain of all true felicity. But when that alone is said in connection with instances of self-sacrifice, a lesson is missed of far greater importance for the vindication of the providential order than the merely homeward-bound view of affliction as useful to the individual sufferer.

The method of inwardness, as pursued by the Stoics, is open to the objection that it makes the way to peace too much of a short cut. They minimised unduly the outward ills of life. It sounds very philosophic to say: To the good no real evil can happen, as to the evil no real good; and to ply the sorrow-laden with such admonitions as these: ‘A son has died; it depends not on the will of man, therefore it is not an evil. Cæsar has condemned you—an involuntary event, therefore not evil; you have been led to prison—so be it. Jove has done all these things well, because he has made you able to bear such things, made you magnanimous, provided that no real evil should be in such experiences, made it possible for you to be happy in spite of such experiences.’17 Men within the school might make themselves believe that such considerations were conclusive, but those outside could not be expected to acquiesce. It is not reasonable to ask men to accept bereavement, condemnation by a judicial tribunal, imprisonment, as matters of indifference, because involuntary so far as the sufferer is concerned. Men naturally wish to know how such events are to be construed with reference to the will of the Supreme. And when it is considered that the masters of the school were wont to point to suicide as a door of escape always open for the unhappy, it becomes doubtful if even they were satisfied with their own philosophy. Why fly from life if outward ill be illusory? If there be a benignant Providence at work in human experience, why not live on through all possible experience, rejoicing evermore, praying without ceasing, in everything giving thanks?

Dissatisfaction with the Stoic justification of Providence finds forcible expression in Cicero's De Natura Deorum, where, after the creed of the porch has been sympathetically expounded by one interlocutor, Balbus, another, Cotta, is introduced sharply criticising it. Among the trains of reflection put into Cotta's mouth the following has a prominent place. If the gods really care for the human race they ought to make all men good; at least they ought to look after the interest of those who are good. But do they? Is it not the fact that there are many instances of good men suffering undeserved calamity, and of bad men prospering? The argument winds up with the remark: ‘Time would fail if I wished to recount the examples of good men overtaken with bad fortune and of evil men favoured with good fortune.’ Of course the case of Socrates receives prominent mention. ‘What,’ asks the sceptic, ‘shall I say of Socrates, whose death, as I read, always brings the tears into my eyes? Surely if the gods pay any attention to human affairs they exercise very little discrimination.’18

Here is the age-long problem of the sufferings of the righteous stated, if not solved in the pages of the philosophic Roman orator. The early Stoics, far from solving the problem, hardly even stated it, their exaggerated doctrine concerning the indifference of outward ill preventing them. What grand possibilities of sublime wrestling with an apparently unfathomable mystery they thereby missed we know from the Book of Job. Suppose Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus had occupied the place of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, what would they have said to the sufferer? Something like this: ‘We hear, friend, that the Sabæans have stolen your oxen and asses, and that your flocks of sheep have been destroyed by lightning; vex not yourself, these are merely outward events independent of your will, therefore no evils, to be treated as if they had not happened by a wise man. We hear, moreover, that your sons and daughters have been suddenly killed, amid their festivities, by a tornado. It is a somewhat unusual and startling event; still, such things do occur now and then, and form part of the order of nature; they happen indifferently to all, irrespective of character; and when they happen they are purely external events, therefore indifferent. For the rest: consider that your children have been restored to the peace of the pre-natal condition, and say to yourself: “When I begot them I knew that they would have to die.”19 We not only have heard, we see, that you are afflicted in your own person with a loathsome disease, wasting and painful. This is harder to bear than all the other ills, but the apathetic wise man is equal to the task. Consider, Job: Pain has its seat in the body, why should it disturb the peace of your mind?’ What would the man of Uz have thought of such consolations? Would they have appeared to him an improvement on the solemn homilies in vindication of divine justice addressed to him by the friends who had come to condole with him? Which is the more trying to patience—to be told: ‘You suffer much, therefore you must be a very bad man’; or to be told: ‘You are, we are sure, a very good man, but you know you do not really suffer?’ Perhaps there is not much to choose between them. Let us be thankful that the author of Job kept aloof from the pedantries alike of Eliphaz and of Zeno; that he conceived of his hero as at once an exceptionally good man and an exceptionally miserable man. For by this sharp antithesis between conduct and lot the problem of Providence in the individual life was adequately stated, and a need for earnest discussion created; and if, after all that was said in the debate, the problem remained unsolved, it was at least kept open for other attempts by the ruthless sweeping away of premature superficial solutions. The Stoic solution was probably not before the writer's mind. Had it been, we can imagine what his sound Hebrew sense would have had to say about it: ‘Destitution, sorrow, pain, are not to be charmed away by fine phrases. They are grim realities. They happen to men under the Providence of God, and some account of them must be given if faith in the justice and goodness of God is not to make shipwreck.’

The later Stoics did make some attempt to supply a rationale of the sufferings of the good, on the assumption that these were real. Epictetus offered as his contribution the idea that tribulation promotes the development of heroic character. In an apologetic discourse on Providence he asks: ‘What sort of a man would Hercules have been had there not been lions and hydras and stags and wild boars and unrighteous savage men to fight with, and drive out of the world? What would he have been doing, had not such beings existed? Spending his whole life nodding in luxury and idleness, without any chance of using his arms, strength, power of endurance, generous disposition.’ The moral of the life of Hercules is thus pointed: ‘Come then, thou also, look at the powers given thee, then say to Jove, Bring any trial you please, for, lo! I have been equipped by thee for beautifying myself by the things which happen.’ To such as are of a different temper, preferring to sit and groan and complain in presence of difficulties, he addresses the remonstrance: ‘I can show you that you have been provided with talents and opportunities for the exercise of magnanimity and fortitude; show me, if you can, what occasion you have for complaining and finding fault.’20

In his treatise De Providentia Seneca presents some distinctive points of view. The aim of this work is not to treat of Divine Providence in general, but to discuss the special question, Why, if the world be under a providential guidance, do so many evils overtake good men? It abounds in fine thoughts felicitously expressed, which, for the most part, must here be left unnoticed. I can refer only to what may be called the spectacular aspect under which the subject is prominently, though not exclusively, presented. Two thoughts fall under this category. The first is that the sufferings of the good are a pleasing sight to the gods; the second, that they make an important revelation of character to the sufferers themselves and to their fellow-men. As to the former, Seneca remarks: ‘I do not wonder if sometimes the gods are seized with a desire to see great men struggling with calamity.’21 He represents the gods as, like generals, placing the best men in the posts of danger, and he counsels those so placed to console themselves with the reflection: God has deemed us worthy to be employed as a means of ascertaining how much human nature can bear.22 The use of trial for the revelation of character to men is thus set forth: You are a great man; but how shall I know, if fortune give you no opportunity of displaying your virtue? I judge you miserable because you never have been miserable. You have passed through life without an adversary. Nobody will know what you could have done, not even you yourself. There is need of trial for the knowledge of ourselves. No one learns what he is good for except by being tried.23 You know the steersman in a tempest, the soldier in battle.24 Calamity is the opportunity of virtue.25 Fire proves gold, misery brave men.26 To other men the manifestation of a heroic spirit conveys a lesson of endurance. The suffering hero is born to be an example.27

The general theory of Providence taught by the early masters of the school might have been satisfactory enough, if they had not done their best to render it nugatory by dividing men into two classes, one of which did not need God's care, and the other did not deserve it. There was no lack of emphasis in their assertion of the doctrine that God cares for men. After God, they argued, there is nothing in the world better than man, and nothing in man better than reason. Therefore God must have reason. The divine reason finds its proper occupation in caring for the world, providing for its permanence, furnishing it with all things needful, and adorning it with beauty; but above all in caring for man. The world was made for beings endowed with reason, gods and men. The care of God for man is apparent in the structure of his body and the endowment of his mind, and in the subservience of the vegetable and animal creation to his benefit. Not to see the evidence of divine care, especially in the mind of man, is to be devoid of mind. As for the body, it is enough to refer to the hand, with its marvellous capacity of art, in the use of which men can produce a second nature in the nature of things.28

Most acceptable doctrine; but when we view this richly endowed being more closely, and consider the account given of the use he makes of his reason, our faith in his being the object of divine care is somewhat shaken. Human beings, we are told, consist of two classes: wise men and fools. The wise are those who follow the dictates of reason; the fools those who disregard these dictates, and are blindly led by false opinion and passion. The fools, it appears, form the great majority; almost the whole mass indeed. And the fools are perfect fools. The wise men also are perfectly wise. There is no shading; there are no degrees of folly and wisdom. Virtues and vices respectively go in groups; he that has one virtue or vice has all, and each in perfection. This idealising way of viewing character is not peculiar to Stoicism, but the tendency to apply the category of the absolute to ethical distinctions was never carried to greater extravagance than by the Masters of the Porch. It reached its highest point of fantastic idealisation in the delineation of the Wise Man. The Wise Man of Stoic theory cultivates all the virtues; does all things rightly; is prophet, poet, orator, priest; is perfect in character, and endowed with a felicity not inferior to that of the gods; is a free man and a king. He is invulnerable, not because he cannot be struck, but because he cannot be injured. Nothing hurts divinity; no arrow can reach the sun.29 He is absolutely self-reliant, and totally indifferent to popular judgment. As the stars move in a contrary direction to the world, so he goes against the opinion of all.30 He neither asks nor gives sympathy. In the proud consciousness of virtue he feels no soft indulgence towards the bad, but severely leaves them to endure the just penalty of their folly.

This man needs not God's care. He is a god himself. He is even superior to the gods in some respects, e.g. in patience. They are beyond, he is above, patience. He does not need even so much as to believe in God. Like Buddha, he can do without gods. The ethics of Stoicism have no need for a theistic foundation; they would suit the agnostic better than the theist. The Stoic wise man is absolutely self-sufficient, and does not need to care whether there be such a thing as a deity, a providence, or a hereafter. He talks piously about the gods, and about their care of men; but this is merely the accident of his position, the tribute he pays to the time in which he lives. He might cast off his creed like a suit of old garments, and it would make no difference. The Stoic temper can survive Stoic theology. The temper is indeed likely to survive the theology, for it is apt to be the death of it. That temper is much more hostile to true faith in divine Providence than the belief in fate, destiny, and the inexorable reign of law which formed a part of the Stoic system of thought. The reign of physical law in no way excludes a providential order of the world, which simply means that the world, while mechanically produced, has an aim to which the whole cosmos is subservient and each part in its relation to the whole. But the proud self-sufficiency of the sage stultifies the whole theory of a providential aim guiding the mind of God, by making man, the crown of creation, independent of God.

The Stoic scorn for fools tends in the same direction. Who can believe that God cares for a race who, having received the gift of reason, almost without exception make no use of it, and seem incapable of being cured of their folly? The true disciple of the porch did not believe it. His maxim was: ‘God cares for the great and neglects the small.’31 The sentiment, as put into the mouth of Balbus, the advocate of Stoicism, by Cicero, means that divine favour is not to be judged by outward chances such as the destruction of a crop by a storm. We are not to think that a man has been neglected by God because such misfortunes befall him, if he be endowed with the truer and more enduring riches of virtue. The inner treasures are the great things; the outer goods of fortune are the small. But for the genuine Stoic the adage was apt to bear another sense, viz. that God cares for great men and neglects small men. In his exposition of the doctrine of Providence, Balbus maintains that the gods care not only for the human race, but for individual men, for men in the great divisions of the earth—Europe, Asia, and Africa; and also for men living in Rome, Athens, Sparta, and, among these, for particular men named.32 But the men named are all more or less famous, concerning whom, and others like them, it is affirmed that they could never have been the men they were without divine aid. There is no mention, even in a general way, of insignificant men as the objects of God's care; no hint that even the hairs of their heads are all numbered. The pathos of the doctrine of Providence, as taught by Jesus, is wholly lacking in these grandiose demonstrations. ‘Magna Dii curant, parva negligunt’ is the keynote of the Stoic's providential psalm of praise.

Returning to the wise man of Stoic imagination, the question arises, Where are men answering to the description to be found? The Stoics themselves were obliged to admit that their number was few; but they ventured to name Socrates, Diogenes, and Antisthenes among the Greeks, and Cato among the Romans, whom the modern historian Mommsen bluntly calls a fool.33 The wise man of Stoicism is in truth only an ideal. But he is none the less important as an index of the spirit of the system. There can be no better guide to the genius of a religion or a philosophy than its moral ideal. The wise man of Stoicism is as vital to it as the Buddha to Buddhism, or the perfect man who studies the law day and night to Judaism. The modifications which Stoicism underwent in course of time tended to gain for it wider currency, but they are not the most reliable indication of the true temper of its teachers. It is by the esoteric doctrine of Buddhism, the law for the monk, rather than by its exoteric doctrine, the law for the laity, that its true character is known. In like manner the apathetic sage, passionlessly yet passionately following reason, is the beau ideal of Stoicism, the revelation of its inmost soul. Suppose, now, we saw the ideal realised in a few rare specimens of humanity, what would they look like? Like the blasted pines of the Wengern Alp, standing near the summit of the pass, leafless, barkless, sapless; chilled to death by the pitiless icy winds of winter blowing off the glaciers. Compare this picture with that of the righteous man of Hebrew poetry: ‘He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,’ with its leaf ever green and bringing forth fruit in its season.34 How poor a character the cold, unsympathetic wise man of Stoicism appears compared even with the tenderhearted saint and sage of Buddhism! Between the Stoic wise man and the Jesus of the Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners, no comparison is possible. Can we wonder that Stoicism, with all its earnestness, remained an affair of the school? No system of religious thought can make way in the world which has no place in its ethical ideal for pity; no gospel for the weak. The Stoic was a Greek Pharisee who thought himself better than other men, and despised all whom he deemed his inferiors. He had his reward. He enjoyed to the full his own good opinion, and failed to win the trust and love of his fellow-men.

In the foregoing paragraph I have referred to modifications of the Stoic system as originally constructed. These were much needed in connection with three salient features: the exaggerated conception of the wise man, the doctrine that pain is no evil, and the connected doctrine of apathy. Shading was introduced into the first by substituting, in the place of the ideal wise man, the man who, though he hath not attained nor is already perfect, yet is advancing onwards towards the goal. In connection with the second it was found necessary to introduce distinctions among the things which rigid theory had slumped together as indifferent, and to divide these into three classes—the things to be desired, the things to be avoided, and the intermediate class of things neither to be desired nor to be avoided, to which the title ‘indifferent’ is properly applicable. In the first class were included such physical endowments as were favourable to virtue—bodily health, riches, honour, good descent, and the like. Finally, the apathy of theory was toned down by a gracious permission to the wise to indulge natural feeling to a certain measured extent; to rejoice in prosperity and grieve under bereavement, to commiserate the unfortunate, and to give play to the sentiment of friendship.

It was, as might have been expected when Stoicism became naturalised in the Roman world, towards the beginning of the Christian era, and from that time onwards, that it underwent this humanising transformation. The austere Roman nature presented a promising stock whereon to graft the philosophy of the porch, but Roman good sense was not likely to adopt without qualification the paradoxes and subtleties of Greek theorists. While welcoming the system in its main outlines, and especially in its characteristic temper, Roman disciples supplied at the same time the needful corrective. Cicero, one of the earliest Roman admirers, if not an abject disciple, of Stoicism, reveals in his writings the common Roman attitude. In the second of his Tusculan Questions, having for its theme how to bear grief, he treats as a mere extravagance the doctrine of Zeno, that pain is no evil. ‘Nothing is evil, he teaches, save what is base and vicious. This is trifling. You do not by saying this remove what was troubling me.’35 Seneca, coming a century later, about the beginning of our era,36 rebukes the pride of the Stoic wise man by frank confession of personal moral infirmity, and by equally frank proclamation of the evil bias of human nature. ‘We have all sinned,’ he sadly owns, ‘some gravely, others less grievously; some deliberately, others under impulse, or carried away by evil example. Some of us have stood in good counsels with little firmness, and have involuntarily and reluctantly lost our innocence. We not only come short, but we will continue to do so to the end of life. If any one has so well purged his mind that nothing can any more disturb and deceive it, he has still come to innocence through sin.’37 This confession occurs in a treatise entitled De Clementia, and it is meant to suggest a motive for the exercise of mercy, a virtue to which Stoics were not prone. As one reads the penitent acknowledgments of the Roman courtier he is reminded of the Pauline sentiment: ‘Considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.’38

With not less emphasis than Cicero, Seneca dissents from the Stoic doctrine concerning pain. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘that there are some men of severe rather than brave prudence who assert that the wise man will not grieve. They must speak of what they have never experienced, else fortune would have shaken out of them this proud wisdom, and driven them in spite of themselves to a confession of the truth. Reason demands no more than that grief be free from excess.’39 Some have doubted whether Seneca could have referred in such unsympathetic terms to a sentiment so characteristic of Stoicism, and have found in the passage quoted a ground for calling in question the authenticity of the work in which it occurs, the Consolatio ad Polybium. But the plea for the legitimacy of grief takes its place beside that for the exercise of mercy, as an appropriate feature of Roman Stoicism.

Epictetus, the Phrygian, was of sterner stuff than Seneca. He had been a slave before he became a teacher; he was lame and of a sickly constitution. This hard lot had bred in him the temper of an out-and-out Stoic, or even of a Cynic; so that he was ready to accept without abatement the dogma: Pain no evil. But the same severe experience had opened his naturally generous heart to a sympathy with the weak more akin to Christianity than to Stoicism. In his teaching God is not the God of the wise only, but of all, wise and foolish alike. No human being is an orphan, for God is a Father exercising a constant care over all.40 On the ground of the universal Fatherhood of God he inculcates humanity in the treatment of slaves. To one who is represented as asking: ‘How can you put up with a slave who, when you call for hot water, pays no attention or brings water lukewarm?’ he replies: ‘Slave! can you not bear with your own brother who takes his origin from Jove, as a son born of the same seed as yourself?’41 so giving to the idea that men are God's offspring, in the hymn of Cleanthes, a breadth of application which its author in all probability did not dream of.

In two respects the later Roman Stoicism was no improvement on the earlier, viz.: the practice of suicide and the view entertained of the future life. The former is one of the most perplexing features of the system. It is hard to reconcile with Stoic principles either the wish or the temptation to put an end to one's life. The Stoic had unbounded faith in the will of the universe, which for him was revealed in events. With Epictetus he would say: ‘Desire nothing to happen as you wish, but wish things to happen as they do’;42 and with Marcus Aurelius: ‘Whatever is agreeable to thee, O universe, is agreeable to me; nothing is early or late for me that is seasonable for you.’43 Is it not a corollary from this that one should be content to let life last as long as it can, viewing the mere physical power to last as an indication of God's will? Was it not an illogical as well as an unworthy proceeding on the part of Zeno and Cleanthes to inaugurate the bad fashion of taking the work of putting a period to their lives out of the hands of nature? Then what need or temptation to pursue this self-willed course could arise for one who believed that disease and pain and all things that tend to produce life-weariness are no real evils? Yet the legitimacy of suicide was maintained by all Stoics, not excepting Seneca, Epictetus, and the Emperor Aurelius. ‘If you do not wish to fight,’ said Seneca, ‘you can flee; God hath made nothing easier than to die.’44 ‘God hath opened the door,’ said Epictetus; ‘when things do not please you, go out and do not complain.’45 ‘If the room smokes I leave it,’46 was the homely figure under which the Stoic ruler of Rome still more cynically expressed the right of men to renounce life when they were tired of it.

That Stoicism gave an uncertain sound on the future life is not surprising. A firm, consistent doctrine on that subject could hardly be expected from a philosophy whose theory of the universe was a heterogeneous combination of materialism, pantheism, and theism. Even the founders of the school do not seem to have been of one mind on the subject. Zeno thought that the souls of men might survive death and maintain their separate existence till the general conflagration, when, with the rest of the universe, they would be absorbed into the primæval fire. Chrysippus restricted the honour of such a survival to the wise. The Stoics of the Roman period seem to be in doubt whether, even in the case of the wise, death will not mean final extinction of being. To the question, How can the gods suffer good men to be extinguished at death? Marcus Aurelius replies: ‘If it be so then it is right, if it be not right then the gods have ordered it otherwise.’47 To a mother grieving over the loss of a beloved son, all the consolation Seneca has to offer is such as can be extracted from reflections like these: ‘Death is the solution and end of all griefs, and restores us to the tranquillity in which we reposed before we were born. Death is neither good nor evil. That can be good or evil which is something, but that which is itself nothing and reduces all things to nothing, delivers us to no fortune.’48

But let our last word concerning the Stoics be one of appreciation. They have added to the spiritual treasures of the human race a devout, religious tone and a serviceable moral temper. The religious tone finds characteristic expression in the hymn of Cleanthes, in some utterances of Epictetus, and in the general strain of the Meditations of Aurelius. The keynote of Stoic piety is struck in the opening sentences of the hymn. ‘Thee it is lawful for all mortals to address. For we are thy offspring, and alone of living creatures possess a voice which is the image of reason. Therefore I will for ever sing thee and celebrate thy power.’49 The sayings of Epictetus breathe throughout the spirit of childlike trust in God, of thankfulness for the blessings of Providence, and of cheerful submission to the divine will. The prevailing mood finds culminating utterance in the closing sentences of one of his discourses on the providential order. ‘What then, since most of you are blind, were it not needful that some one should perform this function (of praise), and on behalf of all sing a hymn to God? For, what else am I, an old man, good for except to praise God? If I were a nightingale, I should do the part of a nightingale, if a swan, the part of a swan; but being a rational creature I must praise God. This is my work and I do it. I will keep this post as long as I may, and I exhort you to join in the chorus.’50 The same spirit pervades the Meditations of the Stoic Emperor, only in them the note of sadness predominates.

The ethical temper of Stoicism is not faultless. It is too self-reliant, too proud, too austere. Nevertheless it is the temper of the hero, whose nature it is to despise happiness so-called, to curb passion, and to make duty his chief end and chief good. A little of this temper helps one to play the man, and fight successfully the battle of life, especially at the critical turning-points in his experience. If the mood pass with the crisis, and give place to a softer, gentler mind, no matter. It is well to go from the school of the porch to the Schola Christi. But Stoicism has much in common with Christianity; this above all, that it asserts with equal emphasis the infinite worth of man. It backs man against the whole universe. In view of the importance of the doctrine we can pardon the extravagance with which it is asserted, and even think kindly of the Stoic wise man. The very existence of a man like Epictetus, a slave yet recognised within the school as a good man and a philosopher, helps us to measure the distance that had been travelled in the direction of Christian sentiment since the time of Plato and Aristotle. To both these philosophers the very idea would have appeared a profanity.51

• 1.

  Vide his Ethics of Aristotle, 3rd edition, vol. i. Essay VI.

• 2.

  Vide his St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, Dissertation II.

• 3.

  Lightfoot on Philippians, p. 272.

• 4.

  Bishop Lightfoot on Philippians, p. 296.

• 5.

  De Beneficiis, lib. IV. cap. ii.

• 6.

  Eodem loco.

• 7.

  Zeno reckoned among the ἀδιάφορα life, death, honour, dishonour, pain, pleasure, riches, poverty, disease, health, and the like. Vide Stobæus, Eclogæ, vol. ii. 92.

• 8.

  The Stoics, with Zeno at their head, reckoned desire, fear, pain, and pleasure the four chief passions. Vide Stobæus, Eclogæ, ii. 166.

• 9.

  Vide Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, iii. pp. 216, 217, where vouchers for these details are given.

• 10.

  Evolution and Ethics, p. 76.

• 11.

  Vide Rendall's translation of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself, introduction, p. xlii. (1898).

• 12.

  Enchiridion, cxxxiii.

• 13.

  F. Ogereau, Essai sur le Système Philosophique des Stoïciens, p. 297

• 14.

  Vide Lectures VI. and VII.

• 15.

  Vide Lecture III.

• 16.

  Dissertationes, Book iii. c. 20, I.

• 17.

  Epictetus, Dissertationes, iii. 8.

• 18.

  Lib. iii. cc. 32, 33.

• 19.

  Ego quum genui, tum moriturum scivi. Seneca, in Ad Polybium Consolatio, cxxx.

• 20.

  Dissertationes, i. 6.

• 21.

  De Providentia, cap. ii.

• 22.

  De Providentia, cap. iv.

• 23.

  De Providentia, cap. iv.

• 24.

  De Providentia, cap. iv.: ‘Gubernatorem in tempestate, in acie militem intelligas.’

• 25.

  De Providentia, cap. v.: ‘Calamitas virtutis occasio est.’

• 26.

  De Providentia, cap. v.

• 27.

  De Providentia, cap. vi.

• 28.

  Vide Cicero, De Natura Deorum, lib. ii., in which an account of the teaching of the early masters on God and Providence is given.

• 29.

  Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis, cap. iv.

• 30.

  Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis, cap. xiv.

• 31.

  Magna dii curant, parva negligunt.—Cicero, De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. cap. lxvi.

• 32.

  Cicero, De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. cap. lxvi. Balbus alludes to the fact that Homer assigns to the leading heroes, Ulysses, Diomede, Agamemnon, Achilles, divine companions in their trials and dangers.

• 33.

  Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. iv. part ii. p. 448; English translation by Dr. Dickson.

• 34.

  Psalm i.

• 35.

  Tuscul. Quæst., lib. ii. cap. xii.

• 36.

  Cicero was born 106 B.C., Seneca probably a few years before the commencement of our era.

• 37.

  De Clementia, cap. vi.

• 38.

  Galatians vi. I.

• 39.

  Ad Polybium Consolatio, cap. xxxvii.

• 40.

  Dissertationes, III. xxiv. I.

• 41.

  Dissertationes, I. xiii. I.

• 42.

  Enchiridion, cap. viii.

• 43.

  Meditationes, Book iv. cap. xxiii.

• 44.

  De Providentia, cap. vi.

• 45.

  Dissertationes, lib. iii. cap. viii.

• 46.

  Meditationes, v. 29.

• 47.

  Meditationes, xii. 5.

• 48.

  Ad Marciam Consolatio, cap. xix. But there are passages to a different effect in Seneca's writings.

• 49.

  From translation by Sir Alexander Grant in Oxford Essays, 1858, p. 96.

• 50.

  Dissertationes, lib. i. cap. 16.

• 51.

  Vide Bosanquet, Civilisation of Christendom, p. 43.