CHAPTER V. THE STOIC SECT IN ROME.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Arnold, Edward Vernon
‘If indeed they [the gods] take no thought for anything at all—an impious creed—then let us have done with sacrifice and prayer and oaths, and all other observances by which we own the presence and the nearness of the gods[135].’
Finally, he breaks away altogether from philosophy and rests his convictions on personal experience:
‘To those who press the question, “Where have you seen the gods, whence your conviction of their existence, that you worship them as you do?” I reply—first, they are visible even to the bodily eye; secondly, neither have I set eyes upon my soul, and yet I do it reverence. So it is with the gods; from my continual experience of their power, I have the conviction that they exist, and yield respect[136].’
One further argument he held in reserve; the sword, the cross, and the stake for the ‘atheists’ who refused to be convinced. He was, after all, a king[137].
Ethics.
139. In ethics, Aurelius states the main principles of Stoicism with clearness; but he altogether ignores the Stoic paradoxes, and does not trouble himself with any detailed theory of the virtues and vices. Firmness of character is to him the supreme good.
‘Be like the headland, on which the billows dash themselves continually; but it stands fast, till about its base the boiling breakers are lulled to rest. Say you, “How unfortunate for me that this should have happened”? Nay rather, “How fortunate, that in spite of this, I own no pang, uncrushed by the present, unterrified at the future!” The thing might have happened to any one, but not every one could have endured it without a pang[138].’
But in spite of these doctrines, we trace throughout his pages a tinge of melancholy. Too apt a pupil of Epictetus, he had learnt from him the principles of submission and resignation, but he had not acquired the joyous confidence of an older period, through which the wise man, even if a slave, felt himself a king. Rather, though a king, he felt himself in truth a slave and a subject to the universe that was his master. He would not go against the universal order, but he hardly felt the delight of active cooperation. In this sense he represents to us the decadence of Stoicism, or (to put it more correctly) Stoicism coloured by the decadence of Rome.
Absorption of the soul.
140. On the question of continued existence after death Aurelius takes up and emphasizes the teaching of Epictetus, ignoring the fact that other Stoic teachers, from Zeno to Seneca, had taken larger views or at least allowed themselves an ampler language. There had been, indeed, a change in the point of view. The early Stoics, occupied with the question of physics, had insisted upon the indestructibility of substance, and the reuniting of the ‘spirit’ (πνεῦμα) with the all-pervading spirit from which it came at the beginning. The Roman school concerned itself more with the question of individuality and personality. Accepting fully the principle that that which is born must die, it comes to the definite conclusion that that which we trace from the mother’s womb through infancy and youth, through success and failure in life, through marriage and the family ties onwards to weakness and dotage, must reach its end in death. The ‘I’ cannot survive the body. The future existence of the soul, if such there be, is no longer (as with Seneca) a matter of joyful expectation, but of complete indifference.
Epictetus had expressed this with sufficient clearness:
‘Death is a change, not from the state which now is to that which is not, but to that which is not now. Shall I then no longer exist? You will not exist, but you will be something else, of which the world now has need; for you also came into existence, not when you chose, but when the world had need of you[139].’
Aurelius constantly repeats the doctrine in varied forms:
‘You exist but as a part inherent in a greater whole. You will vanish into that which gave you being; or rather, you will be re-transmuted into the seminal and universal reason[140].’
‘Death put Alexander of Macedon and his stable boy on a par. Either they were received into the seminal principles of the universe, or were alike dispersed into atoms[141].’
Preparation for death.
141. The saddened outlook of Marcus Aurelius upon life harmonizes well with the resignation with which he contemplates a death, which for himself individually will be the end. Hence it is that his reflections so often make the thought of death a guiding principle of ethics; he who has learnt to look forward calmly to his last act has learnt thereby to abide patiently all the troubles which postpone it. Thus the last message of the princely philosopher, as of his predecessor, is that men should ‘bear and forbear’:
‘Contemn not death, but give it welcome; is not death too a part of nature’s will? As youth and age, as growth and prime, as the coming of teeth and beard and grey hairs, as begetting and pregnancy and the bearing of children, as all other operations of nature, even such is dissolution. Therefore the rational man should not treat death with impatience or repugnance or disdain, but wait for it as one of nature’s operations[142].’
‘O for the soul ready, when the hour of dissolution comes, for extinction or dispersion or survival! But such readiness must proceed from inward conviction[143].’
‘Serenely you await the end, be it extinction or transmutation. While the hour yet tarries, what help is there? what, but to reverence and bless the gods, to do good to men, “to endure and to refrain”? and of all that lies outside the bounds of flesh and breath, to remember that it is not yours, nor in your power[144].’
His yearnings.
142. Aurelius was no teacher of Stoicism in his time: his thoughts are addressed to himself alone[145]. But the happy accident that has preserved this work, which for nine centuries was lost to sight[146], enables us to obtain a view of this philosophy from which otherwise we should have been shut out. We do not go to Aurelius to learn what Stoic doctrine was; this is taken for granted throughout the book; but we can see here how it affected a man in whom the intellectual outlook was after all foreshortened by sympathies and yearnings which had grown up in his nature. The traditional criticism of the school as being harsh, unsympathetic, unfeeling, breaks to pieces as we read these ‘thoughts’; rather we find an excess of emotion, a surrender to human weakness. A study of Stoicism based on the works of Aurelius alone would indeed give us but a one-sided picture; but a study in which they were omitted would certainly lack completeness. He is also our last authority. In the centuries which succeeded, other waves of philosophic thought washed over Stoicism, and contended in turn with more than one religion which pressed in from the East. Yet for a long time to come Stoic principles were faithfully inculcated in thousands of Roman homes, and young men taught in childhood to model their behaviour upon the example of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Epictetus formed the salt of the Roman world. If in riper years they joined, in ever increasing numbers, the Christian church, they brought with them something which the world could not afford to lose.