Roman Stoicism being lectures on the history of the Stoic...

473. From the doctrine of ‘eternal life’ follow the first principles of morals: eternal life is the moral end (τέλος) or summum bonum[86]. The spirit is everything, the act nothing; good lies in the intention, not in the performance[87]; we are saved by faith, not by works[88]. Therefore all tabus fall away; ‘to the pure everything is pure[89]’; ‘in its own nature no food is impure; but if people regard any food as impure, to them it is[90]’; ‘our ungraceful parts come to have a more abundant grace[91]’; ‘everything that God has created is good[92].’ And because God and all men share in one spirit, all men are fellow-citizens in the cosmopolis[93]. To this St Paul sacrifices all personal advantages of which otherwise he might be justly proud, his Hebrew descent, his free citizenship in the Roman empire, and even his standing in sex above an inferior part of the creation[94]. The spiritual condition is expressed in terms of certain emotional attitudes which correspond to the three Stoic ‘constancies[95]’; the details vary, but love, joy, peace, gentleness and sweet reasonableness[96] are frequently recurring terms, whilst faith, hope and love are recommended in one passage of the highest eloquence, love (ἀγάπη, caritas) being given the highest place of all[97].

474. In the treatment of the virtues and vices we miss the familiar series of the four virtues, though three of them find a place here or there in some more elaborate list[98]. The vices are treated with much more fulness. Those connected with the sexual relations and functions are invariably the first to be condemned; incest, adultery, harlotry, foul conversation, are named in almost every list[99]. Next in importance are ill-feeling and quarrelsomeness; heavy drinking comes after these. More upon Stoic lines is the reproof of ‘excessive grief[100].’ The necessity of steady progress is strongly pressed, and the term used (προκοπή) is that with which we are familiar in Greek philosophy[101]. In all the Paulist writers there is also incessant insistence upon the importance of the regular performance of daily duties[102]. Experience not only of the disasters which befel the church at Jerusalem, but also of similar tendencies nearer at hand, had impressed deeply on Paul the insufficiency of moral teaching which relied on general principles and emotional feeling only, especially if such teaching (as in the Sermon on the mount) was mainly negative. The Paulists at any rate set forth, almost in a fixed form, a body of instructions to serve the community as a whole, and social[103] rather than ethical in nature. This teaching follows closely the Stoic teaching of the same period, and is based upon the relationships (σχέσεις), such as those of king and subject, master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child[104].

475. As against the Stoic sage the Paulists set up as their ideal the saint, and used all the resources of eloquence in his commendation. He is the true king and priest[105]; even if he is a beggar, he is surpassingly rich[106]; he alone, though a slave, is free[107]. On the other hand the sinner is always a slave[108]; even his good acts are without real value[109]. All such phrases would be familiar to our Stoic inquirer; but perhaps he might be specially impressed by finding once more the doctrine of the ‘sufficiency of virtue’ amongst the Christians. The term is indeed altered[110], but it bears the same meaning as regards independence of wealth, health and liberty, though with more emphasis upon support from a divine source.

476. It is generally agreed that in the writings of St Paul there is displayed a special sense of shame and horror in speaking of sin[111], which entirely differentiates his teaching from that of the Stoics. This difference, however, cannot be due to St Paul treating sin as ‘defiance towards a loving Father[112],’ for this view was also that of Cleanthes and the Stoics generally; and Paul’s horror of sin depends on no reasoning, but is felt by him as instinctive. It remains to add that our Stoic inquirer would find an apparent conflict between this instinct and Paul’s reasoning. The sin of which St Paul finds it ‘a shame even to speak[113]’ is sexual; and so far as it consists in abnormal social habits, such as those relations between persons of the same sex which had found excuse in the classical world, the Stoic would at once agree that these practices were ‘against nature[114]’ and were unseemly. Again, the marriage of near relations, though not against nature in the sense in which nature is illustrated by the animal world, is still opposed to so deep-seated a social tradition as to merit instinctive condemnation[115]. But the instincts of St Paul go far deeper; the marriage relation is to him at the best a concession to human frailty, and falls short of the ideal[116]. Nor is this merely a personal view of Paul; it is deeply impressed upon the consciousness of the whole Christian church.

477. It would seem that here we have touched a fundamental point in the historical development of the moral sentiments. The sexual tabus are the most primitive and deeply-seated in human history. From this point of view woman is by nature impure, the sex-functions which play so large a part in her mature life being to the savage both dangerous and abhorrent. Hence the view, so strongly held by St Paul, that woman as a part of the creation is inferior to man. But man too becomes by his sex-functions impure, though for shorter periods; and by union with woman lowers himself to her level. Hence the unconquerable repugnance of St Paul to the sexual relation under any conditions whatever[117]; a repugnance which reason and religion keep within limits[118], but which yet always breaks out afresh in his writings. Hence also he assumes as unquestionable the natural unseemliness of the sexual parts of the body; in all these points not going beyond feelings which are to-day as keen as ever, though no philosopher has found it easy to justify them. But in certain points St Paul outpaces the general feeling, and shows himself an extreme reactionary against the philosophic doctrines which he shared with the Stoic. He extends his dislike, in accordance with a most primitive tabu, to woman’s hair[119]; he desires the subordination of woman to man to be marked in her outward appearance[120]; and he forbids women to speak in the general meetings of church members[121].

478. This intense feeling on the part of St Paul required, as his writings assume, no justification; it was therefore an inherited feeling, as familiar to many an Oriental as it is usually strange and unsympathetic to the ancient and modern European. It appears also to be rooted in Hebrew tradition; for if we are at liberty to interpret the myth of Adam and Eve by the parallel of Yama and Yamī in the Rigveda[122], the fall of man was nothing else than the first marriage, in which Eve was the suitor and Adam the accomplice. In the dramatic poem of the Rigveda Yama corresponds to the Hebrew Adam, his sister Yamī to Eve[123]. Yamī yearns to become the mother of the human race; Yama shudders at the impiety of a sister’s embrace. Zeno had already conceived the world-problem in much the same shape[124]; but to the Oriental it is more than a problem of cosmology; it is the fundamental opposition of sex attitude, the woman who longs for the family affections against the man who seeks an ideal purity. In Genesis the prohibition of the apple appears at first sight colourless, yet the meaning is hardly obscure. After touching the forbidden fruit man and woman first feel the shame of nakedness; and Eve is punished by the coming pains of child-bearing, and a rank below her husband’s. None the less she has her wish, for she becomes the mother of all living. It is hard to think that Paul, who always traces human sin back to the offence of Adam, and finds it most shamelessly displayed in the sex-relationships of his own time, could have conceived of the Fall in any very different way.

479. According then to a point of view which we believe to be latent in all the teaching of Paul on the subject of sin, the original taint lay in procreation, and through the begetting of children has passed on from one generation of mankind to another; ‘through the succession from Adam all men become dead[125].’ As an ethical standpoint this position is very alien from Stoicism; with the Stoic it is a first law of nature which bids all men seek for the continuance of the race; with the Apostle the same yearning leads them to enter the pathway of death. It would lead us too far to attempt here to discuss this profound moral problem, which has deeply influenced the whole history of the Christian church. We are however greatly concerned with the influence of this sentiment on Pauline doctrine. For it follows that in order to attain to a true moral or spiritual life man needs a new begetting and a new birth[126]; he must become a son of God through the outpouring of his spirit[127]. This is one of the most familiar of Pauline conceptions, and for us it is easy to link it on to the Stoico-Pauline account of the creation, according to which man was in the first instance created through the Word of God, and endowed with his spirit. But to the community at Jerusalem all conceptions of this kind appear to have been hardly intelligible, and tended to aggravate the deep distrust of the teachings and methods of St Paul and his companions, which was rooted in his disregard of national tradition.

480. This difference of mental attitude soon broke out into an open quarrel. So much was inevitable; and the fact that the quarrel is recorded at length in the texts from which we are quoting is one of the strongest evidences of their general accuracy. The Christians at Jerusalem formed themselves into a nationalist party; they claimed that all the brothers should be in the first instance conformists to Hebrew institutions. Paul went up to Jerusalem[128], eager to argue the matter with men of famous name. He was disillusioned, as is so often the traveller who returns after trying experiences and much mental growth to the home to which his heart still clings. Peter and the others had no arguments to meet Paul’s; he could learn nothing from them[129]; they had not even a consistent practice[130]. At first Paul’s moral sense was outraged; he publicly rebuked Peter as double-faced. After a little time he realized that he had met with children; he remembered that he had once thought and acted in the same way[131]. Jews in heart, the home apostles still talked of marvels[132], still yearned for the return of Jesus in the flesh[133]. A philosophic religion was as much beyond their grasp as a consistent morality. Through a simple-minded application of the doctrines of the Sermon on the mount they had slipped into deep poverty[134]; they were ready to give Paul full recognition in return for charitable help.

481. Thus for the first time the forces of mythology within the Christian church clashed with those of philosophy. For the moment Paul appeared to be the victor; he won the formal recognition of the church, with full authority to continue his preaching on the understanding that it was primarily directed to the Gentile world[138]. External events were also unfavourable to the Hebraists: the destruction of Jerusalem deprived them of their local centre; the failure of Jesus to reappear in the flesh within the lifetime of his companions disappointed them of their most cherished hope. But their sentiments and thoughts remained to a great extent unchanged. To Paul they gave their respect, to Peter their love; and the steady tradition of the Christian church has confirmed this judgment. No saint has been so loved as Peter; to none have so many churches been dedicated by the affectionate instinct of the many; whilst even the dominant position of Paul in the sacred canon has hardly secured him much more than formal recognition except by the learned. So again it was with Paul’s teaching; formally recognised as orthodox, it remained misunderstood and unappreciated: it was even rapidly converted into that mythological form to which Paul himself was so fiercely opposed.

482. This divergence of view is illustrated most strikingly in the two doctrines which for both parties were the cardinal points of Christian belief, the divine nature of the Founder and his resurrection. On the latter point the standpoint of the Hebraists is sufficiently indicated by the tradition of the gospels, all of which emphatically record as a decisive fact that the body of Jesus was not found in his grave on the third day; to the Paulists this point is entirely irrelevant, and they pass it by unmentioned[139]. To Paul again the man Jesus was of human and natural birth, born of the posterity of David, born of a woman, born subject to the law[140]; in his aspect as the Christ he was, as his followers were to be, begotten of the spirit and born anew[141]. His statement as to descent from David (which hardly means more than that he was of Jewish race) was crystallized by the mythologists in two formal genealogies, which disagree so entirely in detail that they have always been the despair of verbal apologists, but agree in tracing the pedigree through Joseph to Jesus. The phrase ‘begotten of the spirit’ was interpreted with equal literalness; but the marvel-lovers were for a time puzzled to place the ‘spirit’ in the family relationship. In the first instance the spirit seems to have been identified with the mother of Jesus[142]; but the misunderstanding of a Hebrew word which does not necessarily connote physical virginity[143] assisted to fix the function of fatherhood upon the divine parent.

The antipathy to the natural process of procreation which we have traced in St Paul himself, and which was surely not less active amongst many of the Hebraists, has contributed to raise this materialisation of a philosophic tenet to a high place amongst the formal dogmas of historic Christianity.

483. But if the tendency to myth-making was still alive in the Christian church, that in the direction of philosophy had become self-confident and active. The Paulists had taken the measure of their former opponents; they felt themselves superior in intellectual and moral vigour, and they knew that they had won this superiority by contact with the Gentile world. More than before they applied themselves to plead the cause of the Christ before the Gentiles; but the storm and stress of the Pauline epistles gave way in time to a serener atmosphere, in which the truths of Stoicism were more generously acknowledged. A Stoic visitor of the reign of Trajan would meet in Christian circles the attitude represented to us by the fourth gospel, in which the problem of the Christ-nature stands to the front, and is treated on consistently Stoic lines. St Paul had spoken of Jesus as ‘for us a wisdom which is from God[144]’ and had asserted that ‘from the beginning he had the nature of God[145]’; his successors declared frankly that Christ was the Logos, the Word[146]; and in place of the myth of the Virgin Birth they deliberately set in the beginning of their account of Christ the foundation-principles of Stoic physics and the Paulist account of the spiritual procreation of all Christians.

‘To all who have received him, to them—that is, to those who trust in his name—he has given the privilege of becoming children of God; who were begotten as such not by human descent, nor through an impulse of their own nature, nor through the will of a human father, but from God.

484. During the whole of the second century A.D. men trained in Stoic principles crowded into the Christian community. Within it they felt they had a special work to do in building up Christian doctrine so that it might face all storms of criticism. This effort gradually took the shape of schools modelled upon those of the philosophic sects. Such a school was founded by an ex-Stoic named Pantaenus at Alexandria in 181 A.D.; and his successors Clemens of Alexandria (ob. c. 215 A.D.) and Origenes (c. 186-253 A.D.) specially devoted themselves to developing the theory of the divine nature upon Stoic lines. Not all the particulars they suggested were accepted by the general feeling of the Christian body, but from the discussion was developed gradually the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity[150]. The elements of this doctrine have been already traced in St Paul’s epistles, in which the dominating conceptions are those of God the Father, the Christ, and the divine spirit. For these in the next generation we find the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; and the last term of the triad becomes increasingly identified with the ‘holy spirit’ of Stoicism. But these three conceptions (with others) are in Stoic doctrine varying names or aspects of the divine unity. Seneca, for instance, had written in the following tone:

‘To whatever country we are banished, two things go with us, our part in the starry heavens above and the world around, our sole right in the moral instincts of our own hearts. Such is the gift to us of the supreme power which shaped the universe. That power we sometimes call “the all-ruling God,” sometimes “the incorporeal Wisdom” which is the creator of mighty works, sometimes the “divine spirit” which spreads through things great and small with duly strung tone, sometimes “destiny” or the changeless succession of causes linked one to another[151].’

Here the larger variety of terms used by the early Stoic teachers[152] is reduced to four aspects of the first cause, namely God, the Word, the divine spirit, and destiny. The Christian writers struck out from the series the fourth member, and the doctrine of the Trinity was there. Its stiff formulation for school purposes in the shape ‘these three are one’ has given it the appearance of a paradox; but to persons conversant with philosophic terminology such a phrase was almost commonplace, and is indeed found in various associations[153]. The subsequent conversion of the members of the triad into three ‘persons’ introduced a simplification which is only apparent, for the doctrine must always remain meaningless except as a typical solution of the old problem of ‘the One and the many,’ carried up to the level of ultimate Being[154].

485. In the ages that have since followed mythology and philosophy have been at work side by side within the Christian church. At no time had Christians of philosophic temperament entirely thrown off the belief in marvels, and this in increasing degree infected the whole Hellenistic world from the second century onwards. But this spirit of concession proved no sure protection to men who, after all, were guilty of thinking. It was substantially on this ground that the first persecutions began within the church. Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria (circ. 230 A.D.), excommunicated Origen, and obtained the support of the great majority of the Christian churches for his action; still Origen steadily held his ground, and has found advocates in all ages of Christian history[155]. Throughout the ‘dark ages’ philosophical thought lay almost extinguished, and a childish credulity attained such monstrous dimensions as to threaten the very existence of social life. In the ecclesiastical chronicles of the middle ages miracles are so frequent that the orderly course of nature seems the exception; angels and devils are so many that men are almost forgotten. To these hallucinations and fictions of the monastery, so deservedly ridiculed in the Ingoldsby Legends[156], the practical experience of daily life must always have supplied some corrective; the swollen claim of ‘faith’ to say yes to every absurdity had to be met by the reassertion of criticism, the right to say ‘no.’

The Reformation, at the cost of infinite effort and sacrifice, swept away the miracles of the saints; modern criticism has spared none of the marvels of the Old Testament, and is beginning to lay its axe to the root of those of the New. Every day the conviction that ‘miracles do not happen’ gains ground amongst intelligent communities; that is (in philosophic language) the dualism of God and Nature is being absorbed in the wider monism according to which God and Nature are one.

486. As the credit of Christian mythology diminishes, the philosophic content of the new religion is regaining its authority. The doctrine of the ‘spiritual life’ has not yet lost its freshness or its power; but the more closely it is examined, the more clearly will it be seen that it is rooted in the fundamental Stoic conceptions of providence and duty, and that, in the history of the Christian church, it is specially bound up with the life and writings of the apostle Paul. It is not suggested that the sketch of Christian teaching contained in this chapter is in any way a complete or even a well-proportioned view of the Christian faith; for we have necessarily thrown into the background those elements of the new religion which are drawn from Judaism[157] or from the personality of the Founder. Nor have we found in Paul a Stoic philosopher: it remains for a more direct and profound study to determine which of the forces which stirred his complex intellect most exactly represents his true and final convictions. No man at any rate ever admitted more frankly the conflict both of moral and of intellectual cravings within himself; no man ever cautioned his followers more carefully against accepting all his words as final. With these reservations we may perhaps venture to join in the hopes of a recent writer who was endowed with no small prophetic insight:

‘The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay the debt which the church of God owes to this “least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God[158].”’