 CHAPTER VI When Socrates declared before his judges that there was no evil to a good man either in life or after death, nor are his affairs neglected by the gods, he sounded the keynote of stoicism, with its two main doctrines of virtue as the only good, and the government of the world by providence. Let us weigh his words, lest we interpret them by the light of a comfortable modern piety. A great many things that are commonly called evil may and do happen to a good man in this life, and therefore presumably misfortunes may also overtake him in any other life that there may be. The only evil that can ever befall him is vice, because that would be a contradiction in terms. Unless therefore Socrates was uttering idle words on the most solemn occasion of his life, he must be taken to have meant that there is no evil but vice, which implies that there is no good but virtue. Unless we are landed at once in the heart of the stoic morality. To the question why, if there be a providence, so many evils happen to good men, Seneca unflinchingly replies, no evil can happen to a good man, contraries do not mix. God has removed from the good all evil, because he has taken from them crimes and sins, bad thoughts and selfish designs, and blind lust and grasping avarice. He has attended well to themselves, but he cannot be expected to look after their luggage. They relieve him of that care by being indifferent about it. This is the only form in which the doctrine of divine providence can be held consistently with the facts of life. Again, when Socrates on the same occasion expressed his belief that it was not permitted by the divine law for a better man to be harmed by a worse, he was asserting by implication the stoic position. Neither Miletus nor Anetus could harm him, though they might have him killed or banished or disfranchised. This passage of the Apology in a condensed form is adopted by Epictetus as one of the watchwords of stoicism. There is nothing more distinctive of Socrates than the doctrine that virtue is knowledge. Here too the stoics followed him, ignoring all that Aristotle had done in showing the part played by the emotions and the will in virtue. Reason was with them a principle of action. With Aristotle it was a principle that guided action, but the mode of power had to come from elsewhere. Socrates must even be held responsible for the stoic paradox of the madness of all ordinary folk. The stoics did not owe much to the parapetetics. There was too much balance about the mastermind of Aristotle for their narrow intensity. His recognition of the value of the passions was to them an advocacy of disease and moderation. His admission of other elements besides virtue into the conception of happiness seemed to them to be a betrayal of the citadel. To say, as he did, that the exercise of virtue was the highest good, was no merit in their eyes, unless they were added to the confession that there was none beside it. The stoics tried to treat man as a being of pure reason. The parapetetics would not shut their eyes to his mixed nature, and contended that the good of such a being must also be mixed, containing in it elements which had reference to the body and its environment. The goods of the soul indeed, they said, far outweighed those of body and estate, but still the latter had a right to be considered. That virtue is the one thing needful would have been acknowledged by the parapetetics as well as by the stoics, but in a different sense. The parapetetics would have meant by it that such things as health and wealth and honor and family and friends and country, though good in their way, were not yet to be compared with goods of the soul, whereas the stoics meant literally that there were no other goods. In practice the two doctrines would come to the same thing, since the adherent of either sect would, if true to his principles, equally sacrifice the lower to the higher in case of conflict. But the parapetetics had the advantage of calling those things goods which everybody, except for the sake of argument, acknowledges to be such. With regard to happiness also they were on the side of common opinion. Happiness is not thought of apart from virtue, nor yet apart from fortune. It has its inner and its outer side. The stoics admitted only the inner. The parapetetics included the outer also. By confining happiness to its inner side the stoics identified it with virtue, but this is essentially a one-sided view. Happiness is a composite conception. It is like the image seen by Nebuchadnezzar in his dream, which began in fine gold and ended in mirey clay. So happiness consists, in the main, of the pure gold of virtue, but tails off towards the extremities into meaner materials. But though we may decline to talk with the stoics, demurring to their misuse of language, we need not refuse to admire the loftiness of their aspirations. They would feign have had the image of their sage wrought to fine gold from head to heel. They felt that no good but the highest can be satisfying. They were seeking for a peace which the world cannot give. And they said to virtue, and they said to virtue, as Augustine said to God, Our heart can find no rest until it rests in thee. They saw that, if happiness depended in any degree upon externals, the imperturbable serenity of the sage would be impossible. In truth it is impossible. Christianity recognized this in postponing happiness to a future life. But it was the craving for such perfect peace which led to the stoic position. They were convinced also that the good man must be beloved of God and the object of his care. But they saw that this was not so with regard to things external. For they inferred that these were indifferent. And if indifferent, then despicable, so that they needed not to worry about them. They had but to keep a conscience void of offence and let other things look after themselves. To take no thought for the morrow was the outcome of their teaching, as of the sermon on the mount. But the stoics were ready to carry out their doctrine to its logical consequences, and if food were not forthcoming, to avail themselves of the open door. How long virtue lasted, they declared, was beside the point. It was the state of mind that counted. The sage would deem that time pertain not to him. Thus were the stoics ready to serve God for not, asking not even for the wages of going on and still to be. They did not judge of his providence by the loaves and fishes that fell to their share, but had the faith which could exclaim, Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Why should he who possesses the only good complain of the distribution of things indifferent? The true stoic, having chosen the better part, was content to be still in murmur not. There might be a future life, the stoics believe there was, but it never presented itself to them as necessary to correct the injustice of this. There was no injustice. Virtue needed no reward, or could not fail of it, for it could not fail of itself. Nor could the vicious fail of their punishment, for that punishment was to have missed the only good. Vrtutum vedeyant, in Tabaskan ke relikta Though the stoics were religious to the point of superstition, yet they did not invoke the terrors of theology to enforce the lesson of virtue. Plato does this, even in the very work the professed object of which is to prove the intrinsic superiority of justice to injustice. But Chrysippus protested against Plato's procedure on this point, declaring that the talk about punishment by the gods was mere bugaboo. By the stoics indeed, no less than by the Epicureans, fear of the gods was discarded from philosophy. The Epicurean gods took no part in the affairs of men, the stoic god was incapable of anger. The absence of any appeal to rewards and punishments was a natural consequence of the central tenet of the stoic morality, that virtue is in itself the most desirable of all things. Another corollary that flows with equal directness from the same principle is that it is better to be than to seem virtuous. Those who are sincerely convinced that happiness is to be found in wealth or pleasure or power prefer the reality to the appearance of these goods. It must be the same with him who is sincerely convinced that happiness lies in virtue. To be just then is the great desideratum, how many know that you are so is not to the purpose. Far more important than what others think of you is what you have reason to think of yourself. The same searching spirit is displayed in the stoic declaration that to be in lust is sin even without the act. He who apprehends the force of such philosophy may well apostrophize it in the words of Cicero. One day well spent and in accordance with thy precepts is worth an immortality of sin. Despite the want of feeling in which the stoic's gloried it is yet true to say that the humanity of their system constitutes one of its most just claims on our admiration. They were the first fully to recognize the worth of man as man. They heralded the reign of peace for which we are yet waiting. They proclaimed to the world the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They were convinced of the solidarity of mankind and laid down that the interest of one must be subordinated to that of all. The word philanthropy, though not unheard before their time, was brought into prominence by them as a name for a virtue among the virtues. Aristotle's ideal state, like the Republic of Plato, is still an Hellenic city. Zeno was the first to dream of a republic which had embraced all mankind. In Plato's Republic all the material goods are contemptuously thrown to the lower classes, all the mental and spiritual reserved for the higher. In Aristotle's ideal the bulk of the population are mere conditions, not integral parts of the state. Aristotle's callous acceptance of the existing fact of slavery blinded his eyes to the wider outlook which already in his time was beginning to be taken. His theories of the natural slave and of the natural nobility of the Greeks are mere attempts to justify practice. In the ethics there is indeed a recognition of the rights of man, but it is faint and grudging. Well there tells us that a slave, as a man, admits of justice, and therefore a friendship, but unfortunately it is not this concession which is dominant in his system, but rather the reduction of a slave to a living tool by which it is immediately preceded. In another passage Aristotle points out that men, like other animals, have a natural affection for the members of their own species, a fact he adds which is best seen in traveling. This incipient humanitarianism seems to have been developed in a much more marked way by Aristotle's followers, but it is the Stoics who have won the glory of having initiated humanitarian sentiment. Virtue with the earlier Greek philosophers was aristocratic and exclusive. Stoicism, like Christianity, threw it open to the meanest of mankind. In the Kingdom of Wisdom, as in the Kingdom of Christ, there was neither barbarian, Scythian, Bond, nor Free. The only true freedom was to serve philosophy, or which was the same thing, to serve God, and that could be done in any station in life. The sole condition of communion with gods and good men was the possession of a certain frame of mind, which might belong equally to a gentleman, to a freedman, or to a slave. In place of the arrogant assertion of the natural nobility of the Greeks, we now hear that a good mind is the true nobility. Birth is of no importance, all are sprung from the gods. Quote, The door of virtue is shut to no man. It is open to all, admits all, invites all, freemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles. Its election is not of family or fortune. It is content with the bare man. Quote, Wherever there was a human being, there stoicism saw a field for well-doing. Its followers were always to have in their mouths and hearts the well-known line, Homo sum, Humana nihil, a me aleenum puto. Closely connected with the humanitarianism of the Greeks is their cosmopolitanism. is a word which is contracted rather than expanded in meaning with the advance of time. We mean by it freedom from the shackles of nationality. The Stoics meant this and more. The city of which they claimed to be citizens was not merely this round world on which we dwell, but the universe at large, with all the mighty life therein contained. In this city the greatest of earth cities, Rome, Ephesus, or Alexandria, were but houses. To be exiled from one of them was only like changing your lodgings, and death but a removal from one quarter to another. The freemen of this city were all rational beings, sages on earth and the stars in heaven. Such an idea was thoroughly in keeping with the soaring genius of stoicism. It was proclaimed by Zeno in his republic and after him by Chrysippus and his followers. It caught the imagination of alien writers, as of the author of the parapetetic De Mundo, who was possibly of Jewish origin, and of Philo and St. Paul, who were certainly so. Cicero does not fail to make use of it on behalf of the Stoics. Seneca revels in it, Epictetus employs it for edification, and Marcus Aurelius finds solace in his heavenly citizenship for the cares of an earthly ruler, as Antoninus indeed his city is Rome, but as a man it is the universe. The philosophy of an age cannot perhaps be inferred from its political conditions with that certainty which some writers assume. Still there are cases in which the connection is obvious. On a wide view of the matter we may say that the opening of the east by the arms of Alexander was the cause of the shifting of the philosophic standpoint from Hellenism to cosmopolitanism. If we reflect that the cynic and Stoic teachers were mostly foreigners in Greece we shall find a very tangible reason for the change of view. Greece had done her work in educating the world, and the world was beginning to make payment in kind. Those who had been branded as natural slaves were now giving laws to philosophy. The kingdom of wisdom was suffering violence at the hands of barbarians. This concludes the reading of Stoicism by George Stock.