The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

The remarkable thing about all these systems, if we may so call them, is, that while the existing popular religion teemed over, so to say, with the idea of a number of personal agents directing human things, these philosophers nearly all concurred in the attempt to find some one agent, and that material, from which all should spring. As yet even the radical distinction of matter and spirit was not clear to their minds:333 the soul of the individual man was to them merely a particle of the vital power which disclosed itself through the universe, the purest portion, but a portion still, of primal matter. In their conception of the constituent cause while they advanced towards unity they receded from personality. Even the world-forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, who first distinctly declares that spirit is not mixed with matter, works only as a power of nature, and is portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as a finer matter.334

After Greek philosophy had run out during about a hundred and fifty years in this sort of vague and imaginative speculation upon the physical world, it underwent a great change, which marks the transition to its second period. These successive opinions of philosophers led a class of men who arose at Athens about the middle age of Socrates to the conclusion, that it would be more profitable to turn the course of human thought from such cosmological reveries to the question of the perception itself of truth by man. He who accomplished this was Socrates, who turned his reflexion by preference upon man himself as the subject who thinks and wills.335 And herein his character had an influence over Greek philosophy which is strikingly marked through the whole of its second period. This period embraces the Sophists, Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, and the Stoics and Epicureans; finally those Sceptic and Eclectic schools which rose naturally from the criticism detecting what is untenable in preceding systems. During the six hundred years which elapse from the teaching career of Socrates to the death of Marcus Antoninus we may say that one great line of inquiry occupied among philosophers the human mind; it was man himself, as the subject of logical thought and moral will.336 The chief endeavour was to form a science of ethics, and a science of reasoning, to which physical and mathematical studies, though at times warmly pursued and never wholly neglected, were yet subordinate.337

Who is this man of singular ugliness, with a face like a Silenus, with a body enduring hunger and impervious to heat and cold, who for thirty years frequents from morning to night the agora, the streets, the porticoes of Athens; who can drain the wine-cup through the night, and with reason unimpaired discuss philosophy through the following day; never alone, ready to converse with all in whom he discerned the germ of inquiry; who neither courts the high nor despises the low, but beside whom may be found the reckless beauty of Alcibiades and the staid gravity of Nicias, the admiring gaze of Plato even in youth majestic, and the sober homage of plainer Xenophon? Who is this, the man most social of men where the whole population is a club, the club of Athenian citizenship; whose tongue arrests the most volatile and inconstant of peoples; whose reason attracts and by turns draws out or silences the most opposite of characters; whose whole life is publicity; of spirit at once homely and subtle, simple and critical, parent both of philosophic certitude and philosophic scepticism? This is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, to whom Greek philosophy will look back as on one that had given its bent and directed its course during a thousand years, until the last of its defenders338 will fight a hopeless battle with triumphant Christianity, as the gods of Greece vanish, never more to return, and the lurid star of a false prophet teaching a false monotheism appears above the horizon, and takes the place, which they have left vacant, to be chief foe of the Christian name.

The special principle of Socrates is thus described to us by an historian of Greek philosophy.339 “It is not merely an already existing mode of thought which was further developed by Socrates, but an essentially new principle and proceeding which were introduced into philosophy. Whilst all preceding philosophy had been directed immediately on the object, so that the question of the essence and grounds of natural appearances is in it the radical question, on which all others depend, Socrates was the first to give utterance to the conviction that nothing can be known respecting anything which meets our thought, before its general essence, its conception, be determined: that accordingly the trial of our own representations by the standard of the conception is philosophical self-cognition, the beginning and the condition of all true knowing: whilst those who preceded him had arrived through the consideration of things only to distinguishing between the representation of things and the knowing of them, he, reversing this, makes all cognition of things dependent on the right view of the nature of knowledge.”

Another340 says: “It is stated in Aristotle's Metaphysics341 that Socrates introduced the method of Induction and Definition, which proceeds from the individual to the determination of the conception. Aristotle marks342 the domain of ethics as that on which Socrates applied this method. According to him the fundamental view of Socrates was the indivisible unity of theoretical prudence and practical ability on ethical ground. Socrates conceived all the virtues to be prudences, inasmuch as they are sciences.343 These statements are fully borne out by the portraits of Xenophon and Plato: Aristotle has only given point to their expression. Thus Xenophon says,344 ‘he was ever conversing about human things, inquiring what was piety and what impiety; what honour and what turpitude; what just and what unjust; what sobermindedness and what madness; what courage and what cowardice; what policy and what politician; what the government of men and who capable of it; and suchlike things; and those who knew these he esteemed men of honour and goodness, those who knew them not to be justly called of servile mind.’ ‘Never did he cease inquiring with those who frequented him about what everything was.’345 ‘And he did not distinguish between wisdom and temperance, but he asserted that justice and every other virtue was wisdom.’346 With this view hang together the convictions that virtue can be taught, that all virtue in truth is only one, and that no one is willingly wicked, but only through ignorance.347 The good is identical with the beautiful and the expedient. Right dealing, grounded upon prudence and practice, is better than good fortune. Self-knowledge, the fulfilment of the Delphic Apollo's injunction, ‘Know thyself,’ is the condition of practical ability. External goods do not advance. To need nothing is godlike; to need the least possible comes nearest to the divine perfection.348 Cicero's well-known expression is substantially correct,349 that Socrates called down philosophy from heaven to earth, introduced it into cities and houses, and required it to study life, morals, goods and evils, which constituted a progress from the natural philosophy pursued by his predecessors to ethics whose province is man. But Socrates possessed no complete system of ethical doctrines, but only the mainspring of inquiry; and so it was natural that he could only reach definite ethical statements in conversation with others. Thus his art was Mental Midwifery,350 as Plato designates it. His confessed non-knowledge, resting on the firm consciousness of the essence of true knowledge, stood higher than the imagined knowledge of those who conversed with him; and to it was attached the Socratic Irony; that apparent recognition which is paid to the superior wisdom and prudence of another until this is dissolved into its nothingness by the dialectic examination which measures what is maintained as a generalisation by the fixed point of the particular case. Thus it was that Socrates exercised the charge of examining men,351 which he was convinced had been imposed upon him by the Delphic god in the oracle elicited by Chærepho, that he was the wisest of men.”

The opinion, practice, and teaching of Socrates concerning the gods and the godhead are set forth most graphically by his disciple Xenophon in two chapters of his Memorabilia. Scarcely could a Christian moralist exhibit more lucidly the argument from design in proof of a divine Providence which has formed and which rules the world; more than this, which has produced the seasons of the year, the plants, the animals, for the good of man. In the eyes of Socrates the human body itself is a never-failing proof of the divine love of man. He details the wisdom with which it is put together, and forces the opponent, who is introduced as not sacrificing, nor praying to the gods, nor believing in divination, to confess: “When I consider this, assuredly these things seem the device of some wise world-maker, the lover of living things.”352 Another he compels by a long enumeration of divine benefits to man to come to a similar conclusion.353 “Certainly, Socrates, the gods seem to have a great care for men. Besides, he replies, when we cannot foresee in the future what is good for us, they help us by revealing through divination what is to come, and instructing us as to the best course. Nay, Socrates, rejoins the other, they seem to treat you even more kindly than other men; for without being asked by you they signify before to you what you should do and what leave undone. That I say true, answers Socrates, even you, O Euthydemus, will acknowledge, if you do not wait until you see the forms of the gods, but are contented, when you behold their works, to worship and honour them. And consider that the gods themselves point this out to you: for not only do the rest of them, when they give us good things, not exhibit themselves to our senses in so doing, but he354 who coördinates and holds together the whole universe, in whom are all beautiful and good things, and who provides them for the perpetual use of men free from waste, disease, and old age, so that they help us unfailingly, quicker than thought, is discerned in the greatness of his operations, but while he administers these to us, is himself invisible. And take thought that the sun, who seems to be manifest to all, allows not men to examine him closely, but should anyone attempt to look at him shamelessly, takes away his sight. And the ministers of the gods too you will find evading our senses; the lightning shoots from on high, and is master wherever it alights, but is seen neither in its approach, nor in its stroke, nor in its departure. The winds themselves are invisible, but their works are manifest, and we feel them as they come. Nay and man's soul too, or if there be anything else in man participating the divine, manifestly rules in us as a king, but is not seen. Bearing in thought these things we must not despise the invisible, but learning their power by their results, honour that which is divine.355 Indeed, Socrates, says Euthydemus, for my part I am quite resolved not the least to neglect what is divine; but my trouble is, that it seems to me that no single man can ever be duly thankful for the kindnesses of the gods. Do not let this trouble you, Euthydemus, for you see the god at Delphi, when anyone asks him how to be grateful to the gods, answers, By your country's law. Now it is surely law everywhere to please the gods by sacrifices, as best you can. How then can anyone honour the gods better or more piously than by doing what themselves bid? Only we must not be behind our power: for anyone who is so behind surely is manifest therein as not honouring the gods. Our duty is to honour them to the utmost of our power, and then to take heart and hope from them, the greatest goods: for a man cannot show a sound mind in hoping from others greater goods than from those who have the power to give the greatest aid; nor from those in any other way than by pleasing them. And how can one better please them than by the most unfailing obedience to them? Now by saying such things, and himself doing them, he was ever bringing those who were in intercourse with him to piety and a sound mind.”

The last words of this man to his judges were: “And now it is time that we depart, I to death, and you to life; but which of us are going unto the better thing is not clear to anyone save to God.”356 And when the hemlock was reaching his heart,357 he uncovered his head, and said with his last utterance, “O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: pay it, and do not neglect it.”

I have cited at length these passages because I think that they exhibit clearly the opinions and convictions of Socrates on the most important of all subjects. We behold here a man of a very religious mind, holding with the utmost tenacity the idea of a Providence, the Benefactor of men and their Judge, since it discriminates between them by reward and punishment: nor is it an impersonal Providence, an abstract Reason, but “a wise world-maker,” who loves man and does him good, and whose operations in this very purpose of doing him good indicate unity of design and perfection of execution: and yet in his conception of the godhead itself he halts between unity and plurality, and beside a statement such as we might read in a Pauline epistle of the one God who orders in harmony the universe and holds it together, we find him passing to the recognition and worship of many gods: beside words to his judges most sublime and most pathetic, concerning the issue of life and of death, we find him with his last breath directing his friend to discharge the sacrifice of a cock which he had promised to Æsculapius. He does not attempt to solve either the rational or the moral antagonism between many gods and one; but practically he throws himself into the worship of his country, referring to the law of each place as that which should determine for ever man the question how the gods are to be honoured. And in this I believe that he is typical of the whole race of philosophers at whose head he stands. Like him they spoke of one God, and they offered the cock to Æsculapius. If we seek the highest expressions concerning the divine unity, wisdom, and power which are to be found in their writings, they approach S. Paul: if we consider other expressions, and above all, their practice, it is in the main that other word of Socrates, Worship according to the law of your country. In the doctrine attributed to him both by Xenophon and Aristotle, that he identified virtue and prudence, and believed that no man is willingly wicked, but only out of ignorance, we have a proof which can scarcely be exceeded in force how entirely the standing-point of Socrates was that above attributed to the Greek mind in general, that of a religion according to nature. It ignores in the most emphatic because in the most unconscious way the inclination to evil in man. The relation between God and man is simply that of greater and less. There is a physical affinity and a numerical proportion between that mighty nature which is ruled through all its length and breadth by a pervading reason, and the portion of it contained in man's body and soul.358

It is curious to imagine what would have been the effect of the life and the death of Socrates had he lived and died just as he did with one sole exception, that Plato and Xenophon had not been his disciples. Socrates wrote nothing: oral discourse was his sole instrument of teaching. When its last memories had faded away, we might have known as little of him as we really know of Pythagoras. He would still indeed have been the greatest of heathen names because he died for his moral convictions. This might have been all, and it would have been very much. This, however, was not to be. In Xenophon's Memorabilia we have an accurate life-portrait of the man, while in the great genius of Plato we have the application of what may be termed Socratic principles to the formation of an ethical, logical, and physical system. The Megaric359 school of Euclides, and Phædo's school of Elis, took indeed one side of his doctrine, the dialectic, for their special subject of inquiry; the Cynic school of Antisthenes and the Cyrenian school of Aristippus another side, the ethical: but it was Plato who embraced in one comprehensive scheme the whole grasp of his master's thought, as well as the collective approved elements of former systems.

The principle of Socrates concerning the union of knowledge and virtue invited his followers to work out a system of dialectics and ethics.360 And further the dialectic process of induction and definition, which Aristotle tells us that Socrates introduced, was made by Plato the foundation of his philosophy.361 Its central point is the doctrine of Ideas. Now the Platonic Idea is the object of the conception. As a single object becomes known by its representation, so the Idea becomes known by its conception. It is not the essence as such which dwells in many similar individual objects, but that essence as represented perfectly in its kind, unalterably, in unity, independence, and self-existence. The Idea points to the general, but is represented by Plato as an original image of the individual projected as it were outside of time and space. Conceive individuals which have a similar being, or belong to the same class, delivered from the limits of time and space, of materiality and individual imperfections, and so reduced to that unity which is the groundwork of their existence, and such unity is the Platonic Idea. The highest Idea is the Idea of the good,362 which is as it were the sun in the realm of Ideas, viewed as the first cause of being and of knowledge. Plato seems to identify it with the highest godhead. Thus the method to attain the knowledge of Ideas is dialectics, which comprehend the double path of rising to the general and returning from the general to the particular.

As to the generation363 of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle states it as the common product of the doctrine of Heracleitus that everything which meets the senses is subject to change and flux, and of the Socratic view of the conception. From Socrates Plato learnt that when once this is rightly formed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he would not then apply it to anything which meets the senses, but inferred that there must be other beings which are the objects of the knowledge acquired by the conception, and these objects he named Ideas. The filiation,364 then, between Socrates and Plato is this: Socrates was the first to require that all knowledge and all moral dealing should proceed from the knowing of the conception, and endeavoured to execute this by his inductive process, while with Plato the same conviction formed the starting-point of a philosophical system: so that what with Socrates was simply a rule of scientific procedure was carried out by Plato to an objective intuition, and when Socrates said, Only the knowing of the conception is true knowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conception is true being.

Thus in Plato we have a man of great original mind attempting with this instrument of induction and definition to form a scheme of the universe, which divides under his hand into a triple aspect of ethics, physics, and dialectics.365 No doubt his main intention was to offer to the cultured and reflective few, – that inner circle to which his teaching and his writings were directed, – a philosophy which should serve them as a religion,366 which should fill up the gaps and remove the anomalies of the existing worship, purifying and restoring it, while it preserved amity with it notwithstanding. Such being his intention, the manner in which he treats the doctrine of the Divine Being is the more remarkable. Instead of basing his philosophy upon it, and showing its relation as a part of his system of physics, ethics, and dialectics, he speaks of it frequently indeed, but always incidentally.367 It is not so with other doctrines which he has at heart. Three of his finest dialogues are dedicated to setting forth as many aspects of his doctrine as to the soul's immortality; the Phædrus treats of its preëxistence; the Banquet of the influence of immortality on the relations of the present life; the Phædo of death as the means of a happy futurity.368 But no one collects together and lucidly exhibits his view of the divine nature. This has to be picked out of his writings, a bit here, and another there, and put together by the student. No doubt he felt, as he has said,369 “with regard to the Maker and the Father of this universe it is hard to find him out, and when you have found him impossible to describe him to all men.” He was intimately convinced that the great mass of mankind was quite unsuited to receive the conception of the Divine Being which he had formed. But I believe there to have been another reason of greater force with him for his not having presented as a whole his conclusions on this central doctrine of all. It was not merely that the fate of his master Socrates was ever before him,370 but the singular position which he held with regard to the established worship. He wished to correct, not to destroy it; he wished to reduce it to monotheism, and yet to preserve polytheism. The two are bound together in his mind. If then his writings be carefully analysed, and every reference to the Supreme Being put together into a sort of mosaic,371 we should find the following picture. The everlasting essence of things, with which Philosophy deals, is the highest object. Ideas are those everlasting gods after the pattern of which the world and all things which are in it are formed, and the Godhead, taken absolutely, is not distinct from the highest Idea. Plato sets forth the causality of Ideas and the sway of reason in the world together with the impossibility to explain what is generated save by an Ingenerate, motion save by a soul, and the ordered disposition of the world, working out a purpose, save by reason; and in all which he declares respecting the Godhead, the Idea of Good, of the highest metaphysical and ethical perfection, is his guiding-point. As this highest Idea stands at the head of all Ideas as the cause of all being and knowledge, so the one everlasting invisible God, the Former and Father of all things, stands at the head of all the gods, alike difficult to find and to describe. Just as the above Idea is distinguished by the conception of the Good, so Plato selects goodness as God's most essential attribute. It is on this ground that he maintains the Godhead to be absolutely good and upright, and its operation to be merely good and upright; against the old notion which imputed envy to it, and derived evil from it. Again, in opposition to the fabulous appearances of the gods, it is from the goodness of the Godhead that he deduces its unchangeableness, inasmuch as what is perfect can neither be changed by anything else, nor change itself, and so become worse. He adds, the Godhead will never show itself to men other than it is, since all falsehood is foreign to it; inasmuch as to falsehood in the properest sense, that is, ignorance and self-deception, it is not exposed, and has no need to deceive others. He extols the divine perfection, to which no beauty and no excellence is wanting; the divine power, which embraces everything and can do everything which is possible, that is, which does not involve a moral or a metaphysical contradiction: for instance, it is impossible for God to wish to change Himself, for evil to cease, and from the doctrine respecting the forming of the world and matter it is clear that the divine activity in producing is limited by the nature of the finite.372 He extols the divine wisdom which disposes all things to its purpose; its omniscience, which nothing escapes; its justice, which leaves no transgression unpunished and no virtue unrewarded; its goodness, which makes the best provision for all. He rejects, as notions taken from man, not merely the Godhead's having a body, but likewise all those tales which impute passions, quarrels, crimes of every kind to the gods. He declares them to be exalted above pleasure and displeasure, to be untouched by any evil; and is full of moral indignation at the thought that they allow themselves to be won over, or rather corrupted, by prayers and offerings. Moreover he shows that everything is ordered and ruled by Divine Providence, which extends over the least as well as the greatest, and as regards men is especially convinced that they are a carefully-tended possession of the Godhead, and that all things must issue in good to those who through virtue gain its goodwill. If the unequal and unjust distribution of men's lot is objected, his reply is, that virtue carries its reward and wickedness its punishment immediately in itself; further, that both are sure of a complete retribution in the after-world, while already in this life as a rule in the end the upright goes not without recognition and thanks, nor the transgressor without universal hate and detestation. As to the general fact that there is evil in the world, it seemed to him so inevitable that it was not requisite expressly to defend the Godhead on that score. All these statements carry us back at last to one and the same point. It is the Idea of the Good by applying which Plato produces so exalted a doctrine of God. In the like spirit he will consider only the moral intention in acts of worship. He alone can please the Godhead who is like it, and he alone is like it who is pious, wise, and just. The gods cannot receive the gifts of the wicked; the virtuous alone have a right to invoke them. God is goodness; and he who bears not the image of that goodness in himself stands in no communion with him.