The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II

The mind of the next great teacher who arose in Greece after Plato presented an almost complete contrast to that of the master under whom he had so long studied. Aristotle's power consisted in a parallel development of two forces which do not often coexist.408 He joined together a rare degree of consistent philosophic thinking with an equally rare degree of accurate observation. This double faculty is shown in what he effected. He made the sciences of logic, ethics, and psychology: he built up those of natural history and politics with the wealth of knowledge which his experience had accumulated.409 Thus his analytic and synthetic genius embraced the whole range of human knowledge then existing. As Plato threw his vivid fancy and imagination and his religious temper into everything which concerned the human spirit, so Aristotle fixed his gaze upon nature, which with him in all its manifestations was the ultimate fact. As Plato rose from the single being to his conception of the true, the good, the beautiful, of which the Idea to him was everything, so Aristotle, steadfastly discarding his master's doctrine of Ideas, took his stand on the single being, examining it with the closest observation and the subtlest thought, and the knowledge thus conveyed to him is everything. Plato's conception of God is that of the great world-former, orderer, and ruler: Aristotle's conception of God is that of a pure intelligence, without power, an eternal, ever-active, endless, incorporeal substance, who never steps out of that everlasting rest into action: who is the world's first cause, but is unconscious of it, his action upon the world being likened to the influence of the beloved object upon the lover. Plato's dualism is summed up in the expression, God and Matter; Aristotle's dualism, in God and the World. Plato represents the action of the Deity as the working-up of the original matter into the millions of forms which the world exhibits: but these millions of forms are taken by Aristotle as if they had existed for ever; the World, as it is, and the Deity, are coeternal.

Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul is that it exists only as that which animates the body, without which its being cannot be known.410 It is the principle which forms, moves, and developes the body; the substance which only appears in the body formed and penetrated by it, and which works continuously in it, as the life which determines and prevails over its matter. Thus the body is of itself nothing; what it is, it is only through the soul, whose being and nature it expresses, to which it is related as the medium in which the purpose, which is the soul, realises itself. Thus the soul cannot be thought of without the body, nor the body without the soul: both come into their actual state together. In the soul Aristotle distinguishes three parts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the thinking. This last, the peculiar property of man, is further divisible into the passive and the active, of which the former is linked to the soul as the soul is to the body, as form is to matter, multiplies itself with individuals, and is extinguished with them. But the reason, or pure intelligence, has nothing in common with matter, comes from without into man, and exists in him as a self-consisting indestructible being, without multiplying or dividing itself. Accordingly this intellect or reason suffers the soul to sink back with the body into the nothing from which both have been together produced. It alone continues to subsist as what is ever the same and unchangeable, since it is nothing but the divine intelligence in an individual existence, enlightening the darkness of the human subject in the passive part of the understanding, and so must be considered as the first mover in man of his discursive thinking and knowing, as well as of his willing.411 As that which is properly human in the soul, that which has had a beginning, must also pass away, even the understanding, and only the divine reason is immortal, and as memory belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thinking only takes place by means of the passive intellect, all consciousness must cease with death. And again, clearly as Aristotle maintains that man is the mover and master of his own actions, and has it in his power to be good or evil, and thence repudiates the assumption of Socrates and Plato that no one is willingly evil, yet he cannot find a place for real freedom of the will between the motion which arises from sensitive desire, and that which proceeds from the divine intelligence dwelling in the soul. Necessity arises on both sides, from the things which determine the passive understanding, and from the divine intelligence.412 Thus his physical theory, as in the case of Plato noted above,413 prevents a clear conception of the human personality. His notion of man in this point corresponds to his notion of God: he does not concern himself with questions respecting the goodness, justice, and freedom of God, inasmuch as his God is not really personal:414 so with regard to man we find in him no elucidation as to the question of moral freedom, nor of the origin and nature of wickedness in man. Wickedness is with Aristotle the impotence to hold the mean between too much and too little: it presents itself therefore only in this world of contingency and change, and has no relation to God, since the first or absolute good has nothing opposed to it. He has not the sense of moral perversion with regard to evil. In accordance with which the end of all moral activity with him is happiness, which consists in the well-being arising from an energy according to nature; as virtue is the observing a proper mean between two extremes. And the highest happiness is contemplative thought, the function of the divine in man, the turning away from everything external to the inner world of the conceptions.

The religious character, which belongs conspicuously to Plato's philosophy, fails, it will be seen, in that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato strove to purify the popular belief, and urged as the highest point of virtue to become like to God by the conjunction of justice and sanctity with prudence,415 Aristotle divides morality from religion as his God is separated off from the world.416 His scientific inquiries have not that immediate relation to the personal life and the destiny of man in which the religiousness of Platonism most consists. His whole view of the world goes to explain things as far as possible from their natural causes.417 Thus he admits in the whole direction of the world the ruling of a divine power, of a reason which reaches its purpose; he believes in particular that the gods care for men, take an interest in him who lives in accordance with reason; that happiness is their gift; he contradicts the notion that the godhead is envious, and so could withhold from man knowledge, the best of its gifts; but this divine providence coincides for him entirely with the working of natural causes. In his view the godhead stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it.

Religion418 itself Aristotle treats as an unconditional moral necessity. The man who doubts whether the gods should be honoured is a subject fit not for instruction but for punishment, just as the man who asks whether he should love his parents. As the natural system of the world cannot be imagined without God, so neither can man in it be imagined without religion. But he can give us no other ground save political expediency for resting religion upon fables so apparent as the stories of the popular belief. He sometimes himself uses these fables, like other popular opinions, to illustrate some general proposition, as, for instance, Homer's verses on the golden chain show the immobility of the first mover: just as in other cases he likes to pursue his scientific assumptions to their least apparent beginnings, and to take account of sayings and proverbs. But if we except the few general principles of religious belief, he ascribes to these fables no deeper meaning, and as little does he seem to care about purifying their character. For his state he presupposes the existing religion, as in his personal conduct he did not withdraw from its usages, and expressed his attachment to friends and relations in the forms consecrated by it. But no trace is found in him of Plato's desire to reform religion by means of philosophy: and in his politics he allows in the existing worship even what in itself he disapproves, as the case of unseemly words, inscriptions, and statues. Thus the relation of the Aristotelic philosophy to the actual religion is generally a very loose one. It does not disdain indeed to use the points of connection which the other presents, but has no need of it whatever for itself: nor does it seek on its own side to purify and transform religion, the imperfection of which it rather seems to take as something unavoidable. The two are indifferent to each other; philosophy pursues its way without troubling itself about religion, without fearing any interruption from it.

In the seventy-seven years which elapsed from the death of Socrates, b. c. 399, to that of Aristotle, b. c. 322, Greek life had suffered a great change. That dear-loved independence which every state had cultivated, and which concentrated every energy of the mind in civil life, had vanished. During the forty years of Plato's work as a teacher it was becoming less and less: Chæronea gave it the death-blow; while Aristotle is the son of a time at which scientific study had already begun to take the place of active political life.419 But the conquest effected by his great pupil Alexander completed this change. He opened the East to the Greek mind, bringing it into close contact with Asiatic thought, beliefs, and customs. Under his successors Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, Tarsus, Pergamus, and Rhodes became great centres of Greek culture: but Greek self-government was gone. Athens with the rest of the Greek cities had lost its political independence, but it remained the metropolis of Greek philosophy. From the last decade of the fourth century before Christ four great schools, the Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean, all seated here, as embodied in the dwelling-place and oral teaching of their masters, stand over against each other. The point most interesting to our present subject is this, that all these schools take up a common ground, one which we consider to belong properly to religion, that is, the question wherein the happiness of man consists, and how to attain it.420 Thus the political circumstances of the land gave the tone to its philosophy. What the time required was something which would compensate men for the lost position of a free citizen and a self-governed fatherland. The cultivated classes looked to philosophy for consolation and support. The answers to this question which the various systems gave were very different from each other, but an answer they all attempted. What they have in common is, the drawing-back of man upon himself, his inner mind, his consciousness, as a being who thinks and wills:421 while on the other hand the mental view was widened from the boundaries of a narrow state to that which touches man in general. The field of morality opened out beyond the range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy. Thus two hundred full years were occupied with the struggles of the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and the sceptical opposition to them of the middle and later Academy. At the very beginning of this time the man who sat first in Aristotle's chair after him, and therefore the head of the most speculative school, Theophrastus, had shocked the students of philosophy by declaring that fortune, not wisdom, was the ruler of the world. But it was precisely against the despondence which such a conviction would work in the mind that the Stoics struggled with their doctrine of apathy, Epicurus with his self-contentment, the Sceptics with their tranquillity of indifference.422 These all sought to cure those whom the fables of the popular religion were insufficient to satisfy, those who felt the evils and trials of life and knew not whither to turn in their need. But the Stoic and the Epicurean cures stood in the strongest contrast to each other.

Zeno423 of Cittium in Cyprus, after listening for twenty years to the teaching of various Socratic masters in Athens, founded a school himself, and wished it to be a school of virtuous men rather than of speculative philosophers. It was a system of complete materialism rigorously carried out. He admitted only corporeal causes, and two principles, matter, and a force eternally indwelling in it and shaping it. These two principles, matter and force, were in fact to the stoic mind only one eternal being viewed in a twofold aspect. Matter for its subsistence needs a principle of unity to form and hold it together: and this, the active element, is inconceivable without matter as the subject in which it dwells, works, and moves. Thus the positive element is matter viewed as being as yet without qualities, while the active element which runs through and quickens everything is God in matter. In real truth God and matter are one thing, or, in other words, the stoic doctrine is a pantheism which views matter as instinct with life.424 God is the unity of that force which embraces and interpenetrates the universe, assuming all forms, and as such is a subtle fluid, fire, ether, or breath, in which are contained all forms of existence belonging to the world-body which it animates, and from which they develop themselves in order: it lives and moves in all, and is the common source of all effect and all desire. God, then, is the world-soul, and the world itself no aggregate of independent elements, but a being, organised, living, filled and animated by a single soul, that is to say, by one original fire manifesting itself in various degrees of tension and heat. If in Aristotle's theory the world is a total of single beings, which are only bound together unto a higher aim by a community of effort, in the stoic system on the contrary these beings all viewed together are members of a surpassingly perfect organisation, and as such, so bound in one, that nothing can happen to the individual being, which does not by sympathy extend its operation to all others. Thus on his physical side, God is the world-fire, the vital all-interpenetrating heat, the sole cause of all life and motion, and the necessity which rules the world: while on his moral side, inasmuch as the first general cause can only be a soul full of reason and wisdom, he is the world-reason, a blessed being, the originator of the moral law, ever occupied with the government of the world, being in fact himself the world. Thus everything is subject to the law of absolute necessity; everything eternally determined through an endless series of preceding causes, since nothing happens without a cause, and that again is the working of a cause before it. What, then, is called, or seems to be, chance, is merely the working of a cause unknown to us. The will of man is accordingly mere spontaneity. He wills, but what he wills is inevitable: he determines himself, but always in consequence of preceding causes. And since here every cause is something subject to the conditions of matter, something purely inside the world, it becomes unalterable destiny. But inasmuch as the series of causes leads back to the first, and this first cause has not only a physical side, but includes intelligence with it, and so everything in it is foreseen and predetermined, therefore that which considered under the aspect of inevitable necessity is called fate or destiny, viewed as thought may be termed Providence, a divine arrangement.

With such a doctrine it is evident that all morality was reduced to a matter of physics: and yet no sect of Greek philosophers struggled so hard to solve the great problem of moral freedom as the Stoics.425 But the iron grasp of their leading tenet was ever too much for them. Man's soul is of the same substance as the world-soul, that is, breath or fire, of which it is a portion: in man it manifests itself as the force from which knowledge and action proceed, as at once intelligence, will, and consciousness. It is, then, closely allied with the Divine Being, but at the same time corporeal, a being which stands in perpetual action and reaction with the human body. It is that heat-matter bound to the blood, which communicates life and motion: it is perishable, though it lasts beyond the body, perhaps to the general conflagration. It has therefore, in the most favourable view, the duration of a world-period, with the outrun of which it must return to the universal ether or godhead: its individual existence and consciousness end.

As to the popular religion,426 the Stoics admitted that it was filled with pretended deities, false doctrines, and rank superstition; that its wilderness of fables about the gods was simply contemptible: but that it was well to retain the names of gods consecrated in public opinion, who were merely descriptions of particular incorporations of the one world-god.

The Stoics did not represent the component elements of human nature as struggling with each other, like Plato.427 With them nature and reason is one thing. Their virtue,428 or highest good, is life in accordance with nature, that is, the concurrence of human conduct with the all-ruling law of nature, or of man's will with God's will. Thus it was that the Stoic sought to reach his doctrine of philosophical impassibility: and to this system the majority of earnest and thinking minds in the two centuries before Christ inclined.429

At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from anxiety and disturbance.430 If Zeno's world was an intelligent animal, that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies – and there are nothing else but corporeal things – have arisen originally from atoms moving themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise man's repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.431 Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional, rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations. Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent, indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.432 His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual opportunity of agreeable entertainment.

The soul of man is a body made out of the finest round and fiery atoms; a body which, like heated air, most rapidly penetrates the whole material frame. The finest portion of the soul, the feeling and thinking spirit, which as a fourth element is added to the fiery, aerial, and vaporous portions, dwells in the breast. In these elements all the soul's passions and impulses are rooted. When death destroys the body, the sheltering and protecting home of the soul's atoms, these evaporate at once. It was clear that in such a system the soul could not outlive the body, but Epicurus laid a special stress on this, since thereby only could men be delivered from the greatest impediment to repose and undisturbed enjoyment of life, the torturing fear of the world below, and of punishments after death. It was the crown of his system, to which ethics, physics, and such logic as he admitted were entirely subordinate, to emancipate men from four fears, the fear of death, the fear of natural things, the fear of the gods, the fear of a divine Providence, which was the same thing as fate.433 Nevertheless, the followers of Epicurus had no scruple, after the manner of their master, who had spoken of the worship of the gods like a priest, to visit temples and take part in religious ceremonies. These, it is true, were useless, since they had nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the gods, but it was an act of reason, and could do no harm, to honour beings naturally so high and excellent.434

Of this school we learn that it gradually became the most numerous of all. Its social force really lay in setting forth as a model the undisturbed security of individual life. It agreed at the bottom with stoicism that man's wisdom and highest end was to live in accordance with nature. Zeno, it is true, called this living in accordance with nature, virtue, man's highest and only good; Epicurus called it pleasure; but Zeno's virtue consisted essentially in the absence of passions, the pleasure of Epicurus in the mind's undisturbedness.435 The Epicureans were more attached to their master's memory than any other school. They were renowned for their friendship with each other. Epicurus's Garden at Athens meant the highest refinement of Athenian life, the enjoyment of everything that was pleasant in the society of likeminded men.436 It was this side of his philosophy which made it popular.

While the schools of Zeno and Epicurus seated at Athens were powerfully influencing Grecian thought, the former especially drawing to it the stronger and more thinking minds, resistance arose to them both in the chair of Plato. First Arcesilaus and then Carneades, who had succeeded to this office, set up in the middle Academy the school of Scepticism. While Stoics and Epicureans alike sought peace of mind through knowledge of the world and its laws, they on the contrary maintained that this same peace of mind could only be attained by renouncing all such knowledge.437 They held that no truth and no certainty were given to man by the representations of his senses, by his feelings, and by his consciousness of these, which do not enable him to know the real being of anything.438 Those who held this view would not say downright that what they contradicted was untrue: they were of opinion that it might be true, only there was no certitude of this, and therefore it must be left undetermined. The uncertainty was as great on the one side as on the other. Sextus Empiricus defined the state of skepsis to be “skilfulness in so setting forth appearances and reflections against each other, as to be brought through the equilibrium of opposing facts and grounds in their favour first to a suspension of judgment, and then to imperturbable tranquillity.”