The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley

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oneself by one's own resolve and effort is finally abandoned. Whether this will permanently be true is another question, probably for us unprofitable. The ancient world, at any rate, and in general the modern world, have pronounced against Stoic Psychology – it was too quick, too superficial. The Stoics did not allow for the sense of sin.[228] They recognized the presence of evil in the world; they felt that "it has its seat within us, in our inward part";[229] and they remark the effect of evil in the blunting of the faculties – let the guilty, says Persius, "see virtue, and pine that they have lost her forever."[230] While Seneca finds himself "growing better and becoming changed," he still feels there may be much more needing amendment.[231] He often expresses dissatisfaction with himself.[232] But the deeper realization of weakness and failure did not come to the Stoics, and what help their teaching of strenuous endeavour could have brought to men stricken with the consciousness of broken willpower, it is hard to see. "Filthy Natta," according to Persius, was "benumbed by vice" (stupet hic vitio).[233] "When a man is hardened like a stone (apolithôthê), how shall we be able to deal with him by argument?" asks Epictetus, arguing against the Academics, who "opposed evident truths" – what are we to do with necrosis of the soul?[234] But the Stoics really gave more thought to fancies of the sage's equality with God and occasional superiority – so confident were they in the powers of the individual human mind. Plutarch, indeed, forces home upon them as a deduction from their doctrine of "the common nature" of gods and men the consequence that sin is not contrary to the Logos of Zeus – and yet they say God punishes sin.[235]

      Yet even the individual, much as they strove to exalt his capabilities, was in the end cheapened in his own eyes.[236] As men have deepened their self-consciousness, they have yielded to an instinctive craving for the immortality of the soul.[237] Whether savages feel this or not, it is needless to argue. No religion apart from Buddhism has permanently held men which had no hopes of immortality; and how far the corruptions of Buddhism have modified its rigour for common people, it is not easy to say. In one form or another, in spite of a terrible want of evidence, men have clung to eternal life. The Stoics themselves used this consensus of opinion as evidence for the truth of the belief.[238] "It pleased me," writes Seneca, "to inquire of the eternity of souls (de æternitate animarum) – nay! to believe in it. I surrendered myself to that great hope."[239] "How natural it is!" he says, "the human mind is a great and generous thing; it will have no bounds set to it unless they are shared by God."[240] "When the day shall come, which shall part this mixture of divine and human, here, where I found it, I will leave my body, myself I will give back to the gods. Even now I am not without them." He finds in our birth into this world an analogy of the soul passing into another world, and in language of beauty and sympathy he pictures the "birthday of the eternal," the revelation of nature's secrets, a world of light and more light. "This thought suffers nothing sordid to dwell in the mind, nothing mean, nothing cruel. It tells us that the gods see all, bids us win their approval, prepare for them, and set eternity before us."[241] Beautiful words that wake emotion yet!

      Immortality

      But is it clear that it is eternity after all? In the Consolation which Seneca wrote for Marcia, after speaking of the future life of her son, he passed at last to the Stoic doctrine of the first conflagration, and described the destruction of the present scheme of things that it may begin anew. "Then we also, happy souls who have been assigned to eternity (felices animæ et æterna sortitæ), when God shall see fit to reconstruct the universe, when all things pass (labentibus), we too, a little element in a great catastrophe, shall be resolved into our ancient elements. Happy is your son, Marcia, who already knows this."[242] Elsewhere he is still less certain. "Why am I wasted for desire of him, who is either happy or non-existent? (qui aut beatus aut nullus est)."[243]

      That in later years, in his letters to Lucilius, Seneca should lean to belief in immortality, is natural enough. Epictetus' language, with some fluctuations, leans in the other direction: "When God does not supply what is necessary, he is sounding the signal for retreat – he has opened the door and says to you, Come! But whither? To nothing terrible, but whence you came, to the dear and kin [both neuters], the elements. What in you was fire, shall go to fire, earth to earth, spirit to spirit [perhaps, breath hóson pneumatíon eis pneumátion], water to water; no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor Pyriphlegethon; but all things full of gods and dæmons. When a man has such things to think on, and sees sun and moon and stars, and enjoys earth and sea, he is not solitary or even helpless."[244] "This is death, a greater change, not from what now is into what is not, but into what now is not. Then shall I no longer be? You will be, but something else, of which now the cosmos has no need. For you began to be (egénou), not when you wished, but when the cosmos had need."[245]

      On the whole the Stoic is in his way right, for the desire for immortality goes with the instincts he rejected – it is nothing without the affections and human love.[246] But once more logic failed, and the obscure grave witnesses to man's instinctive rejection of Stoicism, with its simple inscription taurobolio in æternum renatus.

      The question of the gods

      Lastly we come to the gods themselves, and here a double question meets us. Neither on the plurality nor the personality of the divine does Stoicism give a certain note. In the passages already quoted it will have been noticed how interchangeably "God," "the gods" and "Zeus" have been used. It is even a question whether "God" is not an identity with fate, providence, Nature and the Universe.[247] Seneca, as we have seen, dismisses the theory of dæmons or genii rather abruptly – "that is what some think." Epictetus definitely accepts them, so far as anything here is definite, and with them, or in them, the ancestral gods. Seneca, as we have seen, is contemptuous of popular ritual and superstition. Epictetus inculcates that "as to piety about the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them," but, he concludes, "to make libations and to sacrifice according to the custom of our fathers, purely and not meanly, nor carelessly, nor scantily, nor above our ability, is a thing which belongs to all to do."[248] "Why do you," he asks, "act the part of a Jew, when you are a Greek?"[249] He also accepts the fact of divination.[250] Indeed, aside perhaps from conspicuous extravagances, the popular religion suffices. Without enthusiasm and without clear belief, the Stoic may take part in the ordinary round of the cults. If he did not believe himself, he pointed out a way to the reflective polytheist by which he could reconcile his traditional faith with philosophy – the many gods were like ourselves manifestations of the Spermaticos Logos; and he could accept tolerantly the ordinary theory of dæmons, for Chrysippus even raised the question whether such things as the disasters that befall good men are due to negligence on the part of Providence, or to evil dæmons in charge of some things.[251] While for himself the Stoic had the strength of mind to shake off superstition, the common people, and even the weaker brethren of the Stoic school, remained saddled with polytheism and all its terrors and follies. Of this compromise Seneca is guiltless.[252] It was difficult to cut the connexion with Greek tradition – how difficult, we see in Plutarch's case. The Stoics, however, fell between two stools, for they had not enough feeling for the past to satisfy the

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