Christian virtue of humility or of pity; there the system broke down.
Some of the paradoxes of the “Porch” (notably the crowning paradox of the “Sapiens,” the ideal wise man—an impossible figure) are keenly ridiculed by Horace (Sat. I. iii. 124 sq., II. iii. passim, vii. 83 sq. “The Christian’s Ideal Figure could never be accepted by the Stoic as an example of his typical Wise Man” [E. R. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 70]); but, in his later years, it is probable that Horace learnt to appreciate better the doctrine of the Stoics and to view their system with more sympathy.[1]
The pantheism[2] of the later Stoics tended, it is clear, more and more towards theism; God had become to these philosophers (Epicurus is a case in point) less of an abstraction, more and more of a “living presence”; we may do well to remember the famous motto which Seneca lays down as a rule of life in his tenth letter.[3] And closely bound up with its doctrine of God is the Stoic doctrine of immortality. True, the older Stoics permitted themselves little more than the hope of a limited immortality; but their thought of Death was far from that of a mere extinction (as we find it set forth in Eastern speculation); rather death was the resolution of man’s earthly nature into its original elements—a dissolution of the body—while the animating principle, the soul, returns to its native birthplace “in the heavenlies.” We may compare Virgil’s line (Æn. vi. 730),
- ↑ See D’Alton, Horace and his Age, pp. 84 sqq., 133 sqq., for proofs of this changed attitude.
- ↑ The Stoic conception that God is in all things is balanced by that of the Neo-Platonists, whose root principle is that all things are in God. For the attitude of Plotinus towards Stoicism consult Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, vol. i. There is a brief, but valuable, discussion of Stoicism in its connexion with Christian ethics and theology in Lake and Foakes-Jackson’s The Beginnings of Christianity, part i., pp. 246 sqq. (1920).
- ↑ “So live with men as if God saw you; so speak with God as if men heard you” (Lightf., Essay on “St. Paul and Seneca,” Philipp.,⁶ pp. 279 sqq.).
