In what, then, does the good consist which is to be realized by this civilized State? To this decisive question Aristotle and Plato have in reality only the answer that it is meant to make it possible for a number of its members, viz. the “free” men, to devote themselves entirely to their own bodily and mental culture free from care about material things, and to take the lead in public affairs. It is not established with a view to the production of anything ethical in any deeper sense, nor for the sake of an ideal of progress on lines which could be described as in any sense great and noble. Nowhere do the characteristic limitations of ancient ethics reveal themselves so clearly as in the poverty of their ideal of the State.
The ethical valuation of man as man has not yet been reached. Hence the State has for its object, not the growth to perfection of all, but only that of a particular class.
The nation, too, is not yet recognized as a great entity both natural and ethical, and therefore no consideration is given to the question of uniting the various city communities for the joint pursuit of higher objects. Each remains isolated. Plato thinks he has satisfied the claims produced by membership of the same nation by requiring that in wars waged by Greek States against one another the houses shall not be destroyed nor the fields laid waste, as if the war were against barbarians.
The idea of humanity as a whole has not yet come in sight. It is, therefore, not possible for Plato and Aristotle to make their State work in co-operation with others to promote the general progress of mankind.
They therefore establish their civilized State on a type which is hemmed in in every direction by narrow horizons. Moreover, the political community which they adopt as the type is at the very time when they are writing already a dying entity. While Aristotle is writing his Politics, his pupil, Alexander the Great, is founding an empire, and Rome is beginning to subject Italy to her rule.
More important still than all external faults in their ideal [pg 051] of the civilized State is the fact that these two thinkers are unable to introduce into the community the energies which are needed for its maintenance. The idea of the civilized State is present with the vitality needed, only when the individual is by the impulse contained in his world-view moved so far as to devote himself to organized society with enthusiastic activity. Without civic idealism no civilized State! But to assume anything of that kind in the members of their State is impossible for Plato and Aristotle, since both have already reached the ideal of the wise man who withdraws himself prudently and gracefully from the world.
Plato admits this. His wise citizens who are destined to be rulers devote themselves to the service of the State only when their turn comes, and are glad when they are set free and can again in retirement busy themselves, as wise among wise, with the world of pure Being.
Aristotle, when he raises in the Politics the question whether the contemplative life is not to be preferred to that of political activity, decides in theory in favour of the latter. “It is a mistake,” he says, “to value inactivity higher than activity, since happiness consists in activity.” But in the doctrine of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics there is nothing which could lead the individual to place his life at the service of the community.
Plato and Aristotle cherish undoubtedly the ancient conviction that the individual ought to devote himself to the State, but they cannot find a foundation for it in their world-view. Like Epicurus and the adherents of the Porch, they are under the spell of an ethic in which there is present no will to attempt a transformation of the world.
How much greater than the two Greeks is Mencius, when he is thinking out the ideal of the civilized State! He can make it as large as he likes and take men into its service with their best thoughts, because it results in the most natural way from a large-scale world-view of ethical activity.
Plato and Aristotle, lacking such a world-view, can do no more than guess at the nature of a civilized State, and invent one for themselves. Plato’s Republic is a mere [pg 052] curiosity. Aristotle’s Politics is valuable, not on account of the theory of the civilized State which is there presented, but only for his magnificent practical analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various State-constitutions, and of their economic problems.
The decadence of antiquity does not begin, then, with the suppression of the individual by the Empire, and its destruction of the normal mutual relations between the individual and the community. It sets in immediately after Socrates, because the ethical thinking which started with him cannot really lead the individual beyond himself, and set him as an effective force in the service of the moralization and the perfecting of social relations.
There is no middle term between the ethic of enthusiasm and that of resignation. But an ethic of resignation cannot think out, much less bring into existence, a system of social relations which can be called really civilized.
Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius
“In imperial times Stoicism shrivels up into a moralizing popular philosophy” is what we are usually told in treatises about ancient philosophy. As a matter of fact what we have to deal with is by no means a shrivelling up, but a serious struggle for a living ethic which begins unexpectedly in the later period of Græco-Roman thought, and leads to an optimistic-ethical nature-philosophy.
The pillars of this movement are L. Annæus Seneca (4 B.C.—A.D. 65), Nero’s teacher, who at the command of his pupil had to open his veins; the Phrygian slave, Epictetus (born c. A.D. 50), who in A.D. 94 was with all philosophers banished from Rome by Domitian; the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) who, brought up by pupils of Epictetus, defends the Empire at a time of great danger, and writes his philosophical Meditations while in camp. 8
In their classical period Greek ethics offer us either egoistic considerations of advantage, or cold doctrines of virtue, or ascetic renunciation of the world, or resignation. In whichever direction they turn, they never lead men out beyond themselves.
In Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, they lose this self-regarding character. Renouncing the spirit of the earlier time they develop to an ethic of universal brotherhood, and busy themselves with the immediate, altruistic relations of man to man.
Whence comes this understanding for humanity, which is never seen in classical antiquity?
The older Greek moralists are concerned with the State. Their interest is absorbed in the maintenance of the organization of society which is embodied in the city-republic, so that the free citizens can continue to live the life of freedom. The type of complete manhood is to be realized. All around there is the activity of men who receive no consideration except so far as they are means to this end.
But amid the mighty political and social revolutions which lead to the creation of the Empire this mentality ceases to be accepted as a matter of course. The fearful experiences it goes through cause feeling to become more human, and the horizons of ethics are widened. The city-republic, on which ethical thinking had been built up, has disappeared, but an empire now crushes men down just in the same way. Thus the individual man as such becomes the object of reflexion and of ethics. The conception of the brotherhood of all men appears. A disposition to humanity makes itself heard, and Seneca condemns the gladiatorial shows. Nay more: even the [pg 054] inner relationship between mankind and the animal world is recognized.
So now when they have caught sight of mankind as a whole and man as such, ethics reach such a depth and breadth as allows them to try to comprehend themselves in a universal world-will. Henceforth nature-philosophy and ethics can work together. Stoicism had from the very beginning a vision of this, but had not been able to make it a reality, since it had not at its disposal the needful living and universalist ethic.
But there is another reason why optimism and ethics can now in nature-philosophy come into power. The old school of the Porch was crushed down into resignation just in proportion as it submitted to the necessity for critical thinking. But as time goes on, the practical and religious instincts which were always present in its world-view, gain in strength. The antiquity which is passing away is no longer critical, but either sceptical or religious, and therefore the later school of the Porch can let itself be guided by the ethical demands of its world-view much more completely than the old one could. It becomes at once deeper and more simple than the latter, and, like Chinese ethical monism, rises to such freedom from limitations as to be able to interpret the world-will as ethical. So now Stoics appear who, like Confucius, like Mencius, and like Chwang-tse, and indeed, like the Rationalists of the eighteenth century, preach ethics as something grounded in the nature of the universe and of mankind. They cannot prove the truth of this world-view any better than could Zeno and his pupils, who also resorted to it, but they announce it with an inner conviction which the former could not command, and produce their results by means of an enthusiasm which was denied to their predecessors.
When the later school of the Porch reaches the stage of exalting the world-principle more and more to become a personal and ethical god, it is following laws which are at work also in Hinduism.
Yet the world-view of resignation, which it has inherited from the older school, it never succeeds in rendering entirely impotent. In Seneca and Epictetus this is still strongly maintained side by side with the ethical conception of the universe. It is only in Marcus Aurelius that the optimistic motives sound victoriously through.
Stoicism was from the beginning a multiform elemental philosophy, and it is because it ventured to be this in such comprehensive measure that the later Stoicism is so rich and so full of life.
Moral Sayings of Seneca
No man is nobler than his fellow, even if it happen that his spiritual nature is better constituted and he is more capable of higher learning. The world is the one mother of us all, and the ultimate origin of each one of us can be traced back to her, whether the steps in the ladder of descent be noble or humble. To no one is virtue forbidden; she is accessible to all; she admits everyone, she invites everyone in: free men and freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles. She regards neither birth nor fortune; the man alone is all she wants.
It is a mistake to think that the status of a slave affects the whole of a person’s nature; the nobler part of it is not touched thereby.
Every single person, even if there is nothing else to recommend him, I must hold in regard, because he bears the name of man.
In the treatment of a slave we have to consider not how much we can do to him without being liable to punishment, but how much the nature of right and of justice allows us to, seeing that these bid us treat gently even prisoners and purchased slaves. Although in the treatment of a slave everything is allowed, there is nevertheless something which through the common right of every living being is stigmatized as not permissible in the treatment of a man, because he is of the same nature as thyself.
This, in fact, is the demand which is laid upon each man, viz. that he works when possible, for the welfare of many; if that is impracticable, that he works for the welfare of a few; failing that, for the welfare of his neighbours, and if that is impossible, for his own.
It is through untiring benevolence that the bad are won over, and there is no disposition so hard and so hostile to loving treatment ... as to refuse love to the good people whom it will in the end have to thank again for something more. “Not a word of thanks did I get! What am I now to begin to do?” What the gods do, . . . who begin to shower benefits on us before we are aware of it, and continue them even though we do not thank them.
Moral Sayings of Epictetus
Nature is wonderful, and full of love for all creatures.
Wait upon God, ye men. When He calls you, and releases you from [pg 056] service, then go to Him; but for the present remain quietly in the position in which He has placed you.
You carry a god about with you, and do not know it, unhappy one! You have him within yourself, and do not notice it when you defile him with unclean thoughts or foul deeds.
Cultivate the will to satisfy yourself, and to stand right before God. Strive to become pure, one with yourself and one with God.
Think silence best; say only what is necessary, and say it shortly. Above all, do not talk about thy fellow-men, either to praise them, or to blame them, or to compare them with others. Do not swear; never, if possible, or at any rate as seldom as possible. Your bodily wants—food, drink, clothing, housing, service—satisfy in the simplest way. Avoid unseemly joking, for there is always a danger of becoming vulgar, and joking away the respect of your fellow-men.
As you are careful when walking not to tread on a nail or to sprain your ankle, so take care not to let your soul get hurt.
Moral Sayings from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Everything that happens, happens right, and if you can observe things carefully, you will recognize that it is so. I do not mean only in accordance with the course of nature, but much more that they happen in accordance with the law of righteousness, and as if controlled by a Being who orders all things according to merit.
If I am active, I am so with due regard to the general welfare. If anything happens to me, I accept it and consider it in relation to the gods and the universal source from which, in close connection, come all our happenings.
He who commits unrighteousness is godless, for universal nature created rational beings for one another; to help each other where there is need, but never to injure one another.
Love mankind; obey the godhead.
If thou art unwilling to get up in the morning, reflect thus: I am waking in order to go and work as one of mankind.
Seek all thy joy and contentment in advancing, mindful always of God, from one generally useful deed to another.
The best way to avenge oneself on anyone is to avoid returning evil for evil.
It is a privilege of man to love even those who do him wrong. One can reach this level by reflecting that all men are of one family with oneself; that their shortcomings are due to ignorance, and against their will; that in a short time both of you will be dead.
What is good is necessarily useful, and that is why the good and noble man must be concerned about it.
Nobody gets tired of seeking his own advantage. But doing so procures us an activity which is natural. Never get tired, then, of seeking thine own advantage, provided thou procurest thus the advantage of others also.
Treat as befits a man endowed with reason, that is magnanimously and nobly, the animals which are not so endowed, and indeed all creatures whatever that can feel but have no reason. But other men, since they are endowed with reason, treat with friendly affection.
Thou has existed till now as a fragment of the universe, and wilt some day be absorbed in thy producer, or rather, thou wilt suffer a transformation and reappear as a new germ of life.
Many grains of incense are destined for the same altar. Some fall soon into the flame, others later, but that makes no difference.
The Optimistic-Ethical World-View of the later Stoicism
In their optimistic-ethical world-view the later Stoics find those impulses to effort which were not available for the ancient ethics of the classical age. Marcus Aurelius is an enthusiastic utilitarian like the Rationalists of the eighteenth century, because, like them, he is convinced that nature itself has bound up together what is ethical and what is advantageous to the individual and to the community.
That being so, the classical question of ancient ethics whether the thinking man is to busy himself with public affairs or not must again be discussed. Epicurus taught that “the wise man has nothing to do with State affairs unless exceptional circumstances arise.” Zeno’s decision was that “he will take part in the business of the State unless obstacles prevent it.” Both schools leave the retirement into oneself to the decision of the Wise man, only one lets the grounds for the decision be given somewhat earlier, the other somewhat later. The thought of a devotion to the general good which is to be kept active for its own sake and under all circumstances is outside the circle of vision of their ethic.
With the later Stoics it emerges, because the conception of “mankind” has come in sight. Man, as Seneca works out in his treatise on Leisure (De Otio), belongs to two republics. One is a large and universal one, extends as far as the sun shines, and embraces both gods and men; the other is that into which through the fate assigned us by our [pg 058] birth, we have been adopted as citizens. Circumstances may bring it about that the wise man cannot dedicate himself to the service of the State, but, to escape the storm, must “take refuge in the harbour.” It may happen—and Seneca has in mind his own time—that not one of existing States is of such a character as to put up with the activity of the wise man. Nevertheless, the latter does not wholly withdraw into himself, but he serves the great republic by working to improve the general outlook of mankind, and to hasten the coming of a new age.
In Epictetus also this deepened and widened notion of duty is to be found. Marcus Aurelius does not even consider any impossibility of taking part in public life. In him there speaks the ruler who feels himself to be the servant of the State. His ideal is the citizen who “from one activity which makes his fellow-citizens happier goes on to another, and undertakes with alacrity anything whatever that the State lays upon him.” “Do what is needed, and what is bidden by the reason of a being who is destined by nature to membership of a State, and do it as it is bidden.”
In the middle of the second century A.D. ancient thought arrives at an optimistic-ethical world-view which holds within itself living ideals of civilization, and therefore anticipates those which later on in the eighteenth century will bring into activity so mighty and universal a movement of civilization. But for the men of the Græco-Roman world it comes too late. It does not permeate the masses, but remains the private possession of an élite.
It cannot permeate the masses, because there are forces at work among them with which it cannot combine. It is true, indeed, that the ethic of the later Stoicism is so near akin to the universal charity of the Christian ethic, that by the tradition of later times Seneca is declared to be a Christian, and that the Church father, Augustine, holds up the life of the heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius, as an example for Christians.
Yet the two movements cannot amalgamate, but have [pg 059] to fight each other. Marcus Aurelius is responsible for most terrible persecutions of Christians, and Christianity on its side declares war to the knife against the Porch.
Why this strange fatality? Because Christianity is dualistic and pessimistic, the ethic of Stoicism is monistic and optimistic. Christianity abandons the natural world as evil, the later Stoics idealize it. It helps not at all that their ethical teaching is almost identical. Each appears as part of a world-view which is irreconcilable with that of the other. All contradictions in the world may be concealed, but not that between two world-views, and the struggle ends with the annihilation of the optimistic-ethical world-view of the Stoics, which is defended by officers without an army. The attempt that was undertaken as the ancient world was coming to an end, to restore the Empire and make it an empire as wide as mankind, was a failure.
The horizons of the philosophy of the ancient world had remained narrow too long. No ethical thinkers had appeared who at the right time might have led that world to an ethical optimism about reality. It was a calamity, too, that the natural sciences, which had started in such a promising way, came to a standstill, partly through the fault of fate, partly because philosophy turned away from them, before mankind discovered the law of the uniformity of nature, and obtained thereby control over it. Hence the men of antiquity never acquired that self-consciousness which in their descendants of modern times has kept alive, even through the darkest periods of history, the belief in progress—even though it be sometimes progress of the most superficial kind. This psychological factor is of great importance.
It is true that artistic ability, which in the Greek spirit meets us in such abundant measure, is also control over the material, but this creative power was unable to draw the man of antiquity up to a higher life-affirmation and to belief in progress. It served only to let him express himself, in words and in form, in the antagonism between primitive [pg 060] world- and life-affirmation, and thinking world- and life-denial. It is the puzzling intermixture of serenity and melancholy which produces the tragic charm of Greek art.
From every point of view, then, a strong ethical world- and life-affirmation is made difficult for the ancient world. It therefore falls more and more a prey to pessimistic world-views, which draw its thoughts away from reality, and celebrate the liberation of the spiritual from its bondage to the material in a succession of cosmic dramas. Gnosticism, Oriental and Christian, Neo-Pythagoreanism, which arose as early as the first century B.C., the Neo-Platonism which originated with Plotinus (A.D. 204-269), and the great Mystery-religions, all come to meet the religious, world-shunning disposition of the masses during the breaking-up of antiquity, and offer it that deliverance from the world of which it is in search. In this chaos of ideas Christianity emerges victorious because it is the most robust religion of redemption, because as a community it possesses the strongest organization, and because beneath its pessimistic world-view it has at its disposal living ethical ideas.
The optimistic-ethical monism of the later Stoics is like a sunbeam breaking through in the evening of the long, gloomy day of antiquity while the darkness of the middle ages is already drawing on, but it has no power to waken any civilization to life. The time for that is past. The spirit of antiquity, having failed to reach an ethical nature-philosophy, has become the prey of a pessimistic dualism in which no ethic of action is any longer possible; there can only be an ethic of purification.
The thoughts of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are the winter seed of a coming civilization.
CHAPTER VI
OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW AND ETHICS IN THE RENAISSANCE AND POST-RENAISSANCE PERIODS
Belief in Progress and Ethics
THE essential characteristic of the modern age is this, that it thinks and acts in the spirit of a world- and life-affirmation which has never before shown itself with such active strength.
This world-view breaks through in the Renaissance, first at the end of the fourteenth century, and it arises as a protest against the mediæval enslavement of the human spirit. The movement is helped to victory by the increasing knowledge of Greek philosophy in its original form which is the result of the migration to Italy about the middle of the fifteenth century of learned Greeks from Constantinople. Among the thinking men of that time there arises the belief that philosophy must be something more elemental and more living than Scholasticism made it.
But the thought of antiquity would not have been sufficient by itself to keep alive this new world- and life-affirmation which appealed to it. It has not, in truth, the mentality required. But another kind of fuel is in time brought for the fire. Taking refuge from book-learning in nature, the men of that time discover the world. As seamen they reach countries whose very existence was not suspected, and they measure the size of the earth. As inquirers they press on into the infinite and the secrets of the universe, and learn by experience that forces governed by uniform laws are at work in it, and that man has power to make them serviceable to himself. The knowledge and power won by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Copernicus [pg 062] (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), and others are decisive for the current world-view.
As a movement which draws its life solely from spiritual forces, the Renaissance passes its bloom-time comparatively quickly, and without forming much fruit. With Paracelsus (1493-1541), Bernardino Telesio (1508-1588), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), and others, an enthusiastic nature-philosophy announces itself. It does not, however, reach full growth. The Renaissance has not strength enough to bring to birth a world- and life-affirming philosophy corresponding to their spirit. Here and there their thought surges for a time, like a rough sea, against the world-denying world-view of the Church. Then all is still. What we know definitely as the philosophy of modern times begins almost without any reference to the Renaissance. It springs not from any nature-philosophy, but from the problem of the theory of knowledge which was raised by Descartes, and from that starting-point philosophy has once more had laboriously to seek its way to a nature-philosophy.
It is not, then, because it was enlarged during the Renaissance into a fully thought out world-view that world- and life-affirmation made good its position in the modern age. If it was able to hold out right into the eighteenth century, when it triumphs against the world- and life-denial which mediæval thought and Christianity kept working in opposition to it, it owed this to the circumstance that progress in knowledge and power never ceased. In them the new mentality had a support which never gave way, but became continually stronger. Since the new scientific knowledge cannot be suppressed nor its progress arrested, belief in the power of truth becomes firmly established. Since it becomes more and more evident that nature works with a uniformity which never misses its aim, there grows up a confidence that the circumstances of society and of mankind generally can be so organized as to secure definite objects. Since man is ever obtaining [pg 063] greater power over nature, he takes it more and more as self-evident that the reaching of perfection in other spheres also is only a question of a sufficiency of will-power and a correct way of grappling with problems.
Under the steadily working influence of the new mentality the world-view of Christianity changes, and becomes leavened with the leaven of world- and life-affirmation. It gradually begins to be accepted as self-evident that the spirit of Jesus does not give up the world in despair, but aims at transforming it. The early Christian conception of the Kingdom of God, which was born of pessimism and, thanks to Augustine, prevailed through the Middle Ages, is rendered impotent, and its place is taken by one which is the offspring of modern optimism. This new orientation of the Christian world-view, which is accomplished by a slow and often interrupted process of change between the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, is the decisive spiritual event of the modern age. During this period Christianity takes no account of what is happening to itself. It believes that it is remaining unchanged, whereas in reality, by this change from pessimism to optimism, it is surrendering its original character.
The man of modern times, then, becomes optimistic, not because deepened thought has made him understand the world in the sense of world- and life-affirmation, but because discovery and invention have given him power over it. This enhancement of his self-appreciation and the consequent strengthening of his will and his hopes, determine his will-to-live in a correspondingly pronounced and positive sense.
In the ancient world man’s natural disposition to world- and life-affirmation could not be worked out to a complete world-view of the same, because at that time deep thought about the world and life pressed resignation upon him as a necessity of thought. In the man of the modern age the mentality produced by discovery and invention unites with his natural disposition to world- and life-affirmation, and establishes him in an optimistic world-view [pg 064] without leading him to deeper thought about the world and life.
The spirit of the modern age is not the work of any one great thinker. It wins its way gradually by reason of the unbroken series of triumphs won by discovery and invention. Hence it is not a result of chance that an almost unphilosophic and moreover somewhat antiquated personality like Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626), is the man who drafts the programme of the modern world-view. He founds it upon the sentence: “Knowledge is power.” His picture of the future he develops in his New Atlantis, in which he describes how the inhabitants of an island, through the practical application of all known discoveries and inventions and all possible rational reflexion on the purposive organization of society, find themselves in a position to lead the happiest possible lives. 9
Christian and Stoic Elements in Modern Ethics
What is the relation between ethics and the mentality of belief in progress, and how were they influenced by it?
When the ethical thought of antiquity wanted to come to clearness about itself, it fell a victim to resignation, because it tried to determine the moral as that which is rationally profitable and pleasurable to the individual. It remained shut up within the circle of the egoistic, and never reached the thought of social utilitarianism. From such a fate modern ethics are protected in advance. They have no need to produce from their own resources the thought that the ethical is action directed to promoting the welfare of others, for they find it as something already accepted as true. That is the gift of Christianity. The thought of Jesus that the ethical is the individual’s active self-devotion to others has won its way to acceptance. Ethics, [pg 065] which are making themselves independent of religion, keep, as a result of their passage through Christianity, a pronouncedly active and altruistic mode of thought. What they have to do now is to provide this possession with a rational foundation.
It is extraordinarily significant that to meet modern ethics there comes in the Late Stoicism a philosophical ethical system in which there appear, as the result of rational thinking, thoughts which run side by side with Christian morality. There is now coming up for the benefit of modern times the seed sown by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Cicero, too, counts with modern times for so much, because its thinkers find in his writings noble morality based upon thought. The discovery of Late Stoicism’s ethic of humanity is for modern times akin to their discovery of nature. They identify it with the real Christian ethic, and contrast it with the scholastic, in which Jesus is expounded according to Aristotle. It is through Late Stoicism that modern times become aware that the moral is something direct. Because Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius speak to such an extent just as Jesus did, they help to spread the conviction that the truly rational ethic and the ethic of the Gospels coincide with one another.
When antiquity came to an end, Late Stoicism and Christianity, in spite of the identity of their moral teaching, had torn each other to pieces. In modern times they unite in order to produce together an ethical world-view. Why is that now possible which before was impossible? Because the chasm which lay between their respective world-views has been bridged. Christianity now treats world- and life-affirmation as valid.
But how could this volte-face of Christianity be brought about? Because of the fact that in spite of its pessimistic world-view it upholds an ethic which, so far as it touches the relation of man to man, is an activist ethic. The pessimistic world-view, if it thinks itself out to a consistent conclusion, must end with a purely world-denying ethic, [pg 066] divorced from action, as it has in India. The peculiar character, however, of the world-view of Jesus which is determined by the expectation of the end of the world and the coming of a supernatural kingdom of God, together with the directness of his ethical feeling, entail his proclaiming of an ethic of active devotion to one’s fellow-Man in spite of his pessimistic attitude towards the natural world. This activist ethic is what is wanted to provide the cardinal-point of an evolution from a Christian-pessimistic world-view to one of Christian optimism. The modern age, following its instinct, assumes it as self-evident that an ethic which deals with the active relations of man to man is pre-supposed to be an ethic which assigns a positive value to action as such, and, further, that such an ethic of action belongs to a world-view which is optimistic and which wills and hopes for a transformation of relationships.
It is, then, the ethic of active self-devotion taught by Jesus which makes it possible for Christianity to do what is suggested by the spirit of the modern age, and modulate from the pessimistic to the optimistic world-view. This result finds expression in the way the new conception of Christianity, when it has to come to an understanding with the old one, contrasts itself as “the religion of Jesus” with “the Christianity of dogma.”
A way is prepared, then, in Erasmus and individual representatives of the Reformation, shyly at first but then more and more clearly, for an interpretation of the teaching of Jesus which corresponds to the spirit of modern times, an interpretation which conceives the teaching as a religion of action in the world. Historically and in actual fact this is a wrong interpretation, for the world-view of Jesus is, so far as concerns the future of the natural world, thoroughly pessimistic. His religion is not a religion of world-transforming effort, but the religion of awaiting the end of the world. His ethic is characterised by activity only so far as it commands men to practise unbounded devotion to their fellow-men if they would attain to that inner perfection [pg 067] which is needed for entrance into the supernatural kingdom of God. An ethic of enthusiasm, and therefore presumably focused upon an optimistic world-view, forms part of a pessimistic world-view! That is the magnificent paradox in the teaching of Jesus.
But the modern age was right in overlooking this paradox and in assuming in Jesus an optimistic world-view which corresponded to an ethic of enthusiasm and met with a welcome the spirit of Late Stoicism and of modern times. For the progress of the spiritual life of Europe this mistake was a necessity. What crises the latter must have gone through, if it had not been able without embarrassment to place the new world-view under the authority of the great personality of Jesus!
The mistake was such a natural one that till the end of the nineteenth century it was never seriously shaken. When historical criticism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, proclaimed its discovery that Jesus, in spite of his activist ethic, thought and acted under a pessimistic world-view dominated by the expectation of the end of the world, it aroused indignation. It was accused of degrading Jesus to a mere enthusiast, while it after all only put an end to the false modernising of his personality. 10
What we at the present time have to do is to go through the critical experience of being obliged to think as modern men under a world-view of world- and life-affirmation, and yet let the ethic of Jesus speak to us from out of a pessimistic world-view.
Of this problem which is disclosing itself to-day the early period of the modern age suspects nothing. Jesus and the moralists of Late Stoicism together are its authorities for an ethical world- and life-affirmation.
What the Late-Stoic ethic is for the modern age is shown by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), Michel de [pg 068] Montaigne (1533-1592), Pierre Charron (1541-1603), Jean Bodin (1530-1596), and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), and that whether their ideas run predominantly on Christian or on freethinking lines. To the Later Stoics Erasmus owes it that he can understand the simple gospel of Jesus which was being discovered behind the Church’s dogmas, as being the essence of all ethical philosophizing. It is by finding support in them that Montaigne in his Essays (1580) is saved from falling into complete ethical scepticism. Because he is inspired by the Later Stoics, Bodin in his work De la république (1577), puts forward an ethical ideal of the State to combat the ideas of Machiavelli’s Prince (Principe) (1515). Because he draws from the same source, Pierre Charron in his work De la sagesse (1601), ventures to assert that ethics are higher than traditional religion, and can maintain themselves in an independent position in face of it without losing anything of their essential nature or of their depth. Because the work of Marcus Aurelius has preceded him, Hugo Grotius is able in his famous work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625) to lay so securely the foundations of natural and international law, and thereby to champion the claims of reason and humanity in the domain of jurisprudence.
Other considerations apart, it would have been the first task of the rising power of natural science to restore to currency the world-view of Epicurus, and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) 11 attempts it. He fails, however, to accomplish his purpose. By its inward belief in progress the mentality of the modern age is driven in elemental fashion beyond scepticism and sceptical ethics. What is great in Epicurus, viz. that in obedience to the deepest demands of truth he tries to think ethically within a nature-philosophy which does not interpret nature as embodying any purpose, can neither be comprehended nor be put before his own age by the philosopher’s all too clever modern prophet.
For the weighty questions of absolute truth that time is by no means ripe. Its capacity is only that of the uncritical. Typical for its spirit is Isaac Newton (1643-1727), who in his investigation of nature is purely empirical, and in his world-view remains simply Christian.
Against the difficulties which crop up for ethics and world- and life-affirmation out of a nature-philosophy which works without any presuppositions, the Renaissance and the Post-Renaissance are secure. The belief in progress which arises from the achievements of discovery and invention, and the joy felt in action itself are their world-view.
Thanks to belief in progress, new life streams into ethics. The inner relations between ethics and world- and life-affirmation begin to have their effect. The elementary impulses to activity which are embodied in the Christian ethic are set free, and the belief in progress gives them an aim and object: the transformation of the circumstances of society and of mankind.
It is not any really deeper ethical thinking that brings the modern age in, but the influence exerted by the belief in progress, which arose out of the achievements of discovery and invention, on the ethic which drew its life from Stoic and Christian thought. The cart is drawn by the belief in progress, and at first ethics have only to run along beside it. But as the cart gets heavier and the road more difficult to negotiate, so that ethics ought to lend their strength to help, they refuse, because they have no strength of their own. The cart begins to run backward, and carries belief in progress, and ethics with it, down the hill.
The task before philosophy was to change the world- and life-affirmation which arose out of enthusiasm over the attainments in discovery and invention into a deeper, inner one arising out of thought about the universe and the life of man, and on that same foundation to build up an ethical system. But philosophy could do neither.
About the middle of the nineteenth century, when it has become perfectly clear that we are living with a world- and [pg 070] life-affirmation which has its source merely in our confidence in discovery and invention and not in any deeper thinking about the world and life, our fate is sealed. The modern optimistic-ethical world-view, though it has done so much for the material development of civilization, proves to be like a building erected already to a considerable height but on rotten foundations, and has to collapse.
CHAPTER VII
LAYING THE FOUNDATION OF ETHICS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Hartley, Holbach. Devotion as Enlightened Egoism
MODERN times find world- and life-affirmation so self-evident that they feel no need to give them a sure foundation, and to deepen them, by thought about the world and life. Pessimism they brush aside as reactionary folly, without suspecting how deep down into thought it has sent its roots.
They do, however, see the necessity of establishing the nature of the ethical. How do they proceed to do this?
That the ethical means action directed to promoting the common good is their firm belief from the first, and they are safe from the fate of ancient thought, viz. sticking fast in the mud of resignation while trying to give the ethical a proper foundation. Instead of that they have to answer the question how the unegoistic makes it appearance beside the egoistic, and in what inner relation they stand to each other.
A performance now begins like that which went on after the appearance of Socrates, only the task is proposed this time not by an individual but by the spirit of the time. Another attempt is made to consider the ethical problem in isolation, as if it consisted in reflexions on the relation of the individual to himself and to society, these having no need to settle their position with regard to ultimate questions of the meaning of the world and of life. The ethical problem seems, too, to be a much easier one than it was then, because world-affirmation and activity directed towards the general welfare no longer have to be proved, but appear among the presuppositions which are taken for granted.