Religion in the Greco-Roman world

 

It is hard for any Westerner to imagine a world that has not been secularized and demythologized by the combined power of Christianity and science. Imagine yourself caught in a world exactly like ours, but without the belief in one sovereign God or in scientific cause-and-effect explanations. Your child falls ill, your donkey refuses to pull loads, your crops fail. Without belief in either an ultimate sovereign benevolent God or knowledge of scientific explanation of disease and weather, one would be at a loss to find another explanation than to suppose that there are many gods and forces active in the world, each of which is capricious and unpredictable. The rains sometimes fall and sometimes don’t, the wind sometimes blows and sometimes doesn’t, the earth sometimes produces crops and sometimes doesn’t. These observations probably stand as the basis of Greco-Roman popular religion, and at the basis of polytheism in general.

 

Thus people believed in things like fate, astrology, and magic, as well as the multitude of gods as well. Greco-Roman religion was non-exclusive, as polytheism tends to be. One could worship numerous gods. In fact, even today Hindus have little problem accepting Jesus as a great teacher and even as god incarnate. The issue for a Christian in a Hindu context would not be to argue that it makes sense to think of Jesus as God incarnate, but that he is in some sense uniquely God incarnate. It was their exclusivism that earned Jews and Christians the ironic designation ‘atheists’ in the ancient world. They were people who refused to worship the gods. This was a particularly strong motive for disliking and even persecuting them: those who refused to worship the gods obviously risked bringing divine disfavor. For Greeks and Romans, every public or familial event would have had some religious aspect, some rite to be carried out, so that there was essentially no such thing as ‘secular society’.

 

The Greek gods were well known for being completely anthropomorphic. The only things that set them apart from humans were their immortality and their special powers. But apart from that, they were as likely as any mortal to lie, to lust, to envy, to anger irrationally, and to hold all sorts of grudges and petty vendettas. But by well before Christian times, philosophers had seen that the behavior of the gods in the great ethic myths was morally unacceptable and had sought to rescue the myths through allegorical interpretation. Later Jews like Philo of Alexandria and many early Christian interpreters would seek to ‘rescue’ Old Testament texts from anthropomorphism and other such features by using the same method, allegorical interpretation.

 

I’ll spare you stories of the exploits of Zeus and Hera and their crowd on Mount Olympus – simply watch Xena Warrior Princess or Hercules, and add to each a stronger smattering of a storyline from Days of our Lives, and you’ll have a good idea of what they were about. However, if the characters of the gods are too human and too immoral for our tastes, among the stories are also fables and legends which taught some general truth or illustrated something about human nature and ingenuity. These religions were alive and well in the first century.

 

But let’s turn our attention to Greek philosophy, the influence of which is more directly relevant to our understanding the New Testament. It was to some extent the failure of traditional Greco-Roman religion to satisfy the needs of intellectual, thinking people that led to the formation of the philosophical schools and their approach to questions of life and faith. There is in a very real sense no hard-and-fast distinction between religion and philosophy, since each philosophy included some form of belief about God and ultimate reality.

 

Socrates, unlike the philosophers before him, was not particularly interested in the natural world. He was mainly interested in getting a clear grasp of the moral concepts guiding our lives and in the method by which we come to know the truth about them and about anything else. He would often get together with some of the best and brightest young men of Athens to discuss questions such as "What is courage?" or "What is justice?" Someone would propose an answer and would then be subjected to a searching process of question and answer that would expose the contradictions of his position, and this process would go on until an answer was found that would survive such critical scrutiny, if one ever was. Although Socrates never committed anything to writing, his ideas were to have a lasting influence. The nobility of his soul and the force of his intellect deeply impressed many of the young men in his circle, some of whom would carry on his work.

Plato, an Athenian nobleman, was one of these young men. Disgusted with the butchery and political incompetence of his times, with its moral relativism and skepticism, and profoundly inspired by Socrates, he turned his back on the political career to which he was destined and devoted himself to a life of philosophy. He passionately wanted to construct an ideal state and to place it on a solid moral and metaphysical basis. This basis, he held, was the world of Forms, a world of unchanging, perfect objects existing in some non-natural and non-temporal dimension, a world that is the source of, and more real than, the physical world in which we live. To know, he believed, is to know these Forms, not the perceptible objects around us, and the noblest life that anyone can live is the life of a philosopher, a life devoted to grasping them. Not surprisingly, his ideal state turned out to be one ruled by such philosophers.

Aristotle came down from Macedonia when he was 17 to study in Plato's Academy and remained with him for twenty years. Although profoundly influenced by Plato's ideas, he never—except, perhaps, for a short period of youthful enthusiasm—accepted Plato's basic tenet that there is some other, non-natural world. For him, only the world we live in exists— and he had a passionate love for it, believing that every part of it had a beauty of its own, from the heavenly bodies to the lowliest grub. Knowledge of this world is acquired by allowing our eyes and ears and other senses to perceive it, and by then letting our intelligence go to work on the material provided by the operation of our senses— defining it, analyzing it, and systematizing it. Our intelligence, or reason, is our highest power, and our possession of this power distinguishes us from all other creatures and makes us human. Our aim in life is to be as fully human as possible, to flourish as human beings. More than anything, that means pursuing knowledge as diligently as we can, contemplating it once we have it, and always, so far as humanly possible, letting our actions be guided by it.

 

The Philosophers of Hellenistic Times

With the death of Plato and Aristotle most of the life went out of Greek philosophy. [To be sure, the schools both had founded continued to exist for centuries, until the Christian emperor Justinian closed them down in A.D. 529; but they had lost their intellectual vitality.]

Three new schools of thought were more original and met with considerable success: the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Skeptic. Their very success, however, was a measure of the growing failure of the ancient world. Economic, political and social conditions became gradually worse, and over time people felt increasingly troubled and insecure. More and more there was a narrowing of the human horizon, a limiting of what it was thought possible for humans to achieve in life. Increasingly people sought, not so much to achieve something positive, but to avoid a negative: to avoid inner disquietude, to feel at peace, to feel—nothing.

The message of the three new schools of thought resonated with this sense of the times, for the main concern of each was to attain this inner peace. Each, however, mapped out a different road toward that end—the Stoics arguing that it was attained through "acceptance of nature," the Epicureans through a life of "repose," and the Sceptics through "intellectual equipoise," a stance achieved when one realizes that there are as many reasons for any given position as there are against it.

The further we get into the late classical period, the more men's thoughts turn inward, the more they lose confidence in the power of reason to answer the fundamental questions of life, and the more appealing another road to peace and salvation will seem: the road mapped out by Christianity.

 

Philosophy Is A Way Of Life:

     Modern man is inclined to think of mind, or the "thought process," as an abstraction. Socrates thought mind was a very real thing. He also thought the meaning of things was more real than the actual object in which the meaning was contained because it alone was not subject to change and decay. For example, he thought the idea of man more real than any living man. For this reason, the world of things was a better or worse world in proportion to how close it came to fulfilling its own meaning. In his view, for instance, man becomes good (i.e., the best sort of human being) by trying to fulfill in himself what it means to be a man. Socrates did not think of philosophy, therefore, as a system of logical and abstract statements. Philosophy was not concerned with mere propositions. Philosophy meant a life by which a man actually became his own meaning (i.e., reached self-fulfillment) insofar as it was humanly possible.

 

Socrates' Mission:

     It is clear from Plato's dialogues that Socrates thought of himself as a man with a special mission. Philosophy, he said, is not only the best existence but the only real existence for man. It presupposes an objectively existing absolute "good for man" which can only be known by the mind, and from which all human action receives its value. This "moral ought" has to be experienced, if it is to be the meaningful "best" for any one man. Thus, the philosopher has to lead a certain kind of life. As mind alone can go behind the facade of the senses to grasp the essential meaning of existence, the "moral ought" or the ultimate value in man lies in a life of knowing. The good life is a life of knowledge. Insofar as a man realizes in himself the "ought" which is human perfection, so far has he climbed up the long road from superficial knowledge of the sensible appearance of things to perfect insight into the meaningful essence of things as they exist in all their purity in the incorruptible world of ideas. At the end of the road there comes the vision of the Absolute Good in which virtue and knowledge are united as the One which is the source of all being, and whose light lights everything which comes into the world. When the philosopher has had such a vision, he has already experienced eternal life. Death no longer terrorizes him, for he knows he will live through it. Socrates saw himself as the embodiment of this true philosopher. In the course of his life he went through the necessary discipline until at the end he knew he had seen a glimpse of the meaning of life. Absolute Good was something so real to him that he did not flee death, although he twice had the chance to do so. Socrates believed that his escape would make his life meaningless. To him death was but the step on the way to immortality.

 

Socrates' Death:

     A man to whom an eternal truth is so real that he is not afraid to die is an uncomfortable man to have in a defeated state which is trying to reconstruct a war-torn economy. Moreover, Socrates had shown his moral courage in opposition to the state several times during his service as a member of the Committee of the Senate by refusing to prosecute persons contrary to the Athenian laws, or without just reason. In 399 B.C. he was brought to trial on the charge of "impiety," and put to death, after refusing to go into voluntary exile, or to escape from prison. The heroic way in which he met his death was vividly described for all time by Plato in his famous dialogue, The Phaedo. Socrates' life was an intensely personal and almost religious experience. We know that he was conscious of his particular mission in life from the record of the speeches he made in his own defense at his trial which has been given us by Plato. But, as we said earlier, Socrates left no writings, and it is doubtful he ever developed any philosophical system. He only knew he was looking for an ultimate reality beyond time and space. And he knew this reality was really there. He believed that it could be found through a method of questioning and answering which has since been called the Socratic method. If the philosopher really wanted to know the truth, he should join up with other men like himself who were also eager to find the truth. They would choose a subject for discussion. Through questions and answers about the subject and topics related to it, the essential meaning of the subject would shine forth. It is also questionable whether Socrates thought of the theory of Ideas. Beauty, goodness, and truth were not ideas. They were living principles which were present in all things. Plato took the life and method of Socrates and made a philosophy from them.

 

 

Plato

     As with so many of the earlier philosophers, little is known about the life of one of the greatest philosophers of all times. We do know that he was the student of Socrates for many, many years, and that he did not start to write until after Socrates' death. It is impossible to give an account of Plato's philosophy here. The subject it too big. There are perhaps four aspects of his philosophy the influence of which his pupil Aristotle never completely escaped. All four of these elements belong to the more religious side of Plato's thought.

 

Perfection:

     The first aspect was Plato's desire for wholeness and perfection. There was just one world, the world of ideas. The sensible world was merely an image of the real world, full of imperfections and decay. But the real world was a whole, and perfect entity. Plato did not distinguish between knowledge, virtue, and being. With the artist's eye for seeing everything in its completeness, he said that the meaning of a thing was the same as the goodness of that thing, which was the being of that thing. In human affairs, for example, "virtue was knowledge." The truly good man was the man who had knowledge of the truth. Thus, the truly good man was the only man who could properly be said to be, insofar as he approached the absolute truth of man, his ideal human nature. Plato has been considered the first philosopher to make ethics a part of philosophy. But nowhere does he distinguish the object of ethics from the object of knowledge. The good and the true are but two aspects of the whole, in his opinion. Things are good insofar as they participate in their proper thought or Idea. When we think, however, we can only think in terms of definitions, which are themselves universal concepts which express characteristics common to many individual objects. For Plato, logos, the universal concept, contained the nature of being.

 

Theory Of Ideas:

     From this desire for wholeness comes the famous Platonic theory of Ideas. The world about us is imperfect. It is constantly coming into being and going out of being. It seems impossible that anything which really is should be part of such a world. When we look at a beautiful statue or a beautiful girl, we cannot say that either of them is perfectly beautiful. Yet, there is something beautiful about them. What is it that makes them beautiful? Plato says it has to be something which is itself perfectly beautiful, so beautiful that it never can change. The wholly beautiful is the essence of Idea of what it is to be beautiful. It is Absolute Beauty. In the same way, things are true because the Idea of Truth is present in them. A chair is a chair because it participates in the essence of chairness, which actually exists beyond the reach of the sensible world. Were there no Ideas, there could be no world as we know it.

 

The Reality Of The Ideas:

     If we consider Plato's Ideas abstractions, we shall never grasp his meaning. But if we think of how a great artist sometimes manages to catch the vital meaning of an event on his canvas, we are coming closer to Plato's theory. Take another example. How many of us have known someone for years when, suddenly, one day something happens, and we see him for the first time as a "real person." His personality has become alive and full of meaning in a way which has nothing to do with his appearance or his attitude. Our two minds seem to be looking directly at one another. We feel we have a real contact with that person. Plato's Ideas are similar to this something alive, yet no a part of the sensible world, which we seem to see in our friend.

 

Theory Of Knowledge:

     Plato's theory of knowledge follows from his concept of the Ideas. Since the Ideas are eternal, learning is but a process of recollection. Plato thought there was something different from our body which would outlive our human lives. He had had experience of that something in knowing Socrates. As Socrates was sure, so Plato was sure that our minds were eternal. The sight of a sensible object recalls to our minds that moment in eternity when we "knew" the Idea of that object. The sight of a horse recalls the Idea of a horse, for instance. As knowledge is recollection, so it is also a purification. Plato thought we failed to grasp an Idea because our minds were imprisoned in the shadow world of the senses. In one of his most beautiful myths Plato compares the process of knowing with the experience of a man who has lived all his life watching shadows on the wall of his cave. One day something urges him to turn toward the entrance of the cave. The sunlight shining through the entrance almost blinds him. Gradually he becomes accustomed to the light and makes his way out of the cave. Finally, he stands in the pure sunlight. No longer is he living in the world of shadows. He sees things in their wholeness as they are really are. Knowing is disciplining yourself to become accustomed to the pure light of truth.

 

Plato's Academy:

     The process of knowledge brings us to the last aspect of Plato's thought. Socrates had lived the life of the philosopher. His life had become the Ideal on which all other philosophical ways of life would be patterned. Socrates had shown the dangers of this life. Men could only become perfect if they knew the truth. And they could only know the truth by giving up all the pleasures which bound them to the sensible world. The reward for such virtue was eternal life. Plato's Academy was the result of Plato's belief in the philosopher's way of life. It was a group of like-minded men bound together in the common purpose to find eternal life. In his Academy Plato tried to institutionalize the philosophical journey which had been the life of Socrates.

 

 

Summary Of Aristotle's Intellectual Heritage

     The foregoing outline of philosophical thought before Aristotle gives some idea of the complex problems Aristotle had to solve. He was still living under the impact of Socrates' life and death. No matter how far his thought developed, Aristotle was never able to dismiss the religious insight into the nature of the universe which had been Socrates'. From the natural philosophers through Plato he inherited the two unsolved "natural" questions: What is the nature of reality? How do you account for change? From the Sophists and particularly from Plato he inherited the problems of human existence: What is the nature of man? What is his function in life?

 

Aristotle's Life

     Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. in the Macedonian town of Stagira on the northeast coast of the peninsula of Chalcidice, or what is now called Thessalonika. He was born at a time when the Greek city-state system was already in decline. Athens, the city where the Greek genius had been conquered by the city of Sparta in 404 B.C. During the years that followed, Greece was torn by the struggle for leadership between Sparta and the city of Thebes. Sparta was eventually defeated in 362 B.C. After her own defeat, Athens went through a period of dictatorship under a council known as the "Thirty." With the victory of Thebes she became once more the champion of liberty in Greece. While the Greek city states were gradually growing weaker, a new power was rising in the north, the kingdom of Macedonia. Aristotle's father, Nicomachus, was the court doctor and friend of the King of Macedonia, Amyntas II. Amyntas' son, Philip II, reorganized and increased the power of the kingdom. His son, Alexander, made the name of Macedonia famous in history by his lightning conquest of a huge empire stretching from Greece to the Indian Ocean. Aristotle himself probably spent his childhood at the Macedonian capital, Pella.

 

Family:

     The young boy's interest in natural science came both through his race and his family. Stagira was an Ionian colony and Aristotle was an Ionian Greek. It is no wonder he followed the great scientific tradition of his forefathers. His family was of noble origin with a tradition of medicine. His father was a member of the Asklepiad family, which claimed to be descended from Asklepios, the Greek god-physician, who was said to be the son of Apollo and a mortal princess. We are told that the family trained its sons in medicine. Probably Aristotle had some medical training and helped his father perform surgical operations. His mother's family came from Chalcis in Euboea, where Aristotle was to spend his last days. Unfortunately, both parents died when Aristotle was quite young, and he was put under the guardianship of a Macedonian official, Proxenus.

 

Comment:

     It is important to note that all his life Aristotle enjoyed the protection of the Macedonian court, first under Philip II and later under Alexander. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why Aristotle was able to exert such an influence over the intellectual world of his time.

 

Plato's Academy:

     When he was eighteen, Aristotle entered Plato's Academy at Athens. He remained at the Academy until Plato's death in 347 B.C. It is difficult to imagine the influence Plato had over his pupil, but something of that influence has been discussed above. It is also hard for us to put ourselves in the atmosphere of the great school which Plato founded. We know that the Academy was literally the center of learning for the Mediterranean world into which Aristotle was born. The fame of the Academy and that of its founder brought men from all over the world to discuss the urgent questions of the day. We know these men visited the Academy because Plato mentions them in his dialogues, and even named some of them after the visitors. One who was so honored was Theaetetus, the man who is said to have discovered solid geometry. The astronomer, Eudoxus, came all the way from his home in Cyzicus in Asia Minor in 367 B.C. to discuss astronomy with Plato. In his dialogue named after the great Sophist, Protagoras, Plato shows us his interest in the Sophist's view of life. Then, too, Plato was a man who traveled far and wide. In the course of his travels he had come in contact with the Pythagoreans in Sicily, and with the Sicilian medical school of Philistion. It was from the Pythagoreans that Plato got his interest in numbers, which was to lead him in his later life to suggest that numbers were the basic principles of all things. In short, the Academy at Athens was truly cosmopolitan, reflecting the many influences of travelers from abroad.

 

     The second fact about Plato's Academy was his method of teaching through discussion. The Academy aimed to put Socrates' way of life and his method into practice. Abstract problems were discussed with an enthusiasm which might amaze a visitor from the modern world. One effect of the dialectic method on Aristotle was to make him distinguish between that kind of knowledge which could be gained through discussion and that which could be acquired through observation and deduction. Probably because there was so much discussion, Aristotle had a chance to learn and examine thoroughly all the theories of the earlier philosophers. He also gained a respect for their wisdom, as his frequent references to the "opinions of the wise" show. Another effect of the discussion method was to make both Aristotle and his fellow students realize the value of definition and orderly thinking. An argument has no value unless you define your terms and argue in a systematic way. At the time of Aristotle's entrance into the Academy, there is reason to believe that Plato was working on a standard formula of argument. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that Aristotle should have developed his own tools for

argument.

 

     The third fact to be remembered about the Academy was that its students were working on every type of problem. The impact of the many ideas that were in the very air of the Academy must have left a deep impression on Aristotle. We know that Plato was particularly interested in the Pythagorean theory of numbers about the time Aristotle came to the Academy. Plato had also turned from his original concept of the Ideas as that which had meaning and value in an object to a more workable theory of the Ideas as universal principles. When we wonder why Aristotle devotes two books of his Metaphysics to showing that neither the Ideas nor numbers can be called substances, we must remember the background of the Academy.

 

     Aristotle remained at the Academy for about twenty years. Probable he did not remain a student all this time, but began lecturing and teaching. We know he did some writing during this period, but unfortunately most of his early work has not survived the passage of time. From the fragments which have survived, we can see how deeply Aristotle was under the influence of his teacher during these early years.

 

Aristotle Leaves Athens:

     When Plato died in 347 B.C., his pupil, Speusippus, was elected to succeed him as head of the Academy. Apparently, there was a great deal of friction between Speusippus and Aristotle, who did not like Speusippus' interest in Plato's theory of numbers. At the same time Aristotle's presence had become not welcome in Athens. The Greek Confederacy had fallen to pieces. It was not the moment for a man who was known to have connections in Macedonian court circles to be in democratic Athens. Thus, for both personal and political reasons Aristotle decided to accept the invitation of a fellow student, Hermeias, to live at his court at Assos, a town on the slopes of Mount Ida in Asia Minor. Hermeias had risen from a slave to become the owner of a large mining property on Mount Ida. With the money earned from the mines he had purchased the title of prince from the Persians and now was a ruler in his own right.

 

     Aristotle never returned to the Academy. Apparently, Hermeias gave him a great deal of liberty in organizing the small group of Platonists he had gathered at his court. Aristotle quickly became the leader of the group, directing discussions and giving lectures. This small group was later to form the core of the school that Aristotle himself founded at Athens. While at Assos, Aristotle married Hermeias' niece, Pythias. She gave him one daughter, whom he named after her mother.

 

     After three years at Hermeias' court Aristotle moved to Mitylene on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. He was probably persuaded to go there by another fellow-student at the Academy, Theophrastuse, the future author of a celebrated book called Characters, which had a great influence on English writers of the seventeenth century. Little is known of Aristotle's activities at Mitylene. Many scholars think he did most of his research on biology during this time. It is probable that his friend, Theophrastus, helped him collect his material.

 

Tutor To Alexander:

     Aristotle remained on Lesbos until 342 B.C. He then accepted an invitation from Philip II of Macedonia to become tutor to his son, Alexander. Aristotle had not been at his new post very long when he heard of the capture and crucifixion of his friend, Hermeias, by the Persians. Aristotle was so shaken by the death of his friend that he composed a poem in his honor. This action did not meet with the approval of the Greek world, as Hermeias had been suspected of plotting with the Greeks' Macedonian master, Philip. We tend to think of Aristotle as a hardened intellectual with no emotional reactions. Aristotle's defense of his friend in the face of Athenian disapproval is proof of the value he attached to friendship. On the practical side it was probably Hermeias' contact with Philip which caused the Macedonian king to send for Aristotle to teach his son.

 

     We know little about Aristotle's education of Alexander. Judging from the Politics, we can be sure that Aristotle thought the education of kings very important. We know that he wrote one short work for his pupil on the subject of monarchy, and another on colonies. It was the fashion of the time to hire philosophers to teach king's sons. Plato had tried to teach the young tyrant of Sicily. Aristotle tried to teach Alexander, apparently with little success. Alexander was more inclined toward a life of action than a life of study. When Philip died in 336 B.C., relations between Aristotle and his pupil had already become quite strained. When Alexander set off to conquer the world, Aristotle returned to his native town of Stagira.

 

The Lyceum:

     Aristotle's life at Pella was not all unpleasantness It was probably at Pella that Aristotle turned his thoughts to politics and decided to make an anthology of Greek constitutions. He also made the acquaintance of a man who was influential at the Macedonian court by the name of Antipater. The acquaintance ripened into friendship. When Alexander left for the East, he left Antipater regent of Greece until his return. Antipater encouraged Aristotle to return to Athens and promised him his support.

 

     So it happened that Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 B.C. His return marks the high point of his career. On the outskirts of Athens, a little to the northeast there stood a grove which was sacred to Apollo Lykeios and the Muses. Here Socrates used to come and spend a few quiet hours. Here Aristotle founded his own school to be known the world over as the Lyceum.

 

     There has been some question as to why Aristotle did not return to the Academy. Speusippus had died, but the Academy had already elected one of Aristotle's old friends, Xenocrates, as head. It was obvious that the world-renowned teacher of Alexander could not accept a position lower than head of the Academy. It was fitting that he open his own school. Since he was by this time the recognized leading philosopher and teacher of Greece, Aristotle immediately announced that he was the successor to Plato and his school, the successor to the Academy. In a short time, the Lyceum had taken the place of the Academy, whose students were applying for admission. The solitary reign of the Academy was over.

 

     Aristotle's work at the Lyceum was the fruit of his years of research and analysis. During his years at Athens he seems to have written or revised most of his major writings. He completed the classification of the sciences, developed his own system of logic, and carried most of the sciences to a point which they had never reached before and were not to reach again for a long, long time. At the same time the influence of his ethical and political theories was being felt in Athens and throughout the Greek world.

 

     Following in the Platonic tradition of learning by discussion, Aristotle seems to have written most of his works which have come down to us as lecture notes from which he talked to the students. Apparently, Aristotle was an organizer. Study hours were not free but were planned at the Lyceum. Tradition tells us that Aristotle gave his most serious lectures in the morning. In the afternoon he spoke on more popular subjects, like rhetoric, in order to attract the crowds that came out from the city to hear him. Like the Academy,

the Lyceum had a spirit of its own. Aristotle laid down the rules by which both students and teachers lived. These rules were to survive long after his death. Under Aristotle, Plato's idea of a common life shared by friends in search of wisdom became the basis of the first university in Europe.

 

Aristotle's Influence:

     As was the case with Plato, it is impossible for us to realize the influence which Aristotle's teaching and personality had over his students. Aristotle seemed to live his teaching. His followers, called Peripatetics because they used to walk around the arcades of the Lyceum discussing philosophy, showed little influence of Aristotle's teaching. Once the man was gone, it seemed to be difficult to recapture the original meaning of his words. It was not until the Middle Ages that Aristotle became alive again and spoke to the Schoolmen with the same energy he had put into his teaching at the Lyceum. Thus, Aristotle's teaching at the Lyceum did not give rise to a new philosophy. Rather it marked the ultimate achievement of Greek philosophy.

 

His Last Years:

     The death of Alexander in 323 B.C. shocked the entire Greek world. Once again Aristotle was persona non grata at Athens. A charge of "impiety" was brought against him. Rather than have Athens "sin twice against philosophy" (Socrates had been accused of the same crime), Aristotle turned his school over to his old friend, Theophrastus, and fled to his mother's home in Chalcis. He died in Chalcis from a stomach disease at the age of 64 in 320 B. C. Aristotle must have been a lonely old man in the last years of his life. Exiled from the school to which he had given so much, he withdrew more and more into himself. In one of his letters he writes that he had become more and more attracted by "the wonderland of myth."

 

 

 

[From Dr. Jan Garrett – Stoic Ethics – Information provided on the internet]

 

Contents

 

• Introduction
• Moral development according to the Stoics
• Preferred and Rejected Indifferent Values
• The Emotions
• Answers to Objections
• For further reading
• "Values in Classical Stoicism" Chart

Introduction

Almost anyone who has any ideas about the Stoics has heard that the Stoics advocate two things:

• Indifference to things not under our control (wealth, health, reputation, and the like).
• Elimination of the passions or emotions.

These general ideas about the Stoics are partially correct: The Stoics place things like wealth and health, along with their opposites, poverty, illness, low status, etc., in the category of indifferent things. And they consider what they call the emotions (pathê) all bad. Happiness for them is apatheia, which we can translate as "freedom from the emotions."

It's not difficult to imagine plausible late 20th-century objections to these notions.

OBJECTION 1. Stoics say we should be indifferent about life and health. How, we are tempted to ask, can a good person, who is, say, a parent, be indifferent about the life or health of her child? And isn't it a bit extreme, we want to say, not to care about one's own life or health?

OBJECTION 2. Stoics say we should eliminate the emotions. But psychological counselors today tell us to get in touch with our feelings. Dr. Bill DeFoore, for example, is author of a recent popular psychology paperback entitled Anger: Deal with It, Heal with it, Stop It from Killing You. He tells his readers to say to themselves "All of my feelings are OK with me" (77). DeFoore holds that at the core of each of us is an "inner child," which is either identical to, or "associated with [,] the more vulnerable emotions of fear, pain, and the need for love." We are supposed to affirm this inner child and to protect it (DeFoore, 67)

OBJECTION 3. Without passion, nothing creative or progressive ever gets done. People are sometimes described as apathetic by other people who would have liked to see them more concerned about racism, peace, the environment, or other social problems. If that's what Stoic apatheia recommends for everyone, well, we don't need it, we've got enough.

The Stoics can reply to these objections, but first we have to understand their perspective better. A good place to start is the Stoic conception of moral development.

Moral Development

The young child naturally wants to preserve itself; it should learn how, and it normally does.

As we become older, we become aware that we operate in various roles: son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, student, apprentice, etc. And this goes on into adulthood: we learn what it means to be a citizen, a mayor, a client, a professional, a teacher, a craftsperson, a husband, a wife, a parent, etc. Corresponding to each of these roles is a set of appropriate actions (roughly duties), and there's no particular mystery concerning what they are.

Generally speaking, what should be going on at these two stages is the promotion of the "primary things according to nature"--things like life, health, technical knowledge, possessions, beauty, etc. A child's choices for self-preservation and a person's selection of actions appropriate to his or her roles are all called appropriate actions (AA's). The child's AA is to try to stay alive, the doctor's AA is to assist that process if the child is injured or gets ill; the apprentice's AA is to learn technical knowledge, his master's job is to teach it well. And so on.

The final stage, which is fully reached only rarely, is the goal which Stoics seek to reach. The person who has reached it, they say, is living consistently according to nature. This person, the sophos or wise person, lives virtuously as well as happily. Such a person is able to observe in practice, not merely in words, the distinctions on the "Stoic Values" chart. She can distinguish between goods, evils and indifferents, but within the indifferents, she distinguishes between the preferred and rejected indifferents.

 

Values in Classical Stoicism

This is a rough version of a chart that could be refined considerably. (See comments below.) I give some translations of the ancient Stoic terms, Greek originals first, Latin translations second. When there is just one translation, it is Greek. Wherever a list uses "etc." there are other items that could be added. For instance, I only give five virtues, but there are many more.

Stoics classify values as goods, evils, or indifferents. The indifferents are neither good nor evil, in the strict sense. For a partial listing of indifferents, see below.

GOODS AND EVILS

VALUES UP TO US	GOOD THINGS (t' agatha, bona)	BAD THINGS (ta kaka, mala)
Character Traits	Virtues (hai aretai, virtutes) 1. Wisdom (sophia, sapientia) 2. Justice (dikaiosune) 3. Bravery (andreia) 4. Temperance (sophrosune) 5. Generosity etc.	Vices (hai kakiai) 1. Folly (or Ignorance) 2. Injustice (adikia) 3. Cowardice 4. Intemperance (akolasia) 5. Ungenerosity etc.
Acts	Virtuous Acts 1. Wise acts 2. Just acts 3. Brave acts 4. Temperate acts 5. Generous acts etc.	Vicious Acts 1. Foolish acts 2. Unjust acts 3. Cowardly acts 4. Intemperate acts 5. Ungenerous acts etc.
Feelings	Good Feelings (hai eupatheiai) 1. Wish (boulesis) 2. Caution (eulabeia) 3. Joy (chara) [No good feeling contrary to distress]	Passions or Emotions, a.k.a. Violent Feelings (pathe) 1. Lust (epithumia, libido) 2. Fear (phobos) 3. Delight (hedone, laetitia) 4. Distress (lupe, aegritudo)

INDIFFERENTS (t'adiaphora)

The Stoics classify indifferents into three mutually exclusive classes: preferred, rejected (a.k.a. dispreferred), and unqualifiedly indifferent. Unqualifiedly indifferent things neither generally accord with our nature (as the preferred things do) nor are they generally contrary to our nature (as rejected things are).

 

Comments

1. It is important to remember that the terms translated "good," "bad," "indifferent," "preferred," and "rejected" have precise meanings within the context of ancient Stoic philosophy. These translations do not always correspond to the normal meanings of the words in contemporary English. (The meaning of the original Stoic terms did not always correspond to the normal meanings of the words in the original Greek, for that matter.)

2. "Preferred" things are also called primary things in accord with nature and "rejected" things are also called primary things contrary to nature. Of course, that does not mean that selecting preferred things has priority over choosing the good, but that preferred things are the things that we naturally pursue, even as children, long before we study philosophy and try to become virtuous. Likewise, rejected things are the sorts of things that even children tend to avoid in favor of preferred things.

3. The ancient Stoics distinguished not only between good things, evil things and indifferent things, but within the class of indifferent things, they distinguished between preferred things, rejected things and unqualifiedly indifferent things. The chart gives no examples of unqualifiedly indifferent things.

4. Within the classes of good things, evil things, preferred things and rejected things, the Stoics also distinguished between "___ for themselves" and "___ for other things." Money, for instance, is a thing preferred for other things. The charts do not make this distinction between "for themselves" and "for other things."

5. The Greek word "hedone" is ambiguous. On the one hand, it represents a class of passions or emotions and falls under the class of evil things. There I have translated it "delight." On the other hand, it represents physical pleasure. Some ancient reporters regarding Stoicism place physical pleasure among the preferred indifferents; others say that it has some positive value but not enough to be included even among the preferred indifferents. Cicero is aware of the distinction between these two meanings of "hedone," translating it as "laetitia" (delight) when he means the emotion, as "voluptas" (pleasure) when he means physical pleasure.

6. The Greek writers on Stoicism distinguish in practice between "lupe," which I translate as "distress" (following translators of Cicero, who uses the Latin "aegritudo" for the Greek "lupe"), and "ponos," which I translate as "pain" (following translators of Cicero, who uses the Latin "dolor" for the Greek "ponos"). Unfortunately, translators of Greek often use "pain" to translate "lupe," which leads to absurdities. Thus, a Cynic who is a kind of stand-in for the sage in Epictetus is made to say in English translation, "Am I not free from pain?" What he is really saying is "Am I not free from distress?" As I read them, the ancient Stoics did not teach that sages would be free from physical pain, only that they would be free from the bad feelings, i.e., passions or emotions (pathe), which include distress.

7. The four emotions listed under Evils are really genera (large classes) of emotions. These four genera are broken down more specifically in the reports we have of ancient Stoic ethics, such as those of Cicero, Arius Didymus (the probable author of the Stoic Ethics section in the Anthology of John Stobaeus), and Diogenes Laertius. Anger, for instance, is not ignored but is included as a specific kind of lust. Based on the ancient records, we could construct an interesting classificatory chart of the emotions according to the Stoics.

8. Note that the good feelings correspond (as contraries) to the passions Lust, Fear, and Delight. No good feeling corresponds to Distress. Stoic sages, if there are any, will experience the good feelings. Nonsages will experience the passions. I suspect that the ancient Stoics would have admitted, if pressed, that Stoics who are not sages but are making progress toward wisdom will experience a kind of anticipation or foreshadowing of the good feelings.

 

From this perspective, only the virtues, actions that express the virtues, and feelings inseparable from virtue are good. By contrast, and that phrase cannot be overstressed--by contrast, by comparison, things like life, health, possessions, good reputation, etc. are not good but indifferent. The term "indifferent" does not imply that we should not care about these things; only that we should not care about them when they conflict with right living and lead us into temptation or towards evil.

Now, the opposites of these indifferent things, bodily and external conditions like death, disease, poverty, and disgrace are in a similar position; compared with wickedness or evil, things like acting unjustly, in a cowardly manner, etc., these bodily and external conditions too are indifferent.

Preferred and Rejected Indifferents

Stoics do not altogether ignore the usual distinctions between life and death, health and disease, possessions and poverty. They call things like life and wealth "preferred," things like death and disease "rejected." The preferred things are preferred over the rejected ones. But their value is virtually zero whenever they have to be compared with good things, such as virtuous action.

A person who becomes wise and virtuous will undergo a shift of perspective. Much of what was once called good or bad will be reinterpreted. Wealth, for example, is now understood as a "preferred" thing, no longer a good on the same scale with virtue; in comparison with goodness or virtue, wealth is essentially neutral.

Can we be more specific about virtue? It includes character traits like courage, fidelity, fairness, and honesty, plus the mental ability to make wise moral choices. For the Stoics, virtue is an art that governs selection among the preferred and rejected indifferents. It is an art of living.

AN EXAMPLE. Consider a parent's relationship with her child. Naturally, the parent would like the child's good will, but virtue demands that the parent discipline the child when the child does something very wrong. Now, the "good will" of another person is not really a good, but a preferred thing; losing the good will of another person, by contrast, is a rejected thing. If the parent selects the preferred thing on this occasion, retaining the child's good will in the short run, she will neglect virtue and act in an inferior way. In this case, acting virtuously means overriding the attraction of the preferred thing. The wise person chooses virtue over what is merely preferred and will not be torn over the issue.

The key to virtue for the Stoics is its consistency--courage, wisdom, justice, proper loyalty, proper generosity, proper friendliness--are all consistent with one another. And what is just in one circumstance is consistent with what is just in another circumstance. By contrast, pursuit of preferred things is not always consistent: one person's pursuit of power or fame or money or erotic pleasure may clash with someone else's.

The Emotions

One's position on the so-called indifferent things is inseparable from her position on the emotions.

Emotions, say the Stoics, are excessive attachments to preferred things. When we lust for the pleasures associated with fame, high social status, possessions, money, etc., we are regarding these things as good. Yet they are ultimately indifferent.

If we fear losing or not getting these things, we are regarding their opposites--low social status, poverty, etc.--as bad or evil. Yet these too are ultimately indifferent.

Thus fear and lust are wrong because they involve a false belief. And likewise with distress (including grief) and delight.

We feel distress when we get what we fear (a rejected thing falsely believed evil).

We feel delight when we get what we lust for (a preferred thing falsely believed good).

These terms "fear," "lust," "distress" and "delight" should not be understood in the ordinary way, but need to be understood in relation to the other Stoic ideas to which you have been introduced. Just as "energy" in ordinary life means one thing, and in modern physical theory something a bit different, so "lust" in ordinary English is not quite the same thing as "lust" in Stoicism. You can lust after longevity, possessions, the praise of others, and even health as well as after another human being.

The Stoics say that emotions are excessive impulses disobedient to reason, that emotions are movements in the soul contrary to nature. ("Disobedient to reason" and "contrary to nature" mean about the same thing; the term "nature" sometimes means the ideal--"contrary to nature" here means contrary to reason.)

The Stoics say that emotions are upsets or disorders in the soul. They are physical events, but they are also mental events. As a mental event, each emotion involves a compound belief, one part of which is "fresh."

Here's an example: Suppose someone whom I know passes me on the street and seems to ignore me. I might feel hurt or angry over this. In this case, there is a background belief (BB):

(BB) So-and so ignored me.

BB is presupposed by this emotion but not part of it.

The emotion itself is composed of two beliefs:

(1) So-and so's ignoring me was a bad thing.

(2) I ought to be distressed over So-and so's ignoring me.

(2) is the "fresh" part. Typically events in our more remote past no longer sting, even if we still regard them as bad. I might still think (1) ten years after the event but no longer think (2). In that case I would no longer be angry.

Note that for the Stoics (1) and (2) are both false. (1), however, is the main problem since (2) is largely based on (1).

According to the Stoics every belief can be analyzed into two components ((a) and (b)):

(a) The thought itself, without endorsement.
(b) Assent, endorsement, of the thought.

Stoics call the first component (a) an "appearance." For example, the appearance in (1) is:

(1a) "So-and-so's ignoring me appears to be a bad thing."

One might say to herself:

(1b) "Yes, it is."

Unless we assent to false appearances such as this one, we do not experience an emotion. It is our power to assent or withhold assent that makes it possible to avoid emotions. Unfortunately, most of us have not developed the skill to use this power correctly, so we tend to endorse the false appearances that lead to emotion.

 

Answers to Objections

Now let us return to the objections mentioned at the start.

WILL A STOIC PARENT BE INDIFFERENT REGARDING THE LIFE OR HEALTH OF HER CHILD? Strictly speaking, and in comparison with virtue, the life or health of every person is indifferent. But a Stoic parent chooses her acts because they are the right thing to do, and the right thing for a person to do normally coincides with the role-related appropriate action.

The main difference is the spirit in which the action is done--the non-Stoic does it so as to promote his own or somebody else's preferred values; the Stoic does it because it is right to do it. And doing the right thing is not indifferent at all.

The right thing lies in the striving, not in the external success. You can only do what is in your power. If, having strived rightly, you fail to save life or health, you have no reason for grief, which is a kind of distress.

NOW LET US CONSIDER THE OBJECTIONS CONCERNING THE STOIC IDEAL OF FREEDOM FROM THE EMOTIONS.

To some extent, the Stoic term "apatheia" is misleading, even in the ancient Stoics' own cultural context. In fact, the Stoic view is that the wise and virtuous person will have some feelings.  The wise person experiences not delight but joy (at living a wise life); not fear but caution (which prevents her from agreeing with false appearances); not lust for preferred things but wish (that one choose well and not badly). So, Stoic happiness is not altogether devoid of feeling.

Another important point is that the Stoics recognize what they call pre-emotions; these are physical twinges that are sometimes but not always followed by an emotion. Even a virtuous person may feel a pre-emotion (say, a twinge of desire) when he sees an attractive individual of the appropriate gender. But this is not the emotion of lust; lust is not present unless the first person endorses the false appearance that having intimate relations with that attractive person would be a good, instead of the preferred thing that it might be.

Earlier I mentioned an apparent conflict between the Stoic view that the emotions are bad and modern therapy. But when we examine more closely the views of modern therapists, we do not find such a big conflict. When the therapist whose book I cited (Dr. Bill DeFoore) says that anger can be a good thing, it turns out that he is really talking about emotional energy behind anger, which he reasonably claims can be diverted into nondestructive uses.

When psychologists today tell us to affirm our feelings, they do not mean that our emotional selves are just fine the way they are--people don't usually end up in psychologists' offices if they believe that, and psychologists are not going to put themselves out of business. What they mean is that we should not hide our emotional selves from ourselves; that it is better to be aware of our present feelings than not to be aware. But this awareness is also a starting point for change. None of this is in conflict with what the Stoics say.

Even the goals of contemporary psychological therapy are largely compatible with Stoic practice. Bill DeFoore says that the emotional energy which fuels rage can be redirected--towards acquiring skills that enable one to take responsibility for oneself.

Now the Stoics do not have our modern notion of emotional energy, which after all is loosely borrowed from the notion of modern energy that physicists use. But they had an idea they called impulse, the inner power behind action, and talked about directing this impulse, when it takes the form of desire (orexis), away from preferred things and towards the good. The results would be similar to what DeFoore has in mind.

If one carries out the mental exercises that DeFoore recommends, he says, an inner peace will emerge. Vulnerability and anger will be gradually reduced. The Stoics say that if a person can be successful in eliminating the emotions (all of which are irrational and violent movements in the soul), that person too will enjoy tranquility. This is another way of understanding apatheia, the elimination of all the excessive movements of the soul. Thus, the Stoic ideal is psychological invulnerability. In fact, with this in mind, the Roman Stoic Seneca will compare the wise person to a god.

By contrast, Dr. DeFoore says that the vulnerable "inner child" never disappears entirely--the vulnerability never entirely goes away.

Yet of those who professed Stoicism and tried to live it, to the best of their ability, few claimed that they had reached the goal themselves, and many frankly admitted that they had not. The difference between the Stoics and psychologists like DeFoore seems to be one of emphasis.

The Stoic view, in my opinion, has at least one advantage. Because the Stoics don't strictly rule out reaching a stable goal, they spend more time thinking about what it would be like to live that way. And it does not seem to be a bad idea to have a clear target where one's own happiness is concerned.

 

 

Origen, 2^nd century, one of the early Christian thinkers most influenced by Greek thought, still was open to having his assumption that God is above evil, earthly passions challenged. He eventually penned the words “First he suffered, then he came down”, i.e. God loved us and ‘felt for us’ and thus came incarnate. This was a difficult step for Christians so influenced by Greek thought, or I should say ‘living and breathing Greek thought’, as everyone was in this time.