The higher teaching in Rome between the days of Augustus and the days of Marcus and his son, roughly the period included in the first and second centuries, is well exemplified in the works we possess of the later Stoic philosophers. We shall only be able to touch on the fringes of this study, and we simply propose to give a few references to the words of two of the most distinguished of these teachers, Seneca and Epictetus. Yet even these brief references will give us some insight into the attitude of Paganism on the side of philosophic teaching, in the period of its mortal struggle with Christianity.
Seneca was the tutor and for a time the adviser of the Emperor Nero; his death is dated A. D. 65. Epictetus taught somewhat later, during the reigns of Domitian and Trajan— some placing his death as late as the reign of Hadrian. At all events, he lived well into the second century. Marcus, the Emperor and philosopher, who in some ways may be looked even with favor, on account of the services they not unfrequently rendered, informers and spies, against the feared and hated Christians; as, for instance, in the martyrdom of Polycarp at Smyrna. Then, too, it must not be overlooked that the Jewish religion was never aggressive. It rarely sought for proselytes. Very different was Christianity; among the worshippers of Jesus, every one more or less was a missionary, an active and earnest proselytizer.
We have dwelt on the great change which undoubtedly passed over Paganism in the reign of Augustus and the two following centuries, and on the striking difference between the withering scepticism of the age of Julius Caesar and the superstitious devotion which so largely characterized the days of Marcus. By this strong current of devotion, so to speak, the philosopher teachers were largely influenced; and their teaching in turn helped, especially among the higher ranks of society, to make Paganism in the epoch of its fierce struggle with Christianity something of a reality.
Their efforts were largely directed to reforming the popular religion, and in some way bringing men's minds to the belief in the unity of God. They would persuade men that the many names under which the supreme deity was adored in different lands only represented one Almighty power. It is doubtful, however, if this higher teaching ever really penetrated the masses of the people; and it is more than probable that the vast majority of ordinary folk, until the day of the final victory of Christianity, continued to understand and to practice religion in the old way, worshipping Minerva and Venus, Vesta and Juno, Mars and Esculapius, as deities especially connected with and disposing the issues of the home and the hearth, of peace and war, of sickness and health, much as their ancestors had done. But there is no doubt that an effort to teach men the grand . Unity of God, worshipped under whatever different names and symbols, was made in the schools of the great philosophic teachers of the first, second, and third centuries; helping to give, among the more thoughtful at all events, a renewed reality to a religion which had well-nigh, if not entirely, lost its power over the hearts of cultured people.
Thus the philosopher, the thought-leader and teacher in Rome, the statesman who ruled Rome, the patriot who loved Rome with a great passion, for different reasons and in different ways set themselves to restore—we might say to reform—the fast dying religion of Paganism; and they were partly successful. They breathed into its wild legends a new life by giving them a new meaning; they prolonged its existence for well-nigh three hundred years; they gave it vitality and power to contend with Christianity all through that period of struggle, and although in the long run they were defeated, and in the end the cause for which they struggled was utterly and for ever ruined as far as the Roman Empire was concerned, the contest was a long and painful one, and for a time, as far as men could see, the issue hung in the balance. The long battle between Christianity and Paganism eventuated in a complete victory for Christianity, because the conflict was between truth and falsehood, and in the long run truth will ever be victorious on earth as in Heaven-It is the fashion to describe the great contest between Paganism and Christianity as a combat between evil and good, as a struggle of darkness against light. Such a general presentment may on the whole be accurate, but it is easy to exaggerate. It is too alluring a task for the Christian historian and apologist in his desire to magnify the final victory of the cause he justly loves, to underrate the efforts made by earnest serious men brought up in the atmosphere of Paganism, and living all their lives amidst its associations, to raise the brotherhood of man to a higher and purer level That eminent and devout teacher, Augustine, acknowledges the noble efforts of the philosophers of the earlier Empire when he writes that "Christianity has found the only way which leads to the land of peace, but the philosopher had seen that blessed land from afar, and had saluted it."
Now the great teachers of philosophy, in their efforts to reform the old religion, were not content with endeavoring to inspire their disciples with a loftier, nobler, and truer conception of the Divinity worshipped under so many and often such grotesque forms, but they pressed' home besides in their teaching a higher and purer morality, a morality indeed so exalted that many have supposed that they learned it from the life or from the writings of Christians.
To quote a few examples of their moral teaching: Seneca (circa A. D. 50-60) has something very beautiful to say of the charity or love which is so distinguishing a feature in Christian practice. The Pagan master would have his disciples console and lighten the sufferings of others by that true sympathy which is often more efficacious than mere gifts. He would have them tender and gentle even to sinners, even to their enemies. He charges them to be generous to the poor and needy; he teaches that the son should be ransomed and restored to the mother, that the slave and the gladiator should be if possible redeemed, that the holy rites of sepulcher, so precious a privilege in the eyes of the Roman world, should not be denied even to the remains of a criminal. He would have his disciples live among their fellows, as though God were ever present and looking on, God who was ever with men, at once their protector and friend.
Very sublime indeed appears to have been Seneca's conception of God, who must not only be worshipped by men, but must be loved by them ("colitur et amatur"). Bitterly he inveighed against the popular Epicurean notion that God or the gods were indifferent to us and careless of our woes. Surely, he writes, one who could teach this, was deaf to all the voices or prayers ever going up, was blind to the hands clasped in supplication in every part of the world!
In this necessarily brief study we have only cited from Seneca and Epictetus; but these were only two of the masters who taught in this age in the Roman school of philosophy. They are the two best known, but it would be a mistake to suppose they stood alone. They are conspicuous and illustrious examples of their school, nothing more.
Some, indeed, of the conceptions of the Deity are most striking; it would seem as though the Pagan philosopher was a student of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, when he teaches that the gods ask not at our hands the sacrifices of oxen, or the offerings of gold and silver for their temples, or for money contributions to be poured into their treasuries; what the}' require from us is the offering of a heart at once devout and just. The immortals need no lofty buildings of stone, storey reared on storey; what is required by them of man is that he should build them an unseen sanctuary in his heart.
Little heed, however, was paid to such lofty and purely spiritual ideas of worship by the Pagan peoples who inhabited the broad Roman Empire; and even such earnest and devout disciples of philosophy as the Emperor Marcus were little moved by such noble conceptions, though they emanated from the greatest of the Stoic masters. It was Marcus who thought, in the course of his campaign on the Danube, to propitiate the favor of the immortals by throwing two lions into the great river! It was the same pious and devoted servitor of the gods who, before the expedition against the Marcomanni, brought out and exposed the images of the gods for seven days in Rome in accordance with an ancient Pagan custom; and on that occasion, too, vowed to sacrifice, in the event of the war being successful, such innumerable beasts, that the famous epigram recorded by Ammianus Marcellinus was written: The white oxen to have met Peter, who we believe probably lived and taught in Rome, while Seneca was in power, many years before Paul came to the capital. But without coming in contact with any great Christian teacher such as Peter or Paul, the echo of their voices, perhaps some of their writings even, might have reached the philosopher. The Christian community of Rome, although it was pointedly ignored by so many of the earlier writers of the Empire, must have been well known and carefully watched by the Government. Nero's selection of the "Sect" as the object of his infamous accusation on the occasion of the burning of Rome tells us this. It seems to be beyond dispute that Christian teaching more or less affected and colored, if it did not do more, many of the doctrines and precepts of the later Stoic school of philosophy from and after the middle of the first century. Jerome even refers to letters which passed between Paul and Seneca. The letters, however, in question are undoubtedly forgeries.
But while so many of Seneca's beautiful words possess the aroma of evangelical teaching, we often come upon some sentence, some reflection, which tells us that the writer, although perhaps inspired not unfrequently by some divine thought whose source must be sought and found in the words of the Founder of Christianity, or of some one of His disciples, yet lived in a very different atmosphere from that breathed in the communities of Christians; as, for instance, when the Pagan master speaks of the lofty platform occupied by one who in good earnest is virtuous after his exalted pattern. Such a one, he argues, draws near the gods and becomes their equal—and even in certain respects is the superior of the god (Jupiter). Very different indeed would have been the estimate of his life, made by a holy and humble man of heart who formed one among the congregation of a Peter or of a Clement!
Very striking, again, are many of the thoughts on religion of Epictetus, who carries on the tradition of the teaching of the philosophic reformers of Paganism into the next generation, when Trajan was on the throne; perhaps even as late as the days of Hadrian, well on in the second century. Epictetus would have all sorts and conditions of men pray to the great God. "As for me, I am growing old," said the sage, "what can I do better than praise God? I must do this, I would have all join me here. I would say to Jupiter, 'Do with me what thou wiliest. Take me where thou pleasest, I am thine, I belong wholly to thee.' "Very touchingly, in words which might well have been used in a chapel or oratory of the Christians, Epictetus thus talks of prayer to the Supreme Almighty Immortal. "Shut your door; and, in the solitude of your chamber, think not that you are alone; you are not—because God is with you." "Lord," pleaded Epictetus, "have I ever complained of Thy dealings with me, or found fault with Thy Providence? I have been sick because it was Thy will, I have been poor, ay, and joyfully, because Thou didst will it. . . . wouldst Thou have me go hence today from this glorious world, I go hence willingly; I thank Thee for suffering me to be with Thee, that I am able to gaze at Thy works, and that I have had power to grasp somewhat of the meaning of Thy government."
Thus these philosophers who taught in Rome from the days of Augustus to the days of Marcus and his son, endeavored to lead their disciples to pray, to pour out their hearts to the supreme God. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, A. D. 161-80, was their faithful disciple, and willingly, and from his heart served the immortals; carrying, indeed, his religious service often to the verge of immoderate superstition.
To sum up. There was much in the moral teaching of these masters of the Stoic philosophy of the first and second centuries which resembled the precepts of Christianity. There was emphatically something in their teaching loftier, purer, more real than had ever appeared before in the teaching of any Pagan philosophic schools. It is at least highly probable that some echoes of the words of Jesus and of His disciples, which had been repeated again and again in the Christian communities of Rome and of other great centers of thought in the Empire, had reached the ears of men like Seneca, Epictetus, and other masters of the later Stoic school, had strongly influenced them, and to a certain extent had colored their teaching; more, however, than this cannot be said. Neither Seneca, Epictetus, nor the other philosophers of this school, were Christians, or even in any sense could be said to teach Christianity. No Christian dogma in any form ever appears in their words. If they were acquainted with Christian doctrines, they rejected them apparently without examination. Marcus, the Emperor, their most illustrious disciple, evidently might have had before him such writings as the "Apologies" of Justin. It is more than doubtful if he ever read them. He disliked the Christians, as we have seen, with an intense dislike; and even his sense of justice was not sufficient to induce him to treat the sect with common fairness. In his eyes the followers of Jesus were, for reasons upon which we have briefly dwelt, a positive danger to the Empire. And the attitude of Marcus was no doubt more or less the attitude of the masters of that great philosophic school of the later Stoics of which he was so distinguished a disciple.
We hear little of this school of philosophers after the passing away of the renowned Emperor in A. D. 181. Various causes were at work which explain this rapid waning of its power and influence. In the reign of Marcus it had reached the highest point it ever touched. The great Emperor was a faithful disciple, and his advisers, and the men whom he chose for the various administrative posts throughout his vast Empire, were largely selected out of the ranks of its best known professors and followers. But after the extinction of the House of the Antonines in A. D. 193, the influence of Stoicism very rapidly waned.
One obvious reason was no doubt its failure to commend itself to the mass of the people. Cicero, somewhat before the rise of the new Stoics, tells us of the general unpopularity of philosophy with the multitude. It never found the key to the hearts of the people. The Stoic philosophy appealed, and often with power, to many of the cultured and the thoughtful among the upper classes of Roman society, but it never penetrated into the deep stratum which lay beneath this comparatively small section of the citizens of Rome. For instance, Marcus, the Emperor, the greatest and most influential of the disciples of the later Stoic philosophers, failed completely to induce his people to second his noble and earnest efforts to do away with the sanguinary and demoralizing games of the amphitheatre. They could not or would not understand him.
The philosophic teachers of tho age, of which we are writing, by no means all belonged to the later Stoics. There were in Rome, and in a much less degree in other great cities, other schools of philosophic teaching. But the Stoics were indisputably by far the most prominent, both in the number of their adherents and in the great influence which they exercised.
The lofty morality, the high and severe life recommended by such teachers as Seneca and Epictetus, was utterly unpleasing, perhaps incomprehensible, to the pleasure-loving, thoughtless, careless multitude. Such teaching, often beautiful and true, though somewhat cold and severe, needed something more to commend itself to the people generally than the eloquent words of the Stoic teacher, or even the high example of a Stoic Emperor. That something existed among the Christians, but was utterly wanting outside their circle.
Then again, the philosophic teaching of Seneca, Epictetus, and the other later Stoic masters, powerful and seemingly heart-searching though it often was, made little or no effort to reach the poor and humble dwellings of the struggling trader, or, lower still, the crowded and squalid homes of the artisans; still less did it care to speak to the slave, though one of its great exponents was a slave himself. Its precepts were admirable; its doctors, as we have seen, now and again vied even with the Christian teachers in their earnest desire to persuade the disciples of their school that all men were brothers, and that all alike were deserving of pity, help and comfort; but they went no further. They spoke to a select few only. Their words were rarely heard beyond the walls of their lecture halls. They could talk beautifully of the poor, the slave, and that great many of sufferers who make up the rank and file of the inhabitants of a great city such as Rome; but they never spoke to these—the poor, the slave, and the sufferer.
Strangely different indeed was the way of working adopted by the teachers of that widespread sect, the unresting opponents of Stoic Pagan philosophy.
Unweariedly the teachers of Christianity pursued their propaganda; they had no public lecture halls, the scenes of their instruction were the frequent religious meetings of believers and inquirers—meetings held in poor upper rooms belonging to artisans and little traders; in chapels attached to the houses of the great and powerful; in crypts or catacombs, where slept the loved dead of the Christian community.
The message was never silent; it was spoken with equal fervor to the patrician and the slave. It recognized no rank, it cared little for human culture. Indeed, it especially sought for the outcast, the humble, the unlearned. Never before had any religious teachers taken pains and trouble to seek out the poor, undistinguished, down-trodden folk, but strange to say it was among such that Christianity chose especially to deliver its beautiful, life-giving, true message.
And it was rewarded. The ceaseless propaganda among the poor and the despised—going on as it did year after year in city and in country, in many lands and among many nations, a propaganda carried on too, for the most part, amidst circumstances of grave danger and ever-present peril to the unwearied teachers—touched the hearts of the people; and the disciples of the new faith were, as the second century grew old, counted by thousands and tens of thousands.
Still, though we recognize its especial weakness, its impotence among the masses, we must not underrate the assistance which the philosophy of the later Stoics rendered to Paganism in its hour of need. It was a real help, but it only helped it among the cultured classes. It did nothing to popularize it among the masses of the people. Other influences than philosophy were at work which attached the people to the old Pagan religion, which kept them in vast numbers faithful to the old gods, and to the old idol ritual practiced in the stately temples where their forefathers had worshipped. We have dwelt on some of these influences already at some length—influences which put off for a long period the final ruin of Paganism.