by Epictetus
For a proper understanding of the Discourses it is important to bear in mind their true character, which Halbauer in a valuable study has most clearly stated thus : “The Diatribae are not the curriculum proper, nor even a part of that curriculum. On the contrary, this consisted of readings from the Stoic writings, while the Diatribae accompany the formal instruction, dwell on this point or on that, which Epictetus regarded as of special importance, above all give him an opportunity for familiar discourse with his pupils, and for discussing with them in a friendly spirit their personal affairs.” They are not, therefore, a formal presentation of Stoic philosophy, so that it is unfair to criticize their lack of system and their relative neglect of logic and physics, upon which the other Stoics laid such stress, for they were not designed as formal lectures, and the class exercises had dwelt satis superque, as Epictetus must have felt, upon the physics and logic, which were after all only the foundation of conduct, the subject in which he was primarily interested. They are class-room comment, in the frank and open spirit which was characteristic of the man, containing not a little of what we should now be inclined to restrict to a private conference, often closely connected, no doubt, with the readings and themes, but quite as often, apparently, little more than obiter dicta. They constitute a remarkable self-revelation of a character of extraordinary strength, elevation, and sweetness, and despite their frequent repetitions and occasional obscurity must ever rank high in the literature of personal portrayal, even were one inclined to disregard their moral elevation. For Epictetus was without doubt, as the great wit and cynic Lucian calls him, “a marvellous old man.”
It may not be amiss to dwell a few moments upon the outstanding features of his personality, before saying a few words upon his doctrines, for his doctrines, or at all events the varying emphasis laid on his doctrines, were to a marked degree influenced by the kind of man that he was.
And first of all I should observe that he had the point of view of a man who had suffered from slavery and abhorred it, but had not been altogether able to escape its influence. He was predisposed to suffer, to renounce, to yield, and to accept whatever burden might be laid upon him. He was not a revolutionist, or a cultured gentleman, or a statesman, as were other Stoics before and after. Many of the good things of life which others enjoyed as a matter of course he had grown accustomed never to demand for himself; and the social obligations for the maintenance and advancement of order and civilization, towards which men of higher station were sensitive, clearly did not weigh heavily upon his conscience. His whole teaching was to make men free and happy by a severe restriction of effort to the realm of the moral nature. The celebrated life-formula ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου, which one feels inclined to retranslate as “Endure and Renounce,” in order to give it once more the definite meaning of which the cliché, “Bear and Forbear,” has almost robbed it, is, to speak frankly, with all its wisdom, and humility, and purifactory power, not a sufficient programme for a highly organized society making towards an envisaged goal of general improvement.
And again, in youth he must have been almost consumed by a passion for freedom. I know no man upon whose lips the idea more frequently occurs. The words “free” (adjective and verb) and “freedom” appear some 130 times in Epictetus, that is, with a relative frequency about six times that of their occurrence in the New Testament and twice that of their occurrence in Marcus Aurelius, to take contemporary works of somewhat the same general content. And with the attainment of his personal freedom there must have come such an upwelling of gratitude to God as that which finds expression in the beautiful hymn of praise concluding the sixteenth chapter of the first book, so that, while most Stoics assumed or at least recognized the possibility of a kind of immortality, he could wholly dispense with that desire for the survival of personality after death which even Marcus Aurelius felt to be almost necessary for his own austere ideal of happiness.
Almost as characteristic was his intensity. He speaks much of tranquillity, as might be expected of a Stoic, but he was not one of those for whom that virtue is to be achieved only by Henry James’s formula of successive accumulations of “endless” amounts of history, and tradition, and taste. His was a tranquillity, if there really be such a thing, of moral fervour, and of religious devotion. His vehemence gave him an extraordinarily firm and clean-cut character, and made him a singularly impressive teacher, as Arrian in the introductory epistle attests. For he was enormously interested in his teaching, knowing well that in this gift lay his single talent; made great efforts to present his material in the simplest terms and in well-arranged sequence; and sharply reproved those who blamed the stupidity of their pupils for what was due to their own incompetence in instruction. It also gave a notable vigour to his vocabulary and utterance, his παρρησία, or freedom of speech, suo quamque rem nomine appellare, as Cicero (Ad. Fam. IX. 22, 1) characterizes that Stoic virtue, which few exemplified more effectively than Epictetus; but it also, it must be confessed, made him somewhat intolerant of the opinions of others, were they philosophic or religious, in a fashion which for better or for worse was rapidly gaining ground in his day.
But he was at the same time extremely modest. He never calls himself a “philosopher,” he speaks frankly of his own failings, blames himself quite as much as his pupils for the failure of his instruction ofttimes to produce its perfect work, and quotes freely the disrespectful remarks of others about him. He is severe in the condemnation of the unrepentant sinner, but charitable towards the naïve wrongdoer, going so far, in fact, in this direction as to advocate principles which would lead to the abolition of all capital punishment. He is much more an angel of mercy than a messenger of vengeance. And this aspect of his character comes out most clearly perhaps in his attitude towards children, for with them a man can be more nearly himself than with his sophisticated associates. No ancient author speaks as frequently of them, or as sympathetically. They are one of his favourite parables, and though he is well aware that a child is only an incomplete man, he likes their straightforwardness in play, he claps his hands to them and returns their “Merry Saturnalia!” greeting, yearns to get down on hands and knees and talk baby talk with them. There is, of course, a sense in which Pascal’s stricture of Stoic pride applies to Epictetus, for the Stoic virtues were somewhat self-consciously erected upon the basis of self-respect and self-reliance; but a more humble and charitable Stoic it would have been impossible to find, and what pride there is belongs to the system and not to the man. Towards God he is always devout, grateful, humble, and there is a little trace in him of that exaltation of self which in some of the Stoics tended to accord to the ideal man a moral elevation that made him sometimes the equal if not in certain aspects almost the superior of God.
His doctrines were the conventional ones of Stoicism, representing rather the teaching of the early Stoics than that of the middle and later schools, as Bonhöffer has elaborately proven. There is, accordingly, no occasion to dwell at length upon them, but for the sake of those who may wish to fit a particular teaching into his general scheme, a very brief outline may here be attempted.
Every man bears the exclusive responsibility himself for his own good or evil, since it is impossible to imagine a moral order in which one person does the wrong and another, the innocent, suffers. Therefore, good and evil can be only those things which depend entirely upon our moral purpose, what we generally call, but from the Stoic’s point of view a little inaccurately, our free will; they cannot consist in any of those things which others can do either to us or for us. Man’s highest good lies in the reason, which distinguishes him from other animals. This reason shows itself in assent or dissent, in desire or aversion, and in choice or refusal, which in turn are based upon an external impression φαντασία, that is, a prime datum, a “constant,” beyond our power to alter. But we remain free in regard to our attitude towards them. The use which we make of the external impressions is our one chief concern, and upon the right kind of use de
pends exclusively our happiness. In the realm of judgement the truth or falsity of the external impression is to be decided. Here our concern is to assent to the true impression, reject the false, and suspend judgement regarding the uncertain. This is an act of the moral purpose, or free will. We should never forget this responsibility, and never assent to an external impression without this preliminary testing. In order to escape from being misled by fallacious reasoning in the formation of these judgements we need instruction in logic, although Epictetus warns against undue devotion to the subtleties of the subject.
Corresponding to assent or dissent in the realm of the intellectual are desire or aversion in the realm of good and evil, which is the most important thing for man, since from failing to attain one’s desire, and from encountering what one would avoid, come all the passions and sorrows of mankind. In every desire or aversion there is implicit a value-judgement concerning the good or evil of the particular thing involved, and these in turn rest upon general judgements (δόγματα) regarding things of value. If we are to make the proper use of our freedom in the field of desire or aversion we must have the correct judgements concerning good and evil. Now the correct judgement is, that nothing outside the realm of our moral purpose is either good or evil. Nothing, therefore, of that kind can rightly be the object of desire or aversion, hence we should restrict the will to the field in which alone it is free, and cannot, therefore, come to grief. But herein we need not merely the correct theoretical conviction, but also continual practice in application (ἄσκησις), and it is this which Epictetus attempts to impart to his pupils, for it is the foundation of his whole system of education.
Finally, in the field of choice or refusal belongs the Duty (τὸ καθῆκον) of man, his intelligent action in human and social relations. Externals, which are neither good nor evil, and so indifferent (ἀδιάφορα), because not subject to our control, play a certain rôle, none the less, as matters with which we have to deal, indeed, but should regard no more seriously than players treat the actual ball with which they play, in comparison with the game itself. It is characteristic of Epictetus that, although he recognizes this part of Stoic doctrine in which the theoretical indifference of externals is in practice largely abandoned, he manifests but slight interest in it.
Among duties he is concerned principally with those of a social character. Nature places us in certain relations to other persons, and these determine our obligations to parents, brothers, children, kinsmen, friends, fellow-citizens, and mankind in general. We ought to have the sense of fellowship and partnership (κοινωνικοί), that is, in thought and in action we ought to remember the social organization in which we have been placed by the divine order. The shortcomings of our fellow-men are to be met with patience and charity, and we should not allow ourselves to grow indignant over them, for they too are a necessary element in the universal plan.
The religious possibilities of Stoicism are developed further by Epictetus than by any other representative of the school. The conviction that the universe is wholly governed by an all-wise, divine Providence is for him one of the principal supports of the doctrine of values. All things, even apparent evils, are the will of God, comprehended in his universal plan, and therefore good from the point of view of the whole. It is our moral duty to elevate ourselves to this conception, to see things as God sees them. The man who reconciles his will to the will of God, and so recognizes that every event is necessary and reasonable for the best interest of the whole, feels no discontent with anything outside the control of his free will. His happiness he finds in filling the rôle which God has assigned him, becoming thereby a voluntary co-worker with God, and in filling this rôle no man can hinder him.
Religion as reconciliation to the inevitable — ἑκόντα δέχεσθαι τὰ ἀναγκαῖα (frg. 8), in gratiam cum fato revertere — is almost perfectly exemplified in Epictetus, for with him philosophy has definitely turned religion, and his instruction has become less secular than clerical. But it is astonishing to what heights of sincere devotion, of intimate communion, he attained, though starting with the monistic preconceptions of his school, for the very God who took, as he felt, such personal interest in him, was after all but “a subtle form of matter pervading the grosser physical elements … this Providence only another name for a mechanical law of expansion and contraction, absolutely predetermined in its everlasting recurrences.” Of his theology one can scarcely speak. His personal needs and his acquiescence with tradition led him to make of his God more than the materials of his philosophical tenets could allow. The result is for our modern thinking an almost incredible mixture of Theism, Pantheism, and Polytheism, and it is impossible, out of detached expressions, to construct a consistent system. As a matter of fact, with a naïve faith in God, as a kind of personification of the soul’s desire, he seems to have cherished simultaneously all of these mutually exclusive views of his nature. His moral end was eudaemonism, to which, in a singularly frank expression (I.4, 27), he was ready to sacrifice even truth itself. No wonder, then, he cared little for logic as such and not at all for science. “The moralist assumes that what lies upon his heart as an essential need, must also be the essence and heart of reality.…In looking at everything from the point of view of happiness men bound the arteries of scientific research.” Though spoken of the Socratic schools in general, this word of Nietzsche’s seems especially apt of Epictetus. He was of an age when the search for happiness by the process of consulting merely the instincts of the heart was leading rapidly to an alienation from scientific truth and a prodigious decline in richness of cultural experience.
Yet even in his happiness, which we cannot dismiss as a mere pose, there was something wanting. The existence of evil was in one breath denied, and in another presumed by the elaborate preparations that one must make to withstand it. “And having done all, to stand?” No, even after having done all, “the house might get too full of smoke,” the hardships of life too great any longer to endure; the ominous phrase, “the door is open,” or its equivalent, the final recourse of suicide, recurs at intervals through his pages like a tolling bell. And beyond? Nothing. Nothing to fear indeed; “the dewdrop sinks into the shining sea.” “When He provides the necessities no longer, He sounds the recall; He opens the door and says, ‘Go.’ Where? To nothing you need fear, but back to that from which you came, to what is friendly and akin to you, to the physical elements” (III.13, 14). But at the same time there is nothing to hope for. That Epictetus was influenced by the writings of the New Testament has often been suggested. There were those in late antiquity who asserted it, and it was natural enough in an age when Tertullian and Jerome believed that Seneca had conversed with Paul, and in Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, Justin (II.8) recognizes a kindred spirit. But despite the recrudescence of the idea from time to time, and the existence of a few scholars in our own generation who seem yet to believe it, this question can be regarded as definitely settled by the elaborate researches of Bonhöffer (1911). Of course Epictetus knew about the existence of Christians, to whom he twice refers, calling them once Jews (II.9, 19 ff.), and a second time Galilaeans (IV.7, 6), for there was an early community at Nicopolis (Paul’s Epistle to Titus, iii.12), but he shared clearly in the vulgar prejudices against them, and his general intolerance of variant opinion, even when for conscience’ sake, makes it certain that he would never have bothered to read their literature. The linguistic resemblances, which are occasionally striking, like “Lord, have mercy!” κύριε, ἐλέησον, are only accidental, because Epictetus was speaking the common language of ethical exhortation in which the evangelists and apostles wrote; while the few specious similarities are counterbalanced by as many striking differences. In the field of doctrine, the one notable point of disregard for the things of this world is offset by so many fundamental differences in presupposition, if not in common ethical practice, that any kind of a sympathetic understanding of the new religion on the part of
Epictetus is inconceivable. A certain ground-tone of religious capability, a fading of interest in the conventional fields of human achievement, a personal kindliness and “harmlessness” of character, a truly pathetic longing as of tired men for a passive kind of happiness, an ill-defined yearning to be “saved” by some spectacular and divine intervention, these things are all to be found in the Discourses, yet they are not there as an effect of Christian teaching, but as a true reflection of the tone and temper of those social circles to which the Gospel made its powerful appeal.