History of Political

Thought I
FROM POLIS TO COSMOPOLIS
What Stoicism did was to connect the idea of individual character to
the idea of cosmos.
Stoics will always appear to be essentially passive in the face of the
world’s demands.
Stoicism is something like what we would call resignation, the
recognition that ‘that is the way things are’.
Only the Stoic sense of duty enables the Stoic to act in the world at
all. For there is a Stoic god.
Scholars have often detected a strong flavour of eastern mysticism in
the god of the Stoics.
The Stoic god calls men to do their duty in a world where duty might
otherwise be meaningless. The Stoic world is meaningless without
god,
 Stoic god does not make sports with human lives; he is not like the
providential god of the Christians; does not talk to everyone, or if he
does, not everyone can hear him, because the world’s voices drown
him out.
 world’s noise can only be silenced by a continuous effort of will, a
lifelong training of the internal ear which the Stoics called the soul.
 Cut off every other voice, and the remaining voice is the voice of
god. refusing to listen to them often involves penalties.
 The Stoic knows he lives in a hard-edged world, and he expects to
be cut and bruised.
 They took the idea of a moral training seriously.
 Being a Stoic could come very close to Plato’s picture in the
Republic of the just man living in the unjust society.
 unjust man always does the good and always receives society’s
shame for his pains.
 The Stoic always knows that there are fates worse than death,
 The Stoic seeks above all else to control his own life in a world
in which there is not very obvious controlling moral context.
 In so far as the world is controlled by power
 As the Roman state turned into empire, it became increasingly
unclear what the state was offering in return for obedience.
 Being Roman came to mean nothing very personal. Being a
Roman citizen was still a useful thing to be, but the sense of
privilege was diluted when so many could claim to be citizens.
 Law-abidingness is the most passive of virtues, hardly a virtue at all
in the old Aristotelian sense. Even Roman law felt the need to clothe
the nakedness of state power with a universalising moral theory.
 The god of the Stoics was perfectly placed to be the author of a
universal moral law of which the state’s law was the positive earthly
expression.
 The Stoic god was either nature’s creator or its guardian
 Nature’s law must be the same everywhere and apply equally to all
men.
 What men had in common could be extrapolated into natural law.
 Roman law was itself unchallengeable, but Roman lawyers began to
notice that there seemed to be the makings of a consensus about
what was just and unjust
The doctrine of natural law fits in well with what the Stoics
thought about the human world in general.
The Stoic assumes that the voice of god always tells us the
same thing, while the world speaks with many voices.
Goodness is always the same; evil is the absence of goodness,
not goodness, and, being irrational, the guises which evil will
assume are not predictable
This presents Stoic philosophy with a problem which it
avoids rather than solves.
Stoics are therefore urged to keep on the safe side by sticking
rigidly to the good and thereby avoiding things indifferent on
the off-chance that they are in fact evil.
 only the good can cause itself.
 The sum of evil things and things indifferent could easily add up to
most of the context of human life
 The ancient sense of the goodness of ‘the good things of life’ formed
no part of Stoic sensibility, and this would extend to what the ancients
had always thought of as the just rewards of virtue.
 that the class of rich and noble Romans among whom Stoicism
flourished were not in fact indifferent to the good things of the world.
 Facts like these may be taken as evidence either that the Stoic ideas
were very hard to live up to, or that the Stoic was supposed to take a
particular attitude to the good things that came his way.
 Some commentators prefer to call Stoicism a world religion rather
than a philosophy
 Stoicism lasted as a major belief system in one form or another for six or
seven hundred years, from Aristotle’s day to the days of St Augustine and
beyond
 It does not matter much whether we call Stoicism a religion or a
philosophy, because the distinction only becomes important with
Christianity’s insistence on the difference between itself and the learning
of the pagans.
 Christianity differed from ancient philosophy because the simplicity of
vulgarly credulous minds saved them from the sin of intellectual pride, so
that their hearts could open easily to the simple truth of the gospels.
 Ancient philosophy and religion were at one in agreeing that the purpose
of both was happiness
 successful pursuit of happiness depended on having a particular kind of
knowledge.
only the good could lead to happiness. Virtue ceased to
be a component of the good life but became the good life
itself.
The Stoic philosophy had other consolations besides the
knowledge that one was trying to do what god wanted,
and chief among these was the knowledge that one had
other company besides god.
Ever since Zeno, Stoics had thought of themselves as
belonging to an invisible city of the wise:
This secret society was universal;
Place and numbers did not matter;
The city of the wise did not have to be a face-to-face society
because membership was spiritual and not political;
It was the thought which counted, not the deed.
Membership of the invisible church of the Stoics required no
outward signs, no ritual, and no prescribed patterns of
behaviour.
You just knew, and god knew, that you were part of the city.
The extent of the city encompassed the whole world and
beyond.
The invisible church of the Stoics was a true city within an
empire
The Stoic lived in two worlds simultaneously: in the city
presided over by the one true god of nature and reason, and
in the Empire containing many gods, one of whom might be
Caesar.
Their cities existed on different levels of experience
The Stoic, being a member of two cities, must live his own
inner life on two levels.
The city of the wise fights no battles, so it can never be put
to the sword; containing only the wise it can never be
divided against itself, because those who enter it already
possess and love the wisdom which alone can create equality
and therefore unity.
It is something of a commonplace in the history of ideas to
say that one doctrine prepares the way for another, but it
might be true for the Stoic doctrine of the city of the wise
and the Christian doctrine of the true and invisible church.
Stoicism lacked was any sense of the visible church.
Augustinianism made better sense of Stoicism than the
Stoics ever did. Augustine’s clever mind managed to
weave together the visible and invisible churches
Augustine diminishes the significance of the Roman
Empire, or any other earthly city, but does not diminish
the legitimacy of its power by so much as a drop
Augustine was quick to point out that all paganism lacked a
convincing account of the connection between god-in-the-world
and god as existing externally.
Stoicism could only make that connection into an intensely
private affair of inner voices in intermittent conversation. This
effectively wrote off a good deal of human experience as
meaningless.
What Christianity in its Augustinian version did was both to
extend and to particularise god so that there were no gaps left.
Stoicism did in fact need the Empire to make sense of the world
at all. Augustine was able to see beyond the Empire:
Christianity could still make sense of a world without emperors.