184 LATIN LANGUAGE 



to Stoicism as a religious philosophy. The high seriousness and lofty 

 morality taught by this school the world has passed by with a shrug 

 of indifference; its charities, extended to slaves and even to the 

 lower animals, 



ocra a>ei TC KCU epTrct Ovrjr' 'CTTI yaiav, 1 



have been put down to "rhetoric" or inconsistency; and men have 

 been contented merely to "shiver at its apathy." But its apathy 

 was, after all, only meant as a protest against emotion in the wrong 

 place. The Stoics objected to basing mercy (dementia) upon mere 

 emotion (misericordia) . May not the reason for this indifference of 

 the world at large towards a noble school of thought be found partly 

 in the fact that Stoicism stands too near to ourselves to be seen 

 clearly? It is said that if you show a man his own likeness in a mir- 

 ror he will sometimes turn from it in disgust. Stoicism is essentially 

 a philosophy not of despair, but of confidence and almost defiant 

 optimism. Many of the fundamental ethical principles which are 

 generally regarded as specifically Christian had been developed inde- 

 pendently by the Porch. The idea of the fatherhood of God and its 

 corollaries, the brotherhood of man and the law of love, in a word, the 

 whole idea of basing morality directly upon a religious theory of the 

 universe, is Stoic. 



The striking phrase, TOV yap /cat ye'vos eV/xeY, quoted by St. Paul, and 

 the use of the word irarrfp in addressing the Deity are common to the 

 Hymn of Cleanthes and the prologue to the ^aivop-eva of Aratus. 



And this is a new note in literature; there is nothing quite like it 

 in Plato or Aristotle, though Greek literature of the classical age has 

 some analogies. 2 



In view of these facts it is no matter of surprise that Stoicism has 

 contributed to Christianity some of its cardinal terms : TTVCV/JLO. (spiritus) , 

 crwei'STjo-ts (conscientid) , avrdpKfia (sufficientia) , in their special religious 

 senses, have come to us through the Stoics. Even Xdyos is ulti- 

 mately due to them. 



The phrase TroXtreta TOV KOO-^OV, civitas communis hominum et dec- 

 rum, "city of God," is only one of many links that connect the 

 early Greek Stoics with Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, and Marcus 

 Aurelius with St. Augustine. Nor did some of the chief of the early 

 fathers of the church, notably St. Augustine, fail to recognize the 

 affinities of Christianity to earlier religious systems. Seneca saepe 

 noster, says Tertullian, Seneca noster, says Jerome: and the recog- 

 nition went so far as to lead some zealot to manufacture a corre- 

 spondence between Seneca and St. Paul, which was intended to 



1 Hymn of Cleanthes, third century B. c. 



2 Plato speaks of God as irarfip in the Timaeus, but rather in the sense of 

 the creator the 9riniovpy6s than as standing in an intimate relation to the 

 soul of man. 



