History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
Philosophy
History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
Ethics; Europe -- Moral conditions
allowed his love of a friend in some slight degree to obscure his sense of
justice.(291) The writings of Cicero in his old age are full of passionate
aspirations to a future world, unclouded by one regret or by one fear.
Seneca died tranquilly, bequeathing to his friends “the most precious of
his possessions, the image of his life.”(292) Titus on his deathbed
declared that he could remember only a single act with which to reproach
himself.(293) On the last night in which Antoninus Pius lived, the tribune
came to ask for the pass-word of the night. The dying emperor gave him
“æquanimitas.”(294) Julian, the last great representative of his expiring
creed, caught up the same majestic strain. Amid the curses of angry
priests, and the impending ruin of the cause he loved, he calmly died in
the consciousness of his virtue; and his death, which is among the most
fearless that antiquity records, was the last protest of philosophic
paganism against the new doctrine that had arisen.(295)
It is customary with some writers, when exhibiting the many points in
which the ancient philosophers anticipated Christian ethics, to represent
Christianity as if it were merely a development or authoritative
confirmation of the highest teaching of paganism, or as if the additions
were at least of such a nature that there is but little doubt that the
best and purest spirits of the pagan world, had they known them, would
have gladly welcomed them. But this conception, which contains a large
amount of truth if applied to the teaching of many Protestants, is either
grossly exaggerated or absolutely false if applied to that of the
patristic period or of mediæval Catholicism. On the very subject which the
philosophers deemed the most important their unanimous conclusion was the
extreme antithesis of the teaching of Catholicism. The philosophers taught
that death is “a law and not a punishment;”(296) the fathers taught that
it is a penal infliction introduced into the world on account of the sin
of Adam, which was also the cause of the appearance of all noxious plants,
of all convulsions in the material globe, and, as was sometimes asserted,
even of a diminution of the light of the sun. The first taught that death
was the end of suffering; they ridiculed as the extreme of folly the
notion that physical evils could await those whose bodies had been reduced
to ashes, and they dwelt with emphatic eloquence upon the approaching,
and, as they believed, final extinction of superstitious terrors. The
second taught that death to the vast majority of the human race is but the
beginning of endless and excruciating tortures—tortures before which the
most ghastly of terrestrial sufferings dwindle into
insignificance—tortures which no courage could defy—which none but an
immortal being could endure. The first represented man as pure and
innocent until his will had sinned; the second represented him as under a
sentence of condemnation at the very moment of his birth. “No funeral
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