CHAPTER V EPICTETUS ALLUDES TO JEWS

I did not open the sealed note, though I was not convinced that Epictetus had been a borrower. Paulus the Christian had begun to interest me, because of Scaurus’s quotations and remarks on his style. Indeed he interested me so much that I determined at once to procure a copy of his letters. But Christus himself—whom I call Christus here to distinguish the meaning with which I used the name then from that with which I began to use the name of “Christ” soon afterwards—Christus, I say, at that moment, did not interest me at all.

Moreover I was impressed by what Scaurus said about a military career. Though too young to remember much about the shameful days of Domitian, yet I had heard my father describe the anguish he used to feel, when letters from the Emperor to the Senate came announcing a glorious victory (duly honoured with a triumph) after which would come a private letter from Scaurus informing him that the victory was a disgraceful defeat. And even later on, even after the successes of Trajan, my father, in conversations with Scaurus, had often expressed, in my hearing, still lingering apprehensions of a time when the barbarians might break in like a flood upon the northern borders of the empire—if ever the imperial throne were cursed with a second Domitian. Patriotism would be even more needed then, he said, than when Marius beat back the Cimbri. All this gave additional weight to Scaurus’s remarks. “Artemidorus,” I said, “shall be my model. I will try to be a good soldier and a good Stoic in one.” So I locked up the note, still sealed.

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Here I may say that afterwards, when I did open it, it did not greatly influence the course of my thoughts. By that time, I had come to think that Scaurus was right, and that Epictetus had really borrowed from the Christians. I opened it, therefore, not because I distrusted the fairness and soundness of his judgment, but because I trusted it and looked to him for information. As a fact, it rather confirmed his hypothesis of borrowing, but did not demonstrate anything. The real influence of that little note in my cabinet amounted, I think, to little more than this. In the period I am now about to describe, while daily studying the works of Paulus the Christian, I was beginning to ask myself “If Paulus the follower of Christus was so great a teacher, must not Christus have been greater?” In those days, when taking out Paul’s epistles from my bookcase, I used often to see that packet lying there, with WORDS OF CHRISTUS on it, and the seal unbroken. Then I used to say “If only I could make up my mind to open you, you might tell me wonderful things.” This stimulated my curiosity. It was one of many things—some little, some great—that led me toward my goal.

The reader may perhaps think that I, a Roman of equestrian rank, must have been already more prone to the Christian religion than I have admitted, if I attempted to procure a copy of Paul’s epistles from a bookseller in Nicopolis frequented by my fellow-students. But I made no such attempt. Possibly our bookseller there would not have had a copy. Probably he would not have confessed it if he had. In any case, I did not ask him. It happened that I needed at this time certain philosophic treatises (of Chrysippus and others). So I wrote to a freedman of my father’s in Rome, an enterprising bookseller, who catered for various tastes, giving him the titles of these works and telling him how to prepare and ornament them. Then I added that ?milius Scaurus had sent me some remarkable extracts from the works of one Paulus, a Christian, and that the volume seemed likely to be interesting as a literary curiosity. This was perhaps a little understating the case. But not much. With Flaccus, my Roman bookseller, I felt quite safe. Rather than buy Paul’s epistles from Sosia in[56] Nicopolis, I am sure I should not have bought them at all. Such are the trifles in our lives on which sometimes our course may depend—or may seem to have depended.

Meantime I had been attending lectures regularly and had become familiar with many of Epictetus’s frequently recurring expressions of doctrine. They were still almost always interesting, and generally impressive. But his success in forcing me to “feel, for the moment, precisely what he felt”—how often did I recognise the exact truth of this phrase of Arrian’s!—made me begin to distrust myself. And from distrust of myself sprang distrust of his teaching, too, when I found the feeling fade away (time after time) upon leaving the lecturer’s presence. When I sat down in my rooms to write out my notes, asking myself, “Can I honestly say I hope to be ever able to do this or that?” how often was I obliged to answer, “No!”

I could not trust his judgment about what we should be able to do, because I could not trust his insight into what we were. Two causes seemed to keep him out of sympathy with us. One was his own singular power of bearing physical pain—almost as though he were a stone and not flesh and blood. He thought that we had the same, or ought to have it. Another cause was his absorption in something that was not human, in a conception of God, whom (on some evidence clear to him but not made clear by him to us, or at all events not to me) he knew (not trusted or believed, but knew) to have bestowed on him, Epictetus, the power of being at once—not in the future, but at once, here on earth, at all times, and in all circumstances—perfectly blessed. Having his eyes fixed on this Supreme Giver of Peace, our Master often seemed to me hardly able to bring himself to look down to us, except when he was chiding our weakness.

Passing over several of the lectures that left me in the condition I have endeavoured to describe, I will now come to the one in which Epictetus alluded to Christians. “Jews” he called them. But he defined them in such a way as to convince Arrian that he meant Christians. Even if he did not, the impression produced on me was the same as if he had actually mentioned them by name. The lecture began with the subject[57] of “steadfastness.” “A practical subject, this,” I said to myself, “for one in training to be a second Artemidorus.” But the “steadfastness” was not of the sort demanded in camps and battlefields. The essence of good, said the lecturer, is right choice, and that of evil a wrong choice. External things are not in our power, internal things are: “This Law God has laid down, If thou wilt have good, take it from thyself.” Then followed one of the now familiar dialogues, of which I was beginning to be a little tired, between a tyrant threatening a philosopher, who points out that he cannot possibly be threatened. The tyrant stares and says, “I will put you in chains.” The wise man replies, “It is my hands and feet that you threaten.” “I will cut off your head,” shouts the tyrant. “It is my head that you threaten,” replies the philosopher. After a good deal more of this, a pupil is supposed to ask, “Does not the tyrant threaten you then?” To this the lecturer replies, “Yes, if I fear these things. But if I have a feeling and conviction that these things are nothing to me, then I am not threatened.” Then he appealed to us, “Of whom do I stand in fear? What things must he be master of to make me afraid? Do you say, ‘The master of things that are in your power’? I reply, ‘There is no such master.’ As for things not in my power, what are they to me?”

Epictetus had a sort of rule or canon for us beginners, by which we were to take the measure of the so-called evils of life: “Make a habit of saying at once to every harsh-looking apparition of this sort, ‘You are an apparition and not at all the thing you appear to be. Are you of the number of the things in my power, or are you not? If not, you are nothing to me.’” Applying this to a concrete instance, our Master now dramatized a dialogue between himself and Agamemnon, who is supposed to be passing a sleepless night in anxiety for the Greeks, lest the Trojans should destroy them on the morrow.

“Epict. What! Tearing your hair! And you say your heart leaps in terror! And all for what? What is amiss with you? Money-matters?

“Ag. No.

“Epict. Health?

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“Ag. No.

“Epict. No indeed! You have gold and silver to spare. What then is amiss with you? That part of you has been neglected and utterly corrupted, wherewith we desire etc. etc.”

Here Epictetus—after some customary technicalities—turned to us like a showman, to explain the royal puppet’s condition: “‘How neglected?’ you ask. He does not know the essence of the Good for which he has been created by nature, nor the essence of evil. He cries out, ‘Woe is me, the Greeks are in peril’ because he has not learned to distinguish what is really his own etc. etc.” After this apostrophe, which I have condensed, he resumed the dialogue:

“Ag. They are all dead men. The Trojans will exterminate them.

“Epict. And if the Trojans do not kill them, they are never, never to die, I suppose!!

“Ag. O, yes, they’ll die. But not at one blow, not to a man, like this.

“Epict. What difference does it make? If dying is an evil, then, surely, whether they die all together or one by one, it is equally an evil. And do you really think that dying will be anything more than the separating of the paltry body from the soul?

“Ag. Nothing more.

“Epict. And you, when the Greeks are in the act of perishing, is the door of escape shut for you? Is it not open to you to die?

“Ag. It is.

“Epict. Why then bewail? Bah! You, a king! And with the sceptre of Zeus, too! A king is never unfortunate, any more than God is unfortunate. What then are you? A shepherd in truth! For you weep, like the shepherds—when a wolf carries off one of their sheep. And these Greeks are fine sheep to submit to being ruled over by you. Why did you ever begin this Trojan business? Was your desire imperilled etc. etc.?” [Here I omit more technicalities.]

“Ag. No, but my brother’s darling wife was carried away.

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“Epict. And was not that a great blessing, to be deprived of a ‘darling wife’ who was an adulteress?

“Ag. Were we then to submit to be trampled on by the Trojans?

“Epict. Trojans? What are the Trojans? Wise or foolish? If wise, why make war against them? If foolish, why care for them?”

I doubt whether Epictetus quite carried his class with him on this occasion. He certainly did not carry me, though he went on consistently pouring out various statements of his theory. For the first time in my experience of his lectures, I began to feel that his reiterations were really tedious. My thoughts strayed. I found myself questioning whether my model soldier and philosopher, Artemidorus, could possibly accept this teaching. Would Trajan, I asked, have been so sure of beating Decebalus, if he had considered the disgrace of Rome a matter “independent of choice,” and therefore “nothing to him,” “neither good nor evil”?

From this reverie I was roused by a sudden transition—to a picture of a well-trained youth going forth to a conflict worthy of his mettle. And now, I thought, we shall have something more like the ideal of my first lecture, a Hercules or Diogenes, going about to help and heal. But perhaps Epictetus drew a distinction between a Diogenes and mere well-trained youths, mere beginners in philosophy. At all events, what followed was only a kind of catechism to prepare us against adversity, and especially against official oppression. “Whenever,” said he, “you are in the act of going into the judgment hall of one in authority, remember that there is also Another from above, taking note of what is going on, and that you must please Him rather than the authority on earth.” This catechism he threw into the form of a dialogue between the youth and God—whom he called “Another.”

“Another. Exile, prison, bonds, death, and disgrace—what used you to call these things in the Schools?

“Pupil. I? Things indifferent.

“Another. Well, then, what do you call them now? Can it be that they have changed?

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“Pupil. They have not.

“Another. You, then—have you changed?

“Pupil. I have not.

“Another. Say, then, what are ‘things indifferent’?

“Pupil. The things outside choice.

“Another. Say also the next words.

“Pupil. Things indifferent are nothing to me.

“Another. Say also about things good. What things used you to think good?

“Pupil. Right choice, right use of phenomena.

“Another. And what the end and object?

“Pupil. To follow thee.

“Another. Do you say the same things still?

“Pupil. I say the same things still.

“Another. Go your way, then, and be of good cheer, and remember these things, and you will see how a young and well-trained champion towers above the untrained.”

I wanted to hear him explain why he spoke of “Another,” instead of Zeus, or God. It struck me that he meant to suggest to us that in this visible world, whenever we say “this,” we must also say, in our minds, “another,” to remind ourselves of the invisible counterpart. “Especially must we say ‘Another’”—this, I thought, was his meaning—“when we speak about rulers. Visible rulers are mostly bad. We must prevent them from encroaching on the place that should be filled in our hearts by the Other, the invisible Ruler.”

Instead of this explanation, however, he concluded his lecture by warning us against insincerity, or “speaking from the lips,” and against trying to be on both sides, when we ought to choose between two contending sides. This he called “trimming.” And here it was—while addressing an imaginary “trimmer”—that he used the word “Jew.”

“Why,” said he—addressing the sham philosopher—“why do you try to impose on the multitude? Why pretend to be a Jew, being really a Greek? Whenever we see a man trimming, we are accustomed to say, ‘This fellow is no Jew, he is shamming.’ But when a man has taken into himself the feeling of the dipped and chosen”—these were his exact words, uttered[61] with a gesture and tone of contempt—“then he is, both in name and in very truth, a Jew. Even so it is with us, having merely a sham baptism; Jews in theory, but something else in fact; far away from any real feeling of our theory, and far away from any intention of putting into practice the professions on which we plume ourselves—as though we knew what they really meant!” I could not quite make out this allusion to Jews. But there was no mistaking his next sentence, and it was the last in the lecture, “So, I repeat, it is with us. We are not equal to the fulfilment of the responsibilities of common humanity, not even up to the standard of Man. Yet we would fain take on ourselves in addition the burden of a philosopher. And what a burden! It is as though a weakling, without power to carry a ten-pound weight, were to aspire to heave the stone of Ajax!”

Thus he dismissed us. I went out, feeling like the “weakling” indeed, but without the slightest “aspiration to heave the stone of Ajax.” Perhaps Arrian wished to encourage me. For after we had walked on awhile in silence, he said, “The Master was rather cutting to-day. I remember his once saying that we ought to come away from him, not as from a theatre but as from a surgery. To-day the surgeon used the knife, and we don’t like it.”

“But what good has the knife done us?” I exclaimed. “If only I could feel that the surgeon had cut out the mischief, a touch of the knife should not make me wince. But the mischief within me seems more mischievous, and my strength for good less strong, for some things that I have heard to-day. Is a Roman to say, when fighting against barbarians for the name and fame of Rome, ‘These things are nothing to me’? Is Diogenes, healing mankind, his brethren, to say, ‘Your diseases are nothing to me’? And that fine phrase in the Catechism, ‘follow thee’—is it not really a disguised form of ‘follow myself’? Does it not mean, ‘follow the logos within me, my own reason, or my own reasonable will,’ or ‘follow my own peace of mind, on which my mind is bent, to the neglect of everything else’?”

“It does not mean that, for Epictetus himself, I am convinced,”[62] said Arrian. “I believe not, for him,” said I; “but it has that meaning for me. His teaching does not teach—not me, at least, however it may be with others—the art of being steadfast. And what about others? Did not he himself just now admit that his logos was less powerful than the pathos of the Jews to produce steadfastness? What, by the way, is this pathos? Does it mean passionate and unreasonable conviction? And who on earth are these Jews that are ‘dipped and chosen’?”

My friend’s face brightened. Perhaps it was a relief to him to pass from theology to matter of literary fact. “I think,” he replied, “that he must mean the Jewish followers of Christus—the Christians, about whom we were lately talking.” “Then why,” said I, “does not he call them Christians?” “I do not know,” replied Arrian, “He has never mentioned either Christians or Christus in my hearing; but he has, in one lecture at all events, used the term ‘Galil?ans’ to mean the Christians. And I feel sure that he means them here, because the other Jews do not practise baptism, except for proselytes, whereas the Christians are all baptized.” “But,” said I, “he does not call them ‘baptized.’ He calls them ‘dipped’.” “That is his brief allusive way,” said Arrian. “You know that we provincials, and sometimes even Athenians too, speak of dipping the hair, or, if I may invent the word, bapting it, where the literary people speak of blacking or dyeing it. That is just what our Master means. These Christians are not merely baptized; they are bapted. That is to say, they are permanently and unalterably stained, or dyed in grain. They are. We are not. That is his meaning. Afterwards, as you noticed, he dropped into the regular word ‘baptism,’ and spoke of us as sham-baptists.”

“But he also called them chosen,” said I, “—that is to say, if he meant chosen, and not caught or convicted.” Arrian smiled. “You have hit the mark without knowing it,” said he. “I noticed the word and took it down. It is another of his jibes! These Christians actually call themselves ‘elect’ or ‘chosen.’ I heard all about it in Bithynia. They profess to have been ‘called’ by Christus. Then, if they obey this ‘calling,’ and remain steadfast, following Christus, they are said to be ‘chosen’[63] or ‘elect.’ But our Master believes this ‘calling’ and ‘choosing’ to be moonshine, and these Christian Jews to be the victims of a mere delusion, caught by error. So he uses a word that might mean ‘chosen’ but might mean also ‘caught.’ They think themselves the former. He thinks them the latter.”

I hardly know why I refrained from telling my friend what Scaurus had told me about the probability that Epictetus had borrowed from the Christians. Partly it was, I think, because it was too long a story to begin just then; and I thought I might shock Arrian and not do Scaurus justice. Partly, I was curious to question Arrian further. So after a short silence, during which my friend seemed lost in thought, I said to him, “You know more about the Christians than I do. Do you think Epictetus knows much about them? And what precisely does he mean by ‘feeling,’ when he speaks of ‘taking up the feeling of the dipped’?”

“As for your first question,” said Arrian, “I am inclined to think that he knows a great deal about them. How could it be otherwise with a young slave in Rome under Nero, when all the world knew how the Christians were used to light the Emperor’s gardens? Moreover his contrast between the Jew and the Greek seemed to me to come forth as though it had been some time in his mind, though it had not broken out till to-day. He spoke with the bitterness of a conviction of long standing. If—contrary to his own rules—he could be ‘troubled,’ I should say our Master felt a real ‘trouble’ in being forced to confess that the Jew is above the Greek in steadfastness and constancy. As to your second question, I think he means that, whereas Greeks attain to wisdom through the reason (or logos) these Jews follow their God, or Christus, through what we Greeks call emotion or affection (i.e. pathos). And I am half disposed to think that this word pathos was used by him on the other occasion when he spoke of the Christian Jews as Galil?ans.” “Could you quote it?” said I. “No, not accurately,” said Arrian, “it is rather long, and has difficulties. I should prefer you to have it exactly. Come into my rooms. I am going out on business, so that we cannot talk about it at present. But you shall copy it down.”

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So I went in to copy it down. Arrian left me after finding the place for me in his notes. “You will see,” he said, “that the Galil?ans are there described as being made intrepid ‘by habit.’ Well, that is certainly how I took the words down. But I am inclined to think it might have been ‘by feeling’—which seems to me to make better sense. But read the whole context and judge for yourself. The two phrases are easily confused. Now I leave you to your copying. Prosit! More about this, to-morrow.”