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In this respect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforced the spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal and metaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classic philosophy Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean was founded on despair and was post-rational.
Even Aristippus, the first and most delightful of hedonists, who really enjoyed the pleasures he advocated and was not afraid of the incidental pains even Aristippus betrayed the post-rational character of his philosophy by abandoning politics, mocking science, making his peace with all abuses that fostered his comfort, and venting his wit on all ambitions that exceeded his hopes.
The post-rational principle in the system then comes to the fore, and we see clearly that to sit down and reflect upon human life, picking out its pleasant moments and condemning all the rest, is to initiate a course of moral retrenchment.
Trappist or Calvinist may be practising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God's name, all their hot and miscellaneous passions. This contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannot be avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Every post-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory.
Rational ethics, in comparison, seems a kind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentially religions.
In the Stoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unity and order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of her blasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain and fanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitted a decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also.
The dialectical terms thus contrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers, furnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rational religion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mind is itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positive revelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world.
We may see the Life of Reason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly and fantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Life of Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, its substance impulse and its end happiness. So much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rational system to the matrix of human hopes.
The chief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallen under his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of as a philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and policy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean peoples.
The Greek spirit itself is now calling us away from some of the vestments of Greek tradition. The choice before us is between a 'post-rational' traditionalism, fundamentally sceptical, pragmatistic, and intellectually dishonest, and a trust in reason which rests really on faith in the divine Logos, the self-revealing soul of the universe.
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