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Updated: June 9, 2025
The philosophy of Epicurus and of Zeno an utter detachment from the business of mankind prepared the way for the spirit of the Gospels.
My answer is an address to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of many if carried out appears in a still more ridiculous light than the hypothesis of the being of one." The arguments of Zeno may therefore be regarded as strictly arguments in kind; quibbles if you please, but in answer to quibbles.
The speculative element, from the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno, and still further weakened when that system found admission to Rome after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby driving the spirit out of it fell completely into the shade in Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul of man, or of the divine world-law.
It was as Christians that Diodoros and Alexander both came to visit the convalescent. That which had won so many Alexandrians to the blessings of the new faith had attracted them too, and the certainty of finding their beloved among the Christians had been an added inducement to crave instruction from Zeno.
A heartfelt, willing kiss from your child would make you happier than all the learning that you make so much fuss about, and a caress or a spank from you each at the proper time would do little Zeno more good than all the world-improving discoveries in search of which you embitter your days and nights."
The Greek philosophy, however, even its noblest Avatar, Plato, much less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was never able to achieve that which must be the practically proposed end of all higher philosophy that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the narrow sphere of the school and the palaestra, uniting itself with actual life, and embodying itself completely in the shape of that which we call a CHURCH. This Platonism could not do.
Epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody; Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all-ruling Unity; both parties get rid of the myths. But the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous principle.
The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860.
If they had not done so, we could not have known what deeds were done in Troy, nor what Thales, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, and the other physicists thought about nature, and what rules Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and other philosophers laid down for the conduct of human life; nor would the deeds and motives of Croesus, Alexander, Darius, and other kings have been known, unless the ancients had compiled treatises, and published them in commentaries to be had in universal remembrance with posterity.
"Answer me this, I humbly do beseech, For thou, like Cheiron, Perikles did'st teach." Perikles also attended the lectures of Zeno, of Elea, on natural philosophy, in which that philosopher followed the method of Parmenides.
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