Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

THE NOTE OF DESPAIR. 47
others, but I was content to be sick. I have been poor because it was
thy will, but I was content also. 1
That could be in no true sense a gospel which presented
a man in such an attitude before God and his fellow men.
It was the Gospel whose Litany is, God be merciful to
me a sinner, which touched man s heart at the depths, and
touches it to this day, wherever it is preached throughout
the
human world.
In conclusion, perhaps the most impressive thing in the
discourses of Epictetus, and in the heathen Philosophy of
that time, is the note of something like despair
which runs
through it; not personal despair, but despair of its
power
to do anything for the world. There is one passage in
Epictetus which seems like the last wail of the dying
Philosophy, and which may fittingly close this chapter.
Show me a Stoic, Epictetus cries :
Show me a Stoic if
you can. "Where or how But ? you can show
me an endless number who utter small arguments of the Stoics. For
do the same persons repeat the Epicurean opinions any worse ? And
the Peripatetic, do they not handle them also with equal accuracy?
Who then is a Stoic? As we call a statue Phidiac which is fashioned
according to the art of Phidias so show me a man
; who is fashioned
according to the doctrines which he utters. Show me a man who is
sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, in exile and
happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him : I desire, by the gods, to
see a Stoic. You cannot show me one fashioned so ;
but show me
one at least who is
forming, who has shown a tendency to be a Stoic.
Do me this favour ;
do not grudge an old man seeing a sight which
I have not seen yet.
. . . Let any of you show me a human soul
ready to think as God does, and not to blame either God or man,
ready not to be disappointed about anything, not to consider himself
damaged by anything, not to be angry, not to be envious, not to be
jealous ;
and why should I not say it direct ? desirous, from a man to
become a god, and in this poor mortal body thinking of his fellowship
with Zeus. Show me the man. But you cannot. 2
And the answer to the despairing cry of the grand old
!Bk. III. ch. 5.
2
Bk. II. ch. 19.