To study Marcus Tullius Cicero is to study one of the great masters of Western thought. Akin to someone like C.S. Lewis, the old Tully was more a lucid explainer of philosophy than an original philosopher in his own right. Still, Cicero’s clear thought and solid sense of virtue have been appreciated throughout the centuries. Despite his paganhood, there is a distinct pro-Logos ethos that runs through Cicero’s thinking, which has made him beloved by the Christian centuries. It is no accident that reading Cicero was key in converting St. Augustine to Christianity.
At the same time, and perhaps to the detriment of his lasting reputation, Cicero is also the Ancient who we know more intimately than any other, thanks among other things to the over 800 personal letters of his that have been preserved. What such intimacy reveals is a fallen man very much like ourselves, whose character falls short of his high principles.
Ne plus ultra
Cicero described himself as being part of the Academic Skeptic school of philosophy, which in his case basically meant a kind of pick and choose attitude – an unwillingness to bind himself in any one school. In practice, however, Cicero mainly drew from Stoicism and from the Socratic tradition, particularly Aristotelianism, which ultimately constitute the two main sources of so called Noble Paganism. Conversely, he had nothing positive to say about Epicurean materialism and hedonism.
This broad assessment of ancient philosophy is already essentially Christian, and Christians have ended up making the very same split in assessing what were the noblest and ignoblest of the pagan ideas.
But what does Cicero’s choice of philosophical traditions mean in practice? Well, no less than a commitment to,
free will
objective morality
natural law
teleology
Logos
truth
the classical virtues
universal human nature
divine providence
immortality of the soul
afterlife
With principles like these, there’s really nothing that could be added or significantly improved without the help of Divine Revelation which was to arrive decades after Cicero’s death. Cicero took pagan moral and metaphysical understanding to the utmost ne plus ultra – as far as it could be humanly taken without external assistance.
Particularly remarkable are Cicero’s thoughts on the afterlife, described in his seminal essay on Old Age. While he does not possess the security offered by witnessing the miraculous life of Christ, he nevertheless holds the inherent trust that we shall meet our loved ones again, and the deep sense that this world doesn’t really feel like a home, but more like a hostel – or like a ship looking for a harbor. Besides the intuition of his conscience, Cicero bases his thinking on the particular characteristics of the human soul, all of which lead us to believe it is immortal.
“Human souls function at lighting speed, equally remarkable for their memory of the past and knowledge of things to come. Their capabilities, funds of knowledge, and powers of discovery are endless. Their simultaneous possession of all these talents means, I am convinced, that they cannot be mortal.”
To the critics who scoff and pedantically demand “certainty”, Cicero replies with kind of pagan version of Pascal’s wager,
“Even if I am mistaken in my belief that the soul is immortal, I make the mistake gladly, for the belief makes me happy, and is one which as long as I live I want to retain. True, certain insignificant philosophers [the Epicureans] hold that I shall feel nothing after death. If so, then at least I need not fear that after their own deaths they will be able to mock my conviction!”
Illusory advantage
Another key area of Cicero’s noble pagan thought is that of Natural Law, delineated in his masterpiece On Duties. Alongside Aristotle, Cicero is the greatest exponent of the Natural Law tradition in antiquity. In his approach on the matter, he draws from Aristotle, but more so from the Stoics, because he holds the Stoics to be less compromising and more lofty.
In the Aristotelian model, virtue is the highest good, but his model also admits other, lesser goods besides (ones like health, or life). But the Stoics argue that virtue is the only good, and all other goods aim at it. Any conflict between different goods is thus necessarily illusory. If virtue demands you sacrifice your health for its sake, it is in fact no sacrifice, because you are not truly giving up anything good in the process.
The clash is most pronounced around the topic of utility or advantage. After all, it is natural to argue like Machiavelli, that committing a crime or doing a wrong may not be good or virtuous, but often it will be useful for the attainment of some goal. Even Aristotle argues (commonsensically, as ever) that sometimes doing a virtuous deed may be of some disadvantage to the good man. But according to Cicero and the Stoic tradition, this cannot be so, as nothing that is advantageous can be opposed to goodness.
“What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.”
This is very pro-Logos. True advantage is harmony with the goodness of created order. Any perceived advantage attained by immoral action breaks this harmony, and thus cuts the perpetrator off from the Logos of the world. What could be more disadvantageous?
“The just man, the good man as we understand the term, will never, for his own profit, take anything away from anybody. Whoever finds this assertion surprising will have to confess his total ignorance of what being a good man means.
For there is an ideal of human goodness: nature itself has stored and wrapped this up inside our minds. Unfold this ideal, and you will straightaway identify the good man as the person who helps everybody he can, and unless wrongfully provoked, harms none.”
This is all remarkably Christian, excepting the lack of the incredible, supernatural demand of loving even your enemies and turning the other cheek. Again, Cicero takes virtue to the very limit of where it can be carried without the strength of Jesus.
Blindness of the pagan
After reading the most elevated passages of Cicero and admiring the lofty heights of his thought, there at some point follows the inevitable crash. When one reads his letters, the man they reveal is a vacillator, a political opportunist, a coward, and an unprincipled thinker. These represent the shadowy side of man, and offer a stark reminder that even the most virtuous men cannot escape their fallenness.
A part of the weakness in Cicero’s thought results from his personal frailty, but another reason is the incompleteness of the picture he has at his disposal, which is not his fault. Without Divine Revelation, Cicero of necessity has to leave certain elements hanging, and certain spots empty. And in those empty, uncharted spots his own arbitrary will rushes in and disturbs the noble philosophy.
After coming to the rightful conclusion that there is such a thing as ‘Natural Law’, there follows the question, ‘what is to be regarded as natural’? Without supernatural instructions and examples, we are prone to become self-serving in our determination. This is exemplified by how Cicero smuggles his pro-Republican politics as elements of the Natural Law. Here the natural is reduced to ‘the thing that I like’ and the unnatural as ‘the thing that I dislike’.
Thus, in Cicero’s framework traitors, schemers and murderers like Brutus and Cassius are considered virtuous, because the friend and benefactor they murdered was a ‘tyrant’. At the same time, all monarchy is axiomatically determined as something immoral, and termed simply as tyranny.
Yet by all accounts Caesar’s monarchical rule was in many ways a marked improvement in statecraft compared to the corrupt brokenness of the late Republic. But none of this matters, because Cicero has arbitrarily established Republicanism as part of the Logos of the universe, and anything that goes against it is automatically immoral and thus ultimately disadvantageous, even if it superficially appears advantageous.
Ultimately we should not be too hard on Cicero, because in many respects he was grasping around in darkness. Later Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas would continue the work of noble pagans like Cicero and Aristotle, and fill in the places which they had of necessity left empty, and correct the parts where they had been mistaken. In the end, men like Dante, who had the Christian synthesis at their disposal, were able to place Brutus and Cassius in their proper place: the mouth of Satan.
Less easy to forgive are the 17th and 18th century thinkers who willfully abandoned the filled up, corrected model offered by Aquinas and skipped back to Cicero. It is no accident Cicero’s framework was beloved by revolutionary thinkers like Rousseau, and through him inspired the French Revolution. Granted, it is easy to see that abandoning Aquinas and skipping straight back to Cicero was the only way to justify their Republican, anti-Monarchist politics while retaining an appreciation for Natural Law.
The irony is that what the revolutionary thinkers particularly embraced in Cicero was his weakness – they relished the very places where Cicero was most blind and arbitrary. The men of the so called Enlightenment went through the trouble of closing their eyes from the corrections offered by later, Christian thinking, and lifted on a pedestal the blindness of the pagan.