A Man's Moral Stand

“Those who nourish the smaller parts will become small men. Those who nourish the greater parts will become great men.” –Mencius, China, 3^rd Century, B.C.

Today, philosophy is viewed as an arid, academic discipline. When we think of a philosopher, we think of a crotchety professor in a tweed jacket, shuffling about the university muttering to himself. His hair is tussled and if he looked up (he never does), you’d be hard-pressed to find his beady eyes behind his thick-paned spectacles.  

It wasn’t always so. Some of the greatest men were philosophers: Aristotle; Alexander the Great; Cicero; Thomas More; Benjamin Franklin. Such men knew philosophy wasn’t a discipline reserved for university professors, but is rather the basis of a man’s belief system. Philosophy is based on the Ancient Greek word “philosophia” which means “love of wisdom.” In the Classical age philosophy wasn’t seen as a dogmatic set of rules, but was rather designed to teach a man to think, to attain wisdom through truth. Classical men studied philosophy near the end of their educations to tie studies together and to thereby give them moderate, reasoning approaches to life.

            Consider how Cicero’s philosophy guided him after he witnessed the bloody assassination of Julius Caesar. At 62 years old, Cicero, a Roman attorney, senator, and philosopher, suddenly found himself in a power vacuum with Mark Antony, a man who would be a tyrant. Cicero had to decide whether to flee Rome to one of his country villas, and thereby hypocritically shirk all he espoused, or to stay in Rome and risk his life in a desperate effort to restore the Roman Constitution. Even Brutus, the Roman senator who led the assassination, showed he knew Cicero’s stated convictions when he lifted his bloody knife over Caesar’s corpse, looked at Cicero, and bellowed, “Restore the republic.”

            Cicero decided to fight for freedom. To do so he wrote and published his Philippics, attacks condemning Antony’s attempt to fill in where Caesar left off. But Cicero was only able to be heroic and to rise in popularity with the public because he had a well-developed philosophy on being a man, a belief system founded on justice. He said as much when, during that same pivotal year in Roman history, he wrote a book that outlines mans’ ultimate philosophy. Cicero titled the book De Officiis (today it’s often titled “On Duties”) and wrote it to teach his son Marcus (who was then away studying philosophy in Athens) the ultimate philosophy a man should employ. It was a book Frederick the Great of Prussia would later call the greatest book on morality and ethics ever written. In fact, in 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot, in his Governour, listed three essential texts for bringing up young men: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, and Cicero’s De Officiis and though it was a pagan work, in 390 A.D., St. Ambrose decreed De Officiis to be on par with Roman Catholic Church doctrine.

            As a man standing up to tyranny in a quaking empire doesn’t write in an erudite, academic fashion, Cicero penned De Officiis as a heartfelt open letter to his son and clearly segmented the book with Plato’s four cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Cicero thereby assembled the building blocks of the ultimate man’s philosophy outlined here.