Spurned Lovers of Fate

On the Stoic worldview

It is sometimes said that Stoicism is like Christianity without Christ. The notion sounds ominously like a Christmas tree without the tree – or without the Christmas. Furthermore, people who talk so do not understand Stoic metaphysics, which couldn’t be further from a Christian understanding. A classic way to analyze the nature of Stoicism is to study the subject through Cicero’s work The Nature of the Gods. Cicero was sympathetic to Stoicism and had never heard of Christianity, so he is what me might call an objective observer.

Cicero resembled C.S. Lewis in that he was essentially a popularizer of philosophy, writing to a less educated Roman audience and trying to familiarize them with the great stream of Greek philosophy. Throughout the Christian centuries Cicero remained an important authority on philosophy, but in modern times his influence has waned, partly because of the Greek originals have held greater prestige in academia, but also because Cicero was so wedded to Natural Law that he ill fits modernity.

The following analysis is based on a philosophical dialogue (in the Platonic tradition) which Cicero wrote between three philosophers, Balbus the Stoic, Velleius the Epicurean, and Cotta the Academic Skeptic, the last of whom functioned as a kind of self-insert for Cicero. The dialogue consists of arguments for and against the different positions. The book later became an early favorite of Christian apologists who loved quoting great Cicero to debunk pagan beliefs. However, the more insightful among them recognized that sometimes the skeptical blade that can puncture pagan thought may be used to cut into Christianity as well, exemplified by the esteem the book was held in by infidels like Voltaire.

Biting the bullet

When Greek philosophy spread to Rome, it required a light and considerate touch. Even Roman skepticism was more pious than Greek skepticism, partly because everything in Rome was so religious and bound with ritual. On the other hand, the Roman gods were traditionally held to be more distant and less anthropomorphic than the Greek ones, offering some leeway for more abstract interpretations.

For more sophisticated thinkers the problem was that the Roman understanding of religious belief was intensely transactional and superstitious, ever paranoid. To paraphrase wise old Varro: “Superstition breathes down your necks, your mind will never be at rest. We are not to fear gods as enemies – for that is superstition. We are to love them as parents – for that is religion.”

Its superstitious and transactional character made religion more difficult for conservative thinkers to intellectually defend. It is not surprising that religion had waned. There had not been a priest of Jupiter between 87 BC – 11 BC. Auspices were no longer taken before battles. And of course religious laxity was followed by moral laxity.

The growing popularity of philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism is largely explained by this religious vacuum. Because religious piety had waned, people were searching for a “modern religion”, a philosophical solution for living a life well. The key question the Stoics tried to answer was how to deal with disappointment, sorrow, and misfortune. The solution they found was calm imperturbability, resignation, apathy. The systems pushes the virtue of self-control to such a strain that it cracks the soul beneath and creates monstrous results, where great stoics advice their followers against love. The one notable exception being the love of fate. Love of the inevitable. Looking at such an ethical system we find ourselves far indeed from Christianity.

Compared to the Epicureans who remained devoted to the doctrines of their holy founder, Stoicism was a highly dynamic philosophy (or religion), in that it was able to go through many alterations of form and emphasis, adopt much of Aristotelianism and ultimately bend itself to many of the old yearnings of Pagan religion and to other philosophies that were antithetical to Stoicism’s character, ultimately to the point that the philosophy lost coherence.

The core metaphysical tenets of the system were: materialism, determinism, pantheism, and belief in the fundamental reasonableness of the universe. Really only in the last point does Stoicism match with Christianity, and even there for distinctly different underlying reasons. For Stoics the world is intelligible because the world is God. For Christians the world is intelligible because the world is created and maintained by God, and because we are made in His image.

The Stoics squared their pantheism with old paganism by claiming that the old pagan gods were symbols or manifestations of the rational principle, of the “World Soul” or “Logos” underlying everything. This vague explanation has the air of a fig leaf, fashioned ad hoc to counter accusations of atheism and to placate the hearts of many stoics who were conservative by temperament and by politics, and thus didn’t want to stir the boat or make a break with the past.

Indeed, conserving and observing the religious traditions was core to the Roman self-understanding. Unlike how we moderns tend to see the them, it was not excellence at war or lawmaking that the Romans considered as exceptional about themselves. It was piety. “Only in religion do we exceed the foreigners.”

Informed by this tradition, the wise among the ancients argued that “if reverence for the gods is removed, so are justice and all social bonds”. The question became whether Stoicism was a system that was able to permit and encourage reverence for the divine in any meaningful way.

The first problem is the materialism found at the core of the system. If all is matter, in what sense are the gods godly? Are they not just like elephants or thunderstorms or some other entity stronger than us, but still only matter and energy just like everything else? What can you meaningfully worship if there is no super-nature?

Another, directly related issue is that of determinism. What point is there to pray to the gods if they too are material things within the closed system, bound by determinism? What could they achieve? What can you achieve? What difference could anything ever make in a deterministic system? Indeed, although these philosophical positions first undermine the gods, they end up fulfilling the pagan prophecy: strike at the gods and you will strike at justice and all social bonds.

The stoics tried to retain the meaningfulness of human life by saying that we are all part of the World Soul, that each of us is godly in this way. But by the same logic the stone beside the road is godly, and the maggot in a piece of roadkill. If everything is godly, nothing is. But perhaps more severe still is the strike against virtue and morality, the main attraction and point of pride of Stoicism.

The Stoics nobly upheld the classic virtues of justice, temperance, prudence and courage. Beside those they set the deterministic ethos of accepting the inevitable, resigning to your fate and unflinchingly receiving whatever fortune the God-Universe churns out.

But there is an obvious contradiction between the two visions. What will motivate your virtue if everything is inevitable? Why struggle? Why sacrifice? Why ask for auspices for a future that cannot be altered? Why care about anything if at the same time you are told to resign yourself to the World Soul like a good Buddhist? The Stoic heart is divided between Western virtue and Oriental resignation. We perceive how determinism is both the organizing principle of Stoic virtue, and the headsman that strips it of life.

Though intellectually hard to justify, it speaks well of the Stoics that they were so reluctant to let go of the gods and virtue, and would rather destroy the coherence of their philosophy than stop striving and worshiping. Some of the arguments they offered for the gods’ existence stand the test of time. They pointed at the many divine prophecies that had been fulfilled. They pointed at the incredible design of the universe and argued the necessity of divine explanation. The Stoics would also ask us to honestly look in our hearts: to believe that there is nothing superior to yourself is arrogant to the point of insanity.

Some later Stoics tried to solve the moral dead end by borrowing dualism from Plato, and started asserting that God and nature are not one and the same after all. This, of course, goes against the materialistic, pantheistic metaphysics underlying Stoicism. The ensuing mixture of views was incoherent – deterministic but non-determined, dualistic and pantheistic... This illustrates how in order to motivate and justify moral behavior and to retain reverence for the gods, the Stoics were willing to bite the bullet and live with an intellectually incoherent worldview. The coherence of their philosophy was considered an acceptable sacrificed for such a noble purpose.

Preparing the way

Where the Stoic comes closest to the truth is in his identification of Reason with Divinity. It is here crucial to clarify the traditional definition of reason, and to separate it from our modern notion. The ancients (and even the moderns up until the Enlightenment) believed the heart to be the house of reason, not the head. It is reason that connects our minds with our appetites, allows us to understand what is good in any given situation. It is reason that is responsible of determining between right and wrong, guiding our will to its proper good. In other words, our conscience is an application of our reason.

Unlike how we moderns believe, reason is not morally neutral or utilitarian. Aristotle perceived our logos in us to include both the capacity to intuitively understand fundamental moral truths, and to reason towards practical goods based on those innate principles. Our mind is so constituted that our intellect first intuits moral truths written in our hearts, such as “do good, avoid evil”. Then our reason proceeds to determine what this practically entails in the situation in front of us.

Being able to make rational deductions and inductions, to ‘rationalize’ from one point to another, are merely methods at the disposal of reason, or a description of the how, not of the what. Treating a method as the thing itself has caused great confusion in modern culture, and made it hard for us to understand our ancestors.

This higher understanding of logos is what Aristotle meant when he said that “man is a rational animal”. He did not mean to say that being able to deduce or calculate things is what makes us human. Reason, properly understood, is key to the essence of the soul itself. It’s what makes us capable of discerning truth and goodness. It’s what aligns us with the reality around us. It’s what makes us moral agents, ethical creatures, capable of choosing between right and wrong and living a good life.

In other words, our reason, properly understood, is what allows us to participate in the divine Reason. It is central to explaining what it really means to be made in the image of God.

After Malachi, around 400 BC, God stopped giving the Jews prophets for hundreds of years. However, we now note how this apparent silence spanning four centuries was only local. At the same time on the Northern side of the Mediterranean began the golden age for Greek philosophy, with the rise of the Socrates (a contemporary of Malachi), Plato and Aristotle, later followed and imitated by the Stoic tradition.

This great breakthrough of wisdom was a crucial part of God’s plan of salvation, as without it the world would have lacked the necessary conceptual framework for the Gospel. Without these “Greek prophets” mankind would not have been capable of receiving the revelation of Christ – which indeed was given in the Greek language, following Greek patterns of thought.

As is typical of the ancient sages, the Stoics were carrying a light that illuminated the path forward, far beyond where their own feet could carry them. The deep, mystical, truthful understanding of the Logos was their gift to us, a prerequisite for the immense revelation in the Gospel of John –

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”

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