On the Stoic God (or absence thereof)

Does a modern Stoic need to believe in pantheism in order to be a Stoic?

Image from commonreader.wustl.edu, CC license.

I consider myself a Stoic practitioner, with more than a pinch of Skepticism added to my philosophy of life. Yet, I just finished reading a book that basically tells me that unless I believe in the ancient Stoic God I’m not really a Stoic, but rather someone who just uses Stoic-inspired life hackery to muddle through existence.

So let’s settle this matter once and for all, shall we? Just kidding. Of course we will never settle this sort of things, because people will believe whatever they will believe, and they will provide what they think are good reasons to back up such beliefs. And I am, needless to say, no exception to the rule.

Still, it may be worth considering the subject in a some detail to try to clarify our thoughts about it. Unfortunately, I cannot quote directly the book that spurred my musings in this essay because it hasn’t be published yet. The two authors, though, are solid writers about Stoicism, so I’m not picking at strawmen here.

The chapter on the Stoic God in the book in question begins by acknowledging that Stoicism is not a religion, and yet the authors tell us that it has a significant component of religiousness or spirituality. That, right there, is the first problem. Spirituality yes, religiousness most definitely not.

The term spirituality has a long tradition in modern Stoicism, beginning with Pierre Hadot’s famous Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. If by “spiritual” we explicitly mean a particular approach to the wellbeing of our minds, then Stoicism is most certainly spiritual. If, however, we mean anything along the lines of non-material and religious then Stoicism—ancient or modern—has nothing to do with that.

Religion, in the modern sense of the term, is based on organized belief in the supernatural, belief based not on reason and evidence, but on faith. In that sense, again, Stoicism—ancient or modern—is not religious. The Stoics were materialists and believed that both God and the soul are natural objects. Moreover, they advanced arguments based on evidence for their doctrines, unlike what you find in most modern religions. Ancient Greco-Roman religion was yet a different kind of animal, in that it was bound up with rituals meant to assure the smooth functioning of society, and Stoicism was never involved in anything like that.

So, what sort of God did the ancient Stoics believe in? They were, in modern parlance, either pantheists or panentheists (scholars are still debating the issue; for what it’s worth, I think the Stoics were pantheists, but it ultimately doesn’t matter). This means that they believed that the universe is a living organism, which they called God or Zeus, endowed with the famous logos, that is the ability to reason. Here is a brief summary by the commentator Diogenes Laertius:

“God is one and the same with Reason, Fate, and Zeus; he is also called by many other names. … The whole world is a living being, endowed with soul and reason.” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.135-136)

Why did the ancient Stoics believe this? They advanced a number of arguments, carefully listed and discussed by Cicero in De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of God). For instance, Cicero tells us that Cleanthes of Assos, the second scholarch of the Stoa, listed four reasons why people believe in God: the fact that sometimes we have foreknowledge of future things, through divination; the fact that the Earth appears to be made to facilitate the good living of human beings; the terror induced by natural phenomena like thunder, storms, and so on; and the regularity of the movements of celestial bodies.

Clearly, today nobody in his right mind would accept any of the above as valid reasons for belief in gods. We have no evidence of divination (indeed, Cicero himself demolished the notion in his De Divinatione), we have scientific explanations for the second and fourth points, and we regard the third point as superstitious.

Cicero then tells us that the logician Chrysippus of Soli, the third scholarch of the Stoa, advances the following argument for the existence of God:

“If there is anything in the universe which no human reason, ability, or power can make, the being who produced it must certainly be preferable to man. Now, celestial bodies, and all those things which proceed in any eternal order, cannot be made by man; the being who made them is therefore preferable to man. What, then, is that being but a God? If there be no such thing as a Deity, what is there better than man, since he only is possessed of reason, the most excellent of all things? But it is a foolish piece of vanity in man to think there is nothing preferable to him. There is, therefore, something preferable; consequently, there is certainly a God.” (De Natura Deorum, 2.6)

By modern standard, the above is clearly fallacious. The argument begs the question by assuming that complex and orderly things, like celestial bodies, have to be created by an intelligence. It then goes on to exclude human intelligence as their cause, thus concluding that there must be a God. Again, modern science provides us with far better explanations of how celestial bodies are naturally formed. No deities required.

Finally, Cicero recounts the take by Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism:

“‘That which reasons is superior to that which does not; nothing is superior to the world; the world, therefore, reasons.’ By the same rule [continues Cicero’s Stoic character, Lucilius] the world may be proved to be wise, happy, and eternal; for the possession of all these qualities is superior to the want of them; and nothing is superior to the world; the inevitable consequence of which argument is, that the world, therefore, is a Deity.” (De Natura Deorum, 2.8)

There is absolutely nothing inevitable about this conclusion, and Zeno’s starting point once again begs the question by stating that reason is “superior” to non-reason. Reason, as we know today, is a particular result—among many—of evolution by natural selection. It is one more tool for the survival and reproduction of living organisms, and is in no sense superior or inferior to swimming fast, running, or carrying out photosynthesis.

In the end, the only credible argument ever advanced by the ancient Stoics for belief in God sounds like this:

“For Chrysippus says, very acutely, that as the case is made for the buckler, and the scabbard for the sword, so all things, except the universe, were made for the sake of something else.” (De Natura Deorum, 2.14)

The argument is repeated, using the same example of the sword and the scabbard, by Epictetus in Discourses 1.6. It is well known to modern philosophers as the design argument. Had I been born during the height of the ancient Stoa I’m fairly confident I would have preferred it to Epicurean talk of atoms and swerves. But the argument from design has been dealt a double fatal blow by David Hume and Charles Darwin, and nobody except religious fundamentalists take it seriously anymore.

Finally, I’m a biologist and am therefore well acquainted with what a living being is, from a scientific perspective. It is nothing like the universe. Living organisms are characterized by metabolism, reproduction, and the ability to evolve adaptively, none of which applies to the universe as understood by modern science. The latter is a series of dynamic processes described by empirical generalizations usually referred to as laws of nature.

So, can we put to rest this notion that it makes sense to believe in the ancient Stoic God for us denizens of the 21st century? Good. The next question is: why does it matter?

Because of a logical link proposed by Chrysippus and endorsed by the middle Stoic Posidonius of Apamea:

“The world, in their view, is ordered by reason and providence: so says Chrysippus in the fifth book of his treatise On Providence and Posidonius in his work On the Gods, book iii. – inasmuch as reason pervades every part of it, just as does the soul in us.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.136)

Since the world is a living organism capable of reason, it follows for the ancient Stoics that such world, i.e., God, is the source of a type of Providence. This Providence, mind you, does not work like the Christian one. The Stoic God doesn’t love us individually, nor does it do things that are good for us, and most certainly doesn’t change the laws of cause-effect in order to answer our prayers. (The famous “Hymn to Zeus” by Cleanthes is not a prayer in anything like what we normally mean by that word, despite frequent claims to the contrary. Rather, it is a poem in praise of the rationality of the universe.)

Epictetus explains this very nicely when, in Discourses 2.5, he says that we are like a foot that has to step into the mud. If we think of it only from the point of view of the foot we may be disgusted and reluctant to do it. But if we realize that we are attached to a body, that the body has to get home by crossing a muddy path, and that our whole reason for existence is to be helpful to the body, then not only we will accept our destiny, we will actually embrace it. Similarly, we are like cells in the cosmic organism, and if something apparently bad happens to us, like the death of a loved one, we need to remind ourselves that there is an ultimate reason for the event, and that we should be happy about it because our loved ones, just like ourselves, are doing their part in a cosmic play that we did not write.

Which makes sense of otherwise near-psychopathic passages in Epictetus. In Enchiridion 3 he tells us to kiss goodnight to our wife and child while reminding ourselves that they are mortal. That way we will not be “disturbed” when they die. This makes perfect sense for someone who believed in Stoic Providence. It doesn’t, however, for someone who rejects that premise.

And therein lies the crux of the matter: since Stoic metaphysics (the cosmos is a living organism endowed with the logos) has direct connections with Stoic ethics (love your fate no matter what), if we reject the first we also throw out the second. Ergo, we are not Stoics.

Not so fast! The thinking here is deeply flawed. As far as I can tell, it goes something like this: Stoic metaphysics and natural philosophy (and, for that matter, logic) make a system that informs Stoic ethics. If you throw away the first you have to throw away the second. Therefore, you are no longer a Stoic.

Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see the problem: Stoic metaphysics, natural philosophy, logic, and ethics are not monoliths that need to be taken as inalterable packages. And the Stoics themselves explicitly and implicitly said so. Implicitly because they disagreed with each other and continued research into metaphysics and natural philosophy, evidently expecting to discover new things. Explicitly in, for instance, this favorite passage by Seneca:

“The truth will never be discovered if we rest contented with discoveries already made. Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating. What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Those who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.” (Letters to Lucilius, 33.10-11)

I am most emphatically not rejecting all of ancient Stoic metaphysics and natural philosophy, only parts of it. I’m still very much good, for instance, with materialism and universal cause and effect. Consequently, I’m not rejecting ancient Stoic ethics either, only modifying it. Since I don’t believe in any kind of Providence, I cannot “love my fate.” When my loved ones die I do grieve. But within reason, and accepting as a given that of course we are all mortals. This is pretty much what you find in Seneca, for instance in his letters to Marcia and Polybius, as well as in the 99th letter do Lucilius.

Besides, not even so-called traditional Stoics, who style themselves originalists, really believe everything the ancient Stoics believed. Do they think that the location of the ruling faculty is the heart? Do they practice divination by interpreting the flight of birds and reading the entrails of animals? I don’t think so. Where, then, do they draw the line, and why?

The authors of the above mentioned book also, surprisingly, state that if one doesn’t accept the Stoic God then one cannot possibly believe that virtue is the only true good, a central tenet of both ancient and modern Stoicism. This is a startling claim for a number of reasons.

First, not all ancient Stoics were so keen on it. While it is certainly the version of Stoicism that we get from the early Stoa, Epictetus hardly talks about virtue at all. For him the only true good is one’s own good judgment, one’s prohairesis. It may be reasonable to equate virtue and good judgment, certainly if one takes virtue to mean wisdom in the broad sense, but there is room for disagreement.

Second, the authors in question claim that Stoics accept the notion of virtue / judgment as the only true good by faith, without reason or argument. This is simply not the case. The argument for virtue or wisdom being the only good is given by Socrates in Plato’s Euthydemus: wisdom is what allows us to use everything else correctly and proficiently (279-282). Epictetus reiterates the concept when he talks about Socrates’s skill at “playing ball,” i.e., at dealing with whatever life threw at him (Discourses, 2.5).

Do I believe that judgment is the most precious good I have by far, and that it is up to me to improve it and exercise it properly? Most definitely. Then I am a Stoic.