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What Did The Stoics Believe About God? (Episode 129)
906 Plays7 months ago
The ancients talked about Nature, Reason, Zeus, and God – but what did they mean by it?
In this conversation, Michael tells us who or what the Stoic God is.
We’re here to tell you – and share how the Stoic’s beliefs about God influenced their practice and picture of Stoicism.
(00:58) Why The Stoic God Matters
(03:21) The Agenda
(05:40) Stoic Physics
(08:29) Is This Like Aristotle?
(14:13) God Is Fire
(23:35) The Forms of God
(28:53) God Is Everything
(31:52) The Divine In Us
(37:15) Reason
(38:31) The Cyclic Universe
(45:36) The Problem Of Evil
(54:18) Living In Accordance With Nature
(56:25) Summary
***
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Transcript
Animal vs. Human Value in Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
Epictetus is talking to his students and they ask him, well, you know, why are humans special? He has a paraphrase and then quote, the student asks, is it not the case that animals too are works of God? And Epictetus responds, indeed they are, but they're not of primary value, nor are they portions of the divine. But you for your part are of primary value. You are a fragment of God.
Introducing the Stoic God
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Monteveros. And I'm Michael Tremblay.
00:00:30
Speaker
And today we are going to be talking about the Stoic God. It's one of those issues that anyone who's reading any of the classic Stoic authors must come across this talk of God, nature, and Michael put together a great set of notes for us to go over, you know, what did the Stoics actually mean when they talk about God? What's the Stoic view? So that's what we're going to be doing today.
Ancient Stoic Concepts vs. Contemporary Ideas
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is a cool topic because one thing that's always interesting when you're studying Stoicism or any sort of ancient tradition is being cautious about not putting contemporary ideas onto things. So when the Stoics talk about the mind or the Stoics talk about a soul, it can be very tempting to try to think about those in the ways that the average person today might talk about them. And I think that's especially dangerous when it comes to God.
00:01:27
Speaker
Also because this is coming from a tradition that I think is outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, so it doesn't share a lot of the same conceptions or norms that are most common today. The other thing that I think, so I think I think we want to get that right so we can actually understand what the Stoics are talking about.
00:01:47
Speaker
The other reason this is important, I think, is that the Stoic god, as you said, is very central to a lot of what the Stoics talk about. And we can sometimes gloss over that or skip over that, especially if we're not
00:02:04
Speaker
religious ourselves or we come to studying Stoicism or an interest in Stoicism, not from a religious perspective.
The Role of God in Stoic Philosophy
00:02:11
Speaker
But I always think when you're studying anything, there's what the Stoics thought, there's what the truth of the matter is, and then there's maybe what you think about the Stoics or what we think about the Stoics. We're always trying to have what we think about the Stoics come as close to the truth as possible.
00:02:31
Speaker
And then we can use that as a tool to try to understand what the truth of the matter actually is. But regardless of where you're going to land in your practice or your way of interacting with stoicism, we want to try to get that stoic position right. Even if we disagree with it, even if it seems strange or maybe it doesn't, it seems really helpful and interesting and valuable. And I think depending on where the people listening, where you fall on the way you think about God, either as atheists or
00:02:59
Speaker
a contemporary religion or something in between, there's going to be a wide range of reactions from that doesn't make sense to that's really cool to I don't understand where that comes into ethics or how we live. But to do any of those questions, we have to just get down what the stoics are talking about.
Discussion Structure Overview
00:03:19
Speaker
interested to do that today. I had four ways of going to structure this. First, a quick structure, a quick recap on Stoic physics, because that's important to understand what the Stoics are talking about when they're talking about God. Then this question of what is God? How do the Stoics think about God? What does that mean for us?
00:03:38
Speaker
Then a discussion of conflagration, which is a really important stoic idea about the cyclical nature of the universe and God's relationship in that, and then a summary. And before I kick things off, Caleb, I always have a goal in these episodes to explain these ideas as clearly as possible, but that's extra my goal for this episode. So maybe it'll hold me extra to it as we're talking about this, because I think that
00:04:08
Speaker
I want my language to be as clear as possible because I think sometimes when you don't understand something well or something is complicated or confusing, it can be easy to kind of obscure it in language. I think, you know, I want us to be, I want it to be talking about God in as clear and simple terms as possible, not obscure what we're talking about, not make it more complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes it will be complicated, but not making it more complicated than it needs to be. Um, try to, try to always hold ourselves to that standard of just a clear explanation.
00:04:39
Speaker
I'm excited to get into it.
Stoic Materialism and Principles
00:04:41
Speaker
I think one way to think about it is what we're going to try to do in this episode is understand how the Stoics thought about God, and I think it's debatable exactly
00:04:58
Speaker
how central God is to the Stoic picture. That's not a debate we'll be hopping into for this episode. I think what we can say is that both for several ancient Stoics, philosophy and practice, it absolutely was essential. And even for some modern Stoics, perhaps that God plays an essential role in their picture.
00:05:21
Speaker
So our primary purpose, I suppose, is to hop into debates about whether that's right, but get a sense of what especially these ancient Stoics are talking about. And along the way, I'm sure we can touch on some issues of how that influenced their practice, how that influenced their day-to-day Stoicism as well.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, great. Cool. So let's kick things off. I wanted to start off with just a refresher on stoic physics. Um, we've talked about this before, but just just a quick recap cause it is a bit weird. Um, so first things first, I understand is that the stoics were materialists. So everything, which just means that they think that everything that exists is matter. Um, so you, you, uh,
00:06:07
Speaker
You might think that this makes them an atheist or there's nothing besides matter. If God exists, it has to be material in form. God has to be material. That's what materialism commits them to. In their materialism, there's two different kinds of matter. There's the matter that is active and then the matter that is passive.
00:06:35
Speaker
And so the matter that is passive, I would say takes up space, you know, has kind of mass and dimensions, but is inert. And then the matter that is active is really what
00:06:51
Speaker
gives that shape or gives that kind of passive matter its form, gives the passive matter any kind of energy, movement, direction, stops there from being just passive things. It's like any sort of active movement is attributable to this active matter. So these call this the active and the passive principle. And the reason they call, I guess, the active and the passive principle is that you never actually find these two kinds of things separate.
00:07:21
Speaker
passive principle and your active principle and then they both come together to make matter. I don't think it's conceptually impossible to imagine just passive matter, but the stoic answer is that you would never have just the passive principle. Anything that there is, is matter. It has both this passive and this active aspect of it.
00:07:41
Speaker
And then it is active matter, or so the active principle, which is in all matter, along with the passive principle, which is considered by the Stoics described to be intelligent and described to be connected with God.
God as a Designing Fire
00:07:55
Speaker
And I think that's about as far as we got in our primer on Stoic physics last time. So everything is matter, that there can still be a God, the same way the Stoics would talk about a soul, just has to be, it just has to be matter, can't be a different kind of thing.
00:08:10
Speaker
matters made up of an active and passive principle, and then that active principle is associated with God and intelligence and the kind of movement, structure, and the laws of the universe as well. So that's the refresher. Anything to add on that?
00:08:29
Speaker
Well, one question I have is to what extent does the distinction between active and inactive matter map onto Aristotle's account of causation? The idea that you have these four different causes of something. You have the material cause, something that's the matter out of which it was made, the formal cause, the account of what it is to be.
00:08:58
Speaker
the efficient cause which is sort of often I think how we think about causes today the thing that caused it to be and then finally the final cause which is its end its purpose its telos so a quick example of this would be if you have a statue or something of that sort the material cause is just the clay if you have a someone forming the statue the formal cause is
00:09:28
Speaker
There's an order to it, right? It takes on a form, the form of a statue. The efficient cause is a person who models a clay. You know, they're working with their hands. They cause, you know, they didn't in a sense define what it is to be a statue, but they've
00:09:45
Speaker
impose the form on this matter. And then finally, that person might have some goal in mind, or perhaps even statues serve some larger goal for the sake of beauty or something of that sort. So that's a quick example of a quick run through, I guess, of Aristotle's Four Causes. But it does seem like many of these have that active element to it. So I was curious what you think about that.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yes, I mean, the active principle is associated, I'm not terribly familiar with Aristotle. I mean, that was a clear description, but the active principle is associated with the cause. You know, so I have some quotes here. Diogenes, Lyretius says, the Stoics think there are two principles of the universe, that's the active and passive. That which acts and that which is acted upon. That which is acted upon is unqualified substance.
00:10:39
Speaker
that which acts is the reason, i.e. logos in it, i.e. God. So you have this kind of... So you have this... The active principle there is being associated with the cause or being associated with giving things its shape. There's another one here by Sextus Empiricus that gets right into causes. The substance of what exists, the Stoic say,
00:11:05
Speaker
since it is without any motion from itself and shapeless, needs to be set in motion and shaped by some cause. For this reason, as when we look at a very beautiful bronze statue, we want to know the artist, so when we see the matter of the universe moving and possessing form and structure, we might reasonably inquire into the cause which moves and shapes it into many forms. It is not convincing that this is anything other than a power which pervades it, just as a soul pervades us.
00:11:34
Speaker
Now this power is either self-moving or moved by some other power, but if it is moved by another power, the second power will not be capable of being moved unless it is
Human Reason and Divine Proximity
00:11:43
Speaker
moved. It's kind of a never-ending cycle.
00:11:47
Speaker
So then the power which moves matter and guides itself, or guides it, sorry, must be everlasting and this power must be God. It can't be kind of an ending cycle. It must be kind of this, the unmoved mover, which I think is another Aristotelian idea there.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah. So the Stoic idea, we can perhaps say has some initial similarities with Aristotle's picture of, you know, it's also talking about form causation, but it's more fundamental, I think, in the sense that.
00:12:22
Speaker
when the active principle is sort of the driving organizing force of matter, whether that's giving matter its form or if you want to talk about causation and other ideas about order structure and so on. It's the thing that brings about structure, order, and form. Does that seem right?
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. It's also the cause of anything to be anything rather than nothing, right? Like the reason that active principle is the reason. I mean, we'll get into this a bit later, but it's the reason why a rock holds its shape.
00:13:02
Speaker
It's the reason why things move and any sort of motion or form or direction is all set in motion by this active principle and then sustained by the active principle. I think the easiest thing is to think about what it would be like without an active principle and I guess it would just be kind of like
00:13:24
Speaker
maybe it would be like a random distribution of material that takes on no form or shape and has no movement. Like that would be passive principle only in passive matter. That doesn't exist because all of that matter is imbued with this active principle, this active component of matter, which gives a cause to literally all the motion in the universe, all the form, all the kind of chemical laws, all of the
00:13:52
Speaker
any sort of kind of causal forces that apply on each other and relate to each other. The fact that objects bounce off one another because they have a kind of mass and shape that allows these causal relationships. That's all requires that kind of, that active principle. All right. All right. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense to me. It's an abstract idea, but it makes sense. Yeah, it's tough. I'm trying, I'm trying my best here. I find it, I find it very difficult, much more difficult than the, than the ethics. So then.
00:14:23
Speaker
I always said the active principle is associated with God, but what is God? Is there some sort of definition here? Is it just the active principle? What were the Stoics thinking of when they think of God? Here's a quote from Aetius who was a first, second century AD source on the Stoics. He said, the Stoics made God out to be intelligent.
00:14:45
Speaker
a designing fire which methodically proceeds towards the creation of the world and encompasses all the seminal principles according to which everything comes about according to fate and a breath pervading the whole world which takes on different names owing to the alterations of matter through which it passes. So this is a lot.
00:15:08
Speaker
But first we have the idea that God is intelligent. What intelligence means here, we can discuss further, but God is intelligent. So A, God exists. B, God is intelligent.
00:15:21
Speaker
God is the designing fire which pervades the whole world and methodically proceeds towards the creation of the world as it is and doesn't just produce but encompasses the principles according to which everything comes about. So that's the things I was talking about, about the kind of the laws of physics, the laws of causation, the way that matter interacts with each other.
00:15:48
Speaker
to produce this causal chain, that's all considered to be God. And so I think the key metaphor here, so we have that active principle, but I think the key metaphor that might make it easier to understand is that idea of the breath pervading the whole world.
00:16:05
Speaker
And so when you, if you think about it, like from a stoic sense, if you imagine an individual person and the, and breath here is, is, is Numa, which is like a very specific word, um, for that, that kind of hot breath and humans were considered to have a Numa. It was associated with their, with their soul.
00:16:24
Speaker
And so if you imagine an individual person whose breath is then associated with their heat or their energy, it's something that they have when they're around and they're moving and they're alive. And when they die, they were thought to kind of lose that breath. They lost that Numa.
00:16:41
Speaker
And so they go from this active, intelligent, moving being with designs and motions and goals, and then they die, and then they become a kind of passive corpse. They become cold because they've lost that breath which flows through them. They're a lump of flesh, right, decaying.
00:17:01
Speaker
And so that, but when they, again, when they have the breath, they're unified and spirited. They're acting towards a greater end. So God is that breath. It's that Numa for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. It's that thing that imbues passive matter with movement, but also form and necessary laws. So it's that, it's that active principle, but I think active principle is abstract. You think about it as the energy of the physical universe.
00:17:27
Speaker
And when we think about energy, literally down to the energy that's spent, if you think of entropy as the kind of dissipation of all energy, it's the energy that's spent that kind of causes the sun to shine, causes the plants to grow, causes humans to metabolize their food, causes the planets to orbit the sun. So all that kind of energy
00:17:55
Speaker
is the result of that active principle imbuing the universe with motion, force, energy, as I said, and then in the stomach view, that's all kind of also unfolding towards a specific goal, design, or plan. So that energy is then unfolding towards a specific desired ends, namely the intelligent,
00:18:24
Speaker
ultimately good, providential ends the thing that the god wants the best possible universe.
00:18:30
Speaker
And so one more thing on that. So that's the kind of the designing fire, the hot breath, that's what's associated with God. And that is different from literal fire. It's this kind of metaphorical thing that provides energy. So another quote here, this time from Diogenes, I believe. Zeno says that the sun and the moon and each of the other stars are intelligent and prudent.
00:18:58
Speaker
and have the firiness of designing fire. For there are two kinds of fire. One is un-designing and venture...
00:19:08
Speaker
inventors fuel into itself. The other is designing, causing growth and preservation, as is in the case in plants and animals where it is physique and soul respectively, such as the fire which constitutes the substance of the stars. And so that's just that idea that even if we look at something like the sun, the stoics are seen
00:19:32
Speaker
You know, there's that literal burning, the literal fireness of the sun, but then it's also participating in the designing fire, that active principle, that, that, that breath that is associated with God. Um, and that is different than regular fire, which burns itself up. This is the designing fire, which causes growth and also preservation. It also keeps things the way they are. So did my best to get that down. Any thoughts on that kill?
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think the breath metaphor is really helpful. And I suppose to extend that metaphor further, the Stoics talk as if the whole universe, nature itself, is an organism itself. So you can then ask me what's the driving force behind that organism.
00:20:22
Speaker
And connect it with times when, say, Marcus Aurelius is doing the view from above practice and noticing how parts relate to the whole, how they play this greater part in a larger system, whether that's the flex of foam on a boar's mouth, the cracks in a loaf of bread, whatever it is. God is that sort of fundamental
00:20:49
Speaker
I, you know, life, you're going to use to say, I will say life force, perhaps, um, the, that word has, has other connotations as well. I think that gets it is another way to get the same idea. It really is the, it really is the life force. I think there's these in modern connotations that, but it is that, so it's not.
00:21:08
Speaker
It's not the idea of why there is something instead of nothing, because you might, it's not clear to me the Stoics think without God you wouldn't have inert passive matter, but it is the reason that that something looks like anything at all, right? That looks like planets and stars and humans and cats and dogs and, um,
00:21:31
Speaker
and plants, it's because it's imbued with this life force, which is understood as both. You could both think of it as literal heat, like energy, but also what's captured in that is, again, back to the original quote, the seminal principles according to which everything comes about according to fate. Also, these physical laws of nature,
00:21:56
Speaker
these rules, those are all understood to be kind of determined and produced by this, by God, but as this kind of this energy of the universe or this breath of the universe. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I mean, even just that even just getting to that part, that's a pretty
00:22:16
Speaker
Sometimes even myself, I say, or I'll think like, oh, the, the Stoics think that God is the universe. And it's important, I think, to remember that that's not necessarily the case that they think of it as that, as that life force, as that designing energy within it.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. It's close to the idea that God is the universe or God is everything, but it's not exactly the same thing. It's not to say that God is identical with the universe. It's a specific aspect of the universe.
00:22:51
Speaker
a specific part of the universe that you couldn't, you couldn't, there's nothing out there that couldn't have, that doesn't, doesn't have some God in it. Right? But, um, not everything is God in that sense. I think there is a division there.
00:23:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, I don't want to get too technical, but like, I'm looking at a quote here. The Stoics say that God is mixed with matter, pervading all of it. And so shaping it, structuring it and making it into the world. It is like, it's mixed together. You couldn't separate them. It's not possible to separate them, but God is not, he's not everything at the same time. Right, right.
00:23:36
Speaker
So we've associated, we've established God, so there's this kind of this passive matter, this active principle that's mixed together with this passive matter, and everything has that, the mix of the two. God is associated with that active principle, so you think of it as the life force, the hot breath of the universe, the thing that gives it
00:23:57
Speaker
shape and structure and also preserves its shape and structure, stops humans from just like dissolving into sludge in this. It was the way I like to think about it. I don't know if the Stoics say that, but I think, you know, the fact that I keep my form and I don't just fall apart is because of that active principle keeping me together. And so one thing that's important for the Stoics, and it's really key part of their idea about God, is that this designing fire, so God, manifests in different forms. And these different forms have different names.
00:24:25
Speaker
So first there is tenor, and that's just the idea of just kind of structure. And so this is what you call God, really, when it manifests as just holding shape. So this is the form that holds together objects and objects that have no internal motion. So you think of this as something like a rock. I think of this like concrete metal that's holding up a building. This is still matter. It's still imbued with an active principle, even though it doesn't seem very active. And the active principle is causing it to retain its shape and form.
00:24:55
Speaker
Then you have physique, which is the next highest level. So this is kind of this natural ladder or hierarchy. And this is the form or the manifestation of God that allows for growth and reproduction, but no interaction with impressions. So this is what a plant is. The plant is responsive to its environment, but it's not conceptualizing impressions. Impressions aren't being implanted on a mind in any way. So the plant grows, it can reproduce.
00:25:24
Speaker
And that way it has physique, but it doesn't can't do anything more than that. Then the next highest level, and I should say, again, this material metaphor is really important because actually the active principle is kind of getting finer and finer. They actually thought it was a different type of matter that became more and more refined as you moved up this hierarchy.
00:25:48
Speaker
Then you've got the soul, so you've got kind of structure, you've got this physique, this ability to reproduce and grow and change, and then you've got a soul, this next finer level. And that's the form that can be influenced by impressions and change behavior accordingly. We can think of that like animals, cats, dogs, young human children.
00:26:10
Speaker
They have souls in this sense and they receive impressions and they respond to these impressions. These impressions are imprinted upon them and they respond to them. Then at the highest level, you've got reason or the commanding faculty. This is the most fine form of the active principle in the existing universe. This is the form that can deliberate on impressions.
00:26:37
Speaker
So we, because we have a soul, humans have a soul. We receive impressions, but you know, babies have souls according to Stoics, but they don't have reason. An adult has a soul, but has reason. So it can also reflect actively reflect on its impression, make decisions. Um, say, I think that's true. I don't think that's true. I'm going to think about it a little bit longer. And, uh,
00:27:02
Speaker
So each of these were considered to be finer as we go up that ladder. So again, tenor, physique, soul, and reason. And the closer you get, the more refined you get, the closer you get to reason, the more you are like God, the closer you get to God. And they actually thought that this reason, the active principle that comes with our reason was actually
00:27:29
Speaker
I can't tell if it's metaphorical or literal, but it's either the closest to God you can possibly get, and so they say you've got a part of God in you, or literally a part of the finest part of God existence in the universe, the most intelligent thing in the universe at the time.
00:27:46
Speaker
And this is why when you understand this, you'll see a bunch of quotes that will make reference to this about having a piece of God in you or a part of God in you. And that's what the Stoics are referring to, is referring to this very fine aspect of your active principle, this part of yourself reason that's very close to God. So one quote here, a very famous one from Marcus Aurelius.
00:28:07
Speaker
He says, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself, the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil, but I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.
00:28:33
Speaker
And so that's what Marcus means. He's referring to a specific technical idea in Stoicism. They possess a share of the divine. And what that means is their capacity to reason is like, it's a part of God that they have in them. The Abictetus talks about this all the time too. Any thoughts on that, that kind of hierarchy of being?
00:28:54
Speaker
I think it is interesting that before we move on to these ideas about how we have fragments of the divine in ourselves, others have the very same thing. I think it is interesting to note and spend some time on the fact that even ordinary physical objects
00:29:12
Speaker
other creatures also contain aspects or fragments of God at these lower levels.
00:29:26
Speaker
I think that's a really rich idea and there's a lot of different directions when you can't take it, but I suppose there's at least that problem to see how do things exhibit order that the Stoics are pulling out.
00:29:46
Speaker
And also, how do they have these aspects of providence or purpose built into them? How's that realized? How do things exemplify these lower levels of reason? I think that's really interesting. Yeah, two things to add to that is, one, you might think
00:30:09
Speaker
Which, I'm not sure if this is a Christian idea fully or just kind of my understanding of Christianity. You might think, look, there's divine things and there's not divine things. Your divine thing and other things were made kind of to serve you or are a creation of God, but not a part of God. You're a creation of God. You're connected to God in some way.
00:30:32
Speaker
There's this idea here of God is in these things, right? Yes, God is giving the plants their form and their movement, not just like God didn't set them up and then walk away. God is actively in them, manifesting in a certain form. Because I think it can be tempting to think that if you don't have a materialist view, you might think, well, humans have a soul, so we're special.
00:30:56
Speaker
But when you have this material view, it's like, no, all matter is matter. The soul isn't different. And in that, all matter is organized, governed, set into motion, structured by this life force, right? By this breath of the universe. And even the Stoics think that about ourselves, right? The Stoics will say, well, you're
00:31:19
Speaker
Your stomach is physique, right? Your stomach has movement and changes and adapts, but it doesn't respond to impressions. Or your bones have tenor, right? Your bones, they have structure and form that they hold. So it's like we contain that entire hierarchy within us, right? We have a soul, but then part of our soul has that reason. We share the fact that we have a soul with animals, but part of that soul has reason.
00:31:48
Speaker
That's one idea that there's not this kind of division or this type difference. The other part, though, that I guess I wanted to question here was you were saying that the plants or the animals, they have a part of the divine too. But I think when the Stoics talk about the part of the divine, I think they mean a very specific thing, which is that
00:32:15
Speaker
You have something in common with God. It's tough because obviously under this example, the plants do too and the rocks do too. But there's this idea that like the fineness that you have in your reason, that's more godly than the plant. That's more godly than the rock.
00:32:36
Speaker
And there's something special. There's some divinely special status given to reason. These are not just descriptive differences. There is a hierarchy. Some are better than others. And I don't want to lose that either. Even though God pervades everything, we don't want to lose that hierarchy either.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's an important point. You have the ability to deliberate on impressions, I guess carries with it the ability to see order, impose order, you know, give form to matter. You can talk about these different ways, intentionally create life and so on that I guess are
00:33:19
Speaker
closer to God from the Stoic view. I guess that maybe I'll toss that same issue back at you that I'm mulling over. Why is reason at the top of this Stoic chain of being, if you will? Why is it closest to God?
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, well, one quote here that I think just shows the point that I'm trying to make. Epictetus is talking to his students, and they ask him, well, you know, why are humans special?
Stoic Conflagration and Cosmic Cycles
00:33:48
Speaker
He has a paraphrase, and then quote. The student asks, is it not the case that animals too are works of God?
00:33:54
Speaker
and Epictetus responds, indeed they are, but they're not of primary value, nor are they portions of the divine. But you, for your part, are of primary value. You are a fragment of God. So just that really clear kind of type difference. As to where that hierarchy comes from, I'm not sure. There seems to me almost this axiom that intelligence is better. You almost get this in all of Greek philosophy,
00:34:24
Speaker
And this, this is me taking off the top and trying to, trying to reason through it might be a better answer to this, but in all Greek philosophy, you get this kind of idea of telos, which something has its necessary function or purpose. I can climb a tree, but that's not my, but that's not my telos. That's not my ends. So I can do other things, but my best thing is to think. Right. And so I think it's the same thing with God, which is like, it can do other things. It can, it can.
00:34:49
Speaker
maintain the shape of a rock. It can give a plant its growth and, you know, make, make the sun burn and things like this, but it's, it's, the God is at its best when it's, when it's planning, when it's intelligent and God's intelligence is understood in the way that it's prudentially so intelligently designed the universe to be the best possible universe.
00:35:15
Speaker
And so, in that sense, if God's telos is its intellect, then the most godly part of God is that intellect. And so, we are closest to God if we are the most intelligent. That part of us is the most divine. That's my swing at it. What do you think? I think that makes sense to me.
00:35:44
Speaker
Reason can animate matter, act in a wider range of ways. I'm just going to scale this back to these metaphors of the breath or dynamic fire. You know, think about what, I think what the Stoics are at least getting at there is.
00:36:00
Speaker
recent has an ability to be this driving, organizing force, whether that's on the side of order, structuring the world, or in a sense of providence, you know, or a telos, fulfilling a specific purpose.
00:36:15
Speaker
And human beings, because of their rational ability, can order themselves. People around them form order together and fulfill different purposes in a way that, say, an animal who is not as rational cannot.
00:36:34
Speaker
You know, they can do, they have of course this ability to be influenced by impressions and act on particular purposes, but the range is not as wide. They're not as capable of reasoning or developing new plans and so on. So perhaps, perhaps I'm just reciting what you did, but that's, that's how I see it. Yeah. We are, we are the most God-like because we can do the things that are the best things God can do.
00:37:00
Speaker
And now, I mean, again, that kind of like, why is that the best thing? You end up with this kind of this, you kind of need to fall back on the telos or the, or the function of the thing. Um, or at least, at least the way I do. And one thing I should say, we use reason a lot where they can, I was just noticing you doing that in to substitute with God. That's not just to avoid God language. Um,
00:37:25
Speaker
I think sometimes it can be tempting to avoid God language in our ethical discussions because God comes with a lot of baggage that can actually make things more confusing than if we say reason or nature. But the Stoics also identified God with logos, which is the word for reason and nature.
00:37:47
Speaker
So these were kind of interchangeable concepts as well. So when we talk about God, reason, nature, the Stoics were using those ideas interchangeably, which tells you, I think tells you more about what they think of God than what they think of reason and nature. I think reason and nature stay pretty close.
00:38:09
Speaker
But it's actually, I think moving the concept of God closer towards those two than it is the idea of moving, uh, nature further away from what it is. I would say, um, understand nature is just like all the, all the things that are, um, cool. So that's, so that's, that's what God is, right? It's that breath, that life force of the universe. Um, but.
00:38:34
Speaker
One thing I wanted to get into is this interesting idea of conflagration, the total fire, and this cyclical nature of the universe. Because this is a really, I think an important idea of the Stoic worldview, and it's an implication of having a material God.
00:38:52
Speaker
So a consequence of having a material God, and that God being a designing fire, is that eventually this fire will burn out. The Stoics think that it will come to the end of its natural cycle in a process called conflagration. The Greek for that is just ekpyrosis.
00:39:09
Speaker
Fire being, you know, fire, X, what comes out of the fire. Where everything becomes a total fire. Everything becomes, the entire universe burns basically and burns itself out. So Diogenes Laertes says, the Stoics also suppose that the world is perishable.
00:39:27
Speaker
since it is generated on the same principle as perceptible objects, and anything whose parts are perishable is perishable as a whole. The universe is created, it does its thing for however many thousands, millions of years, and then eventually it burns out.
00:39:51
Speaker
And then at that moment of burning out, it again contracts and it becomes a fiery sperm or soul. And so sperm is a funny metaphor, but it's a, it's not one we use in conversation anymore, but right. They mean this kind of point of origin of life, of creation.
00:40:11
Speaker
And then once it contracts, it expands again. So basically the universe burns out, it contracts into this sperm or soul of the universe, and then it unfolds again.
00:40:23
Speaker
And so the unfolding of the universe that we're now experiencing is the unfolding of God from this moment of contraction after the last configuration, after the last burning out of the universe. And everything proceeds from this sperm or metaphorical point of origin in a perfect matter from this last burning out and contraction period. And the cycle kind of repeats indefinitely.
00:40:51
Speaker
So here's another quote on this. At certain fated times, the entire world is subject to conflagration and then is reconstituted afresh. But the primary fire is, as it were, a sperm, which possesses the principle of all things and the causes of all things past, present, and future.
00:41:12
Speaker
The nexus and success of these is fate, knowledge, trust, and an inevitable and inescapable law of what exists.
00:41:21
Speaker
In this way, everything in the world is excellently organized as in a perfectly ordered society. So again, that's that idea of there's this cycle of it burns out, the universe burns out, it contracts into this singular point, and then it expands again.
00:41:42
Speaker
uh, coming out from this point of origin, um, containing the principles of all things past, present and future, because there's this kind of unfolding of the universe that is following certain laws and these are inescapable laws and the universe unfolds in this perfect way. And the cycle kind of repeats itself, um, indefinitely and eternally.
00:42:09
Speaker
I think that's kind of it's kind of hardcore. It's kind of it's an interesting worldview of the universe. I don't also to kind of bring it back to it in a way that makes more sense to me. I don't know much about modern physics, but I think this kind of parallels with the Big Bang, if you know that idea and the big crunch. And so the big crunch is this idea that entropy of the universe will cause
00:42:31
Speaker
motion to stop and then at that point like energy to fade out and then at that point gravity will kind of cause things to reverse turn back in to a single point in the middle the kind of densest point and then maybe that moment that would be the big crunch and then the big crunch idea is that maybe that moment would cause another big bang would cause the universe to kind of contract to a single point and then expand out again
00:42:58
Speaker
So yeah, that's a lot, but I think this really interesting kind of world creation myth or story or idea that comes from the result of the universe being a material universe, and there's no kind of creation or creator that stands outside of it. I suppose one aspect to highlight is many religions have a view of eschatology where the
00:43:25
Speaker
humankind is sort of barreling towards this end point, whether that's heaven or some other union with God, some sort of form of final justice. It's a single state. Whereas Stoicism has more in common with worldviews that see everything in a deep sense as cyclical is on a cycle, not heading towards a final state of being the best.
00:43:55
Speaker
In a sense, the Stoics believe things already are the best. They're just becoming fulfilling, rolling out, continuing to cycle through.
The Problem of Evil in a Providential Universe
00:44:04
Speaker
And that's, then there's nothing else to hope for. What do you think about that? I don't know much about Nietzsche's conception of eternal recurrence, but yeah, it is this view. I think that Stoic determinism can be hard to swallow sometimes.
00:44:23
Speaker
But it is, metaphysically, this view that things unfold in the best possible way. They then, with the past, the present, and the future being predetermined by the intelligence of God,
00:44:41
Speaker
they then burn out, reconstruct, and are reborn to do the exact same thing for eternity. So it is like a literal cycle, and it is not a cycle you can break. It is not a cycle you can step outside of, because you're a part of it, right? Because the parts that you would use to break out of it is your God-like reason.
00:45:07
Speaker
which God has already obviously accounted for in its creation of itself in its best possible form. I mean, sometimes I think that can seem demoralizing to people the same way determinism can, but I think that's a, yeah, there might be some ethical insights there if you really, um, or, you know, some, some perspective insights. If you, if you take the time to digest it, but I think that's a kind of, it's, it's a, it's very, it's very intense position to hold.
00:45:36
Speaker
Well, I think we should touch on the problem of evil then. So I guess the question comes up. If the Stoics have this view, why do things often seem less than ideal? Why does it so often seem like that we don't live in the best possible world? Why instead live in a world that's imperfect in a number of ways, tragic, people make terrible mistakes, decisions and so on. What's the Stoic view on that?
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the Stoics, this kind of thing comes up whenever you end up with the issue of providence, whenever anybody says the universe is good and you respond to it. But I think when we're looking at this from a God angle, from what we talked about today, I think the way to respond to the problem of evil, why if the universe is determined by God and God is providential, intelligent and good, why is there this struggle?
00:46:28
Speaker
The answer would have to be that humans suffer because of our special ability and proximity to God, which is that because we have this reflective ability, it allows us to live out of sync with our nature in a way that a rock, a plant, or even an animal couldn't, which is to say we have this kind of reflective capacity. And that reflective capacity is a good thing to have. You would never not want to have it.
00:46:58
Speaker
And when well-actualized, it's the best possible thing for you and the best possible thing in the universe, next to God itself. It's the most intelligent thing. But the consequence of being self-reflective is we have the ability to kind of self-reflect our way into ignorance, false beliefs.
00:47:19
Speaker
out of sync with the universe in a way. And so I think I think that would explain it because I mean sometimes there's that explanation for the problem of evil which is that you know God gave us I mean often in Christian view it's this idea that God gave us free will even though we suffer because we have free will it's better to have it than to not.
00:47:39
Speaker
And I think the stoic answer might be something like that, but that it's better to be reflective than not, even if it causes us sometimes to suffer or to not live up fully to our potential. I'm not sure if that's fully satisfying, like any of the problem of evil answers are, but I think there's something, I think the stoics would certainly think we are better off having this ability to reflect than the animals are, even if it leads us sometimes to vice and unhappiness. Right, right.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I suppose one other thought on this is that so much of what people think is evil on the stoic view is not, of course. It concerns indifference, pleasure, pain.
00:48:26
Speaker
wealth, poverty, and so on. These are matters of the situations and what matters is navigating those situations skillfully for the stoic view. That's another aspect of the hardcore view, I suppose.
00:48:44
Speaker
I think they put a question mark next to the idea that so much of the world is bad, rather, you know, what's less than ideal is often how we respond to it. And we have the ability to respond to the world how we choose. And I suppose that's part of the benefits and con of being rational animals is, of course, that you can exercise that reason in good and bad ways.
00:49:12
Speaker
Yeah, so there's that idea. I mean, I think that's exactly right. There's like, why is the problem of bad, I guess, which is why are there so many bad things in the stoic answer? That'd be like, there are no bad things except vice. And then why is there vice? Well, because if there wasn't vice, there couldn't be virtue because virtue comes with exercising your reason well. But yeah, I think directly, right? Like a lot of the bad things dissolve away, which again
Stoic Ethics and Living in Harmony
00:49:36
Speaker
is a hardcore view, right? Like tell that to the starving child or something like this that, you know,
00:49:41
Speaker
Again, it is that idea that this is part of God's plan, this serves a purpose, this is the best of the possible worlds. It is that argument that you have to make to the starving child, which I don't think understandably doesn't sit right with many people.
00:49:59
Speaker
If you were to go full stoic in this view, if you were to have that full perspective shift, then you would, you would not view it as a bad thing. You'd only view the bad thing as you're getting too upset about, too upset about the starving child because you're now not living in accordance with nature or accepting things the way they are, which I think there is some truth to, right? You don't want to be. Okay. You don't want to be getting too frustrated or too bitter at these kinds of things.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yeah, thinking about how explaining evils to others, especially children, I think is a thorny problem. But at least you can see the Stoics explaining evil to themselves when you look at Marcus Aurelius, of course, and the different techniques he uses to sort of situate
00:50:48
Speaker
other people's vice or things he sees as imperfections, whether it's reminding himself that they're ignorant of the good or that things serve and fit into this higher purpose. Often things have a part to play, even if that's not obvious immediately. I think that's maybe another way into the problem.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah, I guess like, I guess the issue I'm running into is like, it's all good and fine when it's like, you know, that awful person sitting at court with you and you know, Marcus is right. He's like, he's bad because he doesn't know the difference between good and evil. And so he's using his reason poorly, but it becomes, you know, when, when a, when a volcano explodes and you know, it kills 2000 people and something like this, the issue with that, I could even see if, if, if
00:51:42
Speaker
If humans were detached from the world, you might even go back to that telos argument for humans and say, well, you're a rational creature. Do your best to rationalize the volcano. But when the volcano is also God.
00:51:53
Speaker
And God has also chosen at this moment to explode, you know, and take the form of molten lava, you know, whatever this, whatever the silly metaphor is, it becomes harder to say, ah, well, this is a, this is some sort of structure that we're not really picking up yet. Or, you know, you have to go through that argument, right? You have to take the kind of Epictetus's argument, which is that.
00:52:18
Speaker
Epictetus makes that argument about, I think this is Zeno, he's quoting, you know, the foot would choose to be muddy if it understood it was part of the body, you know? And so you have to kind of connect it to a greater purpose or function, but it's really hard to see that greater purpose or function. I think even now, yeah, I'm just like leaving the world of people, because I think a lot of this stuff makes sense person to person. But when we get into the world of like famine, droughts, it's weird to see that as, you know, the kind of,
00:52:48
Speaker
Christian view I see sometimes of like, God is mad at you and is punishing you to me makes more sense than, well, this is the determined unfolding of the perfect universe. Well, where does that, where does that kind of stuff have to fit in that? That to me is confusing. Yeah, I think it is confusing. It's challenging in some real sense. I think it doesn't make sense. Yeah. But at least I thought,
00:53:14
Speaker
There's a very short beautiful essay by Schopenhauer that I love, which is on the sort of a short meditation on vice and the argument that people underrate how vicious people are. And then the final paragraph, he says something to the effect of, but you should at least take solace in the fact that
00:53:37
Speaker
Although many people are vicious, they're also miserable. So the world is, in a way, its own kind of last judgment, bringing punishment onto the people who live in it. Very pessimistic, of course. But I think it also, what your remark about, you know, God wanting to punish people, that almost making more sense. It's a completely different kind of view of the nature of things, nature of evil.
00:54:06
Speaker
That's you know, at least intuitively almost does make more sense than some of these views about you know, here's a great tragedy somehow Things had to be this way Yeah, it's just like why you know, yeah, why couldn't got it done done it differently And
00:54:30
Speaker
What was the last thing I was going to say about this? Oh, I didn't, I didn't, I think it's worth bringing up now, you know, at the very end of this episode to the end of maybe we could have another episode on this, but this hopefully makes this idea of living in accordance with nature seem a bit more clearer or that it is living in accordance with nature, is living in accordance with reason, is living in accordance with God, which is basically aligning your beliefs
00:54:59
Speaker
to the way the world actually is and aligning kind of what you value and your expectations and what you want to the universe as it unfolds. So learning to love your fate, that unfolding of the universe that's outside of your control, and then taking accountability and responsibility for perfecting the part of yourself that God has given you control over, made up to you, which is that ability to reason.
Summary: Stoic God and Nature
00:55:30
Speaker
And that is what it is to live in accordance with with nature, which is to live in accordance with God because God is that nature. God is those that life force that those physical laws that abuse everything. And so that kind of ethical that ethical imperative I think makes more sense once there's some meat on the stoic meat on the bones of the stoic view of God.
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think it can be motivating, especially the lines from Epictetus or Seneca about how you have within you a fragment of the divine, and you ought to take care of that part of yourself. You ought to have the self-respect to act like it. It can be motivating for sure. And then, of course, reminding yourself that others too have that same fragment and deserve.
00:56:19
Speaker
deserve respect and you ought to work with them as opposed to against them. Yeah, that's nice. So I'm going to try to summarize it as concisely as possible just to leave a quick summary of what we've talked about today. So the first is the idea that stoicism on God or the stoic God
00:56:42
Speaker
So for the Stoics, God is a material, active principle that imbues the universe. It's mixed together with the passive principle in all matter. You can think of this like a hot breath, the pneuma, the life force of the universe. Since this active principle is in everything, God is literally in or imbues all of the universe, our self included.
00:57:08
Speaker
This active principle, God, provides form and function to the passive matter it imbues. It's what makes rocks have their structure, plants grow, animals have souls. It's also responsible for the physical world following physical causal laws and unfolding an intelligent providential nature as the best of all possible worlds. But there is a hierarchy to the active principle.
00:57:34
Speaker
with humans commanding faculty at the top. We are the most God-like and so we can be said to share a piece of the divine. This is metaphorical though as we talked about. Everything shares a piece of God. It's just that we have the most God-like part. We have the most fine active principle within us.
00:57:53
Speaker
As a physical substance moving towards entropy, God and the universe will eventually burn out into a state of pure fire called conflagration. After this conflagration, this fire contracts and from this contraction there is the sperm or soul of a new universe which proceeds out again much like the Big Bang.
00:58:16
Speaker
And this universe will likely be the same as our own, or at least very similar, and face the same conflagration later on in an infinite cycle of eternal repetition. And so that, I think, is the summary of the ideas we talked about today. Anything to finish this off, Caleb? No, just to say, there you have it. That's the picture of the world, the world you are living in. I hope you are listening carefully.
00:58:45
Speaker
Thanks for putting these notes together. I have a clear conception of the stoic God. I think, um, the truth of the matter has been revealed to me. Yeah.
00:58:55
Speaker
Uh, thank you Socrates. Um, the, the, um, the thing that I'm going to leave with, it was a point that you may kill. I mean, this is, this has been helpful for me, but the point I'm going to leave with is that idea of that kind of connection with other things too. There's this, there's this like, ah, this connection with the animals and plants and the rest of the universe. Cause there's this tendency to see ourselves, there is that one sense in which we are unique, special. We have a share of the divine, but there's also that sense in which we are connected with.
00:59:24
Speaker
Um, everything else in nature as well. And we don't want to see ourselves as too divided from that. That's the thing I'll be thinking about after this. Excellent. Perfect. Well, I think that's a great spot to end. Thanks. Thanks Michael.
00:59:40
Speaker
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00:59:59
Speaker
Stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.