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Judith Stove on Virtue, Providence, and Marcus as God (Episode 130)
773 Plays7 months ago
Why did talking about virtue fall out of fashion – and why is it coming back now?
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Judith Stove about that very question, providence, and Marcus Aurelius as God.
Judith Stove is a Sydney, Australia, researcher and writer, focusing on Jane Austen and her reception, as well as on Stoicism and other classical virtue ethics. Along with Simon J.E. Drew, she co-hosts the podcast 'Soul Searching With Seneca' at The Walled Garden philosophical community. She is currently assistant editor of the online journal 'Stoicism Today.' Judith is part of the organising team for Stoicon-X Melbourne, which is preparing its fourth in-person event in October 2024. Having published two books on Jane Austen's life and times, she is working on her third, about the legacies of Marcus Aurelius, to appear in 2025.
This is How We Become Godlike: Marcus Aurelius and His Monuments
(00:57) What is Stoicism?
(04:21) Community
(09:49) Finding Stoicism
(18:34) Where Did Virtue Go?
(30:09) Providence
(41:20) Does Caleb Believe In The Stoic God?
(46:15) Marcus Aurelius As God
(54:46) Resources
Recommended
Transcript
Marcus Aurelius as a God
00:00:00
Speaker
And also, and this is also maybe a bridge too far for something. But again, it's something I've grappling with as writing my book. Marcus was considered a god. He was considered a god in his lifetime and he was certainly considered a god after his death.
Introduction to Stoicism and Judith Stowe
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros and today I am speaking with Judith Stowe. Judith is a researcher and writer
00:00:29
Speaker
focusing on Jane Austen and her reception, as well as on Stoicism and other forms of classical virtue ethics. She co-hosts the podcast, Souls with Jean with Seneca, serves as the assistant editor for Stoicism Today, and is a part of the StoiconX Melbourne organizational team.
Judith's Focus on Stoicism and Virtues
00:00:52
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me, Caleb. It's a great pleasure.
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, let's start with this broad question. How do you explain what stoicism is these days? Okay, well, it's a philosophy. It's a way of life. I think a lot of people come into stoicism these days as a kind of a life hack. They might have read something about the dichotomy of control, as it's called, to be able to separate matters which are in our control and which are not, and really focusing on those that are.
00:01:26
Speaker
I think other people may have come into stoicism through more pop culture aspects, such as the film Gladiator, right?
Revival of Stoicism in Modern Culture
00:01:34
Speaker
And that kind of brought the names of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus back as household names into a culture that really didn't know about. And so I think there's been a few ways where people might come into it. And I think once they get into it, they realise that there's actually a lot more going on.
00:01:49
Speaker
I think one of the things that is key and maybe kind of tends to get a bit glossed over when people come into the philosophy is the whole idea around virtue. It's kind of counter-cultural really. I think it's probably been counter-cultural maybe at least since the 1960s or the 70s. And I think that might be why to some extent we've seen a bit of a stoic revival in the last probably 10 years.
00:02:18
Speaker
I think there's probably been a cultural hunger for a framework, some kind of moral framework that's really been lacking in culture for some time. But as I say, that sometimes takes a backseat to the life hack aspects. So yeah, I think virtue and the virtues is absolutely key to understanding stoicism. And so that's what I try and focus on when I'm talking to people about it. And once I've explained what
00:02:48
Speaker
what, courage. I mean, everyone's got an idea about courage. Self-control, that's another thing that people kind of might have an idea about and then learn a bit more about.
Key Virtues in Stoicism
00:03:00
Speaker
Justice is a very wide ranging kind of concept. And again, people might have an idea about what justice is, but in stoicism, I think they learn to give it some wider applications. And finally, of course, wisdom, you know, that's what we're all striving for. And so I think that's what really makes stoicism
00:03:16
Speaker
a philosophy and a way of life. So yeah, I think the virtue is a very key aspect that maybe, as I say, tends to get glossed over in some accounts. But I think it's absolutely fundamental and it's how I try to live my life.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's central. I suppose you have that idea. Stoicism is a philosophy as a way of life, which I usually think of as an account of what the good life is and then also how to live it. And as you were saying, I think many people come to stoicism because
00:03:50
Speaker
they pick up some of this advice about how to achieve that life that stoicism is ultimately aiming for, especially around emotion management and different tools around that sort of nature. But then if you dig deeper, you can see, oh, there's this whole vision behind what the good life is that one's point towards. It's not
00:04:10
Speaker
say managing one's emotions for the sake of feeling better or something like this. There's a picture of what it is to live well as a human being that I think is motivating, motivates a lot of people.
Community and Relationships in Stoicism
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I think, again, partly what might get missed in some accounts is the communal aspect. That was so key to ancient accounts of stoicism. And one of the key texts that, again, I always try and point people towards
00:04:37
Speaker
is Cicero's On Duties in book one. Now, Cicero wasn't a stoic. He was a Roman statesman and philosopher, not a stoic, and he had some quite fundamental disagreements with stoicism. But in On Duties, he was really following a stoic playbook and setting out a kind of the worldview. And he sets human life in, first of all, in its
00:05:07
Speaker
in its animal context, you know, the Stoics are very much conceived of humans as part of the animal kingdom, but with these special gifts from the gods that allow us to take a longer view. And so in Book 1 of Anjuti, Cicero presents us as part of born into and part of communities, and this is fundamental. Relationships are fundamental.
00:05:28
Speaker
One philosopher I think who's done a great job and I think he's you may have had a conversation with Will Johncock who's written a great book about stoicism community has really brought this aspect out recently because I think it as I say it does tend to get glossed over a bit in in the more popular accounts but it's absolutely fundamental and I think it's also something that can make stoicism more relatable if we consider it as a very communal and philosophy really focusing on connection.
00:05:57
Speaker
I wonder if you could say more about that. So if you think about some of the key virtues of stoicism, courage, how does that show up in community or how does that show up in other social sphere? Yeah. Well, again, Sisimo gives this great account. He actually identifies the four key virtues in this communal context and he says,
00:06:20
Speaker
that courage is great heartedness in service of the community.
Altruism vs. Competition in Human Nature
00:06:27
Speaker
Justice is giving people in a community what they're entitled to, what they deserve, what's appropriate for them. And wisdom is the all-encompassing virtue which enables us to live best in a community. And finally, self-control is, we need self-control living in communities because obviously,
00:06:49
Speaker
everyone else has their clients, everyone else has their own focuses. So it's incumbent on all of us to cultivate the virtue of self-control so we're not taking more than our share. So we're living, and again, this comes back to this keystone idea of living in harmony with nature, right? The only way to live in harmony with other people is to rein back one's own
00:07:15
Speaker
some of one's own tendencies or desires and so all these virtues turn out to be absolutely key for communal human life.
Stoicism vs. Materialism
00:07:24
Speaker
I just think that's so, that's so enlightening and particularly when, and I'll be very interested in your views on this too Caleb, I think a lot of people today
00:07:35
Speaker
particularly maybe if they're coming from a scientific worldview, they're focusing on kind of competition, Darwinian evolutionary ideas around competition. And there's certainly strong strands in evolutionary psychology that foster this, right? It's all about people are competing for status, people are doing this, people are doing that. And sure, that's certainly a factor.
00:08:01
Speaker
But it tends to push to one side the equally important altruistic, I would say, and prosocial tendencies that really are part of what Stokes would call the best way of following nature. So yeah, I think there's a number of reasons why people tend to overlook the altruistic and communal side of human life these days. I'd say another reason, and again,
00:08:29
Speaker
This might be a little controversial, but we often find that, particularly with a technological focus, we've got AI, we've got
00:08:40
Speaker
often people, often scientific accounts or psychological accounts tend to treat people as if they were like proto computers, you know? And again, that's the kind of a tendency that's totally at odds with, I would say, a stoic humanistic perspective. So that's another strand which might make people find it harder to look at things from the stoic
Judith's Journey into Stoicism
00:09:02
Speaker
viewpoint. So there's all these kind of cultural
00:09:05
Speaker
strands, I guess, which again remind us that stoicism is always kind of counter-cultural, you know. It doesn't go along with materialist priorities. It tells us to take a step back and to look at different priorities from success,
00:09:23
Speaker
money, fame, because these are all, for the Stoics, of course, indifference. They're neither here nor there. They can be used as Socrates reminds us in the Gogias. They can be used for good or they can be used badly. And so all these kind of cultural priorities, the Stoics really tell us to not worry too much about, but to focus solely on acting as virtuosity as we can. I'm curious, how did you find yourself to Stoicism?
00:09:54
Speaker
Okay, well, I was always interested in the classical world and at university I studied classical Greek and Latin, that was my honours degree. But I didn't use it in my work until many years, many years later, I guess, where I had kids. When they were a bit older I started to get back into research and writing and I started writing about Jane Austen and her period.
00:10:15
Speaker
because that's another period I'm very interested in. And a gentleman called Professor James Franklin, who's an Australian mathematician, historian of science, all around polymath.
00:10:27
Speaker
And he was the literary executive of my father, the philosopher David Stowe. So Jim gave me the opportunity to do some research. He had a research project on the ancient virtual self-control. It was called the restraint project. And at that point, I started to get back into all these ancient writers. I started reading Plato and Aristotle and Epicurus and the Stoics once more and thinking, oh my goodness, this is such a rich,
00:10:53
Speaker
resource, this virtuosic tradition, which really hasn't been fully explored in a modern context. So I started to get back into it then and started writing some articles. And then I guess things kind of were drifting along a bit. And then as for many people, it kind of started with a pandemic or actually for me just before. So in February 2020, my husband and I took a trip to Istanbul.
00:11:22
Speaker
And on the way over, I came down with chickenpox. And so there we were in a small flat in Istanbul. I didn't know whether we were going to get very ill. We would have to seek medical help in a language we didn't understand. But luckily, running out the door at home, I'd grabbed Seneca's letters and stuck there in a small flat in Istanbul with chickenpox, not knowing if I was going to get really ill.
00:11:50
Speaker
or what was going to happen next, I had Seneca with me. And he reminded me that being stuck in one spot, being unwell, and having radical uncertainty is a perennial of human life. And the fact that we kind of had forgotten about that was actually more the problem. This was more the norm, this position. And then, of course,
00:12:15
Speaker
within a few weeks, the rest of the world discovered that confinement, radical uncertainty and illness could again be the human norm. Now, as it happened, neither of us got particularly ill and we were able to go on with our trip. But it was that moment that I realised how relevant Seneca always is.
00:12:35
Speaker
and stoicism always is if we just let ourselves realise how relevant they are. And then, as I say, later that year in the pandemic, well, what happened? There was a lot of suffering, there was a lot of uncertainty, but there were also good things that came out of it. And one of the good things, of course, was
00:12:56
Speaker
connecting over the internet, connecting remotely, which really expanded in that time.
Post-Pandemic Growth of Stoicism
00:13:03
Speaker
And I connected with some people in the Australian stoic community. Later that year, we had our first online stoicon, which
00:13:12
Speaker
didn't know what we were doing but it was great fun and we made lots of friendships, lots of connections and that's kind of revolved. We've now had three in-person stoic on events in Melbourne. Of course the modern stoicism movement has what we call the big stoic on and that went online in the pandemic and it's still online and that kind of makes sense for such a big audience as North America and Europe.
00:13:36
Speaker
So yeah, as I said, the pandemic was key with all the bad things that came from it. There were also good directions that emerged out of it. And I think it's given stoicism and stoic commentators and commentary and engagement, a huge kickstart.
Introduction to Stoic Virtue Ethics
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Did you have an interest in virtue ethics before? I mean, of course, if you're familiar with the ancient literature, of course, you had some familiarity with virtue ethics. So I wonder if you were practicing some other type of philosophy, or at least it was something that you had instilled in you with a sense of seeking to become more virtuous, or that different framework that you brought to read more about the Stoics beforehand.
00:14:22
Speaker
Not really. So again, at the undergraduate level, I did take a couple of philosophy subjects. But at that stage, you know, it's funny, philosophy went from Plato straight through to Descartes. There was like nothing in between. And even at that stage, my introduction to Plato, I think we studied, we did the Seateaters. And then in my Greek class, we did one of the books, The Republic.
00:14:50
Speaker
And in neither case did it kind of gel with me. I just didn't get it. I didn't get what somebody was trying to get at. I didn't get his sense of humor. I didn't get his irony. I thought he was just annoying. And look, that was probably down to me. But, you know, I'm very convinced that the great books of classical literature and whether that's English literature or any language literature, whenever you read them,
00:15:21
Speaker
Even though you don't kind of get it fully at the time, it's there in your psyche, in your soul, and it's making changes at a subliminal level. So that when you come back to it, whether that's five years or 10 years down the track, it's made some changes and you are going to be the more receptive the second time around. I really believe that. And so when I came back to
00:15:43
Speaker
to looking at virtue ethics. No, I was just blown away, kind of. I thought, where has all this been? So, I mean, I was brought up. My parents were atheists. My dad, the philosopher David Stone, was quite an aggressive atheist, I would say. So I hadn't been brought up in any Christian tradition. But that finding the ancient virtue philosophers was just a revelation. And of course, partly through that process, I came to realize
00:16:13
Speaker
how, you know, the sort of the love-hate relationship that later developed in Christianity with virtue ethics. And that's, you know, that's a kind of a huge subject, you know, how much Christianity borrowed from the pagan moralists and how much they rejected of the pagan moralists.
00:16:33
Speaker
That's a very big subject. I think what's really interesting and something that's partly come about through researching this book on Marcus Aurelius, at the time when Marcus Aurelius was emperor, it was a very fertile period in Christian development, really. So it's pretty early on. It's the second century of the Christian era.
00:16:59
Speaker
And at this time, there was a lot of what was called the Christian apologists were starting to be known. And that's in the sense of the Greek word or the same as Socrates' Apology. It's like a defense. It's a defense speech in court.
00:17:18
Speaker
the Christian theorists at that point were not trying to be terribly different. You know, they were trying to assimilate what they were doing into the nine frameworks of the philosophical schools. So it was a very interesting period. And so I guess these relationships between virtue ethics and what later became Christianity was sort of in ferment at this time. There was just as there had been
00:17:45
Speaker
cross-fertilisation between the paying and philosophical schools. So for instance, in Cicero's time,
00:17:53
Speaker
as I say, he wasn't a Stoic, but he was influenced by the Stoics. The Platonists were influenced by the Stoa. Of course, the Stoa was influenced by the Platonists. There was even some cross-pollination from the Aristotelians. Just as that had been occurring for centuries, so it was starting to occur to some extent with this new philosophical school of Christianity that was coming along. So these relationships I found so fascinating.
00:18:20
Speaker
So yes, that's a long way of answering that virtue ethics as such was a revelation to me, something I didn't know about, but such a rich and productive way of looking at the
Cultural Shifts in Virtue Ethics
00:18:34
Speaker
world.
00:18:34
Speaker
You mentioned that it's something that has fallen out of fashion perhaps since the sixties or so, at least in the West. I wonder if you're going to say more about that as well, because I think that's a really interesting idea, interesting topic that I think can help someone's bearings when thinking about it. Yeah, sure. So this is something I did do some genuine research on as part of that restraint project because
00:19:03
Speaker
So there's a couple of different schools of thought, I guess. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Scottish and American philosophy, Alistair MacIntyre. He is one of the sort of the leaders in the virtue ethics revival, I guess. Now, MacIntyre is an Aristotelian. And his perspective, which has been hugely influential, I would say, is it was round about the
00:19:29
Speaker
enlightenment around about the time of human can and so on, that people stopped thinking about virtue and went down different paths around moral philosophy. And I've been thinking about this for a long time and partly because of my background in Jane Austen, right? So Jane Austen's writing in that period or just after that period of human can.
00:19:54
Speaker
It seemed to me that, well, she's actually a virtue writer. And it seemed to me, I don't think virtue went out the window straight away after human can. And the more I thought about this, the more it seemed to be the case. So I think people sometimes get a bit of a strange idea that it was with the enlightenment that people stopped thinking about virtue. I think that's not the case. In fact, I think people still, well, certainly in the Anglosphere, which is a tradition I know about, most of our,
00:20:24
Speaker
people still had an idea about virtue right through the 19th century and into the 20th century. Okay, there were other traditions coming along. I mean, obviously on the continent you've got Nietzsche and towards the end of that period, who's, as he said, I'm dynamite, you know, he was blowing up the virtue tradition as well as the Christian tradition. But certainly in the Anglosphere, there was a virtue tradition, I think, that persisted right into the 20th century. However,
00:20:54
Speaker
There was some very fatal things that happened in the 20th century as regards virtue ethics of, you know, there was a First World War, which, which tore through a whole generation's worldview, essentially, in Europe and America and Australia and New Zealand and all the countries that were involved in it.
00:21:13
Speaker
And of course, then we had the Depression, we had the Second World War, and the rise of new tyrannies. And it's not surprising that ideas around virtue probably didn't survive that well after the middle of the 20th century. We see it in the Anglophone tradition at this point where, and all those that's kind of happening between the wars as well,
00:21:38
Speaker
there was a sort of just a dismissal of virtue, ethics, or even traditional morality at all, or even morality. Even talking about morality, people with philosophies would say, well, this doesn't make any sense. It's all just linguistic gains. That's all just posturing. And it's all just saying, if you say, well, this is a good action, all that means is I like that action. Is that all that really means? And so in a sense, by your time you get to the 50s and 60s,
00:22:09
Speaker
not hopefully was there no sense of classical virtue ethics. There was no sense of virtue ethics at all, again, in the Anglosphere tradition. The decline of church going was a huge part of it. And again, there were some good reasons for that and some not so good reasons for that. But by the 70s, there was not really much influence from the church.
00:22:33
Speaker
there wasn't much other moral guidance around really. There was also, and I think this is kind of important, and have been kind of developing since the Second World War in developed democracies, the sort of loss of community. People are very, people are individualistic, they're pursuing careers.
00:22:53
Speaker
And there are a number of books that come out in the 70s and 80s around, you know, the loss of community. But people that gathered around their televisions was at the time rather than gathering at a community event. So all these things, I think, played a role.
00:23:07
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of materialistic values around kids are growing up without role models. There's a lot of mental health problems that certainly got started to get recognized around that same time. So a lot of these these problems or these losses or these lacks, I think started to be felt.
00:23:24
Speaker
And I think you can. And in the 90s, we had Sharon LaBelle's groundbreaking book about a dictator, so based on the art of life, which was the best seller. Right. So that obviously spoke of something in culture. In 1998, Tom Walz, a man in full, again, a novel that was hugely influential. Referencing referencing a picturesque. So again, these these pop culture phenomena spoke to something that was was needed in culture. And then by the 2010s, I guess,
00:23:53
Speaker
you've got the modern stoicism movement starting up. And this is going to be controversial.
Jordan Peterson and Modern Ethical Frameworks
00:24:00
Speaker
But I think something like the rise of Jordan Peterson is another reflection of a similar phenomenon in culture, which is, again, people, particularly younger people, looking for a framework, looking for something to guide them in the multiple choices which modern society has offered them or potentially offers them.
00:24:23
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, people in the stoic movement don't tend to be fans of Jordan Pearson. And there's, again, some better reasons for that and some not so good reasons for that. But as I say, I'm convinced that his rise and perhaps the rise of more less, you know, perhaps less constructive guiding voices is, again, a reflection of what was a bit of a vacuum prior.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, Michael and I have some discussions on Jordan Peterson where we have, say, a number of positive and negative things about him. I certainly agree that he is filling a void where a lot of people are looking for a kind of mentorship and guidance, especially about these questions.
00:25:05
Speaker
that virtue ethics aims to answer, you know, who should I be? And he gives a kind of, if not strictly speaking, virtue ethics type answer, a number of, you know, virtues are going to do play a role in his accounts.
00:25:19
Speaker
And I think for a lot of people, the word virtue has this kind of stuffiness or this kind of thing they're skeptical about because maybe just implies a kind of moralistic judgment, a kind of dogma or something of this sort that I think
00:25:36
Speaker
is a part of the story you just told, kind of rejection or at least skepticism of religion, authority figures. And it's interesting to see it making a comeback. I think there's some hope there. Absolutely. And I think sometimes
00:25:57
Speaker
A practical virtue ethics appears in culture under different names, right? So in Australia, for example, we have a school system, something that's called a values framework. Now, again, I looked into this some years ago. Unfortunately, it's incoherent, it's repetitive, it's superficial, and it's
00:26:16
Speaker
essentially been ignored and sidelined anyway. But such as it is, it approximates a framework of virtues, even though the authors of it don't really understand in those terms. So I think we see in culture sometimes these proxies for virtue, right? In Australia and New Zealand, we're coming up to what's called Anzac Day, which is the 25th of April. Now, in a sense, this is
00:26:40
Speaker
what passes in our very secular society as a sacred day. It's the day on which, and this goes back to the history of the early 20th century, it's a day on which Australian New Zealand forces landed at Glipoli in Turkey in 1915, and it was a military disaster basically. But it's a day on which we
00:27:02
Speaker
commemorate the men and women who fought, suffered and died and being injured or in some way affected by involvement in wars. And so in a sense, it's a proxy for celebrating the virtue of courage. It's just we don't actually call it that. So I think virtuetics makes its way into culture, whether we kind of notice it or not in some ways.
00:27:26
Speaker
And so interestingly, here's another kind of phenomenon which I think is virtue ethics by another name or under no name. Fasting as a practice, right? It's hugely popular these days. People do it for health. They do it for a number of reasons.
00:27:43
Speaker
But it's actually the ancient virtue of self-control in action, right? And people see that it has positive outcomes for their health, or their well-being, or their mental health. So again, we sometimes, as they say, see these things in culture without really recognizing what they are, which is our virtues in action. And of course, I guess the most obvious case that
00:28:08
Speaker
is our sense of justice, right? And we all have a sense of justice. And when something seems to happen that's radically unfair, we feel something which suggests, you know, as the ancient Stokes would have said, we have a sense of what's right. We have a sense of what should happen, what is deserved, what's appropriate, but we just don't necessarily give it that name.
00:28:38
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I suppose if you think, well, what is virtue ethics? It's an account of good character and thinking about ethical questions from what would the person with the best character do? What would the most virtuous person do in this kind of circumstances, as opposed to coming at the question from another frame, like thinking about what would maximize the best consequences? What would follow the right rules of moral conduct?
00:29:04
Speaker
Although those can certainly be useful heuristics, the virtue framing is more around what kind of person would I be if I made this choice, if I made this choice and comparing, aiming to be essentially the best you can be. And that idea, I think, is always present in culture. People have different accounts of what it is to be a good person or not.
00:29:28
Speaker
And there are tensions with these other accounts of morality, of course, thinking about just rules people ought to follow or promoting certain outcomes.
Challenges of Stoic Beliefs Today
00:29:39
Speaker
So it certainly is right that virtue ethics comes under other names. And there's always these questions around, are we promoting the right virtues? Are we balancing or
00:29:52
Speaker
Favoring virtue in a way that's ideal or we paying too much attention to arbitrary rules consequences that may not be that good in and of themselves that whether stoics would think of as Indifferent, you know the sorts of things we ought to manage. Well, not always maximize and so on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah
00:30:12
Speaker
And I suppose if we're thinking again kind of broadly, which I think stoicism manages to do, possibly one of the more difficult aspects of classical stoicism for people to accommodate or even take seriously, I would say, is the idea of a providential cosmos. So while on the one hand people might be on board with the sort of ideas around virtuous conduct,
00:30:40
Speaker
It takes it a step further to think about what we involve, whether the cosmos is in fact providential. We see this debate actually playing out within modern stoicism. There's certainly some spokespeople who put that to one side altogether, who rule it as inconsistent, I guess, with a scientific worldview.
00:31:06
Speaker
there are others who take it more seriously. And I will say, I'm someone who I have, I take it seriously. I take without having, without being explicit, I guess, about Zeus. I do tend to think that everything makes, works better. So there's a pragmatic aspect, but also makes more sense. If we take,
00:31:34
Speaker
the cosmos as, and this is fundamental to ancient thought, as ordered. And of course that's what cosmos means. And that order is visible or perceptible in so many ways, you know, in the regularity of seasonal phenomena.
00:31:52
Speaker
not absolute regularity, but broad regularity. And as Seneca says, the more we understand about natural phenomena, the closer we are to an understanding of what he calls God, or again, cosmos and nature. So I think for me, taking the cosmos as an ordered entity of which I'm a networked element,
00:32:22
Speaker
helps me to make sense of the world, I guess. But as I say, I think that's something that a lot of people would find hard to accommodate. And I think particularly, and so maybe the most difficult aspect for some people might be the idea that the good person can't be harmed. We have a society where there's a lot of resentment,
00:32:51
Speaker
There's a lot of sense of victim hoard. And again, for some better reasons and some not so good reasons. So I think, again, it always comes back to the counter-cultural aspect of stoicism. Marcus basically says,
00:33:07
Speaker
And he says it in a way that means he knows it's kind of provocative. That's how he's saying it, that the good person is not gonna be harmed, that the wrong that some people do can't harm me, and so it's not part of me, and it's not really a relevant part of the cosmos. So I think that can be a difficult aspect for people to accept. What do you think about that?
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's a good question. I think just to introduce it a little bit more for our listeners. So a lot of people will, as we mentioned earlier on in the conversation, will come to stoicism because they find it's useful for helping them solve a practical problem of their experience
Depth of Stoic Philosophy
00:33:50
Speaker
in their life. It helps them build resilience. And then maybe the next step from that is they see not only does it, you know, stoicism have
00:33:58
Speaker
these useful tips about how to think well, how to identify what's up to me, what's not. Practices that I find are powerful, but there's also this framework around what it is to live a good life. The person who I should be, I should be someone who cultivates these virtues. And indeed, focusing my attention on that is another way to do what I was trying to do to begin with, be more resilient, be more tranquil, and so on.
00:34:27
Speaker
And then, as you get even deeper still into the philosophy, you realize, well, what's grounding these virtues? What's the whole picture, as it were? And the Stoics, they are very systematic thinkers, and they have an answer, and at least part of that answer, to be very short, is you have this idea of nature. They have
00:34:47
Speaker
a God grounds it, but it's not a God that stands outside of the universe. It's a God that is, you know, the breath that animates the universe and that provides the order on one part. You can think of it as reason. It orders the universe and also has
00:35:04
Speaker
And this is a sort of providential aspect, this telos, this purpose that drives it forward. So you can think of the universe itself as a whole organism that's animated by this breath and serves a particular purpose, like other organs. It has its own aims. And when you read the ancient Stoics with that,
00:35:22
Speaker
thinking, you realize, oh, they do actually talk about God a decent amount, Epitetus, Marcus Aurelius. They all do and they have this picture of fate and so on that is informed by this picture of what they believe about God and this account of nature and reason and so on.
00:35:40
Speaker
So that's a little, I suppose, a little bit of stage, a little bit more stage setting for the listener. But I should pause there and then say, is there anything else you could add to that picture of the stoic god that you think is useful to flesh out?
00:35:55
Speaker
This is something I'm kind of grappling with a moment. So at our last in-person stochon event, Simon J. Drew, I don't know if you know Simon from the Walgarden Philosophical Community. I do. Yeah, so Simon and I had a conversation about, well, we did a whole soul-searching with Seneca live on stage. It was amazing. We were reading a passage from The Natural Questions, which is an amazing text of Seneca's. Anyway, after the session, a lady came up to me and she looked stricken, and she said,
00:36:31
Speaker
another participant, I sort of said, well, look, you know, I'm sorry that that's the case. But in fact, the Stoics do talk about God a lot. You don't have to take that on board. You know, the Stoics, ancient thinkers also said a lot of things about women that you don't need to take on board, you know, you can kind of negotiate that. But that's a long way of saying that this is something I want to do some more thinking about as to how
00:36:45
Speaker
Oh, but stoicism isn't about God. You spoiled it for me.
00:36:56
Speaker
it's best presented to people who are coming from a very secular kind of a background, which I guess I was to begin with as well, and who are mainly looking for the practical side of things. So yeah, I think it's a really live issue as to how we interpret and how we represent stoic views about
00:37:24
Speaker
God and the gods.
Reconciling Stoic Beliefs with Secular Views
00:37:25
Speaker
And it's not straightforward either. I mean, people tend to, it tends to be a little bit reductive where people say, oh, well, you can just swap out God for nature, right? You know, as Spinoza said, deo siwi natura, God or nature. Well, it's actually not really that simple, quite that simple in stoicism as far as I'm concerned. Partly because there was a whole cultural overlay, or not even an overlay, that's the wrong term,
00:37:52
Speaker
but a matrix, I guess, interwoven with philosophical thought, which was the polyseistic culture, which I think we need to take seriously because certainly Marcus Aurelius took it seriously. Certainly Epictetus took it seriously. Seneca is probably a slightly different case. But I think we need to be mindful of the fact that when
00:38:19
Speaker
where the Epictetus says, you know, it's appropriate to make sacrifices and offerings to the gods. And by the gods, he means Zeus, he means here, he means Apollo, and he means Athena and Hermes. If we don't take those cultural aspects seriously, then we're gonna be missing something. And also, and this is also kind of maybe a bridge too far for some people. But again, it's something I've grappling with is writing my book. Marcus was considered a god.
00:38:49
Speaker
He was considered a god in his lifetime, and he was certainly considered a god after his death, just as his predecessors were. Hadrian, Antoninus, Pius, even Faustina, both Faustinas, were deified after their death. Now, what did that mean? I think we need to take that seriously. We need to take it seriously culturally and theologically. But what does it mean to take it seriously? And I think partly what it means, and again, I'm kind of just working through these ideas,
00:39:22
Speaker
Marcus, well, he was very popular in his own lifetime.
Deification of Marcus Aurelius
00:39:25
Speaker
He was beloved. And people had a sense of what a virtuous person he was.
00:39:32
Speaker
So that kind of made it easy for people, I think, to think of him as having supernatural powers. And they did. It's quite evident that that's what people thought about him. And certainly after his death, we have this passage in one of the historians.
00:39:51
Speaker
I can't remember if it's the Historia Augusta or Cassius Diode. There's a couple of historical sources for Marcus's life, none of which are really complete, and some of which are obviously dependent on each other, so they're not actually independent sources. So the biographical tradition is kind of mixed. But there's this passage which says that after Marcus died,
00:40:14
Speaker
and was formally deified, people just went around saying, oh, well, he was given to us by the gods and he's been taken back to the gods. Now, that seems to me is a very kind of stoic way to approach it. And I think if we want to take seriously stoic theology, we have to take seriously things like that, the sort of the popular aspects of it.
00:40:39
Speaker
and which, again, people often think that popular theology and philosophical theology were in parallel streams that they never met. I think that can't be right because, again, you've got educated people taking both streams seriously.
00:41:00
Speaker
So yeah, it's a huge subject, Caleb. And as I say, I haven't really clarified my own thoughts about it, but I do want to take ancient theology seriously in a stoic context in a way that's perhaps not usual. And again, of course, as I said, counter-cultural.
00:41:20
Speaker
Nice. Well, we should get into the question about Marcus as God and this issue of deification as well. But I think just to make sure I answer your question earlier about what do I think about the role that the Stoic God plays in Stoicism for me? And essentially, I'm agnostic about these sorts of questions. If one is drawn to be systematic in the philosophical sense,
00:41:46
Speaker
I think one can think that there are different kinds of answers to what our human nature is. There are different kinds of answers to that question that are not necessarily the traditional Stoic one. And some of those are consistent with the Stoic picture and others are not. But at any rate, that involves a kind of agnosticism about
00:42:14
Speaker
discussion about the stoic god. Even so, there is a kind of metaphorical use that one can put that language to. And it's useful for, especially, I think, for getting a sense, a larger perspective, because that image of God is so connected with nature, this idea that you play a part in a greater whole, which even if
00:42:34
Speaker
understood in a very common sense way. You are interacting with one person. You can make a small difference to that person, which in turn is going to influence how they approach others. And there's this whole network where effects are traveling through that network and so on. These people play roles in these larger
00:42:54
Speaker
organisms of institutions that proceed in different shapes and sizes through history and so on. I think that push, if there's anything in the idea that's useful, it's that push to thinking from a larger perspective and the fact that as individuals you play an important role in these larger entities.
Epistemic Humility in Stoicism
00:43:13
Speaker
So that's my quick answer to that question. That's a great answer, actually. And I think at the very least,
00:43:24
Speaker
it's appropriate to acknowledge, and even people coming from a scientific work, for better or for worse, we could call a scientific viewpoint,
00:43:32
Speaker
would need to acknowledge is that so many processes in nature, in the cosmos, are poorly understood, right? We don't have access at the moment to a great many, even processes around plants and animals that we see around us all the time. A lot of that information we don't have yet. There is very much, well, as Shakespeare said, there's many more things in heaven than us.
00:44:02
Speaker
we don't necessarily have a good grasp or nearly as good a grasp as we think we do on many biological processes. So even if we kind of take a very reductive starting point,
00:44:15
Speaker
from an historic point of view and say, look, the more we find out about nature, the better it will be. I think that's a perfectly good starting point. As you say, in agnosticism, an acknowledgment of absence of certainty, I guess. We really aren't that well placed.
00:44:35
Speaker
to define a great many cosmic processes so we should yeah a bit of you know epistemic humility around that is appropriate I think and and as well as as I say helping us to appreciate nature from in the sort of the holistic way that that say Seneca does.
00:44:53
Speaker
It's most prominent in Seneca remarks, I think. Evictetus doesn't seem to be, so think, Evictetus is, you know, what's the saying? He's more interested in the human, in the human animals than he is in nature more generally. But then again, we only have the, our Inslection Act. But Seneca, Seneca and Marcus are both very interested in, in the cosmos as a whole, and as a, as an entity, and as a, as our heart, my guess, is one way to put it.
00:45:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. And if you think that the Stoic God has two aspects, this aspect of order and then also this aspect of value, which can be understood as purpose or providence and so on. And at the very least, I think everyone agrees
00:45:44
Speaker
Who is stoic agrees that order exists in nature and there's natural laws, laws of cause and effects. And those make a difference both at the macro scale and the micro scale in our ordinary interactions. And there is a kind of reverence one can cultivate for understanding what those laws of cause and effect are and seeing reality as it is not in terms of just the stories we tend to tell about it, which may or not be true.
Stoicism and Roman Religion
00:46:13
Speaker
So, I suppose that's another bit I wanted to add, but I do want to come to Marcus as God. So, I guess on this question, I'm of two minds. So, on one hand, there's these two takeaways, as there were, that I'd be curious to hear your interactive response to. So, first, I suppose there's the cynical one, which is that you always have
00:46:34
Speaker
in religions, this tension between thinking of God as an abstract, pure, really supernatural way as opposed to doing what makes God more concrete, making God more personal, into an actual person who interacts.
00:46:54
Speaker
And David Hume has a nice chapter on this in his Natural Histories of Religion, this sort of bouncing between this god of the philosophers as opposed to the idols. And he's of course picking on Catholicism to some extent here, where he's, you know, you of course have this pure Christian, monotheistic God on one hand versus the instantiation of this God in different saints, people who are of flesh and blood and so on.
00:47:21
Speaker
And I would think maybe one cynical reading of that is that people just need this entryway to these grander, more supernatural ideas through the familiar. And there's always that risk that the familiar turns into an idol and blocks further progression into thinking about the true nature of reality or God, as it were.
00:47:45
Speaker
I think deifying emperors is pretty close to that, where you have all these political reasons to deify an emperor, the fact that they're such a prestigious figure and humans, in a real sense, bow before prestige. And so that's one thought. But the other thought is that there's a kind of, especially when the Stoics are talking about and taking seriously the existing
00:48:10
Speaker
Roman religions, even if they don't map on literally to the beliefs about the Stoic God, there's a kind of respect for public duty, as it were, just recognizing this is how we organize our social life is around these ideas. And it's a matter not always of
00:48:30
Speaker
sticking to what the literal truth is, but performing my social function, performing my social roles in these kinds of contexts. And that might mean performing these kinds of rituals and doing them by the book, as it were, not just for the sake of these gods, but for the sake of my family who taught me these rituals for their standing and how my behavior reflects on them and the community and so on. So I suppose those are my two quick reflections on
00:48:58
Speaker
Roman religion and how the Stoics made sense of it. One, this more, I suppose, skeptical line about thinking about polytheism, especially deification of the emperors, but also this other maybe more positive thought, which is that the Stoics do take role ethics seriously, and there's always that question, you know, how do you behave?
00:49:18
Speaker
when people are doing these kind of rituals that you think don't perfectly map onto reality. I think often what you ought to do is do what is socially courteous and perform the relevant rituals. So what do you think about those two thoughts?
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah, look, I think they're spot on actually. You're absolutely right to say that the Stoics are certainly taking seriously or respectfully institutions. So that's why we have Epictetus saying, yeah, it's appropriate to offer sacrifice and do all those things. But I think there is, yeah, there's also this tension within Stoicism and this is what leads Seneca to say things like,
00:50:01
Speaker
Well, you don't need statues. You know, you can go to the forest and think about the gods there. And so, yeah, I think totally, I think you're absolutely right. The point about the Enlightenment attitude, I guess, to popular religion
00:50:19
Speaker
We see it in Hume. We see it in a lot of treatments of ancient religion that there's a story about the emperor, Bespasian, who was, you know, he was a career soldier who was, who found himself emperor after, you know, civil war. And he performed his first miracles in Alexandria and cured a blind person. And it's like, and that became a very typical enlightenment
00:50:47
Speaker
funny story about miracles. And it's easy to have that kind of cynical approach. On the other hand, miraculous cures do happen, right? You know, we know that. Again, it comes back to this, we need some epistemic humility about what may have occurred. People do recover from illnesses in ways that are mysterious. Again, diagnostics
00:51:12
Speaker
is very advanced these days, but it's not infallible and the same with treatment. So again, I think, again, we can afford to allow some space for these roles, as you say, this respect for roles that the emperor had. One of his roles was to cure the sick in his role as a god or as a proto-god or however, whatever state this patient was at.
00:51:39
Speaker
And this patient's also known for, just as he was dying, saying, I think I'm about to become a god. So how seriously did he himself take it? So yeah, I think all these tensions are certainly present.
Marcus Aurelius and Supernatural Powers
00:51:50
Speaker
One kind of corollary, I guess, to my more liberal account of taking these ideas around the supernatural very seriously is, and again, I'm wrestling with this with Marcus at the moment,
00:52:06
Speaker
I guess an enlightenment critique of some religious observances is that they're superstitious, right? And again, the Romans had this tension between religion and superstition. What's the borderline between religion and superstition? It's very hard to say. And also the borderline between religion and magic is very hard to identify. And of course, what is a miracle but magic, really, if you look in that sense.
00:52:32
Speaker
And so, as I say, I'm grappling with this idea of Marcus as a miracle worker, as a magus in some senses, as a supernatural figure, someone who was able to bring things about. And interestingly, and again, I've just been reading this today.
00:52:51
Speaker
he's associated, and I've found two cases of it now, he's associated with magic formulas, magic spells. One case is reported again in the historians that he was supposed to have had this magic spell and that that was how he was able to make peace with the Makamani, the
00:53:10
Speaker
German barbarians it's like okay and then his predecessors in the imperial house were kind of hunting around looking for this magic spell that he must have concealed somewhere and so that's it again it's funny right because it's at the absurd end of the superstition spectrum. On the other hand I've just been reading that in the meditations Marcus refers to what are called the
00:53:40
Speaker
Ephesia gramata, the Ephesian writings. Now, I suddenly saw references, I thought, what on earth is that? Well, it's a spell, it's a form of words associated with Ephesus. So I've looked up where Marcus is supposed to refer to this Ephesia gramata.
00:54:00
Speaker
And again, it turns out that it's in book 11, number 26. It turns out there's a textual issue. Nowadays, translators say, no, he wasn't talking about that. He was talking about Epicurean writings. So again, but my point is, I guess, that he's associated with these supernatural techniques, powers, events.
Conclusion and Further Resources
00:54:21
Speaker
And so how are we to fit that into our picture of Marcus? So that's what, as I say, one of the things I've got a chapter on Marcus Magus.
00:54:29
Speaker
Sounds like fun. Looking forward to reading it. Great, yep. Awesome. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? No, it's been a great pleasure. I mean, I think we've only kind of scratched the surface in a way of issues, particularly around the stoic god, but it's been a great pleasure and thank you for having me on. Of course. And where can people go if they are interested in your work or would like to learn more about you?
00:54:53
Speaker
OK, well, at the walled garden philosophical community and you just look for the walled garden, I've got a growth in that community where there's my writings and links to Soul Searching with Seneca. I've also got an academia page which has got links to some of my articles. So they're probably the two main ones. Perfect. Well, thanks again for joining us. It's been a blast. Thanks a lot, Caleb.
00:55:17
Speaker
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00:55:36
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.