Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life by Long A. A

Author:Long, A. A. [Long, A. A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780199268856
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2002-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

6.3 THE COSMIC PERSPECTIVE

Although Epictetus is virtually silent on the physical details of cosmology, he drew closely on those parts of the early Stoic tradition that suited his dominant interest in the world’s divine government and its implications for how human beings should dispose themselves. At one point he comes close to paraphrasing Cleanthes:

76 Education is precisely learning to will all individual things just as they happen. And how do they happen? In the way that he who ordains them has ordained. He has ordained that there be summer and winter, plenty and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites on behalf of the harmony of the universe. And he has given us a body and bodily parts and property and fellow human beings. Remembering this dispensation, we should proceed to education not in order to change the conditions (for this is not granted to us nor would it be better) but in order that, with things about us as they are and as their nature is, we may keep our minds in harmony with what happens. (1.12.15–17)

Epictetus’ context here is the freedom that we can achieve only by a proper apportionment of responsibility. Our responsibility as individual persons is solely over the area in which we are capable of being autonomous—the ‘proper use of mental impressions’ (1.12.34). Everything else is God’s business; it concerns us only to the extent that we adapt ourselves to it by understanding its rationale within the world’s inevitable and providential system.

Cleanthes (the one Stoic whom Epictetus ever quotes verbatim, see n. 14 below) had set the scene and tone for such thoughts in his celebrated Hymn to Zeus.8 There he praises and prays to ‘Omnipotent Zeus, prime mover of all nature’. Cleanthes addresses Zeus as both the rational agent of all natural processes (he mentions the earth’s diurnal motion, the heavenly bodies, and terrestrial events) and as a father, who has given human beings a likeness to himself. He presents Zeus as creator of a human race that shares his capacity for intelligence and moral understanding. Zeus stands to humanity and the world at large as the embodiment and enactment of ‘natural law’. In Cleanthes’ poem there is no explicit pantheism.

Cleanthes credits natural law, also described as ‘universal reason’, with outer and inner aspects. Outwardly, it refers to the inevitable order of natural events—the sun’s rising and setting, the particular structures of living beings, and so forth. All of these, we are asked to observe, display rationality and order, fitting together into a harmonious pattern. Inwardly, natural law or universal reason refers to the moral order, common to divine and human. In this moral sense, the community of law and reason is something that individual persons have the capacity to discover within themselves: in particular, they are equipped to understand that their natural good is premised upon intelligence and cooperation as distinct from self-seeking competition over fame or possessions, and sexual pleasure.

The only way the inevitable order of things could coincide with a universal moral law is for everything that happens to be right.

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