We Are But Dust And Shadows

 

These somewhat deflating but poignant words are those of Horace, Odes 4. 7. 16.  People may know them if only because they were recited by the character Proximo in the film Gladiator, in a different order.

In this Ode, Horace describes the passing of each season, and the continual cycle of death and rebirth in nature.  The fact that in nature, what dies is, in effect, reborn-- life eternally returning after dying in autumn and winter-- seems to have been felt to demonstrate that we humans, though mortal and doomed to die, would live on after death for the initiates of certain of the ancient pagan mysteries, like those of Eleusis.

But in this poem Horace tells his friend that we don't return to life once we die.  He doesn't offer hope of a rebirth.  He says we join those already dead, even famous figures and heroes we know have lived and died, and have never returned to life.  Neither shall we.

It seems a poem which advises acceptance of our fate, without fear. 

 The poet's friend is being told that it's folly to believe or hope that the end isn't the end, and that the reasonable and appropriate course is brave resignation in the face of the inevitable.  It expresses, I think, a very Epicurean or Stoic point of view.  This is unsurprising as it seems that most educated and sophisticated Romans favored one or the other of these philosophical  schools.

It isn't a particularly cheerful bit of friendly advice.  But wise nonetheless.  Leaves and plants die in autumn and winter, and reappear in spring and summer; but what reappears isn't what died, but something different.  The same crop doesn't come back each year (the display of wheat is said to have been a climactic part of the Eleusinian mysteries). Nature provides no analogy for our rebirth.

Lucretius thought that Epicurus did humanity a great service in maintaining persuasively that we don't survive death.  This established that there need be no fear of punishment in Hades once our lives ended.  Some of us, though, find the thought that we'll cease to exist frightening as well.

It's apparent that we've always longed to survive death.  I know nothing of modern physics or quantum mechanics, but it's claimed that they suggest that consciousness is a part of the universe and so ours may continue in one way or another.  That view seems similar to ancient Stoicism's beliefs regarding the nature of the cosmos.  The ancient Stoics also believed that fame, pride, riches. self-love and excessive concern regarding our success in life were were foolish and we are, in effect, but dust and shadows, and living according to the divine in nature is the only real good.

Perhaps modern physics provides support for the ancient Stoic view of our lives and the universe.

Mere Stoicism

Yes, the title to this post borrows from the title of C.S. Lewis' collection of broadcasts made by him in his capacity as chief Christian apologist after the death of G.K. Chesterton (or so I think).  Unlike Chesterton, Lewis was more smug than clever, a characteristic of apologists throughout history, but one which Chesterton managed to control.  Chesterton also managed to defend Christianity without creating an elaborate fantasy world, which strikes me as a more effective approach if one is inclined to defend a religion or belief system which clearly must be defended, or else there would be no apologists.  A religion which produces apologists must be questionable by nature, but appears especially questionable if its apologists must defend it by resort to fantasies.

I don't think Stoicism requires apologists, and don't intend to be one.  That's not what this post is about.  It's meant to explore the limits of Stoicism or what it must be to have no limits, if that's possible.

The limits I refer to relate to its effectiveness in achieving tranquility, and in avoiding sadness or despair.  I sometimes am inclined to think there are limits and that they're unavoidable, particularly with respect to what has taken place.  In other words, I wonder whether the maxims of Stoicism, which are so sensible and seemingly effective in relating to the here and now and anticipating the future, suffice to provide solace regarding the unending, irrevocable past.

The past would seem to be necessarily a matter beyond our control, and therefore nothing to be disturbed by according to Stoicism, and particularly according to Epictetus.  To the extent what took place in the past has consequences now, Stoicism serves to address those consequences, and thought and conduct may serve to diminish their effects.  One might remedy what took place in the past in that manner and in that sense, and one may, with effort, not allow the effects of past actions in the present to be unduly disturbing.  

That's to consider past actions.  What, though, about past omissions, and specifically those omissions which result in one having missed an opportunity, being unable to do what one desperately wants to do or have a life which one longs for now?  The disturbance and despair one feels in that case, especially in highly personal and subjective human matters such as love and happiness, can be painful in the extreme.  It can find expression in our dreams or in sudden encounters with things or persons we know from the past and are unavoidable.  You don't see them coming.

Regret is futile, of course.  There's nothing more futile.  As a result, it should be avoidable.  But how do we avoid what cannot be avoided because it can't be altered, and when what could have been cannot be?  There's nothing to fix.  Nothing can be made better.  Mistakes can't be "made good."

Perhaps the power of regret lies in the fact that nobody else is responsible for what took place, and what didn't take place.  It's easier to ignore or discount things beyond your control when you didn't cause them to be.  It's difficult to be indifferent to yourself, to your own acts, failure to act, or your own thoughts and feelings.

The Quality of Mercilessness

Who better represents the quality of mercilessness than Ming the Merciless?  The quality is even a part of his name.  Seen here is Ming as played by Charles Middleton, who was the Emperor in the three Flash Gordon series cranked out in the late 30s, early 40s of the last century.  Flash (played by Buster Crabbe) flew about in spark-emitting spaceships suspended by wires, foiling Ming's plans.  I don't remember Ming as twirling his mustache like Snidley Whiplash, but he clearly could have done so if he wished.  Perhaps those younger than I am (an increasingly large group) will remember Ming as played by Max von Sydow in the 1980 movie.  He had enormous fun with the role, it seemed to me, though the movie was predictably characterized as discriminatory in later years, like so much else.  Like us, in fact.

All, or most at least, know the part of Act IV of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in which the quality of mercy is extolled by Portia, or at least its first line: "The quality of mercy is not strained."  Portia is "disguised" as a lawyer, as indeed are some who call themselves such.  The quality of mercy may be an "attribute of God himself" as the disguised Portia says.  The quality of mercilessness, though, is an attribute of we his creatures, if indeed we are his creation, in which case one must wonder regarding the implications of the claim that we are made in his image.

But rather than speculate on God and God's attributes, let's instead consider the undoubted mercilessness of we humans.  

It's interesting that the "quality of mercy" speech is directed to Shylock, the Jewish merchant of Venice.  Jews, then as at other times, weren't extended mercy as a rule.  Shylock himself, as portrayed, certainly has none.  That a Jew is chided for being merciless by those Christians typically merciless towards Jews is an oddity.  There are those who believe Shakespeare was really expressing sympathy for Jews in this play, but I think that's a hard case to make.  I think it more likely he was indulging a Christian conceit that the Jews' obsession with the language of the Law above all else demonstrates that their religion is inferior to Christianity, which encourages love and mercy.

But, our curious history supports the view that we're merciless far more often than we're merciful, whether we profess to be Christians or something else.  In fact, we seldom have mercy for anyone or anything--unless it's to our own benefit, or at least does us no harm or requires no significant effort.  We're an inordinately selfish species.  It's not possible to claim otherwise with any degree of reasonableness.

It's been said that we're at our best when things are at the worst.  It's been pointed out that in times of crises we act unselfishly.  That may be the case.  But consider how infrequently these mercy-motivating crises take place.  Hurricanes, tornados, fires, earthquakes--natural disasters--certainly occur, and it would be incorrect to say they're so unusual as to be of no account.  However, when we take into account the time we live and have lived without them, our method of responding to them can hardly be said to be representative of our nature.  Crises are crises precisely because they're infrequent.  In most cases, in the usual course of our lives, we're indifferent to the plight of others at most times at best.

At other times, we seem to actually take satisfaction in the misfortune of others.  This may simply be the kind of satisfaction which we feel due to the fact that their misfortune is not ours.  Or it may be the satisfaction we feel when we believe that their misfortune is caused by their own misconduct, or by their failure to do what's appropriate, or what we would do or have done in their place.  We're smug.  

Sometimes, of course, we're actually responsible for the misfortune of others, by intent or without intent.  When we intend harm we're not inclined to be merciful to those we harm.  When we don't intend to harm, we look on the harm we do as being justified as we're looking out for ourselves.

I've felt and may have expressed for some time that philosophies and religions that espouse love and mercy don't actually motivate us in any important respect.  That is to say, though we pay them lip service, we don't truly love our neighbors as ourselves, nor are we charitable if it requires us to take any more than casual action, nor are we merciful unless shamed into being merciful or overwhelmed by sudden, extreme fellow-feeling we experience in moments of crisis when directly confronted with misery of the kind we cannot ignore.   Those we love are few in number, and are our intimates.  It's disingenuous and hypocritical to maintain otherwise, and in urging us to love one another and be merciful to all these philosophies and religions betray a spectacular misconception of human nature.

A more honest and effective stab at being moral and merciful would be one that encourages not love, but respect, and discourages selfishness and self-regard.  It would not raise as a standard or ideal a conception of human nature based on the occasional moral highs we experience in remarkable circumstances or our feelings normally limited to those close to us.

I've made no attempt to disguise the fact I have a high regard for Stoicism, so it won't come as a great surprise that I think that a more reasonable ethics is found in the first few paragraphs of the Enchiridion of Epictetus (or if you prefer of his student Arrian modeled on the teachings of Epictetus).  It is simple and easily understood, and doesn't require that we be saints or heroes.  It's a common sense guide to limiting our selfishness and desire for things and power over others which is at the basis of our misdeeds.  

We can't be merciless when we don't concern or disturb ourselves with things which are not in our control, as we'll not in that case act in a way which will harm others.  

 

On the Wisdom and Morality of Detachment

Our leaders are either sinister or buffoons, or sinister buffoons (the latter are arguably more dangerous, as it is impossible to take them seriously but they pose a serious threat).  Climate change is taking place, and there is little hope it will be remedied.  The rich get richer; the poor poorer.  Ignorance is not only growing, but is a point of pride.  So, for that matter, is stupidity provided it is stupidity in the service of ignorance.  Information and disinformation are omnipresent, and we seem to lack the will, or the intelligence, to distinguish between them.

It's unsurprising that we see a resurgence in philosophies or ways of life which promote detachment as a means by which we can obtain happiness, or at least tranquility.  Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Taoism are touted these days in books, articles and websites.  Yes, even in self-help books, heaven help us.  Each of these paths in various ways, sometimes even similar ways, teach the value of indifference to things which are beyond our control, or are sources of suffering and delusion.  Stoicism, obviously, is the path I try to follow, and its similarity to the Buddhist view in several ways has been noted.

I think it clear that there is wisdom in these philosophies, particularly in times like these.  But in times like these, is detachment from all the problems, and people, who are the sources of disturbance and suffering moral?  Shouldn't we be doing something about them?

If we should be, what is it exactly that we should do?  This is what I think has to be considered whenever it's claimed that someone should do something about anything, particularly for ethical reasons.  And part of that consideration should include an assessment of what can be done effectively, i.e. what can be done that would actually make a difference?  If we do what will make no difference, it strikes me that what we do we do merely to assuage our consciences, or out of vanity.  The sad fact is that there is very little we can do that will make a difference, except perhaps voting as is possible in this and some other countries, and speaking, and writing.  But most of all in doing those things which are in our control which can make a difference at least in how we and certain others live.

Unlike some other philosophies of detachment, Stoicism at least in ancient times encouraged participation in public affairs.  Thus Stoics among Roman Senators would defy emperors, and suffer the consequences.  But few are in a position to do much of anything similar to what could be done by powerful men in antiquity, and our politics has so degenerated and has become so utterly dependent on money that the chances someone of honor would rise to levels of political power without being corrupted is most unlikely.

Detachment can be combined with morality.  But what can be done morally is limited by what we can or can't do.  So we do what Epictetus recommended:  do the best we can with what is in our power, and take the rest as it happens.  Less and less is in our power, unfortunately, but what we think and how we conduct ourselves is, and it is wisdom to be moral in what we think and do.

Stoicism and Religion

I find myself wondering, now and then, whether Stoicism can be considered a religion, and for that matter whether it should be considered religious.  The answers I encounter when I read those who have addressed the question--those I've become aware of, I should say--are generally to the effect that it can be religious, but is not a religion.

This makes sense if "religion" is defined as a an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies and worship of a superhuman being or beings, i.e. something in the nature of the institutionalized religions with which we're familiar, and "religious" as relating to a devotion to an ultimate reality or deity (I take these definitions, roughly, from Merriam-Webster online).  Despite its growing popularity, Stoicism as far as I know has not become institutionalized or organized to such an extent, and certainly ancient Stoicism, at least, accepted and was devoted to an ultimate reality or deity, that being the Divine Reason.  That deity may even have been worshiped in a sense.  I think of the Hymn of Cleanthes.

In fact, some ancient Stoics seem even to have thought of the deity as personal, as having certain human characteristics and being concerned with humans as individuals.  One sees this tendency sometimes in Epictetus and Seneca.  The early Christian Fathers were fond of Seneca, and could only be so if they saw in his writings some reference to a personal God--though one must be careful in coming to such a conclusion, as the early Christians, like later Christians, would assimilate pagan philosophy in various ways when it suited their purpose to do so.

It seems clear enough that Stoicism need not be a religion, nor need it be religious.  Indeed, it may not even be a philosophy, in the ancient sense of wisdom and choosing the way in which to live.  We know that the wisdom of Stoicism is fundamental to modern psychological therapy such as CBT.

Well and good.  But I confess to feeling a bit disturbed when I see Stoicism used by, and associated with, the worlds of business and the military.  I've no doubt that Stoic techniques can have their uses in those worlds, but the great Stoics of the past were not interested in Stoicism as a path by which success in business could be obtained, or as useful in the development of good soldiers.  I think it's quite clear that the Stoics would consider success in business and in war as being the result of an undue concern with matters and things outside our control, regarding which we should be indifferent at most.

Whether it is or is not necessarily a religion or religious, should it be one or the other?  I think we humans have had and have now more than enough in the way of organized religions.  It isn't clear to me that they've done us much good, overall, and it is clear to me that they've been responsible for a great deal of harm.  Once organized as a religion, I think even Stoicism would lose much of what makes it wise and beneficial.

I do think it should be religious, though, for reasons I hope to explain.  This may be nothing more than an indication of personal preference or desire.

Let me say, first, that I use "religious" here much as it is defined by Merriam-Webster as noted above.  If Stoicism posits the existence of a Divine Reason that is the intelligence or generative influence infusing the universe, and if this spirit is immanent in nature, then I think a "religious" feeling results.  How is it possible to contemplate the vastness of the universe and all it consists of with anything but a sense of awe, and with reverence?  And if acting in accordance with Nature consists of being in accord with the universe, it would seem that by devoting ourselves to Nature is a devotion to the divine that's immanent in the universe.

It may be that in thinking or feeling this way I'm in a minority, because I haven't been able to find any author who sees this as essential to Stoicism, or deals with the religious aspects of Stoicism to any significant extent.  I understand Ricardo Salles addresses this somewhat in his work, but his book on it is so expensive I've haven't had much of an inclination to buy it.

One sees the Stoics referred to as pantheists, or the Stoic view of the universe as panentheistic, but these reference are made in passing, and left unexplored, as if there is nothing more to be said.  For that matter, one sees "modern paganism" called pantheistic, even by its adherents, but those who think of themselves as Wiccan, or Druids or Heathens seem ignorant of Stoicism and ancient philosophy generally.

Surely there's a religious kind of Stoicism in evidence somewhere?  Prepare ye the way of the Divine Reason!

Danse Macabre

I first became familiar with the Danse Macabre through the music of Saint-Saens, who wrote a tone poem by that name.  I thought it a rather jaunty tune, though in a minor key and so thereby a bit unusual, perhaps even grotesque but in an entertaining manner.  I didn't know when I first heard and enjoyed it that it was greeted with something approaching outrage when it was first performed; something I find difficult to believe, but all too believable.

I knew enough even at the time I first heard it to be aware of its association with death.  Perhaps it's jauntiness in that association is what critics and audiences alike objected to in the 19th century.  The use of a xylophone must have been particularly irritating back then.  But it is after all a dance, even if a dance led by Death, and it seems that dance involved hopping or skipping judging from paintings, engravings and drawings by which it was depicted.  So it seems to me "jaunty" well describes the part of Death in it, at least, cavorting as it leads us into....what?

In the Middle Ages when it seems the dance appeared as an object of artistic representation which became, if we can use the word, "popular", the dance as represented had much the same features everywhere it was displayed.  A skeleton or skeletons, sometimes decked out in the garb we associate with the Grim Reaper, leads men and women and children identifiable by their dress as Emperors, Kings, Popes, Bishops, nobility, merchants and peasants--all of the kinds of people of Europe at the time--in the dance of death.  The meaning and purpose of these works is clear enough.  We will all die, and will do so regardless of our status when alive.  Being one of the rich and mighty won't protect us from our inevitable dissolution.  We all come to the same end, die and decay.

At that stage of humanity's "progress" death was more familiar than it is now.  Life spans were short, medicine primitive, sickness rampant.  The Black Plague and other diseases ran through whole communities.  There was no escape from death.  There's no escape now, of course, but seldom was the phrase "here today, gone tomorrow" more applicable.

Clear enough what was meant, then.  But what was the reaction to the message?  Reaction would vary, one would think.  In pagan times it likely meant something different.  There are old Roman funeral inscriptions which state one reaction; that is, to eat, drink and be merry while we can.  That may have been the reaction of some in the Middle Ages as well.  But with the advent of Christianity came a different view of the Danse.  Eating, drinking and being merry were frowned upon at least to a certain extent; to the extent, that is, they were sins or caused sins to take place.  And so the Danse  impressed on many the need to pray for forgiveness, to repent, perhaps even to do good deeds.  This would not be thought to do much if any good, though, in some circles, where only those were saved who were saved by the grace of God, not their own acts.  Also, of course, there would be the reaction that one must do right by the Church and its rules.

In both pagan and Christian times, however, there must have been those few who reacted to the Danse as indicating the vanity of our concerns and actions,  All fame, power and money came to nought.  Marcus Aurelius wrote more than once of the fact that our words and deeds will not be remembered in the future and meant nothing to the world, which we may now call the universe.

How react to the Danse now, though?  Some no doubt react now as others did then.  Some would react like Marcus did.  Most Stoics would know what he knew.  To a Stoic it would serve as a reminder that we should treat things beyond the control of our will as indifferent.  To do as Epictetus said, and do the best we can with what we have and take the rest as it comes.  To understand that our deaths are according to nature, and not to be feared.  Instead to be accepted.

But this time is peculiar in its selfishness, I think.  At least, I think that's the case here in our Great Republic.  We're encouraged not to care about others--and certainly not to do anything for them.  Particularly those who are different.  It's perfectly all right with many of us that some are poor, or can't afford health care, etc.  Perhaps it's our Protestant background, and the myth of rugged individualism that make us uncaring.  Or, perhaps we merely resent that others may get something we don't have "for free."

Our selfishness causes a different reaction to the Danse.  I think that reaction is anger.  We're angry that we, and what we want, will end.   For some of us, that makes it easy enough to do violence, to others.

Ashes to Ashes

A Happy Ash Wednesday to all!

Well, it comes after carnival, so it seems appropriate that a post about Ash Wednesday would follow one about carnival.  It seems inappropriate, though, to wish anyone a Happy Ash Wednesday.  That would be to take the "Ash" out of Ash Wednesday, would it not?  No, not happy.

For several years--many, I suppose--I duly submitted my forehead to be smudged with ashes once a year, as did, and do, many others.  It seems I can't claim that this was or is a peculiarly Catholic tradition.  Certain Protestant churches "celebrate" Ash Wednesday as well.  The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church has no monopoly on the ritual of misery.

"Remember, man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return."  The Latin is: “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”  This is (or was?) the cheerful reminder dispensed along with ashes by priests on this insistently mournful day.  From Genesis 3:19.  We're reminded we're mortal.  So, supposedly, were those in ancient Rome granted a triumph--memento mori they were told as they rode their chariot along the Sacred Way; remember you are mortal.  It's a reminder that seemingly was ignored then, as it no doubt is ignored now, to the extent possible.  Who wants to be reminded of their upcoming death?

Nobody, I would think.  But it is apparently the function if not the delight of certain religions and certain of the religious to remind us of it nonetheless.  One could say that this reminder is made only in the course of reminding us as well that our salvation, and eternal life, is nonetheless guaranteed to us by the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, if only we believe in him.  And so we celebrate Easter.  If we don't believe in him, though, then we'll be among the dust burning in hell, if dust does indeed burn.  Or so some would say, in any event.  Thus, one could also say that the reminder serves as a warning of the horrible fate which awaits us when we die, unless...we repent, and change our evil ways, and believe.  Then, death will have no sting.  It will come, yes, but only as to the body.

It strikes me as strange, given the body-soul distinction made in Christianity, that relics of saints came to be given such importance, and were ascribed miraculous powers.  Some saint or martyr's bone is revered, and causes the blind to see and the lame to walk.  But why, if the soul has left the body?  Was the saint in question so very holy that holiness seeped into his/her body?

I think the Day of the Dead celebrated in Mexico is far less dreadful (literally) than such "reminders" of death as Ash Wednesday.  Unsurprisingly, this event derives from a custom in place before the arrival of the Spanish.  The dead are remembered and cherished.  Those who participate are reminded of death, certainly, but also of life as lived.  Those gone live again, or at least are treated as living; remembered as they were, and invited to participate in a family feast or celebration.

Even more significant is the fact that those living continue to live, and live with the dead and the knowledge of death.  Death is a part of living, and so loses its sting in a far more real sense than it does when its sting is thought to dissipate from the promise of some existence after death, one that can only be imagined.  The wise among the ancients, like the Stoics, thought death had no sting as well, and didn't fear it. 

Fear of it is inspired when it's viewed not merely as an end, but also a beginning--of suffering.  Death is a threat of sorts, now; the threat of hell and punishment if you don't do what you should do, think what you should think, in the craven system of morality that's been fostered here and elsewhere by those who think right and wrong are determined by divine command.  If they are, though, there is no right or wrong, really.  There is just the command.

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."  So says Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus.  So is our death.

(Don't?) Stop the Carnival

It being February, it seems appropriate to address the ritual, or celebration, of carnival in the West.  It's a time of feasting, parading, drinking, role-reversal and excess.  Reveling, I suppose it could be called; silliness, joyous stupidity, on glorious display.

It seems we can't attribute carnival to the ancient Romans, or for that matter blame them for it, as we can certain other celebrations.  The only festival of ancient Rome I'm aware of taking place in what we call February was that of the Lupercalia.  That festival was in the nature of a purification ritual, a cleansing of he city before spring.  A kind of spring cleaning?  In any case, it seems it involved the sacrifice of a male goat or goats and a dog, after which members of its priesthood would run naked around the Palatine Hill, striking onlookers with strips of the sacrificed animals.  This was apparently a cause of laughter.  Still, it hardly seems like carnival as we know it today.

It was a pre-Christian celebration though, and one the early Church decided was so popular it had to be allowed to continue, though Christianized.  And so it marks the period before Lent.  Thus, we're allowed to wallow in our animal nature and indulge its seemingly endless capacity for depravity of some sort or another before we do harsh penance for being human until Easter, that time of the Resurrection and, oddly, bunnies and eggs, real or chocolate.

The title to this post is taken from a novel by Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival.  The novel involved the efforts of an American business man who decided to try to run a hotel on a fictional Caribbean island.  As might be expected, he found it difficult to do, mostly as a result of the fact that he, as an American, was incapable of understanding that the islanders were not nearly as concerned with, or impressed by, the needs of operating a business in the American way.  As also might be expected, it is a stereotypical portrayal of a clash of cultures, particularly that of the Caribbean, for comic effect.  Fans of the Caribbean (I am one) may find it enjoyable, even for other reasons.

There's another kind of carnival, though, that Americans are familiar with as traveling shows involving amusement rides, games of chance, freak shows, vendors of various kinds of unhealthy food, and operated by those known as Carnies or Carnys, who have the general reputation of con artists.

I begin to wonder whether our Glorious Republic has taken on the aspect of this latter kind of carnival.  Whether, in other words, it has become a vast, stationary show put on by con artists of one kind or another, who seek for selfish reasons to distract and amuse us while they fleece us like the dumb, gullible sheep we seem intent on being.

It's a show where freaks abound, and are on permanent and blatant display.  There are rides and games aplenty, shills, hawkers, barkers, con artists are everywhere.

It's a carnival of the irrational, even of the absurd.  Professional athletes praise God for their victories, and this is found admirable but should be viewed as blasphemous--what kind of God intervenes to decide the outcome of a football/basketball/baseball game?  A very small one, I would think.  At least Homer's gods intervened in the serious business of a war, though even a war on this tiny dot in the universe can only be of slight significance.

There are outcries over the fact that a character in a movie is not portrayed as being openly gay, because the author of the work decided to indulge an impulse, incomprehensible to me, to declare the character's sexual preferences.  If Dumbledore is gay, what's the sexuality of the other non-existent characters in those books or movies?  Does Hagrid practice bestiality?

Our politicians are too busy trying to win political points, accumulate cash, and browning their noses to engage in the nation's serious business.  Our artists, such as they are, thoughtless and mendacious.  Our statesmanship is short-sighted, our culture--well, perhaps Oscar Wilde was right about us.

Should the carnival that America has become stop, or continue?  Epictetus wisely said that life is a feast, and that we should sample what comes our way during the feasting that's to our liking, taking never too much or too little, without hurry.   We can't control the carnival; neither can we control the feast.  The show will go on, it's fruitless to protest or deplore the fact that it does and will.  What can we do but the best we can that's within our power?  Enjoy the carnival, if you can.  If you can't, ignore it.

Failing Hands

In the past month or so, I've fallen three times.  For no good reason.  That's not to say there's ever a good reason for falling, although I suppose that if it's in the course of ducking a projectile of some kind, that would be one.

The falls weren't debilitating, though the last two may be attributed to a debilitation in the thigh or knee resulting from the first.  They nonetheless serve to remind me of age and aging and, most uncomfortably, of my age and the all-too undeniable fact that I'm aging.

The "failing hands" referred to in the title to this post are those of the dead, said (somewhat unreasonably) by the poet who wrote In Flanders Field to throw the torch, meant to represent their quarrel with the foe, to those others who will replace them in the fight.  I venture to say that the dead have no hands, and that if they can be said to have them they are not failing but have failed entirely.  "Failing" is nevertheless something age can cause hands, and other parts of the body, to do, and "hands" may mean the hands of a clock as well as those of a man, and a clock measures time as it passes and as time passes we age. 

Aging is a curious thing.  It's association with time in the form of clocks is interesting and suggestive.  Clocks run down, and so do we.  Time passes, and we, eventually, pass away.  Why do we age, with time?  Why does age bring with it the successive decrease of strength and vitality and the increase in weakness and vulnerability?  Time's arrow wounds us and that wound is ultimately fatal.

It's disturbing and has disturbed many throughout--yes, I'm afraid--time.  Some it disturbs mightily.  Hemingway, it seems, despaired of life in part because he was unable to enjoy what he felt was good in it.  In his case that apparently included the ritualistic killing of bulls and causing the deaths of various fish and animals.  Be that as it may, though, he could no longer take his part in what was good as he had in the past and this exacerbated his depression and alcoholism and the possible bipolar disorder which ran in his family.

Others have even rejoiced in it, though.  At least, they've purported to do so.  Those have typically been convinced that life is bad in some sense, or a mere sojourn; a temporary and painful journey required for entry into a sublime state beyond the body.  Yeats compared an old man to a tattered coat on a stick, claiming by implication that is all an old man is, unless "soul claps it hands and sings and louder sings, for every tatter in its mortal dress."  I quote that from memory and may be wrong, but it's a wonderful line in a wonderful poem, and seems apt for those who think of life as, ultimately, a burden.

According to Epictetus, we are little souls carrying around corpses.  Another striking phrase.  Stoics as well as some Christians, and others, have thought that our lives as mortals are insignificant in the end.  This makes sense as the Stoics thought that what was divine in us is not our bodies, but the soul which partakes in the divine and is a part of it.  However, the Stoics could not hate the body or our lives as I think Christian zealots did and still do.  The divine was a part of the universe to them, a part of all that lives in the universe as well.  When the body dies and dissolves, that which is divine in us remains as part of the living universe.

What is simply is.  We age, and as Epictetus also said we should do at all times, we continue to do the best that we can with what is in our power and take the rest of what time and age bring as it happens.

Stoicism And Our Times

Not all that long ago, a man named Frank McLynn published a biography of Marcus Aurelius.  For the most part, the author expressed admiration for his subject.  He was not as kind to certain of those individuals who surrounded the emperor, such as Marcus Cornelius Fronto, who taught him rhetoric and it seems grammar, but McLynn's dismissal of that gentleman as a fussy pedant is tolerable enough.  What I found less understandable was the author's attitude towards the philosophy to which the emperor was devoted--Stoicism.

Especially puzzling was the author's view of Epictetus, who we know Marcus admired.  McLynn refers to Epictetus as a kind of spoilsport, a party pooper; someone full of advice regarding how not to have fun.  It's no wonder, according to McLynn, that the emperor was melancholy having Epictetus as a guide or ideal.

It's strikes me as something of a marvel that someone would write a biography of Marcus Aurelius while laboring under the impression that Stoicism is a grim, dull, repressive, saddening philosophy.  But wonders never cease, to coin a phrase.  Neither, however, has Stoicism or the Meditations or Thoughts of the emperor, or the Enchiridion and Discourses of Epictetus, though what they are remain misunderstood even by professed and professional historians.

In this Age of Instantaneous Emoting, I suppose it's to be expected that any philosophy which promotes equanimity and tranquility and the use of our reason would be seen as perverse, or perhaps dull and uninteresting at best.  And yet, strangely enough, Stoicism seems to be experiencing a surge in popularity.  That seems to be the case based on any search of the Internet, at least.  There are evidently still enough McLynns in the world to indicate the old view that Stoics are repressed, unemotional dullards is still around if it doesn't flourish.  How do we explain the growing popularity of Stoicism given the increasingly frenzied times?

First, I take it as a sign that some of us, at least, are growing tired of their own self-indulgence and particularly that of others.  We're able now to know of everything done or said or thought by everyone, but especially by those who are considered famous for one increasingly insignificant reason or another.  Also, everyone significant or otherwise is eager to tell everyone else what they do or say or think.  More and more, perhaps, we don't want to know such things or wish to remain unaffected by them.  As a result the insight that what is not in our control should be a matter of indifference to us is comforting.

Second, I think it possible that those who are religiously inclined find the dogma of traditional, institutional religions less and less appealing or less and less believable.  They've discovered that there are options available to the spiritual which don't require a belief in miracles, a creator of a vast universe with curiously human characteristics and desires, injunctions against certain kinds of sexual behavior, rules of divine origin regarding eating certain foods and wearing certain clothes, and beliefs which are incompatible with what we learn through science.  Stoicism provides such an alternative.

Third, I think the acceptance of Stoic dictums and the practice of Stoicism provides protection from the incessant deluge of negative emotions, news and conduct to which we're exposed now on a daily basis, and simultaneously a source of strength.  It allows us to keep our heads when all those around us are losing theirs.  Stoics know that they can always control themselves, regardless of the circumstances, because they know what's in their control and what is not.  They know that our lives are what our thoughts make them, and discipline themselves so that their thoughts aren't overwhelmed by dangerous emotions or desires but guided by their ruling capacity.

Our times are noisy, frightening, anxious, dangerous, disturbing, but Stoicism shows us that we need not be frightened, anxious or disturbed and can achieve that through the use of our own intelligence.  What can be more appealing in a chaotic world?

Stoicism, God and Some Consequences of Belief

The immanent God of the universe which is characteristic of Stoicism would seem to be necessarily different from the anthropomorphic God or gods one finds in most religions of the West. Some contend that two, at least, of the later Stoics--Epictetus and Seneca--conceived of God as more "personal" than other ancient Stoics. While I think it's true that Epictetus refers to God with a kind of fondness which seems suited to a personal God, and even it appears spoke (jokingly I believe) as if God spoke to him, I think fondness isn't at all inconsistent with the reverence for nature which would be induced by belief in an immanent deity. So I doubt the God of the Stoics ever was a personal one.

I'm sure that those who believe in a personal God, concerned with we humans more than anything else, our actions, thoughts, what we want, who we have sex with, what we wear, etc., find this conception comforting and satisfying, that kind of deity is one I find hard to reconcile with the God of the vast universe. The Busybody God, as I've called him, isn't what I would expect one immanent in the universe to be. If there was a lesser God who was peculiarly concerned with Earth, it could well be the Busybody God.

The personal God most believe in now, and who has been worshipped in the past is of course not thought of as a God of the Earth solely. Though certainly a personal God, and one with some disturbingly human characteristics, those who believe think of him as being God of the universe nonetheless. Apparently, though, their God of the universe is particularly concerned with human beings living on a tiny planet in a tiny solar system located in one of billions of galaxies. Some think this God actually became one of us. Sort of.

Just why a God of the universe--one immanent in it or, as it seems many prefer, one immanent in it who nevertheless created it and so is apart from it--would be so concerned is something I think very unclear. But there are other consequences of belief in a personal God which I think create problems for us of a profound nature, and which I think can be avoided if we believed in the Stoic version of God.

The belief in a personal God tends to create conflict among us, because we're the concern of such a God. Though the same in essential respects, we're different in many ways which, though superficial, are emphasized because we have lived in groups which foster certain beliefs and norms regarding dress, food, acceptable conduct, sex, law, religious beliefs. Our personal God is concerned with us, and so approves of us and those like us, naturally enough. Those who aren't like us don't have God's approval, almost as a matter of course, until such time as they become like us. Those who don't believe in our personal God are outsiders, strangers, enemies. They must be; God wouldn't be concerned with us if he didn't approve of us. Though he disapproves of us from time to time, we can get back in his good graces because he's concerned with us when we seek forgiveness and act as we should.

An impersonal God, on the other hand, isn't especially concerned with us and as a God of the universe (in Stoicism, God in the universe) wouldn't be concerned with what we wear, eat, who we have sex with, what days we treat as holy, whether we believe in him; in other words, what is typically the concern of organized religion would be of no consequence to such a God. What is the cause of conflict among us cannot have its basis in the belief in an immanent God of the universe entire.

Such a God would as well have none of the characteristics we find comforting, however. Such a God wouldn't love us, wouldn't watch over us a parent would, wouldn't listen to our pleas, etc. Such a God wouldn't be impressed by our ceremonies or rituals. Such a God would in fact be unfeeling; wouldn't have our feelings, in fact, or be in the least bit troubled by them.

We may be saddened by aspects of an unfeeling, impersonal God, but it doesn't follow that without a personal God our lives have no meaning or we may do whatever we want. Impersonal though such a God may be, as it is immanent all of nature partakes in it; so we and all other creatures do so. This knowledge should have the effect that we treat all others (in fact all of nature) as divine, worthy of reverence and respect. What other people may do will not necessarily be divine and may in fact be wrong or harmful to others. That may well create conflict and require action on our part. Otherwise, though, their conduct to the extent it causes no harm is no cause of concern to us. Why should we cause no harm to others? Why should we prevent them from doing so? Because God is immanent in them and in all else.

The Stoic injunction to be indifferent to what is not in our control, and not to be disturbed by it, fits well within this conception of the deity. It also would minimize the tendency to do wrong to others, because those things which normally motivate us to do harm (desire for wealth, fame, power) would not longer do so. We wouldn't be motivated by concerns for things beyond our control. What would motivate us would be the desire to do the best we can with what we have. To live in accordance with nature, which is to say live reasonably, to do no harm, to benefit to the extent we can the rest of the universe of which we're a part.

It's a very spare, simple view of divinity and the spiritual, and requires no myriad of rules, proscriptions, ceremonies. But if it's accepted it diminishes the adverse consequences of belief in God which have otherwise been encouraged throughout out history, largely due to our own self-regard.

What's a Stoic to do?

An aspiring Stoic is bound to ask himself/herself:  What is the appropriate, which is to say Stoic, response to our recent presidential election, its unusual result and its likely effects on our nation and the world?  What's a Stoic to do?

I don't know of any tenet of Stoicism which requires that we ignore what took place or the poor qualities of the candidates and the electoral process generally.  Nor do I think a Stoic is in any way bound to consider the circumstances to be anything but what they are, i.e. that we've elected as our president an inexperienced, arrogant, ignorant, vulgar, obnoxious and seemingly scatterbrained person.  That person will soon fill the executive branch of our government with his yes men (maybe even a woman or two, if they're physically attractive) and like-thinking lackeys.  A Stoic values reason, and that's what reason indicates.

Stoicism doesn't demand that we ignore reality.  Instead, it teaches that we should not be unduly disturbed by things outside our control.  A great deal of what's now taking place is quite beyond my control, and is disturbing.  However, as a Stoic, I'm enjoined to remain tranquil and, essentially, unaffected.  As Epictetus said, I should do the best I can with what I have, and take the rest as it comes.

Very well, then.  I shouldn't allow the capering of those we've foolishly entrusted with the future of our nation and the world to render me miserable.  So much for taking the rest as it happens.  What is the best I can do with what I have, though, in the here and now?

What I have is what is in my power.  So, I have myself; what I think, feel and do.  There's nothing that hinders me from doing what I do well, or doing good, or being just, fair, kind, using my reason, etc.; in short, there's nothing which prevents me from doing what a person should do in order to live a life in accordance with nature, secundum naturam.

There may be some who claim, however, that more than this is required.  It's been maintained that Stoicism accepts the status quo, that it's a form of quietism, and that in its emphasis on indifference to what's beyond our control it ignores the need to take action required to change the world for the better.

But what's in our power may well enable us to do such things, and such things may be the best we can do with what we have.  So there's no conflict between changing the world for the good and Stoicism.  It's reasonable, though, to determine first what we can do for that purpose that would be effective.  In other words, we shouldn't feel obligated to engage in action of any kind provided it expresses the fact that we're displeased with the status quo.  Some of that action could be foolish or harmful.  Whether or not we engage in violence is something within our power, for example, and violence isn't something which is consistent with Stoicism in most cases.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:  "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."  The Stoic will let the future come, then, and in response to it do that which reason indicates is appropriate, and condemn that which reason indicates is not.

Thoughts on "Muscular Christianity"

The Victorian Era is famous, or infamous, for a number of peculiarities.  What's been called--rather uneasily, I think--"Muscular Christianity" is one of them, or so I believe.

"Muscular Christianity" is the name of a movement of sorts which associates Christianity with physical exercise, physical health, team sports and such, not of humans generally but of men specifically.  It's a very if not exclusively manly Christianity.  Ostentatiously manly, in fact. 

It's said to have had its genesis, as it were, in British authors like Charles Kingsely and Thomas Hughes.  Hughes, it may be remembered, was the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a kind of celebration of the life experienced by boys in the English public schools of the time.  Hughes, his book and his hero were spoofed by George MacDonald Fraser in his wonderful series of books which were the supposed memoirs of Harry Flashman, a rogue and scoundrel who, in Hughes' book, also attended Rugby when Tom Brown was there until expelled for drunkenness.  Frasier's Flashman manages to be present at virtually all significant event of the era and though he's a coward and reprobate also thrives, and is in fact honored.

In the U.S., this form of pious muscularity has been associated with Teddy Roosevelt (called "The Great American Sissy" by Gore Vidal, by the way) and the YMCA.  It's adherents seem to maintain that this kind or brand of Christianity looks back to medieval chivalry in that it champions protection of the weak by the strong, and it's been claimed that it has a basis in Scripture.

This seems dubious.  From what I've read, the story of Jesus' anger at the money changers is considered scriptural authority or sanction for "Muscular Christianity."  It's beyond dispute that muscles were required to tip over the tables of the money changers (unless Jesus, being God after all, and so not required to make use of muscles, threw them about by other means).  However, Jesus presumably used his muscles for most everything he did as a man, and that's the case with normal men as well.  So the use of muscles in and of itself would not seem to be peculiarly Christian or Christ-like.

It would seem then that what is considered important by Muscular Christians is the manner in which Jesus used his muscles in this case; that is to say, violently.  But if violent conduct, even righteous violent conduct, is what's being touted there are difficulties with contending that this is what Christianity is or should be.  According to the Gospels, Jesus was a great fan of nonviolence, as in turning the other cheek for example.  Paul's references to athletic events are also referred to, but the ancient pagans often used such events as analogies even when philosophizing, e.g. Epictetus.

If ancient times or early Christianity are to be considered, it's much easier to find evidence of Muscular Pagans than Muscular Christians.  Most Christians refused to even serve in the Roman military, at least until Christians began to become prevalent in the imperial administration.  They condemned the Roman games.  The early Christians could hardly be said to have emphasized the perfection and beauty of the human body.  They were more likely to complain of it and damn it as sinful.  Ascetics were idolized by early Christians, not athletes.

Of course, in the 19th century it would have been difficult for most in England and America to think of physical exercise of any kind as being anything but a manly pursuit.  Women who engaged in it were likely considered odd, abnormal in a particularly disturbing way.  So to the extent physical activity of the kind involved in sports, hunting or war were deemed religious activities or thought to be activities which could be engaged in for religious reasons, it's unsurprising that it was taken for granted that the actors would be men.

But the idea of manly Christianity as a special, better kind of Christianity, or of Christianity as being a manly religion, seems rather odd these days; even risible, in fact.  For someone like me, alas, the old SNL skit about the good ship The Raging Queen and the manly ports at which it called comes to mind whenever the word "manly" is used.  The relationship between Muscular Christianity and idealization of  English public schools (and the YMCA at least as portrayed in a certain popular song) similarly encourages association with a particular kind of manliness, one which may be seen now and then when the female and the feminine are absent from the life being lived.  It was arguably very much on display in ancient Greece, where women simply had no place in social life.  But perhaps I'm too inclined to mockery.

Assuming I am too much so inclined, though, I still think the idea of a Muscular Jesus, exercising regularly, engaged in roughhousing and wrestling or whatever sports were popular at the time in Palestine, to be untenable.  Romans of the time, at least of a particular age, regularly patronized the public baths in which it was common for these activities to take place, but Christians weren't known to frequent the baths any more than they did the ludi.

Muscular Christianity, then, has nothing to do with early Christianity.  I think it likely it has much to do with Victorian values, instead, certain of which remain significant to some even in these times.  I suspect that there is behind it a belief that certain kinds of physical exertion serve to keep the mind occupied and so incapable of erring in other ways; the idle mind being the Devil's playground.  It may also be thought to channel physical exertions away from our base sexual urges and into something more desirable, something which requires discipline and conformity, like sports or, if appropriate, war. 

What's Wrong about Rights

Legal rights are, generally, most useful and beneficial.  What we think of as rights is a relatively new development in the law.  The concept of legal or human rights (as we understand them now) seems to almost leap forth in the 18th century, from somewhere.  Perhaps that wretched fellow Rousseau played a part in this, perhaps there was something more complicated involved. 

We don't see it much (or at least I don't) in ancient times in the West; I'm not certain we see it at all in the East.  Roman law is vast, but beyond the view that certain people are due certain things by virtue of their status--e.g. a Roman citizen being due an appeal to the emperor--individual rights don't factor large in the days extending from the Twelve Tablets to Justinian's Codex.

I've read that the concept of rights has its basis in the idea of natural law.  I question this, though.  Natural law certainly appears in Roman jurisprudence and may be said to be a factor, even a very important factor, in ancient philosophy, particularly in Stoicism.  But if Natural Law engendered the belief that we are endowed by Nature or Nature's God with certain inalienable rights, in my opinion this occurred long after Natural Law had been conceived.

While Stoicism certainly anticipated the idea of a "brotherhood of man" and so recognized the worth of each person by virtue of the possession of a part of the Divine Reason, and its maxim that we should live according to nature indicates that nature provides us with rules which should govern our conduct in life, I don't see this as equivalent to the belief that each person has certain rights.  Indeed, the concept of rights as we understand it seems foreign to Stoicism.

We say we have a "right" to something when we believe that we are or should be free to do something or possess something.  We have a claim to it; we are entitled to it, to the exclusion of anyone else.  Stoicism teaches us that things beyond our control are indifferent.  It urges us not to disturb ourselves with them, not to seek or desire them.  What else is the claim to have a right to property but a claim that one is entitled to something beyond our control?  Epictetus tells us not to be disturbed even by the loss of a loved one, or disturbed no more than by the loss of a favorite cup.  It would be bizarre for a Stoic sage to maintain that he is entitled to anything, even to his own life.  Nature/God will determine when we die and how; we should be prepared to die, but our death is one of the things beyond our control  It's in the nature of a gift, a natural part of life.

Stoics tout the freedom one has from others and other things, but that freedom derives from the recognition of that which is indifferent to us and our own self-discipline.  The Stoic has no conception of a right to be free; one can be free even if in prison, as one maintains sovereignty over that which is truly in one's control.

For my part, I believe the only rights we have are those recognized by the law, that is to say, legal rights.  Certainly those are the only rights which are enforceable.  Legal rights, though sometimes conceived of as possessory, in fact result from restrictions imposed particularly on governmental power.  We have no right of free speech, for example, in the law.  We have the First Amendment, though, which prohibits the government from restricting free speech.  Legal rights therefore often exist purely because the law prohibits certain conduct by others.  I can speak freely in the sense that the government is unable to prevent me from doing so.

When we speak of rights outside the law, whether we call them natural rights, inherent rights, god-given rights, we purport to refer to what has application only if protected by the law.  We treat them as if they are legal rights, though they are not.  We claim to be entitled to certain things or entitled to do certain things by virtue of non-legal rights.

It seems to me that when we employ the concept of rights in ethics, we take an idea which has a beneficial function in the law and employ it where it has no function at all or a negative function.   Rights are something we have or claim.  Our interest in them is selfish.  We don't see rights as creating duties to others.  If we have the right to do and think what we wish, even if that right is qualified so that our right to act and think may not be used to harm others, we may do as we please even if we are cruel, envious, uncharitable, craven, contemptible, gluttonous, miserly.  We may be utterly unworthy, and are not only free to be so but have every right to be so.

In other words, we have the right to be wrong, bad, immoral as long as we don't infringe directly on the rights of others.  This is an ethics which sanctions, if it doesn't actually encourage, the disregard of the suffering of others.

I've always been a proponent of civil liberties, and still am.  Legal rights are essential to our freedom and so vastly significant in the law.   But rights seem a poor thing on which to base a code of morality.

A Friend's Death

Brian Setzer did a song called "Sixty Years."  Its chorus contains the words "We only got sixty years on the planet (Repeat 3 times) and if you get any more you might wish that you hadn't."  It would seem he underestimated just how long most of us have here.  Perhaps he meant sixty good years.  But in one case at least, he was accurate enough.

Memento mori was a medieval practice, involving reflection on one's mortality.  Of course, this was a common practice or discipline long before the Middle Ages.  It's easy enough to find the contemplation of death in Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, for example, and those granted a Roman triumph were told to remember they were mortal by a slave standing behind them in their chariot, holding a crown over their heads.

The death of someone you know, particularly that of a contemporary and a friend, can inspire such contemplation as well.  The inspiration for this contemplation increases with age, naturally enough.  It's something to get used to.

I met the friend of mine who died recently in college.  We were roommates for the better part of four years.  He was odd, quiet and shy.  I also was odd, though not so quiet and not so shy.  We had many things in common in addition to our peculiarity: a fondness for alcohol, literature and music, and the more outlandish forms of wit.  He grew excessively fond of alcohol, however, and it may be that fondness together with a love of tobacco, which we also shared, which ultimately brought about his gradual dissipation and ultimately his death.  I don't know if alcoholism was eventually diagnosed in his case, but had been drunk with him on many occasions and while my drunkenness became less and less a habit his became habitual.  Tobacco I gave up many years ago; I don't think he ever stopped smoking.

Sadly, I hadn't seen him for years when I learned of his death.  For years before that, though, we were very good friends indeed and that friendship lasted long after college, continuing after I married and had children, though he never did.  He clearly wasn't up to either.  The signs of his dissolution were there even in college, when he threw away his chance of doing well by drinking and treating his courses and teachers with contempt.  But he returned and ended up graduating years after his classmates did, to his credit.  It seemed at the time he was pulling himself together.

Perhaps he was a shooting star, as a song he liked put it.  His intelligence and wit could be incandescent, his memory profound, his insight remarkable.  But he had no patience for the kind of life available to him now, and refused always to do what was needed to succeed, though I think he could have done so.  Later, I think he began to lose his hold on life and perhaps on sanity, preferring some other world he was unable to experience; that would not require work and discipline or the compromises and effort required to make money, marry have children, own property.  Medication may have contributed to the disorientation he sometimes displayed

He seemed of a type, in some sense.  The frustrated, lonely artist, misunderstood genius.  A tragic figure.  He could write very well indeed, in my not very humble opinion, when he wanted to.  I hope he continued to write, and that somewhere among what's left behind there may be some work of genius.  But there was more to him than that.  He wasn't merely a poseur.   Yet he burned out very quickly.  He became homeless for a time, I think.  I gave him money, bought him meals, but I was a professional and a father and existed in an entirely different world, and the requests for money became intolerable eventually.  I know I could have done more, but did not.  I doubt it would have made any difference if I had, but regret it nonetheless.

It seems my great regrets have their beginnings in my college years.   What is it about those years that they play such a role?  They should not, because they are gone quickly and the rest of life remains and is relentlessly different from those halcyon days.  I suppose the same could be said about youth.

A friend, according to Cicero, is like a second self.  He was a great friend for a long time, and I often think of him, and miss him, especially during my now sadly solo trips to the friendly and interesting bars and restaurants in downtown Chicago.  In this case a friend was not a second self, really, though I saw in him things I think are or at least were in me, but not to the same extent or of the same dangerous power and purity.  Ave atque vale, Catullus wrote to his brother on his death.  I wrote the same words on the death of my father, and now do so on the death of a friend.

"A Child of the Earth and the Starry Heavens"

The words of the title of this post are the words initiates of the Orphic mysteries were taught to say when asked to identify themselves in the afterlife.  It's a rather wonderful statement, I believe; a characterization to be proud of, poetic in nature.

The Orphic mysteries were what some might call a watered-down version of those of Dionysus; others might call them a far more reasonable version.  The worship of Dionysus could be rather excessive, best characterized by the maenads, the female followers or priestesses of the god who worked themselves into a frenzy while paying homage.  It apparently involved (so it's said), in some cases at least, tearing a poor animal to pieces and feasting on its raw flesh.  The unfortunate beast thus was treated as Dionysus was by the Titans.  The Orphic mysteries were much more subdued.

During the Roman period, the worship of Dionysus along with others, such as Magna Mater and Attis, Isis and Osiris, was fundamentally the worship of a god who died and was reborn, whose death and regeneration was for the salvation of humanity.  Initiates of these cults were spoken of as having been "born again."  If that is a somewhat familiar phrase, it should be.  The similarity between Christianity and the ancient pagan cults popular in the time Christianity was born and became popular itself is remarkable.  The extent to which Christianity is based on the ancient pagan mysteries would probably be even more stunning if the initiates of the pagan cults had been less faithful to their vows of secrecy and the early Church less successful in stamping them out.

But the Orphic identification has an additional significance, I think.  Not because it speaks of men and women as part earth and part heaven.  This view is something familiar to us through the dualism which has been fundamental to Western culture through the centuries; the distinction between body and soul.  Rather, because of the use of the word "and" in the formula, if it may be called such.  No distinction is made in this case.  We are, therefore, children of earth and the heavens, as we are children of a man and a woman. 

This isn't dualism in the traditional sense, at least as I interpret the phrase.  A child of earth and heaven doesn't necessarily have two aspects, one inferior or of less worth than another, e.g. a body which is unimportant and a soul which is all-important.  That's how we're conceived of by the Church and Plato before it.  It's a point of view which consigns the world and living in it to insignificance, if it doesn't result in a view of our lives as being fraught with evil or impurity.  It's a life-hating and world-hating perspective.

In my interpretation, the statement is one which acknowledges that the earth and the starry heavens are parts of a single whole, as are we.  There is no reference to or reliance on something or some being which transcends the universe (and is therefore unimaginable and inconceivable).  At the same time, though, there is an acknowledgment that the universe includes not "merely" us and the world as we know it, but may include much more that we have yet to encounter and will encounter someday, perhaps even after death; something among the "starry heavens."

As science indicates more and more that life exists throughout the universe, and that life here may be the result of the transmission of the elements favorable to life to our planet from other places, the reference to being a child of the starry heavens may be even more appropriate than the followers of Orpheus knew.  Regardless, the phrase speaks to a form of religion or spirituality which is naturalistic, and a divinity which is immanent, also a part of the universe.

This seems to be the Stoic view, if Stoicism is as some claim a kind of religion, or a religious philosophy.  It seems to have been to such to Epictetus and even Seneca, though the "thoughts" of Marcus Aurelius are ambiguous in this respect.  Nevertheless, Stoicism generally at least in ancient times accepted the idea of Providence and a Divine Reason, present in the universe as a kind of matter.

There is a basis for a spirituality, a religion perhaps, which involves reverence for the universe and its creatures and is not dependent on a belief in something apart from the universe, i.e. apart from all we know and can know.  I think one religion, one God, may be considered more reasonable than another even if not subject to proof.  One that doesn't require acceptance of what cannot be experienced is prima facie more reasonable than one which does.

Amor Fati

It's odd that Nietzsche, who excoriated the Stoics in a frantic rant I referred to a few posts ago, referred often to amor fati,"love of fate."  He did so in such a manner as it appears to have been to him a kind of ideal state.

The phrase is a profoundly Stoic one, and acceptance if not love of fate is found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and others of The Porch.  I'm tempted to say Nietzsche was indebted to the Stoics for the idea.  This may even account  for his anger at the Stoics.  So many of us come to hate those who benefit us, gratitude being a burden as Tacitus noted.  Nietzsche apparently also was inclined to refer fondly to the idea of eternal recurrence, another view held by the Stoics, though in their case this idea had a more cosmological meaning; the world would eventually perish only to begin again and have an unchanged existence, only to perish again and come to be again.

I doubt, though, that Nietzsche himself was ever a lover of fate. His end was grim enough it would have taken a Stoic Sage to bear it happily, but it would seem Nietzsche was far too discontented with life, with people, to love fate, condemned as he was to a life of seemingly endless disappointment.

The idea of love of fate, acceptance of fate, strikes many as objectionable.  It's thought to foster a submissive, passive nature and is reviled by some as promoting, or at least ignoring, injustice.  Self-styled radicals and revolutionaries, primarily those who lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, like to refer to it as being a bourgeoisie attitude--unthinking acceptance of the status quo.

It is not, however.  It is an expression of the Stoic doctrine that one shouldn't allow oneself to be emotionally or mentally disturbed by matters not in one's control, but it is in the way of emphasizing the equally Stoic doctrine that one should rightly make use of what is in your control, i.e. one should be virtuous.  Acting rightly would include acting against injustice, to the extent one can.  In the one case, the Stoic is not controlled by things, events and people who are not in his/her control; in the other case the Stoic uses what is in his/her control for good.

This is something generally ignored by critics of the Stoics, who often seem to buy into the idea that Stoics are cold, unfeeling, and unmoved.  They prefer to see only one facet of Stoicism and fail to give it what it is due.  But it is a persistent misconstruction of Stoic doctrine.

Stoicism is certainly not a Romantic philosophy, and followers of Romanticism (like Nietzsche, at least sometimes) tend to despise it.  This may be due to the fact that it is thought to espouse the repression of emotion while the Romantic revels in it.  Stoicism does indeed teach that we should live according to nature, which is to say reason; among the ancients nature was infused with the Divine Reason and we shared in it.  The Romantics of course were reacting against what they saw as too great a reliance on reason, and were often embarrassingly maudlin or zealous in extolling and expressing their emotions.  But again, this is to misunderstand Stoicism, which teaches only the dissipation of bad emotions such as anger and hate.

It is also I think to misunderstand reason, and the Enlightenment, and science, and we see this in those intellectuals who may be considered the successors to the Romantics as well as the religious zealots and fanatics who plague us today.  The successors of the Romantics question not only whether we should be reasonable but whether we can be, and denigrate science and reasonable assessment as mere narratives no more worthy of respect than myths.  The religious mistrust science and reason because neither will support their beliefs when those beliefs are put to the test.

So, science and reason are set upon by both these groups, and they or, better yet, the Enlightenment are blamed for everything from the Holocaust to the teaching of evolution in our schools to crime.  The narrowness of vision and arrogance of such as the "New Atheists" and in earlier times the logical positivists serve to empower these reactionary views.

As a result of anti-reason and anti-science, we may well be living in a world of the kind Yeats wrote of, where "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."  It seems something to be expected where reasonable judgment and conduct are considered no more worthwhile than any other kind of judgment or conduct, and where the words of books written thousands of years ago are considered to be the words of God, which others cannot be allowed to question.

The Stoic and the Ubermensch

Nietzsche famously, or infamously depending on your perspective, condemned the Stoics (in his understated way) thusly:

You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.

It's hardly surprising, of course, that Nietzsche, who seems to have been an insistently, deliberately, emotional thinker, wouldn't find Stoicism congenial.  If ever there was someone overwhelmingly disturbed by things not in his control, it was Nietzsche.  It's unfortunate but typical of him (at least from what I've read) that he condemned it in this fashion; delivering yet another rant rather than a serious analysis.

I wonder sometimes if his frenzied style was typical of his time rather than a personal quirk. William James was more or less his contemporary, and C.S. Peirce; J. S. Mill was older, dying it seems when Nietzsche was in his thirties.  Imagine any of them writing in this fashion, and you (or at least I) can't help but laugh.  Perhaps this was the style in continental Europe, though, or at least in Germany.

Nietzsche's exclamatory comments are very Dionysian, certainly, but if you like me are unimpressed by mere denunciations--argument by exclamation--it's difficult to see in this excited outpouring much that is coherent or much of significance.  I'll perforce address what he seems to be saying to me.

First, he states that Nature is indifferent and we, by living are otherwise than indifferent; we value, have preferences, are unjust.  Of course the ancient Stoics didn't feel that nature was indifferent in the sense being used by Nietzsche, as it was infused with the Divine Reason and had a purpose, so Nietzsche rather than addressing or even acknowledging that is merely telling us what he thinks Nature to be.

Let that pass, though.  We humans are parts of Nature, however, and so our feelings, desires etc.--which Nietzsche seems to think of as contra Nature--are, therefore, just as much part of Nature, as natural, as we are.  So when the Stoics refer to acting according to Nature they obviously refer to acting according to human nature as well as Nature in general, as human beings interacting with the rest of Nature.  It's not possible for us to live "otherwise" than Nature as Nietzsche claims.  Nietzsche's distinction between us and Nature is thus unsound.  Perhaps, though, he didn't think of us as parts of Nature. 

Next, he equates the Stoic dictum live according to Nature to "live according to life."  It's not clear to me, though, why he does so.  In what sense is Nature "life"?  In the sense that it exists?  It does of course exist, but it has certain characteristics, as do we.   Is Nietzsche seriously claiming that the Stoic dictum in question is simply "exist" or "live"?  That would indeed by silly, and it is silly of Nietzsche to maintain that is the case.  The Stoics clearly refer to living in accordance with certain characteristics of Nature and humanity, i.e. to living in a certain way, not merely living.

Then, he accuses the Stoics of imposing morals and ideals on Nature.  He does not trouble to explain this claim anymore than he did his others, but he seems to be saying that the Stoics purport to see in Nature what to think and how to act. 

This makes no sense either, though, as the Stoics quite consistently insist that what is in our control is very limited, and what is beyond our control is vast.  The great majority of Nature, therefore, is not something with which we should concern or disturb ourselves.  So, we would not "see" Stoicism in Nature.  Instead, being Stoics, we understand that Nature is to a great extent something we lack the ability to impose upon.  Also, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius state that our lives are what are thoughts make it; that what disturbs us is not what takes place, but our feelings regarding what takes place.

Stoicism doesn't appear in Nature, but Nature and our nature, and our interaction, necessarily figure in how we should act.  We live according to Nature when we live as reasonable human beings, based on what we know of Nature and ourselves.

He also calls Stoicism "self-tyranny", again for no stated reason.  Just what tyranny is involved in not being unduly disturbed but rather tranquil, being calm and reasonable, is not clear.  But Nietzsche may have so committed himself to being full of Romantic sound and fury that even the merely sensible seemed to him vile and evil.

Not content to denounce Stoicism, he proceeds to denounce philosophy in general.  Indeed, why not, being Nietzsche?  What did he do that was not, directly or indirectly, a denunciation of something?  Nietzsche was an extremist, I think, and more an artist (a tortured one, of course) than a philosopher.  The reference to Bedlam in his condemnation of Stoicism is unfortunate in his case.  Perhaps if he had been a Stoic he wouldn't have gone insane in the end, identifying himself so much with Dionysius that he claimed to be the mad god.

In our Stars

One has to wonder why, despite our reliance on science and our enlightened state, so many of us take astrology seriously.  You would think that its day is long gone, but it isn't.  One can see it in any  newspaper (even the ones which still are made up of paper), and be enthralled by an Eastern version of it in many Chinese restaurants.  Curiously, it seems that whether we are, e.g., a Cancer or a Horse, many fine qualities are attributed to us as being a part of our nature.  Our signs, or years, at birth never seem to ordain that we're idiots, or twisted, or fanatic, or hideous.

We all know the story of the Reagans, or at least Nancy Reagan's, belief in and reliance on astrology when considering the future.  It's reminiscent of Tiberius' reliance on it especially during his time in Capri.  Presumably, neither Ronald or Nancy would have hurled their astrologers off a cliff in the event of a bad "reading" however.

It must be said that astrology played a part in the birth of modern science, particularly astronomy, much as alchemy may be said to have played a part in the birth of modern chemistry.  Since the time of the ancient Chaldeans, at least, some of us have been busy identifying and plotting the courses of heavenly bodies.  These observations were reputedly quite precise; indeed, it appears that a good deal of mathematical information and knowledge were employed by those who read the stars and what else can be seen from the Earth.  The problems with astrology resulted from inferences made from the mathematics based on unfounded assumptions regarding the nature and influence of the stars and planets.

The cult of Mithras in the Roman Empire is an example of the influence of astrology on religion.  We know little of the ritual or liturgy of that cult, but we know from the mithraeums themselves that astrology was involved as the signs of the Zodiac are frequently on display, along with Mithras and his bull and the torch-bearing twins, Cautes and Cautopates.

Why, though, did we (and do we) associate the stars and the planets with our character and fate?    Were the predictable and regular movements of these objects in the sky suggestive of the order of the universe, the laws of the universe?  Being such, was it inferred that we were similarly ordered, or that the order in the sky necessarily governed the creatures of the Earth? 

It's difficult to contend that astrology was or is a means to control our destinies as that is plainly not the case.  Astrology seems to be an example of deterministic thinking; that is to say that we are controlled and unable to control ourselves.  It would then seem more plausible that astrology was used as a means by which to understand our destinies, to know the future which has already been ordained. 

It can't be the case that astrology was looked to as explaining, or at least predicting, what the gods had in store for us as we thought of them as gods themselves.  Particularly in ancient Greece and Rome, the gods were notoriously unpredictable and some of them easily offended or aroused to action.  It would be difficult in that case to attribute to them neatly ordered conduct such as that displayed in the sky.

The Romans, of course, adopted the apparently Etruscan practice of determining the future from the entrails of animals.  Thus the liver of an ox or other creature took the place of the stars as indicating the what was in store.  This seems even more unlikely than accepting the movement of the stars as governing us and our fate. 

Undoubtedly it was hoped that the future could be known and predicted and so it's nor surprising that we sought for (and found) ways by which that could be done.  Priests who knew that way were not required to be of high moral character themselves, as they were simply discerning what was written for us through a consideration of what took place in nature, not through a vision or grace bestowed, or special favor of the gods.  Astrology represented a kind of learning or system rather than a knowledge granted for good conduct.  It was not an award by the gods, it was something that could be taught.

We can "forgive" the ancients for their ignorance, but modern practice of astrology or consultation with astrologers is mystifying.  As it must be the case that most of us are now aware of the vastness of the universe and our planet's tiny part it in, it should be extremely difficult to believe that the stars and planets in their movements serve to fashion our nature and reveal our fates.  But we all still want to know the future, and it may be said that praying for such knowledge or awaiting a revelation of it by some beneficent deity is not all that different from seeking it in the movements of the stars and planets.    If we have no problem accepting the former, there is no problem with accepting the latter.

Acceptance, however, is not something that can be associated with astrology.  If we were blithely willing to accept whatever happens we'd have no need to know what is going to happen.  Astrology and certain kinds of religion may therefore be considered efforts on our part to disturb ourselves with things not in our control, a cardinal error for a Stoic.  I don't recall whether Epictetus, Seneca or Marcus Aurelius dealt with this practice, but will review their work to find out.