Non Fui, Fui, Non Sum, Non Curo

Certain ancient Romans had the words of the title to this post inscribed on their funeral monuments (above is one example, using slightly different wording).  They may be translated as:  "I was not; I was; I am not; I care not."

This epitaph is attributed to Epicurus.  Being a Greek born in the 4th century BCE, it's unlikely that he ever spoke or wrote these Latin words, but likely enough that he did so in the Greek of the time.  It seems an Epicurean sentiment.  Lucretius and others have praised Epicurus for ridding mankind of the fear of death which arises from certain religious beliefs--those which maintain that, on death, unbelievers or those violating particular standards will suffer eternal torment in particular.  Epicureanism and Stoicism were the most popular philosophical positions in the Roman Empire, from what we know.

 

There's a certain admirable brevity in this blithe statement.  If indeed nothing awaits us after death, if we are in fact nothing then, it's clear that we would not care about anything at all.  Someone must exist in order to care about being dead.  We didn't exist before we were born, and so had no cares then.  We recall nothing before we existed.  Why should it be different after death? Indeed, it seems odd to even speak of ourselves as entities which existed before our birth or will after our deaths.  It's not clear to me it makes any sense to do so.  If we were or will be anything, we won't be what we are now, i.e. people who can be spoken of as people.

Other surviving "tombstones" from the Roman era urge those who stop to read them to enjoy life, eat and drink well, while they can.  The implied assertion, if it's not expressly stated, is that we have only one life and it should be lived as pleasantly as possible.  These statements also have an Epicurean ring to them.

These are not sentiments commonly expressed by or on behalf of the dead these days, and have not been common for quite some times, with some exceptions.  Since the advent of Christianity, the tendency is to express hope in everlasting life in a vaguely defined heaven, among its vaguely defined residents, doing vaguely described things which seem to relate primarily to worshipping and contemplating God (also vaguely described).

Just how much comfort did the ancients derive, and can we derive, by accepting the apparent position of Epicurus that we will feel, think, do, and experience nothing at all when we die?  Is the thought that we will simply be gone, soon enough, all that comforting?  Perhaps it's better to be gone than to roast in hell for eternity.  But the end of ourselves wouldn't seem to be something most of us would find satisfying.  Some may well find the idea that they will stop existing frightening, in fact.  Contra Lucretius, some may insist that religious belief can liberate us from the fear of nothingness, of dissipation, which is all we're promised by Epicurus.

Perhaps the cessation of their lives (and of themselves) didn't disturb the ancients as it seems to disturb us.  It has seemed to disturb us for quite some time, in fact, judging from views held by a number of well known persons after what's called the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, when belief in the God of Christianity became increasingly difficult for them to maintain.  I think of Nihilism, Existentialism (or what they're commonly thought to consist of) and those who wonder what the meaning of life really is or whether it has any meaning.

 Romanticism seems to have encouraged the glorification of self, and that would seem to make the belief that the self will vanish in a short period of time rather daunting.

Do we love ourselves more, now, than we did in the ancient past?  Is that self-love responsible for our proclivity to despair of life given the indifference of the universe, and yet fear death?

The Stoic view of death is different from the Epicurean, different from the Christian, and different from the modern.  Marcus Aurelius calls out the distinction between the Epicurean and Stoic view of the universe generally with some frequency.  Either the universe is simply the random result of atoms and the void, or the universe is divine, providential, infused with reason.  We as parts of the universe partake of the divine, and having the capacity for reason may by using it act in accordance with the divine plan.  On death, we remain part of the universe, though we may dissipate, and so continue to participate in the divine universe though our individual personalities may not survive or may survive for a period of time only, not for the life of the universe.  There are claims made that the later Stoics tended more towards the view that our personalities survive and that God was more personal than believed by the earlier Stoics.

For me, the Stoic view is one that doesn't incite despair or fear but instead inspires an acceptance of the universe, our fate, and our eternal place in a living reality.

 

 

 



Comparing Stoicism and Christianity

Anyone who does some reading about Stoicism has encountered books in which it is compared, unfavorably, to Christianity.  These books seem to have been written, at the latest, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  More recent books about Stoicism don't make the comparison, and I wonder whether there simply is no longer an interest in doing so.  Sometimes, the comparisons that were made seem to be in earnest, and even thoughtful.  Sometimes they seem quite partisan, and far less than impartial.  They all seem to have certain claims in common, however.

I've sometimes wondered whether Christian thinkers have resented Christianity's great debt to pagan philosophy.  Christianity hasn't benefited merely from Stoic influence, of course.  It incorporated the thoughts and works of Plato and Aristotle as well; Christian mystics and ascetics spoke and conducted themselves much as the ancient Cynics did.  The influence of the school of Epicurus is not as evident, as may be expected.

The early Christian Fathers didn't share in such resentment, though, nor does it seem to have been prevalent in medieval times, or during the the Renaissance when Aristotle was "the Master of All who Know" and he and other pagan thinkers spent their time in Hell in its relatively comfortable first level, according to Dante.  Certain of the Fathers, at least, spoke of Plato and others as having approached the truth, a remarkable concession from an otherwise highly intolerant crew.  Seneca was considered a kind of Christian, and Marcus Aurelius was said to have regretted or to even have been ignorant of the persecution which took place during his reign.  It was in a sense assumed that people who wrote and thought and acted so wisely, as these figures did, could not really have been all that unchristian; indeed, must have been proto or quasi-Christians.

Perhaps this kind of hat-tipping to the pagan thinkers began to disappear as it became clear that such fabrications as the correspondence said to have taken place between Seneca and St. Paul was established as being forged, and other myths such as Plato's friendship with Moses were found to be contrived.  I suppose it may have been easier to acknowledge the extent to which Christianity borrowed from the ancients when it was at least arguable that Christianity or "proper" Judaism influenced the works of the old philosophers in some respect.

It seems clear, though, that the New Testament doesn't indicate that Jesus and his disciples discussed or were much concerned with the fundamentals of pagan philosophy which became the fundamentals of Christian theology.  So some justification was required when the equivalent of Plato's forms and Aristotle's First Mover and natural law and universal law began to appear in defenses and explanations of the Christian religion.  Perhaps the acknowledgement simply became more grudging or reluctant.

We see Stoicism sometimes described as the noblest of the moral codes pagan antiquity managed to formulate.  But there is always something wrong with it according to these writers, something which, they maintain, caused it to dissipate though it was at one time the preferred philosophy and even religion of the thoughtful Roman upper and mid-to-upper classes.  It was, of course, Christianity that satisfied the need Stoicism could not.  Stoicism's subsequent revivals over the centuries in, for example, Justus Lipsius are acknowledged by these writers, but they seem to consider these events as similar to fits or fads. 

As might be expected, Stoicism's failure is ascribed to the fact that it's tenets are too stern, cold, abstract, unrealistic.  It's claimed that the Stoic view of the emotions and passions was too negative.  Most of all, it seems, it's claimed that Stoicism failed to acknowledge or recognize love--which is to say Christian Love.  And it's claimed the Stoic view of God was materialistic and distant, despite the efforts of Seneca and Epictetus to portray God as more the personal God of Christianity (more personal, at least, when that characteristic fits the apologist's purpose; the God of the famous proofs is notably vague and abstract).

What Christian Love is supposed to be is an interesting question.  The Gospels were written in Greek by men who could not have known Jesus personally.  Was the "love" referred to in the Gospels or St. Paul the kind of "love" we may read about in the works of the pagan philosophers?  Was the "love" presumably referred to by Jesus the same, or something different?

There are quotes from the early Stoics which seem to support the claims the writers make.  However, more recent thinkers have found the Stoic view of the emotions to be far more sophisticated than previously believed, and the therapeutic effect of Stoic practice to be far more effective than previously believed.

It's possible Christianity may be waning now, or that the personal God posited by it an other established religions may be considered less and less credible the more we know of the universe.  Stoicism is not so limited, however, though there also seems to be nothing prohibiting the Stoic from suspecting that God is, in a sense, concerned with human beings and "personal" in that sense.  Perhaps it is this flexibility that is one of the reasons it keeps appearing.  It's by no means defunct, and I suspect it never will be. 

A Visit to a Grave

It's been over twenty-seven years since my sister died, in an automobile accident rather similar to the one that laid me up for a month a few years ago.  A sudden snow and a slippery road; that's all that it takes.  I survived.  She did not.  I grow old.  She does not.  What they say on what is called Remembrance Day in other parts of the world is, of course, true.  Those who died young will not grow old, as others do.  We comfort ourselves by noting the obvious, it seems.  She was just married, and had her whole life ahead of her--another notation of the obvious, but for the fact that she actually did not have a long life to live.

I remember being stuck by the fact that it was unjust.  Perhaps I still had some expectation of justice in those days.  I have few expectations now, none of which depend on the workings of fate.  It's a point on which I differ from the ancient Stoics.  They believed in Providence, and that all that happens is ultimately for the good.  I know that what happens, happens, for good or ill, and am not sure it matters what we think has happened, except to the extent that this (our thought, our perception) impacts us and others.

I'm not sure why I visited her grave, beyond the fact that it had been some time and I thought I should.  I remembered, and was saddened once again.  I wished she had lived, had children, seen mine.  I remembered being a child, with her, and becoming an adult, as she did  And I felt as the poet perhaps should have wrote, and perhaps meant, intimations of my own mortality.

As far as we can tell from what he wrote for himself, Marcus Aurelius thought death would bring either complete dissolution--nothingness--or dissolution into the Divine Spirit or Reason that permeates the universe, which would not be nothingness, though I'm not sure what it would be.  What happens after death fascinates us, and it's natural that it does so.  But as death comes, or will come until we figure a way around it, it's foolish and futile to despair over the fact that it does come.

Epicurus and his followers felt that we will no more exist after death than we existed prior to life.  And, they at least professed to find this thought liberating.  They maintained that the fear of death was banished through this realization.  But, being fearful creatures, we fear it nonetheless, as we fear not existing.  Of course we often dislike living as well.  We are hard to satisfy.  We're very demanding, we humans.

The Stoics were wise, practical thinkers.  Do the best with what you have, and take the rest as it happens, says Epictetus.  That we will die is something beyond our control, as is how and when we will die, except in extraordinary circumstances.  What, if anything, happens after we die (to us, in any case) is similarly beyond our control.  Whether we despair or not is in our control.  How we live and think and feel is in our control.

The same applies regarding the death of those we love.  There is no harm in remembering, just as there is no harm in recognizing and accepting our ultimate fate, provided we don't despair, and provided we continue to do the best we can with what we have.