Ninth installment:
Arrian, a student of Epictetus, wrote eight books, The Discourses of Epictetus, of which four survive. Selections from those eight books were also collected in the Enchiridion, or “Handbook.” The Discourses give us a quite vivid portrait of the man who inspired them, and also give us fascinating glimpses into his singular didactic style. We very quickly see how Epictetus ran his school, the nature of its curricula, and how he mentored his students. We see his earnestness, his zeal, and piety, but we also get a good dose of his sharp and often acerbic sense of humor. It is no wonder that Arrian felt he ‘had to get this down.’
It also can be quite a challenge to understand exactly what is being said in the chapters of the Discourses. The text is composed of lecture notes, we must recall.
So, with that genesis in mind, I’ve set out to read through the four books, a chapter at a time, while also breaking up the text with commentary, (essentially my best guesses as to how we might flesh out what can be very brief or truncated sketches of dialogue and argumentation), as it was no easy business for Arrian to get down what he had experienced in the lecture halls of Nicopolis!
Commentary is in italics! Also, please forgive any formatting issues (spacing between paragraphs) that you see. They stubbornly will not go away no matter what I do!
Book I Chapter 9
How from The Thesis That We Are Akin to God May a Man Proceed to The Consequences?
This chapter is an engaging application of Stoic natural theology and presents us with a ‘drilling down’ on that basis, toward derivation of advice on how to deal with adversity. Its deductions result in admonition that we should approach life in a confident manner in that we can deduce, from God’s nature, that mankind has been given an adequate toolbox for coping with it.
There is also a discussion of a sort of signaling system that Epictetus thinks has been put in place by that same design, key aspects of which are in-built.
He illustrates how that signaling system works with a striking example, one he felt necessary to address, due, not only to the particulars of Stoic theology, but also due to the foreboding contingencies of Roman political life. He feels urgently that he needs to provide a clear account of the necessary conditions that must be met before one can take it that suicide has been opened to him as an option. When faced with the unendurable aspects of life when can we tell that is permissible to end it? This discussion is couched in terms of military service, and recommends Stoics take exacting pains to be clear when the commanding officer, God, is actually giving ‘orders to retreat.’ We have to know when the signals truly tell us to retreat, and have to be able to discern those signals against the background of what amounts to wishful thinking or too hasty a desire to avoid the unpleasant or painful.
The chapter opens with a stirring presentation of the Stoic view of man’s place in the cosmos:
If what is said by the philosophers regarding the kinship of God and men be true, what other course remains for men but that which Socrates took when asked to what country he belonged, never to say “I am an Athenian,” or “I am a Corinthian,” but “I am a citizen of the universe?” For why do you say that you are an Athenian, instead of mentioning merely that corner into which your paltry body was cast at birth? Or is it clear you take the place which has a higher degree of authority and comprehends not merely that corner of yours, but also your family and, in a word, the source from which your race has come, your ancestors down to yourself, and from some such entity call yourself “Athenian,” or “Corinthian?”
Well, then, anyone who has attentively studied the administration of the universe and has learned that:
“the greatest and most authoritative and most comprehensive of all governments is this one, which is composed of men and God, and that from Him have descended the seeds of being, not merely to my father or to my grandfather, but to all things that are begotten and that grow upon earth, and chiefly to rational beings, seeing that by nature it is theirs alone to have communion in the society of God, being intertwined with him through the reason,”
This last is evidently an extended passage from Chrysippus.
Why should such a man not call himself a citizen of the universe? Why should he not call himself a son of God? And why shall he fear anything that happens among men? What! Shall kinship with Caesar or any other of them that have great power at Rome be sufficient to enable men to live securely, proof against contempt, and in fear of nothing whatsoever, but to have God as our maker, and father, and guardian, —shall this not suffice to deliver us from griefs and fears?
The idea here is that one can read off of human cognitive and rational capacities certain consequences as to what roles we should play in the world and what attitudes we should adopt, and what we should value, if, in concert with that reading of our capacities, we also take it that God exists, and not only is similarly rational, but created humanity. Natural theology leads us to certain conclusions. The design argument leads us to these conclusions.
It is quite likely, even if not certain, that this deity designed us with intention of placing us here on Earth with that panoply of abilities we do have, chief among them our capacity to notice the parallelism of human cognizance and rationality, with that of his ultimate source.
This indicates that we are to work with God in some way. Again, that role has been described as ‘co-administration’ by Epictetus. We are meant to work within our own sphere, while learning about nature on the larger scale.
What is more, we should also take it that we have been quite carefully designed with capacity to provide for ourselves, come what may, even if, at times, we think we cannot. Similarly, we see that all non-human species have been given the same wherewithal. By nature, they are adept at survival. There is no good reason to think man would be the one exception to this rule, the one God did not provide for in this way.
And wherewithal shall I be fed, asks one, if I have nothing?
And how of slaves, how of runaways, on what do they rely when they leave their masters? On their lands, their slaves, or their vessels of silver?
No, on nothing but themselves; and nevertheless, food does not fail them.
And shall it be necessary for our philosopher, forsooth, when he goes abroad, to depend upon others for his assurance and his refreshment, instead of taking care of himself? Shall it be necessary for them o be more vile and craven than the irrational animals, every one of which is sufficient to himself, and lacks neither its own proper food nor that way of life which is appropriate to it and in harmony with nature?
Man’s reason and sociality help him in this regard, just as animal species attributes help them survive.
Next, we have an interesting passage that reflects a temptation that might result from a dualistic reading of this ‘kinship with the gods’ a temptation that rears its head when we are caught up in fraught times.
For, if we human beings are mixed creatures, seriously encumbered in various ways by the material aspect of his nature, and it is possible to escape this, as the dualist view contends, then there might be great attraction in purposefully quitting life. There would be great expediency in committing suicide in order to escape those encumbrances. (This is not the only time that we will see the attractiveness of suicide discussed in the Discourses. It is a constant refrain. This chapter is also evidence that the Stoics, usually considered to be materialist monists, were not universally consistent in this position).
Epictetus is here directly addressing the young men in his classroom:
As for me, I think that the elder man [Epictetus is here referring to himself in the role of teacher and mentor] ought not to be sitting here devising how to keep you from thinking too meanly of yourselves or from taking in your debates a mean or ignoble position regarding yourselves; he should rather be striving to prevent there being among you any young men of such a sort that, when once they have realized their kinship to the gods and that we have these fetters as it were fastened upon us, the body and its possessions, and whatever things on their account are necessary to us for the management of life, and our tarrying therein, they may desire to throw aside all these things as burdensome and vexatious and unprofitable and depart to their kindred.
As proxy, he makes the pro-suicide case for the young students that may be tempted that way, using Epictetus’s own words:
And this is the struggle in which your teacher and trainer, if he really amounted to anything, ought to be engaged; you, for your part, would come to him saying: “Epictetus, we can no longer endure to be imprisoned with this paltry body, giving it food and drink, and resting and cleansing it, and, to crown all, being on its account brought into contact with these people and those. Are not these things indifferent—indeed, nothing—to us? And is not death no evil? And are we not in a manner akin to God, and have we not come from Him? Suffer us to go back whence we came; suffer us to be freed at last from these fetters that are fastened to us and weigh us down. Here are despoilers and thieves, and courts of law, and those who are called tyrants; they think that they have some power over us because of the paltry body and its possessions. Suffer us to show them that they have power over no one.”
The body is ‘paltry,’ allegedly of little significance. Food, drink, other people are all ‘indifferents.’ This terminology certainly carries the connotation that we should not be concerned very much at all with these things, and should take early opportunity to escape them, does it not? ‘So,’ asks our young interlocutor, ‘what say you Epictetus?’
And thereupon it is my part to say in response: “Men, wait upon God. When He shall give the signal and set you free from this service, then shall you depart to Him; but for the present endure to abide in this place, where He has stationed you. Short indeed is this time of your abiding here, and easy to bear for men of your convictions. For what tyrant, or what thief, or what courts of law are any longer formidable to those who have thus set at naught the body and its possessions? Stay, nor be so unrational as to depart.”
To focus merely on the duality of our nature, and noting that we have an escape hatch, is to forget that other aspect of our being; we have been designed and put in place to serve some set of functions in the material world. This means that it is logically possible to leave it before we have fully played out our individual roles.
An analogical case may help. A sailor may, via an escape hatch, abandon ship during a battle, saving himself. But, if he does this before being ordered to do so, he will necessarily endanger the entire crew, and the mission, which is to win that battle. Furthermore, he knows he should wait for orders to abandon ship. In his case, the nature of the ‘retreat’ signal is clearly known beforehand. He’ll recognize it when he hears it or sees it.
With regard to retreat from life, what form such signaling may take, we are not explicitly told here. But, we can take it that things have been arranged in such a way as to make it evident enough to us when that signal comes; that signal that we may safely quit our stations in life.
Here we see Epictetus reminding the student of the full implications of the view they profess to accept. According to that view, we have deliberately been placed in our circumstances, and in physical bodies, at our precise times, with intent of our riding out our lives in that assigned place and for the full duration, doing that work it is for which we were intended, which work we can, to some degree, fathom by noting what the roles and circumstances that we have fallen into demand of us. If we too hurriedly desert the post, this will impact that mission, and it will fail. So, we must stay at our posts and carry on until we do receive that truly unmistakable signal, whatever, precisely, it may be.
In any case, we should not enter into thoughts of suicide haphazardly. We should be prepared for any adversities that our assignments, our lives, may entail. In meeting these, we must keep in mind our individual roles, our stations, and because life will be difficult, we must also realize that we will find ample occasion to wish we could die.
Epictetus’s message to those young men around him: we must take great pains to resist being carried away by this wish, and must keep an eye toward those things over which we have been given complete control, (our Moral Purpose and our attitudes toward fortune and misfortune), and we must remind ourselves of the fact that no one can truly wrest the control of these from us unless we let them. Only if life becomes truly unendurable, is it permissible to leave by suicide:
Some such instruction should be given by the teacher to the youth who have good natural roles. But what happens now? A corpse is your teacher and corpses are you. As soon as you have fed your fill to-day, you sit lamenting about the morrow, wherewithal you shall be fed. Slave, if you get it, you will have it; if you do not get it, you will depart; the door stands open. Why grieve? Where is there yet room for tears? What occasion longer for flattery? Why shall one man envy another? Why shall he admire those who have great possessions, or those who are stationed in places of power, especially if they be both strong and prone to anger? For what will they do to us? As for what they have power to do, we shall pay no heed thereto; as for the things we care about, over them they have no power. Who, then, will ever again be ruler over the man who is thus disposed?
Epictetus illustrates this steadfast soldier’s attitude with the case of Socrates:
How did Socrates feel with regard to these matters? Why, how else than as that man ought to feel who has been convinced that he is akin to the gods? “If you tell me now,” says he, “’we will acquit you on these conditions, namely, that you will no longer engage in these discussions which you have conducted hitherto, nor trouble either the young or the old among us,’ I will answer, ‘You make yourselves ridiculous by thinking that, if your general had stationed me at any post, I ought to hold and maintain it and choose rather to die ten thousand times than to desert it, but if God has stationed us in some place and in some manner of life we ought to desert that.’” This is what it means for a man to be in very truth a kinsman of the gods.
Now, again he reiterates that our mixed nature will lead us into trains of thought that would have us abandon assigned positions, which amounts to a too hasty giving up of control of our Moral Purpose for the sake of the material needs and wants we have by virtue of that material aspect of our being:
We, however, think of ourselves as though we were mere bellies, entrails, and genitals, just because we have fear, because we have appetite, and we flatter those who have power to help us in these matters, and these same men we fear.
This sort of action, even if it does not end life, does, in effect, put one in the position of the sailor who abandons ship during battle. To the extent that we morally compromise, we abandon the mission, for part of that mission, its subjective component, is the requirement that we preserve our individual Moral Purpose. We know we must do this because when we fail to do so, we undergo moral injury, guilt, ‘wretchedness’ and the like. These are signals that we are in need of course correction. We Stoics may have no clear and detailed idea what the overall mission is, but have been designed in such a way as to be cognizant when we are departing from it.
He next gives an illustration of a man whose attitude toward life was proper:
A certain man asked me to write to Rome in his behalf. Now he had met with what most men account misfortune: thought he had formerly been eminent and wealthy, he had afterwards lost everything and was living here. And I wrote in humble terms in his behalf. But when he had read the letter he handed it back to me, and said, “I wanted your help, not your pity; my plight is not an evil one.”
And, he gives evidence that he himself does not always adopt the proper attitude:
So likewise, Rufus was wont to say, to test me, “Your master is going to do such-and-such a thing to you.” And when I would say in answer. “’Tis but the lot of man,” he would reply. “What then? Am I to go on and petition him, when I can get the same result from you?” For, in fact, it is foolish and superfluous to try to obtain from another that which one can get from oneself.
If you ask someone to petition a third on your behalf, knowing it will be of no avail, and that you are thereby certain to be at that third person’s mercy, and you have in fact expressed this opinion beforehand, then why petition? You know the results, so you might as well skip it.
The flip side of this, however, is that there is a noble ‘twin’ of such scenarios. Epictetus is not saying one should not petition, but that one should do it clear-eyed. Suppose you know that you can gain nobility or dignity of your person or soul by way of how you react to adversity or threat, and have the fortitude to make the appropriate choices come what may. In this scenario too, it does not matter how others treat you, and asking after decent treatment is superfluous, when considering the most important thing, Moral Purpose.
Still, you can undertake the petition regarding externals, but don’t do so in the slavish or undignified manner.
Again, if it looks like the petition will be turned down, you can simply choose not to bother with it, OR you can petition with that clear-eyed view and with that more important goal in mind of retaining dignity and nobility come what may.
Since, therefore, I am able to get greatness of soul and nobility of character from myself, am I to get a farm, and money, or some office, from you? Far from it! I will not be so unaware of what I myself possess. But when a man is cowardly and abject, what else can one possibly do but write letters in his behalf as we do in behalf of a corpse: “Please do grant us the carcass of so-and-so and a pint of paltry blood?” For really, such a person is but a carcass and a pint of paltry blood, and nothing more. But if he were anything more he would perceive that one man is not unfortunate because of another.
This is an interesting, and quite striking passage, but we can understand the gist, given what has preceded. When one begs for one’s life, or has others do this on one’s behalf, or when one begs for retention of material belongings, or asks others to do so on one’s behalf, he or she is doing something similar to what occurs when friends or family ask for the corpse of someone deceased who had been executed by the state or killed by enemy during war. One is asking for possession of something that, again, is, speaking strictly, not entirely his own.
When it comes to one’s own ‘corpse,’ we can become completely tied up with such attempts, losing sight of what is truly within our power, the ability to choose how we will respond to others, including those who have power over life or over material well-being.
Such a petitioning person may become craven, begging for good treatment from these others, even at the cost of injuring his Moral Purpose, or making himself slave to those other persons, or he can realize that he can refuse to do so, and maintain his dignity, as God has designed and intends for him to behave, regardless of whatever material circumstances he may encounter.
This is the point of the comparison with begging for bodies of the deceased: There is a distinction to be made between one’s person, one’s dignity, one’s Moral Purpose, and his or her body, and there may be times when preservation of the former may endanger the latter. We must be prepared for such eventualities, as it is our duty to always look out after the former as the first priority.
We must keep in mind, in the spirit of the question that heads this chapter, that succumbing to such panicked reactions in the face of threats to one’s material well-being as have been exampled, is to lose track of one’s divinely ordained mission in life. For, whatever the ends of that mission are, in their particulars, we do know this; we are intended to stay at our posts, as Moral Purposes, using the means we have been given to carry out the various roles that the posts carry, and to do so, to the utmost of our ability, keeping dignity intact. This is essentially what it is to be a ‘Moral Purpose.’
We have also been supplied with various tools that are to be used to that effect; the various virtues that we have seen listed in earlier chapters, along with reason, and the signaling apparatus that has also been discussed. We will know we are failing in our mission when we allow ourselves to go begging and pleading and when we are not using these virtues in the face of the bullying threats or other such adversities common in life. Our moral conscience will tell, as will our ‘guardian geniuses’, and considered reason. (More on these as things unfold in the Discourses)
The message of this chapter is hard, because it does not allow us the excuse of coercion. One becomes unfortunate, a dependent and slave beholden to others, only by choosing to do so, by choosing to serve the material side of his being. One does not become abject because of the actions of others. We are designed so that we must ultimately choose how we will respond to threats or other actions, events or adversities, and we will make unfortunates of ourselves when we take the wrong, slavish or suppliant routes. Ultimately, there is never anyone else to blame.
We’ll see illustrations of this, some serious, others amusing, as we proceed. An instance of the amusing variety occurs in the next chapter; an account of a conversation Epictetus had with a disgruntled former office-holder. He uses that story as a contrast to illustrate how Stoic dedication or commitment should be viewed by people like himself (teachers in the Stoic tradition) and his students in Nicopolis. This discussion is one of many instances when he frankly details the challenges presented by life using first person plural pronouns, making quite clear to us that he is aware of his own shortcomings, even as he offers hard admonitions and biting criticisms of others. He means to include himself in the chastisement. He may have been a curmudgeon, but he was a very self-aware curmudgeon!