Providence or Atoms: Stoicism After Religion

A great many people arrive at Stoicism from the same direction. They were raised in a religion, or near one, and no longer believe it; what they miss is not the doctrine but the furniture around it - a reason to get up, a way to sit with a death, a practice, a vocabulary for what a life is supposed to be for. Stoicism looks like all of that with the god removed.

It is worth saying early that this is not quite what it is. Stoicism is not a secular philosophy that happens to be ancient. It is a religion-shaped system, and its ethics were built on top of a physics - the claim that the universe is a single rational living thing, ordered throughout, and that your reason is a fragment of the same reason that runs it. Remove that and the advice remains, but it is standing on nothing in particular.

The interesting part is that Marcus Aurelius already knew this and worried about it in writing.

Providence or atoms

Across the Meditations he keeps returning to the same fork. It appears at least four times, always compressed, always as though he is checking that the floor is still there. In Book 4 it is a single phrase dropped into a list of consolations:

In Book 6 it is put as a straightforward physical disjunction, with no comfort attached at all:

The alternatives are the two live cosmologies of his day: the Stoic one, in which everything is a continuous providentially ordered whole, and the Epicurean one, in which everything is particles falling through a void and nothing means anything. He is a Stoic. He does not need to entertain the second. He entertains it constantly.

The move he makes with it

What he does next is the part worth studying. He tries to build a conclusion that comes out the same on both branches.

The fullest version is in Book 6. If the gods deliberated about him, they deliberated well, since a god without purpose is not conceivable and there would be no motive to harm him. If they deliberated only about the whole and not about him personally, then what reaches him follows from a good general arrangement and he should welcome it anyway. And if - impiously, he says - they deliberated about nothing at all:

That is a man deliberately engineering his ethics to survive the loss of his metaphysics. It is also, almost exactly, the position of the modern reader who likes the practices and cannot believe the cosmology.

Does the hedge work?

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part fails.

The Stoic instruction to accept what happens draws its force from what is doing the happening. If events issue from a rational order that includes you and is not indifferent to the whole, then acceptance is a form of understanding: you are agreeing with something. Take the order away and the same behaviour is still available, but its justification changes underneath it. Accepting the arrangements of a benevolent whole is wisdom. Accepting the output of a particle collision is closer to a coping strategy - possibly a good one, but not the same claim.

Marcus keeps the conduct and lets the reason go quiet. Some readers find that admirable and sufficient. Others notice that the second branch of his disjunction is never really argued, only survived, and that the and why are you anxious? is doing an enormous amount of work without support.

Seneca does not hedge at all

If there is any doubt about how religious this material is, Letter 107 settles it. Seneca spends the letter arguing that the order of things cannot be renegotiated, in terms that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with providence:

And the person who refuses gets a description that any preacher would recognise:

Then he closes the letter by quoting Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoic school, and it is not an argument or an image. It is a prayer, addressed to Jupiter, asking to be led:

The lines that follow say the willing soul is led by Fate and the unwilling one dragged. That is a devotional text at the end of a philosophical letter, and Seneca puts it there because for him there is no seam between the two.

Taking the practice without the physics

None of this is a reason not to use Stoicism. Practices routinely outlive the justifications they were born with, and the good ones here - examining an impression before believing it, separating what is up to you from what is not, rehearsing loss before it arrives - do not obviously depend on the universe being alive.

But it is worth doing knowingly, because two things are quietly lost. The first is the reason acceptance counts as wisdom rather than resignation. The second is the ground of the ethics: the Stoic argument that you should be just and useful to other people runs through the claim that you are a part of one rational whole and cannot flourish at odds with it. Marcus falls back on a smaller premise - that your nature is rational and social, so that is what you should be - and it is fair to ask whether a nature with a purpose in it is really the secular option, or just providence wearing a coat.

What the texts genuinely offer someone in this position is not a replacement belief. It is the sight of an intelligent person, with far more at stake than most of us, refusing to settle the question and getting on with the day regardless. His own summary of the situation runs to one line: