Gospel & Universe 🏛 Skeptics & Stoics

Nor Quite Stoic 1: Meditations

Agnosticism & Stoicism - The Emperor's Notebook

🏛️

Agnosticism & Stoicism

Agnosticism isn’t quite skepticism, nor is it quite stoicism, although all three have a great deal in common. On this page I’ll argue that agnostics share the critical thinking and the positive possibilities of stoicism, yet agnostics don’t come to conclusions in the same way.

I’ll use the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius to suggest that while the agnostic and stoic share a widened vision of life and a skeptical understanding of what we can know, only the stoic concludes that there is a positive, quasi-theistic, unifying design in Nature. In his 3rd to 4th century Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes:

​Doing something? I do it with reference to the benefit of mankind. Something happening to me? I accept it in reference to the gods and the universal source from which all things spring interrelated. (8:23)

Agnostics aren’t quite so optimistic. While they aim for a calm and deeper understanding of the universe, they doubt the existence of gods and they doubt that there’s a “universal source from which all things spring interrelated.” They aren’t as pessimistic as the Naturalists of the late 19th century, who see a blind humanity crushed by an indifferent Nature, yet they’re open to the possibility that the Naturalists and atheists might be right. Conversely, they’re open to the possibility that Neoplatonists like Shelley, and Transcendendalists like Whitman, might be right. In Song of Myself Whitman writes:

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me […] / I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid, / It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. // Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, / To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. // Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. // Do you see O my brothers and sisters? / It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan — it is eternal life — it is Happiness.

To be fair, Aurelius doesn’t just see the universe as form, union, and plan. Rather, he swings from seeing the universe as beautiful and coherent, like Whitman, to seeing it as terrifying and chaotic, like Naturalists and like the existentialist Sartre in his novel Nausea. In Aurelius’ paragraph which immediately follows his paragraph on a universal source, he writes,

Just as you see your bath – all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting – so is every part of life and every object in it. (8:24)

The point I want to make here is that agnostics don’t make such conclusions, either in the direction of a glorious universe or a meaningless one. They do, however, see the possibility for either — and for both. The conclusion of the stoic is that meaninglessness is mitigated by a greater unity or Whole, while the conclusion of the agnostic is that the meaninglessness of chaos and the meaning of the Whole are both speculative. At times we feel isolated and alienated, and at times we feel integrated and unified. To the agnostic, these two states are like yin and yang circling round and round the mystery of who, what, where, when, and why we are.

🏛️

The Emperor's Notebook

On the next several pages I’ll use the version of stoicism we find in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, written from about 170 to 180 AD while the Roman Emperor was fighting Germanic tribes on the Danube. Meditations is a sort of personal diary or notebook, although its refinement and organization suggest a possible larger audience. Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who wrote in Greek, which is not surprising given that Greek culture (art, language, literature, religion, politics, philosophy, etc.) had a profound influence throughout the history of Rome.

Meditations is an eclectic book, full of stoic wisdom. By this I mean a wisdom which allows the individual to be realistic about life while yet retaining the notion that Nature constitutes a bigger, greater, and largely benevolent Design or Whole into which we fit. This is close to the Daoist notion of becoming one with the flow of Nature, and to the notion that Nature is itself in deep synchrony with a spiritual Force, which Daoists call the Dao or the Way. Zhuangzi dramatizes this going with the flow of Nature when he writes about a sage diving into the dangerous waters of a river. The sage survives by allowing his body to follow the water down into the depths, and then back up to the surface.

Aurelius urges us to submit with total humility to Mother Nature:

Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject.

The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city. (Meditations 10:14-15)

Stoics and agnostics agree that Nature controls us completely — our birth and death, our thought and feeling, our very existence. This fact isn’t affected by our behaviour, although the more we engage in life the more we see that this engagement is fundamentally part of, and superseded by, Nature. Aurelius turns this factual observance into an adventurous state of mind: appreciate what you have, integrate yourself into the world in which you live, and don’t allow your finite nature to lead you into an apathetic sense of meaninglessness. This stoic attitude is shared by agnostics, who believe that doubt and mystery can lead to an exciting exploration of the unknown.

Yet Aurelius clearly takes a more positive stand than the agnostic. When he counsels, “take the world as your city,” this can be seen as a way of saying, Be at home wherever you go. Yet it can also be seen in terms of the metaphor of the city, which “reveals the connection between the individual and the universe of which he is a member”:

This metaphor projects the ideal unity and organization of human cities onto the universe in which men are citizens of the ‘city of Zeus’. Zeus, or the Roman Jupiter, favoured the pious emperor and Rome. — Diskin Clay, Introduction to Meditations (Penguin)

This notion of a unified city, like the notion of a unified universe, is a wonderful one, and can make us feel like “Walk Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.” Yet from an agnostic point of view, this city is — like the City of God, Augustine’s neoplatonic other world ruled by the Christian God — a speculative, idealistic place. Whether one sees it in relation to real cities as a contradiction or a complement, to the agnostic it seems more likely an escape or a version of hope.

It’d be great to live in such a city, yet to do so any rational person would need to make a giant leap from reason and practicality. Agnostics can try to project themselves into this city, yet even if they manage to do so momentarily, they always come back to the world we live in — or else they would no longer be agnostics. To the agnostic, permanent citizenship in the neoplatonic One seems like a sort of divine schizophrenia, a happy madness of belief. It seems like a magical hope, and it remains a grand Quizas and ¡Ojalá!

🏛️

Next: Nor Quite Stoic 2: The Bigger Picture

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs