Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.15

You have existed as a part. You shall disappear in that which produced you; but rather you shall be received back into its seminal principle by transmutation.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4 (tr Long)

As I write this, just as our new millennium has begun, people who describe themselves as "Modern" Stoics will bicker and argue, at conferences and on the Internet, as to whether there is any form of a God, or whether there could possibly be any life after death. Too many of them end up defining themselves by their petty and hateful disagreements.

These are indeed essential questions, and the use of reason, not prejudice, should be at the root of any answer. Yet I usually see only fallacies and insults, on all sides, so I stay well clear of such conflicts. I find it disturbing that people who say they follow reason, and believe in human solidarity, will behave with such terrible prejudice, and with such spite for their fellows.

Here’s my trick for bearing my compass. Once I’m told that something is an “of course”, or that “only an idiot would believe it”, you have lost my interest. The rise of the quick “sound bite” answer to life’s question has become a serious hindrance to our sanity. Thinking can never be replaced by arrogant presumption.

I should never begin my own reasoning with a conclusion, but rather with the true premises that can in turn lead to a sound conclusion. I choose to approach Stoicism as a philosophy, and not as a theology.

At the same time, I never assume that Stoicism excludes religion, or that reason excludes faith. That is a false dichotomy. There are things I may know, and then there are things that may well also be quite reasonable to believe, if I have good grounds for trusting their authority. Faith is simply trust, and trust can be quite reasonable. I will never know if my wife will betray me, but I have good faith that she won’t.

What will become of me when I die? All I do know with any certainty is that my own existence is a piece of the whole of existence. I do know that I have my own part, however small, and I also do know that anything and everything in this Universe plays its part within a complete and ordered unity. I do know that things in themselves are never reduced to nothing, and that things in themselves never arise from nothing.

Who or what I am will never cease, in whatever form, and I know that it will change, that it will be rebuilt, and that it will be transformed. Whatever it was that made me also made certain that I will return right back into whatever it was that made me, and to be wherever I need to be, however I might be transmuted.

I never took an interest in Stoicism because I wanted to justify whether I already did or did not believe in any God, or whether I did or did not believe in any specific sort of afterlife. Stoicism, like all good philosophy, is about reason, not rationalization.

Marcus Aurelius has it quite right. What I am now will certainly end, and then I will be something else, flowing back into whatever I came from, and becoming something new. I will most certainly feed the worms, and I may even perhaps feed into many other things.

I leave it to powers greater than myself to decide what that might be. I do not presume to tell Providence how to do her business.

Written in 8/2005

Image: M.C. Escher, Reptiles (1943)