Epictetus, Discourses 1.14.2

Consider this: you, a man, have power to reflect on the Divine governance and on each Divine operation as well as upon things human, you have the faculty of being moved in your senses and your intelligence by countless objects, sometimes assenting, sometimes rejecting, sometimes doubting; you guard in your own mind these many impressions derived from so many and various objects, and moved by them you conceive thoughts corresponding to those objects which have first impressed you, and so from countless objects you derive and maintain one after another the products of art and memory.

 

All this you do, and is God not able to behold all things and be present with all and to have some communication with all? 

 

Why, the sun is able to illuminate so large a part of the Universe, and to leave unilluminated only so much as the shadow which the earth makes can cover: and cannot He who has created the sun itself, and who makes it to revolve—a small part of Himself as compared with the whole—has not He, I say, the power to perceive all things?

 

How odd that I will rely on my own knowledge, and trust in the authority of my own judgments, and yet I am so hesitant to give any credit at all to the Consciousness that moves all things! 

 

Looking only to myself, I become prone to becoming trapped within myself, when the very fact that my understanding is directed outwards toward the wide world around me should teach me that I do not exist in a bubble. My own being is necessarily tied to the fullness of Being, and it is the power of Mind that binds all of this together, the bridge by which such a unity is formed. By means of intellect, things are contained within one another, in a sense become one another, by receiving each other’s forms. 

 

How curious it is when I insist that God doesn’t know me, when it is my rather finite power of awareness that reaches out to know something about His infinite power of awareness. I cover my ears and close my eyes, yelling “I’m not listening! I’m not listening!” and I call this a failure on God’s part to show me any attention or concern. 

 

A grave danger, not just now in modernity but in the entire expanse of human history, is falling into a pit of ever-increasing subjectivism and solipsism. Our skepticism may deny that anything is ever intelligible, and our relativism may claim that nothing is ever in itself true or good, and yet I see more and more how these are merely excuses for our vanity, ways to get out of the noble responsibility of being a part within the whole. 

 

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” My particular way of doing this is to say that even if there is a God, He could not possibly care for me, and this is really just a desperate attempt to make myself feel important by pushing away the one thing that is most important. I do this when I don’t get what I happen to want, and I therefore assume I am being denied what I actually need. 

 

Of course God understands, cares, and attends, since every creature is but an extension of the Divine essence. Nothing is beyond it, and nothing is insignificant to the design. I may forget to turn off the stove, or to show a kindness to my neighbor, but God, as perfect and absolute Intelligence, is never too busy to know and to love me. 

 

Protagoras said that “man is the measure of all things.” John the Baptist rightly countered such a notion with “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Whenever I am exercising my thinking, that is only a function of the Thought that came before me. 

Written in 12/2000