Epictetus, Discourses 1.16.4

Are these the only works of Providence in us? No, what words are enough to praise them or bring them home to us? If we had sense we ought to do nothing else, in public and in private, than praise and bless God and pay Him due thanks. 

 

Ought we not, as we dig and plough and eat, to sing the hymn to God? 

 

“Great is God that He gave us these instruments wherewith we shall till the earth. Great is God that He has given us hands, and power to swallow, and a belly, and the power to grow without knowing it, and to draw our breath in sleep.”

 

At every moment we ought to sing these praises and above all the greatest and divinest praise, that God gave us the faculty to comprehend these gifts and to use the way of reason. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.16

 

I suppose I do have an innate religious instinct, and yet I am also inclined, for better or for worse, to an insistent sort of rationalism, which very easily expresses itself in a sharp skepticism. Of all the Apostles, I would most like to be like Peter, though I am clearly most like Thomas. 

 

What I sometimes, with a mixture of affection and frustration, call “God Talk” can easily leave me uncomfortable; passionate outbursts of praise, supplication, and thanksgiving to the Divine can make me wriggle in my seat. 

 

Now while the consensus of modernity insists that this is because faith is inherently in conflict with reason, I would humbly suggest that this view is misguided. That all finite beings must participate in Infinite Being, or that the principle of causality requires the existence of an Unmoved Mover, are certainly reasonable arguments, and if our purpose in this life is to know the truth and to love the good, and God is Perfect Truth and Goodness, then it follows that our goal must, ultimately, be to know and to love God. 

 

No, I realized that my hesitation comes rather from the shifty behavior of many who claim they are calling out to God. My work, unfortunately, has long put me in the company of many religious charlatans, those who ostentatiously fold their hands and loudly mouth holy words, all as a cover for merely glorifying themselves. Their religion becomes a sort of tribalism, a means to feeling superior to those they consider to be their enemies. I choose to no longer have any part in that. 

 

Yet I should not allow myself to be overcome by cynicism, or to deny God on account of those who try to twist Him to their own ends. There are still plenty of people in this world who do understand what it means to be loving, humble, reverent, and pious. For them, religion embodies a genuine calling to increasing their own virtues, in a complete commitment to other creatures and to the Creator. They understand that outside the whole they are nothing, and within the whole they share in everything. 

 

When I start to think of it that way, I am then glad to be grateful for everything, not just the things I happen to prefer. I am then at peace when I can kneel before what is so much greater than myself, even if no one else is looking. I am then able to serve, no longer demanding to be served. 

 

The words of the above prayer by Epictetus, and it is indeed a prayer, arise from his dedication to reason, which exists in total harmony with a faith in the guidance of the Supreme. 

—Reflection written in 1/2001

IMAGE: Jean-Francois Millet, The Angelus (c. 1859)