Natural phenomena are cyclical. They repeat themselves indefinitely: night follows day; winter follows autumn; a clear day follows a storm. And this repetition guarantees that they cannot be forgotten: the natural world, in a peculiar but comprehensible way, effortlessly achieves a kind of ‘immortality’, whereas ‘all things that owe their existence to men, such as works, deeds and words, are perishable, infected as it were, by the mortality of their authors’ (Arendt). It is precisely this empire of the perishable, which glorious deeds, at least in theory, allowed the hero to combat. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, the ultimate purpose of works of history in antiquity was to report ‘heroic’ deeds, such as the behaviour of Achilles during the Trojan war, in an attempt to rescue them from the world of oblivion and align them to events within the natural order:
If mortals succeeded in endowing their works, deeds and words with some permanence and in arresting their perishability, then these things would, to a degree at least, enter and be at home in the world of everlasting ness, and mortals themselves would find their place in the cosmos, where everything is immortal except men. (‘The Concept of History, Ancient and Modern’, in
Between Past and Future
, 1961)
This is true. In certain respects – thanks to writing, which is more stable and permanent than speech – the Greek heroes are not wholly dead, since we continue today to read accounts of their exploits. Glory can thus seem to be a form of personal immortality, which is no doubt why it was, and continues to be, coveted by so many. Although one must add that, for many others, it will never be more than a minor consolation, if not a form of vanity.
With the coming of philosophy, a third way of confronting the challenge of human mortality declared itself. I have already remarked how fear of death was, according to Epictetus – and all the great cosmologists – the ultimate motive for seeking philosophical wisdom. According to the Stoics, the sage is one who, thanks to a just exercise of thought and action, is able to attain a human version – if not of immortality – then at least of eternity. Admittedly, he is going to die, but death will not be for him the absolute end of everything. Rather it will be a transformation, a ‘rite of passage’, if you like, from one state to another, within a universal order whose perfection possesses complete stability, and by the same token possesses divinity.
We are going to die: this is a fact. The ripened corn will be harvested; this is a fact. Must we then, asks Epictetus, conceal the truth and refrain superstitiously from airing such thoughts because they are ‘ill omens’? No, because ‘ears of wheat may vanish, but the world remains’. The way in which this thought is expressed is worth our contemplation:
You might just as well say that the fall of leaves is illomened, or for a fresh fig to change into a dried one, and a bunch of grapes into raisins. For all these changes are from a preceding state into a new and different state; and thus not destruction, but an ordered management and governance of things. Travelling abroad is likewise, a small change; and so is death, a greater change, from what presently is – and here I should not say: a change into what is not, but rather: into what presently is not. – In which case, then, shall I cease to be? – Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need. (Epictetus,
Discourses,
III
, 24, 91–4)
Or, according to Marcus Aurelius: ‘You came into this world as a part: you will vanish into the whole which gave you birth, or rather you will be gathered up into its generative principle by the process of change.’ (Meditations, IV,14)
What do such texts mean? They mean simply this: that having reached a certain level of wisdom, theoretical and practical, the human individual understands that death does not really exist, that it is but a passage from one state to the next; not an annihilation but a different state of being. As members of a divine and stable cosmos, we too can participate in this stability and this divinity. As soon as we understand this, we will become aware simultaneously how unjustified is our fear of death, not merely subjectively but also – in a pantheistic sense – objectively. Because the universe is eternal, we will remain for ever a fragment – we too will never cease to exist!
To arrive at a proper sense of this transformation is, for Epictetus, the object of all philosophical activity. It will allow each of us to attain a good and happy existence, by teaching us (according to the beautiful Stoic formula), ‘to live and die like a God’ – that is, to live and die as one who, perceiving his privileged connection with all other beings inside the cosmic harmony, attains a serene consciousness of the fact that, mortal in one sense, he is no less immortal in another. This is why, as in the case of Cicero, the Stoic tradition tended to ‘deify’ certain illustrious men such as Hercules or Aesculapius: these men, because their souls ‘survived and enjoyed immortality, were rightly regarded as gods, for they were of the noblest nature and also immortal’.
These were the words of Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods. We might almost say that, according to this ancient concept of salvation, there are degrees of death: as if one died more or less, depending on whether one displayed more or less wisdom or ‘illumin ation’. From this perspective, the good life was one which, despite the disappointed acknowledgement of one’s finiteness, maintained the most direct possible link with eternity; in other words, with the divine ordin ance to which the sage accedes through theoria or contemplation.
But let us first listen to Plato, in this lengthy passage from the Timaeus, which evokes the sublime power of man’s sovereign faculty, his intellect (nous):
God gave this sovereign faculty to be the divinity in each of us, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from the earth to our kindred who are in heaven. For the divinity suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright. Now when a man gives himself over to the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts necessarily become mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must become entirely mortal, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal. (90b–c)
And must also achieve a higher condition of happiness, adds Plato. To attain a successful life – one which is at once good and happy – we must remain faithful to the divine part of our nature, namely our intellect. For it is through the intellect that we attach ourselves, as by ‘heavenly roots’, to the divine and superior order of celestial harmony: ‘Therefore must we attempt to flee this world as quickly as possible for the next; and such flight is to become like God, to the extent that we can. And becoming like God is becoming just and wholesome, by means of intellect.’ (Theaetetus, 176a–b).