The Stoic Arguments for the Existence and the Providence of the Gods (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 461 Myrto Dragona-Monachou. The Stoic Arguments for the Existence and the Providence of the Gods. Athens: National and Capodistrian University of Athens, 1976. Pp. 330. This book inventories all the arguments for the existence of the gods that appear in Stoic writings or were imputed to the Stoics. Counting variations, that is forty-seven or so arguments , some historically important and others quaintly stretching the meaning of the word "argument." The antecedents of each argument are traced, interpretations and evaluations by the ancients given, and modern comments by other scholars compared. The scholarship is thorough and the aids (six indices, two bibliographies, copious and helpful citations of sources and references) are admirable. Dragona-Monachou does well what he set out to do. The trouble is in what he did not set out to do. Here are the answers, but what was the question ? Dragona-Monachou sometimes seems to believe that the arguments for the existence of the gods were intended to overcome disbelief in the existence of the gods, as if the Stoics were in a debate with the Atheist Club of the Universityof London. As someone once said, Jowett's translation of Plato is not so bad if one accepts the assumption that Plato was a regular communicant of the Church of England. Dragona-Monachou's assumptions are not as narrow as Jowett's, but he has similar limitations. How else can he summarize belief in a world full of gods in Thales' time as "awareness of his living presence as the supreme existential reality"? (No referent for "his" can be found in the context.) That the Stoics were arguing against disbeliefin the objects referred to is peculiarly implausible . Early Stoics refer to god more or less interchangeablyas one of the four elements (fire), as nature, as the active principle in the world, and as the logical constituent of substance. It is hard to believe that anyone needed convincingthat these things exist. To treat their arguments as if success depended on excluding the possibility of nonexistence is like discussing the location of your aunt's umbrella when interpreting the arguments of a Frenchman about the spatial presuppositions of Western civilization. What they were arguing for is a religious attitude toward these things. Whether or not it is appropriate to attune ourselves to the regulating order of nature with reverence, instead of withdrawing into our private garden or dealing with the world subjectively, was the issue. Although distracting, that Dragona-Monachou should deal with Stoic answers in a different context (he lumps together Plato's talk of the Good, the demiurge, the world-soul, Aristotle's unmoved mover, and arguments for the ungenerated and deathless nature of the sun, moon, and stats as alternative arguments for the same conclusion as that of the Stoics) is not entirely inappropriate. This book is aimed not only at a classicist's interest in the thought of the time, but at the borrowing of forms of argument and their refinement through different epochs of history. It is to Dragona-Monachou's credit that he keeps his discussion of specific texts free of his doubtful assumptions about their relation to other times. The best of this decade's books on the Stoics is that of F. H. Sandbach (The Stoics [London: Chatto and Windus, 1975]). Sandbach analyzes what it meant to the Stoics to say that something exists (that it acts or is acted upon), and he separates carefully what is postulated from what is known by argument (that reason rules the world is known by faith, not argument), but he is very scanty in his comparison of passages and contexts. This book provides what Sandbach lacks. The two can be read together with advantage. Dragona-Monachou's book is for scholars. Key passages that are the subject of lengthy discussion are often given only in Greek or Latin, which is perhaps not surprising in a text that was originally a dissertation in Classics at the University of London. ROBERTWIEMAN Ohio University ...