Did Epictetus Believe in a Personal and Plotting God?

It’s rare I get to introduce a Stoicism “colleague” on this blog, and even rarer that I’d get to plug their new book at the same time. While neither of these are the point of this week’s edition, it’s appropriate for me to do both at some point along the way. This week I’m asking (and answering) what might be a contentious question: Did Epictetus believe in a personal (interfering) and plotting (that is to say, planning and/or intentional) God? Is the Stoic God the sort of god that has done things with us in mind (as a species of animal and as individuals) and is also involved in a personal relationship with us the way that Christians say they are in a personal relationship with Christ or their God?

Why such a heavy lift this week?

On Bluesky, which is a social network you can think of as Twitter v2.0, I reposted a contemporary theologian’s post and added some of my own thoughts:

Within that thread I added,

To which the contemporary Stoic philosopher, co-author of the soon to be released “Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and other Ancient Philosophers”, and founder of The Stoic Fellowship, Greg Lopez , replied:

These portions of Discourses are long, and I’m not going to post them all here. Instead, I’m going to take two selections from them to illustrate what I believe to be true: that Epictetus was using metaphorical and socially placative language in his discourses.

That’s something I don’t believe anyone has ever suggested of Epictetus of in the past, but I’m going to here.

Epictetus was a teacher who charged tuition, just like any other teacher in Rome

We don’t know how much Epictetus charged his Students, but we do know he was well-sought-after and that means, had he wanted to, he could have charged a lot. Although it is likely not the case that, if he charged a lot, he kept the money for himself — if, that is, we are to believe Simplicius (a 6th Century Neoplatonist philosopher) when he wrote:

Since Epictetus was not a Cynic and beds are certainly preferred indifferents, I tend to think comments like this about Epictetus (or any ancient Stoic) rise to the level of hyperbolic self-indulgent fanboying. I imagine it would make for a funny “never meet your heroes moment” if we scooped Simplicius up in a time machine, took him back to the life of Epictetus, and found the venerable old Stoic living in a modest home on a comfortable bed.

Epictetus wasn’t Diogenes, and Stoicism isn’t Cynicism, so I have a hard time believing 70-year old Epictetus was sleeping on stone floor with naught but a straw mat. Who would he be trying to impress? And why would he feel he had to do it? Nothing in the Stoic canon says we can’t have nice things — unless those nice things get in the way of our pursuit of Virtue. Which means if Epictetus slept on a straw mat in alleyway, he was the kind of man whose pursuit of Virtue was vulnerable to… furniture.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. At least, not to me.

It’s probably the case the Epictetus lived in a modest house, and used whatever he charged for tuition to keep his school open and to pay his rent. If there was surplus (and I think it’s fair to assume there could have been), I’d have no trouble believing the suggestion that he donated the rest of his money to others as way of supporting the Cosmopolis and fulfilling his Oikeiotic roles as a member of it.

So he charged to teach. When you’re charging to teach you’re automatically ostracizing some would-be students.

Zeno taught for donations in the public market (so they say), Epictetus taught only those who could afford his fees. I’m not implying he charged an arm and a leg, or that he was wrong for charging (or that he was somehow less Stoic for charging), I’m only saying that charging meant only certain people could afford to learn from him.

Everyone in Ancient Rome would have wanted their sons to learn philosophy, to be wise, to be taught by the renown slave-turned-famous-phiolosopher Epictetus, but, if we’re honest and practical about it, who would have actually ponied up the dough (or even been able to) to pay for something as highfalutin as expert Stoic Philosophy classes?

Epictetus taught in Koine Greek, so to attend you’d have need to understand that language and everyday Roman’s wouldn’t have had any need for that. Maybe international merchants, maybe nobles and their children, maybe military families, but not the farmer, not the shopkeeper, not the regular everyday average Roman.

I believe Epictetus taught mostly “rich kids” — and I don’t necessarily mean that disparagingly.

This is foundational to why I think Epictetus used metaphorical and placative language in his lectures.

It would have been important to Epictetus to get through to his students something that made a difference

If you’re the son of a nobility, a senator, a military general, or a successful businessman, think about how your father would want you to use philosophy — why they would want you to have an education that included philosophy and to what ends they would believe it would serve you.

Think also about how you, as this son, would feel about being made to learn philosophy from one of the most notoriously grumpy philosophers of the time.

I believe that most of the students who attended Epictetus’s school either (A) didn’t want to be there or (B) were there to get out of the education what could be gotten out of it inasmuch that it could further their broader, non-philosophical ambitions.

Epictetus, no doubt, wanted to teach great minds who wanted to pursue Virtue in earnest, but I would bet all the gold in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin that the bulk of who he got to teach were those who wanted to leverage Stoicism as a career hack.

Sound familiar?

No doubt, Epictetus would have understood this. He would have known these people were never going to become sages and that they had no real earnest interest in doing so. Still, he would have realized he could have an impact of some kind — and, no doubt, he wanted to.

I believe this is why he spoke in the way he did. He had no desire to get bogged down in the mire of explaining the difference between Zeus-as-a-lighting-bolt-hurling-shape-shifter-who-lived-on-a-mountain and Zeus-as-the-logic-inherent-in-the-self-sustaining-system-of-the-Cosmos.

So, sure, it’s “Zeus”, because to expect a bunch of young men with compromised motives for being in his class in the first place to have the attention span, wherewithal, or desire to unlearn themselves from the cultural zeitgeist of gods and such at the time would have been unrealistic and pie in the sky.

So when Epictetus says something like:

Yes, he’s talking about Zeus as a being who issues decrees, and who is the designer and assigner of our fates, but I think he’s saying that in lieu of being able to say something a lot more esoteric, which might be…

Epictetus wasn’t a sage, and when we hold him up as some perfect embodiment of Stoicism, and when we fool ourselves into thinking we even understand what a perfect embodiment of Stoicism would be in the first place, we’re less able to be practical about what he was like and how imperfect and flawed he probably was.

Perhaps my thoughts on Epictetus’s teaching style are not accurate, perhaps they’re far off base… but I’ll tell you what isn’t: we didn’t know him, he’s been dead for nearly 2000 years, and what we know for certain about him probably would be enough to write a one page biography that wasn’t conjecture, hearsay, or references to people who lived many years after he was dead and never knew him.

Whoever he was, however he thought when he thought to himself, whatever he was really like, we’ll never know…

I just doubt he slept on a straw mat and believed in the mythical Zeus.

Thanks for reading.