[The] natural human horror at the ever imminent prospect of the annihilation of a Present which can never really be prolonged can no doubt be counteracted, and even overcome, either by a philosophical fortitude in facing hard facts without flinching or by a religious intuition of a “larger hope” lightening the darkness of death.
The philosophical response to the challenge of Mutability is to be heard in the concordant voices of an Epicurean poet and a Stoic emperor whose consensus on this crucial point reveals a fundamental unity of outlook at the heart of two classic expressions of the Hellenic philosophy which are superficially antagonistic to one another.
Lucretius strikes a note which is as true to the temper of his Master as it is remote from the spirit that is vulgarly attributed to the Epicurean school:
cedit enim rerum novitate extrusa vetustas
semper, et ex aliis aliud reparare necessest. …
materies opus est ut crescant postera saecla,
quae tamen omnia te vita perfuncta sequentur;
nec minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque.
sic alid ex alio nunquam desistet oriri,
vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu.
[Footnote: Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, ll. 964-5 and 967-71.]
“For the old always gives way, driven out by something new, and it is necessary that one thing be created from another [...]. There is need of matter so that future generations can grow; and yet they will all follow you when their life is done; others have perished before, just like you, and will perish hereafter. So one thing will never cease to come into being out of another, and life is given to none as a freehold, but to all on lease.” I am not sure who the translator here is; since I cannot find my Penguin translation, I took, and modified, it from an incomplete online version of Monica Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
This Epicurean poetry is echoed by Marcus Aurelius in Stoic prose:
“You are afraid of Change? But nothing can happen without Change; it is something that is of the essence of the nature of the Universe. You cannot even take a hot bath without the fuel undergoing one kind of change, or digest your dinner without the food undergoing another. In fact, without the possibility of Change there could be no satisfaction for any of our needs; and in this light it becomes evident that, when it is your own turn to change into something other than yourself, this is all in the day’s work – just another necessity of Nature. … In Nature’s hands the sum of things is like a lump of wax. At one moment she moulds it into a toy horse; then she kneads up the horse in order to mould the same stuff into a toy tree; then she makes it into a mannikin, and then into something else. The duration of each of these successive shapes is infinitesimally short, but where is the grievance? Does it do a packing-case any more harm to be broken up than it does it good to be knocked together?”
[Footnote: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, Book VII, chaps. 18 and 33.] [Translation probably by Toynbee.]
The religious response to the challenge which Philosophy meets in this way is to be found in the New Testament in two variants of one simile:
“That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,” [footnote: 1 Cor. xv. 36.]
and
“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.” [Footnote: John xii. 24.]
In these flashes of religious light an apparently merciless sacrifice of a sensitive Present to a callous Future is seen as an illusion in which the growing-pains of a single immortal soul have been falsely construed into a war to the knife between two irreconcilable adversaries. On this view the underlying reality is not an inconsequent Mutability but a triumphant Withdrawal-and-Return – a reality which is as glorious as the illusion is repulsive.
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
