3. The Christian Fathers.
There were two basic
reasons why the Christian apologists tried to
refute the
doctrine of cosmic cycles. First, it seemed to contradict
the essential Christian dogma of free will, for if every-
thing recurs in the same manner ad
indefinitum and
if the same identical persons commit the same
deeds,
then all choice is eliminated. This was the position of
Origen.
Since his statement in De principiis is
clear,
it may be well to quote it in full.
The disciples of Pythagoras, and of Plato, although they
appear to hold
the incorruptibility of the world, yet fall
into similar errors. For as
the planets, after certain definite
cycles, assume the same relations
to one another, all things
on earth will, they assert, be like what
they were at the
time when the same state of planetary relations
existed in
the world. From this point of view it necessarily
follows
that when, after the lapse of a lengthened cycle, the
planets
come to occupy towards each other the same relations
which
they occupied in the time of Socrates, Socrates will
again be born of
the same parents, suffer the same treat-
ment, being accused by Anytus and Meletus, and con-
demned by the Council of the Areopagus.... We who
maintain that all things are administered by God in propor-
tion to the relation of free will of each
individual, and are
ever being brought into better condition, so far as
they
admit of being so, and who know that the nature of our
free
will admits of the occurrence of contingent events...
yet we, it
appears, say nothing worthy of being tested and
examined.
But, he goes on to say, we do believe in the resurrection
of the body. In
view of Origen's mistaken idea of
Plato's views, it is probable that he did
not understand
what the Stoics said either, and we quote his words
not
as testimony to what any Platonist, Stoic, or
Pythagorean actually said,
but as testimony to current
opinion among the Fathers.
One of the difficulties that the Church Fathers faced
is the verse in
Ecclesiastes which says that there is
nothing new under the sun. Where
Stoicism was held
to imply the recurrence of individuals, this verse was
interpreted as implying only the steady occurrence of
the same kinds of
things. Saint Augustine in his
City
of God (Book
XII, Ch. 13) takes this up and replies
that it does not imply the total
recurrence of the past,
but speaks simply of the course of generations,
solar
phenomena, floods—in short, of the coming into being
and the passing away of kinds of things. It does not
mean, he says, that
the philosopher Plato, who in a
certain century in Athens in a school
called the Acad-
emy, formed of his pupils, must
reappear in the future
during an infinity of centuries in the same city, in
the
same school, before the same public, and teach the
same lessons.
For otherwise, and this is the second
objection that the Christian
apologists had to the doc-
trine of cosmic
cycles, it would mean that Christ would
have to be born again, crucified
again, resurrected
again. And this thought is repugnant to Saint Augus-
tine. He knows that Christ died once for
our sins and
furthermore that His resurrection has freed mankind
from
death forever. The world will last for six thousand
years and then be
destroyed, but its destruction will
not be followed by its resurgence.
The doctrine of cosmic cycles plus that of the eternal
recurrence was
dropped by Christian writers, though
their continued exposition of it and
arguments against
it must imply that it had a certain popularity among
the laity. It was revived again by Friedrich Nietzsche
in the nineteenth
century, but his arguments in support
of the idea were different from those
of the Stoics, as
far as we have the latter. The idea seems to have
come
to him while resting after a walk from Sils-Maria to
Silvaplana.
He thought that since there is no end to
time, and presumably only a finite
number of possible
events and things, everything now existing must
recur.
The obvious basis of this argument is that any calcula-
ble probability must happen in
infinite time. Nietzsche
took the reasoning seriously and contemplated
writing
a book (for which only notes remain) to be called The
Eternal Recurrence. In Thus Spake
Zarathustra (par.
270-71) we find the Superman saying:
The plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined,—
it
will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of
the eternal
return.
I will come again with this sun, with this earth, with
this eagle, with
this serpent—not to a new life, or a
better
life, or a similar life: I come again eternally to this
identical
and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to
teach
again the eternal return of all things,—to speak again
the
word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce
again
to man the Superman.
In the notes for The Eternal Recurrence he extends
the reasoning to this end. The extent of universal en-
ergy, he says, is finite. Since all events are the result
of changes based on the expenditure of energy, the
number of
kinds of things is finite. Since the duration
of time is infinite, has
already lasted for an infinite
series of moments and will continue to exist
for another
infinite series of moments, all possibilities must have
been already realized and the future will inevitably
repeat the past. It is
perhaps unnecessary to point out
that at most this argument would imply the
recurrence
of kinds of things, something that every man has ob-
served in his daily life. This is very
different from the
recurrence of identical individuals. But Nietzsche
had
been a professor of classical philology and, though he
may have
forgotten his Stoic forebears, he was repeat-
ing their conclusions if not their reasoning.
The importance of the argument for him was its
supposed ethical
implications. To accept to the full the
eternal recurrence meant for him to
live “beyond good
and evil.” Good and evil could be
relevant within the
context of a given cycle, but had no transcendent
importance. Believers in Judaism and Christianity,
however, had grown up in
the belief that good and
evil were standards laid down by God eternally,
not
for now and here. And since Nietzsche above all
wanted to liberate
his reader from what he called the
slave-morality of the Judeo-Christian
tradition, he per-
ceived an escape in this
idea of eternal recurrence.
