Is the Sage Real?
Is the Sage Real?
I diverge from many traditional Stoics on this
The hierarchy of moral perfection, which is the clunky name I’m giving to the hierarchy I’m about to outline and definitely not a description any Stoic has ever used, is, from top to bottom:
God
Sage
Prokoptôn
Madman
The madman may be aware of Virtue (or may not be) but has no care to work towards it. For this reason is the madman mad.
The Prokoptôn is aware of Virtue and works towards it because they are not mad.
The Sage has attained Virtue (is morally perfect in their thoughts, attitudes, and actions).
God, in Stoicism, is the universe (a sentient and conscious universe) and everything within it. I’m not sure if it has Virtue, per se, but it is from the body of the universe (of the Stoic God) that Virtue is made manifest so I think it’s reasonable to say that the Stoic God (the Universe; Nature) possesses Virtue in one way or another.
The Sage as a myth-borne ideal, not an achievable status of character
If we, as Stoics, agree that the Sage is second only to God, we must, at the very least, accept that the Sage is rare — and we do accept this.
“Do you know what kind of man I now mean when I speak of "a good man"? I mean one of the second grade, like your friend. For one of the first class perhaps springs into existence, like the phoenix, only once in five hundred years.” (Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, 42.1)
…
“There have been just one or two good men, as is fabulously related by them, like some absurd and unnatural creature rarer than the Ethiopians’ phoenix.” (SVF 3.658)
If you’ve been reading about Stoicism for a little bit you’ll be familiar with the phrase “as rare as the phoenix” (in reference to the occurrence of Sages), but I’ve always wondered from where this phrase (or the concept behind it) originates, so I did a little digging.
Here’s what I found, it is from Herodotus (~484-420 BCE):
There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix, which I did not myself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to the Egyptians very rarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred years. They say that he comes regularly when his father dies; and if he be like the painting, he is of this size and nature, that is to say, some of his feathers are of gold color and others red, and in outline and size he is as nearly as possible like an eagle. This bird, they say (but I cannot believe the story), contrives as follows.
Setting forth from Arabia he conveys his father, they say, to the temple of the Sun plastered up in myrrh, and buries him in the temple of the Sun. He conveys him thus. He forms first an egg of myrrh as large as he is able to carry, and then he makes trial of carrying it, and when he has made trial sufficiently, then he hollows out the egg and places his father within it and plasters over with other myrrh that part of the egg where he hollowed it out to put his father in, and when his father is laid in it, it proves (they say) to be of the same weight as it was; and after he has plastered it up, he conveys the whole to Egypt to the temple of the Sun. Thus they say that this bird does. — (Herodotus, Histories 2.73)
The Egyptians believed in this bird. I think, however, that it is, at best, tenuous to believe that the ancient Stoics believed in it as a real and existing creature. The way Herodotus speaks of the phoenix seems, to me, to be in a tone of almost academic cultural cataloguing (e.g., Richard Gordon Smith or Frederick Hadland Davis) and not in a tone suggestive of fact-documenting.
Why does this matter?
Because if the ancient Stoics didn’t believe in the phoenix literally, and only used it as a metaphor for rareness, it would mean that the phrase, “as rare as the phoenix” could elude to the Sage not existing literally but being something more like a mythical ideal. Theoretically possible within the laws of Nature, yes, but impossibly unbelievable.
I happen to like this view of the Sage as an unachievable state of character because it reinforces a truly Stoic idea: that there’s always progress to be made; that there is no end to how one can improve one’s character.
To some that might sound exhausting, but, as my dear friend Kai Whiting says (and I’m paraphrasing), “perfect health may not be possible, but the physician has the ideal of perfect health fixed firmly in their mind as they work to improve the health of their patients.”
I don’t think the Sage being a myth-borne unachievable status of character is any more problematic to Stoic practice than the idea of “perfect health” is to medical practice.
So, for me, the Stoic Sage is exactly as rare as the phoenix.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash