Seneca believed that human beings should be grateful to both “God” and “Nature.” But since the Stoics were pantheists, Seneca carefully pointed out that the terms “God” and “Nature” are interchangeable.25 Pantheism is not atheism, but it isn’t theism either. While the idea of God doesn’t bother me in the least, I know that religion and the idea of God make some people uncomfortable. So if you’re reading through an ancient Stoic text and come across the term “God,” you’re entirely free to replace that term with the word “Nature” in your mind. No Stoic would fault you for doing so.
Gratitude is a response to generosity, especially to a gift that is freely given. The Persian poet Rumi (1207–1273) found the sun to be a perfect symbol of generosity since, in his words, “its only property is to give and bestow.” He wrote, “The sun makes the earth green and fresh and produces various fruits on the trees. Its only function is to give and bestow; it doesn’t take anything.”26 Seneca, who wrote around 1,200 years before Rumi, would have agreed with this beautiful metaphor. In fact, Seneca, somewhat amazingly, used it himself. For Seneca and the Stoics, Nature, or the universe, is generous. In one passage, Seneca suggested that the ultimate model of freely given generosity was the work of “the gods,” by which he seemed to mean the sun and celestial bodies:
It is our aim to live according to Nature and to follow the example of the gods. . . . See the great efforts they make every day, the generous gifts they bestow; see the wealth of crops with which they fill the lands! . . . They do all these things without any reward, without any advantage for themselves.27
Being philosophers, the Stoics did not believe in the traditional gods of the Greeks and Romans. Instead, the Stoics saw the gods as symbolic personifications of nature’s elements and life-giving powers—for example, the sea, life-giving rain, and the fertility present in nature.28 At other times, Stoics used the phrase “the gods” to denote the sun and other celestial bodies. The movements of the sun and the planets trace out ordered, rational, and predictable mathematical patterns over time, which underscored the Stoic belief in a rational universe, subject to natural law.
As pantheists, the Stoics did not believe in a personal God who stood outside of the universe, like the God of theism and Christianity.29 But they weren’t atheists either. Instead, they believed in a deep, unifying force, present in nature and the cosmos, which we could describe as rational, “divine,” resplendent, the source of order and beauty in nature, and something worthy of admiration. As Seneca clearly summed up the Stoic view, “What else is Nature, except God and the divine reason that permeates the entire world and all its parts?”30 We must also remember that, for the Stoics, God was not supernatural, but material—like a breath or life-force permeating the cosmos.
We can be sure that the Stoics, as philosophers interested in logic and science, thought quite differently about ideas like God than most of their neighbors. For example, they didn’t take stories and myths about the gods literally. Rather, they gave them symbolic or allegorical interpretations in harmony with reason. At the same time, though, they didn’t shun the religious practices of their time. Like love and gratitude, the Stoics saw reverence and piety as important virtues that held society together.
For the Roman Stoics and for many people today, gratitude can be more than just an interpersonal or social emotion. There are many ways that we can experience and be grateful for gifts and blessings that don’t come from other people. For example, Seneca stressed all of the incredible gifts we receive from Nature. In one passage, he lists some of them. He mentions “so many virtues . . . so many skills . . . our mind, from which nothing is hidden,” which “is swifter than the heavenly bodies.” We have been given “so much food, so much wealth, so many blessings heaped on top of each other.” Nature has given us so many gifts, he says, it would be absurd not to feel gratitude. As he concludes, “Any correct evaluation of nature’s generosity will force you to admit that you have been her sweetheart.”31
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an avowed atheist who proclaimed “the death of God.” Some have seen him as a prophet of nihilism. But toward the end of his career, Nietzsche experienced a “perfect day” and a spontaneous feeling of deep gratitude. On that day, not only were the grapes ripening under the autumn sun, but, as he described it, “a ray of sunshine had fallen on my life.” As he wrote, “I looked behind me, I looked before me, and never have I seen so many good things at once.” Then Nietzsche asked, “How could I fail to be grateful to my entire life?”32
Similarly, Richard Dawkins, the most famous and outspoken atheist of our time, was asked if he ever had a religious experience. While Dawkins said, “I would not call it a religious experience,” he did say that he has felt a profound sense of gratitude for his own existence. He explained some of these experiences in a deeply moving tone of voice:
When I lie on my back and look up at the Milky Way on a clear night and see the vast distances of space and reflect that these are also vast differences of time as well, when I look at the Grand Canyon and see the strata going down, down, down, through periods of time which the human mind can’t comprehend: I am overwhelmingly filled with a sense of almost worship. It is not worshipping anything personal, any more than Einstein would have worshipped anything personal. It’s a feeling of sort of abstract gratitude that I am alive to appreciate these wonders. When I look down a microscope, it’s the same feeling. I am grateful to be alive to appreciate these wonders.33
Obviously, as atheists, neither Nietzsche nor Dawkins was expressing gratitude for their existence to God. Like my experience of waking up and sipping tea in the morning, many feelings of gratitude are not directed toward anyone. I also believe these experiences of cosmic, nonpersonal, or existential gratitude are quite common. They occur to many people and increase their sense of well-being. They can even occur to atheists. But how can we explain them?
As philosopher Robert Solomon pointed out, we should not always think of gratitude in terms of a personal relationship. Instead, “Gratitude is a philosophical emotion [emphasis added]. It is, in a phrase, seeing the bigger picture.”34 In this sense, cosmic gratitude originates from experiencing life in the context of a greater whole. Being grateful for your entire life, for the very existence of a loved one, or for the sublime beauty of nature is not a “grateful to whom?” kind of question. Rather, as Solomon explains, it’s being aware of these things in a greater context that inspires deep appreciation. As he puts it, “Like many moods, gratitude expands beyond the focus on a particular object to take in the world as a whole.”35 This kind of gratitude is much more than just being a response to a social transaction. As such, it certainly deserves our attention.
STOIC APPRECIATION
In some cases, gratitude can be a form of love. If you tell another person, “I am grateful for your existence,” it’s equivalent to expressing a kind of love. Sometimes, as a way of expressing love, I will simply say, “I appreciate you.”
Central to Stoicism, as a philosophical way of life, is a deep sense of appreciation, from which both love and gratitude emerge. We can deeply appreciate the beauty of a sunset even though it’s changing every moment and will soon disappear. Its transience adds to its unique beauty. Similarly, a Stoic can understand that everything in nature is changing, transient, and impermanent, including our own lives, without reducing his or her depth of appreciation.