Gary's Reviews > The Nature of the Gods

Loosely structured as a dialogue, The Nature of the Gods is an exposition of the metaphysics of the Epicurean (founded by Epicurus), Stoic (founded by Zeno), and Academic (founded by Plato) schools of philosophy at the time of the Roman Late Republic. Cicero is uniquely suited to this study: as a young man he was an Epicurean, was then for some time a Stoic, but for much of his life found the most satisfactory approach to fundamental questions in the Academy.

The metaphysics discussed include the nature of being: is existence infinite in time, or did it spontaneously come into being, or was it created from nothing by a god, or was it shaped from preexisting chaos by a demiurge? Are there gods at all, or is there one god, are there many gods with powers of their own, or are the many gods simply aspects of one god? What role does god, or do the many gods, play in human life? Are they involved, do they care? Are they benevolent, indifferent, or malignant? Are all entities and events predetermined; are humans bound by fate; do humans have real choice?

Cicero has not written a history. He has lived these schools of thought; he learned from the leading philosophers of this time; he was one of them and he talked about these things with his friends. That this is a contemporary account of philosophical thinking in Rome at a crucial time in its history makes this especially interesting to me. No one has answers to these foundational questions about existence and humanity but we must keep asking them, and we must try to understand as best we can how others in other times pondered them.

Others will say, "Why ask questions for which there is no answer?" I submit that these may be the most important questions of all because seeking is in itself a truly human thing. It is the antidote to merely accepting “received and revealed truth.”