Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse

The theory that there might be a plurality of worlds traces back to the Atomist philosophers of the fifth century B.C.E.¹ Against the Ionians’ singlematerial principles (water, air, fire, the indefinite), Leucippus and his pupil Democritus argued that the world is composed not of one basic element, but of microscopic, indivisible bits of matter called “atoms,” from the adjective atomos (uncuttable).² These atoms move eternally in a void (kenon) and at some indeterminate time and place collide haphazardly to form a vortex (dine) that is “cut off from the unlimited.”³ In this vortex, the atoms “jostle against each other,” “circling round in every possible way,” and become “entangled” (periplekomenon) with one another.⁴ These entanglements gradually form a circular (not spherical) cosmos, with the heavy materials at the center, the light materials ablaze at the periphery, and a shell or membrane (hymen) encasing the whole.⁵

Yet this “whole,” for the Atomists, is not the only whole. As Diogenes Laertius, the third-century C.E. biographer of the philosophers, explains it, a cosmos is just a small, bounded part of “the all” (to pan), which includes both atoms and void and which Leucippus “declares … to be unlimited [apeiron].”6 If the all is unlimited, then there are an unlimited number of atoms in existence and an unlimited amount of space within which they move. This means that the random atomic collisions that generate the cosmos must also generate other kosmoi—even an infinite number of them.⁷ Classicists G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven affirm that Leucippus and Democritus are “the first to whom we can with absolute certainty attribute the odd concept of innumerable worlds,”⁸ and it is clearly these philosophers against whom Plato and Aristotle seek most energetically to guard their singular cosmologies. Interestingly, Plato never mentions either philosopher by name, an omission that Diogenes, at least, attributes to his inability to refute them properly.⁹ Aristotle, by contrast, frames a great deal of the De caelo as an explicit rebuttal of “Democritus and Leucippus,” and throughout his corpus argues against each of their tenets—from the theory of particulate matter to the existence of a void to the existence of an actual infinity to the existence of multiple worlds.¹⁰ But whether they name their adversaries explicitly or not, we will recall that in both the Timaeus and the De caelo, the oneness of the cosmos establishes its imperishability. If there is nothing outside this world, then nothing can threaten its eternal endurance, whereas a cosmos that is one of many is expendable and would likely be destroyed by whatever exists beyond it.¹¹ Untroubled by this prospect, the earliest Atomists affirmed that kosmoi are destroyed regularly; as Hippolytus explains in the Refutations, “Some are growing, some in their prime, some waning; here they come to be, there they fail. They perish by colliding with each other.”¹² Such a collision causes each world to unravel into its constituent atoms, and from these atoms new worlds eventually emerge.

This highly un-Platonic, un-Aristotelian view was developed a century later by Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E), who grounded philosophy in the Atomism of Democritus and Leucippus, even as he claimed to have no teachers.13 Writing under the cosmogonic dominance of the Timaeus in particular, Epicurus sought a different explanation for the order of the universe than the benevolence of a god and the perfection of a transcendent model.¹⁴ He did not teach that there were no gods—merely that to be divine meant to be free from all cares. The gods, then, would have no reason to be involved with the realm of mortals, whether as its creators, sustainers, or occasional punishers. With divinity off the table as a creative force, Epicurus found his alternative in the Atomist principles of infinity and accident: given infinite time, infinite substance, and infinite space, any material configuration that can emerge, will. There is thus no need to appeal to an intelligent cosmic designer; this world of ours, which seems so finely tuned and harmoniously composed, was bound to arise at some point.¹⁵

In fact, Epicurus argued, this world must have arisen elsewhere, even an infinite number of times, in time or space.¹⁶ He was not the first to make this claim; Democritus had also taught that there are an infinite number of worlds just like ours.¹⁷ Perhaps thanks to Aristotle’s criticism,¹⁸ however, Epicurus believed that Democritus had failed to secure this teaching mathematically. According to Aristotle, Democritus had said that worlds were composed by means of an infinite number of atoms with an infinite number of shapes.¹⁹ Although these premises secured the infinity of worlds, however, they did not secure the repetition of worlds, for if there were an infinite number of types of atoms, then there would potentially be an infinite number of types of worlds. This would mean that no world would necessarily be the same as any other, and we would still be left asking why this world is so well suited to life. Epicurus therefore asserted that although there are an infinite number of atoms, there are a finite number of types of atoms.²⁰ This means that any given configuration is bound not only to occur, but also to recur—infinitely. So this world of ours, perfect and unique as it may seem, is just one of those things that happens from time to time.

In this manner, Epicurus can be said to have performed a Copernican revolution avant la lettre (and well beyond it): not only is our cosmos not the only one, he argued, but it is not even the only one of its kind. And it certainly will not last forever; like Democritus, Epicurus taught that the world will eventually be destroyed in relation to the material outside it. But unlike his predecessor, he did not say that this destruction would come about through the collision of different worlds. More like the pre-Socratic philosophers, he conceived of the world as an organism whose demise is merely the end of its life cycle. When a world begins, Epicurus taught, it takes matter into itself from the infinite space outside it. Like any organism, it will continue to grow as long as the amount it takes in exceeds the amount it gives off.²¹ Midway through its life, a world will reach a point of equilibrium, after which “there is an excess of loss over gain and the Cosmos becomes weaker and weaker, losing not so much bulk as intrinsic compactness, until it finally breaks down” and unravels into the atomic whirl around it.²²

Although the earliest sources of this Atomist cosmology survive only in fragments, it has been preserved and elaborated most fully in Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Written in the first century B.C.E., this text brandishes the teachings of Epicurus against Platonic-popular creationism, on the one hand, and Aristotelian physics, on the other.23 Lucretius (ca. 99–55 B.C.E.) assails the former from the very beginning of the treatise, lauding Epicurus as the first man to laugh at the gods’ thunderbolts and their “menacing roar,” to free himself from the “crushing weight of superstition [religione]” and leave it “trampled underfoot.”²⁴ Lucretius goes on to say that it was precisely this triumph that allowed Epicurus to travel “beyond the fiery ramparts of the world” and out to the universe itself (1.73–74).²⁵ Once Epicurus was free from the tyranny of the gods, he could posit and contemplate an infinite number of kosmoi outside our starry cosmic shell.

In Epicurus’s footsteps, Lucretius resolves to clear away all theistic cosmogonies in order to uncover the infinite universe, teeming with worlds.26 For Lucretius, seeing the cosmos as a divine creation is unacceptable not only because it enshrines a singular cosmos where a vast multiplicity should be, but also because it commits a slew of other crimes—which, for the sake of convenience, can be grouped into four. First, creation narratives keep people in perpetual fear of the creators. This fear prompts them to engage in “foul” rituals in order to win the gods’ favor or escape their wrath—practices that Lucretius sees as both humiliating to humanity and insulting to the gods. Second, creation stories assume narcissistically that the gods care about human affairs. But, as Epicurus taught, the gods exist in blissful, eternal contemplation; they would have no reason to disturb this serenity by engaging in cosmic affairs (1.62–70). Third, creationist cosmologies begin from the false premise that our world is particularly well suited for human flourishing—even that, as Plato insists, it is perfectly constructed for this purpose. Following Epicurus, Lucretius counters that the universe was clearly not designed “for us” or for any purpose at all, considering that it is “so profoundly flawed.”²⁷ As evidence, he cites the uninhabitability of vast regions of the earth, the recalcitrance of the land that produces our crops, and the excesses of sun, frost, and wind that destroy them (5.200–17). Implicitly against Plato, Lucretius argues furthermore that the elements do not exist in perfect balance with one another; rather, fire wants to consume earth, water wants to extinguish fire, and air wants to dry up water in an agonistic tango of what Friedrich Solmsen calls “ceaseless cosmic strife.”²⁸ “Besides,” Lucretius continues, “why does nature feed and increase the frightful tribes of wild beasts, enemies of the human race, by land and sea? Why do the seasons of the year bring disease? Why does untimely death stalk about?” (5.218–21, translation altered slightly). Considering what David Hume’s Demea will call “the perpetual war … kindled amongst all living creatures,”²⁹ it is the height of both ignorance and selfishness to insist that the world was in any way designed “for us.”

Finally, Lucretius claims that in addition to being cosmologically, psychologically, theologically, and intellectually misguided, theistic cosmogonies are morally treacherous. He sets forth this view at the outset of the poem in response to the anticipated objection that if people no longer fear the gods, human society will devolve into chaos. Lucretius assures us that such concerns are unfounded. After all, it is not “impious” philosophy that leads one down “a path of crime…. On the contrary, more often it is … religion which has brought forth criminal and impious deeds” (1.82–84, translation altered slightly, emphasis added). As a prime example of religion’s immorality, Lucretius cites Agamemnon’s mythic sacrifice of Iphigenia. Persuaded by priests that the gods demanded his daughter to ensure his safe passage to Troy, Agamemnon brought her to be “slaughtered by her father’s hand” (1.99, translation altered). The story, Lucretius suggests, speaks for itself. A man killed his innocent daughter for the sake of favorable sailing conditions: “so potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds” (1.101).

There is, therefore, no reason to believe the world is a deliberate product of divine craftsmanship. It is far sounder, Lucretius suggests, to contemplate nature as having arisen “of her own accord” (1.1092). The world is not the work of the gods, but of primordial particles colliding by chance, combining and recombining “through infinite time” (5.190–91). Like the proverbial typewriting monkeys who eventually hammer out Shakespeare, these atoms have an infinite amount of time, energy, and materials with which to collide—making it “no wonder that they fell into such arrangements … as this sum of things now shows” (5.193–95, translation altered slightly). The principles of infinity and accident therefore have just as much explanatory power as any theistic cosmogony and bring the added benefit of liberating humanity from its service to a fleet of inscrutable gods. “If you hold fast to these convictions,” Lucretius promises, “nature is seen to be free at once and rid of her proud masters [dominis privata superbis]” (2.1090–91). And with the proud masters out of the way, we, too, can travel with Epicurus beyond this world to contemplate a vast universe of worlds, for the very processes that produce this imperfect cosmos are bound to produce an infinite number of others.

Mindful of the strangeness of this position, Lucretius sets forth the Epicurean doctrine of cosmic multiplicity through a series of progressive proofs and illustrations. His first step is to demonstrate—more against Aristotle than against Plato—that the universe, literally “all that is,” cannot possibly be finite. “Let us grant for the moment that the universe [omne quod est] were finite,” Lucretius begins. “Suppose someone proceed[s] to the very end and throws a spear” at what he believes to be its boundary (1.968–70, translation altered).30 Two possibilities ensue. Either something stops the spear, or nothing does. If nothing stops it, then the universe has no boundary. If something stops it, then there is a boundary, which is to say there is a “beyond” into which the spear could have traveled had it not been stopped. In other words, Lucretius is suggesting that if there is a boundary, then there is necessarily something outside that boundary. So either way, the universe must be infinite: “Wherever you place your extremest edge, I shall ask about the spear” (1.980, translation altered slightly).

Lucretius deepens this proof of infinity by appealing to the mutual reliance of matter and void. Early in the De rerum natura, he argues (also against Aristotle) that if the void does not exist, then matter would not exist because atoms cannot move without empty space between them (1.369, 1.430–31). This means, furthermore, that the void (inane) is not external to matter (corpus, materia), but is mixed, intermingled, tangled up with things (admixtum rebus)—irreducibly constitutive of all that is (1.369). Insofar as void and matter are so tangled, they provide further testimony to the infinity of the universe. For if the void is inextricably admixtum with the stuff of the world, then “matter must be bounded by void and … void bounded by matter.” Neither can provide an absolute edge to the cosmos because each must be surrounded by the other. “By this alternation,” Lucretius concludes, “nature renders the universe infinite [ut sic alternis infinite omnia reddat]” (1.1009–11, translation altered).

Having established the endless entanglement of matter and void, Lucretius has laid the argumentative infrastructure that he will need to prove the existence of many worlds (terrae, mundi) within this infinite universe (omnium, omne quod est, orbis).31 He begins this proof from the principle of infinity, suggesting that because space is infinite and particles of matter (the word he uses for atoms is semina [seeds]) are “innumerable,” it is highly unlikely that this world could be the only one (2.1055–57). If one admits that there is matter outside our world, he reasons, it would be very strange to suggest that those seeds just sit still “out there” without forming anything. Rather, they most likely obey the same natural principles as the rest of the matter in the universe, “knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways, heedless, without aim, without intention, until at length those combin[e] which … could become … the beginning of mighty things, of earth and sea and sky” (2.1058–63). In short, Lucretius summarizes, “when abundant matter is ready, when space is to hand, and no thing and no cause hinders, things must assuredly be done and completed” (2.1067–69, emphasis added). In this manner, he provides an early articulation of what Arthur Lovejoy will in the 1970s call “the principle of plenitude”: thanks to the infinite bounty of nature, anything that can be created will be created.³² Lucretius seems to find this principle self-evident because immediately after stating it, he intensifies his tone and concludes: if it is the case that nature behaves uniformly, then “you are bound to confess that there are other worlds in other parts of the universe” (2.1074–75, translation altered, emphasis added).

Just in case his audience remains unconvinced, Lucretius follows this argument with evidence from experience. Whether we assent to the principles of atoms and void or not, we all have doubtless come to realize that “there is no thing in the sum of things that is unique” (2.1077–78, translation altered slightly). Not a single animal, man, or “dumb scaly fish” (2.1083) can be called (with apologies to William James’s crab) “itself, itself alone”;³³ rather, each of them is one of many others just like it. “Therefore,” Lucretius explains, “you must in like manner confess for sky and earth, for sun, moon, sea and all else that exists, that they are not unique, but rather of number innumerable”—and here he subtly changes tack—“since there is a deepset limit of life equally awaiting them, and they are as much made of a perishable body as any kind here on earth” (2.1084–89, emphasis added). Worlds are ultimately innumerable because, like everything else, they are members of a species, and, like everything else, they are perishable. And so at the end of this series of arguments, we have run up against Plato’s and Aristotle’s primary concern: to concede the plurality of kosmoi is in fact to concede their impermanence. Worlds decay just as surely as they come into being, living for a time and then unraveling again into the chaotic flux from which they arose.

As in every cosmogony, however, the nature of this chaotic flux is not easy to pin down. In the Timaeus, we recall, a full description of chaos really comes halfway through the story of the formation of the cosmos, when our speaker interrupts himself to start his story again. Out of nowhere, he suddenly says that he must add a “third thing” to his previous two and heads back to chaos: “[T]here were, before the world came into existence, being, khôra, and becoming, three distinct realities.”34 But the moment Timaeus adds khôra to the story, he drops the demiurge, leaving us with two fairly incompatible accounts of the state of things before the cosmos. If we shift to another mythic context, the book of Genesis also begins twice, its first primordial scene a triumvirate of God (Elohim), breath (ruach), and deep (tehom), and its second an empty earth, a stream of water, and the hands of YHWH.³⁵ And in a strikingly similar fashion, the De rerum natura also gives us two different accounts of the chaos before and beyond the cosmos.

The first thing Lucretius has to say about this chaos is that it is not nothing. At the time of his writing, the formal doctrine of “creation out of nothing” (creatio ex nihilo) had not yet emerged—it would not do so for another two hundred years, when some of the early church fathers adopted it in order to affirm the sovereignty of God against the so-called Gnostics.³⁶ Put briefly, the fathers considered a God who could create out of nothing to be more powerful than a God (like Plato’s demiurge) who created out of a preexistent material. After all, to say that God creates out of something is to imply that God depends on something or is limited by something or at the very least has to negotiate with something in order to create the world. God’s creation out of “nothing,” then, establishes God as the supreme (and sole) creative force in the universe.³⁷ But, again, this logic had not yet been formally articulated in Lucretius’s time; in fact, Jesus of Nazareth had not yet been born. Yet the antiauthoritarian Lucretius seems nevertheless to anticipate the argument, making “creation out of nothing” his first target. In fact, he builds his entire cosmology on refuting it: “The first principle of our study we will derive from this: that no thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing [nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam]” (1.149–50).

The primary reason Lucretius gives for affirming this “first principle” is that if something could come out of nothing, anything could come out of anything: men from the sea, fish from the earth, “and birds could hatch from the sky” (1.159–62). He takes this argument directly from Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus: “To begin with, nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent. For in that case anything would have arisen out of anything.”38 As the examples of Plato and the Ionians attest, however, neither Lucretius nor Epicurus was the first to hold this principle: the philosophers of antiquity were unanimous in holding that nothing comes from nothing.³⁹ So Lucretius is effectively beginning from what he would regard as an uncontroversial position, suggesting that once we truly understand what we already know, the rest of his argument will follow easily. In particular, excising nothingness as a cosmic starting point will excise any sort of sovereign God who might create out of it. As Lucretius predicts, “[W]hen we shall perceive that nothing can be created from nothing [nil posse creari de nilo], then we shall at once more correctly understand … the manner in which everything is done without the working of the gods” (1.155–58). If nothing is ever created from nothing, then there is no need for a creator to produce something. Eternal, inchoate matter is perfectly capable of calling itself to order—and of dismantling and rearranging any order it may establish.

Epicurus follows Leucippus and Democritus in teaching that cosmic order begins to emerge by means of a vortex (dine). From the primordial chaos, atoms form a turbulent swirl that gradually produces compounds, elements, and worlds.⁴⁰ The question that all these thinkers leave unanswered is: What produces the vortex itself?⁴¹ How do the atoms move before they organize themselves into a generative whirl, and how does this whirl come about in the first place? In other words, what is chaos, and how does it produce the vortex that makes the cosmos?

Lucretius does describe these primordial operations, but as cosmogonists often do, he tells two different stories about them. One strand of the De rerum figures chaos as what Michel Serres calls a “cloud”: a “stormy combat of atoms” colliding at random in every possible way.⁴² This is the description of chaos usually attributed to Leucippus and Democritus, and Lucretius employs it in a number of places throughout the text. For example, immediately after his proof of cosmic infinity in book 1, he describes the state of things before “the first beginning” as involving a great number of seeds, “shifted in many ways … harried … trying every kind of motion and combination” (1.1024–26). Similarly, after reminding us of the principle of infinity in book 2, he says that the innumerable seeds of the universe had been, from eternity, “knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways, heedless, without aim, without intention” (2.1059–60). In both of these passages, the primordial scene is one of absolutely random motions and collisions, which, given enough time and material, eventually generated the earth, sky, sea, and their inhabitants by the sheer force of accident (1.1026–28, 2.1060–62; compare 5.416–31).

The work of this “cloudlike” chaos finds a fuller and slightly different description in book 5, which offers an extended explanation of the cosmogonic process. Before the world was made, Lucretius tells us, there was “a sort of strange storm [tempestas], all kinds of beginnings [omnigenis e principiis] gathered together into a mass, while their discord, exciting war amongst them, made a confusion of intervals, courses, connexions, weights, blows, meetings, motions, because, on account of their different shapes and varying figures, not all when joined together could remain or so make the appropriate motions together” (5.432–42).

The notion of elements gathering together “like to like” echoes a fragment from Democritus in which atoms are sorted out through a rotational movement, as when a “sieve is moved around [dinon] [and] lentils are sorted and ranged with lentils, barley with barley, and wheat with wheat.”43 This passage is probably the one that lies behind Serres’s suggestion in The Birth of Physics that Lucretius’s cloud-chaos ultimately generates the cosmos by means of “the Democritean dinos.” “The vortex (tourbillon) is thus the pre-order of things,” Serres writes, “their nature, in the sense of nativity. Order upon disorder, whatever the disorder may be; the vortex arises.”⁴⁴ Strangely, however, Lucretius does not mention the vortex in relation to the cosmic cloud—nor does he ascribe any sort of rotational movement to it. Rather, we have a storm of collisions out of which “like things” entangle themselves into a textile of earth and then the interstitial rising up of mist, sea, and cloud. Serres detects a vortical motion behind or beneath this primordial separation and entanglement, but it seems to me that the clues in the text are sparse.

The Democritean vortex haunts Lucretius more noisily in his description of another type of chaos, which appears briefly between his more numerous descriptions of the primordial storm. Having very recently described the original state of things as an “everlasting conflict [of] struggling, fighting, battling in troops without any pause, driven about with frequent meetings and partings” (2.118–20), Lucretius suddenly gives a very different account of things. “The first bodies,” he writes, “are … carried downwards by their own weight in a straight line through the void [rectum per inane feruntur]” (2.216–17). Serres focuses much of his marvelous reading of Lucretius around this brief burst of linear chaos, which he calls the “laminar flow” or the “laminar cascade.”⁴⁵ He borrows the term from fluid mechanics: a flow is said to be “laminar” if it is perfectly stream-lined—that is, if all its particles move in the same direction, with no diagonal or perpendicular movements.⁴⁶ This primordial cascade, unlike its stormy counterpart, is not a site of atomic collisions and perpetual war; to the contrary, it is nothing but ceaseless, parallel flow—just an ideal of atoms in perfect motion—until, “at uncertain times and places, they swerve a little [depellere paulum] from their course, just so much as you might call a change of motion” (2.218–20, translation altered slightly, emphasis added). With this tiny swerve, everything changes; things begin to take place. As Serres explains it, this slight inclination (clinamen) produces “the minimum angle of formation of a vortex”: it is the tiny deviation that draws the sea around it into an atomic whirl.⁴⁷ And as each of the ancient Atomists taught, this whirl alone produces everything and anything that is. As Lucretius concludes, “[I]f they were not apt to incline, all would fall downwards like raindrops through the profound void, no collision would take place and no blow would be caused amongst the first-beginnings: thus nature would never have produced anything” (2.221–24). What this means, Serres ventures, is that the real atomic unit is not the atom, but the clinamen: because nothing happens without the swerve, the swerve is “more atomic, so to speak, than the atom.”⁴⁸

The Lucretian text thus presents us with two very different descriptions of the world before the world: the omnidirectional “stochastic cloud” and the unidirectional “laminar flow.”49 It might be tempting to try to call this difference to order: to suggest, for example, that the laminar chaos precedes the stormy chaos so that atoms would move from an initially parallel pouring-out, through the slight angle of the clinamen, into the tempest’s warlike collisions, which produce the cosmogonic vortex. But it seems important to note that Lucretius leaves these two chaoses stubbornly unconnected and unreconciled: the storm does not seem to produce a vortex, and the laminar flow that does produce a vortex does not give rise to the storm’s atomic war. In fact, even though Serres wants to connect each of these primordia to the vortex, he, too, resists arranging them into a single story: “Now there are indeed two kinds of chaos, the cloud and the pitcher. In the first image, multiple aleatory collisions within the infinite void of space send disordered atoms moving in all directions. In the second image, against the second background, encounters and collisions are not possible, and the laminar atoms move only in one direction.”⁵⁰ The two are irreducible to each other—even, in a sense, opposed—but Serres suggests that they are nevertheless communicating complementary things about the noise beneath all information or meaning (sens). Chaos “either dissipates in all directions, or flows in one direction. There is no sense when everything has the same sense. There is no sense when everything is in all senses.”⁵¹ The cloud and the pitcher are therefore “two thresholds of disorder”—mayhem, on the one hand, and absolute uniformity, on the other. In other words, as Empedocles knew, both pure difference and pure identity are chaos (see chap. 1, sec. “So Let Us Begin Again …”).

In a sense, then, we are quite close to the Timaeus: if both pure difference and pure identity are chaotic states, then cosmos can only come about in and as their interdetermination (“again with the Same and the Different he made … compounds intermediate … and taking these three he mixed them into a single unity”).⁵² But, of course, there are two irreducible differences between Lucretius and Timaeus: the creator-god and the singular cosmos. Whereas Timaeus secures the latter by means of the former, Lucretius abolishes the former to dismantle the latter: an infinity of worlds does away with the sovereign god who secures the oneness of the world.

This is not to say that the infinity of worlds does away with divinity altogether; to the contrary, Lucretius calls on Venus at the beginning of the poem to guide his hand and put an end to earthly strife (1.1–55).53 And toward the end of the poem, he infamously calls Epicurus “a god” for having overcome fear and suffering through the tranquility of wisdom (5.8–12). As we will recall, this tranquility was the result of Epicurus’s having rid the cosmos of its “proud masters” (dominis superba, 2.2091). But even Epicurus never said that the gods did not exist; he merely said they did not govern the affairs of the universe.⁵⁴ In other words, Lucretius is not abandoning the notion of divinity as such; rather, his rejection of the world’s singularity—like his preemptive rejection of creation out of nothing—indicates that he is abandoning divinity understood as domination, as sovereignty. If, as thinkers as varied as Augustine and Ludwig Feuerbach have argued, there is a reciprocal relationship between human beings and their visions of the divine—if, to put it crudely, people worship gods who look like them—then the Atomists’ refusal of divine sovereignty should have profound consequences for human sovereignty as well. We have already heard Lucretius criticize religion for instilling violent tendencies in its adherents (1.82–101), suggesting that those who are free from the “proud masters” will be less likely to make themselves masters of others. And sure enough, centuries later, Plutarch will report that the mere thought of Atomist cosmology left as sovereign a character as Alexander the Great unhinged: “[H]aving heard Anaxarchus on the infinity of kosmoi, Alexander wept and, when his companions asked what was the matter, he said, ‘Is it not worthy of tears that, when there are infinitely many kosmoi, we are not yet masters of one?’”⁵⁵

To summarize, insofar as Lucretius refuses cosmic singularity, dismantles both divine and human sovereignty, and hinges all of it on a preemptive refutation of the idea of creation out of nothing, one might venture that he faces and even celebrates the multiplicity that his Platonic, Aristotelian, and eventually Christian counterparts would glimpse but then cover over. Indeed, multiplicity surfaces in a number of different ways in Lucretius’s work. First, it establishes the cosmos as such, beginning with a vast plurality of “singular” seeds (1.584, 1.609) whose interactions come to establish each world through a misty entanglement (or vortical whirlwind) of sameness and difference. A cosmos is therefore constitutively multiple and as such is never simply itself. Second, as Judith Butler has argued, anything constituted by relation is “undone” by it as well—and everything is constituted by multiplicity.56 Thus, for Lucretius, the “dance of atoms” that worlds the world will likewise one day unmake it, unraveling it back into a chaos of material from which new worlds will form. Third, these new worlds compose what one might call this world’s “external” multiplicity—its being one of many worlds. But this manyness is not a strict plurality: precisely because each world is the product of and the material for other worlds, each of them is constitutively bound up with an untold number of others. And because the same processes of birth and death compose and undo all things, Lucretius’s unbounded universe, in its infinite plurality, can also be said to be one. So multitude and mortality, like atoms and void, encase each other infinitely. The multiplicity that forms the world also leaves it vulnerable to destruction, and its destructibility makes it part of a (loosely united) multiplicity.

But there are multiple ways for worlds to be multiple. For the earliest Atomists, what I am calling “external” cosmic multiplicity was figured primarily in spatial terms: our world is one of an infinite number of worlds that exist simultaneously. It will be destroyed by a kind of spatial calamity, when it collides with another world out there. Following Epicurus’s revisions of Democritus, Lucretius likewise configures the world as one of a spatially coexistent many, but he also places a great deal of emphasis on the temporal multiplicity of worlds. As Epicurus taught, our world will most likely not be destroyed by a collision in space, but by the gradual wreck of time. It will grow old like any other organism, lose its vitality, and die. And this is where the Epicurean “first principle” is of central importance. To say that nothing comes from nothing is also to say that nothing goes to nothing (1.216). Just as the cosmos did not spring out of nihil, it will never be annihilated. Rather, as Lucretius says the moment he mentions the matter of beginnings, nature brings all things back into the “first bodies” (corpora prima) that compose them (1.60; compare 1.249), and these bodies go on to make new worlds. Worlds are “one of many” both spatially and temporally: an infinite number of mundi exist throughout infinite space, and each is destroyed and recombined into new worlds throughout infinite time.

This emphasis on cosmic rebirth among Democritus’s successors is most likely a function of the rise of Stoic cosmology in the late fourth century B.C.E., which figures multiplicity in strictly temporal terms. Like its Epicurean rival, Stoic cosmology will be demonized, repressed, and mostly forgotten by the Western philotheological tradition that it nonetheless haunts. We will explore these various hauntings in chapters 3 and 4, but first we turn to the Stoics themselves.

Against the Epicureans, the Stoics taught that there is no such thing as a smallest unit of matter, or atom. Rather, they followed Aristotle in arguing that matter is continuous, which is to say infinitely divisible. If there are no atoms, then there is no empty space in which they must move—no void “tangled up with things.” The only space that one might call “empty” would therefore lie outside the realm of things altogether, and so some commentators explain the Stoic universe as a bounded, continuous cosmos, surrounded by an infinite void.⁵⁸ As historical linguist Michael Lapidge points out, however, it is not clear whether the Stoics spoke of “void” (kenon) in the positive or privative sense; that is, although they have traditionally been interpreted as having posited a nothing outside the cosmos, they might just as plausibly have meant there is simply nothing outside the cosmos.⁵⁹ Either way, the absence of any extracosmic material means there is nothing “out there” that might form other worlds. For the Stoics, ours is the only world in the universe.

Even as the Stoics asserted the singularity of the cosmos, however, they rejected the imperishability that has traditionally secured it: “[T]he world, they say, is one and finite.”⁶⁰ Against Plato and Aristotle alike, Zeno taught that insofar as the world has a beginning, it must have an end. Moreover, anything whose “parts are perishable is perishable as a whole…. Therefore the world is doomed to perish.”⁶¹ As we will recall, Epicurus maintained a similar view on similar grounds. But whereas Epicurus the Atomist attributed the world’s demise to an excess of excretion over absorption, Zeno the Stoic said that it will end when the sun dries up the earth and consumes the cosmos in flames.⁶² From these flames, a new universe will be born, live for a time, and then be set on fire again—and the process will repeat eternally. Over against the Atomists’ spatial multiplicity, then, the Stoics offered a temporal multiplicity: there is only one world, but it is destroyed and re-created throughout infinite time, like the mythic Phoenix, out of fire.

This is by far the most distinct feature of early Stoic cosmology: the periodic destruction and regeneration of the universe, a process called ekpyrosis (literally, “out of fire”). The idea was not without precedent; nearly two centuries earlier, the philosopher Empedocles had taught that the cosmos undergoes periodic regeneration under the influence of “love” (philia), which draws all the elements together, and “strife” (neikos), which separates them from one another.63 But the Stoics described their cosmic cycles “more naturalistically or mechanically” (not to mention more dramatically) as the result of condensation and rarefaction, dual processes through which fire would eventually consume and re-create the cosmos.⁶⁴

Unfortunately, this Phoenix universe in its ancient formulation remains only in a few scattered fragments and some anti-Stoic treatises.⁶⁵ Moreover, the middle and later Stoics abandoned ekpyrosis entirely, along with cosmology in general. This means that there is nothing like a “Stoic Lucretius” when it comes to cosmology—no Greek or Roman source that has preserved these teachings in any depth. Even Cicero, whose On the Nature of the Gods is often cited in relation to ekpyrosis, mentions the doctrine only in a qualified, almost embarrassed hurry. His Stoic character Balbus takes only a moment in a lengthy exposition of his own philosophy to say, “[T]he philosophers of our school believe that in the end it will come about (though Panataeus is said to have thought it doubtful) that the whole universe will be consumed in flame: because when all the water is dried up, there will be no source from which air can be derived and nothing but fire will be left. From this divine fire a new universe will then be born and rise again in splendor. But I must not dwell too long upon the system of the stars and planets.”⁶⁶ This strange little passage leaves one wondering: Why such haste? Why does Cicero find ekpyrosis so repellant as to announce it as doubtful to begin with, describe it as quickly as possible, and then change the subject as soon as he can? And why is there no lengthy engagement of this idea among any of the Roman Stoics?⁶⁷

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, historian of religions Mircea Eliade suggests that the Romans shied away from ekpyrosis because it promised the inevitable demise of the “empire without end.” In the same book, Eliade argues that every sociopolitical ritual repeats the “cosmogonic act,” or creation of the universe. If this is the case, he argues, then building the Roman Empire might be seen as an effort to take the reigns of the universe away from the Stoic god. As Eliade ventures, the Roman emperor attempted to “liberate history from the law of cosmic cycles” by enacting these cycles himself—by unmaking and remaking the world with each invasion.68 To be sure, the doctrine of ekpyrosis would undermine the integrity of this imperial project, which is to say the very sovereignty of the sovereign. Just as Alexander the Great wept over the possibility of infinite kosmoi, Caesar Augustus would be far less august if a cosmic conflagration threatened to wipe out his “eternal city” and start the whole process again.⁶⁹ Furthermore, as we shall see momentarily, it is not just late Stoic philosophy that excises ekpyrosis; Augustine of Hippo (354–430) will find the doctrine so repugnant that he will foreclose any Christian consideration of it, and this foreclosure will hold throughout sixteen subsequent centuries of theological reflection. But what exactly did ekpyrotic cosmology entail, and why was it so unanimously rejected?

According to Diogenes Laertius, the early Stoics taught that “the whole world is a living being [zoon], endowed with soul and reason.”⁷⁰ This means that the Stoic world is governed providentially from within; reason pervades the cosmos, just as the soul pervades the human body. This “reason” (nous or logos) is often also called “fate” or “god” and suffuses the material cosmos as its “rational, perfect … providential” spirit.⁷¹ Unlike the rational, perfect, and providential spirit of the Timaeus, however, Stoic spirit is irreducibly corporeal: the source texts figure it variously as breath (pneuma), ether (aither), or fire (pyr).⁷² In short, the material world contains everything it needs for its own generation and governance within it. There are no ideal Forms regulating the universe, nor is there a First Mover setting it in motion from beyond the cosmic fray. Rather, the principles of creation, animation, providence, and eventual destruction are immanent to this one cosmos. In this sense, the early Stoics can be called “monists”: there is no disembodied realm hovering above or beyond the corporeal realm of this only-world.

That having been said, the Stoics often figured the corporeal components of this only-world in dualistic terms. Like the rest of the ancient philosophers, they taught that “nothing comes from nothing,” so the cosmos must have emerged from some kind of primordial material. Because they held that matter is continuous rather than particulate, however, they rejected Epicurus’s aboriginal atoms and void, returning instead to the pre-Socratic notion that the world emerges from an initial substance, into which it will eventually dissolve. Yet according to classicist Michael Lapidge, the Stoics had also learned from both Plato and Aristotle that “genesis could only take place from the intersection of opposite forces.”⁷³ So they found a cosmic compromise, teaching that the primordial substance was not one, but two. “[The Stoics] hold that there are two principles [archai] in the universe,” writes Diogenes, “the active principle and the passive.”⁷⁴

The active principle is often associated with the cosmic breath or fire we have just glimpsed—that is to say, with reason, providence, and the god. The passive principle, by contrast, is a wet and “formless material” (apoios hyle) that is “shaped or ‘qualified’ by the active principle into a universe.”75 Some Zeno fragments offer a highly gendered gloss of this duality, calling hyle the cool “female secretion” that mixes with the hot pneumatic sperm to generate the world.⁷⁶ Chrysippus of Soli goes further, in one fragment likening hyle to Hera and pneuma to the sperm of Zeus⁷⁷ and in another illustrating the cosmogonic process with reference to a painting of Hera fellating her husband.⁷⁸ In an effort to salvage early Stoicism from such unsavory dualisms, Lapidge argues that the active and passive principles are technically inseparable—just “two aspects” of the same creative substance. Unfortunately, he explains, some Stoic teachers “forgot” this inseparability and “resorted to biological terminology,” thereby compromising the dignity and complexity of their own thought.⁷⁹

Classicist David Hahm chooses not to pay much attention to the fellatio fragment, arguing instead that Chrysippus avoids Zeno’s dualism problem by locating the primal substance back behind the distinctions of active/passive, male/female, and spirit/matter. According to Hahm, the creative force for Chrysippus is not the two archai, but pure fire (pyr), which is also called the “god” (theos) and which itself gives rise to the opposing forces that assemble the universe.80 In this sense, the Stoics can be seen as hearkening back to Heraclitus, for whom the principle of the world “was and is and shall be: an everliving fire.”⁸¹ At the same time, Hahm concedes that many Stoic fragments do confine this allegedly primordial fire to the “active principle” alone, which they say operates upon an equiprimordial (and watery) “passive” principle.⁸² There is therefore a tension in early Stoic thought between the monism of fire and the duality of the archai; it is not clear whether the world begins in oneness or in manyness.⁸³ Of course, one might say that this very interpretive difficulty speaks to a certain pluri-singularity at the beginning; as Jean-Baptiste Gourinat explains, “these two principles are two different bodies, even if they are always mixed together, and constitute by mixture a unified body.”⁸⁴ Here we might recall Michel Serres’s description of the Timaean cosmos: “The world is a harmony, the world is a mix, the world is unitary … but it is only mixed with mixtures.”⁸⁵ One significant difference between these cosmogonies, however, is that whereas the demiurge remains outside the world he creates, the Stoic divinity is inextricably part of the mix; as Gourinat reminds us, “God himself only exists in matter.”⁸⁶ The Stoic creator exists without remainder in and as the world’s fire-watery mix, which is neither one nor two, but the relation between them—an aboriginal many-one that tangles together not just spirit and matter, but also world and god.

Insofar as the Stoic divinity is irreducibly in the cosmos it governs, it is markedly different from the Platonic demiurge (who transcends the cosmos he assembles) and from the Epicurean gods (who float beyond the worlds they ignore)—not to mention from the transcendent Abrahamic sovereign who creates and governs the universe. In some accounts, the Stoic god is said to be the breath or life force of the world, “pervad[ing] all that is in the air, all animals and plants, and also the earth itself, as a principle of cohesion.”⁸⁷ In others, the god is said to be the cosmos.⁸⁸ Therefore, although later Stoics would adopt a “more Platonic,” proto-Christian vision of a governor god outside the universe, one can call the early Stoics “thoroughgoing pantheists.”⁸⁹ They believe the divinity to be utterly bound up with—and sometimes identical to—the world it creates and regulates. As such, Diogenes Laertius tells us that the god can be called by many names “according to its various powers”: Dia, Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hephaestus, Poseidon, and Demeter.⁹⁰ The gods, then, are every bit as pluri-singular/female–male as the hydropyric cosmos they inhabit. They are, in short, both providentially and ontologically bound up with the life of the worlds they create. When we bring this insight to bear on the doctrine of ekpyrosis, we therefore begin to see that the pluri-singular god both oversees and undergoes the fiery cycles of birth and destruction that constitute the life of the cosmos.

Ekpyrosis is certainly the strangest and least integrated of all the Stoic teachings. Where could they have gotten the idea that the world periodically consumes itself in flames? And what does it have to do with the rest of their cosmology—let alone their ethics? According to Lapidge, there are three explanations of the doctrine scattered throughout the Greek source texts, but they are mutually incompatible, and none of them is well elaborated. The most common story is that the sun and stars will eventually dry up all the moisture in the world, setting the whole thing on fire. As Zeno writes, “[T]he sun is fire—shall it not, then, burn up what it has?”91 Another says that when the planets return to the positions they occupied at the moment of creation, the universe will be engulfed in flames and renewed.⁹² And a third account suggests simply that the god, figured as pure fire, “keeps on increasing until he absorbs himself into himself.”⁹³ Whatever the cause of its ignition, the cosmos is said to burn gloriously for an unspecified amount of time, after which there emerges a watery mass upon which the fire again operates to re-create the cosmos.⁹⁴ Unsurprisingly, there are numerous and conflicting accounts of the source of this watery mass: Does the fire produce it? Does the fire become it? Or does the fire just spare a little bit of water from the world before the blaze? This difficulty aside, there is a more basic question that all three versions leave unanswered: Why would the universe undergo these cycles at all? This question is at least double-sided: in terms of physics, one is left asking how the creative principle of the universe suddenly becomes a destructive one; and in terms of theology, one wonders why a “perfect,” “providential” god would annihilate the universe it creates—much less a universe it pervades.⁹⁵

Jaap Mansfield offers a sustained resolution to both prongs of this problem by explaining that for Zeno the conflagration is not a tragic or violent occurrence; rather, it is the “best possible state of affairs.”⁹⁶ Edward Adams similarly writes that the conflagration “is not the death of the cosmos but its acme” because when everything is fire, everything is god.⁹⁷ If this is the case, then to the physical question one can answer that the “destructive” fire does not oppose the “creative” fire at all. Rather, both are stages in the life of the same substance, which like everything else in the cosmos undergoes periodic cycles of death and rebirth. To the theological question of why the god would unmake its handiwork, one can say, first, that the god has no choice but is bound to the laws of physics that it both governs and pervades, and, second, that the conflagration is not annihilation. It is, rather, a divine assimilation of all things, through which the life of the world is renewed.

But perhaps the best-known vindication of these cycles emerges through the teaching of cosmic repetition. Because the divine is rational and perfect, and because it permeates every corner of the cosmos, the early Stoics insisted that this world must be the best possible world. And because it is the best possible world, it can only be the way that it is.98 This means that every cosmos emerging like a phoenix from the flames will look just like the one that burned before it—identical down to the smallest detail. “There will be another Plato and another Socrates,” says Zeno,⁹⁹ another Caesar Augustus and another Barack Obama, another me who writes this book and another you who reads it, forever and ever. Some of Zeno’s followers allowed for minuscule variations among successive kosmoi—a freckle, perhaps, on a face that had been freckle free the previous time around.¹⁰⁰ But for all intents and purposes, each world will be exactly the same as its predecessors and descendants because the cosmos is perfect as it is.

Stoic cosmology is, of course, where Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gets his infamous idea of “the eternal return.” In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche speculates that “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things might in the end have been taught already by Heraclitus. At least the Stoics have traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Heraclitus.”¹⁰¹ In the eternal return, we therefore have a nineteenth-century repetition of the ancient idea of repetition, whose genealogy seems to bend time back on itself. “In the end,” Nietzsche writes—which presumably means at some point in the future—it “might” turn out to “have been” the case that the ancient Heraclitus taught the eternal recurrence of all things, which is now proclaimed by Zarathustra (a futural repetition of the ancient Persian prophet). At the very least, Nietzsche says, this untimely idea recalls the infinite cycles of Stoic cosmology, which were clearly haunted by Heraclitus. Despite this Stoic heritage, however, Alexander Nehemas suggests that it is not clear how seriously Nietzsche took the eternal return as a cosmology. As far as Nehemas can see, Nietzsche was far less concerned to assert this circular repetition as a physical fact than he was to offer it as a psychological possibility.¹⁰²

It is in the spirit of possibility, for example, that The Gay Science confronts its reader with a dizzying “what if”: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.’” The demon goes on to specify that living “this life” again would amount to reliving every joy and every sorrow “and everything unutterably small or great”—everything exactly as it has been, forever. What, Nietzsche asks, would you do? “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?” Or would you instead say to the demon, “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”?103 For Nietzsche, the possibility of the eternal return asks us what it would take to opt for the latter and call this demon a god. What would it take for you to affirm your life so radically that you would be able not only to accept but to will the whole thing back again—your own life, with all its stupidities and triumphs—exactly as it has been, once more and “innumerable times more”?¹⁰⁴

For Nehemas, “what it would take” does not necessarily entail cosmology, but it certainly entails ontology, which in turn opens onto ethics. This interpretation will therefore help to round out our investigation of the Stoics, for as centuries of commentators have noted, the ekpyrotic eternal return does seem to make for “a rather awkward ethics.”¹⁰⁵ If nothing can be other than the way it is, what room does this leave for decision, freedom, or change? Does the Stoic vision of “living in accordance with nature” amount simply to resigning oneself to the world as it is? To thinking of oneself, as Zeno is said to have said, “as a dog tied to the back of a cart”?¹⁰⁶ Following Nehemas’s lead, I would like to suggest that by presenting the eternal return as a psychological hypothesis rather than a physical law, Nietzsche allows us to think differently about what it would mean to live in relation to this teaching—which is to say, to live as a set of relations.

Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche insists that just as there is no lightning without its flash, there is “no ‘being’ behind doing,” no “thing-in-itself,” “no subject … beyond … its characteristics and effects, it experiences and actions.”¹⁰⁷ Applied to the human “subject,” this means that there is no “I” without the specific events that compose “my” life—however trivial or accidental these events might be. Trivia and accidents constitute me to such an extent that if any of them were different, I would not be me. In response to Nietzsche’s demon, then, it would make no sense to try to affirm some parts of my existence without the others—to wish, for example, that “I” could come back next time being able to draw—because changing anything about me would amount to abolishing me tout court. By a similar logic, Nehemas reminds us that “every event in the world is inextricably connected with every other,” so that if anything in the world were different, everything in the world would be different.¹⁰⁸ Positively stated, if in response to the demon you could wish anything to be the same, you would have to wish everything to be the same. Thus asks Zarathustra: “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored: if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored—oh, then you loved the world.”¹⁰⁹

If it is the case that the eternal return is above all an ontoethical possibility, then to will the identical recurrence of all things is not simply to resign oneself to whatever happens, but to recognize the world as fundamentally “entangled and ensnared”—more radically, to love it as such. This affirmation is itself the space of freedom: we can choose to love the entangled world or not. Moreover, this affirmation constitutes a difference in the eternal return of the same. For a world that is willed and loved in its interdetermined insanities is different from the “same” world passively endured or misunderstood as the sum of discrete entities. Perhaps this is what Gilles Deleuze means when he writes that “it is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs.”110 To “want it all back” is to affirm the pluri-singular inextricability of cause and effect, spirit and matter, god and world—and this very affirmation makes “it” other than itself.

Perhaps surprisingly, a conclusion approaching this one can be drawn from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180). Although he thought cosmology a waste of time and never mentioned ekpyrosis or cosmic repetition,¹¹¹ he retained enough of this ancient-modern idea to affirm its entangled ontology. “All things are interwoven [implexa] with each other,” he writes in the Meditations. “Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to the one universe. The world-order is a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things.”¹¹²

Half a century later, the Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria (185–254) reverses these priorities, retrieving Stoic cosmology while dropping its pantheizing ontology. In De principiis, Origen tells us that a cyclic cosmology is the best way around that perennial, “impious[,] and absurd” question of what God was doing “before” the creation of the world (Was he just lounging around, waiting for the right time to start creating? What was God the God of if there was no world? If God is eternally God, then mustn’t the world be eternal as well?).113 Origen’s answer is that the world is not coeternal with God, but that God has nevertheless always been in action as God because there have been worlds before our own and will be worlds after it. Origen finds ample support for this position in Scripture, citing the Psalms’ conviction that “the heavens will perish” (Psalm 102:26), Matthew’s notion that “heaven and earth shall pass away” (Matthew 24:35), and, above all, the Isaianic promise that “there will be new heavens and a new earth, which I will make to abide in my sight” (Isaiah 65:17).¹¹⁴ Origen also cites Ecclesiastes, who reaffirms the existence of multiple worlds when he asks, “What is that which hath been? Even that which shall be. And what has been created? Even this which is to be created: and there is nothing altogether new under the sun. Who shall speak and declare, Lo, this is new? It has already been in the ages which have been before us.”¹¹⁵

In short, the soundest way to secure the eternal divinity of God without asserting the eternity of the world is to affirm that this world is not the only one—there have been and will be more. How many? Origen confesses that he does not know—“although, if anyone can tell it, I would gladly learn.”¹¹⁶

Although Origen affirms the existence of multiple worlds, he is careful to make a number of qualifications to keep the doctrine from slipping into paganism. First, he maintains that although God does create a succession of worlds, he creates each of them not out of the stuff of any previous world, but rather ex nihilo.¹¹⁷ Second, Origen insists throughout the treatise that God is not “in any degree corporeal.”¹¹⁸ This means that when Deuteronomy 4:24 calls God “a consuming fire,” for example, it is speaking metaphorically: God cleanses us from all moral impurities, but God (unlike the Stoic divinity) is not literally fire—or any other physical substance at all.¹¹⁹ Third, Origen argues that the different worlds that God creates cannot be identical to one another because souls are driven by free will and so are not bound to any predetermined cyclic course. Because souls can “direct the course of their actions” as they see fit, different worlds must be different from one another—some better and some worse—with different souls populating each one.¹²⁰ And finally, although there can be said to be a plurality of worlds, “it is not … to be supposed that several worlds existed at once, but that, after the end of this present world, others will take their beginning.”¹²¹ In other words, the scriptural “ages of ages” are incompatible with the spatial riot of the Epicureans, but they fit perfectly well with the temporal multiplicity of the Stoics. A few crucial differences notwithstanding, Origen’s cosmos looks very much like that of the Stoics: “I am of the opinion,” he writes, “that the whole world ought to be regarded as some huge and immense animal, which is kept together by the power and reason of God as by one soul.”¹²² Just like the Stoics, Origen sees the world as a living being and an interrelated, God-permeated one at that—except his God is immaterial, and therefore transcendent to the creation that God suffuses.

But even Origen’s highly qualified reconciliation of Christian theology with Stoic cosmology never quite takes root—thanks in large part to Augustine’s sustained invective against the idea in The City of God (413–426).123 Writing as bishop of Hippo in the wake of the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, Augustine is concerned throughout this book to assert the sovereignty of God over that of any earthly ruler. When it comes to cosmic origins, Augustine’s concern for sovereignty leads him to assert God’s creation out of nothing against two principal adversaries whose positions we have already glimpsed. The first are those who argue that the world must be eternal if God is eternally God. The second are those who argue, against the first, that God is always God because this world is just one of many.¹²⁴ In other words, Augustine takes on Origen’s opponents and Origen himself, rejecting both the problem the former presents and the solution the latter provides. He does away swiftly with those who say that the world is eternal, arguing simply that nothing can be co-eternal with a singular God.¹²⁵ The many-worlders, however, prove a trickier group of opponents, and Augustine’s efforts to refute them throws his argument into strange disarray.

Augustine tells us that of the philosophers who assert a plurality of worlds, some posit an infinite number of perishable worlds, whereas others believe that there is only one world, which undergoes “an infinite series of dissolutions and restorations.”126 In other words, there are the followers of Democritus and Epicurus (who posit what I am calling a spatial multiplicity) and the followers of Zeno (who posit a temporal multiplicity). After this brief reference, however, Augustine drops the Epicureans altogether, directing the entirety of his argument against the Stoics. “The Physicists,” he begins, referring to the Greek Stoics, “assert … an unceasing sequence of ages, passing away and coming again in revolution.” Although he mentions the Platonic interpretation of these ages as internal to the imperishable world (as in the periodic destruction of cities through floods and fires),¹²⁷ his real concern is with the Stoic teaching that the world itself “disappears and reappears” throughout an infinite succession of ages. In particular, he zeroes in on the baffling notion that each world will be filled with people and cities and events “which appear as new, but which in fact have been in the past and will be in the future.”¹²⁸ This, of course, is the doctrine of eternal return—Zeno’s idea that there will be another Plato in another Athens who teaches another Aristotle, “time after time … in innumerable centuries in the future.”¹²⁹ Augustine seems also to be familiar with Seneca’s meditation on this teaching, which imagines that after the coming conflagration “the souls of the blest, who have partaken of immortality … shall be changed back into our former elements” to live their lives once more, as they were.¹³⁰ And the idea nearly drives the bishop crazy. “They are utterly unable to rescue the soul from this merry-go-round,” he charges, “even when it has attained wisdom.”¹³¹ For under such conditions, each soul must come back each time to live and die again, the same way as before, without improvement or escape.

As it turns out, then, Augustine’s chief argument against the Stoics is not really an argument so much as an extended expression of discomfort:

It is intolerable for devout ears to hear the opinion expressed that after passing through this life with all its great calamities (if indeed it is to be called life, when it is really a death …) that after all these heavy and fearful ills have at last been expiated and ended by true religion and wisdom and we have arrived at the sight of God and reached our bliss in the contemplation of immaterial light … that we reach this bliss only to be compelled to abandon it, to be cast down from that eternity, that truth, that felicity, to be involved again in hellish mortality, in shameful stupidity, in detestable miseries, where God is lost, where truth is hated, where happiness is sought in unclean wickedness, and to hear that this is to happen again and again, as it has happened before, endlessly, at periodic intervals, as the ages pass in succession.¹³²

“Who could listen to this?” Augustine asks. “Who could believe it? Who could even tolerate it?”133 The idea is so intolerable, in fact, that it prompts even this inveterate seeker of truth to suggest, “[I]f it were true it would be more prudent to suppress the truth, nay, wiser to be in ignorance—I am trying to find words to express what I feel.”¹³⁴ What Augustine feels is something like a revolted despair, and this despair produces a far dimmer view of this world than he usually sets forth. Just one book earlier, he had taken pains to defend the inherent goodness of creation against the “delirious raving of the Manichaeans.”¹³⁵ But faced with the possibility that this creation might return, all he can see is death, fear, misery, and untruth (“tartareae mortalitati, turpi stultitiae, miseriis exsecrabilibus”).¹³⁶ One imagines Augustine here thinking back to his own “pestilential” youth, to those wasted years of hating truth and seeking happiness “not in God but in his creatures.”¹³⁷ One can almost see Nietzsche’s demon steal into Augustine’s “loneliest loneliness” to taunt him with the possibility of doing it all again. The raving Manichaeans, the shameful sex, the death of his mother again, forever—it is as though Augustine pictures an infinity of his adolescent selves throwing pears at an infinity of hapless pigs, and the last thing the man can do is affirm the Stoic perfection of creation. Rather, he throws himself down and gnashes his teeth and curses the demon: “God forbid [absit] that what the philosophers threaten should be true,” he exclaims.¹³⁸ God forbid that the soul, having finally escaped this “hellish” life into beatific existence with God, might have to do it all over again. For life thus construed would be an “unremitting oscillation between false bliss and genuine misery.”¹³⁹

As for Origen, whom Augustine otherwise considers a “learned and experienced” theologian,¹⁴⁰ his erroneous endorsement of Stoic circularity stems, Augustine explains, from a misunderstanding of Ecclesiastes. For when “Solomon” says that what has been is the same as what will be, or that “there is nothing new under the sun,” he is likely just referring to “successive generations, departing and arriving.” Or perhaps, Augustine continues, he is referring to categories rather than to individuals: to men, trees, and plants in general rather than to this Plato or that hibiscus. Or, he flounders, maybe Solomon is referring to the eternal mind of God, which contains all things so completely that, strictly speaking, there is nothing new. Augustine admits that the meaning of the passage remains unclear, but whatever it may be, “heaven forbid [absit] that correct faith should believe that those words of Solomon refer to those periodic revolutions of the Physicists.”¹⁴¹ Again, Augustine has less of an argument here than a wish—a plea, even, that this not be the way things are. He substantiates this plea by appealing to “the promises of God,” but of course he chooses his promises carefully, taking them not from Isaiah (“there will be new heavens and a new earth”), but from the letters of Paul. He focuses on two in particular: first, that “Christ died once for all for our sins” (Romans 6:9) and, second, that “we shall be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Both of these assurances, we might note, preserve the eternal integrity of the singular subject, whether human or divine. Like Christ, we humans will live and die only once before dwelling with God forever. And so “heaven forbid,” Augustine repeats, that Christ should be said to die in more worlds than one.¹⁴² Aside from subjecting Our Lord to perpetual violence, this act of unsettling his singularity would unsettle our own, dooming us to endless earthly repetition. And this repetition, to be frank, seems to be Augustine’s worst fear of all: “heaven forbid” that we be forbidden from heaven, dwelling with God only to lose him again and condemned to these mortal cycles forever.

Augustine will ultimately decide that these two Pauline promises—the uniqueness of the Christ event and the permanent immortality of the human soul—amount to nothing less than geometric salvation. They turn the Stoics’ hellish circles into a “straight and right” path from creation to eternal life with God.143 “So let us keep to our straight way, which is Christ,” he concludes, “and turn our minds from the absurd futility of this circular route of the impious.” In Christ, we shall never find happiness only to lose it. Rather, “we shall keep it always, in assured security, and no unhappiness can interrupt it.”¹⁴⁴ And now that he has finally secured our eternal security, Augustine can return to the problem of creation. Beginning from the certainty that this world is not eternal, and “seeing that those cycles of [the Physicists] have been hissed off the stage,” he concludes that the only remaining possibility is that God created the world “in time,” yet with no change in God’s being or design.¹⁴⁵ If this sounds like a contradiction, he adds, then it is likely close to the truth, for “who could plumb this unplumbable depth of God’s counsel, and scrutinize his inscrutable design?”¹⁴⁶ An absurd creation narrative, in other words, is better suited to an inscrutable God than a straightforward story would be.

Can this be the reason that Christian theology never quite came to terms with the Stoics’ cycles—because St. Augustine “hiss[ed] them off the stage” in the fourth century? And did he do so because of the threat to divinity they posed or simply because he could not stomach the notion? Whatever the reason and with very few exceptions, the Western tradition did not even consider Stoic cosmology long enough to dismiss it until the early twentieth century, when astronomers and physicists begin to grapple with the cosmological implications of general relativity. And sure enough, fifteen centuries after Augustine’s revolted dismissal of the Stoics, a British astrophysicist named Arthur Eddington will be hit by a similar wave of nausea. As Alexander Friedmann realizes in the 1920s, if the amount of matter in the universe were to exceed a critical density, it would draw the universe into a “big crunch,” from which another big bang might bang, and the cycle of the cosmos could start anew.¹⁴⁷ Contemplating this possibility in 1935, Eddington (like Augustine) has no concrete data with which to refute it;¹⁴⁸ rather, he opposes the notion “from a moral standpoint,” calling the idea of a cyclical universe “wholly retrograde. Must Sisyphus for ever roll his stone up the hill for it to roll down again every time it approaches the top? That was a description of Hell. If we have any conception of progress as a whole reaching deeper than the physical symbols of the external world, the way must, it would seem, lie in escape from the Wheel of things.”¹⁴⁹

As we read of the hellish, pagan circles overcome by the linear “way” of “progress,” we might think this a passage straight out of The City of God. Indeed, Eddington’s theological recapitulation deepens as he goes on to quote scripture: “Since when has the teaching that ‘heaven and earth shall pass away’ become ecclesiastically unorthodox?”150 Leaving to one side the question of why Eddington is contemplating ecclesiastical orthodoxy in a technical paper on entropy and cosmic expansion, it is interesting to note that this quotation from Isaiah, which Eddington cites as evidence against the periodic renewal of the cosmos, is the same passage that Origen used to support it. So Eddington’s scriptural argument is a flimsy one. But that is not really the point; for Eddington, the bottom line is simply that the idea of eternal recurrence is distasteful. “I am no Phoenix worshipper,” he writes in The Nature of the Physical World. “It seems rather stupid to keep doing the same thing over and over again.”¹⁵¹ The whole idea seems to Eddington childish, inane, annoying—as if the cosmos itself were some unending hymn that all creatures started singing,

In this chapter, we have explored two different models of cosmic multiplicity. Against the Academic insistence that there can be only one, finite world, the Atomists posited an infinity of kosmoi haphazardly moving through infinite space. The Stoics, by contrast, posited one world destroyed and reborn throughout infinite time. Perhaps needless to say, neither model became the template for observational astronomy, Western philosophy, or Christian theology. As we have seen, neither Roman philosophy nor early Christian orthodoxy was at all hospitable to the early Stoics’ endless cycles. The Atomists suffered even greater ridicule beginning in the first century B.C.E. and lasting at least through the early fifteenth century.153 Throughout this period, a poorly understood “Epicureanism” was consistently demonized as both intellectually stagnant and ethically repulsive—failures that were attributed to its godlessness. This fairly unanimous rejection can be traced back to Cicero, on the one hand, whose “Epicurean” character in the De natura deorum is nothing short of imbecilic,¹⁵⁴ and to the early church fathers, on the other, who sought not only to refute Epicurean physics, but also to imagine the depths of sin to which such physics must have led. As Howard Jones explains in his history of Epicurean philosophy, “Epicurus and his latter-day disciples were credited with a colorful array of depravities and perversions …: swinish gluttony, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, sodomy, incest—[with] Theophilus, Clement, Pseudo-Clement, Ambrose, Epiphanius, Peter Chrysologus, Filastrius, and Augustine each contributing a little to the list.”¹⁵⁵ The condemnation was so virulent and so exceptionless that by the year 410, Augustine could say of Epicureanism that “its ashes are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them.”¹⁵⁶