Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

386
Keimpe Algra
However, we have reason to doubt whether such Stoic attempts to
fit demonology into the framework of Stoic cosmo-theology were successful
in the end. Especially the notion of an external demon can be
argued to present considerable difficulties, even from an internalist
Stoic point of view. No ancient source informs us about a discussion
of such difficulties among Stoics, but we can think up some of them
by ourselves. First, there are difficulties of a properly physical nature.
The argument for the survival of individual human souls, for example,
was perhaps not as strong as it had appeared to some. For if the soul provides
coherence to the body, the gradual deterioration and the eventual
disintegration of the body might be thought to signal a similar waning
away on the soul’s part. As the Epicurean account in Lucretius stresses,
we normally see psychic capacities, including sensation, waning as people
approach death. 72 It is hard to imagine that later Stoics were unaware
of arguments of this kind.
Yet even if the existence of demons is assumed to be physically possible,
one might still question their theological status, in particular their
function within the overall providential scheme of things. Aren’t external
good demons, bringing about things that are at most preferred indifferents
(such as salvation in the case of the Dioscuri) basically superfluous
once we have our internal guardian spirit caring for what really matters,
i. e. virtue or following nature? For sure, the early Stoic were ready
to accord demons a role in divination, but Posidonius makes it quite
clear that this was only one conceivable form of divination and that
god could also communicate with man directly. If one takes on the larger,
cosmic perspective, it is not quite clear what niche is left for demons
anyway in an anthropocentric, providentially ordered cosmos – a cosmos
which was after all defined rather exclusively, from the earliest
stages of Stoicism onward, as the ‘house of gods and men’.
natural, natural in a stricter sense, that is mechanical, and natural in a larger
sense, which I call super-mechanical”, apparently relegating matters to do
with souls, spirits and demons to the third category. I owe this quotation
from Boyle’s The Christian Virtuoso to Clark 1997, 305. In this book Clark offers
an illuminating survey of the various ways in which many philosophers and scientists
of the early stages of the ‘scientific revolution’ managed to incorporate
demonology within their physics or metaphysics; see especially Clark 1997,
151 – 160 (“Witchcraft and Nature”) and 294 – 311 (“Witchcraft and the Scientific
Revolution”).
72 Lucretius III, 445 – 462, esp. 451 – 455.