How the world will end

The Stoics on cosmic conflagration

Robert Frost speaks of the end of the world.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The early Stoics were firmly on the side of fire.

According to the ancient Greek philosophers the world will end in cosmic conflagration: ekpýrosis.

As Aristocles reports, the ancient Stoics held:

At certain fated times the entire world is subject to conflagration, and then is reconstituted afresh.

They believed that the entire universe was animated by a life force: an active principle. This force renders the world intelligible. It gives order and providence. This life force, God, is the “intelligent energizing power” at the foundation of the world.

It sustains the present world, but it will not do so forever.

In the end, everything will be destroyed. The universe is cosmic kindling destined to ignite. The world will end in fire.

Then everything will begin again.

Here again we’re reminded of the phoenix.

Many of the ancients saw the world as cyclic. Things happen again and again. There’s nothing new under the sun. What comes to pass will come again. This possibility brings to mind Nietzsche’s amor fati and the eternal return:

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; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

The Gay Science

If things are bound to return, that brings a high stakes to every decision. Then again, if things only happen once, that too brings a life into stark relief.

Either way, both thoughts justify the seriousness the Stoics bring to their works and life.