Towards The Sublime Rationality

In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods,he carefully examined views of divinity of Epicurean school and Stoic school,the main schools of Philosophy in the late Roman Republic,which both boasted of rationalism.Although he did not elaborate his own view of divinity,his attitude towards Stoic school and speech of Cotta,a scholar of the Academic school,implied that he agreed with stoic’s view that the nature of Gods is identified with rationality and regarding Gods as the principle inner of nature which promote the development of all things by themselves.On Fate and On Divination,finished after On the Nature of the Gods,are supplements to the unfinished words in On the Nature of the Gods.They show that Cicero opposed the materialization and personification of Gods,and refused to give them the color of mystery and superstition.In addition,as a farsighted statesman,Cicero,for practical purposes,regarded rationalist view of divinity as the cornerstone of his political,legal and religious theories.However,it must be noted that Cicero’s rational Deism designed a schema of common rationality between Gods and men,but his skeptical stance denied the possibility of acquiring necessary knowledge and distrusted human’s cognitive ability,which completely deconstructed the schema,causing a great tension in Cicero’s ideological system.