Stoicism was a school of thought that proceeded from the Hellenistic period of Greco-Roman history, and was characterized by a pantheistic physics, a structurally Greek ethic with its foundations in Aristotelian thought, and a focus on the rationality of the universe. Stoic philosophy was focused on the rationality of the world and of the universe at large. There is a sense in which the arguments that the later, perhaps more argumentatively practiced and subtle, Stoics make for the existence of the gods and of the intelligence (and intelligibility) of the universe seem to be an exposition of the natural wonder of every man at the beauty, elegance, and power visible in the cosmos as a whole. Christianity shares with Stoic doctrine a focus on the power and rationality of the cosmos, and the two systems of thought have a remarkable amount of interplay even in current public discourse.

Arguments abound that Christianity came about at such a time as would have made it popular by default, since Jew, Greek, and Roman alike were seeking for an explanation of the afterlife in a way that would serve as a counter-argument, or an answer, to the Stoic claim that there was no immortality of individual souls. The faithful counter that this was a matter of divine forethought rather than mere historical inevitability, though perhaps both arguments are equal in gravity: in the public discourse, there have always been matters upon which both sides agreed, even in the most extremely dichotomous debates. Cicero, as a first-century B.C. author and orator and an adherent to the Academic Skeptical school, provides a wealth of argumentation and dialogue on theological points that were not only pertinent in his day, but relevant and cogent for apologetics taking place in universities, offices, and courtrooms even today. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to examine not only Stoicism and Christianity as they attempt to explain the universe in terms of having been crafted purposefully by a sentient intelligence, but also to examine the major points upon which classic, Greco-Roman Stoicism (especially as put forth in the second book of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods [De Natura Deorum]) agree with classical Christianity both in its infancy and today.

For the Stoics, the world (i.e., the universe) was not only reasonable, but was composed of reason, or logos—that is to say that the logos permeates all of that which is; everything is constituted by and is held together inside of a rational order. This rational order, according to Stoic doctrine, is rightly called “god,” though they make allowances for the pantheon of other gods that populate, for instance, traditional, ancient Greek mythology. These gods they believed were the heavenly spheres and other observable cosmic objects. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is one God, contrary to the gentiles’ pantheon of gods, and instead of being equivalent with reason and within the world, He is utterly separate from the world, having created it and the cosmos and everything present in them. However, the sharpness of this difference is cast in the light of a mutually respectful understanding of similarities when we see that, for instance, the account of John the young apostle of Christ begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1, NAS). Here, in Koine Greek, “Word” is the English translation of logos, the same word used by both Stoics and Hellenistic Christians as reason and as God. (That it is also used, more specifically, by Christians as a designation of the second member of the Godhead, viz., Christ Himself, is an important difference but does not bear directly on the present discussion.) Paul, in his letter to the Romans, notes that every person on Earth is capable of coming to some sort of knowledge about God (Rom. 1:18-20), and King David of Israel before him, in the eighth Psalm, sings of the design and wonder of creation (vv. 1, 3-4; NAS):

O Lord, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth,
Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?

Like the ones already mentioned, there are many similarities between Stoic thought and the Christian tradition. These points of similarity between the Stoic and Christian perspectives enabled meaningful discussion between them in Hellenistic Greece; and, strikingly, many of the same arguments shared by the Stoics and Hellenistic Christians apply to the dialogue between religious and secular factions in the Western world today.

Specific points of agreement between the Stoics and the Christians can be most helpfully found in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, Book II, in the dialogue between Balbus the Stoic and Cotta the Academic Skeptic. Balbus begins his speech by declaring his purpose for the discourse as a Stoic: to show that there are gods, to explain what they are like, to show that they govern the universe, and that they are attentive to man and to his affairs. This essentially agrees with Christian thought, insofar as the explanation of God’s character, an explanation of His sovereignty over all affairs of men and events in the cosmos, and that God is intimately concerned with mankind, which is posited as the pinnacle of creation, having within itself an image of Himself (which is reason, though not exclusively that; we shall see more of this later in Book II). In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, Moses records the creation process, coming to climax in the creation of rational man (vv. 26-27, NAS):

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Balbus goes on to say that anyone who has observed the heavenly bodies must be compelled to realize that there is a governing force behind those bodies. This is the classic cosmological argument, which takes evidence from the world around us (cosmos) by which we can infer the existence of God by the fact that the world came into being and is contingent on the being that has come before it, and which must have always been—i.e., is metaphysically necessary (lest the argument fall into infinite regress).

To this Balbus ties the idea that the opinion in the public forum that there is a God or are gods is so persistent that the idea must be true, that is, there must be an actual object toward which this conception points. This seems somewhat weak to us today, but is nevertheless tied to, for instance, the medieval Scholastic and early Modern Christian tradition and to contemporary theological arguments. St. Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, posited that God was “something greater than which cannot be thought,” which not only begins to converge on Balbus’ argument here, but also the argument Cicero later records (in section VI of the Yonge translation) that it is vain to think there is nothing better than man in the entire unverse; but if there is something greater than man, we must concede that not only that there is a purpose higher than man in the cosmos, but that we along with the universe were created by those beings for whom the universe does indeed exist. The idea of God is so ingrained in our minds that we cannot possibly escape it; and this agrees with the Biblical account, which reads, “the fool has said in his heart, `There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1) and again, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 9:10, 111:10). Anselm expounds on the fourteenth psalm in the second and third chapters of his Proslogium (Discourse) with the following meditation:
There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our God. […] Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms xiv. 1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that thou dost exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool? (Holt 2003)

With this argument, Anselm founded what we now refer to the ontological argument for the existence of God, an a priori argument from pure reason using only the concept of what God must be. These two sections in Cicero, then, are a combination of ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God, both of which are still employed in popular apologetics discourse today; while no one accepts these arguments as utterly conclusive, they provide fuel for further discussion.

In sections 13 through 15 in Book II of the Inwood and Gerson translation of De Natura Deorum, we see Cleanthes reiterate four ways that men can come to conceive of the existence and nature of the gods or, as it were, of God. The first, he claims, is from the fulfillment of divinations. Cicero took a low opinion of divination, as evidenced by the dialogue between himself and his brother Quintus in On Divination (translated by Yonge). The practice is, of course, condemned by the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as evidenced by Levitical law (Lev. 19:26, Deut. 18:10) and by the apostle Paul’s reproach of the soothsayer in the book of Acts (16:16-18). However, fulfillment of prophecy is one of the miracles by which men are intended to be convinced to belief according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The second of Cleanthes’ points is that we understand that the gods exist from the blessings they give us, as in clement weather and good crop yields and other natural blessings. This is an interesting argument because it is still made today in reverse, as a theodical question: that God, if He exists, must either be too weak to prevent evil or He Himself must in some capacity be evil because of the bad things that happen on Earth. Cleanthes’ third point is that the cosmos is full of wonderful and powerful sights, all of which strike fear and awe into the heart of men. This is an example of an argument that most modern thinkers discredit outright, but there is a refreshing honesty in the Stoic mindset that allows an awe at the created world that later thinkers tend to try to explain away psychologically; it is, nevertheless, an argument adopted by Christians as a point that lends apologetic strength to the aforementioned cosmological argument. Finally, Cleanthes points again to this argument, that the universe is too beautiful not to have had an intelligent designer; Cicero goes further in reporting Balbus’ comments to the effect that the world itself must be intelligent, as a consequence of a pantheistic physics.

Chrysippus, as reported in section II.37 of the Inwood and Gerson translation of On the Nature of the Gods, makes a kind of teleological argument for the existence of not only the existence of God but of the role of animals and of man in the natural (indeed, rational) order of things. Since man makes objects that are for a certain purpose, we must also come to the conclusion that we ourselves, having been created with the capacity for reason, must also have been created for a purpose: “man himself was born for the sake of contemplating and imitating the cosmos; he is not at all perfect, but he is a certain small portion of what is perfect” (Inwood and Gerson). The Stoics meant this argument to point to the part of the logos, which is God, that is in ourselves as part of the pantheistic world; but this same concept just as easily applies to Christian dialogue, insofar as the image of God in which Christians say humans are fashioned resides in us especially, and not in any other part of creation.

While there are other arguments along these lines, these few serve the exposition of the point that the Stoic proofs for the existence and nature of God share much with the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the points of disagreement between the Greco-Roman Stoic school and classical Christian thought tend to help elucidate and bring into sharp relief the points of agreement between the two systems of apologetics. Just as the Stoics entered into dialogue with Epicureans and the Academic Skeptics of their own day, we too can learn from their arguments for the existence and nature of God in formulating our own arguments either for or against in the public forum of today’s dialogue between contemporary Christians, Muslims, Jews, empirical secularists and adherents to other religions in the world today.

References:

Holt, T., trans. (2003). St Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogium, Chapter IV. Accessed 27 March 2006:

Inwood, B. & Gerson, L. P. (1997). Hellenistic philosophy: Introductory readings. Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis.

New American Standard Bible. (1995). The Lockman Foundation.

Yonge, C. D., trans. (1997). The nature of the Gods; and, on Divination; Marcus Tullius Cicero. Prometheus: NY.

Stoicism was a school of thought that proceeded from the Hellenistic period of Greco-Roman history, and was characterized by a pantheistic physics, a structurally Greek ethic with its foundations in Aristotelian thought, and a focus on the rationality of the universe. Stoic philosophy was focused on the rationality of the world and of the universe at large. There is a sense in which the arguments that the later, perhaps more argumentatively practiced and subtle, Stoics make for the existence of the gods and of the intelligence (and intelligibility) of the universe seem to be an exposition of the natural wonder of every man at the beauty, elegance, and power visible in the cosmos as a whole. Christianity shares with Stoic doctrine a focus on the power and rationality of the cosmos, and the two systems of thought have a remarkable amount of interplay even in current public discourse.

Arguments abound that Christianity came about at such a time as would have made it popular by default, since Jew, Greek, and Roman alike were seeking for an explanation of the afterlife in a way that would serve as a counter-argument, or an answer, to the Stoic claim that there was no immortality of individual souls. The faithful counter that this was a matter of divine forethought rather than mere historical inevitability, though perhaps both arguments are equal in gravity: in the public discourse, there have always been matters upon which both sides agreed, even in the most extremely dichotomous debates. Cicero, as a first-century B.C. author and orator and an adherent to the Academic Skeptical school, provides a wealth of argumentation and dialogue on theological points that were not only pertinent in his day, but relevant and cogent for apologetics taking place in universities, offices, and courtrooms even today. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to examine not only Stoicism and Christianity as they attempt to explain the universe in terms of having been crafted purposefully by a sentient intelligence, but also to examine the major points upon which classic, Greco-Roman Stoicism (especially as put forth in the second book of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods [De Natura Deorum]) agree with classical Christianity both in its infancy and today.

For the Stoics, the world (i.e., the universe) was not only reasonable, but was composed of reason, or logos—that is to say that the logos permeates all of that which is; everything is constituted by and is held together inside of a rational order. This rational order, according to Stoic doctrine, is rightly called “god,” though they make allowances for the pantheon of other gods that populate, for instance, traditional, ancient Greek mythology. These gods they believed were the heavenly spheres and other observable cosmic objects. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is one God, contrary to the gentiles’ pantheon of gods, and instead of being equivalent with reason and within the world, He is utterly separate from the world, having created it and the cosmos and everything present in them. However, the sharpness of this difference is cast in the light of a mutually respectful understanding of similarities when we see that, for instance, the account of John the young apostle of Christ begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1, NAS). Here, in Koine Greek, “Word” is the English translation of logos, the same word used by both Stoics and Hellenistic Christians as reason and as God. (That it is also used, more specifically, by Christians as a designation of the second member of the Godhead, viz., Christ Himself, is an important difference but does not bear directly on the present discussion.) Paul, in his letter to the Romans, notes that every person on Earth is capable of coming to some sort of knowledge about God (Rom. 1:18-20), and King David of Israel before him, in the eighth Psalm, sings of the design and wonder of creation (vv. 1, 3-4; NAS):

O Lord, our Lord,
How majestic is Your name in all the earth,
Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?

Like the ones already mentioned, there are many similarities between Stoic thought and the Christian tradition. These points of similarity between the Stoic and Christian perspectives enabled meaningful discussion between them in Hellenistic Greece; and, strikingly, many of the same arguments shared by the Stoics and Hellenistic Christians apply to the dialogue between religious and secular factions in the Western world today.

Specific points of agreement between the Stoics and the Christians can be most helpfully found in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, Book II, in the dialogue between Balbus the Stoic and Cotta the Academic Skeptic. Balbus begins his speech by declaring his purpose for the discourse as a Stoic: to show that there are gods, to explain what they are like, to show that they govern the universe, and that they are attentive to man and to his affairs. This essentially agrees with Christian thought, insofar as the explanation of God’s character, an explanation of His sovereignty over all affairs of men and events in the cosmos, and that God is intimately concerned with mankind, which is posited as the pinnacle of creation, having within itself an image of Himself (which is reason, though not exclusively that; we shall see more of this later in Book II). In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, Moses records the creation process, coming to climax in the creation of rational man (vv. 26-27, NAS):

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Balbus goes on to say that anyone who has observed the heavenly bodies must be compelled to realize that there is a governing force behind those bodies. This is the classic cosmological argument, which takes evidence from the world around us (cosmos) by which we can infer the existence of God by the fact that the world came into being and is contingent on the being that has come before it, and which must have always been—i.e., is metaphysically necessary (lest the argument fall into infinite regress).

To this Balbus ties the idea that the opinion in the public forum that there is a God or are gods is so persistent that the idea must be true, that is, there must be an actual object toward which this conception points. This seems somewhat weak to us today, but is nevertheless tied to, for instance, the medieval Scholastic and early Modern Christian tradition and to contemporary theological arguments. St. Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, posited that God was “something greater than which cannot be thought,” which not only begins to converge on Balbus’ argument here, but also the argument Cicero later records (in section VI of the Yonge translation) that it is vain to think there is nothing better than man in the entire unverse; but if there is something greater than man, we must concede that not only that there is a purpose higher than man in the cosmos, but that we along with the universe were created by those beings for whom the universe does indeed exist. The idea of God is so ingrained in our minds that we cannot possibly escape it; and this agrees with the Biblical account, which reads, “the fool has said in his heart, `There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1) and again, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 9:10, 111:10). Anselm expounds on the fourteenth psalm in the second and third chapters of his Proslogium (Discourse) with the following meditation:
There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our God. […] Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms xiv. 1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that thou dost exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool? (Holt 2003)

With this argument, Anselm founded what we now refer to the ontological argument for the existence of God, an a priori argument from pure reason using only the concept of what God must be. These two sections in Cicero, then, are a combination of ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God, both of which are still employed in popular apologetics discourse today; while no one accepts these arguments as utterly conclusive, they provide fuel for further discussion.

In sections 13 through 15 in Book II of the Inwood and Gerson translation of De Natura Deorum, we see Cleanthes reiterate four ways that men can come to conceive of the existence and nature of the gods or, as it were, of God. The first, he claims, is from the fulfillment of divinations. Cicero took a low opinion of divination, as evidenced by the dialogue between himself and his brother Quintus in On Divination (translated by Yonge). The practice is, of course, condemned by the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as evidenced by Levitical law (Lev. 19:26, Deut. 18:10) and by the apostle Paul’s reproach of the soothsayer in the book of Acts (16:16-18). However, fulfillment of prophecy is one of the miracles by which men are intended to be convinced to belief according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The second of Cleanthes’ points is that we understand that the gods exist from the blessings they give us, as in clement weather and good crop yields and other natural blessings. This is an interesting argument because it is still made today in reverse, as a theodical question: that God, if He exists, must either be too weak to prevent evil or He Himself must in some capacity be evil because of the bad things that happen on Earth. Cleanthes’ third point is that the cosmos is full of wonderful and powerful sights, all of which strike fear and awe into the heart of men. This is an example of an argument that most modern thinkers discredit outright, but there is a refreshing honesty in the Stoic mindset that allows an awe at the created world that later thinkers tend to try to explain away psychologically; it is, nevertheless, an argument adopted by Christians as a point that lends apologetic strength to the aforementioned cosmological argument. Finally, Cleanthes points again to this argument, that the universe is too beautiful not to have had an intelligent designer; Cicero goes further in reporting Balbus’ comments to the effect that the world itself must be intelligent, as a consequence of a pantheistic physics.

Chrysippus, as reported in section II.37 of the Inwood and Gerson translation of On the Nature of the Gods, makes a kind of teleological argument for the existence of not only the existence of God but of the role of animals and of man in the natural (indeed, rational) order of things. Since man makes objects that are for a certain purpose, we must also come to the conclusion that we ourselves, having been created with the capacity for reason, must also have been created for a purpose: “man himself was born for the sake of contemplating and imitating the cosmos; he is not at all perfect, but he is a certain small portion of what is perfect” (Inwood and Gerson). The Stoics meant this argument to point to the part of the logos, which is God, that is in ourselves as part of the pantheistic world; but this same concept just as easily applies to Christian dialogue, insofar as the image of God in which Christians say humans are fashioned resides in us especially, and not in any other part of creation.

While there are other arguments along these lines, these few serve the exposition of the point that the Stoic proofs for the existence and nature of God share much with the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the points of disagreement between the Greco-Roman Stoic school and classical Christian thought tend to help elucidate and bring into sharp relief the points of agreement between the two systems of apologetics. Just as the Stoics entered into dialogue with Epicureans and the Academic Skeptics of their own day, we too can learn from their arguments for the existence and nature of God in formulating our own arguments either for or against in the public forum of today’s dialogue between contemporary Christians, Muslims, Jews, empirical secularists and adherents to other religions in the world today.

References:

Holt, T., trans. (2003). St Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogium, Chapter IV. Accessed 27 March 2006:

Inwood, B. & Gerson, L. P. (1997). Hellenistic philosophy: Introductory readings. Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis.

New American Standard Bible. (1995). The Lockman Foundation.

Yonge, C. D., trans. (1997). The nature of the Gods; and, on Divination; Marcus Tullius Cicero. Prometheus: NY.