Stoic God vs. Jewish God

Had it not been for Constantine the Great, Socrates might have been to us what Confucius is to the Chinese (both were born 8,000 miles apart, but only 80 years apart). But Greco-Roman philosophy, with its brilliant scientific, metaphysical, ethical and political traditions, was overcome by Judeo-Christian theology. There are similarities between Socrates and Jesus: both were condemned to death by the powers that be, for political-religious reasons. But they are worlds apart : Socrates believed that reason was the highest gift of the gods to men, and that it was enough to guide them through life, if only they used it properly. Jesus, or so his disciples claim, brought a revelation that had to be believed for salvation. Besides, Socrates was mortal, while Jesus beat death.

In this article, I propose to contrast the Hellenistic and the Hebraic concepts of God, as well as their fundamental understandings of man. In short, I will be contrasting the “cosmotheism” of philosophers (with an emphasis on the Stoics) with the exclusive monotheism of the Jews (leaving aside the Christian version for another article). I make no apology for my polemic approach: I consider the Hellenistic tradition a unique civilizational breakthrough, and the Abrahamic tradition a devastating sickness of the soul.

Among the many schools that paid tribute to Socrates, the Stoics had the most lasting, albeit the most diffuse influence.[1] Although there is plenty of highbrow intellectual discussion in Stoic literature, it was mostly concerned with the practice of the good life and social harmony, and its essential teachings were simple and accessible to all men. Stoic ethics had the favor of Cicero, and later of emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of “the five good emperors” (Machiavelli), whose reign (161-180) was, according to Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), “possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”[2] The only serious competitor at the time—besides Plato’s legacy which was hard to distinguish from Socrates’ and was claimed by virtually every school—was Epicureanism. It is sometimes argued today that Epicurus’ system was the most advanced, because it relied on the atomist materialism of Democritus, and taught that chance and necessity govern the world, as the Darwinian dogma teaches us today. But besides the fact that Epicurean sources are scarce (the most important one being a poem by Lucretius), it seems to me that its influence is vastly overestimated. In any case, it lacked the Stoic sense of “Providence” (Greek pronoia, Latin providentia), as Marcus Aurelius emphasized in his Meditations by the repeated disjunction: “Either providence or atoms.” Stoicism is the philosophy that most resembles Confucianism in its general spirit, and it arguably could have sustained the Roman civilization spiritually, ethically and politically for a thousand more years.

Stoicism aroused great enthusiasm during the Renaissance. Cicero's Stoic treatise on Duty (De Officiis) was the first classical text to be printed, in 1465. Erasmus published Seneca's work in 1515, and in 1584 Justus Lipsius promoted Stoicism in his essay on Constancy, which impressed many thinkers such as Montaigne (1533-92) and gave rise to what is known as Renaissance Neo-Stoicism, whose influence continued right up to the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “natural religion” being particularly close to the Stoic view. Stoicism has remained influential among the best Western minds (read my post on the “Stoic Kennedys”).

At the time of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, Christianity attracted only “the silly, the mean, and the stupid, with women and children,” wrote the philosopher Celsus, in his Discourse Against the Christians (written in Greek like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations). He was exaggerating: we know that some members of the Roman gentry were already Christian. Which is why Celsus worried about the growing influence of Christianity, and feared it would ultimately bring the collapse of the Empire.[3] Justin of Neapolis, known posthumously as Justin Martyr, was beheaded in Rome in 165 with six of his students, for refusing to sacrifice to the gods (a simple token of loyalty to Rome and to the emperor). To the prefect Rusticus’ threat, he had responded: “That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord, Jesus Christ, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Savior.”

Commodus, Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, initiated a policy of tolerance towards Christianity, under the influence of his mistress Marcia. The following Severan dynasty (193-235) brought Syrian influences that contributed to the spread of Christianity. Then, after a period of political instability which saw five short-lived dynasties, came Diocletian (284-305), who restored order and secured the borders along the Rhine and Danube, but moved the heart of the Empire to the East, residing in Split, Sirmium, Nicomedia, and Antioch. He is remembered by Christian historians as determined to eradicate Christianity. He was succeeded by Constantine the Great, who became the protector and organizer of the Church. According to Peter Heather, author of a new interpretation of the spread of Christendom, Constantine had been a secret Christian long before he made his coming-out in 324, as perhaps his father and mother had been before him.[4] In 58 years, the Constantinian dynasty (305-363) started the Christianization of the Empire, that was later enforced even more aggressively during the 106 years of the Valentinian and Theodosian dynasties (379-457). Christianization meant a war against “paganism”, that is, against every forms of non-Christian religion. Only Judaism was tolerated, and even protected by the Theodosian Code.

The Cosmic Stoic God

Greek philosophers traditionally distinguished between three branches of teaching: logics (the art of correct reasoning), physics (the study of Nature, Phusis, encompassing both what we now call science and metaphysics), and ethics. According to a philosophical metaphor attributed to the Stoic Chrysippus of Soles (third century BC), philosophy is like a fertile orchard whose fence is logic, whose trees are physics, and whose fruit is ethics. There are variations on this agricultural metaphor: for Seneca, philosophy is like a tree whose roots are logic, whose trunk is physics and whose branches are ethics.[5]

Logic, then, is the beginning. Convinced that man’s highest faculty is reason, Socrates saw himself as a midwife helping people give birth to the truth by their own logic, through the dialectical method. Reason is divine. According to the Stoics, the Cosmos is rational, and human reason (logos) is man’s participation in the divine Reason (Logos). They could have said, as Hegel would much later: “To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back; the two exist in a reciprocal relationship.”[6]

From the premise that God is infinite by definition, the Stoics deduced that nothing can exist outside Him. Consequently, God and the Cosmos are one. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as “Pantheists” (the word was coined in 1705). But the Greek word kosmos translates as “order” or “harmony”, and can refer to either the universe itself or its ordering principle. The Stoics did not equate God with the material world, and did not confuse spirit and matter, but they saw God as active in both.

And while feeling part of the cosmic God, they could still address Him in prayer as a person. In a famous Hymn to Zeus, Stoic philosopher Cleanthes (third century BC) called God “Nature’s great Sovereign, ruling all by law,” to whom men must turn their minds in order to live “the noble life, the only true wealth.” He prayed that people who do evil by ignorance can be enlightened: “Scatter, O Father, the darkness from their souls.” The Stoic Seneca wrote in the first century AD, in his Letter to Lucilius 41:

We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol’s ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise? He it is that gives noble and upright counsel.

The Stoics are therefore monotheists, but they insist on the immanent presence of God in everything, and in every human soul in particular. “Since our souls are so bound up and in contact with God as parts of Him and portions of Him, does not God perceive every motion of these parts as being his own motion connate with himself?” (Epictetus, Discourses I.14).

Rather than “pantheism”, which sounds close to “animism”, the metaphysics of the Stoics can be defined as cosmotheism: it’s not God in every little things, but God as the unifying principle of all things. German Egyptologist Jan Assmann coined the word “cosmotheism” to describe the metaphysics underlying Egyptian polytheism: the gods form the organic body of the universe, as one unified divine constellation.[7] Greek and Roman philosophers adopted that view. Most of them had no interest in religious cults, but they saw no incompatibility between the uniqueness of the divine and the plurality of its manifestations or representations. They often used the words “God” (Zeus), “the god” (o theos) or “the gods” (oi theoi) interchangeably. Cicero did the same in Latin in his essay On the nature of the gods. In that sense, polytheism is resolved philosophically into an inclusive monotheism. This is what the pagan Maximus of Madaura tried to explain to his former pupil Augustine of Hippo in 390:

Who could ever be so frantic and infatuated as to deny that there is one supreme God, without beginning, without natural offspring, who is, as it were, the great and mighty Father of all? The powers of this Deity, diffused throughout the universe which He has made, we worship under many names, as we are all ignorant of His true name, the name God being common to all kinds of religious belief. Thus it comes, that while in diverse supplications we approach separately, as it were, certain parts of the Divine Being, we are seen in reality to be the worshippers of Him in whom all these parts are one.

The notion that the Greeks—or even the Barbarians, for that matter—were incapable of rising above polytheism, and that Europeans needed Jewish monotheism to “know” “God” is the seminal Jewish lie that has alienated us from our pre-Christian spiritual roots.

Ethics, the rational knowledge of good and evil, is the fruit of philosophy. It was Socrates’ main focus. He taught that virtue is the condition of true happiness, for it is by doing what is right that one takes care of one’s soul; “no evil can come to a good man either in life or after death” (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 41d). How to know what is right? By logic, first: it is through reason that man gains knowledge, and it is also through reason that he gains freedom, which is nothing more than the freedom to choose from among the possibilities. Stoic ethics is therefore based on a discipline of “inner discourse”, aimed at distinguishing what is under our control from what is not: “We must make the best use that we can of the things which are in our power, and use the rest according to their nature.” (Epictetus, Discourses, I, 1). But ethics is also based on physics, because virtue requires a metaphysical understanding of the holistic interconnectedness of all beings. The virtuous man is the wise man who lives in harmony with Nature and with his own nature, and who, in every situation, tries to be a factor of social harmony. And true happiness comes from living virtuously.

The Stoics accepted the Socratic equation: wisdom = virtue = happiness. They did not base the encouragement to virtue on the belief in some post-mortem retribution, and rarely speculated about the afterlife. Nevertheless, they took for granted that there was an immortal divine principle in man. The philosophers’ view on the immortality of the soul, however, was not necessarily egalitarian. Individual immortality was something to be conquered. According to Plato, man “partakes of immortality” to the extent that he “thinks thoughts that are immortal and divine” (Timæus, 90b-c). Therefore, to philosophize is to learn to die (Phaedo). Practically, this meant, to Marcus Aurelius: “The perfection of conduct consists in using each day we live as if it were our last” (Meditations VII,69).

To summarize, in a different order, the main principles of Greco-Roman Stoicism, the highest expression of Greco-Roman religion:

1. Knowledge through logic: Reason is the gift of the gods to man. It is the highest faculty of the soul, through which man can understand the world, himself and the divine Logos.

2. Rational ethics: By reason alone man can know good from evil, understand and practice virtue. Since reason is universal, there exist universally valid moral principles. There is no other path to true happiness, the spiritual joy of fulfilling one’s purpose in the Cosmos.

3. Cosmic God: Through Logos and Providence (notions later appropriated by Christianity), God is immanent in the world. God is the soul of the universe, manifesting itself in a multiplicity of ways, which may be called “the gods”. Polytheism is revolved into an inclusive monotheism.

One more point about politics: Generally speaking, philosophers thought that philosophy was necessary for good government, but few—probably not even Plato—believed in Plato’s utopia of the philosopher-kings: “Do not expect Plato’s Republic,” wrote Marcus Aurelius (Meditations IX,29). Stoics generally favored a constitution based on “a mixture of democracy, kingship and aristocracy” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives VII.131).[8]

The Jewish Jealous God

The Judaic religious paradigm, expressed in the Hebrew Bible, differs from the Stoic philosophical paradigm in three essential respects: