The Breath of the Stoic God

     To readers from Christianized cultures, the claim that the divine is a physical being which directly, causally interacts with the matter of the world can seem odd. Church traditions are drawn from Jewish beliefs, mixed with Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the divine being immaterial. It might cause those familiar with that line of thought to see the Stoic conceptions as weaker than the self-existing, eternal “supremely good being, separate from and independent of the world, all-powerful, all-knowing, … creator of the universe,” which became the monotheistic God.¹ However, the pantheistic conception of the Stoic God aligns with the Stoic's strict materialism, completely avoiding the host of issues packed into supernatural concepts, and is strengthened by the appeal that God is a part of the physical processes of the universe—a direct link in the causal chain of events.

     One would be remiss to not point out that the philosophic reason for seeking the truth behind the concept of the divine was different in the ancient world. Modern theists attempt to show that their concept of God is a necessary part of the world through a series of arguments meant to demonstrate and justify their conclusion. This was not the goal of ancient religious philosophers. Each school sought its own first principle, the explanatory force that caused the empirically observable world around them (with at least one exception of the Epicureans, who did not associate the first principle with the divine). They did not start with a religious book and then try to justify that position, but rather the trend was to start from the functioning world around them and ask the question, “what sort of thing could have caused this world?”

     While this decidedly teleological approach is similar to William Paley's watch, it does not mean to show that the universe is, or is like a purpose-built machine, constructed one cog or gear at a time by a great watchmaker.² The Stoics did not presuppose a conception of the divine as modern design arguments tend to do, but started with the four elements, a common belief in all schools of philosophy at the time, and sought to show how the world that actually is could become organized using them. Diogenes Laertius traced out the process where the two principles in the universe, the active and the passive, combined in a “seminal fluid” in the form of “water via air” in a way that reorganized matter into the four elements, which he called the “spermatic principle of the cosmos”.³ Laertius uses this principle along with his concept of God, Zeus, mind and fate being the same, part of the active principle, to explain how the world becomes organized, like a biological process in which the active changes the passive into a new form like itself, which he calls “an animal, rational and alive and intelligent … in the sense that it is a substance which is alive and capable of sense-perception”.⁴

     The 'thermal energy' and the pneuma are the necessary links between the rationality of God with the changes and organization of the passive materials. Since the Stoics maintain a materialist view of everything, it is impossible for them to hold that God could be “separate from and independent of the world” because that would require some nearly mystic link, or at minimum a shaky argument of how God affects changes in the world. This avoids the issues the Epicureans faced as they tried to conceive of how the gods could inspire people to live the good, blessed life by us having images of the gods in dreams generated by the atoms shed from the gods, or as Velleius stated, atoms cast toward the gods from our minds “latch[ing] on to” concepts of a blessed being living “with the greatest sensation of pleasure”.⁵

     Packing the concept of God into a physical principle of the universe requires no further explanation on the question of how God affects the world. God shapes the world by joining with the matter, and that requires no complex account of a flow of atoms from one source or another. The materials, being passive, cannot be shaped by themselves but require an active force, which the Stoics identify as God.

     This also avoids many of the conceptual issues inherent in craftsmen gods like Plato’s, which Velleius called the “wonders of philosophers that preferred dreaming to reasoning” in that they failed to address the complexities that construction of a universe would entail, like the placement of scaffolding and the types of tools used – the pragmatic concerns that creep up in top-down explanations of the world.⁶ In the continuing passage, Velleius attempts to bring the same criticisms against the “Stoic Pronoia”, charging Lucullus and Balbus to explain the same pragmatic world-building issues, as if answering for Plato as well, “...why did these world-builders suddenly emerge after lying asleep for countless generations?”⁷ Velleius uses “Pronoia” as if it was a god akin to Plato's craftsman, but that doesn't seem to fit with the Stoic view.

     The Stoic rejection of anthropomorphizing God places Velleius' accusations at conceptual odds with the Stoics.⁸ The picture of a force or an idea placing scaffolding, using tools, employing building techniques and helpers seems lacking, as if Velleius had failed to fully grasp the Stoic notion. Additionally, his attempt to credit Pronoia with a sudden world-building project beginning after a “boundless length of time” seems to miss the point.⁹ The Stoic use of “pronoia” appears to stem from the notion of providence, and be part of God, but only as much as God has all virtues.¹⁰

     Many Stoic writers claimed that the cosmos existed in a cycle of “generation and destruction”.¹¹ While there was debate over the exact nature of the active force, be it “a fiery force”, “moisture”, or “air”, the general notion is a purely physical cosmos, alive with either fire or pneuma, changeable both for the better and for the worse, and, at some point, will die and be reborn.¹² If we take the claims of a living cosmos and the conflagration seriously, as literal, non-metaphoric ideas of how the world is according to the Stoics, then claims like Velleius' appear completely off the mark.

     Instead, we are left with a view of the cosmos that appears to be more consistent with the state of affairs as they would have been understood, a naturalistic picture of “creation”, where the materials gain organization over time until they are consumed and recycled – a living universe. In the ancient world, this view was on even footing, at best, with other competing theories simply because of a lack of scientific knowledge. By placing the concept of God into the physical processes of the cosmos, the Stoics were able to make the same appeals to a natural order that other teleological arguments do, while avoiding many of the weaknesses of both ancient and modern religious philosophies. This move ultimately strengthened their concept of God by separating it from the Platonic and Aristotelian gods.

Bibliography

Algra, Keimpe. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Available from Google Books, accessed 23 Apr. 2013, http://books.google.com/books?id=9lRD6feR3hEC.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and P. G. Walsh. The Nature of the Gods. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Inwood, Brad, and L.P. Gerson. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

Rowe, William. Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007.

1 William Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, (Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), pg. 6-7.

2 Rowe, Philosophy of Religion, pg. 56-57.

3 Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), pg. 132-133.

4 Inwood, Hellenistic, pg. 135.

5 Marcus Tullius Cicero and P.G. Walsh, The Nature of the Gods, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pg. 20.

6 Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, pg. 10.

While Velleius was not a Stoic, Cicero's treatment of his argument would likely have been known.

7 Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, pg. 10.

8 Inwood, Hellenistic, pg. 134.

9 Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, pg. 11.

10 Keimpe Algra, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Google Books, accessed 23 Apr. 2013, , pg. 465.

11 Inwood, Hellenistic, pg. 134-5.

12 Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, pg. 118-120.