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