A philosophical movement which flourished in the Hellenistic Roman period from c.320 BCAD 200 alongside and in competition with Epicureanism and Scepticism. The Stoics, named after the Painted Stoa (colonnade) where they met, believed in a rational, materialistic, and deterministic universe in which virtue consisted in understanding natural necessity and then cheerfully accepting it; the individual soul is literally a part of the larger cosmos, into which it is absorbed. The major figures in its formulation were the founder, Zeno of Citium, and the two succeeding heads of the School, Cleanthes and Chrysippus. It accorded well with the ethos of Rome, and was later taken up by such figures as Seneca and Epictetus.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy, the founding of which is associated with Zeno of Citium, which became the foremost popular philosophy among the educated elite in the Greco-Roman Empire, to the point where, in the words of Gilbert Murray, "nearly all the successors of Alexander [...] professed themselves Stoics." A primary goal of Stoicism was to improve the individual’s spiritual well-being. Stoicism holds that passion distorts truth, and that the pursuit of truth is virtuous. Greek philosophers such as Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and later Roman thinkers such as Cicero, Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Younger, Dio Chrysostom, and Epictetus are associated with Stoicism. In Cicero's case, it should be emphasised that while he shared many of the moral tenets of Stoicism, he was not a Stoic himself but an eclectic. Stoic philosophy is usually contrasted with Epicureanism. The term "Stoicism" is derived from the word "stoa," which means "porch," which is where Zeno began teaching in about 300 B.C.
Brotherhood
A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Graeco–Roman world, and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities, such as Cato the Younger and Epictetus.
In particular, they were noted for their urging of clemency toward slaves. Seneca exhorted, "Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies."
Stoicism's influence on Christianity
Although Stoicism was considered by many early Fathers of the Church to be a part of the philosophical decline of the ancient world, many of its elements were held in high esteem, in particular, the natural law, which is a major part of the Roman Catholic and early American doctrines of secular public morality. The central Stoic idea of logos strongly influenced Christian theology, in particular, identifying Christ with the logos (see John 1). The Stoic definition of virtue as the conformance of the will to the rational order of the world has parallels with traditional Christian morality. The Stoic cosmopolitanism influenced Augustine of Hippo's concept of the City of God. Stoicism influenced the Christian Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, a book which promotes Christian morality via secular philosophy;
Modern Usage
The word "stoic" now is very commonly referred to someone indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, or joy. In contrast to the term "epicurean", the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Stoicism notes, "the sense of the English adjective ‘stoical’ is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins."
Quotations
Collection of various Stoic quotations:
Epictetus:
"First, decide who you would be. If then we accept this, and, when things go amiss, are inclined to blame ourselves, remembering that judgment alone can disturb our peace and constancy, I swear to you by all the gods that we have made progress." "In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind, is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our opinions and the decisions of our will." "Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them." "I am formed by nature for my own good: I am not formed for my own evil." "If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."Marcus Aurelius:
"It loved to happen." "The universe is in change, life is an opinion." "Everything is right for me, which is right for you, O Universe. "Let there be freedom from perturbation with respect to the things which come from external causes, and in actions whose cause lies in yourself, be just; "Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear." "It is in our power to refrain from any opinion about things and not to be disturbed in our souls; "If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. nor have they admission to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul; “Even when the mind is feeling its way cautiously and working its way round a problem from every angle, it is still moving directly onwards and making for its goal.” "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment"Seneca:
"The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live." "The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears."Books
Primary Sources
A. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 1987) Brennan T. Epictetus, Discourses and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, April 2004. Harvard University Press Epictetus Discourses Books 1 and 2, Loeb Classical Library Nr. Harvard University Press Epictetus Discourses Books 3 and 4, Loeb Classical Library Nr. Long George Enchiridion by Epictetus, Prometheus Books, Reprint Edition, January 1955. Moses Hadas (ed.), Essential Works of Stoicism (1961: Bantam) Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (transl. Robin Campbell), Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium (2004) ISBN 0-14-044210-3 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, translated by Maxwell Staniforth; Oates Whitney Jenning The Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, The Complete Extant Writings of Erpicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, Random House, 9th printing 1940.Studies
John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) Brad Inwood, ed., The Cambridge Companion to The Stoics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Bakalis Nikolaos, Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics Analysis and Fragments, Trafford Publishing, May 2005, ISBN 1-4120-4843-5 A. Long, Stoic Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996; University of California Press, 2001) Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Blackwell, 1995, ISBN 0-631-18033-8 Steven Strange (ed.), Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations (2004) ISBN 0-521-82709-4 Lawrence C.
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