the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Stoics
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or STOICS . When St. Paul met representatives of the Stoic philosophy at Athens ( Acts 17:18 ), that school had been in existence for about three centuries and a half. The name came from the Stoa or Porch where Zeno (about b.c. 340 265), the founder of the school, taught at Athens.
The leading Stoic maxim is, ‘Live according to nature.’ Nature both in the world and in man is to be interpreted by its highest manifestation Reason which appears in the world as the all-pervading ethereal essence or spirit, forming and animating the whole; and in man as the soul. This World-spirit occupies the place of God in the Stoic system. Thus we find St. Paul quoting the words of a Stoic writer, ‘We are also his offspring’ (Acts 17:28 ). The approximation, however, is in language rather than in reality. The theology of the Stoics is pure pantheism. Their so-called God has no independent or personal existence.
The supremacy of reason in man is pushed to such an extreme that virtuous conduct demands the entire suppression of the emotional side of man’s nature. This rigorous moral standard became, for practical reasons, considerably modified; but Stoic morality was always marked by its rigidity and coldness.
The great quality of Stoicism, which set it above Epicureanism, and brought it into line with Christianity, was its moral earnestness . In his dissertation on ‘St. Paul and Seneca’ Bp. Lightfoot has said, ‘Stoicism was the only philosophy which could even pretend to rival Christianity in the earlier ages of the Church.’ Perhaps there was in St. Paul’s mind at Athens the high hope of bringing to the side of Christ such a noble rival of the gospel. Yet Stoicism and Christianity ran parallel rather than came into contact with one another, until through the weakness inherent in its theology and its ethics the current of Stoic philosophy was dissipated and lost.
W. M. M‘Donald.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Stoics'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/s/stoics.html. 1909.
