Zeno of Cittium - founder of Stoicism

A history of pantheism and scientific pantheism by Paul Harrison.

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The universe is a living thing, endowed with soul and with reason.

Central area of Milky Way galaxy.

The Stoics are best known today for their ethical views on the acceptance of fate. These views derived from their belief that the universe was an animate and rational Being pervaded with soul. The Stoic philosophy was the closest thing to an organized religion of strict pantheism.

The school was founded by Zeno of Cittium in Cyprus, one of antiquity's boldest yet least known thinkers. He is not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, who earned far greater fame from a handful of paradoxes, designed to prove true by logic what everyone, from experience, knows to be false: that motion and change are impossible.

Zeno of Cittium flourished between 300 and 260 BC. Born in Cyprus, he came to Athens and studied philosophy under the cynic Crates and the Platonists Xenocrates and Polemo. From Crates he appears to have picked up a contempt for riches - his favourite pastimes, it is said, were eating green figs and basking in the sun. He ate raw food and drank water. Diogenes Laertius reports that he disliked large groups, and would choose the end seat on a couch. After Plato he wrote a Republic advocating that wives should be held in common. Heraclitus appears to be a powerful influence, though he is not mentioned as such.

Zeno seems to have been quite old when he himself began teaching to small groups, in a painted colonnade on the Athenian agora known as the Stoa Poikile. Hence the school he founded came to be known as the Stoics. At one point, when he was unable to pay the resident alien's tax, the Athenians sold him into slavery - but he was bought by a friend and freed. Later the Athenians honoured him with a golden crown and a large tomb built at public expense.

As with so many ancient philosophers, very little has survived of Zeno's own writing, though Diogenes Laertius provides a very long summary of his ideas and those of the other Stoics.

Stoicism had a powerfully developed system of philosophy, which covered logic, ethics and physics. The central beliefs were that the cosmos was a divine being, endowed with a soul that was made of a refined form of matter. Our role on earth was to accept and live according to nature. The Stoics also believed that we should accept our destinies unquestioningly, since they embodied the will of the universe: for that reason their name became synonymous with patience and long-suffering.

Many of their theories were striking forerunners of modern science. The theory of a recurrent cosmic conflagration, for example, could turn out to be true - if the density of matter is high enough to cause a recollapse of the universe. The Stoics also believed that the sun was a sphere of fire, larger than the earth, and that the moon shone with reflected light.

At the height of Rome's power, Stoicism vied with Epicureanism and Platonism for dominance in the Roman intellectual elite. The emperor Marcus Aurelius was an adherent. But like other rational creeds, as the Roman empire degraded into chaos, Stoicism succumbed to the mystery religions from the East.

The quotations are from Diogenes Laertius [DL], Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trs R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, 1925, and A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

Selected fragments.

The world is a plenum. Everything is matter.

The primary matter they make the substratum of all things … By matter is meant that out of which anything whatsoever is produced. Universal matter … neither increases no decreases. [DL 7.147]

Zeno (thought that) it was totally impossible that something incorporeal . . should be the agent of anything … Only a body is capable of acting or being acted upon. [Cicero, Academica, 1.39.]

The world has no empty space within it, but forms one united whole. This is a necessary result of the sympathy and tension which binds together things in heaven and earth. [DL 7.140]