A Primer On The Stoic God

Let me start by saying: if you’re an atheist, I still feel you’re still going to enjoy this edition. I’ll spend a few characters explaining, by way of a personal anecdote, why I think so.

Some years ago, I was probably in my early 30s, I first learned that “gnostic” wasn’t just a fancy way of saying “I’m not open to being proven wrong about my beliefs re: truth” (as opposed to agnostic, which is the opposite), but that it was also, itself, a religion. The religion of The Gnostics.

I had never heard of “The Gnostics”, so I Googled them. I wound up at a course provided by Great Courses Plus (no, this isn’t a sponsorship) on The Gnostics.

What I found was absolutely amazing. Not because I thought it was true (I didn’t), but because this was the very first time I had encountered the intricate details of a religion that wasn’t in the Abrahamic tradition.

To give you a taste:

The Gnostics believed that the God of our universe is actually a false God called “Yaldabaoth” (I’ve probably misspelled that). He is the offspring of a pair of entities (one male, one female), many of which, combined, form the mind and body of the true god (whose name may be lost to time or, more likely, I just don’t remember).

These two entities created Yaldabaoth without the approval of all the other entities (of which there are many), and, as a result of this, the “real” god is on a mission of sorts to, and this is an awkward word, disassemble Yaldabaoth and return him to the body of his pairs, and thus the body of the true god.

The accusation of the Gnostics, is that the Christians had been tricked by Yaldabaoth and are, essentially, in service to a heretic false god who is, as it turns out, truly evil as well.

I may be misremembering a lot of these details, in fact I’m sure I am, but you can see why this totally unfamiliar take on creation would have been interesting to me — it’s very novel, I suppose.

If you’re an atheist reading this edition, I want you to assume that you’ll take the same sort of novel enjoyment away from this primer on the Stoic God.

What the Stoic God is not

The Stoic God is not a being, nor does it have a gender. This God does not hear prayers, dictate moral law, speak to prophets, have “chosen people”, or a house of worship. The Stoic God is also without awareness of itself and is, as a result, entirely devoid of intention, purpose, and meaning.

Now, that last sentence will upset some traditional Stoics that read this publication and have told me, personally, how much they appreciate my knowledge and understanding of Stoicism.

I do intend to explain exactly what I mean when I say that the Stoic God is devoid of those things — and I will.

However, I’m not going to do it just yet because it will derail the read for everyone else.

If you’re a traditional Stoic reading this, please stick with me until the end and I promise you’ll get clarification.

Lasty, the Stoic God is not an entity with a plan.

The Stoic God, being entirely unaware of itself, has no ability to plan, and has certainly not planned the future. The Stoic God is not the creator of a fatalistic existence (at least not entirely, and at least not intentionally).

(something about how things are what they are because they are, not because of a reason… similar to evolution or conicidences.)

What the Stoic God is

The Stoic God is a system, conceptualized as an animal or complex organism, and variously referred to as both “the universe” and Nature (capital “N”, always).

The Stoic God (that system), is the progenitor of everything — not just humans, not just turtles, not just scorpions, rocks, flowers, blades of grass, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity, but everything.

It is also, for the Stoics, above all else, an inherently (and, as I’ll soon try to explain, necessarily) logical entity that is responsible for the setting in motion of a causal chain that will continue until Ekpyrosis (or, to be less Greek about it, the fiery destruction and collapse of the the Universe) and which cannot be, to use an unnecessarily dramatic word, escaped.

Some important details of the Stoic God

First and foremost is that the Stoic God has both a mind and a body.

The body is the Universe and everything in it. You are part of the body of God, as am I, as is the seat within which you are presently sitting or the floor upon which you are presently standing. Everything, in fact, is part of the body of the Stoic God.

If a human being has fingers and toes, ears and legs, arms and buttcheeks, and all these things are part of a human body, then a Universe has stars and planets, moons and oceans, humans and squids, and all those things are part of a Universe’s body.

The mind of the Stoic God is less easy to comprehend, because of course it is.

It might best be thought of as the less physical, but, in my opinion, more important parts of the Universe. Gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, magnetic fields, et cetera. The Stoics wouldn’t have understood these things scientifically — or, really, much at all — so these are not the names they gave to these less physical, but absolutely critical, parts.

Instead, the Stoics came up with the Pneuma and the Logos.

Had they access to the tools and knowledge we have today, they would have Still conceptualized the Universe as God, but they very likely would not have named its parts the way the did, or imagined the effects of those parts in quite the same way.

The Pneuma and the Logos can be thought of, today, as variables for things that the Stoics couldn’t possibly have sorted out through reason alone.

However, and importantly, this is absolutely not how the ancient Stoics thought of them in their time.

The Pneuma was the “Divine Breath”, while the Logos was “Divine Reason” and the “Active Principle”.

How these two things interacted is, if not hotly debated in academic circles and comment sections the world over, at least abstract and hard to define exactly. What I can be sure of is that the Logos and the Pneuma, through their interactions, determined the form physical matter takes — and the degree to which that physical matter is imbued with a “portion” or a “share” of Divine Reason.

Everything in the Universe is part of the Universe and so, because Divine Reason exists throughout the entire Universe, everything in the Universe has some concentration of Divine Reason in it and, therefore, depending on that thing’s ability to do so, is capable of fully realizing and embodying its share of Divine Reason and, thus, align itself with the whole of the cosmos — with God.

“Aligning” with the Stoic God

If you’ve made it this far, be glad you did because this bit is the deepest root of Stoic ethical theory. To misunderstand this bit is to be doomed to misunderstand all of Stoicism.

The concentration of Logos in a thing (be that thing a mineral, plant, animal, or something else), is determined by the state of tension, in that thing, between the Pneuma and, well, the Pneuma. Rather than attempt to explain (because I would fail miserably) how the Pneuma can create tension all on its own, I’ll try an analogy.

Since the Pneuma is “the Divine Breath”, we might think of this tension (which the Greeks called “tonos”) as “held breath” or, better yet, “contained breath” — I’m not saying the ancient Stoics thought of it this way, but describing it this way might be useful (to me) in explaining it.

Let’s imagine the physical object in question is a turtle 🐢 

Turtles have a certain capacity for containing pneuma. Since the Divine Breath (the Breath of God, we could call it) necessarily contains Divine Reason, this “Contained Pneuma” is, itself, a container for a certain amount of Reason.

This isn’t a great analogy because it’s not the volume of the contained Pneuma that defines the amount of Logos in it, but I think it’s good enough for my purposes in this edition.

Humans are not turtles, so our capacity for containing Pneuma, naturally, would be different — and it would seem, we humans, have a uniquely high capacity for containing Pneuma and, thus, in this analogy anyway, Divine Reason.

Stoicism is a philosophy for humans, as far as the Stoics were concerned, not just because humans are the only animals on Earth capable of understanding Stoic philosophy but also because human beings are the only animals on Earth in need of Stoic philosophy.

But why?

Because every other thing in the Universe, as far as the Stoics reason, whether those things are eagles, salmons, holiday fruit cakes, celestial bodies, or Zeno’s pet ferret (which is not canon, I’m only making a joke… and, of course, desperately wishing Zeno really did have a pet ferret), everything aligns with Nature (capital “N”) without choosing to do so.

Humans, on the other hand, having so much contained Pneuma and leverageable Logos, have the (seemingly) unique ability to choose to act out of alignment with Divine Reason.

This, for Stoics, is a serious problem.

To have the ability to ignore the share of Divine Reason apportioned to us, and to choose to act out of alignment with Nature as a result, is to become something like an abscess on the body of God — a wrench in the works, a fly in the ointment, a pen in the washing machine! To be out of alignment with the inherent logic of the universe is to doom oneself to a life of suffering.

If only there was a philosophy aimed at helping people understand just how big a problem this is, and which encouraged its students set out on the life-long process of, first, figuring out what it looks like to be a human living in alignment with Nature (God), and then, to start attempting to live that way.

This is why the Stoic God is “required reading” for anyone looking to understand Stoic Ethics: the Stoic God was, in the formation and ongoing development of Stoicism, the sole justification for all Stoic ethical positions. It is the presupposition that enables every conclusion reached by the Ethics branch of the philosophy.

So why isn’t the Stoic God aware of itself?

I promised an explanation, here it is :

Natural Selection, and so also the theory of Evolution, (oh boy, where am I going with this?) is often misunderstood. I’ll try to outline what I mean:

Imagine a dung beetle gives birth to two baby dung beetles. One of those babies has an extra leg. This extra leg is due to a mutation, something entirely unexpected and, for all intents and purposes, random.

If that extra leg provides a survival advantage, which it absolutely is not guaranteed to do, then chances are high that our extra-legged dung beetle will reproduce. When it reproduces, it will pass its genetic mutation on to its off-spring. Not every one of its children will present with the same extra leg, but some will — and every single one will carry the mutation, whether it presents or not.

As more and more generations go by, and the number of extra-legged dung beetles increases, slowly the extra-legged dung beetles begin to outnumber the normatively-legged ones. A little bit more time and there’s only the extra-legged ones. The mutation is no longer a mutation, it’s the normative body of all dung beetles.

Millions of years later, when we observe how this random extra leg is the only thing that makes rolling dung balls away fast enough to avoid being eaten by predators possible for the dung beetle, we either think:

A. That the dung beetle responded to its environment and somehow willed its way to growing an extra leg or

B. That God designed the dung beetle with an extra leg so it could be perfectly fit for its environment.

But neither of these things are true.

Animals do not grow long necks, in the case of Giraffes, for example, to reach tall trees. Instead, animals with long necks can reach the fruit of tall trees and, therefore, have a survival advantage over those animals who do not have long necks or who cannot reach the fruit of tall trees.

Giraffes exist today not because they chose to grow long necks, but because their having long necks enabled them to eat otherwise unreachable food resources during difficult times — which enabled them to survive for the, roughly, 800,000 years they existed before anatomically modern humans showed up and, undoubtedly, upon seeing them, said, “wow, imagine an animal designed just to eat fruits from tall trees.”

The Stoic God, that is to say The Universe, is the same as the giraffe.

The Stoic God does did not give rise to logic and reason by design or choice.

Logic and Reason are simply the result of the anomaly which created the Universe. They aren’t here by design, but they are here.

The Stoic God, then, isn’t a being that can be aware of itself. Instead, it is a system that we benefit by being part of — the God is just the name we’ve given to that system, because, if anything could fairly be thought of as “God”, it is the system that enables our existence.

These are, very much, my words. While I’m confident the Ancient Stoics didn’t view their “God” as a being, I’m equally confident that they probably didn’t have this specific understanding of it.

Ancient Stoicism was founded in 300BCE, and we cannot expect that any man or woman, no matter how incredibly intelligent, insightful, or wise they were, to have had access to the scientific knowledge required to “figure out” the nature of existence (we do not even possess it today, over 2,000 years later).

Lack of this knowledge would require either (A) a lot of blatantly incorrect assumptions or (B) a lot of "this stands to reason, so while we can’t prove it impericaly, it is sound logically, so let us believe it until someone can argue differently and force us to change our arguments” type of conclusions.

I very much believe that, had the Stoic school remained “in session” from its founding to now (instead of being, basically, dead from 200AD to ~1970AD, that the leaders of that school would have arrived at an understanding of the Stoic God very much in line with the one I’ve shared in this section.

To sum up

The Stoic God isn’t something one worships, or pays homage to — nor is it a self-aware entity that has plan it designed with the future of everything in mind.

Instead, the Stoic God is the name we give to the system that enables our existence. That system is stable, has a set of rules and conditions that we (as a result of being their beneficiaries) can easily understand as logical and that some will choose to understand as an intentionally designed Giraffe instead of as an anomaly that just as easily could have never happened.

It’s not important that you believe in the Stoic God, but it is important that you understand it supports the ethics of their philosophy and is the reason Virtue is the only good.

Thanks for reading.