Markus Aurelius one of the most
famous Stoic philosophers identifies the idea of God in the Hellenistic period
“If there are Gods and they are just, then they will not care how
devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived
by. But if there are Gods and they are unjust, then you don’t have to worship
them. And if there are no Gods then you will be gone, but will have lived a
noble life, that will live on in the memories of your loved ones”
To understand God we need to
understand what the world is like what exists in it. A blend of energies and
matter creating life, bound by laws of nature we call force. While energy leads
to creating matter that forms the universe. Energies breed life as it is the
building block of matter.
Based on these concept things like
time, meaning of words, space is dependent on ‘matter’ to exist. Without the
existence of matter they don’t really exist, yet links us through experiences
and calculates our existence spread over time.
To understand existence and
question it, it is important to be a rational thinker. Rational thinking leads
to understanding of transforming information to knowledge. If we understand
this idea and it seems that we agree to the basic idea so far narrated we can
move forward to enhance our understanding of God.
Besides being good and evil, the
existence of God remains part of a belief. God is not an entity or has a
personality that is outlined by a manual of laws and practices answering our
confusions and outlining every human being according to a same structure and
instructions over an idea of inner peace. Stoics believe that inner peace
doesn’t come through an external source be it God, because a person cannot
depend on an external factors for happiness that rests within.
To achieve this self
actualization and understanding of God as quoted by many sufi poets as well one
must be fully focused on living a good life without boundaries on thoughts. But
there has to be a limit on actions and reactions.
“Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself
in your way of thinking.”
Markus Aurelieus
God is in the universe He is
everywhere but He is not outside the universe. He exists among matter and energy,
while matter exists on its own due to the energy. So if energy is neither
created nor destroyed then matter would also be an infinity and constantly
evolving, leading to a force governing the infinite existence of matter. Force
also becomes an infinite source but depends on matter while matter depends on
energy that exists on its own. Modern religions like Christianity, Judaism and
Islamic believe that God exists everywhere (within and outside the universe)
which gets contradicted against this argument.
For stoics God is more like an
organizing principle that governs all matter and orders even the tiniest event
occurring in the universe according to His design. God is less like a person
and more like a ‘force’.
Stoics have an interesting idea
of the building block of God as matter is broken down into energy. God is
broken down or made of ‘Pneuma’ that means Breath. Based on the philosophical reasoning
breath is considered a fire element. Stoics believe that every entity in the
universe has a limited amount of ‘Pneuma’ in them which allows God to govern
all matter. That makes us all a little bit of God ourselves.
“All is one and one is all”
Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin)
Since Stoics believe that God is a
force and not a personality that bounds the universe by laws through a precise
design that we are unable to cheat and/or modify. This makes God maximally
rational therefore He orders everything maximally rationally rather ordering
irrationally without logic. His laws are not dependent or effected or reasoned
by submission. There would be no deviation from a plan so the idea of free will
doesn’t really exist or the branching of life either.
In Christianity the word ‘Pneuma’
is taken up as ‘Logos’ meaning an embodied soul of God that explain Jesus as
the son of God and shares the importance of breath as breathing life into
beings. These were not original ideas that were prolonged and taken up by the
modern religions like Islam. When Muslims quote breathing life into dead to
make them rise again on the Day of Judgment it is rationally challenged by the
Stoic philosophy. Since the ideas were blatantly taken up from previous
philosophies to be modified and applied to the then modern societies that
didn’t have a background for such an idea.
It is easier to inject an idea among people who don’t know, where
people know even a tiniest bit of information can lead to questions that can
raise conflicts to the spread of the injected idea.
A rational thinker cannot believe
in God, he just has to know it.
One must live a good life, a good
life is one that is happy, happiness comes from virtue, happiness isn't
pleasure unlike the concept of hedonism or necessarily what we mean as
happiness as a personal idea.
The problem arises from the Greek
word Eudaimonia. A lot of philosophies have Eudaimonia as an end goal or the
purpose of life, it is translated as happiness but more literal meaning can be
‘human flourishing’ it is everything that a good life can consist of. A lot of
philosophers concluded the definition of philosophy to be the idea of finding
‘Eudaimonia’ and how to achieve it. For stoics it is finding virtue, the only
thing that will always be good, without any qualification or any internal or
external factor will be ‘being rationale’ the most important question that
remains is
How do we know how to be rational?
That can be answered with depth
by the concept of Stoic God. Since God is perfectly maximally rational and we
being the bit of God ourselves, we should try to be more like God rather than
an influential human figure and eventually we will be rational.
Ofcourse the God we humans are
trying to be is not a modern God but rather a logical force governing all
matter and energies in the universe. Therefore in accordance with the Stoic
philosophy we all have the ability to be rational leading to be virtuous and
eventually happy living a good life. All we have to do is to accord our will
according to the universe, rather than believing irrationally through
submission.
