A rational thought of a Stoic God (philosophy of happiness)

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.