Diogenes Laertius tells us that the Stoics held "that there are two general principles in the universe--the passive principle (τὸ πάσχον), which is matter, an existence without any distinctive quality, and the active principle (τὸ ποιοῦν), which is the reason existing in the passive, that is to say, God. For that He, being eternal, and existing throughout all matter, makes every thing." [825] This Divine Reason, acting upon matter, originates the necessary and unchangeable laws which govern matter--laws which the Stoics called λόγοι σπερµατικοί-- generating reasons or causes of things. The laws of the world are, like eternal reason, necessary and immutable; hence the εἱµαρµένη--the Destiny of the Stoics, which is also one of the names of the Deity. [826] But by Destiny the Stoics could not understand a blind unconscious necessity; it is rather the highest reason in the universe. "Destiny (εἱµαρµένη) is a connected (εἰροµένη) cause of things, or the reason according to which the world is regulated." [827]
[Footnote 825: ][ (return) ] Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. lxviii.
[Footnote 826: ][ (return) ] "They teach that God is unity, and that he is called Mind, and Fate, and Jupiter."--Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. lxviii.
[Footnote 827: ][ (return) ] Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxxiv.
These two principles are not, however, regarded by the Stoics as having a distinct, separate, and independent existence. One is substance (οὐσία); the other is quality (ποῖος). The primordial matter is the passive ground of all existence--the original substratum for the Divine activity. The Divine Reason is the active or formative energy which dwells within, and is essentially united to, the primary substance. The Stoics, therefore, regarded all existence as reducible, in its last analysis, to one substance, which on the side of its passivity and capacity of change, they called hyle (ὕλη); [828] and on the side of its changeless energy and immutable order, they called God. The corporeal world--physical nature--is "a peculiar manifestation" of God, generated from his own substance, and, after certain periods, absorbed in himself. Thus God, considered in the evolution of His power, is nature. And nature, as attached to its immanent principle, is called God. [829] The fundamental doctrine of the Stoics was a spiritual, ideal, intellectual pantheism, of which the proper formula is, All things are God, but God is not all things.
[Footnote 828: ][ (return) ] Or "matter." A good deal of misapprehension has arisen from confounding the intellectual ὕλη of Aristotle and the Stoics with the gross physical "matter" of the modern physicist. By "matter" we now understand that which is corporeal, tangible, sensible; whereas by ὕλη, Aristotle and the Stoics (who borrowed the term from him) understood that which is incorporeal, intangible, and inapprehensible to sense,--an "unknown something" which must necessarily be supposed as the condition of the existence of things. The formal cause of Aristotle is "the substance and essence"-- the primary nature of things, on which all their properties depend. The material cause is "the matter or subject" through which the primary nature manifests itself. Unfortunately the term "material" misleads the modern thinker. He is in danger of supposing the hyle of Aristotle to be something sensible and physical, whereas it is an intellectual principle whose inherence is implied in any physical thing. It is something distinct from body, and has none of those properties we are now accustomed to ascribe to matter. Body, corporeity, is the result of the union of "hyle" and "form." Stobaeus thus expounds the doctrine of Aristotle: Form alone, separate from matter (ὕλη) is incorporeal; so matter alone, separated from form, is not body. But there is need of the joint concurrence of both these--matter and form--to make the substance of body. Every individual substance is thus a totality of matter and form--a σίνολον.
The Stoics taught that God is oneliness (Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxviii.); that he is eternal and immortal (bk. vii. ch. lxxii.); he could not, therefore, be corporeal, for "body infinite, divisible, and perishable" (bk. vii. ch. lxxvii.). "All the parts of the world are perishable, for they change one into another; therefore the world is perishable" (bk. vii. ch. lxx.). The Deity is not, therefore, absolutely identified with the world by the Stoics. He permeates all things, creates and dissolves all things, and is, therefore, more than all things. The world is finite; God is infinite.
[Footnote 829: ][ (return) ] Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxx.
Schwegler affirms that, in physics, the Stoics, for the most part, followed Heraclitus, and especially "carried out the proposition that nothing incorporeal exists; every thing is essentially corporeal." The pantheism of Zeno is therefore "materialistic." [830] This is not a just representation of the views of the early Stoics, and can not be sustained by a fair interpretation of their teaching. They say that principles and elements differ from each other. Principles have no generation or beginning, and will have no end; but elements may be destroyed. Also, that elements have bodies, and have forms, but principles have no bodies, and no forms. [831] Principles are, therefore, incorporeal. Furthermore, Cicero tells us that they taught that the universal harmony of the world resulted from all things being "contained by one Divine SPIRIT;" [832] and also, that reason in man is "nothing else but part of the Divine SPIRIT merged into a human body." [833] It thus seems evident that the Stoics made a distinction between corruptible elements (fire, air, earth, water) and incorruptible principles, by which and out of which elements were generated, and also between corporeal and incorporeal substances.
[Footnote 830: ][ (return) ] Schwegler's "History of Philosophy," p. 140.
[Footnote 831: ][ (return) ] Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxviii.