less a genuine product of Hellenic thought than an importation from the East. It represented a synthesis between Hellenism and Oriental speculation. Not one of the greater Stoic teachers was a native of Greece proper. It is worth remembering that the Apostle Paul’s birthplace, Tarsus, was a stronghold of the creed of the Stoics; and there is no reason to suppose that Paul was a stranger to their tenets.[1] Lactantius (Institutes, iv. 9) admits that Zeno had anticipated certain features of Christian teaching: “Zeno rerum naturæ dispositorem atque opificem universitatis λόγον prædicat”; and the words in Heb. ii. 10 have a distinctly Stoic flavour: δι᾽ ὃν τὰ πάντα καὶ δι᾽ οὗ τὰ πάντα (God is the final and efficient cause of all things).[2] Certainly the Stoic system foreshadowed the doctrine of a true brotherhood of man.
What was peculiar to Stoicism was its constant insistence on Morality, and its “grim earnestness and devout submission to the divine will.” Virtue, in that system, is alone good; vice bad; all other things are ἀδιάφορα (indifferent). It was in a strictly practical spirit that Stoic ethics was developed by the Romans, as we see in Seneca; but the later Stoicism, confronted with the facts of life, had in some points to soften the rigid outlines of earlier theory, just because the idealism and the pessimism of that earlier theory were fatal to any effort of moral reform; “the cold, flawless perfection of triumphant reason was an impossible model, which could only discourage and repel aspirants to the higher life” (Dill, Roman Society, bk. iii., chap. i.). There was no room in such an austere doctrine for the
- ↑ Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, iv. 616. Hicks, Greek Phil. in N.T., p. 94.
- ↑ For traces of Stoicism in the Pauline Epistles, see the illuminating discussion by Lightfoot, “St. Paul and Seneca,” in his edition of the Philippians. We might instance two thoughts, at least, which show that Paul did owe something to Stoicism: (1) αὐτάρκεια (2 Cor. vi. 10), (2) the worldwide city of God (Eph. ii, 19, Col. iii, 11).
