The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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98 THE STOIC CREED
too well aware, like Marcus Aurelius, that the most
lasting fame is but of brief duration, to rest satisfied
with this. Speaking- of death, he says, The day that
you dread as though it were your last is the birthday
1
of eternity,"
and so he advocates a personal or "ob
jective immortality, and supports it by characteristic
reasoning. To him, as to other later Stoics, the im
mortality of the soul was not only a logical consequence
from the Stoical it
physics was also corroborated by
;
the fact of men s general belief in it, and thus came
with particular authority.
And the object of the belief
is to Seneca, in his highest apocalyptic moments, no
vague colourless hereafter, no mere abstraction of the
intellect, but a vivid, definite future life of bliss, a state
in which we shall revel in ineffable light, and have the
mysteries of nature revealed to us, and in which we
shall hold intercourse with the gods and with the spirits
of the blessed. His delineation in such a mood almost
approaches to the warm glowing picture of the Christian
teaching in the New Testament. 2 Thus did the later
Stoicism try to meet the claims of the human heart,
which the earlier Stoicism had to a large extent ignored,
and to adjust its pantheism to the deeper personal needs
of human nature, which were more and more making
themselves felt. Had the views of Plato regarding im
mortality (as disclosed, say, in the Phcedo) affected the
older Stoics, their treatment of the future state would
have been different ;
but it is one of the peculiarities
of the case that the earlier Stoics, though conversant
1
Ep. 102: "Dies iste quern tanquam extremum reformidas
seterni natalis est."
2
See Epp. 26, 55, 63, 102, 120.