The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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THE STOIC CREED
shut out from mind :
there are no bonds of causation
between them, and they have no points of community.
But, if so, there is no means whereby the two can be
brought together they must for ever remain : apart,
and by no possibility could the world, as we know it,
have come into being at all. Dualism of this stamp is
utterly unworkable.
As to the second, we have not here, as in the previous
case, a self-contradiction ;
for the eternity of matter is
quite a tenable notion, if matter be not from the begin
ning rigidly shut out from intelligence, but, on the con
trary, be conceived as something harmonized from the
first ordered, with its parts in rational relationship.
This was Aristotle s idea, which he claims to have been
first thrown out by himself namely, not the eternity of
matter per se, but the eternity of matter as a cosmos.
The strong point about it is, that it clearly recognizes
that an eternal Deity must have an eternal manifesta
tion, and that matter absolutely unordered is an im
potent conception. But it is liable to objection on the
score that it seems not to perceive that the modes of
Divine manifestation
actual, possible, or conceivable
are countless. We can dogmatically affirm ordered
matter to be necessarily eternal only if we can prove it
to be the sole possible means whereby the Deity can
objectify Himself. That, however, cannot be done ;
for Spirit may reveal itself to spirit, and in and through
spirit be manifested and a
;
world of spirits would meet
the requirements of the divine manifestation, as well as
a material universe, and so the cosmos need not be
eternal the eternal may be the spirit world.
In the third view, the dependence of the world on