The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
PREDECESSORS OF STOICS IN ETHICS 137
it to the Old Testament to its early historical records
and its anthropomorphic way of viewing the Deity ;
and thence to Origen and the Catechetical school of
Alexandria, who included the New Testament in
their
scope and thence to Biblical critics in later ; ages so
that the principle has permanently affected Christian
exegesis.
In these respects, at any rate, there is a real affinity
and causal
connexion between Cynicism and Stoicism,
though it would not be difficult to show that the Cynics
also found the germs of their system in
previous philo
sophic thought. But with essential affinities there are
also essential differences, which will be obvious as we
proceed ;
and
"
perhaps we nearest touch the spring of
difference," as Sir Alexander Grant puts
it (The Ethics
of Aristotle, vol. i. pp. 317, 318),
by observing that
Cynicism is essentially mere negation, mere protest
against the external world while
;
Stoicism is essentially
positive, essentially constructive, and tends in many
ways to leaven the external world. Cynicism despised
the sciences, disdained politics, exploded the social
institutions, and ridiculed patriotism or the distinctions
of country. Zeno, on the contrary, rearranged the
sciences according to his views he :
enjoined the wise
to mix in affairs ;
and he conceived not a mere negation
of patriotic prejudices, but the positive idea of cosmo
politanism. Cynicism, therefore, is a withdrawal from
the world into blank isolation, while Stoicism is the
withdrawal into an inner life, which forms to its votaries
an object of the highest enthusiasm.
Hence the elation,
often hyperbolical, which tinges the Stoical austerity ;