The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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THE STOIC CREED
These two views of the life
according to nature,
though distinct, are not antagonistic. On the contrary,
the one is the necessary complement of the other
"the
way of both is one." 1 The first is the inter
pretation of the rational life from the standpoint of
the universal or the whole, and the second is its inter
pretation on the level of human nature, a part of the
whole and meaningless
if divorced from it. The first
is ontological, and determines the Stoic theology ; the
second is psychological, and gives us the Stoic theory
of virtue and happiness their theory of Conscience,
for the ruling faculty"
is "conscience," and the very
term conscience (orweicfyo-is)
seems to have been coined
in the Stoic mint and to have come to us from thence. 2
It is the second of these interpretations that is at
present before us, as we sketch the Stoic ethics.
II
The ethical teaching of the Stoics, as of all great
moralists, centred in consideration of man s happiness
and its relation to virtue^ To them, as to Aristotle,
happiness was something that must be self-sufficient,
which, again, resolved itself into the position that
"a
good man shall be satisfied from himself" (Prov.
xiv. 14). "Dig within," says Aurelius (Med. vii. 59).
Diogenes claims to have been taught it by
Antisthenes. See
Epictetus, Diss. iii. 24.
1
Aurelius, Med. v. 3.
2 "The most important of moral terms, the crowning triumph
of ethical nomenclature, 0-we577<ns, conscientia, the internal, abso
lute, supreme judge of individual action, if not struck in the mint
of the Stoics, at all events became current coin through their
influence
(Lightfoot, Sf. Paul s Epistle to the Philippians, p. 301).