The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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THEOLOGY AND RELIGION 215
thought, and holding us responsible to Him for our
character and conduct. He is omnipresent, and, like
the Deity of Butler, rules through conscience. "So
that,"
he counsels us (Diss.
i. 14), when you have shut
the doors and made darkness within, remember never
to say that you are alone ; for you are not, but God is
within, and your Daemon l is within, and what need
have they of light to see what you are doing ? To this
God you ought also to swear an oath, just as the
soldiers do to Caesar. . . . And what shall you swear?
Never to
disobey, and never to make accusations, and
never to find fault with any of the things
been given by him, and never unwillingly to
that have
do or to
obey any of the things that are necessary."
Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, is, for the most
part, a pantheist. Yet, the pantheism that appeals to
him is based less on the hylozoism of the earlier Stoics
than on the rationality of the All, intellectually con
ceived : it is spiritualistic or idealistic rather than physi
cal or materialistic. You exist but as a part inherent
in a greater whole. You will vanish into that which
gave you being ;
or rather, you will be retransmuted
into the seminal and universal reason"
(Med. iv. 14).
One main difficulty in precisely determining the Stoic
conception
of the nature of God arises from the fact
that, apart from the philosophical doctrine of the Deity,
the Stoics accepted the popular notion of the existence
of "the
gods." They accepted even the popular
mythology, but were very careful to interpret
it in a
way of their own they used it simply as symbolical
of higher truth, thereby copying the Cynics. But this
1
This is the equivalent of
"
guardian angel."