The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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Whatever
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228 THE STOIC CREED
inexorable law, from which God, in any
true sense of
the term, is excluded ; or, if He be included, we are in
the grasp of an ultra-Calvinistic theology that seems to
paralyze human freedom.
befalls," says
Marcus Aurelius (x. 5), "was
fore-prepared for you
from all time ;
the woof of causation was from all
eternity weaving the realisation of your being, and
that which should befall you."
"Does
aught befall
you ? It is well a part of the destiny of the universe
ordained for you from the beginning
all that befalls
;
was part of the great web (ibid. iv. 26).
And there
is no doubt that, even in the greatest of the Stoic
Doctors, Fate at times appears as a coercive force,
or compulsive power, overriding
all : ducunt volentem
Fata, nolentem trahunt. 1 "The universal cause is like
a winter torrent ;
it
sweeps
Med. ix. 29).
all before it
(Aurelius,
It
may, however, be maintained that the Stoics at
their best got beyond this position, and meant little
more by Fate than that things happen in the world
according to law and order, that events are part of
a general plan or system, and that human actions
must work out their consequences ; and, as applied
to God, that not even the Deity acts arbitrarily and
capriciously, but with Him, too, law and order hold,
and reason guides the world. If so, they were on the
track of a great truth a truth that is seen in its fulness
only when we throw into the conception
of God s
governance of the universe the ideas of love and mercy,
as well as those of intelligence and justice. It is not
1
This is the opposite of Epicurus s dictum that
masters, r6 Trap 7/^.as o.<riroTov" (Diog. Lae rt. x. 133).
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we are our own