The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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STOIC MASTERS AND THEIR WRITINGS 25
universe," urged Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, iv. 27),
"or else a welter of confusion. Assuredly then a
world-order. Or think you that order subsisting
within yourself
is compatible with disorder in the All ?
Recall to mind the alternative (iv. 3) either a fore
seeing providence, or blind atoms
and all the abound
ing proofs that the world is as it were a city."
In like
manner, Balbus, in Cicero s De Natura Deorum (ii. 37),
maintains that it is as easy to believe that, by throwing
a large quantity of the letters of the alphabet at random
on the ground, there would emerge, legible and clear,
the Annals of Ennius, as to believe that the world, so
obviously showing marks of wisdom and design, could
have been produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. 1
To the Epicurean Ethics a no less strenuous oppo
sition had to be made. If "pleasure"
were man s
highest good, then, it seemed, egoism and selfishness
ruled, virtue was stripped of its absolute value, and
morality had no sure foundation. In the constitution
of the reasoning being I perceive no virtue in mutiny
against justice ; in mutiny against pleasure
I see selfcontrol
(Aurel. viii. 39). Hence the Stoical treat
ment of the emotions and desires. Complete repression
of these was the counsel, if peace were to be secured :
let
Banish joys, banish fear, put hope also to flight, and
not grief be present
(Boethius, DC Consol. Phil.
Lib. i. metrum 7). No one carried on this antagonism
to Hedonistic Ethics more persistently than Epictetus.
2
- 1
The Epicurean Cosmogony will be considered in Chapter VI.
2 See, for example, Dissertations, i. 23 and ii. 5.
The arguments
against Epicurean Hedonism will be adduced in Chapters VIII.
and X.