The Stoic HANDBOOK - College of Stoic Philosophers

that we should not be deceived by the things others value, that we should
cooperate with the divine flow of destiny, and we should always perform
our duty to family, friends, and country with honor and charity for all.
They were the words of one of the last and greatest of the Roman Stoics.
After his death, the empire was battered by a hundred years of plague,
civil wars, and barbarian conquest. It was a time when people needed and
wanted a savior to rescue them from almost constant grief and fear.
Christianity offered that promise, a savior who they claimed was God,
one who promised he would return soon to rescue his chosen people, and
one who would destroy the wicked and create a safe haven, a heaven in
which his followers would dwell forever. All they needed to do was
believe, and all these things would come to pass, even in their lifetime. It
was a powerful message, and the people yearned for it to be true.
THE NEW STOA
In the beginning, the sudden rise in fortunes of the Christian cult
presented a new opportunity and responsibility to explain what their
beliefs were all about. Most of the early, articulate leaders of the faith
were well schooled in the classics in which Stoicism was, more often
than not, the central focus of their education. It was not uncommon for
the early Christian writers, called apologists, to flesh out their stories and
beliefs in Jesus as the son of God with Stoic cosmology and ethics.
Eventually, much of Stoic doctrine was absorbed into Western intellectual
history with the help of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, St. Jerome,
John Cassian, St. Augustine, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Thomas
Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart, to name a few. There was no common
agreement about which of its themes were correct, incorrect, or
irrelevant. Even today, Christian writers disagree on many things. But
whether they agreed or disagreed, Stoicism was permanently impressed
into the traditions laid down by the Christian thinkers of the early Middle
Ages to be taken up again and again, studied, argued, accepted, and
rejected through the later Middle Ages.
By the time of the Renaissance, Stoic philosophy became even more
central to Western thought. The heroic ideal of the Shakespearean tragedy
is a Stoic. Queen Elizabeth I was an admirer of Stoicism and personally
translated the Discourses of Epictetus into Elizabethan English. The
ethics of the Stoa predominated and inspired Renaissance philosophers
and essayists in their creation of the new humanism of that era.
There are more books and scholarly articles written on Stoic philosophy
today than there has been in any other time in its history. The academic
community breathed new life and meaning into the Stoa, and a new age
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