Great Ideas of Philosophy

D. In the Stoic account, the mode of causation employed by God is nomological; that is, the affairs of thecosmos are controlled by immutable laws. This aspect of Stoic teaching matches up perfectly with the Godof the Hebrews who gave us the Ten Commandments.E. Why has the creator brought about this universe? Stoicism tends to leave this question unanswered, but theJewish Christians do not.1. The cosmic creation must have been undertaken for a reason. Having ordered the entire universe, thecreator must take an interest in it.2. At work here is not an Aristotelian rational plan or the god of the Stoics. It is a providential God whotakes an interest in his creation, particularly that part of the creation that most reflects his goodness andperfection, that part of the creation that is, although fallen, in some sense, perfectible. This is the Godof the Jews, of Islam, of Christianity.3. How distant this is from Olympianism and the divine fire of the Stoics! This God offers what is goodfor us for our sake; he has befriended mankind as a father does his children.4. Therefore, all men—the Stoics’ linguistic universal polis—are brothers, of whatever country or socialstanding; no one is of greater moral worth than another.III. The Stoic conception as interpreted by Hellenized Jewish Christians raised some central philosophicaldifficulties.A. First of all, if a providential creator made an entirely rational and perfect universe inhabited by rationalsouls, how is the problem of evil to be explained?B. Further, if this providential divinity is, by its very nature, an omniscient and omnipotent entity, a God whocould have made things any way he wanted to have them, that must mean that the individual’s fate ispredetermined. Is this a fatalistic doctrine?1. To accept Stoicism totally is to accept a rational order that is so inflexible that everything isdetermined by it, but the Stoics were deterministic in their physics, not their psychologies. Stoicism isan ethical philosophy that must allow both the power of reason and the power to defy reason.2. But why would the omniscient, omnipotent, and providential God of the Jews and Christians constituteus in such a way that we could defy reason?3. The answer is found in the Stoics’ apatheia, which becomes a way of reconciling oneself not to thenomological framework of a rationally ordered universe but to the will of God. Apatheia also groundsthe Christian belief that the goodness of God is, ultimately, the cause of all things.IV. The period of early Christianity was a quite cluttered time in the history of ideas, replete with Greek and Romaninfluences colliding with already ancient Hebraic teachings and the authority of Scripture.A. Christian fathers, such as Origen and Tertullian, wanted to dismiss the whole of Greek and Romanphilosophy—look what a mess these fine thinkers had made of their world! The teachings and example ofJesus Christ were all that was needed.B. There is in this a kernel of anti-intellectualism in the early church and it, too, must be dealt with if thechurch itself is to be erected on a broad intellectual, rational, and teachable foundation that will appeal tothe thinking parts of the world.C. Again, this is all taking place in that period of Roman hegemony that depends on a civil world that isunraveling. It is the ancient world of the Hebrews, a monotheistic world that turns its back on Rome. It is aworld of Jewish scholarship that finds in Athens an illumination that cannot be found in Scripture. It is aworld that is regrouping.D. Stoicism provides a bridge from the classical world to the one that will be recognizably Christian. It doesso by its teaching, by its influence on Rome and Roman administrative law, and by certain philosophicalprecepts that match up with what Christians adopt as a matter of faith.1. Some of the early church fathers took the divinity of Jesus Christ as establishing the epistemic andmoral authority of earlier teachings. The teachings of Christ were the last word on all things true, butthese teachings were not available to earlier philosophers.2. However, given that the teachings of Christ are now available, the earlier pagan thought is adistraction.3. Christianity had to be based on something firmer than mere “productions of philosophy”—it had to bebased on truths, creations of divinity made available to us by the grace of God.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11