Stoicism and Logos

from J.N.D.Kelly-Early Christian Doctrines,Graeco-Roman Philosophy p.17-19

Founded by Zeno of Citium c. 300 B.C., it was a closely knit system of logic, metaphysics
and ethics. Its lofty, if somewhat impersonal, moral ideal won it countless adherents; it taught
conquest of self, life in accordance with nature (i.e. the rational principle within us), and the
brotherhood of man. From the theological point of view, however, what was most remarkable
about it was its pantheistic materialism. The Stoics reacted vigorously against the Platonic
differentiation of a transcendent, intelligible world not perceptible by the senses from the
ordinary world of sensible experience.Whatever exists, they argued, must be body, and the
universe as a whole must be through and through material. Yet within reality they drew a
distinction between a passive and an active principie. There is crude, unformed matter,
without character or quality; and there is the dynamic reason or plan (logos) which forms and
organizes it. This latter they envisaged as spirit (pneuma) or fiery vapour; it was from this allpervading fire that the cruder, passive matter emerged, and in the end it would be reabsorbed
into it in a universal conflagration. But though more ethereal than the passive matter it
informed, spirit was none the less material, and the Stoics were not afraid to accept the
paradox of two bodies occupying the same space which their theory entailed. This active
principle or Logos permeates reality as mind or consciousness pervades the body, and they
described it as God, Providence, Nature, the soul of the universe (anima mundi). Their
conception that every-thing that happens has been ordered by Providence to man's best
advantage was the basis of their ethical doctrine of sub- mission to fate.
Thus Stoicism was a monism teaching that God or Logos is a finer matter immanent in the
material universe. But it also taught that particular things are microcosms of the whole, each
containing within its unbroken unity an active and a passive principie. The former, the principle
which organizes and forms it, is its logos, and the Stoics spoke of seminal logoi (logos
spermatikos), seeds, as it were, through the activity of which individual things come into
existence as the world develops. All these 'seminal logoi' are contained within the supreme,
universal Logos; they are so many particles of the divine Fire which permeates reality. This
leads to the Stoic doctrine of human nature. The soul in man is a portion of, or an emanation
from, the divine Fire which is the Logos. It is a spirit or warm breath pervading the body and
giving it form, character, organization. Material itself, it survives the body, but is itself mortal,
persisting at longest until the world conflagration. Its parts are, first, the five senses; then the
power of speech or self- expression; then the reproductive capacity; and, finally, the ruling
element , which is reason. The soul is the logos in man, and the Stoics made an important
distinction between the 'immanent logos (logos endiathetos), which is his reason considered
merely as present in him, and the 'expressed logos' (logos prophorikos), by which they meant
his reason as extrapolated or made known by means of the faculty of speech or selfexpression.