Stoicism & God

There's no denying it, the Ancient Stoics believed in God.

But it wasn't the God you're thinking of. Not even close.

The Stoic God was wholly natural, and not something you prayed to or begged favors from.

Instead, the Stoic concept of God was something more like a "conscious cosmos" and, importantly, Stoic Cosmology/Physics is the foundation of every ethical or logical claim ever made by the Stoics.

To quote Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature Emeritus, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, A. A. Long:

"The ethics of Stoicism is parasitical on the physics."

In other words: without the Stoic God there is no coherent Stoic philosophy.

Like it or not, this is technically true.

This course is going to take you through the ins and outs of the peculiar and wholly unique concept of "the Stoic divine."