STOICISM. - A philosophical school founded in the Stoa (Porch) of Athens by ZENONE OF CITION around 300 B.C. His successors were Cleante (d. 233-32), author of a famous hymn to Zeus, and CRISSIPPUS OF SOLI (d. c. 206). To this school, known as the Old Stoa, also belonged Aristone of Chio, Eratostene of Cyrene, ZENONE OF TARSUS... The Middle Stoa followed, with Rhodes as its principal center: its most distinguished representatives were Boethus of Sidon (d. 119 B.C.), Panaetius of Rhodes (180-110) and Posidonius of Apamea (135-51), with whom eclectic influences from Plato and Aristotle were blended, and in the latter especially, the religious sense of speculation was accentuated, heralding Neoplatonism (v.).
The work of Panaetius, *Περὶ τοῦ καθήκοντος*, served as a model for Cicero’s *De officiis*. The New Stoa, or Roman Stoa, of which Panaetius was the principal founder and which flourished in the imperial age, included L. A. Seneca (v.), Musonius Rufus and his disciple Epictetus (v.), and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, with whom the original Stoic doctrine lost much of its systematic rigor, indulging in not a few motifs of Platonic dualism. The same philosophical school founded in Rome by Q. Sextius around 40 B.C. may be considered a derivation from Stoicism, even though in it, especially in Sotion of Alexandria, Seneca’s teacher, Pythagorean influences are evident.
The Stoics divided philosophical inquiry into three fundamental parts: logic, physics, and ethics, while recognizing their intrinsic connection and unity (Arnim, op. cit. in bibl., II, 38). In their physical conception, Stoicism, reacting decisively against Platonic and Aristotelian dualism, revived certain fundamental aspects of the philosophy of Heraclitus and constructed a rigorous naturalistic monism (v.). The incorporeal does not exist; only bodies are substances, since only what is material acts and produces effects. Incorporeal are place, time, motion, and everything that can be enunciated (τὸ λεκτόν) of substance. Through a critical revision of Aristotelianism, the Stoics reduced the fundamental determinations of reality, or categories, to four: substance, quality, modality, and relation. Substance or substratum (οὐσία, ὑποκείμενον) is the prime matter of which all things are constituted; essential quality (τὸ ποιόν) is what differentiates substances and is inseparable from them; modality (πῶς ἔχον) is accidental quality (such as sitting) that does not subsist in itself; relation (πρός τί πως ἔχον) exists only in function of another thing (such as right and left). The last two, unlike the first two, are therefore not entities but mere incorporeal “enunciables.”
Two are the original principles of all things: the passive, which is unqualified substance, or matter, and the active (no less corporeal than the other), namely reason (λόγος), which produces individual beings within it and is inseparable from II. God is the λόγος, “industrious and artisan fire” (πῦρ τεχνικόν), which inwardly informs matter; He is spirit (πνεῦμα) that permeates every living being and gives it unity and consistency; He is “like a seed (λόγος σπερματικός) that contains within itself all the reasons of beings that were, that are, and that will be” (Aristotle, in Eusebius, *Praep. ev.*, XV, 816d) and is therefore providence (πρόνοια), necessity (ἀνάγκη), destiny (εἱμαρμένη), and the immanent principle of finality, of cohesion in the mineral world, of vegetative power in plants, of sensibility in animals, and of reason in man. As such, God assumes many names; the gods, that is, the elements and natural phenomena, are born and die, but Zeus, the inextinguishable fire, endures through the mutable vicissitudes of the world. Thus the Stoics interpreted traditional mythology naturalistically.
The cosmos is spherical and therefore finite (though infinite is the space that surrounds it), animate, perfect, blessed, and divine: it is generated from fire and resolves back into fire in a general conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις; Seneca [*Nat. quaest.*, III, 29] considers it of Babylonian origin), to be reborn like the mythical phoenix and repeat the previous cycle exactly (ἀποκατάστασις). The souls of men (of the best only, according to Chrysippus) survive until the ecpyrosis, since the soul too is a corporeal breath innate to man.
Closely connected with these naturalistic principles is Stoic logic, which aims to be a logic of the concrete. Hostile to every form of innatist epistemology, the Stoics saw in sensory experience the beginning of all knowledge: it starts with sensation, which is the impression (τύπωσις) of the object upon the soul, or, as Chrysippus maintained, alteration (ἀλλοίωσις); when sensation ceases, representation (φαντασία) arises; from the repetition of representations, experience is formed, from which intellectual knowledge, or science, derives—an organic connection of concepts. Some concepts then form spontaneously in all men and are therefore called “preconceptions” (προλήψεις) and “common notions” (κοιναι ἔννοιαι); others, however, are the result of reflection and mental operations. Though sensation is a passivity (πάθος), the Stoics, not wishing to reduce knowledge to mere registration of empirical data, highlighted, with the theory of “assent” (συγκατάθεσις), the active aspect of knowledge: there is no “comprehension” (κατάληψις) without assent (v.). Here, however, the solutions are equivocal: now assent conditions comprehension, and in this case the intellectual act is the work of a free intervention of the subject and, as such, is distinct from sense (voluntaristic thesis); now comprehension is the presupposition of assent, inasmuch as sensation is considered already endowed with its own evidence (ἐνάργεια), that is, as “catalectic representation” (φαντασία καταληπτική): an attempt is thus made to unify sense and intellect, or at least to minimize their distinction (intellectualistic thesis). In short, Stoicism, which has full confidence in the value of perception, lacks a critical theory of experience. Consequently, the criterion (v.) of truth was placed now in the “catalectic representation,” now in the “common notions,” now in the “coherence” among representations.
Undoubtedly, once the world was conceived as an organic and living being, inwardly pervaded by the divine unifying Force, knowledge too had to be conceived as “relation” and “accord” between subject (v.) and object (v.). This metaphysical dogma, while conferring upon particular things that unity and connection which seemed compromised by naturalistic presuppositions, led the Stoics also to recognize a very special importance in hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms, to the detriment of apodictic knowledge—not so much to introduce a motif of contingency (which would be antithetical to their determinism) as to adapt more closely the movement of thought to the various and manifold aspects of experience.
In morality—clearly open to the influences of Cynic thought—the Stoic reveals the most vital tendencies and, at the same time, the most critical aspects of the Hellenistic age. Its categorical imperative is perfectly consistent with its metaphysics: “Live according to nature”; natura sequere. And since the world is governed by an unfailing law, namely the divine Logos, man—alone among living beings capable of knowing that law and accepting it consciously—has the duty (τὸ καλόν) to conform to it: “Great is the consolation when one is swept along with the universe” (Seneca, De prov., V, 8). Therefore, to live according to nature is equivalent to “following reason,” to “living consistently” (ὁμολογουμεῖν) (χθι): for the Logos is one and unchanging. Stoic wisdom arises first from this lyrical contemplation of the cosmos experienced in a pantheistic sense, from this sympathetic relationship of the individual with the Whole: the lucid and unmoved knowledge of universal order translates into disinterested actions that know no compromise with the passions.
Now, the passions (which Zeno reduced to four fundamental ones: desire, pleasure, fear, and pain) are not the consequences of an irrational part of the soul, opposed by nature to the good (something that Stoic pantheism cannot admit), but are disordered movements of the soul, produced by false value judgments, by erroneous opinions. Virtue, the only true good, is therefore perfect reason, having reached the highest degree of knowledge: it is thus also “freedom from passion” (ἀπάθεια). All virtues, sharing the same principles and identical end, are merely different names for the same fundamental virtue. And since virtue is one, whoever truly possesses one possesses them all; and whoever possesses a vice possesses them all. There is no middle ground between virtue and vice.
The Stoic exalts the dignity of the sage, who stands free and unperturbed before reality, serenely and heroically enduring the blows of fortune. “Endure and abstain” (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου). For him, all those things—such as health, beauty, wealth, and glory—that are neither vices nor virtues in themselves are indifferent (ἀδιάφορα); even life itself is an ἀδιάφορον, from which the sage may free himself by suicide (ἐξαγωγή) in cases of extreme necessity (Marcus Aurelius, III, 1; Epictetus, Diss., I, 29, 29; Seneca, Ep., 8, 34-36; 70, 6.17).
Yet this ethical rigorism was not always maintained within such narrow limits: the indifferent things were themselves distinguished into “preferable” (προηγμένα), “non-preferable” (ἀποπροηγμένα), and “neutral”; between virtues and vices, suitable actions (πρέποντα) found a place, and even progress in moral life was admitted. Though egocentric and refinedly individualistic, Stoic ethics proclaimed the solidarity of all men; it affirmed a universal natural law that makes every man a citizen of the world; it fought slavery and championed, against the narrowness of nationalisms, the ideal of cosmopolitanism; under the solicitude of its pantheistic monism, it polemicized against polytheistic religions and irrational cults, arguing, on the basis of a consensus gentium, for an original universal religiosity.
In the Roman world, Stoicism spread especially among the educated classes, and amid the general decline of traditional religion, it formed the core of a more intimate and robust ethical spirituality, shedding much of its logical and physical concerns. Its natural-law theory became the ideal foundation for a theory of the Roman Empire understood as universal sovereignty. In this sense, its civilizing work stands alongside that of Christianity, with which it shares an interest in soteriology and a reverence for interiority. Yet the human dignity it extols does not transcend the coordinates of naturalism (v.), nor is it strengthened by the light of operative charity.
In the history of thought, Stoic morality has always been the banner of inner autonomy and self-sufficiency, influencing now the Neoplatonists, now the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza), now the moralists of the 16th–17th centuries (Lipsius, Vossius, Heinsius, Charron), and now Kantian thought. Its juridicalism matures in Grotius into the demands of international law and penetrates Locke’s political thought (v.); its religious naturalism develops the concept of natural religion and insinuates itself even into the Reformation (Zwingli). The rigorous demand for immanent unity inspires all recurring forms of pantheism, as well as any teleologically conceived cosmology; it takes up the Orphic heritage only to reject it in turn in Orphism (Orphic hymns); it nourishes the heroic furors of Bruno and his enthusiastic vision of the One-All; it spreads, curiously mingled with Neoplatonic motifs, in the Romantic climate and revives in the pantheism of Schelling and in the poetry of Goethe and Hölderlin. On the other hand, Stoic logic, as the logic of the particular and the concrete, in its effort to overcome Aristotelian difficulties without ever drifting into the shallows of nominalism (v.), deposits its experimental demands into modern empiricism (v.) (Bacon, Locke, Hume) and positivism (v.), keeping alive, no less than Epicureanism, the insistence on concreteness and the polemic against essences in the name of functional relations.
STOJAN, ANTONÍN CYRIL
Archbishop of Olomouc, b. 22 May 1851 at Beňov in Moravia, d. there 29 September 1923.
From a modest farming family, he studied theology at Olomouc. Ordained priest in 1876, he devoted himself to pastoral care until 1917, when he was named capitular canon. From 1920 he governed the diocese as capitular vicar, and from 1921 as archbishop. A highly organized man, he developed intense religious, cultural, and social activity even on the national level. Through great pilgrimages to the shrines of Hostýn and Velehrad, he renewed the religious life of the masses and, through spiritual retreats, that of intellectuals. From 1897 he was deputy to the Parliament in Vienna and later, from 1920, senator of the Czechoslovak Republic. He promoted the Christian social movement in the spirit of papal encyclicals, founding among other things in 1907 the association of Catholic agrarian youth (Omladina).
He made effective use of his parliamentary mandate in support of charitable, cultural and religious works and institutions. To promote the reunion of dissenters with the Catholic Church, in 1891 he founded the pious union “Apostolát sv. S. Cyrila a Metoděje,” which later spread to several other Slavic countries and from which, in 1910, the publication of a popular monthly periodical took its rise. At the same