Is Stoicism a religion?

Philosophy, with a theology inside it

“Religion” has no single agreed definition, so the clearest way to answer is to compare. Here is what ancient Stoicism had and didn’t have.

The last row is why a plain “no” needs a footnote. The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and their physics, the study of nature, was also a theology: the force that shapes and orders the world was god (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). They defended that view with arguments, the way they defended everything else.

Stoic writers could also disagree with the founders and say so. Seneca, for one, declares that he follows no single Stoic authority and keeps the right to judge for himself (On the Happy Life 3, in our words). Stoicism had firm doctrines, but they stood or fell by argument. For the wider picture of what the Stoics taught, see What is Stoicism?

What the Stoics meant by God

The Stoic god was not a person standing outside the world. It was the world’s own active principle: reason (logos), or a designing fire and breath (pneuma), running through all matter and shaping it according to a plan. The Stoics held that this god is a body, present everywhere, and that the whole cosmos is a single living thing, with god related to it roughly as a creature’s life is related to its body (SEP (opens in a new tab)). They called it Zeus, nature, reason or providence, and like most Greeks and Romans they also spoke of “the gods” in the plural.

Marcus Aurelius kept this picture in front of him as an exercise:

The spinning thread and the web at the end are images for the way causes are woven together, and they recall the old picture of the Fates spinning each life’s thread. In another entry Marcus lists what the one world contains:

The Greek word behind “common reason” is logos, the word people mean when they speak of the Logos in Stoicism. The reason that orders the world is present, as a share, in every human mind. That is why Stoic theology was never only about the sky. It grounds the ethics: if every person has a portion of the same reason, every person is kin, and living according to nature means living by reason alongside other people (see the Stoic principles). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls this view an ancient form of pantheism (opens in a new tab), since god and the world are not separate.

The Stoics also prayed. Cleanthes, who led the school after its founder Zeno, wrote a hymn to Zeus (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). The Enchiridion, the handbook of Epictetus’s teaching compiled by his student Arrian, ends with verses to keep ready to hand, and the first lines are Cleanthes’ prayer:

Long’s English leaves the poet unnamed. Seneca names him: near the end of Letter 107 he gives a Latin rendering of these verses and credits them to Cleanthes. The last maxim joins two sayings of Socrates from Plato’s Crito and Apology.

Read as a prayer, the first lines ask to be led. Read as philosophy, they make an argument: events will go where they go, and the only choice is whether you go willingly. Refuse, and in the poem’s words, “I make myself a wretch, and still must follow” (Enchiridion 53).

Fate and providence

Fate, for the Stoics, was not a script written by unpredictable gods. It was the unbroken chain of causes in which every event follows from earlier ones, and they identified that chain with the reason of Zeus working itself out (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Providence is the same order seen from another side: the conviction that it is rational and good, arranged for the sake of the whole.

Ancient critics raised the obvious objection, known as the lazy argument: if your recovery is fated, why call the doctor? Chrysippus, the school’s third head, answered that some events are fated together. The recovery is fated along with the call, so the call is not pointless. Fate, on this view, includes what you do. Cicero reports the exchange in his treatise On Fate.

Seneca took up the harder question in his essay On Providence: if providence rules the world, why do good people suffer? His reply, in our words, is that a god deals with good people as a strict father deals with his children, testing and toughening them instead of spoiling them (On Providence 1–2).

For Epictetus, belief in providence came with a task:

Two things in this passage bear on the question of this page. First, piety for Epictetus is mostly a matter of judgment. You will blame the gods whenever you count things outside your power as good or bad, so right belief about the gods comes down to placing good and evil “only in those things which are in our power” (Enchiridion 31). That is the line Epictetus draws in the book’s first sentence, an idea now known by the modern name dichotomy of control.

Second, the last sentence takes ordinary worship for granted. Epictetus expects his students to keep making offerings “according to the custom of our fathers,” as their neighbors did. Stoicism was not a rival religion. It was a philosophy held by people who also kept the religion of their city.

Wanting events to happen as they actually happen, rather than as you wish, is the attitude Epictetus asks for in Enchiridion 8. Later readers call it amor fati, “love of fate,” which is Nietzsche’s phrase, not a Stoic one.

Marcus Aurelius’s hedge

Marcus believed in the gods. To those who ask where he has seen the gods, he answers that they can be seen even with the eyes, that he has never seen his own soul either yet honors it, and that he knows the gods exist because he keeps meeting their power, so he reveres them (Meditations 12.28, in our words). Still, when he wrote about how to live, he often set the question of the gods out as a fork in the road and walked down each branch to see where it led. Here is the clearest example:

Read it like a lawyer’s brief. Suppose the gods look after each person: then his share was decided with care. Suppose they look after only the order of the whole: then his share follows from that general arrangement, and he ought to accept it. Suppose, finally, that they attend to nothing, a view he calls wicked and argues from anyway. Even on that last branch, one thing is left standing: “I am able to determine about myself” (Meditations 6.44). Whatever the heavens are doing, a creature that reasons and lives among others still has work in front of it.

The fork comes back in other entries, with chance as the rival. In 4.3 and 9.39 the options are providence or atoms. In 12.14 there are three: a fixed necessity, a kind providence that can be won over, or a tempest with no one at the helm, in which you still have your own mind to steer by. Entry 9.28 shrinks the method to one line, which in our words says: if a god is in charge, all is well, and if chance is in charge, don’t let chance be in charge of you. The gods mattered to Marcus, but the instructions he wrote himself still apply on every branch.

Practicing Stoicism without the theology

Most of what people practice under the name of Stoicism carries over with no belief about god at all:

• The sort. Some things are up to you, such as your judgments and choices, and others are not, such as your body, your property and your reputation (Enchiridion 1). You can test that against any morning of your life.
• Judgments. What disturbs you is not the event itself but your opinion about it (Enchiridion 5).
• The four virtues. Wisdom, courage, justice and temperance as the measure of a good day.
• The review. Seneca’s look back over each day before sleep (On Anger 3.36), which the Evening Examination turns into five questions.

What changes is the ground under acceptance. A Stoic who believed in providence could take a loss as part of a good whole, something to “accept with pleasure,” in Marcus’s words. Without providence, the reason is plainer: what has happened has happened, and resentment spends effort on the one thing no effort can reach. Marcus’s third branch points the same way. Whatever the gods do or don’t do, what you do next is still yours to decide, and that is enough to practice on.

Take two people let go in the same round of layoffs. One prays that night and the other doesn’t. The next morning both can do the same work: list what is no longer up to them (the decision, the timing, what former colleagues think), list what is (a call to an old manager, an updated résumé, how they talk about it at dinner), and choose one thing to do before noon. The texts fit inside the first person’s faith and stand on their own for the second.

Stoicism for religious readers

Readers who pray will find a good deal that is familiar, such as giving thanks (Marcus closes Book 1 by thanking the gods for his family and teachers), accepting what can’t be changed and keeping close watch on one’s own conduct, though the Stoic god is a reason inside the world that is itself a body, not a creator who stands apart from it. Christian writers borrowed from the Stoics early and argued with them too, and Stoicism and Christianity covers where the two traditions agree and where they part.