THE HYMN OF CLEANTHES
NOTE ON CLEANTHES AND THE STOICS.
Cleanthes, the Stoic philosopher, was born at Assos, in the Troad, about the year 331 B.C. and died at an advanced age in 232 B.C. The successor to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, he was president of the Stoa for over thirty years and was himself succeeded by Chrysippus. He was evidently a man of profound earnestness and masterful energy, combining strong intellectual convictions with deep religious feeling.
Like all the great teachers of his school, he must be reckoned as a pantheist, though (as Taylor notes, Ancient Ideals, i. 376) Stoic emotions about the divine are diverse, often vague, springing from a deep-seated reverence for all-ruling “law” (call it what we will—Destiny, Nature, Zeus, Providence, or the Universal Reason). In Stoicism, though in some respects Cleanthes revolutionized the study of physics, which he regarded as giving the surest rule for human conduct generally, the main interest of the creed lies in its moral postulates. Physics is to be regarded as the scaffolding of ethics.
Among the great prophets of ancient Israel religion became at once “universal and individual, centred in the inner life of the subject” (Caird, Evolution of Religion, ii. 119); and a not dissimilar process of development may be traced in the philosophy of Stoicism. From the first it was a religious philosophy, and it is here that it makes its supreme appeal.
Stoicism, as Grant has shown (Ethics of Aristotle), was
