What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgements on
events...Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish;
but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a
tranquil flow of life. Men are not worried by things, but by their ideas
about things. When we meet difficulties, become anxious or troubled, let
us not blame others, but rather ourselves, that is: our idea about things
... Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are
up to us, our impulses, desires, aversions, in-short whatever is our
doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor our possessions, our reputations,
or our public offices, or that is, whatever is not of our own doing.
--Epictetus

-----------------------------------

Stoicism teaches self-control and detachment from distracting emotions,
sometimes interpreted as an indifference to pleasure or pain. Stoics
believe that this allows one to be a clear thinker, level-headed and
unbiased. In practice, Stoicism is intended to imbue an individual with
virtue, wisdom, and integrity of character. Students are encouraged to be
altruistic as well as psychologically independent from society, regarding
it as an unruly and often unreasonable entity while encouraging active
engagement in improving society.

Virtue, reason, and natural law are prime directives. By mastering
passions and emotions, stoics believe it is possible to overcome the
discord of the outside world and find peace within oneself. Stoicism holds
that passion distorts truth, and that the pursuit of truth is virtuous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

The Stoics' core message was that human emotions are not passive reactions
but are subject to cognitive control. Thoughts, opinions and
interpretations cause, mediate and shape emotions, which the Stoics saw as
something of an act of judgment and will, and a matter of our own
responsibility. But Stoicism can also become extreme, enabling individuals
to detach themselves to survive or to kill, which sometimes leaves the
doer with lasting trauma.

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The Stoics held that emotions like fear or envy (or impassioned sexual
attachments, or passionate love of anything whatsoever) either were, or
arose from, false judgements and that the sage--a person who had attained
moral and intellectual perfection--would not undergo them.

The later Stoics of Roman Imperial times, Seneca and Epictetus, emphasise
the doctrines (already central to the early Stoics' teachings) that the
sage is utterly immune to misfortune and that virtue is sufficient for
happiness.

Our phrase 'stoic calm' perhaps encapsulates the general drift of these
claims.

When considering the doctrines of the Stoics, it is important to remember
that they think of philosophy not as an interesting pastime or even a
particular body of knowledge, but as a way of life. They define philosophy
as a kind of practice or exercise in the expertise concerning what is
beneficial. Once we come to know what we and the world around us are
really like, and especially the nature of value, we will be utterly
transformed.

In the Sophist Plato asks for a mark or indication of what is real or what
has being. One answer which is mooted is that the capacity to act or be
acted upon is the distinctive mark of real existence or 'that which is.'
The Stoics accept this criterion and add the rider that only bodies can
act or be acted upon. Thus, only bodies exist.

However, they allow that there are other ways of being part of nature than
by virtue of existing. Incorporeal things like time, place or sayables
(lekta, see below) are 'subsistent' (huphestos, Galen 27G)--as are
imaginary things like centaurs. Moreover, all existent things are
particular. The Stoics call universals 'figments of the mind' and seem to
offer a conceptualist treatment akin to Locke's, treating an apparent
predication like "man is a rational, mortal animal" as the disguised
conditional, "if something is a man, then it is a rational mortal animal"
(Sextus Empiricus, 30I).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/

Later Stoics believed that the universe was created by fire and would be
destroyed by fire, before being created again. The goal of Stoicism was to
bring the human mind into agreement with the Logos, the impersonal force
of reason who formed the universe and to recognise that the Logos did so
for mankind's benefit, regardless of personal circumstance.[5] The Logos
might be described by a Stoic as "the soul of the universe" while the
physical world was the universe's body. While some claim that this is not
true pantheism,[6] it has to be noted that Stoics believed that everything
was material, even god.

http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/stoics.php

The Stoic philosophy appeared in a time when people were looking not to
the years ahead but to the past for their ideals, expecting little of the
future but more weariness and futility. Slavery was the evil social
foundation undergirding the whole magnificent Greek civilization. The
common people suffered terrible poverty, the economic system was faced
with hopeless problems, political life was apparently beyond rescue. It
was a tired age, lived amid some of the most splendid architecture the
world had seen, but the inherited magnificence had no relationship to the
human conditions which prevailed. These were among the seedbeds of
Christianity with its otherworldly hope of civilization, and the matrix of
antiquity's noblest secular philosophy, Stoicism.

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/med/me-sams.htm

Stoicism's influence on Christianity

Although Stoicism was considered by many early Fathers of the Church to be
a part of the philosophical decline of the ancient world, many of its
elements were held in high esteem, in particular, the natural law, which
is a major part of the Roman Catholic and early American doctrines of
secular public morality. The central Stoic idea of logos influenced
Christian thought (see John 1). The Stoic definition of virtue as the
conformance of the will to the rational order of the world has parallels
with traditional Christian morality. The Stoic cosmopolitanism influenced
Augustine of Hippo's concept of the City of God. Stoicism influenced the
Christian Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, a book which promotes
Christian morality via secular philosophy; this book was highly
influential in the Middle Ages.

The appeal of Stoicism to Christianity may be due to the fact that
Stoicism is largely based on Semitic and not Greek philosophy, and so
perhaps there is a more natural compatibility with the Jewish roots of
Christianity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

Justin Martyr carefully noted the natural affinities between the emerging
Christian theology and the traditions of thought deriving from Plato, and
Origen explicitly endeavored to combine the two in a single system. This
path of development continued for centuries, reaching its peak in Gregory
of Nyssa and Ambrose, who was the teacher of Augustine.

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2w.htm

Eastern Philosophy Conquers Rome

We have seen that the new Romans brought with them eastern religions
which, to the early Latins would have been repugnant to their nature. But,
there was a race change in Italy. The new race was mainly of easterners
who felt right at home in the old Babylonian Sun-cults and mystery
religions. It is hardly any wonder that Rome went over to Babylonianism.
As Dr. Frank says:

"The Mystery cults permeated the city, Italy and the western provinces
only to such an extent as the city, Italy and the provinces were permeated
by the stock that had created those religions."

Frank, "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," p.707

Understanding that these new Romans readily accepted those beliefs which
appealed to their temperaments, it will pay us to review the philosophies
which those eastern Romans accepted. The origin of the later Roman
philosophies were directly from the east. They were mainly from Syria.
Indeed, the one philosophical belief which gained practically universal
approval and acceptance by Roman society in the first and second centuries
was the Stoic philosophy.

Stoicism is one of the most interesting philosophies that ever came out of
the east. It has been compared as the most "Christian" of all
philosophies. Many books have been written endeavoring to show the
remarkable parallels between Stoicism and Christianity (especially Roman
Catholicism). There is some definite agreement between Catholicism and
this philosophy. The philosophy taught the universal brotherhood of man,
the doing away with national barriers, the encouragement of intermarriage
and having one law over all. They called the ideal state as one governed
by a central city, the city of God. When the Roman Empire came along, the
Stoic philosophers saw in the Empire the ideal physical state if it were
only administered humanely and for the public benefit. Because of this,
and other reasons, the Stoic philosophy was taught in profusion over the
Empire, and nowhere was it accepted more, and with a type of religious
crusading spirit, than in Italy.

In the first and second centuries, Platonic teachings in their primitive
state were not as popular as they had been. The system of Aristotle was
not altogether accepted because his teaching was not universal enough.
Epicureanism, the only possible rival of Stoicism, was too selfish,
anti-religious and not conducive to universal brotherhood. Only one
philosophy suited the Roman temperament in the early Empire - that was
Stoicism. It was the one philosophy that did not, in one way or another,
repudiate the pagan gods. It agreed that they should definitely be
retained for man, for his happiness and man's need for religion.

The Stoic philosophers encouraged to a great degree the teachings of
paganism. The religion that the later Stoics promoted was generally the
Roman variety because their utopian city of world rule was Rome. Only by
acknowledging Rome could they hope to achieve their universal state. And
they gained their world-state to a remarkable degree through the Empire.
It is little wonder why most of the noble Romans accepted the doctrines of
Stoicism and not the other philosophies. No philosophy suited the
temperaments of the later Romans more than this one of eastern
origination.

Stoicism was the Babylonian reaction to Greek philosophy. Stoicism was the
philosophy designed for the eastern peoples who were mainly of Semitic
stock (though there were some Persian mixtures). It was the philosophy
designed to maintain Chaldeanism in an age which looked like Greek secular
philosophy might take the place of religion. Thus, Stoic philosophy was
invented to retain Chaldeanism amongst the intellectuals, and it succeeded
remarkably. The whole Roman world virtually succumbed to it.

Stoicism, thus, was the philosophy of easterners who became the later
Romans. The wide spread acceptance of this normally alien philosophy is a
strong indication that the Romans who grasped onto it were also the people
who invented it. As the Syro-Phoenicians and Samaritans progressively
migrated westward into Rome and Italy, they simply carried their religious
and philosophical beliefs with them. And because those beliefs proved to
be far superior to what the people in the west had formerly believed about
the old Republican gods and goddesses of Rome, they promoted these eastern
deities to the highest pantheon within the Roman Empire of the third and
fourth centuries. These were the pagan religions that Constantine and his
successors were imbued with at the time they began to see in Christianity
the vehicle with which to preserve and to transform Rome into a new and
dynamic state. And they were successful.

Indeed, there was nothing inferior about these eastern religions and
philosophical beliefs nor the people who brought them to the west. They
were the very teachings that Constantine and his followers adopted. True,
they changed their names and the doctrines which they advocated into names
that were derived from the New Testament. In effect, the later emperors
retained pagan idolatrous worship which had come from ancient Babylon and
began to call it the religion of Christianity. Constantine struck coins in
honor of Helios the Sun-god long after he claimed to be a Christian. These
idolatrous teachings and practices, however, were as different as daylight
and dark from those taught by Jesus and his apostles. Of this there can be
no doubt.

The primary person who was responsible for establishing the syncretic
development of mixing paganism into Christianity, so the New Testament and
the early Christian scholars inform us, was Simon Magus. It took about 300
years for the syncretic principles of Simon Magus to make an impact on
orthodox Christianity. But with Constantine the Great, the seeds of the
syncretism fell on fertile ground. From then on, idolatry and pagan
doctrines and customs began to enter mainline Christianity.

An observer during the time of Constantine was the great Christian
historian Eusebius. He mentioned that Simon Magus was indeed the
originator of all heresy in the Christian community and that even in his
day there were people who were feigning Christianity but at the same time
were bringing into vogue the use of idolatrous images.

Mainline Christians did hold out against the philosophies of Simon Magus
until the time of Constantine. But the 50 years after Constantine saw the
doors open wide for the blending of pagan doctrines, customs, images,
pictures, etc. with the mainstream teachings of the visible Christian
Church. And we have been saddled with them ever since.

http://askelm.com/people/peo019.htm

Over the course of human history every society, even the most culturally
isolated of civilizations, has developed some form of faith-system for
interpreting and understanding the spiritual and material worlds.
Thousands of such systems have existed over the centuries, and as tribes
and cultures expanded, these faith-systems inevitably met each other
face-to-face and clashed. Two thousand years ago there was a particularly
important collision; one between the Roman stoic and the gentile
Christian. At this time in Western civilization, Christianity was just
planting its seeds and beginning to grow, whereas stoicism was already
legitimate in its foundation and strong in its following (Stavrianos 100).
One might wonder how Christianity ultimately replaced stoicism as the ...

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Via Romana
http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/index.html

The Rebirth of Stoicism
http://puffin.creighton.edu/phil/Stephens/rebirth_of_stoicism.htm

http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/stoicism.htm
http://ecole.evansville.edu/articles/stoicism.html
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Stoic.htm
http://zork.cs.uvic.ca/quotes/stoics_encyclopedia.html
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/stoic10.txt
http://www2.selu.edu/Academics/Depts/WritingCenter/miller.html
http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y67s10a.html