Peter Jones

Stoicism at the doctor’s

issue 09 February 2013

It has been proposed that, to deal with certain sorts of emotional problems for which we go to the doctor, we should be given an improving book to read. Quite right too, the Stoic would reply.

‘Stoicism’ derives from the Greek stoa, the portico in Athens where from 300 BC its inventor Zeno (a Cypriot) taught it. Its main principle is caught in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ with its ‘motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things’. The argument was based on the idea that (i) in a sense the universe was God, and God was the universe, (ii) the divine element in the world was reason (logos), and (iii) the whole material world was permeated by logos — ‘like honey through a honeycomb’ — including our souls, the divine in us.

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