God, the Jews, and Us — Laurent Guyénot

….Most educated Romans were eclectic in their philosophical opinions, but the most influential school was Stoicism. It had the favor of Cicero at the end of the Republic, and of Marcus Aurelius at the zenith of the Empire. That Stoics professed a form of monotheism is beyond discussion. In a famous Hymn to Zeus, Stoic philosopher Cleanthes (third century BC) called God “Nature’s great Sovereign, ruling all by law,” to whom men must turn their minds in order to live “the noble life, the only true wealth.” Cleanthes prayed that people who do evil by ignorance can be enlightened: “Scatter, O Father, the darkness from their souls.”

It is said that Stoics confused God with the Cosmos or with Nature, and for that they have been labelled in modern times as “pantheists”. But we must be careful with Greek words and their translations: Kosmos means “order”, implying an “Intelligent Design”, and Nature (Phusis) has a dynamic meaning: it is the animating principle within Nature.

Greeks and Romans, however, did not pretend to know God, even less what God wants, what God says, or what God likes. Such anthropomorphism was acceptable for gods, not for God. God is, for the philosopher, the unknowable, or at least the unspeakable, since saying anything about God was putting a limitation on the infinite. This, we may call philosophical humility, which contrasts with theological arrogance.

But if God is unknowable, the laws by which He rules the Cosmos are partly accessible to human science. These laws constitute a sort of intermediate principle, the creative thought or wisdom of God, called Logos in Platonic tradition, sometimes identified as the feminine Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The fact that the universe is ruled by natural laws is proof of the existence of God, according to Cicero (Of the nature of gods II.12.34):

For when we gaze upward to the sky and contemplate the heavenly bodies, what can be so obvious and so manifest as that there must exist some power possessing transcendent intelligence by whom these things are ruled?

…We must remember that the struggle between Rome and Jerusalem is a central dialectical force in ancient history. This reality has been largely underestimated in Western historiography, heir to a Christian civilization whose vocation was to reconcile Rome and Jerusalem.

link