Cleanthes of Assos · Philosophy
Cleanthes wrote the one long text to survive whole from the early Stoa, the <em>Hymn to Zeus</em> - a poem that is also a physics, praising the <em>logos</em> that steers all things by law, casting the wicked as those who flee the common law, and weaving even evil into providence’s single harmony.
When Zeno of Citium died, the school he had founded in the Painted Porch - the Stoa that gave Stoicism its name - passed to his most devoted pupil, Cleanthes of Assos, a former boxer who had carried water by night to pay for philosophy by day. Cleanthes led the Stoa for some thirty years, and though nearly all his many books are lost, one work survives almost whole: the Hymn to Zeus, about forty lines of verse that form the longest continuous text to come down to us from the early Stoa. It is an extraordinary document, because it is two things at once. It is a genuine religious hymn, addressed to Zeus in the language of worship. And it is a compressed statement of Stoic cosmology, for the ‘Zeus’ Cleanthes praises is not the philandering thunder-god of Homer but the rational principle - the logos - that pervades the universe and steers all things by law. To read the Hymn is to watch a philosopher pray to Reason itself.
The governing thought of the Hymn is that a single rational power orders the whole of things, and that this order is a law binding on all. Nothing anywhere - on earth, in the heavens, or on the sea - comes to pass apart from Zeus, Cleanthes says, with one telling exception: the deeds that the wicked do ‘through lack of wisdom.’ Even so, the divine Reason is so masterful that it can take the crooked and make it straight, bring order out of disorder, and fit together what is loved and unloved into one. Good and ill alike are conjoined into a single whole, so that out of the entire fabric of the world there issues one everlasting Reason. The universe, for Cleanthes, is not a heap of accidents but a lawful composition, and the law is the very mind of God running through it.
The Hymn does not end in doctrine but in prayer. Cleanthes asks Zeus, the giver of all, to deliver human beings from their ‘baleful ignorance,’ to scatter it from their souls, and to grant them the wisdom by which Zeus himself governs all things. And he states the goal of that wisdom: that human beings, being honoured with understanding, may honour Zeus in return by singing his works unceasingly - since there is no greater office for a mortal, or even for a god, than rightly to praise the universal law. This is a remarkable claim. The highest human activity is not conquest or pleasure but the grateful contemplation and praise of the rational order. For Cleanthes, philosophy at its summit becomes doxology: to understand the cosmos truly is to find it worthy of song.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Cleanthes’s Hymn to Zeus is the longest surviving text of the early Stoa, that its ‘Zeus’ is the cosmic logos ruling all by law, that the wicked are those who flee the common law through ignorance, and that evil is taken up into a single everlasting Reason. Explain these ideas in your own words.
Leads to The Psalmist.
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