The cosmos is a single rational animal, and you are a part of it.
Providence is not a plan made for you; it is the fact that the whole is ordered. Living well means agreeing with how it is already going.
Stoic physics is pantheist and materialist at once: there is one substance, it is alive, and reason is its organising tension rather than something added to it. From that follows the doctrine of fate — everything is caused, including your assent — and the claim that virtue is agreement with the way things are going. Marked as held by most rather than shared because the later Roman Stoics get thinner about it: Marcus repeatedly writes "gods or atoms" and concludes that either way the ethical instruction is the same. That hedge is the crack the modern movement widened.
This is why Zeno was the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end "life in agreement with nature".
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VII.87, R. D. Hicks translationThe formula the whole system hangs on, and the one the modern revival argues about.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.