Religion and Philosophy

...[Oriental] religions to a state of being tolerable original Latin: tolerari posse, a rational proof original: Nachweis addressed to the intellect, demonstrating that folk belief and the scientific knowledge of the educated do not need to be at odds. Since a reinterpretation of the deities into natural forces or abstract concepts had already begun within the great Oriental religions—which were guarded by an established class of priests—the Stoic school original: Stoa. A school of Hellenistic philosophy that taught that virtue is based on knowledge and living in harmony with divine Reason. provided, above all, the vocabulary for the Hellenistic transformations of those religions and, in a sense, created a religious common language original Greek: koinē (κοινή). Just as Koinē Greek became the standard language of the Mediterranean, this provided a shared conceptual framework for different faiths.. In itself, their apologetics the religious practice of defending one's beliefs through systematic argumentation was as religiously ineffective as most such defenses are, just as the ruler cult remained—at least for the Greeks. In these cults, the new monarchies sought to unify their Greek and Oriental subjects and, similar to the city-state, tried to create a divine representation of the political entity.

However, during the third and second centuries BC, philosophy took on an almost religious significance for the Greek person. Now focused primarily on ethics, it sought to make the individual independent from the blind play of external events and the turmoil of one’s own passions, aiming to give them a firm center within themselves and peace through freedom. To what extent philosophy now gripped even completely non-theoretical natures, and the nobility of soul it cultivated even on its outermost fringes, can be seen in a man of practical life as sober as Polybius c. 200–118 BC; a Greek historian known for his analysis of the rise of the Roman Republic. Likewise, a teacher like Panaetius c. 185–109 BC; a Stoic philosopher who was instrumental in bringing Stoic ethics to the Roman world demonstrates the height of intellectual culture and the ideal of true humanity it could achieve. Religion played no part in this whatsoever. It was only the collapse of his aristocratic ideal of humanity³, which his student, the Syrian Posidonius c. 135–51 BC; a polymath and Stoic who integrated scientific observation with mystical and religious feeling, at least on mo—