The Stoic God was material, and therefore knowable to man, who is also a material being. They believed that all things which were knowable to us were of a material nature.
St. Augustine took this idea of becoming close to the divine through knowledge of it, but expressed that this knowledge had always been within us. Through our memory, which is one of the only things we can trust as real, we remember God "You are always the same, and you always know unchangeably the things which are not always the same," (Augustine 137). St. Augustine believed that the were was an immaterial and formless God "You are certainly not our physical shape...Yet you mad humanity in your image and man from head to foot is contained in space," (94).which we had known before our mortal "morbid condition of the mind," (186). He believed that through religious conversion and religious devotion, man could rid himself of his mortal limitations and remember the divine splendor of God. Through ones memory, one attained closeness with the glory of God, "Memory pleasures in distinct particulars and general categories all the perceptions which have penetrated, each by its own rate of entry," (195). St. Augustine gives an example of how simple this idea is, and would be if people just opened themselves up to a relationship with God. His conversion in his garden, as seen in his Confessions, shows how we only need one...
However, Plato believed that this knowledge is remembered through the knowledge of the Forms, or the natural essence of material beings; and not innately born in the minds of all men. The Stoics, although their God was thought to be a material being, believed that this knowledge was innately incorporated in the human soul. This was then believed to be brought out by specific religious experiences in Christianity as seen in the conversion of St. Augustine, who believed that we know God through our memory of him which has been within us from birth and is brought out through recollections of Him. Whatever the methods used, the goal still remains the same; it is the goal of human life to uncover the forgotten pathways to the divine. Man will achieve true reunion with the divine through exploration of the natural world, including his own mind.
Works Cited
St. Augustine, Confessions. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1991.
Plato, the Republic. Penguin Classics. New York. 2005.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Stoicism." 1996. Found on November 14, 2007 at: http://plato.standford.edu/entries/stoicism
