Pneuma (Stoic) - Pneuma and Cosmology

Pneuma and Cosmology

In Stoic cosmology, everything that exists depends on two first principles which can be neither created nor destroyed: matter, which is passive and inert, and the logos, or divine reason, which is active and organizing. The 3rd-century B.C. Stoic Chrysippus regarded pneuma as the vehicle of logos in structuring matter, both in animals and in the physical world. Pneuma in its purest form can thus be difficult to distinguish from logos or the "constructive fire" (pur technikon) that drives the cyclical generation and destruction of the Stoic cosmos. When a cycle reaches its end in conflagration (ekpyrôsis), the cosmos becomes pure pneuma from which it regenerates itself.

The Stoics conceived of the cosmos as a whole and single entity, a living thing with a soul of its own, a spherical continuum of matter held together by the orderly power of Zeus through the causality of the pneuma that pervades it. This divine pneuma that is the soul of the cosmos supplies the pneuma in its varying grades for everything in the world.