But only this aspect of Christian preaching, satisfying the social aspirations of the masses, does not explain the broadest influence of Christianity, those significant rates of its spread in the territory of the Roman Empire in the I-II century. ad. the Reason for this lies in those God-seeking tendencies that were characteristic of Roman society during its deepest crisis. The socio-psychological roots of the God-seeking of this era should be found in the mood of helplessness, abandonment, passing into despair and despair, in blind resignation to fate. The surrounding world seemed to the people of that era mired in Vice and evil, and the ordinary person had nothing to do but to submit, to follow his fate, passively expect and hope for some mystical salvation. In the public consciousness of that time, the idea of fate, fate, the inevitability of what is destined from above, takes the dominant position. This idea received its philosophical expression in late stoicism.

In the interpretation of the Stoics, the world is a single, holistic education. The one world order exists because of the unity and universality of the divine Logos. The divine world Logos is the seed of the world, disintegrating into many seed-Logos. Each seed contains a thought, a rational principle that determines the fate of each part of the whole. Therefore, in its essence, the world Logos is identical with the world destiny, the divine Providence that created the world and governs its existence. “Do you want to call God fate,” asks Seneca and answers, ” you can not be mistaken, because everything depends on him, he is the cause of all causes. If you want to call him Providence, it will be true, because his wisdom directs everything so that there is no disorder in the world, and everything has a reasonable meaning and explanation. Whether you call it nature, you will not sin against the truth, from it everything is born, its breath lives. Call it peace, and you will not be deceived. For he is the whole that you see, the perfection in all its constituent parts, preserving himself by his power.”

Stoicism provided Christianity not only with methodological guidelines for the formation of a worldview, but also with a system of moral values. It is characterized by the preaching of apolitism, disregard for the realities of concrete social life, denial of the value of the subject-body and the opposition of the spiritual body as a higher sphere of vital interests. “I am not so small as to be a slave to my body — I look upon it as nothing but a chain that fetters my freedom,” Seneca writes to his friend and patron Lucilius. “Remember,” Seneca urged, ” nothing but the soul is admirable, and for a great soul there is less of it.”