Should Christians Be Stoics? (Part 1)

1. A Survey of Greco-Roman Stoics

One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, by C. Kavin Rowe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

An offhand comment by Scot McKnight sent me looking for this book, and I ended up buying it, and then reading it because I’d bought it, even though it was rather formidable. (It seemed foolish to buy something I wouldn’t read, or have time to read; but if I applied that principle to my library, it would be much smaller!) I also was attracted to the book because I’d read one of Prof. Rowe’s previous works, World Upside Down, which was an accessible survey of the way that Paul and other Christians were received by local cultures and the Roman Empire as recorded by Luke in Acts of the Apostles. I highly recommend World Upside Down; it’s affected my thinking in significant ways.

World Upside Down made the point that, when Christianity came to the Greco-Roman world, it was a huge surprise, not because of the truth of the religious movement as such but because it called into question other religious traditions (whether local or imperial religions), commerce, and whatnot else. Christianity was a threat. “Businessmen discerned the danger to their livelihood, politicians found themselves in a pickle, local religious authorities saw their celebrations stop” (Rowe, in preface to this book). In short, Christianity was not seen as simply one choice among many.

In One True Life, Rowe says he intends to take on the thought world of the elite in Roman civilization, whereas in World Upside Down he was noting the practical difficulties created by the incursion of Christianity. To do this, he surveys 3 “thought leaders” of the Roman world: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (who, in addition to being a Roman emperor of the second century A.D., was also trained as a philosopher). He then compares their writings with those of St. Paul, St. Luke (Acts), and St. Justin Martyr (2 primary persons from the New Testament, and then, a prominent second-century Christian).

Now, despite the fact that my undergraduate minor was in philosophy, I found the first three chapters, especially, to be somewhat difficult slogging. Rowe’s concern is that we be aware that the choices we make about the path, or paths, we take in life have large implications. And his target in part is that modern “comparative religion” engagement typically attempts to find points of similarity among the religions. This, he says, reduces our anxiety about having chosen an unworthy path: if all paths are similar in key points, our worry about having chosen incorrectly can be assuaged or negated.

Seneca

“Death,” said Seneca, is the greatest dread humans have. It motivates us, and we organize our lives in ways to avoid it. Therefore, the most important therapy a person can choose is to face his or her death, daily; in fact, we lose a little of our life every day. For Seneca, then, failure to face one’s death is to succumb to things in life that are less consequential: we will spend inordinate energy to avoid what we fear. On the contrary, if we face death, our greatest fear, somehow releases us to a better life. He makes 4 primary points: (1) we don’t know when we’re going to die; (2) given this fact, there’s really nothing to dread; (3) death destroys all human pretension (Jackson Browne, who, I doubt, has read Seneca: “death is there to keep us honest”), and this is freeing; and (4) we can’t change anything after we die, so we really can’t end up evaluating our prior choices once we’re dead (so: “get over your anxiety about trying to avoid death,” as it were).

Once we’ve faced our mortality, then, we are free to choose virtue, in the present (since we cannot affect the future). The only wall we humans can create that cannot be breached is the internal wall of a “soul shaped by virtue” (p. 25). Virtue comes from the life of a person who has given up on avoiding death; virtue is shaped by the person’s philosophy, in the sense that the person’s inner life has come to terms with, and been shaped by, the very nature of the world. (This is the core of stoicism: what is is and cannot be altered by us.)

Rowe’s summary of Seneca:

“Seneca insists that philosophy is not a discrete subject, something to be learned in a university alongside other matters of human knowledge and concern, but is instead a redemptive mode of being. It rescues us from the inevitable perils that accompany life on all sides and press us from without. It treats the diseased soul and the cancers that plague us from within. It shapes us mentally and physically by practices that develop the existential pattern that heals. Philosophy, in short, is the wise way of life that enables us to die daily, build and fortify the inner fortress against Fortuna [the goddess of ‘luck’] to become aligned with God and Nature, and to control the passions—and therefore to walk the only path that grants happiness in the world in which we find ourselves.”

Epictetus

Unlike Seneca, who was born into the upper classes of the time, Epictetus was probably born a slave and lived most of his life as such (albeit, in the end, an educated, and in some ways “upper class,” slave). He believed that the correct view of God is comprised of several important judgments (p. 47): God exists; God has forethought; and this forethought includes both important “heavenly” matters but also earthly and human concerns; and this forethought is related to human beings on an individual basis.

Given this basis, core to Epictetus’s thinking was the notion that “some things are under [human] control, and some things are not” (p. 49). The goal of any human, then, is to sort out which is which: what can we control, and what can we not? Obviously, spending energy on what we cannot control is foolishness. To distinguish the two we must know the true nature of everything that we encounter. A death due to illness is (typically) not something we can control, so we can sort it into the “not under my control” stack. But health, on the other hand is obstinately difficult to sort out: we only need to consider the plethora of modern advice about what is healthy. Eat this; don’t eat that! Drink this, but not that!

What fouls up the thinking of a person who works hard at distinguishing the two sorts of items (controllable; not controllable) is her passions, emotions. Emotions cloud our judgment. Empathy, therefore, should be rejected, since to empathize with another’s feelings brings the other person’s emotions into our own thinking, causing confusion, clouding our own judgment about the truth of a thing or an event. The only road to freedom is to construct an inner, impenetrable fortress that cannot be swayed by the emotions. To construct that fortress requires true knowledge of the nature of things and events: is it something I can control? If so, what does Nature teach us about the way we should live in view of that? But don’t dwell on what you cannot control; doing so will lead to unhappiness and a skewing of your choices in regard to what is good.

Marcus Aurelius

In the last decade or so, there’s been a great resurgence of interest in the writings of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman Empire in the third quarter of the second century A.D. Someone (I don’t remember who it was) remarked on Twitter in the past several months that he had gone into a bookstore in Los Angeles and, in the “philosophy” section about 90% of the books were translations of Marcus Aurelius. This seems to reflect a modern interest in Stoicism as an approach to life, as represented in the writings of Marcus Aurelius especially.

Death according to Marcus is a regular part of life, as regular as summer and winter (things we can observe in nature), and, therefore we “should await death as one of the works of nature” (p. 69). It should not be feared. Instead, we should focus on the here and now, the present. It’s all that matters. What then is God? For Marcus, the word “refers both to nature/the cosmos and to the reason that directs it. This reason is also present within human beings and constitutes their divinity” (p. 73). Comment: for me (JEE), this is close to a kind of panentheism that seems pretty common in some modern thought: the universe is shot through with divinity and so are we humans: it’s all of a piece.

How then to live? What’s most important for Marcus are right judgments. And this, as for Epictetus, requires correct sorting of everything, of our experience, our impressions of things, people, events. If we sort badly, existential instability is created, and on the surface, at least, this is unhappiness. When you are injured (hit your finger with your hammer, for instance), “let the part that makes judgments about these things rest at peace” (p. 75). How? Why? Because you have the power to restrict the reach of physical pain to your body; your “fortressed” mind can be at peace. In this sense, reason is supreme; rationality rules. Doing so results in a better society, because, for instance, we will discover that “injustice toward our fellows is an impious offense against Nature herself” (p. 81). Furthermore, it is “human nature to care for all humans” (ibid.). Failure, therefore, for human beings is simple failure of training one’s reason to lead one to personal conduct worthy of humanity.

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In the next post on this Rowe’s book, I’ll move on to St. Paul, St. Luke, and St. Justin Martyr, and (probably) Rowe’s conclusions (which had me quite enthusiastic! although it’s possible I’ll hold off on the conclusions for a third post).

For now, I welcome any reaction to these summaries of 3 ancients. It’s worth noting that Marcus Aurelius famously said that “no one will remember you after you’re dead, so don’t worry about death” (a paraphrase). He’s actually been very well remembered, and not just by philosophy majors. The Stoics are reflected in a fair amount of contemporary Western and Christian thought. What’s your reaction?