In Defense of Christian Stoicism
Christianity did not set Stoicism aside, but added to it. To “the passions,” it added “sin.” We sin because our passions are at war within us.
Stoicism is the practical core of ancient philosophy and of Christian teaching: Control, rather than be controlled, by your passions. Accept what you cannot control. Find happiness, not by changing your circumstances, but by changing your perspective.
Yet both secular and Christian voices have turned on it in their adoption of a modern, romantic philosophy of life against a classical philosophical one. (See The School of Life’s incredibly helpful summary of the romantic and the classical personalities/philosophies.)
Contemporary progressives oppose Stoicism partly for its recent renaissance among men and particularly on the political right. Jordan Peterson’s message, for example, is essentially Stoicism, as a psychological take on the practical teaching of Christianity.
The magazine Christianity Today recently published an article that appeared to oppose Stoicism in particularly stark terms: “The Stoic Sin: Unbothered and Unloving, Apathy Turns Us Away from What Gives Life,” by Uche Anizor. The online title of the article is also revealing: “Apathy Used to Be a Virtue. But It’s Our Culture’s Hidden Vice.” CT has awarded Anizor their 2022 CT Book Award, for his book Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care.
Strangely, Anizor’s article is much more careful than CT’s titling of it. Anizor in fact distinguishes “apathy” in the modern sense, from both apatheia and the doctrine of divine impassibility. He finds the best term from the theological and philosophical tradition that captures apathy to be acedia, not to mention “sloth.” See this clarification: “Our apathy is the exact opposite of the apathy our forebears lauded. Ours is loveless; theirs was defined by love. Ours denounces self-discipline; theirs required it.”
Nevertheless, the impression CT gives is of a criticism of Stoicism and a recommendation of a more empathetic and romantic attitude toward the emotional life. It is against that popular impression that I offer my defense of Stoicism.
Let’s begin with Jesus Christ’s endorsement of the content of Stoicism: “Do not be anxious about your life…. Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment…. Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart….” Christ is an opponent of the passions.
We can also mention Stoicism’s anticipation of the Christian ethic. For instance, on today’s college campuses, there are few who embrace from principle an ethic of sobriety and self-control. Before the advent of Christianity in Rome, it was the Stoics who recommended this ethic of self-control and sobriety out of a seriousness about life and reverence for God. To what Stoics already understood of God and morality, Christianity added further knowledge of God and of salvation from human failure to live up to Stoicisim’s demanding ethic that, in large part, reflected the divine law of nature.
Yet in modern times, an ethic of passion and anxiety is much more common than the Stoic-Christian ethic of freedom from passion. Heidegger’s existentialism, for example, made the basis of a philosophy of life care, largely because, without a grounding in a Platonic endorsement of the reality of good, good became a projection of emotion. Contrary to the positivists, Heidegger thought this dimension of existence was, if anything, more real than the merely physical. However, his grounding of the moral dimension of existence in emotion undercut the phenomenological realism to which he aspired.
Christian Romantics want to ground love in emotion, passion, when love is in fact a seeking of the good of another. Sentimentalism is this seeking of sentiment instead of the reality that naturally gives rise to sentiment. Romanticism doesn’t tell us to help the poor; it tells us to feel more passions of concern and that we would be virtuous for doing so.
Stoicism is not a recommendation of apathy, in the modern sense, nor of acedia. Stoicism only makes sense if you understand what is meant by “the passions.” And if you have experienced them.
Apathy is not disregard for what is good and bad, but freedom from passion. The passions are psychic forces that misrepresent to us what is good and bad.
The problem with grief, for example, is not that it represents the death of a child as a tragedy. Of course, it is. The problem with grief is that it reveals that we thought of a person as immortal, or as someone to whose life we had a right; it represents the death of a child as something that could not have been anticipated, that never happens, that is not in the normal course of things. The reality is that we are mortal, and we are only subject to a different set of causes of death at a younger age, not protected against them.
The problem with anger is not that it represents cutting someone off in traffic as wrong; perhaps it is. The problem with anger is that it represents others as doing wrong whether they have or not, as having done so from pure malice and disregard for our existence or that of another, and as having been unprovoked and having no suffering to explain or excuse one’s behavior. What is more, anger represents ourselves as the righteous judge of the universe, entitled to bring down judgment upon the evildoer, with no blood upon our own hands.
None of what anger takes to be the case is true; the reality may be that we have misinterpreted someone’s action, or it may have been an accident. The reality is that no one acts unprovoked; and the more evil someone’s action, the more excuses and explanations there are of why they are blinded to its evil. And finally, the reality is that we are ourselves guilty, and we are not the judge of the universe, but fellow guilt-bearers, in need of mercy.
The passions not only misrepresent the world to us; they cause us to act in ways that are uncalled for. The grieving person may visit the grave or a medium in hopes of communicating with the deceased. The angry person may harm another person unjustly, increasing wrongs. And so on.
Stoicism offers a particular view of our disease and a particular therapy. The disease is subjection to the passions; the therapy is philosophy.
Christianity did not set Stoicism aside, but added to it. To the account of our malady, it added “sin,” without dispensing with “passion.” “Passion” became the source of the temptation to sin. We sin because our passions are at war within us. (And it is not as though “sin” was unknown to the Stoics.) To the account of our therapy, it added salvation in Christ without dispensing with proper teaching and thinking, if not under the name “philosophy.”
Another important clarification is in order: Stoicism does not caution us against all that we today call “emotion.” It did not even caution against all “passions.” Our modern category of “emotion” encompasses all that the Christian tradition included under passions and affections. The Stoics distinguished bad passions from good passions, eupatheia.
People have different perspectives. Some people may be encountering a lot of apathy; they may see that as a major problem. But from another perspective on the world, apathy is far from the world’s problem. People seem controlled by their passions, from outrage to narcissistic forms of empathy. Our views of the world around us are also distorted by the forms of media we consume and the fact that our reception merits the name “consumption.”
Progressives often accuse conservatives of apathy over racial injustice, when conservatives have reason to believe the facts have been seriously misrepresented, and they are not unresponsive to racial injustice but recommend a conservative, rather than a progressive, response to it. Progressives would benefit from a more sympathetic (or if they wish, empathetic) portrayal of conservatives in their media and minds.
Among the passions that progressives and romantics like to recommend, empathy has been shown to lead to violence. A passion that convinces us that we are concerned for someone is not helpful in actually doing them good. It is the same that Seneca argued against anger. Not even the Aristotelian position of moderation is correct.
Stoicism does not deny the tragedies of life. It understands and is affected by them more deeply than the romantics are. As Seneca put it, “Why weep at the parts of life? The whole of life calls for tears.” Our existence is a tragic existence (goatish, as Plato put it). Acceptance of that frees us from passions. The passion of the moment arises from our failing to bake into our view of life the tragic dimension.
Progressives and romantics have not even begun to feel the weight of existence as we should. The idea is that if only we did something, or even felt something, the problem would be put to right. Jesus knew better: “The poor you will always have with you.” The tragic conditions of existence are not problems to be solved. But if they were, they would be insoluble. The right response is less to feel than to pray and to do.
This is a place where romantics, pushing empathy over apathy, and the type of heartless conservatives who certainly exist, agree with one another: Suffering is something that only happens overseas and on the mission field, or to poor, black people. Au contraire, life is suffering. Some of the great Stoics were wealthy, extremely powerful “white” men. (Others were slaves, women, etc.) This is because they recognized that suffering is essential to life, befalls us all, and cannot be remedied by temporal or monetary measures.
Accordingly, both the heartless conservatives (and a great many Christians in the pew) and the romantic progressives think that suffering is a niche issue. We need empathy to feel others’ suffering because we don’t have enough, or any, ourselves. Sympathy is perfectly adequate when people from every tribe, tongue, and nation can recognize each other’s common experiences.
Christianity could use a revival of Stoicism. It might just make us better Christians.
Part 3 of 3
Passions are always a response mechanism to a perception (epistemological/phenomenology) which may operate at a conscious or unconscious level. They do not emerge from nowhere. In “unconscious,” I mean that one has not yet explored the basis of those passions. I do not find people, even supposedly pietistic Christians, to be all that good at understanding the motions of their own psyche, partly because they are dishonest about themselves and the world. Like physiological feelings, the emotive passions serve as a first warning system. They may be wrong. But failing to investigate these intuitions may lead to peril. I was saved from child sexual abuse because of paying heed to those warning intuitions.
Secondly, empathy, despite the plausible reality of provoking greater and deleterious passions, is always better the sympathy. For empathy can provide experiential wisdom and counsel (in that the empathetic has experienced something similar) that the mere sympathetic.
There is obviously much more to say. Perhaps, when I go to full war of Divine Impassibility, I might do it there.
One more thing. Have you seen or read "The Giver?"
Part 2 of 3
There is much in Stoicism to recommend it. Stoicism provides the only philosophical movement, that I know of in history, which have martyrs (Google Stoic Opposition in the First Century CE), upon whose blood of their martyrs, Stoicism came to culturally prevail in the second century CE. Yes, your definition of love is more valid, “love is in fact a seeking of the good of another,” than the sentimentalists.
However, Stoicism had no understanding of genuine grace or even magnanimity, but operated upon dry duty and justice.
Stoicism is unlike Roman Republican mores. For the latter was concerned about the common good and saw relationship between the ethical good and ontological flourishing. Stoicism is particularly atomistic, even egoistic. It attempts to give a reasonable motive to pursue the virtuous and prudent within a society which does not, and thus disadvantages the virtuous and prudent. For that reason, it has lost hope in the relationship between the ethical and the ontological.
It is interesting that, because it supplies such a psychologically arid existence, that Nero, who was mentored by Seneca, and Commodus, the son of philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, reacted in Newtonian fashion (The Third Law of Emotion). I also suspect that through Aurelius’s foolish choice of successor, violating a political principle of the Five Good Emperors, Stoicism was discredited and would decline and give way to Neoplatonism in the third century CE.