Stoicism and Christianity, with a Focus on Boethius - Prof. Thomas Ward

Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Timistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events visit us at TimisticInstitute.org. Tonight we're going to be talking about stoicism and I'm going to try to end with my favorite stoic, who's not really a stoic, St. Boethius. And it might sound odd to put that title in front of his name, but so he is addressed officially in the the crypt in which he's interred at the chapel of, what is it called, St. Peter in the Golden Heaven in Pavia, Italy. It's the church more famous for housing the earthly remains of St. Augustine. But there is Boethius too, Boethius, Severinus Boethius, St. and Martyr. So I venerate him as such. I commend you, I recommend you do the same, but the talk itself won't focus on that aspect of Boethius so much as his philosophical ethics and the role that stoicism plays in that system, but also the way in which Boethius at the end of the day is not a stoic, but that's getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. So I want to start way, way, way, way back. I want us to think about stoicism as a system of ethical thought rooted in historically ancient Greek philosophy. Ancient Greek philosophers, most famous of which of course are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, theorized about natural philosophy and metaphysics and theology, but also ethics. But the way in which they approached ethical topics, I think a little bit different from the way in which we often think about ethics today. Now this is a crowd of students all of whom are required to take an ethics class and at an institution where people like Plato and maybe especially Aristotle are especially revered. So this might be preaching to the choir a little bit, but at least for sort of setting the groundwork, bear with me even if this all sounds extremely familiar to you. The starting point for ethical reflection for Greek philosophers is what is the good life? Not what is right and wrong or what is the foundation of right and wrong or something like that. Those sorts of questions arise, but ethics in the classical tradition has to do with an inquiry into what makes for a good life. And not only Stoics but Aristotle and Plato agree on this much that the virtuous life is the happy life. The virtuous life is the happy life. You can't be a truly happy person in the full sense of the word if you're not virtuous and maybe more importantly or more surprisingly. The virtuous person just is the happy person. All virtuous people are happy, all truly happy people are virtuous. The cultivation of virtue is an effort to bring our appetites, our powers under the control of reason to bring reason to bear on our animal lives. And so providing the conditions for the highest or noblest types of human activities without self-control, the sort of self-control that virtue provides, you are quite limited. In fact, you're not free to do the best things that humans are capable of doing. And for Plato and Aristotle, these highest things are political activities, concrete contributions to one's polis, and even more importantly, contemplating divine things. The Aristotle taught that in addition to virtue, something else was needed for happiness. And we're approaching here a major disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics. So Aristotle thought that if someone was totally virtuous and yet had to endure some horrible misfortune, it would be foolish to call such a person happy. There's a certain amount of luck involved in achieving the ideal of happiness if you are Aristotle or an Aristotelian. And here's the luck. You have to have been blessed by fortune or the gods with what he called external goods, at least to some degree. External goods like good health, a certain amount of wealth, being from a good family, having good looks. This is all there. In the Nic Ethics, we talked about looks maxing at dinner. I was asking, I just heard the term and I was asking what it meant. I think I've learned all I need to learn about that. So Aristotle was not a looks maxer, not at all. But if you are a looks maxer, you would not along with Aristotle here. Yes, even a certain kind of pleasing physical appearance is required for happiness. Why? For Aristotle, it's because so much of the truly happy life has to do with our public conduct, our political activity, our contributions to the city. And so having a certain kind of education, having a good name, being from a good family, being physically whole, not disabled, all of these Aristotle thought of as conditions for exercising political virtues. So it's not as though he thought that these external goods were as important as virtue, not at all. Virtue was the most important thing for Aristotle. But he did think that there were these extrinsic conditions that one must meet if that one must meet if we're going to count him a happy person. Okay, this Aristotelian teaching about the external goods is I think one of the clearest ways to illustrate what is distinctive about stoic ethics. The stoics basically deny that one needs external goods in order to be as happy as a person can be. So Cicero, the first century Roman philosopher and statesman, he has this book called Da Vinibus on Ends and it's a sort of, you know, comparative philosophy of different ethical systems. And he describes stoicism and he gives the various arguments for stoic views about this or that. But he also teases the stoics a little bit. He says that anything that is worthwhile and stoicism can just be found in Aristotle. You know, they both teach both stoics and the Aristotelians. Teach that virtue is the most important thing that happiness isn't possible without virtue. The virtuous man is the happy man. It's a it's a good dig, I think, at the stoics. Maybe they weren't as original as some of their terminological innovations make it sound. But I think so. Cicero ultimately was wrong. That the stoics really do represent a different ethical outlook from the Aristotelians and the Platonists. And it's precisely this teaching about external goods, namely that they are not needed. The stoic sage, the stoic master, can achieve the highest happiness a human being is capable of, whether he enjoys great fortune or great misfortune. If someone who suffers horrible misfortune is made miserable by that misfortune, all that goes to show is that that person wasn't truly virtuous after all. The truly truly virtuous person can endure horrible misfortune with as much poise, tranquility as the virtuous person enjoying luxurious circumstances. Their founder of the stoic school Zeno of Citium had been a merchant in his early life, he sold cloth. And the story is this is a story told by Diogenes Lertius in his lives of the philosophy. The story is that Zeno was awaiting a shipment of cloth. So the ship was literally supposed to come in to the port at Athens, and it was shipwrecked in a storm. So he lost his fortune. And he had to kind of freak out, despair, wallowed for a while. And then snapped out of it and thought I need to deal with this with my sadness in some more constructive way. And so he began to study philosophy. And at first he was hanging out with the cynics. We all know the term cynicism, but it was an actual school of Greek philosophy. He got cynical about the cynics and then sort of set up on his own. And the Stoics are so called because they hung out at a place that is called a stoa or porch in Greek. The stoa, particularly, the painted porch. And that's why they're called the stoics, rather than the xenons or something like that. So Zeno founded the Stoics School at the stoa. And as he would give his lectures about his ethical outlook, he would tell the story of being shipwrecked. Because the day that I lost that shipment of cloth, I gained a great fortune. I gained a great fortune. By losing his material possessions, he was inspired to pursue a life devoted to wisdom and virtue. And so he credited that loss as the event in his life that gave him what was truly valuable. This hunger for wisdom and virtue. The characteristic attitude of the stoic is detachment. Detachment from anything that is outside of our control. And that includes all material possessions. It includes other people. It includes current affairs. The stoic thought is that if you are able to be detached from all of these things and only care about what is under your own control, then nothing that happens to you in your life can make you miserable. So detachment safeguards us from misery. That's not the same claim as saying something like detachment makes us happy. And we'll come back to that difference later on. But detachment at least safeguards you from becoming miserable. What stoics thought was under our control was our own character. So if you devote your life to the cultivation of virtue, mastering your passions, training your mind and all of that, devote yourself to the cultivation of virtue and detaching yourself from all external goods, then you can achieve the stoic ideal of the happy life, which is not something like joy or be attitude. It's more like tranquility. If you, if you endure some sort of bad fortune and you become miserable for it, the problem for the stoics is not the misfortune, but you. Likewise, if you enjoy some really good fortune and you account your happy mood or your euphoric state to whatever good fortune you've just experienced, the stoics to say you haven't achieved the sort of virtue really needed. Only if you're detached both from misfortune and from bad fortune, can you really be said to be in control of your own life, to the extent that you're sort of moved in a euphoric direction by good fortune or moved in a miserific direction by your bad fortune. You're just being strung along with the flow of fortune. You're not in control of your life. The way to remain in control of your life is not to let things bother you and to gain the sort of dispositions of character that actually lets you practice that detachment. It actually lets you practice that detachment over time. But Wethia said, in the consolation of philosophy, I think this is the first quotation on the handout, that there is no situation that is miserable unless you think it so. Likewise, every condition is blessed, part of the typo, when a man endures it with an untroubled spirit. So it's your own reactions that make you miserable, not the thing that you identify as the thing that makes you sad. It's not that thing out there, it's your inner condition. And no matter how difficult our grim things might seem out there, if you can endure it with an untroubled spirit, but Wethia says that you are blessed. Our own passions, appetites, pull us naturally in many different directions. So the effect of stoic virtue is a sort of integration of the self. And this is a theme that you can find in Aristotle, a theme that you can find in St. Thomas, in many respects. Again, the stoics are within this broad tradition of classical ethical reflection. But just to reiterate where they part ways from Aristotle is on the rejection of external goods is required for happiness. Some stoics go so far as to say that everything other than a good will, a good will is indifferent, indifferent, neither good nor bad. And if things are neither good nor bad in themselves, but just indifferent, that's how we ought to treat them. So sometimes called the doctrine of the indifference. We can read here from a Diogenes Lertius, who himself wasn't a stoic, but sort of summing up stoic teaching. The stoics say that some existing things are good, others bad, and others are neither of these. The virtues are good. The opposites of these are bad. Everything which neither does benefit nor harms is neither of these. For instance, life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, low repute, ignoble birth, and the like. These things are not good or bad, but indifferent. For just as heating, not chilling, is the peculiar characteristic of what is hot, so too benefiting, not harming, is the peculiar characteristic of what is good. But wealth and health no more do benefit than they harm. Therefore, wealth and health are not something good. Furthermore, they say that which can be used well and badly is not something good. But wealth and health can be used well and badly. So, you have a lot of money, you can do really good things with it, support a family, give endow professorships at Franciscan University, give to the poor, and so on, all good things to do, but you can also obviously do evil things with your money. Health, that might be a little trickier to think through. Of course, you can do good things if you are healthy, but you can do bad things too because you are healthy. If you are laid low by the flu, and your life ambition is to go around punching people in the face whenever you meet them. But you're stuck in bed with the flu, your body feels like a ton of bricks, and you can't move, your health is getting in the way of your evil deeds. Once you recover your health, you get over the flu, and now you're healthy, so now you can go and do your evil deeds. So, even good health, the Stoics think, is not good or bad in itself. It's only conditionally good. I suppose. Conditional on the person having a good will. So in itself, it is indifferent. The Stoics extended this doctrine of the indifference that we should be indifferent about anything that is external to us or outside of our control. They extended this to other people. And this is where you see how the Stoics are following a certain kind of logic that makes sense, but follow that logic to a place where probably most of us don't want to go. And this is the epictetus quotation on the other side. It's pretty famous passage. Maybe some of you have heard of it before. In the case of everything attractive or useful that you were fond of, remember to say, just what sort of thing it is beginning with the least little things. So if you are fond of a jug, say, I am fond of a jug, for then when it is broken, you will not be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say you are kissing a human being for when it dies, you will not be upset. Okay, so let me try to unpack these. So the jug thing, suppose you have not just a $2 plastic thing that you picked up at Walmart, but like grandma's antique milk glass. And it is a family heirloom. It has been in the family for generations. If for whatever reason you wanted to sell it, you fetch hundreds of dollars for it, but it is monetary value. It is not primarily what makes it so precious. It is the fact that it has been in the family and it is beautiful and so on and so forth. It is just a jug. So the counsel here is that you feel really attached to this beautiful jug, but remember it is just a jug. So when it breaks, you do not care. The stoic, the ideal stoic, of course, does not care when grandma's jug breaks. It is just a jug. And then he applies the same kind of analysis to the case of our family members, our spouses and children. It is just a human being. Everyone has got to die. We are all mortal. If I were to become like full of grief at the death of my spouse or my child, that would be a reaction that would be in discord with nature. Things die, things come and go. They leave us, as Kermit the Frog says, in where am I even going at this example? Unscripted. What show is this? Dickens, Muppet Christmas Carol. The best the best Christmas Carol out there. So in Muppet Christmas Carol, Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit and then Tiny Tim dies. Well, he does not die, but you know, you get the idea and he scrooge a scene of vision of Tiny Tim having died. And Kermit the Frog there, Bob Cratchit is with his family, the Piggy's and the other Frog. This Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog together and some of their kids are pigs and some are frogs. And Kermit the Frog says to his family after Tiny Tim has just died. Life is full of meetings and partings. That is the way of things. And it's this beautiful stoic moment. He's fighting back tears a little bit so he hasn't quite mastered the stoic virtues. But he's counseling his family. Look, this is just the way of things. So we shouldn't be upset when our family members die. This application of stoic indifference to our relationships with other people. For me is the bridge too far. It's where I get off the stoic bandwagon. It's not the only reason why I for all my admiration of stoicism why I'm not a stoic. But it's one of the big ones. There's something about knowing another person, valuing another person. That we see there a kind of value that it's not like you have jugs and then you have automobiles and then you have people and people are just cooler than automobiles or jugs. No, it's like a different kind of thing. If you can't see another person as a person and not just a highfalutin thing then there's something wrong with you. If you are so committed to preventing yourself from suffering that you can't love another person, there's something wrong with you. Okay, so for all their great emphasis on the cultivation of virtue, practicing detachment from things that are outside of our control, all things that I recommend for your own practice. For all that the stoics maybe don't give us enough. The stoics did not aim high enough. I want to start to transition to Boethius and Christianity here. The ultimate end. As Catholics, we know our ultimate end is union with God in heaven and we describe that union as "beautific." And we can probably barely imagine to ourselves what perfect beattitude would be like, what it would feel like. Think of the absolute best moments of your life, the nobelist and most enjoyable, as little teeny tiny foretastes. But the Christian hope is in this ecstatic and euphoric intellectual and effective union with God Almighty. It is an almost hedonistic religion. The stoics, by contrast, thought of the absolute perfected state of a human being as freedom from suffering. Freedom from suffering is the best we can hope for on the stoic view. So what is all this detachment aiming at? What is this cultivation of virtue aiming at? Not being sad, not being in pain. In fact, a more positive state of feeling euphoric or feeling pleasure, having a pleasurable experience. If anything, those are suspect for stoics because they might lead us astray from the right kind of detachment, from things. So if the great contrast between Aristotle and Stoics is that Aristotle thinks the external goods are necessary for the good life and the Stoics don't, the great contrast between the Stoics and Christianity is that for Stoics, the highest end of a human life is freedom from suffering, whereas for Christians it is the attitude. I think that we can and should learn a lot from the Stoics. Stoicism has had a pretty profound influence on Christian thought, not as profound as Aristotle or Platonism, but it's there. St. Paul sounds like a stoic in some ways in this famous passage from his letter to the Philippians. I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with little and I also know how to live in prosperity, in every and in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled, going hungry, of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. The indifference that St. Paul seems to express here has a sort of stoic resonance, but with this important difference that St. Paul is crediting Christ and the strengthening that Christ gives to him, his ability to live in this state of indifference. He's not crediting his own virtue. A less important Christian thinker, but one who is definitely worthy of your attention, is the aforementioned Saint Boethius. The influence of the Stoics on Boethius is far more profound than the traces that we might be able to find in Saint Paul. Who has heard of Boethius before? Almost all. Who has read the consolation of philosophy or parts of it? Most of it. Good. Well, Lady Philosophy visits Boethius, she says, "What's wrong?" The character Boethius is in tears, the beginning of this philosophical dialogue. What's wrong, she asks him, and what he explains is wrong is just what you and I would explain is wrong. He's just been sentenced to death. He's had an unfair trial. He's been falsely accused of treason. He's been betrayed by his friend. And now he's in prison and he's really sad about it. And so that's the response that he gives to Lady Philosophy. And she says, "That's not why you're sad. You're sad because you've let yourself become sad. You're sad because you have exiled yourself from the city of the philosophers. You're sad because you don't know what you are. You have forgotten what you are," she says at the end of book one. And when Boethius can't tell her what he is, what kind of thing he is, Lady Philosophy says, "Now I know what your biggest problem is. The greatest cause of your affliction is that you've forgotten what you are." But she doesn't tell Boethius what he is. So then in book two, she tries to detach Boethius from all of the goods of fortune, the loss of which key things has made him miserable. So the wealth, social status, political power, all of the prestige that he enjoyed before his downfall, she goes through one by one to say, "Look, none of these things can make you happy." And all throughout book two, she might as well be a stoic sage. All she is doing there is trying to get Boethius into that state of detachment so that he can take seriously the thought that even as a prisoner about to die, he can be happy. If you thought the external goods were necessary condition for happiness, and you are a prisoner on death row, and you've lost everything, well, then you'd think, "I can't be happy." Despair would be a rational response if these goods of fortune are necessary for happiness. Lady philosophy doesn't think they are, she is a good stoic. What happens in book three, the stoicism stops. The true end of a human being, what everyone seeks is true happiness, she says, not the absence of suffering. All of these goods of fortune that you were so attached to, that hopefully I've helped you to become less attached to, all of these goods of fortune at their best are images of the true good that we all seek, images of the true good. So Boethius has transformed this doctrine of stoic indifference. Boethius and Lady philosophy recognize, as well as the stoics did, that things in themselves, if things out there, in themselves, if we are attached to them, are bound to make us miserable because they are bound to disappoint us. We can't hold on to these things. But for Boethius and Lady philosophy, they are not mere indifference. They bear some faint similarity to the good itself. So we are not intrinsically neutral or indifferent, intrinsically they are good. We just too often try to find the final good in things that are at best only images of the good, and that's a big part of our problem. But with this new kind of attention to the external goods, seeing them not as obstacles to happiness, but as images of the true good we all seek, it's this shift that happens from book two to book three, as Lady philosophy tries to orient Boethius to what that true good is, which of course is God. So right in the middle of book three, in book three is right in the middle of the five books of the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius and Lady philosophy direct a prayer to God to help them as the conversation turns from the detachment from worldly goods that has been most of the subject of the first half of the book to the ultimate end of human being, of human life, the one in union with whom we become perfectly blessed. What Boethius does is he takes what I think of as the very best of stoicism, emphasis on virtue, detachment from things that you can't control. Don't place your hope for happiness in these things, but he gives us Christianity. Our ultimate hope is not for the absence of suffering, but for pure happiness, true happiness. He also happens to be better than the stoics on the question of how we ought to relate to other people. Friendship, she tells Boethius, is the most sacred good. She wants Boethius to be stuck in with other people, not to be detached from them. So in her discourses on the goodness of friendship, she implicitly rebukes this passage from epictetus about how our close relations are just human beings bound to die. And most importantly, in her emphasis on our destiny of union with God in heaven, she adds what is lacking from stoicism, which is hope, hope for eternal happiness rather than simply the absence of suffering. Thanks for listening to this lecture on the Tammistic Institute podcast. The generosity of people like you makes this podcast possible. If you enjoy these talks, please consider showing your support at www.tammisticinstitute.org/donate. 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