I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with pagans lately. Not the modern, self-indulgent, falsely idealistic, entitled, uninteresting kind all around us, conspicuously so at our universities. But the ancient – almost too interesting – stout seekers of the true and the good. Especially the Stoics, who influenced St. Paul and other early Christians, and – not incidentally – helped prepare the ground for the spread of Christianity among peoples living in great darkness, under bad rulers. Like us.

Plato and Aristotle are great lights – when there’s a chance that at least some measure of reason will guide worldly affairs. But in times like ours, the Stoics are particularly helpful because they know that serious evil exists and don’t expect, certainly not in the short run, to be able to do much about it, least of all via politics. What, then, is to be done?

They, like the Christians who were to follow, put their greatest efforts into forming their own souls: into gratitude for what has been given to us in our very existence; and, therefore, the pious efforts to bring ourselves into harmony with the divine order of the cosmos that made us. Our successes or failures in pursuit of that goal are the real measure of good – and evil. Soul work was as central to Epictetus (a former slave) as to Marcus Aurelius (a Roman emperor).

All that has affinities, of course, with the Faith, and opens a fresh window onto spiritual and moral disciplines that people today often dismiss as merely pious old Christian platitudes. But even Reason, right reason in the right hands, can approach them.

Marcus Aurelius reminds himself more than once in his Meditations:

Say to thyself at daybreak: today I shall come across the busy-body, the thankless, the bully, the treacherous, the envious, the unneighborly. All this has befallen them because they know not good from evil. But I, in that I have comprehended the nature of the Good that it is beautiful, and the nature of Evil that it is ugly, and the nature of the wrong-doer himself that it is akin to me, not as partaker of the same blood and seed but of intelligence and a morsel of the Divine can neither be injured by any of them – for no one can involve me [against my choice] in what is debasing.

But even for Stoics, this is not easy to live out consistently.

The Stoics also understood, like Christians, that this basic spiritual orientation was true freedom, that indulging desires that go against the divine order is the only thing that really enslaves us. As the man for all seasons, St. Thomas More, says, “The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them.”

There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in ancient Stoicism, I think, because it provides some of the Christian benefits without – so people think – the Christian dogmas. The Stoics, in fact, had their own fundamental dogmas, starting with the benevolence of the Divine Nature. Do many modern Stoics believe in that?

But more importantly, efforts at pure self-discipline, really a kind of Pelagianism, fail, as they did in the ancient world, because no one can live the Stoic ideal absent grace. As St. Paul said famously, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  (Romans 7:15)

Who teaches such truths anymore? The Church still does, weakly. But she’s gone halfway, and lately more than halfway, towards indulging people like our campus radicals in pipe dreams about international peace and justice, and in the identity and “pride” movements – the greatest mental and spiritual slavery in our time.

We’ve tried to do what we can here at TCT with our online courses. A new one – not to be missed – begins this week on Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, really much more than an introduction. (Info here) We also are offering our twenty-fourth year of the Free Society Seminar in the Slovak Republic this summer for university students and young professionals. (Website here)

The Faith, of course, is not only ideas. Christianity notably appealed – and appeals – both to common folk and some of the great thinkers and doers in history. Which should pique our interest, given the spiritual desert of our moment, in what it was/is that draws pagans of all kinds and classes to the Faith.

Scholars have speculated that there were two large Christian phenomena that impressed ancient peoples.

The first was that Christians were able to die for the Faith under persecution by the state, not only willingly, but even with a certain serenity. To the ancients, death was the great foe. And much of what we call philosophy – Aristotle is the sole exception, and only partly – was a kind of spiritual practice about how both to live and to die. It was commonly assumed that only the most advanced philosophers, such as Socrates, could live serenely and look death in the eye without fear.

And then the Christians came along, mostly ordinary folk without fancy college degrees (so to speak) – though some had great learning, too – and seemed able to do those very things.

Even more conspicuous was Christian charity. This took several forms: everyday relief efforts of the poor, but also heroic ministry to the sick and dying. Most pagans, whatever they said about fraternity and kindness – and the Stoics said a lot – headed for the hills during periodic waves of plagues that strike all human communities. The Christians did not.

There’s much to ponder here: Our own need for a kind of Christian Stoicism – courage and serenity – even under unfriendly regimes run by nominally Christian politicians – and above all an increase in Christian charity.

“Making the world a better place” is a worthy, if limited goal, in many respects better left to progressives, who have plainly made almost everything they touch worse.

While “[T]hese three remain: faith, hope and love.” (1 Corinthians 13)

__________

You may also enjoy:

+James V. Schall, S.J. Ivory Tower

Brad Miner In Praise of Dispassion