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October 20 - October 20, 2017
old and young alike, we must look our death directly in the face, acknowledge its reality, and embrace it (Ep. 12 et passim).
old and young alike, we must look our death directly in the face, acknowledge its reality, and embrace it (Ep. 12 et passim).
Focusing on the fact that death comes without consulting us about its timing should, Seneca argues, release us from anxiety about our future plans.
Finally, the contemplation of the consequences of death offers an unrivaled view onto the quality of our current life.
Living each day as a full life—the perspective created by looking at the day as if we’ve died—exercises bit by bit a kind of quality control over the entire thing, regardless of when we actually expire.
Life, Seneca tells Lucilius, is like a play—it matters not how long the action runs or at what precise point it ends. What matters is “how good the acting is,” the philosophical quality of the life played out on the earthly stage (Ep. 77.20).
Suicide is “an open space in which Nature guards us.” Our freedom is thus protected: “When our plight is such as to permit it, we may look about us for an easy exit. If you have many opportunities ready to hand, by means of which you may liberate yourself, you may make a selection and think over the best way of gaining freedom; but if a chance is hard to find, instead of the best, snatch the next-best, even though it be something unheard of, something new. If you do not lack the courage, you will not lack the cleverness to die” (Ep. 70.24).
Philosophy, Lucilius is told, is in principle for everyone (Ep. 44), though admittedly he also learns that only a few will become wise—most, Seneca observes, would rather just mindlessly watch sports (Ep. 76.1–4). Still, they all need the invitation: even the mob can be helped by the witness of the philosophers.
He does not say “don’t go to the soothsayer” but rather “go in the right way,” that is, as a philosopher who already knows that whatever the predicted outcome, “it will be possible for you to turn it to the good” (Ench. 32.2).
Philosophy is working on yourself! It is more like rough training for the Olympics than reading a book (Ench. 29), more like the contest of the event itself than lifting weights and flexing your bronzed muscles (Disc. 1.4.13)! Do
Epictetus obviously never had the chance to read Foucault on discipline or punishment (though Foucault did read Epictetus), but he did know how to guide his students toward a type of self-criticism that Foucault himself brilliantly thematized two millennia later: by conducting his relations with others “as if Another is looking on from above” (Disc. 1.30.1–2), the student constructs a Monitor who keeps watch over his life.
Epictetan Stoic philosophy, therefore, is for society exactly to the extent that its practitioners both refuse to participate in the confusions that make its members sick and exhibit the natural way we ought to live through playing the roles in which they are cast.
“Isolate the present,” Marcus says, for “this is the mark of a perfected habit of life (ēthos): to pass through each day as if it were the last”
The resurrection of Jesus testified, for Paul, to God’s commitment to redeem the stuff of the world rather than to reject it, to validate its goodness by going to its material foundations and remaking them.
Instead, for Paul, anthropology is what the human being has been through its history from the first Adam until the second—and, then, what it can become in light of the Christ-event.
According to Paul, therefore, hope in the face of death is rooted not in a particular philosophical
anthropology—predicating
predicating immortality as a necessary property of the soul, say—but in G...
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To put it into later terms, had Paul known of the distinction between the fides qua creditur (the faith by which it is believed, that is, trust) and the fides quae creditur (the faith which is believed, that is, content), he could well have understood it. But he would not have taken these distinctions to name fundamental differences in “faith.” Rather, for Paul, trust simply was trust in the life-giving power of the God who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead even when things appeared to the clear-eyed to indicate the foolishness of that trust. In the meantime between the now of new
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It is rather that the social shape of humanity in Christ derives from the call to witness to the identity of the one God.
Paul is, however, hardly an optimist. Indeed, in his view our natural capacities to seek God and do the good—or to quench our thirst for truth and beauty—inevitably lead us away from that which we seek. Sin overpowers us, enslaves us, and makes us sick unto death. And no amount of spiritual exercise or striving against our illness can make us well. Recovery and repair come to us from the outside, from God’s side of the human predicament. Paul’s letters, therefore, are not lessons in self-cultivation or community organizing or social criticism or any such things in themselves. They are rather
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The term Lord (kyrios) occurs more than twenty times before its use for Jesus in the womb. In each case it refers to the God of Israel.
For Luke, to express Jesus’ identity literarily is to narrate it as a complex both/and: Jesus is both the human being he
obviously was and simultaneously the human exposition of Israel’s God.
The meaning of the titles in Luke and Acts, rather, will
be determined by the figure of Jesus in the story.22 It is he that gives them their most significant shape.
The cross would have been the end of any messianic identity and, simultaneously, the hopes of his disciples. Yet precisely because God raised him from the dead, it was no less than God himself who confirmed Jesus as the Messiah. The suffering Jesus was vindicated by an act that overturned the observable
Contemporary students of Luke’s Christology have often been much concerned not only with titles but also with categorizing Luke’s view of Jesus as either “high” (more toward God) or “low” (more toward a human being). Luke, however, did not work with opposing categories of this kind, and the fact that the human Jesus shares an identity with God as Lord already suggests their interpretative insufficiency. Where New Testament scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would see opposing poles—humanity and divinity—Luke instead sees only one thing: the Lord himself in the human life of the
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Father, for Luke, means Father in a very particular way: the Father of the Son Jesus. To speak of God as Father in Luke and Acts is simultaneously to speak of Jesus as his Son.
The prodigal bets on the fact that his father will not turn him away. But in a surprising, almost über-display, the father himself dramatically exceeds the son’s calculations of his goodness and enacts what in first-century terms could be seen only as extravagant kindness or love. For complete rejection, he returns kindness, even love, to the wicked.
In the Lukan view of things, metanoia (repentance) is not simply a sequence of sorrow, confession, and pardon. The metanoia kind of turning is instead a more fundamental change in the lived structure of human existence that moves us from the patterns of waywardness and ignorance into patterns of release and repair. It is, in short, a “repentance unto life,” as the apostles realize from Peter’s testimony (Acts 11:18).
There is no Spirit-enhanced “supernatural” discourse intelligible only to those on the inside of Christian faith: both the Christian and the Stoic claims are to be understood and accepted or rejected in the same way and on the same ground as any other claims to truth; and there is no rivalry of rationalities: the encyclopedic conception of natural, unitary rationality is explicitly promoted as the ground for relating the texts of divergent traditions.
importat
When, for example, Malherbe identifies similarity between Paul and some ancient philosophers in the views/practices of the moral life, he assumes—even as he constructs—the existence of a spectrum along which both Paul and the philosophers can be placed. The
The fact that there is no word for morality as such in any ancient or medieval language should already caution us against the assumption that we know what ancient morality in general could be. And, in fact, we do not. The reason is strikingly simple: it did not exist. No
Modern scholars who believe they are comparing similarity/difference along a spectrum called morality arbitrarily excise certain parts from more densely complicated wholes and name these parts “moral.”44 What is here obscured is the fact that the ancients did not think they were reflecting upon moral questions or developing disciplines to lead them in moral lives. They thought, instead, that they were reflecting upon and practicing how to live an entire life. It is true that they wrote much about the virtues, of course, but the virtues were exemplified within wider philosophical accounts of
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theoretical discussion in ancient philosophy/theology was inseparable from the acquisition of habits of life that allowed one to think theoretically in the first place.
Not only does the “disengaged self” create a domain that cannot touch him—placing his object of scholarly attention within a framework of objects to be investigated without prior normative commitment—he also “takes a stance” toward himself that “takes him out of his normal way of experiencing the world and ourselves.”
But for the ancients there is no such human being: the self cannot be thus divided, for there is no objectifiable thinking faculty—the mind qua mind or soul qua soul—that can know truth apart from the much denser reality of the I that lives. I
Conceiving knowledge as that which is gained by a detached-thinking-thing—the objectified mind that knows apart from the life in which it is embedded—is yet one more way in which modern encyclopedic inquiry contravenes the traditions it seeks to absorb.64
If, therefore, we accept the designation Christian or Stoic, we ipso facto acknowledge the existence of the stories that make it possible for us to locate the texts in these forms of life.78 The
This inability to live more than one tradition at a time means that in a crucial and, truth be told, rather sobering sense, even the central patterns of reasoning in one tradition—as that tradition understands them—will not be understood in another. Moreover, insofar as we do not participate in the alien tradition we seek to query, we cannot know what it is that we do not know.92 Short of conversion, we are literally shut out of one by the life we live in another.93 Rival rationalities are not surmountable by learning. What then is the exercise of narrative juxtaposition
In stark contrast to both the modern scientific sense of evolutionary time and the Jewish or Christian sense that God precedes his creation, the Stoic story has no part without humanity. It is simply assumed that human beings are part of what the cosmic cycle produces or contains. We do not “come on the scene,” nor do we go off it. As
Of course, devotion to Christ and the community that bears his name is only the re-beginning, the way in which the End of things is made visible in the midst of time. It is not yet the End itself. The final chapter of the Christian story
To say it slightly differently, the way the Christian story runs to its end is unintelligible without the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
Or to be more precise, the consummation is when the world is finally and completely taken up in the work wrought in Christ from beginning to end.
Being a Christian or a Stoic is as much to be involved in a continuous argument over what it means to be a Christian or Stoic as it is to be distinct from outsiders.46 But no amount of conflict within Christian tradition can lead to Stoicism as the particular answer to Christian conflict, and vice versa.
We cannot be what we are summoned to become without the time it takes to train the being in becoming. And that is to say—yet again—that we cannot know the truth before we take the existential plunge and try to live it within the time that is the one and only life we have to live.54
To study a rival tradition is to encounter difference of the profoundest and possibly most opaque sort—the result of exquisite existential trajectories that have not been yours. To
