Stoicism in medieval and modern philosophy
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- philosophy
- apathy
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Stoic undercurrents in medieval thought
During the period when Christian institutions and doctrines were developing (230–1450 ce), Stoicism continued to play a popular role. The De consolatione philosophiae (524; Consolation of Philosophy) of Boethius (died 524/525 ce) was widely known and appreciated as a discourse on the mysterious questions of the nature of good and evil, of fortune, chance, or freedom, and of divine foreknowledge. If the plan of Boethius was to serve as an interpreter of Plato and Aristotle, he succeeded only in working through some logical theories of Aristotle, together with several commentaries on those theories. In the Consolatione, however, the themes are quite different; in the fifth book, for example, he attempted to resolve the apparent difficulty of reconciling human freedom (free will) with the divine foreknowledge, a problem that among Stoic thinkers—though by no means uniquely among them—had been in general currency for a long time. This work of emancipation from worldly travail through the glories of reason and philosophy, which included Stoic doctrines as found in the writings of Cicero and Seneca, was much more influential for later medieval thought than that of Lactantius, of the late 3rd to early 4th century, who was largely concerned with the writing of a history of religion—a summary statement of Christian doctrine and life from earliest times. Lactantius also wrote a not unimportant work called De ira Dei (313; On the Anger of God). It poses a problem of how to deal with the essentially Greek, or philosophical, view that God cannot feel anger because he is not subject to passions and that apatheia (“apathy,” or “imperturbableness”) is not merely the mark of the wise person but also a divine attribute. That view, which had been most thoroughly developed among Stoic thinkers and particularly by Epictetus, raised a peculiarly Christian problem, the concern of the power of God to reward the righteous and punish the transgressor; thus, it challenged the very idea of providence. Other manifestations of anthropopathism, the attributing of human feelings to God, had also been charged against the early Christian religionists; and the writers of the time—Lactantius and Tertullian among them—took great pains to refute the largely Stoic formulations of these charges. Although the refutations took the form—in St. Augustine, for example—of denying that the wrath of God is a perturbation of the soul and of holding that it is rather a judgment, the concept of the divine essence excludes all passions. Within the monastic tradition, there remained more than a residue of concern over apathy as a divine attribute and as a model for the truly religious.
Other significant Stoic influences appeared in medieval discussions of the popular origin of political authority and of the distinctions made in law between jus naturale (natural law), jus gentium (law of nations), jus civile (civil law)—doctrines of Stoic origin—found in 3rd-century Roman juridical texts gathered together by St. Isidore of Sevilla (died 636 ce), a Spanish encyclopaedist and theologian. The Stoic belief—as against Aristotle—that humans are by nature equal was an integral part of the knowledge that certain rules of law are universally recognized, laws that all people might naturally follow. In this way, the Romans—whose genius lay in organization and in law—fostered the conception of natural, or common, law, which reason was supposed to make evident to all people. Thus, in the second half of the 11th century, the Stoic texts of Cicero and Seneca became important doctrinal sources for the initial discussions of social and political philosophy. These early theories of law, of natural equality, and of the rights of prince and populace were to become the basis for 13th-century systems of social and political privilege and obligation.
In the 12th century, John of Salisbury, an English critical scholar, produced, in his Policraticus (1159), the first complete attempt at a philosophy of the state since Classical times. Stoic doctrines of natural law, society, state, and providence were important elements in his effort to construct a social philosophy on ethical and metaphysical principles. The impact of these doctrines and the lengthy history of their use in the earlier Middle Ages can also be found in the views of St. Thomas Aquinas on the philosophy of the state and of human nature.
Revival of Stoicism in modern times
If the influence of Stoic doctrines during the Middle Ages was largely restricted to the resolution of problems of social and political significance, it remained for the Renaissance, in its passion for the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity, to provide a basis for the rebirth of Stoic views in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, as well as the documentation of the more familiar Stoic doctrines in ethics and politics. Late in the 16th century, Justus Lipsius, a Flemish scholar and Latin humanist, was responsible for the first restatement of Stoicism as a defensible and thoroughgoing (Christian) philosophy of human nature. His treatises De constantia (1584; On Constancy) and Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589; Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction) were widely known in many editions and translations. His defense of Stoic doctrine in Manuductio ad Stoicam Philosophiam (1604; Digest of Stoic Philosophy) and Physiologia Stoicorum (1604; Physics of the Stoics) provided the basis for the considerable Stoic influence during the Renaissance. About the turn of the 17th century, Guillaume du Vair, a French lawyer and Christian philosopher, made Stoic moral philosophy popular, while Pierre Charron, a French theologian and skeptic, utilized Stoic themes in De la sagesse (1601; Of Wisdom), as did the skeptic Michel de Montaigne in his Essais (1580; Essays). Through the work of Lipsius, Stoic doctrines were to influence the thought of Francis Bacon, a precursor of modern philosophy of science, and, later, the De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws), by the political theorist Charles-Louis, baron de Montesquieu. In the continuing and relentless war against the Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages, the doctrines of Stoicism influenced many prominent figures of the Renaissance and Reformation periods.
Pietro Pomponazzi, an Aristotelian of early 16th-century Italy, in defending an anti-Scholastic Aristotelianism against the Averroists, who viewed the world as a strictly necessitarian and fated order, adopted the Stoic view of providence and human freedom. The 15th-century humanist Leonardo Bruni absorbed Stoic views on reason, fate, and free will. Pantheism, the view that God and nature are unitary in the sense that God is an impersonal being, and naturalism, the view that nothing is supernatural, both of which identify God with the cosmos and ascribe to it a life process of which the world soul is the principle, were widely held Renaissance notions. Such a pantheistic naturalism was advocated—though from diverse standpoints—by Francesco Patrizi, a versatile Platonist, and by Giordano Bruno, defender of an infinite cosmos; and in both authors the inspiration and source were fundamentally Stoic. In the development of a philosophy of public law based upon a study of human nature, Stoic elements are found in the Utopia (1516), by Thomas More, and the De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace), by Hugo Grotius. The latter work is one of the most famous Renaissance treatises on the theory of natural and social rights.
The foremost Swiss reformer of the early 16th century, Huldrych Zwingli, who regarded justification by subjective belief as the foundation of the new Christianity, utilized Stoic views on the autonomy of the will, on the absolute predestination of the good and evil person, and on moral determinism (see also moral responsibility, problem of).
Another Stoic influence of considerable importance in the tradition of Christian humanism was the view that all religions have a common basis of truths concerning God—a universal Deism. Among those who favoured such a view were Zwingli and Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance humanist and scholar. More and Grotius also laid special stress on that view, and its influence was felt in the moral, social, and even the artistic life of the 16th century. Later, Herbert of Cherbury, often called the father of Deism, further developed the idea of religious peace and the reduction of opposing religious views to common elements. This view became one of the most popular ideas of the 17th century.
Philipp Melanchthon also cultivated humanism and the philosophy of antiquity as a basis for a reborn Christianity. Although Aristotle was his chief inspiration, Melanchthon made telling use of the Stoic theory of knowledge, with its notions of innate principles and the natural light of reason, which teach the great truths of metaphysical and moral order. Stoicism thus became the basis for the natural-law theory, which holds that the state is of immediately divine origin and independent of the church—a Protestant view opposed by Roman Catholic writers.
The Cartesian revolution in thought in the 17th century brought forward several Stoic notions: that morality consists of obedience to the law of reason, which God has deposited within humans; that ethics presupposes a knowledge of nature, because humans must learn to know their place in the world, for only then may they act rightly; that self-examination is the foundation of ethics; and that the innateness and commonality of truths bespeak the view that only thoughts and the will belong properly to humans, for the body is a part of the material world. Such views were particularly developed by René Descartes, often hailed as the father of modern philosophy, in his dualism of mind (or soul) and body.
Benedict de Spinoza, a freethinking Jewish rationalist, made similar use of Stoic views on the nature of humans and the world. That aspect of Spinoza’s thought that is debatably labeled pantheist is essentially Stoic in character. Together with the Cartesians, Spinoza insisted upon the importance of internal and right reason as the sole means by which to attain to indubitable truths and to the possibility of human freedom.
Blaise Pascal, a French scientist and religious philosopher, also was sympathetic to Cartesian conceptions of human nature. His religious thought retained the Cartesian and Stoic insistence on the independence of human reason, holding that humans are fundamentally thinking beings, innately capable of making right decisions. However, there is an important and crucial difference and conflict between Pascal’s views and those of Spinoza and the Cartesians: for Pascal, though the use of (the Stoic) right reason might result in proofs and demonstrations that lead to the God of truth, it would never lead to the God of love, the one true God. Thus, the Stoic exaltation of reason to an entity in its own right—indeed, to a divine entity—as exemplified among the Cartesians and in the thought of Spinoza, was rejected by Pascal in the Jansenist Christianity that he finally adopted—a rejection that, because it also repudiated free will, distinguishes Pascal from those who held Stoic as well as alternative conceptions of human freedom and responsibility.
Christianity in general, in spite of striking contrasts with Stoicism, has found elements within it that parallel its own position. As the Stoic, for example, feels safe and protected in the rational care of some immanent providence, so the Christian senses that a transcendent though incarnate and loving God is looking after him. And in general, Stoicism has played a great part throughout the ages in the theological formulation of Christian thought as well as in the actual realization of Christian ideals.
Contemporary philosophy has borrowed from Stoicism, at least in part, its conviction that human beings must be conceived as being closely and essentially connected with the world. And contemporary humanism still contains some obviously Stoic elements, such as its belief in the solidarity of all peoples based upon their common nature, and in the primacy of reason. It is perhaps just because Stoicism has never become a full-fledged philosophical system that, many centuries after the dissolution of the Stoic school, fundamental themes of its philosophy have emerged again and again, and many have become incorporated into modern thinking.
Jason Lewis Saunders