Something beyond Seneca's imagination

The gift of one’s life — the costliest gift imaginable — would hardly be given to an undeserving cause: as Seneca comments, if a person is worthy (dignus), I shall defend him even at the cost of my own life; if he is unworthy (indignus), I will do what I can to aid him, but not at such a cost (Ben. 1.10.5).72 Yet Christ died in those inconceivable conditions — a gift that, Paul seems anxious to insist, is no mere throwing away of life, but an expression of love, the deepest personal commitment. This love is figured as God’s rather than Christ’s (5:5, 8; contrast Gal 2:20), since the death of Christ is God’s handing over of his only Son (8:32); but the difference is not great (cf. 8:39: the love of God in Christ). This gift is neither a trivial token, tossed to whomever it might reach, nor a costly gift carefully targeted at the highly deserving. It is the costliest gift, given with the deepest sentiment and the highest commitment to those who, at the time of its giving, had nothing to render them fitting recipients. It is this strange and nonsensical phenomenon that Paul parades in 5:5—11 (cf. 9:6—18). On the basis of this extraordinary gift, Paul can take confidence: if enemies have been reconciled in such a fashion, how much more will the reconciled be saved (5:10)!—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 478

Seneca on giving

To preclude the giver from always looking for a return-as-res, Seneca employs a famous paradox: the benefactor should immediately forget the gift; the beneficiary should always remember it (2.1o.4). At the end of the treatise, Seneca admits that this is somewhat hyperbolic language (7.22–25): what he is really targeting is the tendency of donors to keep harping on about their gifts and their desire to enhance their honor, to humiliate the recipient, or to prompt some material return. In the same vein, he criticizes any benefaction that is performed for the sake of utilitas: one should give for the goodness of giving alone (1.23), and for the benefit of the beneficiary, not for one’s own profit (4.1–15).—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 49

It's all about gratitude

Thus, for Seneca, the essence of a benefaction is not its content, the favor or gift contributed by one party to another, but the goodwill in which it is given: as a Stoic, his primary focus is on the animus, not the res (2.34—35; 6.2.1). What matters about a benefaction is not what is given or how much it is worth (which may be determined by fortune, good or bad), but how it is given (15.3); it is at this, the deepest, level that human relationships are most powerfully formed. At the same time, and for the same reasons, what matters about the return is not the thing reciprocated but the grateful attitude of the beneficiary: since Stoics refer all things to the animus (2.31.1), what a benefit aims to achieve is not an external counter-gift but an internal virtue, gratitude.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 48

A variation on a theme of discipleship

Internal to the Stoic way of reasoning is the claim that its pattern is visible in a human life and not apart from it. The particulars of the exercise that is Stoic reasoning are not analytically verifiable statements but lived shapes. Or, perhaps, the statements of logic that are analytically enticing find their analysis in the course of a Stoic life. A Cato, a Musonius, a Seneca, an Epictetus—these are necessary in the strictest sense to what Stoic reasoning is taken to be. Get an exemplum, says Seneca to Lucilius, so that you see reason in the flesh. Call it to mind so that you know how to become what you seek (Ep. 11.10). According to the Stoic story, the path to nature that is reason’s repair involves imitation of those who have gone before and shown the way.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 211

<idle musing>
There's a lot to be said for examples. But as Christians, we are told to imitate Jesus, which is a far higher ideal than a Seneca or a Cato or an Epictetus or a Marcus Aurelius. And, we are given the Holy Spirit to empower and guide us in that path.

Yep. I'll take the Christian way over the Stoic way, even while acknowledging that they have much of value. But, it is more a stream of light in a darkened corner than the flood of light in the revelation of God in Jesus.
</idle musing>

But I'd rather watch TV!

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.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 42

<idle musing>
Some things never change, do they? That's why bread and circuses is so effective.
</idle musing>

Embodied living

If philosophy is the practice of a wise life, its truth cannot be learned apart from its embodiment. Precisely, that is, because philosophy is “practicing the truth” (Ep. 98.17), apprenticeship is the requisite form of study and learning. “Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno, if he had merely heard his lectures,” Seneca tells his pupil. That is why “he shared in Zeno’s life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules” (Ep. 7.6). “What ought to be done,” my dear Lucilius, “must belearned from one who does it” (Ep. 98.17). Practice, Seneca repeatedly insists, is correlated with apprenticeship because knowledge comes by observing a master at work and being trained by his example. For this reason, says Seneca, "I hold that no man has treated humanity worse than he who has studied philosophy as if it were some marketable trade, who lives in a different manner from that which he advises” (Ep. 108.36). Such a person, Seneca’s logic runs, actively prevents the possibility of learning how to live, for he severs the necessary relation between knowledge and life. “A teacher like that can help me no more than a seasick pilot can be efficient in a storm. He must hold the tiller when the waves are tossing him; he must wrestle, as it were, with the sea; he must furl his sails when the storm rages; what good is a frightened and vomiting steersman to me?! And how much greater is the storm of life than that which tosses any ship!” (Ep. 108.36).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 38–39

<idle musing>
Boy, we could sure use some embodied examples now, couldn't we?

The 18th and 19th century German Lutherans had a term for those who spouted orthodoxy but didn't live it: Confessionalism. And they created Pietism as an antidote.

Granted, pietism taken to extreme can be just as bad as confessionalism, but combine the two and you get a good recipe for effective change.
</idle musing>

Buffeted here and there

In Seneca’s letters, then, there is at bottom a kind of dualism inherent in what is. God/Nature and Fortuna, that is, are simply different ways to name the character of what is. Neither God nor Fortuna is personal in any kind of significant sense. They are, rather, textures of the cosmos, reasonable and wild, respectively. To survive the wild, Seneca counsels his pupil, our lives must become aligned with the reasonable; we thereby live in accordance with nature and ourselves become God, thus achieving divine happiness in the midst of the world’s wild, excessive power (see Ep. 48.11; 59.14; 82.1).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 30

<idle musing>
And there's the rub, isn't it? We are on our own. If we don't make the most of our lives, it's our own fault. Sure, we're gods, but gods without any real power. The only power we have is to live for the present—but in a reasonable way.

I don't know about you, but I'll take Christianity, with a personal (in the sense of having personality) god, who doesn't just show the way, but lives inside us to enable us. We aren't on our own.

We might still appear powerless, but we have "exceeding great and precious promises" that the Holy Spirit is within us and that God is in the process of re-creating all things new—including not just us, but the whole of creation.

Just an
</idle musing>

Tormented

In contrast to the animals, who “avoid the dangers which they see, and when they have escaped them are free from care,” human beings “torment ourselves over that which is to come as well as over that or which is past.” “Many of our blessings,” Seneca continues, “bring bane to us; for memory recalls the tortures of fear, while foresight anticipates them” (Ep. 5.9). We are thus hemmed in from before and behind. We have only one space in which to live free of fear in the face of Fortuna’s power: it is “the present alone” that “makes no man wretched” (Ep. 5.9).”—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 25

<idle musing>
Again you can see the intersections with Christian thought. It's easy to understand why Stoicism was attractive and Christians raided from its thought. But, again, the differences are greater than the similarities, as we'll see in the next post.
</idle musing>

Beware of gifts—not just Greeks bearing them

Beware, says Seneca, for gifts can possess you. Seneca’s claim here is more subtle than the typical Stoic injunction to avoid attachment to “externals" (though of course this is assumed). Indeed, his warning to “other men” is that gifts draw us in and accustom us to their presence, thus creating a set of dependencies that fundamentally determine us away from the happy life. Through our fear of the gift’s potential absence or the experience of grief at its departure—the loss of a fleet of grain ships, say, or a crash in the stock market—our lives reveal a basic conditioning by the presence of the gift and the existential vulnerability that is its direct result. We fear, we grieve, we damage our chance to live well. Over time, Seneca's logic suggests, our dependency on the gift is deepened, and we have learned to move within the gifts ambit. We have thus been ensnared by Fortuna, and we now belong to her. By giving us what we believed was a gift, Fortuna has in the end come to possess us. While we thought we held the gifts in our hands, she was holding us in her grasp. Fortuna’s gifts, says Seneca, make us vulnerable to defeat precisely because they are not gifts. Remember your own line, Lucilius, “What Fortune has made yours is not really yours” (Ep. 8.10). Don't be fooled, my friend, it's still the ol’ bait and switch.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 23–24

<idle musing>
It's lines like this that enabled the early Christians to say that Stoicism was a tutor—handmaiden is the word Rowe uses, I think—leading to Christianity.

It sounds almost Christian, doesn't it? "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be," as Jesus said. But, if you know much about Stoicism, you know that the theological presuppositions are diametrically opposed to Christianity. Their concept of God is pantheistic and impersonal.
</idle musing>

Sickness unto death? Or fear of death as a sickness?

Seneca argues that we still treat death as that which happens to someone else. Like Tolstoy almost two millennia later, who knew that war can happen only because of our capacity to believe someone else will get killed in the battle, Seneca says that “we never think of death except as it affects our neighbor” (Ep. 101.6). Seneca ’s psychological point here is that human beings know they will die, but nevertheless deny their deathward existence by projecting it onto their fellows. In short, Seneca’s letters repeatedly display his concern to grasp the widespread human condition vis-a-vis death as a self-destructive denial of the way things are and must be: we know that we are mortal and must die, and yet out of a fear of our death we organize our lives to a stunning degree in an attempt to avoid it. For Seneca, this is a sickness from which we need to be healed.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 15