Stoicism and Christianity

Where they agree and where they part

Roman Stoicism and early Christianity shared a world. Seneca was Paul’s contemporary, and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius lived while the first churches were spreading. The two share much of their moral vocabulary. Where they differ, they differ about what is ultimately real.

God. The Stoic god is not a person who made the world from outside it. In Stoic physics, god is the active principle in matter, a designing reason that is itself a body and is present everywhere (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Nearly all early Christian thinkers agreed that God is not a material being (SEP (opens in a new tab)), and Christian teaching holds that God made the world rather than being part of it. Is Stoicism a religion? sets out the Stoic theology in full.

The soul. The Stoics held that the soul is also a body (SEP (opens in a new tab)), and Marcus left its fate open. Christianity rests on the resurrection. Some early Christians, Tertullian among them, also thought of the soul as material, but the church moved toward the immaterial soul that most Christians now assume (SEP (opens in a new tab)).

Grace. Epictetus built his teaching on the claim that your choices are wholly your own (Enchiridion 1). That claim gives Stoicism its dignity, and it is where many Christian readers have balked. Blaise Pascal admired Epictetus as a moralist but called it arrogance to think that the human mind is part of the divine and can perfect itself (SEP (opens in a new tab)). For a Christian, goodness is finally a gift.

The shared ground is mostly ethics. Both traditions rank character above wealth, status and comfort. Both ask for self-control, honesty and care for people who can do nothing for you, and both expect you to look back over your conduct and do better tomorrow.

Members of one body

The deepest conviction the two share is that no one is a stranger. Marcus Aurelius put it with an image that readers of Paul will recognize:

The point turns on one letter. Melos, in Greek, names a limb, one of the working members of a body. Meros names a share or a piece. If you think of yourself as merely a part of the whole, Marcus says, “thou dost not yet love men from thy heart” (Meditations 7.13). You do good because it is proper, not because it delights you.

Paul uses the same Greek word, in the plural melē, when he tells the church at Corinth that it is one body with many members, none of which can tell another that it has no need of it (1 Corinthians 12:12–27; see also Romans 12:4–5). The overlap is real, and so is the difference. For Marcus, the body is the whole community of rational beings, held together by the reason they share. For Paul, the body is Christ’s. How much Paul knew of Stoic theory is an open scholarly question; the SEP points to Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s Paul and the Stoics (2000) as a reading of Paul in relation to it (SEP (opens in a new tab)).

What Marcus Aurelius wrote about Christians

Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 and wrote the Meditations as notes to himself. Christians appear in them once, in an entry about being ready to die:

The entry is about which kind of readiness deserves respect. Marcus admires a soul prepared to leave the body, whatever follows, as long as the readiness comes from the person’s own judgment and is shown “considerately and with dignity” (Meditations 11.3), in a way that could persuade someone else. The Christians are his example of the wrong kind: readiness from “mere obstinacy.” Long’s obstinacy stands for the Greek parataxis (Perseus (opens in a new tab)), a word for troops drawn up in line of battle, which the standard Greek lexicon glosses in this passage as obstinate opposition (LSJ (opens in a new tab)). The charge is something like defiance for its own sake. Read with the closing words, “without tragic show,” the complaint seems to be that their deaths looked like a performance.

The first half of the entry matters too. Marcus leaves open whether the soul will be extinguished, dispersed or continue to exist, and the readiness he praises does not wait for an answer. A martyr’s readiness rested on the hope of resurrection.

George Long, whose 1862 translation is quoted here, noted that this is the only passage in which the emperor speaks of the Christians, and added that Epictetus calls them Galilaeans (Discourses 4.7). Epictetus’s point there is close to Marcus’s: the Galilaeans can face a tyrant’s guards without fear, but they get there by habit, where a philosopher should get there by reasoning. Some scholars have argued that the words naming the Christians in 11.3 began as a reader’s note in the margin and were later copied into the text; C. R. Haines made that case in his 1916 edition. If so, the explicit comparison is a later reader’s, though Marcus may still have had the Christians in mind.

The legal background was harsh. In Marcus’s reign Christians could be punished simply for being Christians, though officials were not to hunt for them. Britannica notes that although Marcus disliked the Christians, there was no systematic persecution under him; local martyrdoms still happened, including those at Lyon in 177 (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). The Christian teacher Justin Martyr was condemned in Rome around 165 (Britannica (opens in a new tab)).

Stoics in the New Testament

The Stoics appear by name once in the Bible, in Acts 17:18. Paul is in Athens, arguing in the synagogue and, every day, in the marketplace. Some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers take him on. Some of them dismiss him as a babbler; others think he is announcing foreign gods, because he speaks of Jesus and the resurrection. They bring him to the Areopagus to explain himself.

Paul’s speech there (Acts 17:22–31) reaches for common ground. He tells his audience that the God who made the world does not live in temples made by hands or need anything from people, that every nation descends from one ancestor, and that God is not far from any of us. Then he cites their own poets on human beings as God’s offspring. The line comes from the opening invocation to Zeus in the Phaenomena of Aratus, a poem that reflects its author’s Stoic philosophy (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). A Stoic in the crowd could have agreed with most of this.

The agreement ends at the resurrection. When Paul speaks of a man God raised from the dead, some of his hearers mock him and others say they will hear him again another time (Acts 17:31–32). The scene is a fair summary of the whole relationship: a shared moral and even religious vocabulary, and a parting at the claims that are specifically Christian.

Two more points of contact come up often. Seneca’s elder brother Gallio was the Roman governor of Achaea who, in Acts 18:12–17, refused to hear a case brought against Paul at Corinth; Britannica dates their meeting to 52 CE (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). And a set of letters between Paul and Seneca circulated in antiquity. They are a forgery, though an old one: Jerome and Augustine both refer to them (SEP (opens in a new tab)).

How Christian writers used the Stoics

Christian writers were open to some Stoic ideas and not others (SEP (opens in a new tab)), and the borrowing was steady. Justin Martyr studied Stoic and Platonic philosophy before he became a Christian in 132. He later taught that Christ is the whole divine logos, of which the pagan philosophers had found only traces (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). In his Second Apology (7–8) he praises the Stoics’ moral teaching and rejects their doctrine of fate. Logos is also the word in the first verse of John’s Gospel, usually translated “the Word,” and it is the word the Stoics used for the reason that orders the world. The word is shared. What it names is not: John’s Logos becomes flesh.

Medieval Christians rejected what they called Stoic fatalism but kept ideas of conscience and natural law with clear Stoic roots; the SEP traces the natural-law tradition that runs through Thomas Aquinas directly to the Stoics (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Around 1600, Justus Lipsius was the leading figure in an effort to build a systematic synthesis of Christianity and Stoicism, now called Neostoicism (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Epictetus’s Enchiridion had already been used in monasteries in lightly Christianized adaptations, and in the seventeenth century readers such as Guillaume du Vair and Thomas Gataker generally found his Stoicism fully compatible with Christianity (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Pascal, as noted above, disagreed.

Stoic practices a believer can use

The practices travel more easily than the theology, because most of them are about attention and conduct. Four have clear counterparts in Christian life.

Reviewing the day. Seneca describes going over his whole day each night once the lamp is out, hiding nothing from himself (On Anger 3.36). Christians will recognize the examination of conscience, and the daily examen that Ignatius of Loyola built into his Spiritual Exercises. The difference comes at the end. Seneca pardons himself and resolves to do better, where a Christian brings the day to God and asks forgiveness. The Evening Examination is a free, five-question version of the Stoic review, and its questions work as well before a prayer as without one.

Sorting what is up to you. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion by drawing a line between what is ours to govern and what isn’t, an idea that now goes by the modern name dichotomy of control. The Serenity Prayer, usually credited to Reinhold Niebuhr, draws the same line as a petition.

Answering people who wrong you. Marcus reminded himself to love even people who do wrong, on the grounds that they are kin, act from ignorance and cannot make his mind worse than it was (Meditations 7.22). The Gospel gives a different ground, imitating a Father who sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:44–45). On an ordinary Tuesday the practice looks much the same: the colleague who took credit for your work still gets a fair, calm answer. For more, see Stoicism and difficult people.

Remembering death. Epictetus advises keeping death before your eyes every day, so that you will never think anything mean or want anything too much (Enchiridion 21). The Latin motto memento mori is a later label, and much of its later history runs through Christian art and devotion.

What a believer will usually leave aside is the Stoic god, a body within the world; the hope of perfecting yourself by effort alone; and, for many, the ideal of being free from every passion. What remains is a large body of practical wisdom, the part of Stoicism that Christian readers from Justin Martyr on have most often kept.