Augustine against the Stoics

Stoics seek a safe space after all

Stoicism is fashionable on social media, and it’s not hard to see why. According to Pierre Hadot, the Stoic aim is "the delimitation of our own sphere of liberty as an impregnable islet of autonomy, in the midst of the vast river of events and of Destiny." (The Inner Citadel, p. 83) For people being swept down the churning river of social upheaval over the last few years - spluttering, flailing, barely able to keep their heads above water - the Stoics thus offer high-grade self-help.

Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men, sees Stoicism as an antidote:

What Stoicism does have to offer is an antidote to the disease of this age. Stoicism opposes hysteria, and advocates emotional control. We are inundated with outrage pornography and the goads of infotainers who make their livings spinning people up. Most would benefit from a little more emotional control. Why wouldn’t you want to be in better control of yourself? ⁣

16,000 copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations were sold in 2012; it now sells well over 100,000 copies annually. Conversions to Theravada Buddhism - strikingly similar to Stoicism in its focus on attenuating attachments to transitory goods - are also growing.

Because of its emphasis on self-control, Stoicism is often presented as a tough-minded reaction to the safe space obsession: the Stoic never gets triggered. Many social media accounts purporting to preach masculinity, for example, transmit its teachings. But this view is superficial. Rightly understood, stoicism - as Hadot’s islet image implies - is really about turning the mind into the supreme safe space. How many of the people thinking they’re nourishing themselves on nuggets of Stoic wisdom have read St. Augustine’s critique of Stoicism in The City of God? Not many, I bet. So let’s look at some of its most noteworthy elements.

‘Life eternal is the supreme good,’ Augustine says, and ‘death eternal the supreme evil’, and ‘to obtain the one and escape the other we must live rightly.’ But we do not, he warns, have ‘in ourselves power to live rightly’ unless we pray. It shouldn’t take much looking around or within us to realise this harsh truth. How many Stoic sages do you know?

Augustine adds that the Stoics have, ‘with a marvellous shallowness, sought to find blessedness in this life and in themselves’. After quoting “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are vain” (1 Corinthians 3:20), he then asks, ‘Is the body of the wise man exempt from any pain which may dispel pleasure, from any disquietude which may banish repose?’ No, the Stoic sage is bound to his body. Despite his excitement about his mind’s god-like power to master itself, he is a mere creature. Similarly, Stoics pride themselves on their reason, but Augustine recalls ‘the pitiable movements of the insane, and those actions which we shudder to see, when sense is deceived and reason deranged’.

Consider David Stove, a twentieth-century philosopher famed for his tough-minded critiques of political correctness. After a stroke, his wife was paralysed. Stove’s son describes how his father, convinced that announcing his cancer diagnosis had caused the stroke, ‘unravelled’:

All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt.”

There is no repose, Augustine says - no mental safe space. The role of virtue is to ‘wage perpetual war with vices’. Indeed, ‘the very virtues of this life, which are certainly its best and most useful possessions, are all the more telling proofs of its miseries in proportion as they are helpful against the violence of its dangers, toils, and woes.’ Fortitude, for example, is ‘the plainest proof of the ills of life, for it is these ills which it is compelled to bear patiently. And this holds good, no matter though the ripest wisdom co-exists with it.’

Stove’s son continues:

In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now.”

Histrionics about tough-mindedness became emotional hysterics in the end. Stoic practices couldn’t soothe Stove’s soul. And they certainly couldn’t save it. Josef Pieper writes in Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969), p.101, of how the ‘profound discord and hidden infirmity’ infecting Stoic doctrine ‘is nowhere revealed so baldly as in its attitude toward death’:

The maxim not to let our hearts be affected and shaken by anything may on occasion be quite worthy of respect; but it must become absurd in the face of an event whose whole importance consists in shaking to the very depths not only the energies of our soul, but our existence itself.

Although he had been sectioned for threatening to hurt himself, Stove ‘through that gift for eloquence which seldom entirely deserted him…convinced a psychiatrist that he should be released’. He hanged himself the next day.

Stove was not the first Stoic suicide. ‘Was it, I would ask, fortitude or weakness which prompted Cato to kill himself?’

Augustine’s question is astute. He is ‘at a loss to understand how’ the Stoic philosophers claim there are no ills, yet they allow their sages to commit suicide to avoid them.

‘There is a mighty force in these evils which make fortitude a homicide — if, indeed, that is to be called fortitude which is so thoroughly overcome by these evils, that it not only cannot preserve by patience the man whom it undertook to govern and defend, but is itself obliged to kill him.’

The Stoic ideal is not only unattainable - even Jesus died in agony rather than equanimity - but, Augustine argues, undesirable. To watch the beloved suffer while maintaining inner tranquility is not to love at all.  It is repose purchased ‘at the price of brutality in the soul, of stupor in the body.’ In their ‘stupid pride’, the Stoics ‘attempt to fabricate for themselves a happiness in this life, based upon a virtue which is as deceitful as it is proud.’