Epictetus Follow-up

I spoke too soon. In bk. II, ch. 23, Epictetus says that the will can be perverted. And later in the same chapter, he admits that we can enjoy pleasant things, but only as we enjoy an inn on the way home: a lovely, succinct way of putting what I tried for paragraphs to say yesterday. He doesn’t emphasize either point, but they are there.

Given the title of Epictetus’s work, Discourses, the shortness of the chapters, and the frequent bits of implicit dialog, I take it that each chapter was a lesson given to students. Sometimes it seems to me that a student might have actually done the writing, that Epictetus perhaps had a Boswell who had mastered some sort of clay-tablet shorthand and took down the words of his master. Whoever actually wrote the Discourses down, Epictetus made both corrections (at least in my view they’re corrections) in the same chapter, or discourse, so I wonder if he didn’t have some student who thought like me, asked some questions, and urged some admissions from the teacher.

But I don’t mean to criticize Epictetus too much. As I think about yesterday’s post, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I did. The main point I meant to make is that I believe I need his teaching. I want to learn what Paul calls the “secret” of being content in both hunger and abundance. I want to have constant comfort in the firm belief that God works all things together for good for me, even my problem with retina detachment and the plethora of floaters that fill my eyesight like the microbes in the junior-high microscope experiment. And I believe that Epictetus’s teaching can help me get there.

Epictetus may have been a pagan who calls God “Zeus,” but his teaching, as far as it goes, isn’t that far from biblical teaching. The Stoic says that I am perturbed because I put my desire on something outside of my control and then didn’t get it, that I placed my aversion and fear on a circumstance outside of my control and then fell into that very circumstance, and that I should therefore deliberately place my desire and aversion on things under my control. By comparison, the epistleist (Is that a word? Should be.) James says, “You covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.” And I read this in the book of Proverbs this morning: “The desire of the righteous ends only in good; the expectation of the wicked in wrath.” I hope to be righteous and not wicked, so I want to learn from Epictetus’s patient and eloquent teaching to put my expectations and desires on things that won’t cause wrath by falling through, and to treat blessings as inns on the road home. I guess I should also say that I want to desire this patience in such a way that I will be patient with myself when I don’t achieve patience right away!

By the way, when Epictetus used the word “Zeus” (possibly pronounced “dzay-oos”) to refer to God, he may not have had any mythical character in mind. If he had grown up speaking Latin, he would have called God “Deus” (“day-oos”) like any Roman Christian or medieval Christian monk.

A Dose of Stoicism

I can’t buy into Stoicism, but I think American Christianity (or at least my Christianity) needs a dose of Stoic teaching, and I prefer Epictetus’s presentation over that of Marcus Aurelius.

As I’ve been enjoying rereading the Discourses of Epictetus the last few days, I’ve thought a lot about William James saying that cranks and mad people are able to spin out endless sermons on their one beloved theme. Epictetus certainly circles around and around his main point, but he sounds much more sane to me than the lunatics and conspiracy theorists James has in mind. Epictetus’s main point is that we humans aren’t tranquil because we set our will (both desire and aversion) on things out of our control. Taking that statement on its own, it’s hard to disagree. If I just have to get that job, or I just have to inherit that money, or I just have to get that expensive toy, and it doesn’t work out, I’m devastated. If I simply won’t tolerate the heat or my colleague’s annoying habit or another visit from my weird cousin, and then it happens, I’m beside myself. So don’t set your heart on that toy, and don’t think that life will end when the dog days come.

The reason I like Epictetus better than Marcus Aurelius, the much more well known Stoic (which name are you more familiar with?), is simple: he talks about God. One of Stoicism’s teachings is that we should plan to deal with pain caused by things out of our control by remembering that we are a part of a whole and that sometimes the good of the whole requires the sacrifice of one part. For instance (says Epictetus), a foot would never want to be cut off, but the human understands that sometimes a foot needs to be amputated for the life of the whole body. With Epictetus, we’re assured that a wise God has disposed the order of the universe, so we have a Person we can trust when we tell ourselves that we’re a part of a grander design and that our pain is worth “it.” We don’t have to know what “it” is; God knows. But with Marcus, “it” is simply the functioning of the universe, the cosmic balance of a machine that doesn’t care whether we suffer or not.

Stoicism, even Epictetus’s version, has its problems. For one thing, in saying that the will, misplaced on things outside our control, is really what causes anxiety and disappointment, Epictetus firmly believes that the will is under our control. I believe, on the other hand, that the human will is perverted and that sometimes “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Still, the Christian has the direction of the Holy Spirit to renew the will daily, so the advice to learn to will what actually happens (Epictetus’s formula) is not far from the Christian doctrine that we should conform our will to God’s will.

A stickier problem for the Christian trying to learn from Epictetus is that he says we ought to be tranquil. With the corrections I’ve pointed out, I can agree in his analysis of what causes disturbance and in his instruction on how not to be upset, but should we always follow those instructions? The Christian answer is complex. Paul says, quite Stoically, that he has learned to be content in all circumstances. But was he always tranquil? He tells us to “be angry and do not sin,” and he yelled at Ananias, “God shall strike you, you whitewashed wall!” As I read it, he had a controlled purpose for his outburst, but was he content?

Well, Paul may have made mistakes, you say. But the Christian can’t impute sin to Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t always tranquil. The Lord wept over the death of Lazarus, mourned for Jerusalem and longed to protect her as a hen protects her chicks, and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Clearly He was not always tranquil. I like it that the Bible doesn’t give easy answers to this question of whether to be tranquil or to use passion to good purpose; a Christian must use wisdom to discern what the answer is from moment to moment. And for a Christian, “using wisdom” doesn’t mean we can ever come up with a table or flowchart to meet every situation, a Talmud of rules within rules that determine the wise response to every circumstance. Since Christ has been made our wisdom, living in wisdom means that we must have an ongoing relationship with Christ and follow his leading in every situation.

A last problem I need to correct. Epictetus, in his insistence that our problem is that we set our will on things out of our control, says that I must view external things as none of my concern. Actually, not even Epictetus believes himself here. He says in other places that we must behave so as to fulfill the promise in our God-given design, which means we should act rationally and in harmony with society and the world. So it seems that some external things, the people in my community for instance, are indeed my concern. I believe the healthy way to think is to see that every created thing that surrounds me is of concern to me (“All things are yours, and you are Christ’s”) while remembering that it is at best only partially under my control. It’s not the mere delight or aversion in an external thing that ruins tranquility but the desire to control. I can’t stop a mass murder, especially one that’s already taken place and is being reported, but I can grieve. I can’t control the appearance of snow, but I can rejoice when it comes down.

When I was a kid, I once told my dad that I wished I could pick up the birds I saw in the yard, not to harm them or keep them, but just to enjoy them more. He told me that God didn’t make things that way, that He made birds to fly away from people because not every human had my innocent intentions. Fifty-five years later, I have a bird feeder outside my office window. No bird is there right now, and I have almost no control over when they do come – no control at all once I remember to fill the feeder. But every bird that comes is a blessing that I should thank God for. What I need to learn from Epictetus is not that the birds aren’t my concern or that I shouldn’t set my will on seeing a bird outside my window, but that birds aren’t mine to hold and that I shouldn’t set my heart on possessing one.

OK. OK. I could buy a parakeet. Here’s a better example. We live in the Smoky Mountains, and we have security cameras on our house, not to detect the nonexistent thieves, but to take video of black bears that stroll down our driveway and come to our porch. We’re very excited every time we hear the Ding! on our phones. Sometimes we run to the front window in time to see the bear leaving. We might get three bears in a week, and we might have to wait ten months between visits. But every appearance of these beautiful creatures is a thrill and a blessing. It makes no sense and does no good to be upset and disappointed on a day when we don’t see a bear. I have no will to possess one (although I do download the videos sometimes!) and only a facetious desire to scratch one behind its ears. Enjoy, but don’t set your heart on controlling or possessing.

Now here’s the hard part. Can I learn to treat painful things the same way I treat blessings like birds and bears? If it isn’t under my control, accept it, respond to it appropriately, but don’t be unwound over it. Don’t fear it before it comes; fearing it won’t stop it from happening. Don’t brood over it and constantly regret it after it comes; brooding won’t make either the memory or the scars go away. Believe that God has things under control and that my pain is worth it, and trust Him enough to know that I don’t even have to know what “it” is, because He does.

In Search of In Search of the Castaways

One primary goal of my Third Decade Reading Plan (these plans have played such prominent roles in the last twenty-eight years of my life, I can’t help thinking of them as capitalized) was and is to put away heady, adult things like German philosophy and to replace those parts of the plan with adventure novels that would help me relive my avid adolescent reading experiences. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne all lie in the bull’s-eye of that target.

Most of the books by Verne on my current ten-year list I had already read by checking them out from Florissant Valley Public Library in the 1970s, but I had never read The Children of Captain Grant until the first two weeks of this year. And yet this book did more to revive my teenage enthusiasm than any book has for years. The whole story of finding a mysterious, mostly dissolved note in a bottle, following the southern 37th parallel around the entire globe in search of Captain Harry Grant, picking up an eccentric scientist by accident (can't we call nineteenth-century fictional geographers scientists?), and taking along the kids on a dangerous adventure, was just right. This book felt even more like the beloved Verne of my memories than Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea did, and that was a book I actually read before and remembered.

The first third, in which the party crosses the Andes and Patagonia, was the most appealing to my inner twelve-year-old with its blizzards and earthquakes and landslides and rescues by condor. (!) The second third, which involves the crossing of Victoria, Australia, had more geographical description than adventure, although the party’s lives lay in grave danger for a chapter or two near the end. All the fun returned, though, in the final third, which saw the party captured by cannibals in New Zealand.

OK, I’ll deal with this briefly. Although the narrative presentation of the Maori felt at times  uncomfortably racially disrespectful, Verne clearly, explicitly tried to treat these people in a Christian way that afforded them dignity. When he has to lay such foundations as correcting some of his characters in their belief that the native New Zealanders aren’t even human, we can’t expect him to be as progressive as a woke, twenty-first-century college student. And I always try to remember that our descendants will find the literature of today annoyingly hidebound in our own unexamined prejudices. Verne tried, and I give him credit for that. But I could understand it if a Maori found the book offensive.

I first wrote down the title In Search of the Castaways on my Plan for this year. But just before year 1 started, when I was trying to find a good translation of Off on a Comet, I discovered two important and amazing facts. (1) In Search of the Castaways was originally known as The Children of Captain Grant. (2) Most translations of Verne, including all the ones I had borrowed from Florissant Valley Public Library, were abridged. I searched last year for a good translation of this book for almost as long as Captain Grant’s children searched for their father. I even wrote to an author who, I learned, had finished a translation and was looking for a publisher. (He understandably didn’t want to share his work with me.) I ended up reading a translation freely available online, the work of D. A. Sample. Sample doesn’t know French well and used Google Translate to get started on the passages that had been left out of most English versions. But, with some scattered yet notable grammatical mistakes and typos, the translation is actually quite good. And in the online medium, Sample was able to format clearly by color the restored passages. It’s amazing what kinds of things earlier translators left out! The most astonishing was a beautiful description of the constellations and nebulas visible from the southern hemisphere. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I have less patience with these literary butchers than I have with Verne in his flawed but good-hearted treatment of the Maori.

Please Let There Be an Arras!

Before Shakespeare, there was Christopher Marlowe. The always-correct Wikipedia says (at least it said it last week) that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were the first popular plays (ca. 1582) on the London public stage, both showing the power and suitability of blank verse for drama.

I can see why Tamburlaine had such an immediate and fateful effect. Marlowe’s pair of plays, about the fourteenth-century founder of the Asian Timurid Empire, flows in straightforward meter with a strong simplicity of vocabulary that I found very easy to understand even today. You don’t get any of Shakespeare’s neologisms or extended metaphors, but you do get powerful drama. Part I (i.e. the first play) tells of Tamburlaine’s rise as he conquers kingdom after kingdom, sometimes through military superiority, sometimes through stratagem, and sometimes merely by presenting himself to his opponents, who apparently all agreed on his almost superhuman beauty and dignity. Part II, a better drama with a dash of poetic flare along with all the clear expository dialog, tells of the mighty emperor’s downfall. Why does success seem like such an imcomplete story? Whatever the explanation, Part I’s meteoric rise would offer little satisfaction without the tragic descent of Part II.

I also just read Marlowe’s Edward II. This weak English king seems despicable at first and then pathetic. But my sympathies turned toward him about the same time as his brother Edmund’s did in the play. Edward’s horrible death isn’t explained in the dialog; I think the audience was assumed to know it. (Edward was burned from the inside out with a red-hot poker.) Apparently, if I correctly understood the stage directions, or lack thereof, this death takes place on stage with screaming from the dying king. Gruesome. I would hope that the action was hidden behind an arras as thick as the one that hides Polonius.

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is next. Time to quit writing and start reading!