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.