Warren Smith

Kate Bowler: Hi, I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So here’s what I want to talk about today. Maybe right now, maybe even in your own home, maybe in your group chat, maybe someone sitting across from you at the dinner table, there is someone reading Marcus Aurelius. Or they’re waking up at five in the morning, or they’re journaling about what is or is not in their control. They’re ready with a stoic quotation that you didn’t ask for. They have, perhaps, a small medallion in their pocket. That reminds them in Latin that they’re going to die. People are reaching for practices that help them navigate a very uncertain world. And right now, many people are reaching for Stoicism. Today’s episode is about one of the most popular spiritual movements in American culture that nobody’s actually calling a spiritual movement. So if you’re not really sure what a Stoic is, just ask a man how often he thinks about the Roman Empire. No, just joking, but it is actually a pretty good idea. But I have been thinking a lot about it lately. And I realized that I needed help from somebody who actually knows where all of this comes from because Stoicism is not new–it is in fact older than Christianity. The early Christians knew it intimately. They argued with it. They borrowed from it. They eventually decided that for all of its merits, it was getting something fundamentally wrong about what it means to be human. So I called my friend Warren. Dr. Warren Smith is Professor of Historical Theology at Duke Divinity School, where he teaches courses on Christian doctrine, ethics, and the early church. He is in fact, honestly, one of the very best lecturers I have ever heard, hands down. He is a scholar of the patristic period, the formative centuries where Christian thinkers were working out in real time what Christians actually were, what they weren’t, what the church was. He’s written on Ambrose, on Gregory of Nyssa, on the Christian engagement with classical philosophy, on what the ancients meant by virtue and what we’ve lost in translation. And he is really one of the people, the only people I trust to take something genuinely complicated and make it land for the rest of us, which is one of their rarest and most useful gifts in the academy. He is a very good friend of mine. He’s also somebody that I call when I’m having a personal problem and then I try to dress it up as a theological crisis. But he has such a deep pastoral heart. And he is the person who helps us think about difficult things clearly. Warren, I am very glad that you agreed to come in to the Everything Happens Studio and talk to me.

Warren Smith: It’s always good to be with you.

Kate Bowler: This is a very basic question just to ground us, but a lot of us hear the word stoic and genuinely don’t really know what it means. Walk us through who the stoics were, like where does it start? And what was that school essentially devoted to trying to figure out?

Warren Smith: I think when we hear the word stoic or use the word, stoic, to say so-and-so has a stoic temperament, we usually sort of think of them as someone who endures hardship without batting an eye. They’re not emotional. They’re very much in control of themselves. And that’s both true and not true. Stoicism has its roots in a figure by the name of Zeno who lived around the year of 300, so a hundred years or so after Socrates. And the view that he articulates is very different, say, than what Socrates taught. I mean, Socrates thought that the reality is divided between an intelligible world of ideas that is in heaven as opposed to the material sensible world that we live in day by day. Zeno took a very different view. I think there are probably four key elements of Zeno’s thought. The first is he was a materialist, meaning he believed that everything was matter. Therefore, even though the Stoics spoke of God, their God is not a spiritual, immaterial, incorporeal, transcendent being. Rather, God is nature. In other words, the Stoics were pantheists. Everything is divine, but there isn’t anything that’s not matter. The second key point is they believe that this material world nevertheless has a reason to it. The word they use is logos, or they’ll speak of the seed of reason. Logos the Greek word, which can neither mean word, or it can mean reason. I mean, I’m engaged in a logos right now, a reasoned account of what Stoicism is. But for them, this logos, this reason, permeates the material world very much the way we would talk about the laws of nature governing it. But human beings are special in that we’ve been endowed with a seed of reason that allows us to apprehend that logic that follows and orders all of the material world, our life in nature. And because we can understand that logic, we’re able to order our lives according to the goods appropriate to each person based on their nature. And so for them, the good life, and this is the third point, human flourishing, the good life, or happiness, is spoken of as a life according to nature or a life according to reason, all right? So in other words, I know what my body entails, what it needs, and I’m able to live accordingly so that my body will flourish. I don’t eat too much or too little, so forth, allright? The third key idea for them was that in order to be happy, all one needed to do was to live virtuously. And here the Stoics were very different than either the followers of Plato or the followers of Aristotle, both of whom said, you know, virtue is important, but you also need basic material things in order to thrive. So we need food in order be happy as well as we need virtue. You can’t be happy if your life has basically gone to hell. I mean they talk about the figures during the Trojan Wars and say, ah, you know, they had a lot going for them, but when your kingdom falls apart, you fall apart too. You can’t be said to be happy. The Stoics said no: happiness is within your control because you can be virtuous. You can choose how to respond to any circumstance that’s thrown at you. And therefore, you have great autonomy. You can rule and govern yourself. And so whatever the world throws at you, you have control over how you respond to the world. The final point is that the great enemy of happiness, the great enemies of human flourishing, is the passions. And the passions are psychic disturbances that come from our experience of forces that are threatening or probably will threaten us in this world. And Zeno defined the passions this way. He said these passions like grief or anger or fear or anxiety, these are simply errant judgments, mistaken judgments. In other words, and I think he’s on to something. Emotions don’t exist in a vacuum. They are a response to things. They are, and those are based on judgments about the world. We see, say, a parent hitting a child, well, you know, we may either intuitively grasp that that’s wrong or we may reason ourselves, but there’s going to be an emotional response. And if we become angry, you know, Zeno says, you know, that emotion is a response to the judgment. Now for him, one of the biggest emotions that was a problem was grief or the fear of death. And so Zeno says, you know, why are people afraid to die? Well, it’s because they’ve read too much Homer. They hear these stories about what Hades is like, and therefore, they’re afraid dying because they don’t want to go down and have to face Cerberus there at the gate of hell. And he says, no, no. We can correct those errant judgments. We can free you from passions by teaching you what the truth is. And if, for instance, you realize that death is just part of life, it’s going to come to all of us, it is perfectly natural, and there isn’t a place called Hades where you have Cerberus and the god of the underworld is going to inflict punishments on you. When you realize that’s not true, then you won’t fear death, and you will simply accept death. You know? I mean, therefore, in many ways, Stoicism has the appeal because it’s a form of ancient cognitive therapy. If you get our ideas right, then you won’t experience the sort of emotions that plague us.

Kate Bowler: I’ve always thought in a very rough way, it’s always useful at first pass when you’re looking at a spiritual tradition to ask, is this a head religion, is this a heart religion, or is this is a spirit religion? It really is a head religion. It’s like, order your thoughts and you can order your world. It sounds like Stoicism’s priority on right reason creates this very controlled, understandable, intelligible framework for someone to regain a sense of agency.

Warren Smith: Oh, absolutely. It is a head approach to life. You let your rational faculty govern you and guide you in making judgments, and then all will be well. I mean, one of the things that they speak about is a world in which you have very little control over the things going on around you. And, therefore, they say, look if you act virtuously, according to reason, then you need not be threatened by those other things. No one can make you respond in wrath, or no one could be the cause of lust. You control those things, and when you do, you will be, at the end of the day, you will be happy.

Kate Bowler: The popular version of Stoicism that people encounter today has this stripped down idea that it just means control your emotions, don’t sweat what you can’t change, grow tougher. But the part that it seems to really thin out is this piece that you were describing about the Logos. Can you tell me more about what kind of Like in what way is that a religious, a fully ordered religious world? Or was it just, I think sometimes I have a hard time…

Warren Smith: Yeah, I think it’s one of the real challenges that Stoicism faced, I mean, that on the one hand you want to say all is matter, but then what status do you give to this logos, this reason?

Kate Bowler: Is it like capital L logos, is it like bigger than them or is it just like the way you see gravity or you know you experience the laws of nature as things that are just happening to you in a way you can understand?

Warren Smith: I think that would be an easy way to put it, that there is a logic to the way the world works which you, as a rational being, are able to recognize, you know? We all know when we’ve done something in excess or when we haven’t done enough, right? And we usually suffer as a result of either the excess or the deficiency. And therefore they say just our experience teaches us that there are conditions under which we will thrive and there are conditions under which we will suffer. And the goal is to minimize the amount of suffering by swimming with the current of nature. One of the, I mean, very often stoicism is associated with the idea of being resigned, resignation. Right? You don’t have any control over it. And therefore, one of the metaphors is you’re going to make yourself miserable if you swim against the current of fate. You’re going to suffer less if you simply accept the current. Your child dies. Well, the Stoics would say, look, we’re not stones. Of course we feel something. But if I act as if the death of this child is unnatural, if I deny the reality that our child was mortal, I’m mortal, I’m gonna die, then your anger and rage at this horrible thing that’s happened, well, which they say isn’t really horrible, someone just dies. That’s what happens to all of us. Then you’re making yourself suffer. It’s a self-inflicted suffering. Instead of simply saying, this child was dear, but we’re not going to agonize about it. We’re not gonna make the loss of the child more painful than it was good that we had the child. And here I’m paraphrasing the Roman statesman Cicero, who lived in the first century AC, whose beloved child did die, his daughter, when she was in her 20s, dies. And he has to write a letter consoling his wife. And he says, among other things, you know, it would be wrong for us to suffer more than the joy she gave us. In other words, we must preserve the good of our life together than making ourselves so miserable. As if her coming as if our life would have been better if she’d never come into our life.

Kate Bowler: Yeah. I had a guest a while ago, Michael Ignatieff. He actually ran for Canadian Prime Minister one time. He’s a wonderful intellectual. And he wrote a really beautiful set of meditations on consolation, like what comforts us. And he had a chapter called Cicero’s Tears about this experience of Cicero losing his daughter. And he noted that it was really only when his daughter dies, that his own theology seemed to also be coming apart, that he was personally actually quite devastated and that he couldn’t live up to this stoic ideal and this sort of paragon of consolation was in fact inconsolable. Do you think that this way of life, I mean, I just know that a lot of Christian theology is only sort of, we can only tease it out when we realize that we’re being hypocrites. But do you think moments like that just like ultimately show the limits of their own theology that they themselves probably understood?

Warren Smith: Cicero wrote a book called On Duties, and in that book, he takes, he steps back from a stoic view, the stoic of the perfection and self-mastery that is possible for the sage. He says, number one, it’s not possible. And in fact, we don’t need to go that far. All we need to do is have imperfect examples of virtue. Whose virtue is still nevertheless at a high level.

Kate Bowler: Yeah, we believe in virtue. We don’t always have to fully embody it for it to be true.

Warren Smith: Right, so whether that was reflected, whether that reflects his response to the death of his daughter, you know, would be a question for historians to talk about. But that’s precisely one of the points where an early Christian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, a North African who lived at the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century, launched his critique against Stoicism. And one of the things that Augustine says is, look, we are embodied creatures, and therefore, there is going to be an embodied response or experience of things that go wrong in the world. And he also said, as a Christian, you know, we believe that instead of being liberated from the body, salvation lies in the resurrection of the body. When all the bodies aches and pains, when the cancer is gone forever. And, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, we become clothed with incorruption and immortality, being clothed with the glory of Christ’s resurrection. And so Augustine says, guess what? We will never be happy. We will never be fully blessed in this life. Precisely because we will experience these bodily and emotional crises, and it’s not going to be until we are healed both in our minds and in our bodies at the resurrection when Christ comes and establishes His kingdom. Then and then only, in fact, will we be truly healed, truly happy, free from the sufferings that characterize the present age. One of the things he says that is, I think, very important, Augustine makes the point that since we’re going to suffer in this life, as well as experience joy, the question really is, which emotions are good emotions and which ones should we question? And he said all emotion springs from love. I mean, human beings were made to love. We were made out of God’s love for us. And therefore, the real question is, does our emotional reaction come out of a love of God and neighbor? So, in other words, when you are, as a pastor, Say at the bedside of someone who has just discovered they have cancer. Or a parent who discovers that their child has brittle bone disease. Your tears are an expression of your love for them. I mean, it’s what Paul talks about when he says, we bear one another’s burdens as well as sharing one another joys. And what those tears are about is the recognition of the brokenness of the world in its present state. And for Augustine, those tears also reflect an element of hope, an element totally absent from Stoicism, because it is the eschatological hope, the hope of the resurrection, that we will not always have this, but that eventually God will perfect creation and free us from all tears. And that, and therefore our tears in the present, in a way, are our longing for that life that is to come.

Kate Bowler: Yeah. Yes. As opposed to the stoic account, which would be, why cry when this is the world as it is?

Warren Smith: Yeah, exactly.

Kate Bowler: I’d love to go back to Augustine, because I have a lot to ask you about, and it’s one of your great treasure trove brains is on Augustine. But in a stoic framework, would it be wrong then to pray, or wrong then, to seek a miracle, which is an intervention into the laws of nature as they are?

Warren Smith: I think very much so. In the Enlightenment, a movement that grew out of Christianity was a movement called deism. And deism, growing out of a Newtonian view of the world, in which God made the world and ordered it according to the laws of nature. The idea was, well, if God established the laws of nature. Well, laws are inviolable. So why would God break God’s own laws? Therefore, God created the world, infused in us certain innate ideas, guide us for acting justly. But no, God doesn’t intervene. God lets things sort of work their way out. And he was only, you know, someone who responded to such deism was the philosopher John Locke, who in the 17th century was saying, look, miracles are necessary because they’re God’s way of turning us from thinking about reality just in terms of the material world we see around us. But there has to be something to snap our attention and make us think about a transcendent source of the mundane, the quotidian, right? So you’re absolutely right. The Stoics would express this same view, right, no, praying to gods doesn’t matter. I mean, there are no gods, really. Nature is deaf to our cries. The best thing we can do is simply accept this is our fate. This is what’s befallen us and carry on.

Kate Bowler: I don’t want to like cheat and blame the worst parts of bad behavior on any religious tradition, but it does seem like Marcus Aurelius standing on the edges of the German, the Germanic frontier, sending out his forces to slaughter people is not exactly like the spiritual ideal…I just find when in the movie Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius became popular as this great sort of sage, and yet we’re not really pointing out the weapon of mass violence that the Roman Empire really to truly become.

Warren Smith: I mean, this becomes one of the Christian objections to, both to Platonism and to Stoicism, but in some way in particular for Stoism. The Stoics did believe in the brotherhood of humanity. When Paul uses in Corinthians the model of the body, and we are all part of the Body of Christ and each part of body has its particular purpose, I mean that’s a very Stoic sensibility. And therefore, you appreciate all of the different roles that people play. And one of the, if you will, elements of hypocrisy is that Marcus Aurelius, believing in this idea of the brotherhood of humanity, nevertheless is willing to slaughter. So instead of really recognizing that brotherly bond of nature, the Stoics had the idea of the Cosmopolis. And what they meant by Cosmopolis was you know, instead of polis, meaning city, instead of seeing your identity as part of the city where you were born, Athens or Sparta or Rome, you are a part of a cosmopolis, the city of the universe in which there really is a fundamental bond of human nature rather than seeing real divisions along what we would now call racial or ethnic lines. No, no, no. I mean, you may be German and I may be Roman, but we’re all human beings and that somehow should unite us. So yeah, so how do you look on such disregard for human life? And that’s part of Augustine’s argument, is you need to be able to feel sympathy, a fundamental sympathy, both as fellow human beings and with it, that we are God’s creatures whom God desires to redeem, right? And therefore, you need that sense of compassion in order to act virtuously. So whereas a Stoic philosopher like Seneca would say, and Seneca was a philosopher in the first century, he actually was a failed mentor to Nero, the infamous, Nero didn’t buy into the Stoic philosophy that Seneca taught. But Seneca said, look, there’s no place for compassion. If you’re a judge, you don’t determine whether to be lenient to someone or to send them off to death based on how pathetic they can appear. Okay, because that’s just giving them an Emmy or an Oscar. No, he says, no, you should decide solely on the basis of reason. Any sort of emotional sense of compassion has no part in your judgment, right? And Augustine pushes back and says, no, we know in our minds that we should be compassionate or we should merciful, but sometimes we need that sense of communion, that sense of connection to our brothers and sisters in order to act mercifully toward them. So the emotion, rather than being an impediment to doing what is morally right, the emotion is necessary in order for us to respond appropriately, to respond virtuously.

Kate Bowler: Yeah. That our emotions can be truth bearers, as opposed to disordered thinking. It sounds…it’s funny. Over the years, every now and then, when someone presents modern stoicism to me, I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m pretty sure that I am encountering the original, everything happens for a reason, and we have to find out those reasons and live according to them. Because the response to a world that doesn’t happen for a reason is that we look at uncertainty, we look at chaos, we look at brokenness, and it requires a response in us. I think one way we would probably share a response with the stoics is that we would say that in light of a broken world, that we require courage, more courage than we thought we would ever even want to need. And that we need prudence. I really love any discussion of like the wisdom to know, to find that place of careful action to be deeply thoughtful about what is ours to do. That all sounds very reasonable to me, but to have a broken, to believe that a broken heart is in fact an open heart, that it is a way in which God also communicates truth about the present and then also about the future. It just makes so much sense that Stoicism would, in erasing the idea that there will be a better future or one in which God changes the rules and restores things or dramatically offers us a new world, a restored body of king of God is here and not yet, man, wouldn’t that be nice when it comes. But if it’s just the present, then we have to fully readjust all of our expectations. There’s a response to grief and brokenheartedness that is like really key to The Everything Happens community and that we want better language to look at something that shouldn’t be and know that we’re not crazy. So I’d love to hear more about why this kind of compassion is so key to the Christian imagination.

Warren Smith: Compassion for Christians is an imitation of the incarnation, that God, who does not experience finitude as we do, nevertheless descends to be with us. And is, I mean, is Emmanuel God with us, and to God with us it meant that God took upon himself all of all of the pain, all of the brokenness, all of the suffering. There was a bishop by the name of Ambrose, who was Bishop of Milan, which in the end of the fourth century was the capital of the western part of the Roman Empire. And Ambrose, when he comes to interpret the line in the Gospels where Jesus on the cross cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Ambrose doesn’t take that to mean that Christ sees the Father as having rejected Him, abandoned Him. But rather, it is because Jesus has taken on our human nature and the brokenness and estrangement from God that we experience because of sin, because Jesus, who knew no sin yet for our sake became sin, took on our sin, as Paul says, then that is Jesus giving voice to the human estrangement from God, which the incarnation fundamentally overcomes, and the evidence is Easter, that God does not abandon us in our suffering, but that in Christ’s resurrection, though the wounds remain, they are healed. So they’re a sign of the healing that will come to us. I think this idea of God with us is a powerful image. And I think marriage is a wonderful example. You know, people say, you know, you don’t marry your in-laws, you just marry your spouse. Well, that’s total nonsense. I mean unless your spouse is an orphan, you’re marrying into that family. And that means you’re marrying into all the stuff, all the baggage that family entails. But you take it on because you’re a part of that family. You deal with the eccentric uncle. You deal with the father-in-law who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. You do it because you are now part of their family. The incarnation is God entering Adam’s family and therefore taking on all of Adam’s crap that has come into the world because of sin. And He’s taken it on and then somehow, in the mystery of Easter, delivers us from it, redeems us, and that’s the hope that he puts out so that we don’t just have to live in the present. But that we can persevere, sometimes with a stiff upper lip and sometimes with tears, but nevertheless with a confidence that at the end of the day, God will be sovereign and that what he did to Jesus, he will do to us also.

Kate Bowler: When Christianity first encounters Stoicism, how did they decide, I mean, they’re interacting all the time, it’s in the waters. So what did they explicitly borrow from Stoicism?

Warren Smith: I mean, one idea is this concept of the Logos. One of the early Christian theologians, a teacher in Rome by the name of Justin Martyr, gives us an account of his conversion to Christianity, and it starts back that he had to decide what school he would study under. And one of the schools he goes to is the Stoics. And ultimately is dissatisfied with them and turns away. What’s interesting for him is that he ultimately sees that there are elements of Stoicism that Christians can appropriate. They do have elements of truth. I mean, in the sense, all truth is God’s truth. So they’ve got a portion of the truth. They just don’t have the whole picture. In other words, they know a little bit of the logos, but as a Christian He knows the Logos incarnate, because the Logos is at the beginning of John’s gospel. It says, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. And then it skips down, and Logos became flesh, Jesus, right? And so Justin was saying, yes, we know the Logos. We live by faith, but we also live by reason. But the model, the standard for reason, is not some abstract idea that we infer from looking at nature. We look to the incarnate Logos, to the Father’s reason present in Jesus of Nazareth. I think there’s also a positive response to the Stoic critique of the passions. A realization for Christians that sometimes our emotions get out of control, or sometimes they’re directed at the wrong thing. And therefore, what we need to do is not abandon the emotions, but have them rightly ordered. And as Augustine’s saying, let them be ordered by the love of God. Right? And that love is not just a fuzzy feeling, but it also entails discipline. I mean, part of the attraction of Stoicism is that sense of self-discipline.

Kate Bowler: Rigorous. So rigorous. It’s also funny that it’s happening, I’m just thinking about modern stoicism, but it is interesting that it is probably one of the only critiques to our very therapeutic, I feel, my emotions are always correct, but that’s how I feel Warren, culture. And that to even just appeal to virtue as a standard that doesn’t change. That we have to conform ourselves to, I think, is very counter-cultural.

Warren Smith: Absolutely. I think someone once said to me, look, it’s just emotion all the way down. And I understand we have emotional responses, but not every emotion is right. Not every emotion is reasonable. And therefore, the question becomes, how do we order those emotions? And that’s part of the challenge. Yes, that you have an emotion is real. And instead of suppressing that, acting as if you don’t have that feeling, no, you need to acknowledge the emotions and the way those emotions are manifesting themselves, because they’re going to come out. I mean, if you’re feeling resentment towards somebody…

Kate Bowler: Yeah, I’ll name them now.

Warren Smith: I mean, that smolders and eventually it will come out in ugly forms, you know, whether it’s being passive aggressive, whatever. So you need to acknowledge the emotion, but then you need to be critical about the emotion. And I think that’s part of what Stoicism and in its Christian form does is to say, okay, you know the fact that so-and-so got a raise and I didn’t. The fact that my best friend just got appointed to this big steeple church and I have this congregation of 50 people who are struggling to stay afloat. You know, is my resentment appropriate or does that reveal the insidious nature of sin that cannot share joy with others, but in fact actually Finds pleasure in seeing other people suffer. I mean, and that’s envy.

Kate Bowler: It’s one of the things I appreciate most about the Christian language of sanctification. I like this picture of like the burning off the edges of you get to keep the sort of that, the fire of what’s really true about your, the truth of our emotions, but you can kind of, we’re hoping that as we go along, that we will, that they’ll increasingly grow more and more holy as a result. And frankly, I think it probably just grows more and more holy as a result of that kind of right interrogation. But I think most people would say probably service and like the more involved you are in other people’s pain. I just find that it’s when you’re very close to somebody else’s pain, it almost feels like it’s the marrow of the universe. I don’t know a better way to get out of my own problems and my own head and then redevote myself to this project of being human than compassion and heartache.

Warren Smith: Yeah, I love that analysis because it brings together holiness and compassion. There is no holiness without compassion, and compassion means being with people. And that changes the way I think people think of holiness, holiness understood as separation, you know, so that I’m not going to be corrupted, I’m going to not be disturbed. I mean, that was a big Stoic theme that, you know, you would be concerned for someone’s welfare, but you would not let their suffering cause you to have psychic disturbance.

Kate Bowler: I think we need to have better, and this is one thing I truly value in you, Warren, is the precision with which you can name an almost complete truth. And that’s why we don’t say heresy anymore.

Warren Smith: I do.

Kate Bowler: I do! But heresy as an almost-complete truth. In thinking about the Stoics, it was kind of fun to look back and realize like we don’t actually use the word heresy to like someone who’s just, who has a belief so utterly different than our own. We only refer to it as malformations or partial formations of a Christian belief we are desperate to uphold. So which parts of ancient Stoicism were named by the church as being heretical, as being almost complete truths?

Warren Smith: I think the first is this highly materialistic conception of the Logos. I mean, pantheism is not Christianity. God may descend to us and be present, but the sum of God is not the sum of the material world, that God is the source of the material world. But He doesn’t make it out of himself. But He transcends. So there is that element of transcendence that you find in Christianity. And earlier you had a similar thing in Platonism that you didn’t really have in Aristotle or in the Stoics or in the Epicureans. So that absence of transcendance was a definite thing that they would reject. But I think also the total absence of hope. I mean, Christians are called to live hopefully. And I think what that hopeful living has two components, at least. One is a hopefulness in the present, meaning that we believe, we’re not deists, that God has withdrawn, but we believe God is still active in the lives of creatures, using each one of us, to accomplish good, even sometimes in the midst of horrific evil. But then there is the ultimate object of hope, and the key idea of hope is that hope is that which we do not yet have, and yet even though we don’t have it, there is that confidence, based on what God’s done in the past, that God will accomplish in the future, that God will fulfill God’s promises. And I think that focus on confidence in God’s fidelity to His promises. God chose the people of Israel. God will not abandon the people of Israel that Paul talks about at the end of Romans. And I think that strong sense of trusting, and being therefore hopeful, is just something the Stoics wouldn’t have, that wouldn’t even register in their perspective.

Kate Bowler: And then if we should take away the very best parts and convoking you to be deeply still lucky in our approach today, like what should we keep? I’m imagining that some of this language of like the wisdom to discern and the extra layer of reflection to live deliberately. I think we do need to live deliberately to live beautifully and to continue to try to restore our relationships. I think an extra layer of discernment that helps us question our own very natural, but sometimes not ultimately useful responses, particularly to the people we love, stoicism sounds like it has a very like reasoned, careful approach to these moral inventories that’s useful.

Warren Smith: I think that’s right. I think another thing is, and it’s a corollary of compassion, and that is sometimes what our loved ones need from us in a moment of crisis is what looks like stoic strength. In other words, there’s a time my wife wants me just to hear what hurt she’s feeling.

Kate Bowler: I like that I can hear it.

Warren Smith: Especially if I’ve caused it.

Kate Bowler: I like that I can hear the, don’t run around fixing everyone else’s problems. That’s not what I asked before. That’s good.

Warren Smith: Sometimes, you know, and she wants to see an emotional response that I care that she’s hurting, for whatever reason. But there are other times she also needs me to be strong for her and I need her to be strong for me. So some moments the tears are helpful and some moments, the, all right, we’re going we’re going to work through this together. So that when I’m feeling my lowest, I don’t need to, it doesn’t benefit me if I feel like I dragged you down to where I am, but I know I can hold on to you because you have a strength that will be there for me when my strength is failing. And I think there is something to stoicism about that sense of you don’t have to express compassion by always crying with somebody.

Kate Bowler: It’s been so wonderful to hear your brain tease through the parts of it that feel incredibly pertinent today, and also just to reimagine which parts of stoicism we might want to keep with us. Thanks for doing this with me today, I really appreciate it.

Warren Smith: It was a pleasure to be with you, as always.

Kate Bowler: I keep thinking about how tempting it is to believe that the goal is to become less affected by our lives, less disappointed or heartbroken by all the things we can’t control. And of course, there is real wisdom in knowing what is ours to carry and what isn’t. But Warren gave us other questions to consider too. What if some of our feelings aren’t failures of self-mastery? What if grief is what love feels like when we’ve lost something? What if being human means that we will be moved by one another and occasionally just totally undone? So maybe we don’t need to become invulnerable. Maybe we can just become a little more honest about what we love and what we never wanna let go of. So for everyone who’s trying very hard to keep it together right now, I get it, and this blessing is for you. May you release the pressure to be unbothered by what hurts. May you know what is yours to carry and what was never yours to control. And when grief comes, which it will, may you not mistake it for failure, because love makes us vulnerable, and maybe that is the greatest blessing of all. All right, my darlings. If you would like more conversations for when life gets beautiful and terrible and occasionally completely ridiculous, you can follow along with my weekly newsletter over on Substack. Substack is just a website. It is the coolest thing ever. I am at katebowler.substack.com and we have the nicest community over there and I would love it if you came on and just checked us out. Everything is free. There’s like the nicest community in the comment section, just take a look. Or come find me on social media at Kate C. Bowler. All episodes this season are available to watch on YouTube or Spotify. Next week, I’ll be talking to an expert in neo-stoicism, Ryan Holiday. So continue on to part two of today’s topic. You are not gonna wanna miss it. Make sure you are subscribed to follow along. Everything Happens Studios is made possible through the generous support of Lilly Endowment and the work of my team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.