Stoicism and Christianity

I appreciated Spencer Klavan’s thoughtful review of Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor and his recognition of my attempt to write a biography that made Marcus “seem human without making him seem any less impressive” (“The Last Great Stoic,” Fall 2024). Marcus was, I believe, an ordinary person with flaws who strove earnestly to improve himself—and succeeded. Klavan suggests that I might prefer a world where Marcus’ Stoicism had prevailed over the rise of Christianity, but I do not see these as mutually exclusive ethical traditions. Though distinct in important regards, Stoicism and Christianity share deep ethical concerns and values. They have historically influenced one another, and I believe they can continue to do so with mutual respect.

In The Divine Comedy, for example, Dante honors the Roman Stoic Cato the Younger by making him the guardian of the entrance to Mount Purgatory. Cato chose death rather than be captured and exploited as a war trophy and bargaining chip by Julius Caesar, a man he rightly feared was intent on overthrowing the republic and seizing absolute power. Yet, rather than consign the famous Stoic to Hell for the sin of suicide, Dante elevated him, in effect, to the status of a pagan saint—his countenance luminous with moral virtue: “Alone, so worthy of rev’rence in his look, / That ne’er from son to father more was ow’d.”

Cato’s final act was not driven by despair or passion but by a principled choice. In the face of morally intolerable circumstances, he preferred to martyr himself in the name of liberty rather than surrender to tyranny. As Cicero explains in De finibus bonorum et malorum, the Stoics believed we have a duty to preserve our lives unless confronted with exceptional suffering—whether from severe and incurable pain, disability, or other unbearable conditions. Although they firmly rejected suicide motivated by unhealthy passions such as melancholia, they allowed that, in extreme cases, reason might justify choosing death over life as a last resort.

This perspective differs from traditional Christian ethics, as Klavan rightly notes. It is worth observing, however, that public opinion increasingly aligns with Stoic reasoning on this matter. While certainly raising unsettling moral dilemmas, contemporary debates about euthanasia—such as Canada’s MAiD program—also highlight significant shifts in our values over the past century. For example, a recent Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans support legal euthanasia, a figure which has doubled since surveys of this kind were first conducted in the 1940s.

I must respectfully disagree, therefore, with the assertion that “any return to unadulterated Stoicism as a way of life for the West would,” in this regard, “represent not progress but regress, of a kind that even now would offend some of our most profound ethical sensibilities.” Many people today are drawn to Stoicism precisely because they find in it a worldview that is rational, humane, and consistent with their moral intuitions—even when these intuitions diverge from traditional Christian teachings.

Donald J. Robertson

Montreal, Canada

Spencer A. Klavan replies:  

In my review of his book, I wrote that Donald Robertson “embodies some of the level-headed clarity Stoicism is known for.” His eloquent reflections on my comments demonstrate this to be true once again.

And he’s right, of course, that Stoicism and Christianity have mutually informed one another since Christianity’s beginnings. As I pointed out in my review, when Saint Paul surveyed the various Hellenistic schools of philosophy, it was a Stoic—the poet Aratus—he chose to cite in arguing for humanity’s shared divine parentage. There are, I suspect, traces of Stoic cosmology at play in the prelude to John’s Gospel. And, as Robertson points out, Stoics have appeared in a favorable light throughout Christian literature—from Dante’s Purgatorio to Joseph Addison’s play Cato, which did more than a little to steel the nerves of America’s revolutionaries when it was performed at Valley Forge. 

In fact, an intriguing example of how the two traditions intertwine was on display just recently, when at the end of January Vice President J.D. Vance told an interviewer that “there’s this old-school, and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country.” 

This is indeed a major strain in Christian thought known as the ordo amoris, based on readings of the Old and New Testaments by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But before the ordo amoris, there was the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis, put forward by the 2nd-century A.D. Stoic Hierocles in terms uncannily similar to those articulated by Vance. Hierocles’ ideas are preserved by Stobaeus in his Florilegium or Anthology. They are compatible with Confucianism, common sense, and Christianity. 

So, individual Stoics and Christians can live together profitably. On that, Robertson and I are (fittingly) in harmony. But the question I raised in my review was whether a civilization, writ large, can be Stoic and Christian at the same time in its foundational assumptions. I remain convinced that the answer is no. For, as Robinson seems to agree, there are certain points—among them the life of the soul after death and the morality of suicide—on which Stoic and Christian teaching are simply incompatible. 

When Robertson observes that “public opinion increasingly aligns with Stoic reasoning” on the subject of euthanasia, he is actually describing exactly the kind of phenomenon I was talking about when I worried that it may be “Christianity whose star is on the wane, and pagan philosophies like Stoicism that are getting a reboot”—again, at a civilizational level. The majority in the West will break one way or another on questions like the eternity of the soul, which in turn will inform how we handle subjects like MAiD. My reasons for preferring the Christian to the Stoic approach—including the truly dystopian pressures that MAiD is putting even now on the poor and the infirm—were laid out in my review.

Jefferson and Slavery

Many have made an industry out of portraying Thomas Jefferson as having an “unwavering commitment to emancipation,” as Jean Yarborough does in her review of Cara Stevens’s Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery (“The Liberties of a Nation,” Fall 2024). But someone with an unwavering commitment to end slavery does not retain hundreds of slaves at his mountaintop plantation, does not buy and sell slaves (breaking up families), does not have a decades-long intimate relationship with one of his slaves (while condemning “race mixing”), and does not “demur” when his friend and true abolitionist Edward Coles calls on him to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. As Yarbrough mentions, Coles left Virginia with his slaves and freed them on the way to Illinois where he became the second governor of that state.

Although Yarbrough’s review is positive overall, she does differ with Stevens over whether Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, noting that “one of my few disagreements with Stevens is that she accepts this argument uncritically, which leads her to some questionable conclusions.” The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which maintains Monticello, believes that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is fact, supported by DNA and extensive circumstantial evidence. Jefferson was a widower during the entire time the relationship with Hemings is thought to have taken place, and Hemings was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister, both having the same father. Some visitors to the mansion noted the resemblance between some of the young slaves and the master of Monticello.

That the Hemings relationship was almost certainly factual, and that Jefferson kept, bought, and sold slaves must therefore mean that Jefferson was a hypocrite. This conclusion is inescapable. On what basis, then, do Stevens and Yarbrough believe that his commitment to abolition was “unwavering”? All of Jefferson’s personal economy and happiness was wrapped up in the continuation, not the ending, of the slave system. It would be more accurate to describe his anti-slavery views as rhetorical, certainly when compared to those of Edward Coles.

We have monuments to Jefferson, revere him as a profound thinker and humanitarian, praise him as one of our most important founders. Only in recent decades has his failure and hypocrisy been thoroughly documented and widely discussed. So, how do present-day Americans rescue the author of the Declaration of Independence from himself? We cannot. We can understand and accept the truth and, at the same time, appreciate that Jefferson’s concepts of freedom and equality remain aspirational—the foundations of what America is and wants to be—and that as a country, moving always forward, we must aspire to implement these unprecedented and truly revolutionary ideas.

Daniel Mallock

Cleveland, Ohio

Jean M. Yarbrough replies:

The views Mr. Mallock expresses here are nothing new; in fact, they merely parrot the received wisdom on l’affaire Hemings. Mallock uncritically accepts the prevailing view that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings. I am agnostic. I have never ruled out the possibility, but I’ve always insisted that the DNA evidence is inconclusive. Someday, as our knowledge in this area grows, we may get a more definitive answer. Until then, I think it important to defend Jefferson’s honor. He has not been proven guilty, even though we’ve had several narratives aimed at making the story more attractive. 

Perhaps Mr. Mallock did not read my review to the end. I brought up Lincoln’s criticisms of Jefferson’s “diffusion” strategy for ending slavery and emphasized the compelling arguments offered by the most far-seeing of his younger admirers. It is possible to criticize Jefferson’s proposals without calling into question his lifelong, but ineffective, opposition to slavery.