Paul and the Person

Reframing Paul's Anthropology

Susan Grove Eastman

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780802868961
• eBook ISBN: 9781467448390
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

 
In this book Susan Grove Eastman presents a fresh and innovative exploration of Paul's participatory theology in conversation with both ancient and contemporary conceptions of the self. Juxtaposing Paul, ancient philosophers, and modern theorists of the person, Eastman opens up a conversation that illuminates Paul's thought in new ways and brings his voice into current debates about personhood.

PART ONE

A Three-Way Conversation

CHAPTER ONE

The Way to Freedom

Epictetus on the Person

I want to be the purple, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful. Why then do you say to me, “Be like the majority of people”? If I do that, how shall I any longer be the purple?

—Epictetus, Discourses

Consider the following excerpt from an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “Lent: It’s Not Just for Catholics.”¹ The author, Arthur Brooks, begins with a celebration of nonconformist individualism and then claims, “A true individualist—a nonconformist to his or her own natural impulses—consciously accepts suffering for the benefit it brings.” The true nonconformist, that is, pushes against inner boundaries and fears, which ultimately boil down to the fear of death. Lent, it turns out, is the chance to embrace suffering and “stare down death” in such a way that suffering and pain are no longer experienced as such, but simply as opportunities for growth. According to Brooks, such pushing against one’s own fears and embracing suffering can happen through any number of practices, from Lent to Buddhist contemplation of corpses. The point is the inner independence thus gained:

But the spirit of these practices is open to everyone, religious or not. Think of it as a personal declaration of independence. The objective is not to cause yourself damage, but to accept the pain and fear that are a natural part of life, and to embrace them as a valuable source of lessons to learn and tests to pass.

So to all the nonconformists in business, politics and art: more power to you. But that’s child’s play. To say, “I am dust, and to dust I shall return”: Now that’s rebellion for grown-ups.²

Epictetus couldn’t have said it better. Facing death, training oneself in a stance of inner freedom and detachment, resisting and controlling impulses, treating the challenges of pain and potential sources of fear as opportunities for a kind of education that renarrates them as practice in character—such choices appear to be Stoic through and through. Indeed, in some ways this is a Stoic interpretation of a Christian practice, but it has been transferred from the framework of Christian theology and practice into the realm of American individualism.

In another sense, therefore, Brooks’s essay is neither Stoic nor Christian, but rather an instance of modern atomistic thinking. The tip-off is the little line, “the spirit of these practices is open to everyone, religious or not.” Such a claim is nonsensical from the perspective of Lent as a journey toward the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But the claim is also incoherent from a Stoic perspective. For the Stoics taught that getting one’s thinking right was completely tied to getting one’s understanding of the cosmos in line with God’s immanent guidance of the entire universe, in which social, natural, and divine realities are part of a continuum of being. Theirs was a practical natural theology, which funded the self-help advice they gave out so freely. To say that one could engage in practices of embracing suffering and death without a corresponding understanding of the order of the universe would be unintelligible to them. “The way things are” and “the way we should be” go hand in glove. In this sense Stoic thought is decidedly remote from a modern utilitarian individualism that says that everyone has “their personal truth” and is content with “whatever works,” without regard to any “objective” reality. Stoic thought is too unified and comprehensive to allow such personal relativism.³

I start out with this excerpt from a recent op-ed because it shows how much modern misconceptions of Stoic thought may pervade and distort common understandings of Christian practices. The practice of Lent is not an invitation to nonconformity and individualistic freedom; rather, it is a shared reflection on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ashes on the forehead and the solemn declaration “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” are not “staring down death” but a sharing in the death of Jesus. In the article, both Christian practice and Stoic ideas are unmoored from their respective worldviews and ways of life, rendering each incoherent.

So Brooks’s invitation to a “Stoic Lent” provides a cautionary tale, a warning of what not to do, as I begin to introduce different ways of construing the self, both past and present. My focus here is Epictetus, whose rich, sophisticated, and brilliant advice for a life of freedom and integrity can hardly be adequately traced in this short chapter. Epictetus, born around 55 CE, was at one time a slave of Epaphroditus, who himself was a freed slave in the household of Emperor Nero. Consequently, Epictetus experienced firsthand the vagaries and instabilities of life close to power. Allowed to study philosophy under the great Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, Epictetus eventually received his freedom and gained a reputation as a philosopher. When Domitian came to power and banished the philosophers from Rome late in the first century, Epictetus was among that number. He fled to Greece and set up a philosophical school in the relative obscurity of the Roman colony of Nicopolis, where he remained until his death in roughly 135. His student Flavius Arrian recorded his lectures and published them as the Discourses, along with a compendium of Epictetus’s thought called the Encheiridion.⁴

Among the many philosophers in Paul’s day, all of whom claimed to guide the seeker to a wise and happy life, I have chosen Epictetus for several reasons. First, the arm of his influence is long, reaching down to the present day. Origen praised Epictetus as “admired by ordinary people who have the urge to be benefited, and who perceive improvement from his words” (Against Celsus 6.2). Pascal said of Epictetus that he “understood the individual’s duty so well. I’m tempted to say he would deserve adoration, if he had also realized the individual’s powerlessness.”⁵ Descartes self-consciously embraced Stoic ideals and formulated maxims for life very like those of the Stoics, even though his cosmology differed significantly from that of Epictetus. In the eighteenth century, Anglican bishop Joseph Butler credited Epictetus with providing a basis for morality without requiring revelation, through the idea of an inborn sense of right and wrong: “We naturally and unavoidably approve some actions, under the peculiar view of their being virtuous and of good desert; and disapprove of others.”⁶ Praised by Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, the philosopher continues to appear in contemporary culture in a variety of ways. James Stockdale, an American pilot who spent over seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, subsequently wrote a book about Epictetus as the resource that kept him going during that time. Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full features a protagonist who is deeply influenced by Epictetus.⁷ A perusal of Epictetus’s works quickly demonstrates his enduring appeal; at times he seems strikingly contemporary in his astute observations concerning human relationships and society.

Second, no other Hellenistic philosopher has so frequently been associated with Paul himself. This association has a long lineage; there are three extant adaptations of Epictetus’s Encheiridion for use by Christian monks, dating back to at least the tenth century.⁸ In one instance, a Christian adaptation of the Encheiridion substitutes the name of Paul for that of Socrates.⁹ Given such precedents, perhaps it is understandable that the great scholar of Epictetus, A. A. Long, simply claims without comment that Stoic ideas appear frequently in Paul’s letters.¹⁰ As noted in the introduction, Troels Engberg-Pedersen has argued strongly and provocatively that Stoic ethics provide historical corollaries and compelling access to Paul’s thought for contemporary readers, whom he calls “we moderns.”¹¹ Whether Engberg-Pedersen is correct in this assessment is a matter for further discussion; in my view, as will become clear later, there are ground-level differences between Paul’s view of the world and that of Epictetus, and these cosmological differences cannot be set aside in a quest for a common ethics, let alone a shared notion of the person.¹² Nonetheless, juxtaposing Epictetus, Paul, and modern theories of the self provides a way to sharpen understanding of Paul’s theology and of what is at stake in his peculiar and puzzling anthropology.

Third, Epictetus has a particularly supple, richly developed discussion of aspects of human identity and flourishing, including agency, self-perception, rationality, embodiment, and social relations, which is distinctively amenable to exploring the notion of the person.¹³ Among the Stoics, Epictetus comes closest to contemporary ideas of persons as autonomous, self-contained individuals, although his underlying cosmology subverts the similarities. Although he had no word that translates “person” (nor did Paul), it would appear that Epictetus had a working model of what it means to be a human being.

Whether in fact Epictetus had a theory of the self, however, is a debated topic. A lot depends on how both “theory” and “self” are defined. Does Epictetus have to have an abstract and developed concept of the self in order to have a working understanding of what it means to be a person? And does there have to be a discrete, autonomous, freestanding, and bounded individual for there to be a “self”? Or can there be a person existing on a continuum of being and interaction with continuous give-and-take between what’s “internal” and what’s “external”? And which of these pictures more accurately fits Epictetus’s teachings? Among modern classicists, A. A. Long sees in Epictetus the harbingers of individual identity, autonomy, and free will; Christopher Gill disagrees and emphasizes instead continuity with Greek philosophical concepts of the person as communally constructed.¹⁴ Both scholars consider the points of contact between Epictetus and contemporary theories of the self, but they differ as to which contemporary theories provide the best analogues: Long assumes a Cartesian picture of the self and sees in Epictetus the precursors of individualistic notions of free will, whereas Gill sees intriguing analogies with more recent theories of the person as embodied and socially embedded. This debate has affinities with distinctions between the body as “self-relation” and as “other-relation,” which I have proposed as a heuristic framework for this investigation: both are to be found in the copious and compelling advice that Epictetus gave to his followers.

Individualism: The Self as Self-Relation

Like other Hellenistic philosophers, Epictetus taught above all the way to a happy life, which for him meant inner freedom from compulsion and living in harmony with the divine order of the cosmos. His teaching thus emphasizes ad infinitum the principles of self-understanding that ground such freedom and harmony. First and most important is the distinction between what is under our control and what is not. His Encheiridion begins as follows: “Some things are under our control [eph’ hēmin], while others are not under our control [ouk eph’ hēmin]. Under our control are conception, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything that is our own doing; not under our control are our body [to sōma], our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything that is not our own doing” (Ench. 1).

What is in our power as human beings, says Epictetus, is simply this: conception, and the way we evaluate all the data of consciousness, whether that be events that happen to us or even thoughts that arise in us.¹⁵ This data is named collectively by the term phantasia, usually translated “impressions” or “representations.”¹⁶ The latter translation conveys the idea that what concerns Epictetus is the way we represent events to ourselves—the way we narrate them and evaluate them in relationship to what truly concerns us. And it turns out that what truly concerns us or, in Stoic terms, “belongs to us” (what is proper to who and what we are as rational human beings) is very limited indeed. It is the capacity to accept, and thereby “to choose,” to live in harmony with the way things are and to dismiss everything else as irrelevant to our well-being. What is in our power therefore includes (1) our choice of attitudes and consequent actions that are true to who we are and (2) our refusal to become subject to passions or false understandings of events. These attitudes are “internals”; everything else, including our body, is “external.”

The first book of Epictetus’s discourses expounds on the same theme of what is and is not in our power: “Among the arts and faculties [dynameis] in general you will find none that is self-contemplative [theōrētikēn], and therefore none that is either self-approving or self-disapproving” (Disc. 1.1.1).¹⁷ In fact, only one faculty can tell us what to do in any given situation:

That one which contemplates both itself and everything else. And what is this? The reasoning faculty [hē dynamis hē logikē]; for this is the only one we have inherited which will take knowledge both of itself—what it is, and of what it is capable, and how valuable a gift it is to us—and likewise of all the other faculties. For what else is it that tells us gold is beautiful? For the gold itself does not tell us. Clearly it is the faculty which makes use of external impressions [phantasiais]. . . .

As was fitting, therefore, the gods have put under our control only the most excellent faculty of all and that which dominates the rest, namely, the power to make correct use of external impressions, but all the rest...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by John M. G. Barclay
• Preface
• Introduction: The Puzzle of Pauline Anthropology
• Part One: A Three-Way Conversation
• Part Two: Participation and the Self
• Conclusion: Pushing the Reset Button on Paul’s Anthropology
• Works Cited
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources