Kevin Vost - The Porch and the Cross: Stoic Wisdom

THE PORCH AND THE CROSS

Kevin Vost

THE PORCH

AND THE CROSS

Ancient Stoic Wisdom

for Modern Christian Living

Foreword by

KENNETH J. HOWELL

Preface by

JARED ZIMMERER

First published in the USA by Angelico Press

Kevin Vost 2016

Foreword Kenneth J. Howell 2016

Preface Jared Zimmerer 2016

All rights reserved: No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission

For information, address: Angelico Press, Ltd.

4709 Briar Knoll Dr. Kettering, OH 45429

www.angelicopress.com

ISBN 978-1-62138-170-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-62138-171-6 (eBook)

NIHIL OBSTAT:

Reverend John P. Cush, S.T.L.

Diocesan Censor

IMPRIMATUR:

Most Reverend

Nicholas Di Marzio, Ph.D., D.D.

Bishop of Brooklyn

Brooklyn, New York, December 5 , 2015

Cover image: James Tissot (French, 18361902 )

Gentiles Ask to See Jesus , Brooklyn Museum,

Purchased by public subscription, 00.159.202

Cover design: Michael Schrauzer

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sister Matthew Marie Cummings, O.P., and Sister Elizabeth Anne Allen, O.P., for introducing me to Angelico Press when I was provided the opportunity to review and endorse their edited volume, Behold the Heritage: Foundations of Education in the Dominican Tradition (Angelico Press, 2012). Many thanks to Angelicos publisher, John Riess, for saying yes to this book idea on a topic perhaps a bit unusual for a modern Catholic publisher. Thanks as well to my editor, Sam Wigatow, and to all the Angelico staff who helped bring this book to print.

Thanks are due as well to Dr. Kenneth Howell and Jared Zimmerer for the thoughtful foreword and preface they provided. Thanks as always to my friend and sometimes co-author Shane Kapler, who labored on his complementary tome, The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Seven Core Beliefs of Catholics (Angelico, 2016), and provided support, advice, and encouragement while I plugged away on this one.

I would also like to express gratitude to Patrick Ussher, a Ph.D. student at the University of Exeter in England with a great knowledge and passion for the practical wisdom of the Stoics, the editor of the book Stoicism Today: Selected Writings (CreateSpace, 2014), and manager of the Stoicism Today website blog, for posting on their site a chapter I had written on the Stoics from a previous book on my reversion story, and for allowing me to mention that this book was forthcoming.

Last and never least, Id like to thank my wife Kathy for all that she did and endured like a Stoic over those many months in which my nose was stuck inside old books while my fingers clicked noisily away at the keyboard. (I think old Epictetus himself would have been proud of her.)

Foreword

THERE IS A WIDESPREAD NOTION today that science and/or philosophy are in conflict with religion, specifically the Christian religion, a notion that is rarely questioned in the popular media. When I taught classes on science and religion in two public universities over the years, I regularly encountered students who had bought into this notion. Why? Part of the answer is historical. The idea that there is a conflict between science and religion began in earnest in the Enlightenment of the 18th century but it became an unquestioned fact by the opening decades of the 20th century. Even so brilliant a thinker as Bertrand Russell naively bought into the warfare narrative. So, it is not surprising that such would be the common belief among students.

If we look at science, or more broadly human reason, from a wider historical perspective, we discover some astounding facts. Prior to the 17th century, there were very few hints of any potential conflict between human reason and the Christian faith. In fact, in the Middle Ages, faith and reason were seen as complementary ways of arriving at truth. Though this belief was at times tested, most medieval thinkers embraced the idea of compatibility. This did not mean, however, that faith and reason were believed to be the same thing, or to teach the same truths. These thinkers made clear distinctions. What it did mean was that the Christian mind did not reject truths of reason because they were not specifically religious. The attitude in the Middle Ages had in fact been adopted centuries earlier by Christian thinkers who were steeped in the philosophical traditions of the ancient Greeks. From Justin Martyr in the second century to Augustine in the fifth and beyond, the early Christian thinkers embraced all that was true and good in pagan philosophy. One of the most fruitful examples of this rapprochement occurred in the case of Stoic philosophy.

Kevin Vost has chosen to focus on the ancient Stoic philosophers. He makes it abundantly clear that the Stoics drew on and developed their own natural reason to such a degree that they discovered many moral truths without the aid of the Christian religion. The choice to focus on the ancient Stoics is not an arbitrary one, for the Stoics were philosophers as the ancients conceived philosophy to be. Modern academic philosophy has become dry and sterile in many of its compartments. The ancients in general conceived of philosophy as a way of life, as a reflective guide to living well (bene vivendi). This included the study of nature, or what we call science today, as well as logic and ethics.

The Stoics have much wisdom to teach us moderns. This fact can be seen in the revival and application of Stoic wisdom in certain circles of modern psychotherapy. Like the modern therapist, the Stoics concentrated on the question of what it meant to live well. One foundational belief of the Stoics was the idea that for human beings to live well they must live in accord with their own nature and the nature of the world around them. This can be seen in one of Vosts protagonists, the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

He who does not know what the cosmos is does not know where he is. He who does not know from what the cosmos has sprung does not know who he is nor what the cosmos is. He who lacks one of these does not know where he has sprung from. Who then seems to be the one who flees or pursues the praise of those who make noise, who know neither where they are nor who they are.

(Meditations , book 7 , no. 52)

The idea that human happiness was tied to the nature of things in the universe was a common assumption of most of ancient philosophy, but it has been largely rejected or neglected in the modern world. Since the time of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, most people think of morals as subjective opinions that have nothing to do with nature. One doesnt have to cite examples of how people today imagine that what they think in their heads is more real or true than the objective truths around them in the wider world and imprinted in their own bodies.

Careful engagement with the Stoics can show us that human reason needs to be guided by objective facts and realities. And this is what those early Christian thinkers realized. It is also what allowed them to adopt and adapt those natural truths of reason in the service of their Christian faith. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this act of putting human reason at the service of faith was what gave birth to the universities in the Middle Ages. The University of Paris in the 12th century, for example, grew out of three monasteries where ancient Greek learning was combined with Christian theology. The truths of natural reason and the truths revealed by God in the Christian faith are not the same truths, but they are compatible with one another.