Stoicism Is Insufficient
The Stoic’s highest good is virtue and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Sounds deep doesn’t it? But when the storm of a pandemic, subsequent failed career transition, and straining personal relationships came along with lock downs, political strife, and riots in the streets, I began to see that I had bigger questions for philosophy.
While personal responsibility, self discipline, and that ever attractive stoic calm were what originally attracted to Stoicism, new questions emerged. What can I do to preserve the Republic? What can I do to move humanity forward? Who can go beyond virtue and happiness to discover infinite purpose and peace?
The Stoics were silent on these questions. Seneca's sacrifice at Nero’s feet didn’t restore the Republic. Nor did any of his prose on tragedies ever birth democracy in the darkness of an empire. Epictetus freed himself from slavery but had nothing to say on the matter of ending the inhumane institution. And after spending countless hours reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I felt no more at peace and still had no greater purpose.
I needed philosophies bigger than myself.
A Republic If You Can Keep It
I began to research the lives of Cato the Younger and Marcus Tullius Cicero. Republicans in the most classical sense of the word. They inspired George Washington and Benjamin Franklin (among many others) to forge a republic and not simply lay down their lives but spend their days to the tune of decades in the greatest sacrifice making a nation of sovereign citizens.
Our nations are not things beyond our input though they may be mostly out of our control. I was reminded of a cold morning at Valley Forge. My parents took me there when I was ten years old. As we walked the dewy grounds, I stopped among a battery of cannons and began to weep. It was my earliest realization that strangers stood in front of these cannons so I could be free. It felt wrong, as it would feel wrong now, to not consider the extravagant inheritance that has been bestowed on us with this Republic. And I admit I was a derelict in my citizenship before I dared disciplined myself in the way of Republicanism.
Progressivism and Fulfilling the Law
The Roman Republic fell while attempting to grant citizenship to foreigners en masse and hand out free grain to its people. All while a provincial governor named Julius Caesar knew his political opponents would unfairly use Rome’s aging legal system to endebt and destroy him. The fall of the Republic sounds all too familiar. Caesar before his assassination would reform the law and grant citizenship to many while moderating the grain distribution to better serve the people of Rome. Then in our Republic, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt would both have attempts on their life for their efforts to fulfill the law by ending slavery and advocating for the poor. The former would lose his life for it. The latter only asked his would-be assassin, “Why did you do it?”
Stoicism never inspired me to make any great sacrifice. Stoicism never inspired me to feed the hungry, free those in slavery, or seek equality for all. As a Mexican American, I grew up in a world where my mothers greatest desire was for me to hide my ethnic heritage as it was a proven liability to her and her parents for opportunity in this country. She gave me a name that she said would look good on a resume but all it ended up being was a front row ticket to witness the ethnophobia our country has for Hispanics. I wanted heroes who not only freed themselves from oppression, I wanted heroes who would lay down their life for their countrymen regardless of their culture or the color of their skin. I knew I needed discipline in what it took to be a progressive to not only make just laws, but fulfill them.
The Christian Mystics
Did any of these stoics ever love anyone? Did anyone ever love them? Sure there are notes from Epictetus about how love “is only in the power of the wise”. But the stoic philosophy returns void on the endurance of the everyman, the feminine power of wisdom, and the invitation in love to do greater things.
I love my wife as an equal and a partner and a woman of wisdom and strength. I love my son in a way only a father can and have hopes and dreams only parents know. I love my Lord, Jesus Christ because he was the first person who ever gave me an inheritance, a trust fund, that I’ve been able to take the world over and be accepted, welcomed, forgiven, and loved unlike any other.
I needed the meditations of Ignatius of Loyola after a cannon ball ricocheted into his leg, ending his career. I needed that progress of healing and faith and fervor and strength. When my own leg was injured and I was unsure I would ever walk again, it was the Ignatian Meditations that brought me purpose and peace. He wasn’t an emperor, statesman, or king, but another man like me.
I needed the writings of Teresa of Avila because Wisdom, Sabiduria in Spanish, is feminine at its core. And while I have come to see how the best of us hold and hone the masculine and feminine powers, a school of philosophy so devoid of women is one impoverished of wisdom, the stoics included. As a married man I can assure you there is no path in stoicism to understanding a woman. No man can teach a man the depths of a woman's soul. For us to be whole, we must also digest wisdom in the ways only women can produce.
I needed the mysticism of the disciples of Jesus. It seems somehow in the English world we forget “disciple” means to be a disciplined one. But the followers of Jesus would be rejected even by the Socratics for the way they formed their questions, let alone their ridiculous answers. Yet somehow, some way, they would fulfill the haunting line from John’s Gospel:
“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”
The Stoics believe everything outside of one's person is outside of their control. And while I can appreciate the virtues in stoicism of personal responsibility, the sacrifices for me come up short and selfish. I want to be a citizen who contributes to his country and stewards the gift of a Republic for generations to come. I want to be a man who is active in the pursuit of progress and willing to sacrifice himself for his fellow countrymen, regardless of gender, color, and culture. I want to be in love, not enslaved by desire, but enamored and in service to the divine and the infinite in every person.
If you would dare make your life about these greater things then Stoicism is insufficient but I am certain there is even more.
This essay is the second entry in a series of works for Write of Passage. I already could not say enough good things about this cohort based course. For your insightful feedback on this essay, thank you Alan Hibbard, Oscar Obregon, Bryan Liu, Elizabeth Edwards, Grace Sydney Smith, and Vicky Zhao. Special thank you to Chris Wong for your editors eye on my first draft and Sandra Yvonne for the critiques and conversations that helped shape this piece.