Suffering: Stoicism V. Christianity (Marcus Aurelius and the Apostolic Fathers)
A perennial question arises in this world east of Eden, the question of human suffering. Countless thinkers have wrestled with this, capturing what wisdom they gained in works now considered classics. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius articulates the Stoic attitude, which centers around acceptance, endurance, self-discipline, and the pursuit of virtue no matter what. However, Christianity flipped this sensible worldview on its head through the gospel that God became man, suffered crucifixion, and rose from the dead. Christ’s words and example placed the dilemma of suffering within the context of a relationship, empowering the heroic witness of individuals such as St. Ignatius and St. Polycarp. While Stoicism and Christianity both view suffering as a part of life to be borne with courage, the love of Christ Crucified fills the Christian outlook with unique joy and hope.
Common sense and personal experience attest to the inevitability of suffering. Marcus Aurelius makes this a basic premise in his reflections on a life fraught with near-constant suffering. Avoidance is impossible, so acceptance is the remaining alternative. The praiseworthy individual is “undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests.”[1] This disposition is possible through mental strength and self-discipline. He says, rather bluntly, that the body can withstand whatever the mind can: “Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.”[2] The mind disciplines the impulses of the body, so suffering becomes one more element among many in a person’s life.
Acceptance and endurance are not the only principles in the Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly asserts that suffering, however severe, does not interfere with the workings of the mind and the soul, so people remain capable of virtue regardless of this exterior circumstance. He says, “They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice?”[3] He echoes this point elsewhere: “No one can obstruct the operations of the mind. Nothing can get at them—not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse—nothing.”[4] Suffering, for Marcus Aurelius, is no excuse for a life of evil. An individual can be crushed by suffering, or use it as an excuse for weakness or vice, but this is a choice. The spirit can rise above such a temptation: “Either pain affects the body (which is the body’s problem) or it affects the soul. But the soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquility. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them.”[5] His treatment of suffering as “the body’s problem” is central to his point. For Marcus Aurelius, the meaningful life lies in discovering the good through philosophy and doing it; therefore, since suffering is a bodily experience, one must engage his will and do good regardless.
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations contain great wisdom regarding suffering, especially in his point about the power of the soul over the body. Christianity encompasses all that is true, including this wisdom, but the Christian treatment of suffering is on a qualitatively different level. The Church, in her creed, her wisdom, her saints, and her mission, walks in the footsteps of Christ her Head to the Cross and beyond. Suffering is an unavoidable part of life, but it is one that God willingly participated in through an act of radical love. The Christian can proclaim with St. Paul “the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’”[6] The appearance of such a statement in the Meditations is unthinkable; the only conceivable “victory” over suffering in the Stoic context is self-discipline. The charity through which the Son of God took on flesh is the same charity animating the Christian soul and filling all suffering with divine significance.
From the Protoevangelium on, the Scriptures tell the story of a Messiah who set his face towards Jerusalem.[7] To use Chesterton’s words, “from first to last the most definite fact is that [Christ] is going to die. . . . We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance in the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice.”[8] The Lord’s entire public ministry must be seen in light of its final act, that He would “suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”[9] The call to take up the Cross echoes from Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you,” to His words to Peter showing “by what death he was to glorify God,” after which He said, “Follow me.”[10] However, suffering does not get the final word. It was “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory,” and therefore, “we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”[11] God’s boundless love for humanity would not allow for them to be lost to a broken world. He saw fit to give an answer to suffering, precisely by making a way to glory through it. To Christ Crucified the believer can say, “You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”[12] The place of pain and, at best, patient endurance becomes a place of encounter with Love itself, the Word far surpassing the words even of the great Marcus Aurelius.[13]
The martyrs understood God’s response to suffering to its fullest extent. They had fallen in love with Jesus Christ, and so rejoiced in their sufferings as an opportunity for intimacy with Him. Such an attitude is not masochism, but rather extraordinary compassion enlivened by charity. The love that moved Our Lady, Mary Magdalene, and St. John to stay with Christ to the bitter end is the same love that saw the martyrs through fire and sword, a love “that moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.”[14] The expression of the Christian life finds fulfillment, like the law, in the command to love.[15]
The letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written on his way to martyrdom in Rome, reveal his understanding of the suffering he was about to undergo. He speaks of his hope “to have the good fortune to fight with wild beasts in Rome, so that by doing this I can be a real disciple.”[16] The perfection of discipleship is a recurring theme for the martyr; he goes so far as to say that “if we do not willingly die in union with his Passion, we do not have his life in us.”[17] Ignatius understands that “a servant is not greater than his master.”[18] The Christian cannot expect to walk an easier way to glory than Christ did, for the Way Himself “was worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to intercede for all before the Father.”[19]This is central to the Christian view of suffering, that Christ embraced His Cross before asking His disciples to take up theirs. Ignatius emphasizes this point, speaking of the implications for his own death if Christ did not die: “if, as some atheists (I mean unbelievers) say, his suffering was a sham . . . why, then, am I a prisoner? Why do I want to fight with wild beasts? In this case I shall die to no purpose. Yes, and I am maligning the Lord too!”[20] However, Christ truly died, a fact Ignatius stakes his own life upon. Christ’s Passion infuses the sufferings of His followers with charity, and a charity with redemptive power. Ignatius’ love for the Lord radiates through his meditations on his upcoming torture: “Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—only let me get to Jesus Christ! . . . Let me imitate the Passion of my God.”[21] He asks his reader elsewhere, “Grant me no more than to be a sacrifice for God while there is an altar at hand.”[22] Ignatius sees in these tortures what only a Christian can: a sacrifice in imitation of the Redeeming Sacrifice, offered once and for all by Christ the great high priest.[23]
Similar themes arise in the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, as told by Christian eyewitnesses. The anonymous author begins by praising the martyrs, the company of whom Polycarp was soon to join:
For who would not admire their nobility and patient endurance and love of their Master? . . . [They] achieved such heroism
that not one of them uttered a cry or a groan, thus showing all of us that at the very hour of their tortures the most noble
martyrs of Christ were no longer in the flesh, but rather that the Lord stood by them and conversed with them. And giving
themselves over to the grace of Christ they despised the tortures of the world, purchasing for themselves in the space of one
hour the life eternal.[24]
The visible unity of the martyrs with the Lord attests to their love for Him, giving their death the distinction of sacrifice rather than execution. The author continues, noting the many parallels between the death of Polycarp and that of Christ, intended so “the Lord might show once again a martyrdom conformable to the gospel.”[25] The prayer of Polycarp shows this conformity to the Gospel most clearly: “I bless thee, because thou hast deemed me worthy of this day and hour, to take my part in the number of the martyrs, in the cup of thy Christ, for ‘resurrection to eternal life’ of soul and body in the immortality of the Holy Spirit; among whom may I be received in thy presence this day as a rich and acceptable sacrifice.”[26] In Polycarp’s “hour,” like in Christ’s, he drank the cup prepared by the Father, and laid his life down in order to take it up again.[27]As was true for Ignatius, Polycarp’s love for Christ moved him to recognize the Cross in his impending death, and embrace it as God’s will and an opportunity for intimacy with Him.
While Stoicism and Christianity both view suffering as a part of life to be borne with courage, the love of Christ Crucified fills the Christian outlook with unique joy and hope. Marcus Aurelius advocates for acceptance and endurance in his Meditations, emphasizing that the soul remains unimpaired in its pursuit of virtue. The heroic martyrdoms of Sts. Ignatius and Polycarp, however, indicate a qualitatively different conception of suffering. These great saints were aflame with the love of Jesus Christ and filled with the power of the Gospel. The Son of God entered the story of human suffering, and by His Passion and Resurrection made it redemptive. He also made it relational through the call to follow Him, so an experience of humiliation and agony can become an experience of intimacy through supernatural grace. Such grace elevates the universally human condition of suffering, a dilemma with no other satisfactory response.
[1] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 29.
[2] Ibid., 132.
[3] Ibid., 112.
[4] Ibid., 109.
[5] Ibid., 106.
[6] 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 (RSVCE).
[7] Cf. Genesis 3:15, Luke 9:51.
[8] G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York: Image Books, 1955), 210-11.
[9] Matthew 16:21.
[10] Matthew 16:24, Matthew 5:11, John 21:19.
[11] Luke 24:26, Romans 6:5.
[12] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (Boston: Mariner Books, 1984), 308.
[13] Cf. 1 John 4:8, John 1:1.
[14] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Francis Cary. (London: The Colonial Press, 1901), 423.
[15] Galatians 5:14 (RSVCE).
[16] Ignatius, “To the Ephesians” in Early Christian Fathers, trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 88.
[17] Ignatius, “To the Magnesians” in Early Christian Fathers, trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 95.
[18] John 13:16.
[19] Cf. John 14:6; Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 56.
[20] Ignatius, “To the Trallians” in Early Christian Fathers, trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 100.
[21] Ignatius, “To the Romans” in Early Christian Fathers, trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 105.
[22] Ibid., 103.
[23] Cf. Hebrews 4:15 (RSVCE).
[24] “The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp” in Early Christian Fathers, trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 149-50.
[25] Ibid., 149.
[26] Ibid., 154.
[27] Cf. Matthew 26:45, John 18:11, John 10:17.
