The Lowering of Standards
It is a peculiar thing to watch an idea gain currency precisely at the moment when it seems least worthy. In recent years, Stoicism has begun to appeal to a new generation of Christian men who find in Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus a kind of bracing wisdom, virtues articulated cleanly, resilience taught without sentimentality, a framework for enduring without flinching. These men are not wrong to see in the Stoics something real. But they are deeply mistaken to suppose that what the Stoics offer can substitute for what the Apostles proclaim.
The concern is not that Christians read Marcus Aurelius. It is that some read him as though he were an alternative to Peter or Paul.
The Business of Building Myths
We live in an age of narrative entrepreneurship, and Ryan Holiday has proven himself a master of the form. His work connecting Stoic philosophy to Christian wisdom operates with a kind of careful equilibrium, he does not claim that Jesus was a Stoic, precisely, but rather that the Stoics anticipated certain truths that Jesus would later teach. In his recent Christmas material, he has drawn explicit parallels between Stoic virtue and Christian discipleship, and millions of followers have received the message: here is an ancient tradition that speaks to the same deep human needs that Christianity addresses.
The problem is not that the parallels are entirely false. It is that they are partially true in precisely the way that counterfeit currency is “like” genuine money, similar enough to deceive the careless, different enough in every material way to fail when truly tested.
But before we examine the gap, we must first look at a more fundamental problem: the myths themselves.
The Man Behind the Marble
Marcus Aurelius occupies a peculiar place in modern imagination. We know him through two lenses: the Meditations, a series of private reflections written for himself, and a romantic historiography that has him standing nobly on the frontier, enduring hardship through reason alone. The reality is far stranger and far more instructive.
In the year 175 AD, the most powerful man on earth was a wreck. The physician Galen, Marcus’s personal doctor, recorded something Rome’s celebrants prefer to forget: that the Emperor’s morning ritual involved swallowing a thick black syrup, theriac, a complex medicine containing opium, before he could stand. Without that daily dose, his chest seized, his blood came up, his hands trembled. He was fifty years old and dying by inches. The Meditations we revere were written by a man who depended on medication to keep breathing as he faced the Antonine plague, which killed two thousand people daily in Rome, and the Germanic invasions at the Danube frontier.
This is not a detail to mock him with. It is essential context. When Marcus wrote that “death smiles at us all,” he was not waxing poetic. He was watching soldiers drown in their own blood. When he wrote that pain “is neither unbearable nor everlasting,” he was gritting his teeth through chest pain that made respiration a labor. The Meditations is not a philosophical treatise calmly reasoned by a serene mind. It is the record of a man using discipline and rationality as a psychological shield against despair, a coping mechanism, and an admirable one, but a coping mechanism nonetheless.
To learn from this is legitimate. To worship it as the apex of human wisdom is to mistake survival for transcendence.
The Slave and His Master
The story of Epictetus carries a different kind of instruction. We know him as a Stoic philosopher of remarkable eloquence; we know also that he spent his life enslaved to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Emperor Nero. This is not a coincidence worth glossing over.
Epaphroditus held one of the highest offices in the imperial bureaucracy. More importantly, he served Nero, a man whose reign defined depravity for generations of Romans. It was under Nero that the first systematic persecution of Christians unfolded. When the Great Fire consumed Rome in 64 AD, Nero required a scapegoat. The Christians, a small and unpopular sect, fit the role perfectly. What followed was not a minor incident in urban administration. Tacitus records that Christians were arrested en masse, tortured, and executed with elaborate cruelty, crucified, thrown to wild beasts, burned alive as human torches while crowds watched. Among the dead were the Apostles Peter and Paul, martyred for their refusal to deny Christ.
Epictetus, enslaved in this same household, under this same tyrant’s command, taught a philosophy of freedom. “No one is master of another’s moral character,” he would tell his students. “In this alone lies good and evil.“
The statement is profound. It is also, for a man living in chains under a tyrant who was murdering Christians, a partial truth offered under duress. A slave of Nero’s secretary could hardly proclaim that external things were truly evil, or that the body and its sufferings were ultimately irrelevant. He lived the opposite reality every day. That he managed to teach at all is a testament to Stoic resilience. But resilience under tyranny is not the same as victory over it.
The Apostle Paul, writing from that same era, wrote something different: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” This is not the language of detachment. It is the language of union, of death and resurrection, of identity transformed not by discipline alone but by grace.
The Fundamental Divide
To understand why Christians should not lower their standards to embrace Stoicism, one must grasp that these are not two slightly different paths up the same mountain. They are fundamentally different mountains, pointing in fundamentally different directions.
Stoicism is, in its essence, a works-based religion focused entirely on temporal goods. The Stoic seeks virtue through discipline of the will. He achieves peace by controlling his judgments and accepting what comes as part of the rational order of the cosmos. He does this knowing that death ends all; there is no afterlife, no resurrection, no God who loves him personally. There is only the cosmos, impersonal and eternal, operating according to an impersonal logos, reason itself, indifferent to human flourishing or suffering.
Christianity, by contrast, rests entirely on grace. It teaches that man is by nature sinful, inadequate to save himself, incapable through his own effort of achieving righteousness. It teaches that God, personal and loving, entered history in Jesus Christ, died, and rose again, offering eternal life as a gift to those who believe. The Apostle Paul was explicit about this: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” The Church condemned as heresy the view that man could perfect himself through his own effort, the position known as Pelagianism.
Why does this matter? Because it means that a Christian who adopts Stoicism as his primary framework for holiness has, whether he realizes it or not, rejected the very foundation of his faith. He has chosen to rely on his own reason and discipline rather than on God’s grace. He has accepted the sufficiency of temporal virtue rather than eternal transformation. He has exchanged a personal God for an impersonal cosmos.
The writer and social critic Theodore Dalrymple has observed that “the fragility of civilization is one of the great lessons of the twentieth century.” But there is a deeper fragility: the fragility of the human soul when it rests on its own strength alone. The Stoics knew this truth, which is why they counseled acceptance rather than hope. What they did not know, what they could not know without revelation, is that the soul need not rest on its own strength. It can rest on the strength of God, which is made perfect in weakness.
Where the Stoics Fall Short
This is not to say the Stoics were wrong about everything. They were not. They saw truly that virtue matters. They saw truly that we do not control externals and must master our judgments about them. They saw truly that courage and justice and wisdom are worthy pursuits. When Paul wrote to the Philippians, “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things,” he was not contradicting the Stoic insight. He was elevating it.
But Paul’s very next words reveal the difference: “and the God of peace shall be with you.” The Stoic can achieve some semblance of peace through discipline. The Christian receives peace as a gift. The Stoic can train himself to be virtuous. The Christian can ask God to make him virtuous, trusting that the Spirit will work in him “both to will and to do of his good pleasure.“
The Apostle Peter, writing to Christians facing persecution under Nero, the very tyrant whose secretary enslaved Epictetus, did not counsel detachment from their suffering. He counseled endurance rooted in hope: “Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.” This is not resignation. This is resurrection hope.
The Cost of Lowering Standards
To turn young men toward Marcus Aurelius rather than toward Paul is not a harmless choice. It is a choice with spiritual consequences.
The Stoic who has trained himself through reason and will to accept his suffering may endure without complaining. But he will endure alone. He will have no one to cry out to, no one who has borne his suffering with him, no promise that his pain will be redeemed or transformed or given meaning beyond itself. He will have only himself, his discipline, his judgment, his rational fortress against the chaos. When that fortress cracks, as human fortresses do, there is nothing behind it.
The Christian has more. He has a Savior who suffered. He has a Father who grieves with him. He has the promise that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” He has the resurrection. He has the communion of saints. He has something that Stoicism, despite all its insights, can never offer: he has not only the tools to survive but the assurance that his survival has meaning because it is bound up with the redemptive purpose of God.
The young men of our age are right to hunger for seriousness, for discipline, for virtue taught without apology. The churches have often failed them here. But the answer is not to seek that seriousness from pagan philosophy. The answer is to recover it from the Apostles, who knew discipline and virtue and seriousness as deeply as any Stoic, but rooted in something more than reason. Rooted in love. Rooted in grace. Rooted in the living God.
A Better Way
The Apostle James wrote to suffering Christians: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” This is not Stoic detachment. This is not grim resignation. This is joy in the midst of testing, because the suffering is not meaningless; it is working something in us. It is making us like Christ.
Paul wrote: “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church.” The Stoic could never write this. His virtue is his own achievement, his suffering his own private endurance. But the Christian suffers in union with Christ and for the sake of others. His pain is woven into the larger narrative of redemption.
This is a higher standard, not a lower one. It demands more of us, not less. But it offers what the Stoics could not: it offers us a God who knows our name, who has borne our suffering, who promises not only endurance but transformation, not only survival but eternal life.
The concern is not that Christian men read widely or think carefully. The concern is that we surrender the deposit of faith for something lesser, however noble its garments. Ryan Holiday’s synthesis is intellectually respectable and seductive. But seduction toward half-truth is the most dangerous form of deception. It offers just enough of what we hunger for that we might never notice what we have lost.
We have been given the Apostles. We have been given men who knew suffering more deeply than Marcus Aurelius ever could, because they suffered for a cause greater than their own virtue. We have been given men who offer not the peace of rational detachment but the peace that surpasses understanding. We have been given men who point us not toward stoic endurance but toward resurrection.
The lowering of standards always begins with the most reasonable-sounding arguments. This is just one more tool for the toolbox. This is just philosophy; it need not conflict with faith. This author did not intend to undermine Christianity. But the history of the Church is the history of steady erosion, one compromise at a time, one lower standard replacing a higher one, until we wake to find ourselves shaped by the world rather than transformed by grace.
It is not unkind to say clearly: the Stoics were wrong about what matters most. And it is not sectarian to insist that our young men be formed by apostles, not by philosophers, by revelation rather than reason alone, by grace rather than works, by the living God rather than an impersonal cosmos.
“As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.“
The Apostle Paul wrote those words. He knew what he was guarding against. So should we.
Pastor Thomas Irvin
George County Baptist Church
Lucedale, Mississippi
