It is finished! Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind (Part 1)

Pre-Print Graphic. The WUNT2 monograph

is forthcoming in June 2020

After 15+ years of off-and-on research time, trying to find gaps in a hectic teaching schedule, two sabbaticals, and every summer and winter break spent writing, and many nights of solitude typing away and increasing my caffeine tolerance, finally I can announce: "It is finished!" (John 19:30). By God's grace, I submitted the manuscript Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind to Mohr Siebeck back in September 2019. With some back and forth with an excellent editorial and production team (thanks Tobias Stäbler and Jana Trispel!), my work with the corrections/editions plus indices is done. The book is in production and will likely be in print this coming April 2020. Many thanks to Megan Herrold, my research assistant, who help me edit the entire manuscript + indices. Words cannot express how much I owe to my doctoral supervisor Dr. Judy Gundry and second Doktorvater Dr. Seyoon Kim for their support and encouragement in seeing this book through to the end.
     The book's primary audience is for other scholars and doctoral students doing research on the moral traditions of early Christianity's Greco-Roman environment. It attempts to map the moral universe of the ancient Mediterranean world during the late Republic to early imperial period of Rome from which both Diaspora Judaism and early Christianity emerge. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (2017) calls this era "the Transitional Period" during which Stoicism and Platonism dominated the moral and intellectual environment of the Roman Empire. The intellectual culture during this era shifted from the traceable influence of Stoicism (i.e., the Middle Stoa and Neostoicism) in the 1st century B.C.E. towards the documented dominance of Middle or Imperial Platonism by the end of the 2nd century C.E. 
      This monograph contributes to the synoptic picture of Greco-Roman antiquity by defining the moral transformation systems of the Platonists and Stoics so that the historian can have a starting point for what constitutes Platonist doctrines and what constitutes Stoic ones, including the latter’s Neostoic innovations. In my study of Middle Platonism, I analyzed mainly the works of Plato, Plutarch, Alcinous, and Galen and for Stoicism, Zeno, Chrysippus, Musonius Rufus, Seneca, and Epictetus.
     Here I develop systemic models for a given philosophical school's teaching on emotional control, ethical action and habit, character formation, and the role of communities and the divine. These models demonstrate that the internal logic and interconnectedness between seemingly disparate moral topoi (or topics of ethical concern) which were shared between the major philosophical schools of this era find their coherence as distinct systems of moral transformation. This is the primary thesis that the monograph defends.
    Secondly, the book also functions as a type of handbook which gives a "big picture" of Platonism and Stoicism as systems of philosophy. The teachings of every philosopher are read in their contingent, historical particularity and for how they cohere with the overall tenets of a given philosophical school. This project thus develops independent models of contingency and coherence for each Greco-Roman philosophy of mind. The method has been applied by J. Christiaan Becker to Pauline theology (1980), and I have modified it for ancient philosophy of mind. Though, as Abraham Malherbe has argued, every philosopher should be examined independently in their own right (i.e., lex Maherbe), because every philosopher of a particular school (i.e., Stoicism and Platonism) is united in one's fidelity to the teachings of the founder (i.e., Zeno/Cleanthes/Chrysippus and Plato, respectively), we can also talk about 'systems' of a school based on the interpretation of the founder's texts and a coherence between different members of a given sect based on their fidelity to the founder.
    The relevance of the book for New Testament studies lies in its foundational role for a further research on how the Apostle Paul engaged, appropriated, and modified the moral traditions of his day to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ to Gentile audiences in terms which the latter could understand. If the moral traditions of the Greco-Roman world were dominated by Stoicism and Platonism, or rather, by the interactions between these two intellectual movements (i.e., the thesis of Troels Engberg-Pedersen and other contributors to From Stoicism to Platonism), then a systemic study of Stoicism and Platonism is needed in order to situate the moral exhortations of Paul to his Gentile churches within their Greco-Roman cultural environment. At heart, Paul was a missionary. He would know how to engage and modify the moral traditions of his day to explain better to his Gentile recipients the major tenets and distinctions of the gospel he preached. 
    In sum, a short epitome of the book's major contributions to both classical studies and New Testament research are listed as follows: 

1. The book argues and defends the thesis that moral transformation is one important and effective way to find internal coherence and interconnectedness between disparate moral topoi, a project that Johan Thom (2003) has called "mapping the moral universe" of Greco-Roman antiquity. 
2. It constructs models for the moral transformation systems of Stoicism and Platonism and therefore enables scholars to contextualize any study of specific moral topos from the broader perspective of an entire school of thought
3. The models differentiate for the reader areas of continuity and innovation between orthodox or early Stoicism and their latter Greco-Roman Neostoic heirs; the same has been done for distinguishing Plato's teachings and Middle Platonism
4. The types of interactions between Stoicism and Platonism have been mapped and organized in a way to help the interpreter detect Greco-Roman allusions in the New Testament and sets up possibilities for how the NT author engages, appropriates, and modifies the moral traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The concluding chapters argue for 6 interaction types between rival sects: eclecticism, refutation, competitive appropriation, irenic appropriation, concession, and common ethical usage. Paul and his Diaspora Jewish contemporaries may not have employed all of these interactions types in their engagement with Greco-Roman moral traditions but this taxonomy of interactions lays out the possible ways they have may have engaged and modified a common encyclopedia of knowledge intrinsic to their cultural environment. 

Below are screen shots of the Table of Contents. I plan on giving separate expanded blog posts for each of the major contributions described above. Stay tuned for further posts. MJL

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      ** Postscript: Originally I had hoped to publish the book way back in 2015/16. In fact, some book sellers like Amazon or Book Depository surprisingly list the monograph as having been published already. This is incorrect. The book's publication date is officially 2020. Nothing was released in 2015/16.

Competitive Acculturation, Part 2: Alcinous and the Stoics on Good Emotions

[Warning! going turbo nerd again:] Remember that in a previous post (long ago, in a time far far away...[here]) I cited Thiessen’s definition of competitive syncretism as: “Rivals in the marketplace in part resemble one another ... They have to 'imitate' one another in order to outdo one another in the imitation” (A Theory of Primitive Religion; p. 49). In this earlier post, I used Thiessen’s definition as a template and but jettisoned the problematic term ‘syncretism’ to give the category competitive acculturation. Here in this post, I would like to give an example of competitive acculturation from ancient philosophical discourse (a long overdue post).

   Here is a quotation from the Middle Platonist Alcinous in his handbook on Platonism entitled the Didaskalikos. Here he pokes fun at his rivals, the Stoics, on what constitutes the basis for human flourishing (εὐδαιμονία):

• Contemplation (θεωρία), then, is the activity of the mind when it intelligizes the intelligibles, but practice (πράξις) is the activity of the rational soul which happens through the body. The soul which contemplates the divine and the thoughts of the divine is said to be in a good state (εὐπαθεῖν), and this state of the soul is called ‘wisdom’ (φρόνησις), and this, one may say, is none other than assimilation to the divine. – Alcinous, Didask. 2.2 (= Whittaker 153.2–9; Eng. trans. follows Dillon, Alcinous, p. 4)

The key word that is the hinge text for competitive acculturation is εὐπαθεῖν. In the thematic context of  the passage: when are human beings at their best? (you can call it “living according to virtue” like the Stoics, or call it “assimiliation to the divine” as the Middle Platonists do), the Stoics and Platonists had contrasting views on the τέλος or end/goal of life. The Stoics believed if we extirpated harmful emotions completely, and are ruled only by rational good emotions called the εὐπάθειαι, then we can live life according to virtue and be fully human.

   According to the Stoics, the sage could experience some “good emotions” or “good affective states” called εὐπάθειαι – i.e., joy (χαρά), willfulness (βούλησις), and caution (εὐλάβεια) – which stood as the positive counterparts to the harmful the passions of the soul which threaten to derail human life and character, namely, pleasure, lust, fear and grief. That is, joy stood as the positive counterpart to pleasure, willfulness to lust/desire, and caution to fear, with no apparent equivalent εὐπάθος corresponding to grief (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.116; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. 4.12-14; note: Cicero translates εὐπάθειαι as constantiae or "stable states").

Roman copy (1st cent. AD) of a Hellenistic original (200 BC)
Head of Chrysippus, 2nd successor of the Stoa
Photo taken by Max Lee © 2010 British Museum

   So here is the punchline: in philosophical discourse, the Stoics own the language of the εὐπάθειαι. It would be impossible for the philosophically informed reader to miss the allusion then of Alcinous to the Stoic doctrine of the good emotions with his use of the word εὐπαθεῖν especially in the context of the discourse: what does it mean to flourish as a human being.

   Alcinous effectively says the Stoics are wrong. Good emotions are inadequate. We do not reach our potential until we participate and commune with the divine through the process of contemplation (θεωρία = how the mind sees the transcendent world and models its life after what it sees). Ethical practice (πράξις) is important but secondary to the contemplative life which provides a paradigm for moral living. If we see what beauty, goodness, and justice is in the transcendent Forms of Beauty, Goodness, and Justice, then we can shape our souls and govern society according to the beauty, goodness and justice we see.

   So the example or case for competitive acculturation works if one can demonstrate that:

1. a particular group (philosophical, political or religious) owns the terminology or language like the Stoics did for the terms εὐπάθειαι / εὐπάθος
2. a rival group uses the same language in a literary context that evokes the discourse of their competing interlocutors (in this case, what is the τέλος or end/goal of life? what is human flourishing?)
3. the rival group offers an alternative solution or thesis in contradistinction to the solution offered by the other group (Alcinous posits theoria as the key to human flourishing not the good emotions of the Stoics)
4. often times there is a double entendre or word play: “the good state” (εὐπαθεῖν) of a human being is not the Stoic good emotions (εὐπάθειαι) and extirpation of the passions but the Platonic mind’s assimilation to the divine. 

The question, then, is with Paul’s use of such charged words as εὐαγγέλιον (gospel), εἰρήνη (peace), κύριος (Lord), σωτήρ (Savior), κτλ., did Paul consciously pit his gospel against the good news of the imperial cult? Did the imperial cult own this language? or do these terms find wider currency elsewhere? Going beyond whether Paul had an anti-imperial gospel or not, do current claims to find any Greco-Roman allusion in Paul which are competitive meet all or some of the above conditions distilled from Alcinous’ interaction with his Stoic rivals?

   We are still, in the end, just scratching the surface of how methodologically do we approach the problem and detection of Greco-Roman allusions in Paul, but I thought this example would give us some food for thought to move forward on the issue.