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.

Herculaneum: Where Particle Physics and Papyrology Meet

I love what I do. Just when you think nothing can surprise you any more, something always lights up your horizon in the world of the ancient history and biblical studies. NPR just released a fascinating radio story on a major breakthrough in papyrological studies: using a particle accelerator developed in France, papyrologists are beginning to read the text off of a fossilized papyrus scroll without having to open it. You can listen to the radio show here, and read more from the technical published article on which the show is based at Nature Communications. 

Photo of a rolled up, charred scroll uncovered from the Herculaneum
library which was buried under volcanic ash in AD 70
Photo credit: www.npr.org

   Since my research agenda involves the intersection between ancient philosophical discourse and Paul, and my next major monograph will be on Paul and the Epicureans (right after I'm done with my 1st one.... almost there by the way!), I have been reading the philosophical writings of Philodemus uncovered from the ancient library at Herculaneum in Italy for some time. The villa of Piso (Julius Caesar's father-in-law) near the seaport of Herculaneum, along with the entire city of Pompeii just 9 miles south, if you recall, was buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 70. Hopefully some of you had a chance to see the exhibit of Pompeii when it circulated nationally in the States back in 2006. It was stunning! and my sons and I had a great learning experience when the exhibit was displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago. 
   To appreciate the NPR article, let me digress a bit to explain succinctly the process that archaeologists and papyrologists undertake to reconstruct an ancient text from papyri. When I work with the ancient texts, I almost always deal with the published form, like this example from Richard Janko's Philodemus: On Poems, Book 1 (The Asthetic Works 1:1; New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 260: 

Print edition: P Herc 460, Column 67, lines 1-10

The above critical, published text is reconstructed, with conjectures on what the text might be in brackets since there are gaps or unreadable sections in the original papyrus.
    But in order for me to read the above, some enterprising papyrologist had to do the hard work of unrolling a brittle, charred scroll. As soon as you unroll the scroll, it starts to fall apart and you are left with hundreds of fragments that need to be carefully put together with the other fragments in correct order, much like how a person has to solve a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but in this case, you might be missing many of the pieces, or some of the pieces are stuck together and you have to take them apart before finishing the puzzle. Here is the same text above but as a photo of its original fragment: 

Photo of P Herc 460, fragment 1

This piece, however, needs to be laid aside the other pieces to reconstruct the full text. Many times the texts are illegible and have to viewed under a multi-spectral, infra-red light in order to read the ink (click the link for a youtube video on the process). Without the infra-red light, it looks much more like a charred mess: 

Almost completely illegible charred Herc papyrus fragment
Photo Credit: The Friends of the Herculaneum Society

Fragments from an unrolled scroll put back together
Photo credit: www.npr.org

Often papyrologists double as artists and sketch their reconstructed texts in their notebooks. Here again is the same P Herc 460 fragment (highlighted in yellow) but hand-drawn and put to gether with other fragments:

P Herc 460, frag 1-4, redrawn by F. Casanova
(frag 1 is highlighted in yellow)

   What makes the NPR article, now, so exciting, is that with the particle accelerator and technique called "X-ray phase-contrast tomography," they can read the ink off the papyrus scroll without having to unroll it. This way, the rolled scroll is kept from potentially being destroyed by the unrolling process. The technique still needs further refinement but if all goes well, we might see previously unpublished scrolls accessible to the academy and public when their texts are reconstructed and made available in the print edition. I don't have the expertise to do any of the above, except to read the printed form of the texts. So I'll have to eagerly await along with everyone else what treasures can be unlocked when particle phyics and papyrology collide at Herculaneum!
   Want to watch a video demonstration of the process? See the youtube video demonstration below from the University of Kentucky lab team. Wow!

The Irritating Bite vs. the Sting Which Kills

It's been hard to blog with the start-of-the-semester madness, but finally, I can get back to my previous post on Philodemus' treatise On Death (Book IV). 
   There I wrote about how the Epicurean sage manages grief and fear by cutting out from a person's natural aversion to death whatever wrong ideas or superstitions he or she has attached to it. Philodemus is especially critical of associating with death the idea of divine judgment according to the myths of his day (κατὰ τοὺς μύθους); he would not be very receptive to the idea of that we are all assigned a place in Hades (πρὸς τὸν ἀποδεδειγμένον αὐτοῖς καθ' Ἅιδου χῶρον) in the afterlife where furies torture the wicked (IV.27.8-14; Henry ed.). Thus, Epicurean philosophical therapy is the process of rationally dispelling such myths concerning death, with the result that the great pain (μεγάλην... λύπην; 25.11-12) fueled by false ideas is reduced to a natural bite or sting (φυσικὸς ὁ δηγμός; 25.36). 
   Apparently, this remainder which is left over, the natural bite, after myths and superstitions have been cut out, is actually useful for the philosopher. For one thing, it humanizes the Epicurean since it is unnatural for a person to feel nothing when one's loved ones have passed away (you can see Philodemus taking a jab here against the Stoics who argued that the sage is "apathetic" to grief). A natural aversion to death (= death's bite) can also encourage a person to live well and wisely in the present (37.12-38.25; see Armstrong, 45-49*), much in the same way natural anger without false ideas about vengeance helps a person to seek justice for wrongs done (cf. Philodemus, On Anger, col. 67). 

Silver Tetradrachm (Greek: τετράδραχμον) coin from Ephesus
featuring a bee and stag (ca. 390-130 BC)
image credit: coinquest.com

So the key to Epicurean therapy is reducing great pain to a manageable, useful, and natural bite. Death is nothing but an irritating sting or bite that should not be feared. 
    But Paul's understanding of personified Death (θάνατε) and its sting (τὸ κέντρον) is that the latter is no small bite or peck like that of a mosquito. Rather, like some ancient species of wasps, bees, and scorpions of Paul's day, a sting can kill you (1 Cor 15:54-55; cf. Aristophanes, Wasps 403-407). There is a double entendre here. Paul's use of κέντρον refers to both the torturing device of personified Death (click here for details) and also the (insect's) sting which kills and ends life. In contrast to the Epicureans, Paul does not think the reality of divine judgment and justice is a false myth but part of the eschatological reality which frames the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a divine law to which all must answer. While Paul's vision of the afterlife is nothing like Virgil's description of Hades (Aeneid, Book 6), he nevertheless does not discount the idea that God does exact justice for all humanity at the resurrection of the dead. Nor does Paul think any rationalization process could ever remove the agony which death brings. 
   Instead, the only solution is to remove the sting altogether. Death has no power over Christian believers because God will raise them up on the day of Jesus' return. Why settle for a bite, when God, through Christ, has conquered death's crippling effect on human life once and for all?! 

* See David Armstrong, "All Things to All Men: Philodemus' Model of Therapy and the Audience of De Morte," in Philodemus and the New Testament World (NovTSup 111; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 15-54. 

Philodemus on Removing the Sting and Bite of Death

I'm posting a bit later than I had planned. The family and I went out of town over the weekend to show our support to my youngest son as he competed at a major chess tournament. It was a nice diversion for us, though he did not do as well as we had hoped (our delusions of grandeur were crushed after the 1st round!), but back to the subject on hand. 

   Now that I have mapped out a range of mainstream beliefs, fears, and superstitions surrounding the afterlife in the Greco-Roman world (here), this would be a good place to introduce what some of the popular philosophers of Paul's day had to say about conquering our fear of death. The Epicureans, by far, had the boldest of claims. In Key Doctrines 2, Epicurus makes a statement which will become epigrammatic for generations to come among his followers: 

• Death can do nothing to us (ὁ θανατος οὐδεν πρὸς ἡμᾶς), for a dissolved thing cannot sense anything, and anything which cannot sense also cannot do anything to us. 

The Epicureans believed in a material soul and that the soul could not survive long without the body. At death, the soul seeps out of the pores of the body and dissolves into nothingness as the body, too, dissolves when it decays in the grave (Philodemus, On Death IV, 8.7-29).* There is no eternal afterlife, and there is nothing to fear after death because we simply cease to exist. There is neither pain or pleasure, but a just a gentle release from life. So death is nothing to be afraid of. 
   But what about before death? Is not most of our anxiety about death experienced when we start to think about what we might lose at death, or when death is near and we are about to step over the edge of life with our last breath? 
   A Greco-Roman Epicurean by the name of Philodemus (ca. 110-40 B.C.), whose works were carbonized and preserved following the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79 at an ancient library in Herculaneum, Italy, devoted an entire treatise (of which we only have Book 4) on how to die well and without fear of what might happen afterwards.

Click here for an affordable paperback edition
* Excerpts taken from this edition by W. Benjamin Henry

Philodemus explains, for example, that "it is natural for such a person to be stung" (διότι φυσικὸν μὲν τὸ νύττεσθαι τὸν τοιοῦτον) by death (On Death IV, 16.5-7), and death has "a most natural bite"(φυσικώτατον δηγμὸν) that produces tears even in the most sensible person (25.7-13).* But what turns a natural reaction to death into an unmanageable great sorrow (μεγάλην... λύπην; 25.11-12)* is the attachment of untrue, false, superstitious, and unwarranted ideas to the natural impulse.
   So much of the Epicurean program for soul-therapy (a term popularized by Nussbaum's study on ancient philosophy entitled The Therapy of Desire) for mastering fear and other emotions (like anger or lust) involves cutting off the false or empty opinions (δοξῶν) we attach to a natural impulse (τὴν φυσικὴν ὁρμήν; 16.4-8).* 
   Philodemus gives us several examples. The cure for fearing that my sudden death will leave behind my wife and children in dire straits is to recognize the false opinion that their livelihood depends on my continued existence and to provide for them a competent patron or guardian who will care for them if I were to die suddenly (25.2-36). 
   Or, a beginning student of philosophy who dies before she can reach perfection need not be pained by the wrong idea that all her time studying philosophy was wasted but take comfort that her efforts towards perfection could leave behind an inspiring example for others (17.32-18.14).
   Philodemus goes on to give many more examples, but they all have a common theme: a person removes the fear of death by dissociating from it the wrong beliefs or ideas which fuel our deepest anxieties. This therapeutic program was, for the philosopher, the best way to die well and die with courage.
   Now as a historian, I pass no judgment on Epicurean teachings. Philodemus (and fellow Greco-Roman Epicurean philosophers like Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenoanda) provided a rational way of dealing with the pathos associate with death. Certainly there is truth to the proposition that human beings often attach to natural reactions all sorts of unreasonable, far-fetched, and even complicated "what if" scenarios that only function to fuel our stress. 
   However, existentially and personally, I cannot help but feel the Epicurean program for soul-therapy is still poor medicine. Am I really OK if my life is cut short and ceases to exist before I could finish my studies? You mean I dragged my poor wife and kids through the vicissitudes of a Ph.D. program and died suddenly before I could graduate with my degree?! (I actually had a near-death experience on the Pasadena highway on the way to the Fuller Theological Seminary campus to turn in my finished dissertation!... but that's a different story for another day).
   What if I did not plan for my sudden death? What happens to my wife and kids after I'm gone? Philodemus' advice only seems to work if you take the time to plan out and anticipate your death. It feels like an ancient form of buying life insurance. Yes, you'll be dead but at least your family will be taken care of. Hmmm... is this enough?
   Next post: Paul. Let's see what the apostle to the Thessalonians and Corinthians has to say on the subject of death and its sting.