Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) was among the most famous Stoics of the Roman era, as well as one of the fiercest persecutors of the Roman Christians during his reign as emperor (161-180). For background reading for a class on Constantine, last week I was reading his Meditations, a sort of self-interactive reflection on his education from childhood to manhood. Ironically, they resemble another great work of the period: Augustine's Confessions. The likeness does not end there, though - the striking surface similarities of the Stoic and Christian philosophies warrant a closer analytical look. Here my purpose is only to give an introduction (hopefully one that might spark debate or encourage more knowledgeable philosophers to comment) to Stoicism in comparison to and in contrast with Christianity; you can find a whole lot more by doing a Wikipedia search. (I feel like I'm cheating by saying that...)
The trademark characteristic of Stoicism is no doubt its emphasis on suppressing emotions, as evidenced by the fact that "stoic" has entered into the popular vocabulary as an adjective or noun for anyone who exhibits a cold rationality in the face of typically moving experiences. For true Stoics, though, there is utmost virtue in the extirpation of passion and emotion, which are seen as unworthy reactions against the infallible course of nature. Pleasure and pain are equal. There Stoicism diverges radically from Christianity, whose God, in the person of Christ, showed passionate anger in the temple overrun by merchants (Mark 11:15-17), expressed sorrow for the hard-heartedness of Jerusalem's leaders (Luke 13:34-35), and wept for the particular terrors of the death he was about to face (John 11:35). However, Christianity does teach that all of our soul's faculties are affected by the Fall, and emotions are not to be neglected in the practice of measuring everything by the Scriptural standards for godly living.
A related moral ideal in both philosophies is taking every thought captive. In Stoicism, all things rational are done for a purpose, specifically the purposes of nature; any thought that does not conform to those purposes, then, must be rejected. For instance, it is despicable to have any sort of fear or uneasiness about death, because one can observe the universality of death and conclude that it is wholly natural, something to be passively accepted. In Christianity, though, we take every thought captive to Christ, the human embodiment of divine truth. And as an aside, death is not natural to Christians or something we must simply accept - instead, mourning for its dark significance as the wages of mankind's sin yet acknowledging the hope of everlasting life is the proper response.
One of the first Stoics, the slave Epictetus, averred the reprehensibility of living an unexamined life. He understood that among all life in creation, man's most important distinctive trait is his ability to think rationally, to interpret the works of God: "...it is a shame for man to begin and leave off where brute animals do." Christians agree that contemplation and understanding are means by which we take full advantage of the way we were created with rational minds; however, Stoics believed all knowledge was gained empirically, rejecting the theory of innate ideas (see Romans 1:18-31 for the Christian thesis on that).
The Greek super-word logos - having a range of meanings from "word" to "reason" to "thought" - is a famous one for the troubles it has caused translators working in John 1. Apparently it was an all-around favourite of the Greek philosophers, as the Stoics also had a share in it. For them, the "logoi spermatikoi" are the "sparks of the divine" within everyone, giving men power to conform their reasoning to the so-called "fiery pneuma," or the immanent spirit of rationality that governs the world. Augustine, interestingly, had a similar idea in De Magistro, only he identifies Christ (following John 1) as the logos who endows every mind with intellectual light. Either way, we get the idea that because of this logos, man can think according to a universal standard.
The caveat, of course, is supposing that with all these parallels, the two philosophies must be compatible, or at least similar in such a manner that we can merge them and come out closer to reality. But in the study of philosophy, as with everything else, we must "test all things and hold fast to what is good." In this way we bear witness to the same testimony that Joseph recognized and pointed out to his brothers who effectively sold him into royalty, not slavery: the Stoics, with their elaborately developed explanation of life's ultimate questions, were not in their right minds, but God nevertheless uses their sinful folly to make His own think more carefully about the true nature of His mind.
