One of the most characteristic and, to the contemporary mind at least, bizarre theses of orthodox Chrysippean Stoicism is its insistence on the wholly rational character of the human mind or soul. The whole of the soul, or at least the whole of the hēgemonikon or “leading part” of the soul, is said to be reason (logos): there are no irrational parts or powers within the soul, no independent sources or faculties of emotion or nonrational desire, and all cases of apparent irrationality are supposed to be referred to the operations of thought itself (dianoia, another name for the mind). This seems to fly in the face of much of what we assume or feel sure we know about human psychology: not only do modern psychological theories tend to stress the role of irrational or subrational factors in human motivation, but we seem to be clearly aware in ourselves of major nonrational or irrational aspects of our own behavior and thought processes. Thus when confronted with Stoic claims such as that all emotions and desires are really just judgments or beliefs, or that passions or emotions are unnatural conditions that ought to be extirpated, we find these not only hard to swallow but difficult and nearly impossible even to grasp. However, there is nothing about this sort of difficulty with Stoicism that is specifically modern.

As Sten Ebbesen has emphasized in his contribution to this volume, the influence of Stoicism in the Middle Ages is to be found everywhere and is yet felt subtly enough that one is often unsure whether it is Stoicism itself that is being encountered. Part of the reason for this is fairly simple: Stoicism was so very influential in the Roman Empire that it left its mark on most of the church fathers and on most of the philosophical schools of late antiquity. Because so little work by card-carrying Stoics has survived, Stoic ideas were transmitted into the Middle Ages largely through thinkers who, while influenced by Stoicism, were not themselves Stoics and who often made free with Stoic ideas. Not surprisingly, it is often hard to tell when a later thinker is in some important way a Stoic.

In this chapter I want to make one piece of what would have to be a much more complex argument to be complete. My larger thesis is that Peter Abelard is as close to Stoicism as a Christian could be and that in his case this is not some independent rediscovery of Stoic ideas but a self-conscious taking up of them with profound consequences for later medieval philosophy. I stake this claim as a claim about Abelard's positions in a variety of areas, including logic – hence my ambiguous title.

We are all familiar with the notion of a moral judgment. In the vocabulary of ethical debate, this term is so common as to be a cliché. While we have different theories about how we make such judgments, it would seem distinctly odd to observe that “judgment” is a term transferred from another semantic domain and to attempt to sort out its meaning by scrutinizing its source or to impugn the clarity or usefulness of the term on the grounds that it began its conceptual career as a mere metaphor. Whatever origins the term may have had, they now seem irrelevant.

But is this really so? I want to argue that moral judgment has not always been taken as a bland general synonym for moral decisions and that it need not be; to see that, we can consider uses of the terminology of moral judgment in which the original semantic sphere for such language (the judicial sphere) is still relevant to understanding how it is used. One such use comes from the Stoic Seneca, and I argue that he did take the notion of moral judgment as a live metaphor, one that he used to develop his own distinctive Stoic views on moral thinking.

That the particular language we use in talking about moral decision and moral assessment should matter is not surprising. Even for us, this is not the only way to talk about such matters; we also invoke the notions of deduction, calculation, and analysis, for example.

In the French language, to call someone a Stoic is to recognize the virtue of standing firm in adversity, of enduring misfortune with courage and tenacity, without being driven from the path one has chosen. The characteristic Stoic attitude thus appears to be constancy. The image of the sage as a rock, immovable in a storm, was a standard trope in French moral literature during the seventeenth century. On the mark of the publisher Plantin we read the motto, labore et constantia (by labor and constancy). This illustrates the extent to which this virtue seems characteristic of the rebirth of the Stoic movement at the end of the Renaissance. The restoration began with the philological work of the humanists, but it is also tied to a definite political context, marked by the renewed outbreak of religious troubles and civil war. Treatises on the subject of constancy flourished at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries and had impressive publishing histories. But treating constancy as a cardinal virtue was not merely a compromise choice: Charron had preferred prudence, Descartes generosity, Pascal charity. Constancy is the virtue of someone who relies first and foremost on his own strengths and not on God or others. As Lipsius says, a man writes a treatise on constancy primarily for himself and his own benefit, and not because he seeks fame.

Expressing the inimitable tranquillity of the Stoic sage, Seneca declares that

Perhaps one of Stoicism's greatest points of appeal, prominent in its resurgence in the early modern period, is its assertion that happiness is attainable by any rational individual. Moreover, this happiness is, as Seneca depicts it, a this-worldly salvation: the rational individual can aspire to a perfect happiness, a tranquillity impervious to any and all assaults of Fortune. Such is the virtue of Stoic ethics famously celebrated in the sixteenth century by Justus Lipsius, who, exasperated by the conflicts raging within the Christian tradition and the horrific wars accompanying them, looked to Stoicism for an alternate source of moral sustenance and the prospect of genuine respite from public tumult – to be sure, nothing less than an enduring peace of mind. According to the Stoic model, such eminent tranquillity, which entails perfecting one's intellect, is founded on a specific collection of doctrines: an immanentist theology whereby God and the universe are rational in nature and can be perfectly apprehended by the human mind; virtue that is readily indicated in natural impulse; a diagnosis of the passions, the primary obstacle to virtue, in terms that immediately invoke their susceptibility to remedy; and, finally, psychotherapy as the means to happiness, a means that is subject to individual agency and responsibility.

The great study on first movements in Christianity by O. Lottin ascribes the invention of the idea to the eleventh century. But in fact the idea of first movements in emotion has its first extant record a thousand years earlier in Seneca's On Anger, book 2, chapters 2–4, and has a long history in Christianity after that.

Where were the Stoics in the late Middle Ages? The short answer is: everywhere and nowhere.

Stoicism is not a sport for gentlemen; it requires far too much rigorous intellectual work. Most of Western history consists of gentlemen's centuries. But there were the couple of centuries, the fourth and the third b.c., in which the ancient philosophical schools were created, and there were the three centuries from a.d. 1100 to 1400, when medieval scholasticism flourished – centuries that produced a considerable number of tough men ready to chew their way through all the tedious logical stuff that disgusts a gentleman and to make all the nice distinctions that a gentleman can never understand but only ridicule, distinctions necessary to work out a coherent, and perhaps even consistent, picture of the structure of the world. In this respect, a good scholastic and a good Stoic are kindred spirits. As an attitude to doing philosophy, Stoicism is everywhere in the late Middle Ages.

Also, bits and snippets of Stoic doctrine were available in a large number of ancient writings and could inspire or be integrated in scholastic theory. Further, some works with a high concentration of Stoicism were widely known, notably Cicero's Paradoxes of the Stoics, De Officiis, and Seneca's Letters to Lucilius. Finally, Saint Paul was a crypto-Stoic ethicist, and so were several of the church fathers.

Descartes wrote little in the way of moral philosophy, but he regarded the topic as of the utmost importance. As he describes it in the preface to the French edition of his Principles of Philosophy, the uppermost branch of the tree of philosophy is occupied by la morale, “the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom” (AT IXB 14/CSM I 186). This moral system would be more than just the final element of Descartes' philosophy; it also defines the end, or telos, of his ordered reconstruction of knowledge. In an important sense, the prior, theoretical parts of his philosophy are established for the sake of the practical benefits that follow from them. To those skeptical about what philosophy has to offer, Descartes confidently replies that the difference between his principles and those of other philosophers, “as well as the long chain of truths that can be deduced from them, will finally make them realize how important it is to continue in the search for these truths, and to what a high level of wisdom, and to what perfection and felicity of life, these truths can bring us” (AT IXB 20/CSM I 190).

Descartes is usually seen as the quintessential modern philosopher, yet in his broader conception of philosophy's goal we find repeated a central ancient theme: philosophical knowledge is valued not only for its own sake, but as the basis of the best sort of human life – one in which we realize the greatest perfection and happiness.

A successful rehabilitation of Stoic ethics will have to defeat the idea that there is something deeply wrong, and perhaps even psychologically impossible, about the kind of emotional life that Stoics recommend. The image of the austere, dispassionate, detached, tranquil, and virtually affectless sage – an image destined to be self-refuting – has become a staple of anti-Stoic philosophy, literature, and popular culture. It has been constructed from incautious use of the ancient texts and is remarkably resistant to correction. Reminders that the ancient Stoics insisted that there are good emotions are typically brushed aside by asserting that the ancient catalog of such emotions is peculiar; that the emotions in even that peculiar catalog are not accorded much significance by Stoics; and that the ruthless emotional therapy practiced by Epictetus is a reliable guide to the sort of emotional life Stoics want all of us to cultivate – namely, a life of desiccated affect and discardable attachments.

Both Stoics and anti-Stoics alike have developed an unwholesome fascination with a picture of the Stoic sage drawn for extreme circumstances. We persist, in high art and low journalism, in telling and retelling stories of good people who resolutely endure horrors – injustice, torture, disease, disability, and suffering. Those of us who are attracted to Stoicism often find such stories inspiring, and even anti-Stoics give them grudging admiration. But our fascination with them can be seriously misleading.

THE STATESMEN'S BIBLE

A child born this year in the United States has a life expectancy of 76.4 years. A child born in Sierra Leone can expect to live 34.7 years. Most adults in the United States and Europe are literate, although illiteracy remains a disturbing problem, correlated with poverty. Some developing countries attain nearly our overall rate of literacy: Sri Lanka, for example, has 90 percent adult literacy, the Philippines 94.6 percent, Jordan 86.6 percent. In many nations, however, a person's chance of learning to read (and, hence, to qualify for most well-paying jobs) is far lower. In India, only 37 percent of women and 65 percent of men are literate, in Bangladesh 26 percent of women and 49 percent of men, in Niger 6 percent of women and 20 percent of men. Clean water, health services, sanitation, maternal health and safety, adequate nutrition – all these basic human goods are distributed very unevenly around the world. The accident of being born in one country rather than another pervasively shapes the life chances of every child who is born. Being female, being lower-class, living in a rural area, and membership in an ethnic or racial or religious minority also affect life chances within every nation. But, on the whole, differences of wealth and opportunity among nations eclipse these differences.

The Stoic Discourses of Epictetus are conspicuously marked throughout by the figure of Socrates. No other philosopher, not even Zeno or Diogenes, is named nearly so frequently. Epictetus views Socrates as the single figure who best authorizes and exemplifies everything he is trying to give his students in terms of philosophical methodology, self-examination, and a life model for them to imitate. This strikingly explicit coincidence between Epictetus' objectives and Socrates makes the Stoicism of the Discourses particularly distinctive.

In order to take the measure of this point, we need to start from the role of Socrates in the preceding Stoic tradition. The earliest Stoic philosophers had drawn so heavily on Plato's and, to a lesser extent, Xenophon's Socrates that members of the school were happy to be called Socratics. The details cover numerous Stoic doctrines in ethics, moral psychology, and theology, including the priority of the soul's good over everything else, the unity of the virtues, the identity of virtue with knowledge, and divine providence.

In 1949 Max Pohlenz, the doyen of early twentieth-century German scholarship on Stoicism, published an article, “Paulus und die Stoa,” in which he discussed the first few chapters of the apostle's letter to the Romans and the Christian historian Luke's account of Paul's speech on the Areopagus in chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles. Pohlenz was asking about the Stoic credentials of various ideas in the two texts. He concluded that in Paul there was nothing that went directly back to Stoicism. Instead, any Stoic-sounding ideas had come to Paul through Jewish traditions that would rather reflect some form of middle Platonism. In Luke, by contrast, there is a direct reminiscence of Posidonius.

In 1989 Abraham J. Malherbe, Buckingham Professor of the New Testament at Yale Divinity School, published a book, Paul and the Popular Philosophers. He argued that in a number of individual passages in the letters, Paul was interacting directly with specific motifs derived from the moral exhortation of philosophers like the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans. Paul need not have read, for instance, Chrysippus. But he had an easy familiarity with the moral discourse of the “popular philosophers” of his own time, as exemplified to us by his near contemporaries Seneca, Dio Chrysostom, and Epictetus.

In Paul and the Stoics (2000), I argued that Paul is relying on central ideas in Stoicism even when he states the core of his own theological thought. This development should be of some interest to students of Stoicism.