Eschatology against the Stoics

Augustine rebuts Stoic notions of apatheia and eupatheia in Book 14 of the city of God. He says that Christian experience even those emotions that Stoics denounce – distress and pain and desire – and he roots these experiences in the fact that Christians live in the present age “because they are still groaning within themselves, ‘waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our bodies.’” In glory, the saints will be free from pain, though not free from emotion.
Stoicism is a form of over-realized eschatology. Stoics immanentize the echaton.

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Restoring Man at Notre Dame

Carl R. Trueman

It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…

Deliver Us from Evil

Kari Jenson Gold

In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…

Natural Law Needs Revelation

Peter J. Leithart

Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…