Why This Author HATED Stoicism

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Three men, three fiction and philosophy giants and three different takes on the value of stoicism. JRR Tolken, CS Lewis, and GK Chesterton. What did they think of the Stoics? Marcus Aurelius, Masonius Rufus, Cynica, and Epictitus. Their philosophy has never faded from Western culture. And as we've noted on this channel, because we find stoicism to be so much worthwhile for navigating the pains of modern life, stoicism is pretty popular. Again, it gets talked about.

[00:00:27]But I chose these three guys because they're all connected. Lewis and Tolken were of course friends and collaborators, Catholic and Protestant.

[00:00:35]GK Chesterton was older and died around the time when Lewis and Tolken began seriously writing. And he inspired both of them greatly. And he reshaped Lewis's imagination on Christianity. And for Tolken, Chesterton embodied a combative Catholicism that would not go quietly into the night, which is where stoicism comes in. We have to ask ourselves this question. What is stoicism good for? And the second question must be what are its limitations? So let's begin with Tolken.

[00:01:03]Compared to the other two, Tolken does not give much to go off of. What we do have are stoic attitudes expressed in the Lord of the Rings and a brief commentary in his essay on fairy stories. Frodo says to Gandalf, "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."

[00:01:22]>> So do all who live to see such times.

[00:01:25]All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

[00:01:29]>> Characters don't always speak for the author. Often they can do the opposite.

[00:01:33]But in the case of Gandalf, I think it is a safe bet that Tolken is speaking to the reader about his view of pain and misfortune. How you react determines everything and that is where virtue comes from. Now stoicism is not the only philosophy in the world that promotes this kind of focus on choice and going with the flow of events beyond our control. But it is stoicism's defining feature in legacy. Some things are in our control and others are not. Every situation has two handles. One by which the weight can be borne and the other not. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. Marcus Aurelius meditations. Things will just happen to us. You don't control the time you were born into the family. You don't even control your reputation when slander exists. Virtue then is a state concerned with choice. That's Aristotle and the Nicomeian ethics. Now Tolken is a bit more specific in onfairy stories. And this is where he seems to express that stoicism is a tool not the goal of life.

[00:02:41]I do not say seeing things as they are.

[00:02:44]Instead seeing things as we were meant to see them. This is actually really important because if you've read your meditations, seeing things as they are is very Aurelius coded. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself to strip things down to the basic parts so that he'll be less attached or emotional about those things. Wine is grape juice. Purple robes are just sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Sex is friction, spasms, and fluid. Fame is nothing but noise and applause is hands flapping together devoid of any real value and death is nature. But Tolken does not think that death is wholly natural.

[00:03:28]Death is the result of the fall and of sin. It's been corrupted. In the Sylmerelion, he says of men, "Death is their fate, the gift of the aluvatar, but Melor has cast his shadow upon it and confounded it with darkness and brought forth evil out of good and fear out of hope." So in this context, he's saying that death is sort of this actual gift given to you by the creator in order to reunite with him, but it has been tainted by darkness. Beyond that, Tolken is not going to sign off on the disenchanting worldview of sex being nothing but friction and the color of purple being shellfish juice. He wants the recovery of things that have lost their power due to human brokenness to remind us that we were meant to be wondrous. He says he wants to see things as we were meant to see them to return to something better. So my verdict is that Tolken would call stoicism a noble pagan halftruth useful as a field knife but as a map to navigate your life. To take the metaphor further, stoicism is for making sense of the traffic jam and the debris on the road or of the car wreck, but it cannot give you a destination worth driving toward. Now GK Chesterton, y'all Chesterton really hated the Stoics. He attacks it by name numerous times in his book, Orthodoxy, for a lot of the reasons you'll hear it attacked today. It is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the Stoic, to grin and bear it. Greek heroes do not grin, but gargoyless do because they are Christian. It's a philosophy of resignation, he says, throwing up your hands and almost surrendering to the way things are. And it's also humorless. He goes a bit further to compare the political indifference of the Stoics to that of the early Christian who had a more revolutionary spirit about government and life on earth. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given up on the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of virtue in nature and hardly of virtue in society.

[00:05:46]They had not enough interest in the outer world to wreck it or revolutionize it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. What a great passage.

[00:05:56]It's also a touch unfair though. Quick history overview cuz stoicism begins in Greece with Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrisphus, and it takes 500 years for stoicism to enter the palace through Hadrien and Marcus Aurelius. It goes from a philosophy of the nomadic peasants to the kings. You have this easy criticism of the Stoics, which is why wasn't Marcus Aurelius enlightened enough to return democracy in Rome or end slavery.

[00:06:25]It's the same kind of recycled stuff you hear with George Washington and slavery.

[00:06:30]But you do have the age of stoic opposition to dictatorship in Rome. Ko the younger opposing Caesar. Thracia against Nero. Monius Rufus is just one of many stoics to be exiled at one time or another because philosophy was disruptive to the emperor. Agrianus is put to death by Tiberius. And one of his lasting ideas gets recycled by Epictitus is that we are all to be the red thread in a white toga to stand out in the crowd and irritate the majority. Now, it seems to me that Cynica's service to Emperor Nero for so long is one of the great stains on Stoicism's civic history. It makes it a very easy target for critics who want to say that it was a philosophy of accommodating evil.

[00:07:18]Chesterton's view, and I suppose this is true, was that stoicism is insufficient to change the world. The people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up. Christianity offered a single answer. So there's that line of attack from chapter 10 again, the social engagement issue. And the second attack is the claim of self- worship. The last Stoics like Marcus Aurelius were exactly the people who did believe in the inner light. Inner light sounds nice, but that's not a compliment coming from him.

[00:07:49]He's saying that they were like the Quakers in believing we all carry a slice of God within us. The stoics might have called this the hegemonicon or the breath within us that comes from the gods to bring us soul and life. He says Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist who had pride without the excuse of passion. Of all the horrible religions in the world, the most horrible is the worship of the god within which to the stoics was probably their divine reason and alignment with the impersonal logos. Chesterton isn't accusing Aurelius of being petty or greedy or inhumane. He's just saying that in the end, stoicism curves inward.

[00:08:33]It's meditative, hyperfocused on the inner life. And Chesterton views it as incompatible or at least inferior to the Christian who looks beyond himself. If you think God is inside you, his fear was that you eventually drift towards self- worship. that Jones shall worship the God within him turns out to ultimately mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Stoicism begins as self-mastery and ends with staring into the mirror.

[00:09:01]And this is all very Chestertonian.

[00:09:03]Stoicism is too gray, too tired, too resigned, no jazz hands, and it's not rebellious enough against the world.

[00:09:11]Now, if you haven't read Chesterton, I highly recommend Orthodoxy. You can see where CS Lewis came from intellectually.

[00:09:19]So, let's talk about Lewis, who out of the three men was the most comfortable searching for Christian truth in pagan narratives and philosophy. There's a lot of evidence that CS Lewis was a Stoic in so far as stoicism shaped his personality and ethics. The trail of almost word forword recreations of Stoic philosophy in his books is quite long, so I've narrowed it down to just a few.

[00:09:45]In the Screw Tape Letters chapter 21, which by the way we're doing a read through for members of the channel, Lewis begins with the demons advising on how to corrupt human beings. Men are not angered by mere misfortune, but by misfortune conceived as injury. Yes.

[00:10:03]Calling for Marcus Aurelius. You have been plagiarized. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. Or Epictitus. Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed. You must believe that you are being harmed.

[00:10:20]If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. This comes up often in Lewis's many books that being offended is within your power of choice. that our initial impressions or feelings, emotions about events require us to step back and assess if they are true or potentially a deception. And then in Screw Tape letter number three, Lewis describes a man who is annoyed with his mother and her tone of voice and facial expressions. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy. If you know your job, he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. Epictitus the Stoic says that we should test all of our impressions. Like a shopkeeper tests the authenticity of a coin, we should do our due diligence to make sure our assumptions aren't counterfeit. It's the same message in a different wrapping.

[00:11:26]Don't assume the worst or imagine harms when real harms are certain to come eventually. Another stoic insight can be found in chapter 6. We want him the human being to be in the maximum uncertainty so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future. Every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against God. He wants men to be concerned with what they do. Our business is to keep him thinking about what will happen to him. And again, here you're seeing Lewis touch on a central theme of stoicism. And it's not a coincidence, as I will demonstrate here shortly. Marcus Aurelius says in meditations, "Today I escaped anxiety, or no, I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside." Anxiety is a core enemy in the Stoic cannon, which is why it's become so popular in the 21st century, a true age of clinical anxiety. Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to. With the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present, says Aurelius, compared to Lewis, who then says in Screw Tape Letters, in a word, the future is of all things the least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time and nearly all vices are rooted in the future. In Synica's letters, he also says, "True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future." It makes sense. Something that CS Lewis biographer Humphrey Carpenter has claimed about The Lord of the Rings is that Tolken cast treebeard the ant as a standin for his friend CS Lewis. booming voice and slow deliberative and dare I say stoic attitude about the problem of evil in the world until the ants see it on their doorstep. In CS Lewis's retelling of the Cupid story till we have faces he has a character called the fox who is the resident palace philosopher and tutor to the heroine. The god within you is the god you should obey. Reason, calmness, self-discipline. That is stoicism reduced to bumper stickers. But the fox is not a villain in this story. He is beloved and a cherished teacher. He's not a fool. And he teaches genuine moral wisdom. But he cannot offer a path to salvation or anything beyond your self-discipline. The fox has limits.

[00:13:58]He's always going on about conforming to nature. same as Epictitus and Aurelius.

[00:14:04]As the fox delighted to say, she was according to nature what every woman or even everything ought to have been or meant to be. Another passage, one of the fox's maxims was that if we cannot persuade our friends by reason, we must be content and not bring a mercenary army to our aid. Passions, again, emotion. This isn't exclusively stoic.

[00:14:27]There's Plato, Aristotle, Socrates.

[00:14:29]Stoicism is a good umbrella for the idea that emotion is something you should distrust. You're not burying it. You're not suppressing it or bottling it up.

[00:14:39]You're just questioning your emotions and holding that they are not objective truth. They are the smoke, not the fire.

[00:14:46]Lewis was very comfortable giving credit to other religions and philosophies without feeling compromised as a Christian. He says in mere Christianity, if you are a Christian, you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong. all through. If you are an atheist, you do. A Christian is free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain some hint of the truth. Now, stoicism isn't a religion, but it can be treated like one if you spend enough time on stoic subreddits and follow the YouTube algorithm for Marcus Aurelius takes. Where Tolken, Lewis, and Chesterton all agree, it seems, is that stoicism is not worthless. It's not nonsense, but it can't take you but so far. And we generally agree with that here on Geeky Stoics. It's a wonderful set of tools and mental disciplines for cleaning your room, ordering your thoughts, and taming your passions, but it doesn't tell you how you should decorate your room, how you should order your life, or how you should think about beauty and wonder.

[00:15:46]Chesterton has a line about this that I really like. He says, "Detached intellectualism is all moonshine, for it is light without heat. It is a secondary light reflected from a dead world.

[00:16:00]Stoicism can in many ways reflect truth, but it isn't the truth. Now, if you've enjoyed this, we have a whole book coming out on the topic meant to help you build these lessons into your life.

[00:16:13]It's called Great Escape: 30 Reflections on Stoicism, Faith, and the Wisdom of Great Stories. It's coming out in December. So, to join the wait list and get on there for the pre-order launch, just go to this address here, throw in your email, and there's going to be all sorts of bonus and perks for people who do that. Can't wait to share it with you, and that's all for now. Be well.