In our last article, we walked through the forest of virtue. We saw that the Stoic “stumps” of Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance are noble but dead until they are grafted into the living root of the Holy Spirit and watered by Faith, Hope, and Love.
Now we must descend from the high ground of virtue into the turbulent waters of the heart. We must talk about emotion.
For the modern man, this is often confused territory. We are caught between two cultural extremes. On one side, the secular world tells us to “follow our feelings” and treats every emotional impulse as a sacred truth. On the other side, the “Manosphere” and pop-Stoicism often sell a vision of the “Alpha” who feels nothing—a stone-faced warrior who has strangled his emotions into submission.
This latter image is a crude distortion of the ancient philosophy. The classical Stoic did not aim for unfeeling hardness, but for the perfect rational control of the soul known as Apatheia.
But when we open the Gospels, we see something startling. We see a Savior who weeps at a graveside. We see Him making a whip of cords in righteous anger. We see Him rejoicing in the Spirit and sweating drops of blood in agony.
If Jesus is the perfect man, then the Stoic ideal of the sage who maintains perfect, dispassionate control cannot be the full Christian ideal. We must find a better way.
The Stoic ideal of apatheia, or freedom from the passions, offers a disciplined stability, but it must be refined by the biblical doctrine of God. While God is without passions in the sense of suffering or involuntary change, He is a God of holy affections. Therefore, the Christian goal is not the eradication of emotion, but the sanctification of the affections, ordering our loves, hatreds, joys, and sorrows according to God’s revealed will.
The Stoic Ideal: The Fortress of Apatheia
To be fair to the Stoics, we must clear up a common misunderstanding. Apatheia does not mean “apathy” in the modern sense of laziness or lack of caring. It means “freedom from pathos.”
For the Stoic, a pathos (passion) was defined as a false judgment or an excessive impulse.
- Fear is the false judgment that a future indifferent thing (like death) is “bad.”
- Lust is the false judgment that a future indifferent thing (like sex) is “good.”
- Grief is the false judgment that a present indifferent thing (like loss) is “bad.”
Because these emotions are based on lies (believing that things outside our control matter), they are diseases of the soul. The goal of the Sage is to cure these diseases. He seeks to reach a state where he is never enslaved by fear, grief, anger, or envy. He seeks to be a fortress that no external event can shake.
The Stoics did allow for “good feelings” (eupatheiai), such as rational caution or rational joy in one’s own virtue. But these were cool, intellectual states. The hot, messy, overwhelming waves of emotion were enemies to be defeated.
The Theological Corrective: Impassibility and Affection
While this discipline produces men of great stability, it risks producing men of profound detachment. The ultimate corrective to Apatheia is found in the nature of God Himself.
The Westminster Confession of Faith teaches that God is “without body, parts, or passions.” (WCF 2.1) This is the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. It means God does not suffer. He is not “acted upon” by His creation. He does not have mood swings. He is not overwhelmed by emotions that disturb His blessedness. In this sense, God possesses the ultimate stability the Stoic seeks.
However, unlike the Stoic “God” (an impersonal fire), the God of Scripture is a Person. He is not a stone. While He is free from passions (suffering), He possesses pure, holy, and vigorous affections. These are not reactive changes, but are the active expressions of His immutable nature; they simply are who He is.
- He loves His people with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3).
- He is angry with the wicked every day (Ps. 7:11).
- He rejoices over Jerusalem with singing (Zeph. 3:17).
- He is grieved by human sin (Gen. 6:6).
These are not involuntary spasms of feeling; they are the settled, active, and holy inclinations of His will. And when God became man, Jesus Christ displayed these affections perfectly. He wept for Lazarus (John 11:35). He looked at the Pharisees with anger (Mark 3:5). He felt a soul-crushing sorrow in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:38).
If the Stoic Sage looked at Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, he might judge Him as “irrational”—grieving over an external event. But as Christians, we see Perfect Humanity. Therefore, to be fully human is not to kill emotion, but to have emotions that are perfectly ordered by truth.
The Christian Alternative: Ordered Affections
So, if we reject the Stoic goal of eliminating passions, do we embrace the modern chaos of “following our heart”? By no means. Jeremiah tells us the heart is “deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9).
The Christian solution, beautifully articulated by Augustine is Ordered Affections (Latin: Ordo Amoris).[1]
The problem with the sinner is not that he loves; it is that he loves the wrong things, or he loves the right things in the wrong order.
- He loves money more than God.
- He fears man more than he fears God.
- He grieves the loss of a promotion more than he grieves his own sin.
The goal of sanctification is not to stop feeling, but to re-order our feelings to match God’s value system.
- Righteous Anger: We should be angry at sex trafficking or heresy, because these things offend God.
- Holy Grief: We should weep when death tears a family apart, because death is an enemy.
- Godly Fear: We kill the fear of man by cultivating a greater, overwhelming fear of the Lord (Matt. 10:28).
Practical Application: Taking Every Thought Captive
How does the Christian Stoic apply this? We utilize the Stoic discipline of examining our judgments, but we do so in obedience to the Apostle Paul’s command to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
When a strong emotion hits—say, a flash of anger at a disrespect—we do not blindly follow it, nor do we simply repress it. We interrogate it.
- Pause (The Stoic Discipline): We refuse to give “assent” to the immediate impulse. We stop the chain reaction.
- Evaluate (Taking it Captive): We bring the thought before the tribunal of Scripture. We ask:
- “Why am I angry?”
- “Is this anger based on a true judgment (God is offended) or a false judgment (my pride is hurt)?”
- “Is this emotion ordered according to God’s will?”
- Adjust (Sanctification):
- If it is disordered (ego-driven), we repent. We remind ourselves of God’s sovereignty (Providence) and let the anger go.
- If it is ordered (righteous indignation), we channel it into constructive action (justice), rather than destructive rage.
We are not seeking to be stones. We are seeking to be temples. A temple is not empty; it is filled with holy fire. But the fire is contained on the altar, burning for the glory of God.
Conclusion: Feeling Like a Man
Loved ones, do not let the world tell you that to be masculine is to be emotionless. The most masculine Man who ever lived wept openly. But He never let His emotions rule Him; He ruled them. He submitted them to the Father.
The Christian Stoic feels deeply. He loves his wife passionately. He hates evil fiercely. He weeps over the lost. But he is not a slave to these feelings. He is their master, under Christ. He possesses a “heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26), soft toward God, but protected by the iron armor of self-control.
In our next article, we will look at one of the specific ways we order our lives in this world: the concept of Nature. Is the “natural” life the good life?
Key Terms & Concepts
- Apatheia: (Stoic) The state of being free from pathos (irrational, disturbing passions). The ideal state of the Stoic sage, characterized by tranquility and invulnerability to external events.
- Ordo Amoris: (Latin, “Order of Love”) An Augustinian concept defining virtue as the rightly ordered love of things according to their true value. Sin is “disordered love” (loving a lesser good more than a greater good).
- Divine Impassibility: The orthodox doctrine (WCF 2.1) that God is “without passions.” This means God does not suffer, is not subject to involuntary emotional changes caused by external agents, and is not overcome by emotion. It does not mean He is unfeeling or indifferent; He possesses pure, active, holy affections (love, joy, wrath) consistent with His unchangeable nature.
- Taking Thoughts Captive: Based on 2 Corinthians 10:5, the spiritual discipline of subjecting every thought, impulse, and judgment to the authority of Christ and the truth of Scripture, rejecting lies and embracing truth.
[1] See Augustine of Hippo, “City of God,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Marcus Dods, vol. 2 of Series 1 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 14.9.