On Stoicism And New Southern Optimism

In 1959, the Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a scathing article in Commonweal describing one of the stranger realities of life in the South. He argued that the South was more indebted to Paganism than Christianity. Responding to a backlash against a New Orleans Catholic Archbishop’s pastoral letter calling segregation sinful, Percy pointed out the obvious contradiction of white Catholics defying Christian social teachings and staying silent on issues that deny the dignity of fellow Christian men. 

“The greatness of the South, like the greatness of the English squirearchy, had always a stronger Greek flavor than it ever had a Christian. Its nobility and graciousness was the nobility and graciousness of the old Stoa,” he writes. “We in the South can no longer afford the luxury of maintaining the Stoa beside the Christian edifice. In the past, we managed the remarkable feat of keeping both, one for living in, the other for dying in. But the Church is no longer content to perform rites of passage; she has entered the arena of the living and must be reckoned with.”

This accusation is hardly new. It is one of the oldest complaints launched against the Antebellum South since the founding of England’s colonies. Thomas Jefferson—though a conflicted deist and an Epicurean—was highly influenced by the philosophy of the ancient stoics, calling them “the higher thought of Western civilization: nobility of character, high ethical purpose, the ideal of self-sacrifice, belief in God and His divine providence, emphasis on virtue as the highest good and on action to make it effective, the need of bringing conduct into conformity with the law of Nature, and the realization of a high and stern sense of duty in public and private life.”

Lest we forget, Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death" and Nathan Hale's "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" are both alleged paraphrases from Cato, a Tragedy, a popular 18th century play about the Roman Stoic Cato the Younger, who died fighting an oppressive empire lead by a cruel tyrant. 

The Founding Fathers—stewing in an ocean of incompatible enlightenment, classical, and Christian ideals—would end up creating a Republic that infused the values of Stoicism, Aristotelianism, classical liberalism, and Protestantism into an amalgamation that subsequent generations have struggled to unpack fully. Southern aristocrats, swayed heavily by classical education and enlightenment rationalism, developed a culture driven by a spirit of magnanimity and generosity that infused Stoicism. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that teaches that the world is an orderly place that can be rationally understood. The Stoic lives a life of self-reflection, focusing on the parts of life that can be altered (opinions, actions, desires) and ignoring what cannot (the body, reputation, political power). Given that death is inevitable and an afterlife isn’t necessarily guaranteed, the Stoic aims to live a life of virtue and fraternity towards others. Fate cannot be defeated, but the mind always remains safe and impenetrable within itself. 

Stoicism would reemerge during the Renaissance and modern eras amid the decline in Christianity, with works like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations receiving frequent English translations over the past three centuries. Neo-Stoicism has even become popularized as a self-help philosophy by modern philosophers like Ryan Holiday, resulting in dozens of bestselling books on the subject and Meditations selling hundreds of thousands of copies since 2016. 

As Houston Christian University Pr. Louis Markos writes, Stoicism proved a useful post-Christian alternative for virtue ethics, allowing you to “protect yourself as well as you can from the arbitrary stabs of fate; hold on to what little pleasure you can find in this uncaring world; follow your duty and stay true to your word; foster balance and equanimity of mind; detach yourself from the madness and futility of life.”

This made the philosophy ideal for the South. Its strength, its ability to endure hardship and failure, would become particularly pronounced among displaced aristocrats after the Civil War. Markos continues, “Having lived in Texas now for twenty-five years, I can still see remnants of that heroic Stoicism that, mingled with Christianity, gave the South her honor, her courage, and her sense of duty.” 

However, as Percy argues, that quality would come into tension with Christianity’s charity and optimism. It stood in sharp contrast to the socially minded Christianity of the early 20th century, epitomized by Christians like William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Francis Cabrini, and G.K. Chesterton. 

The exact nature of this mix of Stoicism and Christianity is debatable. As with the modern debate on “Christian Nationalism,” the lines are blurred. Among scholars of General Robert E. Lee, whether or not to consider him a Stoic is an openly debated question. Markoes echoes a popular story that Lee kept a copy of Meditations on his nightstand. R. David Cox’s Lee biography conversely argues the opposite, that Lee was a committed Episcopalian who allegedly took communion alongside black Christians. Lee was a hopeful general until the final years of the Civil War and remained hopeful throughout that God’s providence would allow him to shape the world. Regardless, Lee was still a classicist who read and studied the Stoics as a matter of education, and his theology was merely a layperson’s understanding. 

Stoicism is broadly syncretic with Christianity when considering their mutual dedication to monotheism, providence, and virtue ethics. The Apostle John directly appeals to the Stoic notion of the “logos” in the opening verse of his gospel. St. Paul dialogs with Athenian Stoics in Acts and it's possible that he even corresponded with the Stoic philosopher Seneca during the reign of Nero. 

However, Stoicism is focused on the divinity of man’s inner light. The self, the mind, is regarded as holy. Christianity attributes all holiness to God. From these two founts, these philosophies skew in different directions. Stoicism becomes pessimistic, while Christianity is optimistic. There is little hope in Stoicism. The inner light is doomed to depart the body. Stoicism finds it irrational to pretend otherwise or grieve that fact. Anyone who has read Meditations can tell you that Marcus Aurelius spends most of his time journaling against intense melancholy and attempting to soothe his beliefs that his soul will disintegrate upon his inevitable death.

As a result, early Christians tended to distance themselves from these ideas. As historian Thomas Cahill writes, church fathers like St. Augustine and St. Jerome grew weary of the Greeks and Romans. They avoided them due to their tempting ideas, fearing their souls may burn in hell for admiring Cicero and Plato more than Christ—a prejudice later Catholic intellectuals like St. Thomas Aquinas would abandon as they synchronized Aristotle into their theology. 

Admiration for Pagan philosophers would intensify during the Enlightenment, with John Adams’s life goal being to become the American Cicero. However, as historian Thomas E. Ricks writes, the decline of classism and the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the 19th century began to fundamentally transform the Republic. Civic virtue became less prominent as a social value. The free market flourished. The number of religious leaders skyrocketed. Americans wanted to define themselves on their terms, with less deference to the classical world. As Ricks writes, “This new religiosity led some to question the morality of heeding examples from Pagan Rome.” 

The classicism of Lee, which Percy rightly identified in 1959, lingered in the South due in part to its intense suffering after the war, its economic ruination, the tortures of the Reconstruction era, and its humiliations throughout the 20th century. The tools the South used to preserve itself became the unfortunate tools that protected its hierarchies and pessimism. They fell back on the trappings of Chivalry and the politics of Aristotle, echoing the ancient pro-slavery sentiment that it “Tis right the Greeks should govern barbarians.” 

The character of the modern South bears little resemblance to this. The past 40 years have seen a complete change in the makeup and economic success of the South. Texas, Tennessee, and Florida have become a refuge for Americans fleeing prohibitive laws, small business regulations, and high taxes. It is no longer a realm of proud pessimism but of optimism. What little remains of the old aristocracy is drowned out by the voices of ascendant Evangelical Christianity and populist nationalism, even if large regions of the South remain striken with poverty and blight. It is moving in the right direction and has reasons to feel confident. 

Today, Stoicism has become a philosophy of the elite. It is the fascination of San Francisco tech billionaires; a means to tapering excess where the richest people in the world can find order and meaning in lives defined by consumerism and indulgence. These elites, similarly ensnared in a pessimistic worldview of climate disasters, bigotry, and transhumanism, have little hope for the future. Elizabeth Holmes is likely reading her favorite aging copy of Meditations right now in jail while she contemplates defrauding Theranos investors. 

None of this is not to say that Stoicism is a cancerous philosophy. Stoicism is the most sensible and virtuous philosophy for a society where God is already dead. It is the greatest secular philosophy ever conceived for enduring the unendurable. It is a tempting ideology, if only because its given great minds the strength to succeed. Cato the Younger’s last stand for the Roman Republic and noble suicide is romantic and admirable in all but a Christian context. It’s not surprising that a region that faced a century of economic depression and racial animas would simply try to grit and bear it. Its no surprise they would attempt to maintain the inner light of the South as it outwardly decayed. 

“For Southern society was above all a society of manners, an incredible triumph of manners, and a twilight of manners seems a twilight of the world. For the Stoic, there is no real hope. His finest hour is to sit tight-lipped and ironic while the world comes crashing down around him,” says Percy. 

However, Stoicism is currently most vibrant in areas that remain trapped in despair. Stoicism fed many of the South’s best and worst tendencies. It gave the Southern gentleman his backbone, and the slave driver his whip. The New South is optimistic. It has a reason to be hopeful. It can be proud entirely on its terms, free of the burdens of the past. It no longer has to pretend “King Cotton” isn’t propping it up, because it’s freer and more prosperous than ever before. It is the only place in the country, to borrow a phrase, that can think of what can be unburdened by what has been.