Episode #244 - Stoic Grace (Part 1)

Grace has been a concept that I’ve personally struggled to understand for quite some time, in no small part because it’s a religious term which has a supernatural element to it. In Christianity, grace is often viewed as some kind of connection with God. However, I’ve come to realize that we can understand grace from a Stoic perspective, and I believe that there is much benefit in doing so. So: what is Stoic grace, if we can be bold enough to try and define such a thing? This episode will be released in two parts because this topic is really dense. The next episode will be #245 released next Tuesday.

Episode Transcript

A Brief Look at History – Christianity and Stoicism

Before I go into Stoic grace, I’d like to take a few minutes and discuss some history. Of course, this will not be a thorough look at the history of religious thought, but it will provide a bit of back-knowledge so that we can best understand the topic at hand.

Broadly speaking, religious practice has always been a part of human experience. In fact, one could very well argue that religious practice is what makes us human. As a species, though, we haven’t always recorded everything. We weren’t always literate.

Just to be clear, that does not mean that we are smarter today than we were before we were written literate. Written literacy is what allows us to share ideas in society via books, etc., but the concept of logos is manifested through speech as well (of course!).

In fact, there is a school of thought that perhaps by focusing so much on written literacy that we lose some of our ability to think creatively or abstractly. Learning an alphabet, grammar, etc. takes up a very large amount of our time in development. What if, instead, we replaced that with meditation? Philosophical practices? Would we be better off? I tend to think that all of the time learning to read and write absolutely pays off in the long-term… but who really knows? Maybe I’m biased (in fact, I definitely am).

In any case, the main point is that we’ve had religious practice and philosophical thought for much longer than recorded history. And then we started recording history around 5,000 years ago in Egypt and Sumer. There are lots of documentation about the religious practices of Babylonia, for example, around their God Marduk.

Stoicism comes into the picture around 2,500 years ago. However, like every religion/philosophy, Stoicism builds upon what was there before it – I think we need to have an appreciation for that. Christianity comes into the picture about 2,000 years ago, which was also built upon what was there before it – including Stoicism.