John McCain, Stoic Philosopher

Can we all agree that we've had about as much reflection on the dreadful Bob Jones University donnybrook as we can stand? Might we concede that the nasty contretemps over the religious right as a "force of evil" is already stale? Even those of us who enjoy discussing religion might now wish John McCain had kept his mouth shut.

Should McCain soldier on past Super Tuesday--an increasingly iffy prospect--a much more interesting religious debate could emerge, one involving Christianity, classical philosophy and the moral renewal of American culture.

The thing that excites the public's imagination most about McCain is his status as a warrior who endured five and a half years of prison and torture to be true to his country and his ideals. His story celebrates the virtues of Stoicism, the pre-Christian Greco-Roman philosophy that preached the sacred obligation to suffer any pain and indignity, even unto death, for the sake of righteousness.

Neo-conservative intellectuals William Kristol and David Brooks recently suggested that McCain's informal Stoicism offers Americans a way to talk about public virtue without depending on religion. Evangelical thinker Marvin Olasky dunned them for extolling "the religion of Zeus."

But Christian thinkers as separated by time and place as Paul, Tertullian, Augustine, Aquinas and Erasmus would not have seen classical thought as a threat. Nor would American secular heroes like George Washington, who revered Seneca, or Robert E. Lee, a devout Christian who rode into battle with the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius in his saddlebag.

Those men understood that Western culture rests on two pillars: Faith, the inheritance of the Jews; and Reason, the gift of the Greeks. All Western religion, philosophy, and culture comes from the creative conflict between Athens and Jerusalem.

"What the classical culture did to unify the West was to give a foundation for ethics, the need to be virtuous," says Alphonse Vinh. Vinh, a self-described "Christian humanist" who is working on a book about the Stoic tradition in Southern culture, observes a "siege mentality" among certain religious conservatives, "who are very sensitive to any kind of non-traditional Christian influence that might infiltrate the fortress.

"The problem is the early Christian church is steeped in classical culture. There are a lot of Stoic ideas in Paul's letters, and the early Church fathers were classically educated," he says.

In fact, Christian intellectuals have traditionally seen in the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans the providential hand of God at work preparing the world for the universal Messiah, born of the Jews.

Doing the right thing, even if it means resignation in the face of pain and death--that is the essence of Stoic wisdom. Duty, honor, courage, dignity, discipline--these comport well with Christianity.

The problem, from a Christian perspective, is that Stoicism is incomplete.

For one, Stoicism is aware of humanity's faults, but doesn't have the more profound sense of humanity's sinfulness, which is Christianity's inheritance from Judaism. And Stoic philosophy can be pitiless, lacking notions of love and mercy, which are at the heart of Christian teaching.

"The Stoics were not compassionate in the sense that we now use that word," says novelist Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who says he is not a Stoic, had his contemporary protagonists in "A Man in Full" fervently embrace Stoicism as expounded by the first-century sage Epictetus.

"Epictetus says, in so many words, 'Look, you have enough problems trying to take care of yourself. You can't go around trying to take care of everyone else."

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