Friday, October 18, 2024

*** This is a rough transcript of today’s show ***

It is the 18th of October 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

 

In 2014, marketing guru Ryan Holiday published the first of his self-help books, introducing stoicism to a new age. His “The Obstacle is the Way” was one of many books in the past decade reaching out to largely young male audiences and repackaging Roman Stoicism.

A storm of articles, books, and think pieces then tried reconciling ancient philosophy with Christianity. Are they compatible? Are they opposed to one another? And, as I get to tell you on this show, there is nothing new under the sun. Marketing stoicism and Christianity have at least a 400-year-old history with the delightfully named “Justus Lipsius,” the controversial Flemish professor in the late 16th century who was born on the 18th of October in 1547 in what was then the Spanish Netherlands.

 A few things: “flemish” has nothing to do with his disposition or throat—he was from Flanders. And “Justus Lipsius”—you guessed it—is a Latinized name to sound sophisticated. But we are gone, so give him a pass because his birth name was “Joest Lips.”

So, our boy Justus Lipsius, born amidst the Spanish occupation, would see the dire effects of a Reformation that became a state issue and began to use armies as often as they might theological disputation.

He was born into the Catholic Church and sent to school among the Jesuits until his parents feared he might become one of them. Then he was taken to the University of Leuven, where he got a top-notch education in the classics.

His first published work was a philology, and while perhaps not exciting, it did procure him work as the secretary to a Cardinal in Rome. Lipsius spent his first two years in Rome working on a catalog and history of the ancient Libraries—his model becoming the chief model for library histories to the present.

In 1572, Catholic Spanish troops invading Belgium confiscated his property, which may have fast-tracked his move towards the Reformation. He would be hired at the University of Jena, which would then become a center of Lutheran Orthodoxy.

But Lipsius was not as concerned with theological arguments as he was with ethics. And it was in the ancient Roman philosophy of Seneca that he thought he found something compatible with Christianity. The use of ancient philosophy and Christianity has always been debated. To what extent could you mine the riches of pagan philosophies for Christianity, and to what extent does a Christian need to eschew all “worldly” authors?

The use of Seneca, or commentary on the stoic philosopher, was nothing new in Christian circles: Augustine spoke of him, and John Calvin’s first work was a commentary on Seneca.

Lipsius composed his principal work, Two Books on Constancy, in 1584, using him. It would be printed and translated in some demand for the next century.

In it, Lipsius outlines his “Christian Stoicism,” which differed from classical stoicism in a few ways. First, the Christian stoic was not to ignore emotions but rather have their emotions transformed into love. It delves into the problem of evil, positing that what we perceive as evil may not be in the end and that the world is governed by God instead of fate. Common to both philosophers and later humanists, the key to a “good life” or the “best possible life in light of sin” was reason. This is the “constancy” of which he writes- the “immovable strength of mind” that is neither too high nor too low. Lipsius would also criticize the strict materialism of the stoics- one could argue that materialism is at the heart of classical stoicism, but it is the Neo-stoicism of Lipsius that would mark the blending of Christianity and stoicism- and one that we might contextualize in the religious strife of the second half of the sixteenth century. Lipsius was caught between the Dutch and the Spanish, between the Lutherans at Jena, who were suspect of him, and the Catholicism of his youth. Lipsius would end up in Louvain, where he would elicit the praise of, among others, Michel de Montaigne, who claimed he was one of the “most learned men alive”. Lipsius would die in 1606- born on this day in 1547, Justus Lipsius was 58 years old.

 

The last word for today is from the daily lectionary and Psalm 104 in the style of the Scottish Metrical Psalter:

Bless GOD, my soul.  O LORD my God,

thou art exceeding great;

With honour and with majesty

thou clothed art in state.

 

With light, as with a robe, thyself

thou coverest about;

And, like unto a curtain, thou

the heavens stretchest out.

 

Who of his chambers doth the beams

within the waters lay;

Who doth the clouds his chariot make,

on wings of wind make way.

 

Who flaming fire his ministers,

his angels spirits, doth make:

Who earth's foundations did lay,

that it should never shake.

  

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 18th of October 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who is more than just lips… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by man reminded of the old Letterman “just bulbs” “just shades” skit…I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.