PRESIDENT'S ESSAY
Eschatology against the Stoics
POSTED
February 18, 2008

Augustine rebuts Stoic notions of apatheia and eupatheia in Book 14 of the city of God. He says that Christian experience even those emotions that Stoics denounce - distress and pain and desire - and he roots these experiences in the fact that Christians live in the present age “because they are still groaning within themselves, ‘waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our bodies.’” In glory, the saints will be free from pain, though not free from emotion.
Stoicism is a form of over-realized eschatology. Stoics immanentize the echaton.

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