Augustine's Critique of Stoic Ethics

City of God  19.4

 

     
  I am astonished at the effrontery of the Stoics in their contention that [human] ills are not ills at all, when they admit that if they should be so great that a wise man cannot or ought not to endure them, he is forced to put himself to death and depart from this life.  Yet so great is the stupefying arrogance of those people who imagine that they find the ultimate good in this life and that they can attain happiness by their own efforts, that their 'wise man' (that is, the wise man as described by them in their amazing idiocy), even if he goes blind, deaf, and dumb, even if he is enfeebled in limb and tormented with pain, and the victim of every other kind of ill that could be mentioned or imagined, and thus is driven to do himself to death--that such a man would not blush to call that life of his, in the setting of all those ills, a life of happiness!  

What a life of bliss, that seeks the aid of death to end it!  If this is happiness, let him continue in it!  How can these circumstances fail to be evil which overcome the good of fortitude, and not only compel that same fortitude to give way to them, but to reach such a pitch of delirium as to call a life happy and in the same breath persuade a man that he should make his escape from it?  Is anyone so blind as to fail to see that if it were a happy life it would not be a life to seek escape from?

In fact the admission that it is a life to be escaped from is an open confession of weakness.  Then what keeps the Stoics from humbling their stiff-necked pride and admitting that it is a life of misery?  Was it by patient endurance that Cato took his own life?  Was it not rather through a lack of it?  For he would not have so acted had he not been unable to endure Caesar's victory.  What happened, then, to his fortitude?  Why, it yielded; it succumbed.  It was so thoroughly defeated that it abandoned this 'happy life'; it deserted and fled.  Or was it a happy life no longer?  If so, it was a wretched life.  Then how can it be that those circumstances were not evil, if they made life a misery from which man should escape?

 
     

From:  City of God 19.4.  Trans.  Henry Bettenson.  New York:  Penguin, 1972.

Note:  Cato opposed Julius Caesar during the Roman Civil War.  Upon Caesar's victory, he killed himself rather than to accept Caesar's clemency.  He is usually considered the great exemplar of virtue by the Stoics.