Providence, Virtue, and History in John Chrysostom and the Stoics
Visiting scholar from Notre Dame University (Indiana), Robert Edwards, will deliver a public lecture on John Chrysostom at Macquarie University (Sydney) in late April 2020. In anticipation of the lecture, Edwards offers a foretaste below. Scholars have often claimed that John Chrysostom’s moral teaching is, if not Stoic, at least stoicizing. This claim especially applies to Chrysostom’s teaching on what is in our power ( to eph’ēmin ) vs. what is not—that is, the relationship that human choice and action have to externals. For Chrysostom as for the Stoics (so the argument goes) externals are indifferent ( ta adiaphora ), and only virtue can be spoken of, properly, as good ( to kalon, to agathon ). The evidence which is typically brought forward to support such a claim is Chrysostom’s use of something approximating a dictum of Chrysippus, the “second founder” of the Stoic school: “no one can be harmed unless he harms himself.” Chrysostom even has a whole treatise named after i...