Friday, December 30, 2022

Wayne A. Meeks on the use of autarkeia αὐτάρκεια ("self-sufficiency") in Greek Literature

  

The autonomy and self-sufficiency of the city, its autarkeia, was at the center of the pride that its citizens felt, and it included especially the freedom of the polis to settle its quarrels within its own walls. It was, of course, precisely that autarkeia which so soon after Aristotle’s time would have to yield to the imperial will of Philip, Alexander and his successors, and then the Romans—who added an alien law and a bureaucracy as well.  (Wayne A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians [Library of Early Christianity; Philadelphia, Pa.: The Westminster Press, 1986], 20)

 

. . . the Stoic does not choose hardships, even though he welcomes those that come, as “showing the man” (Epictetus, Discourses 1.24). Furthermore, there is no such metaphysical dualism behind the Stoic asceticism as there was in some forms of Middle Platonism. For the Stoic mind and body are both material, and the mind or soul of the individual will not, any more than the body, is a natural event and therefore cannot be evil. When the great rhetorician Isocrates called death “the last of evils” (compare Paul’s “last enemy,” 1 Cor. 15:”6), says Musonius, he showed that he was no philosopher, for “how could there have been any smattering of knowledge of or acquaintance with true good and evil in the man who thought that an evil which is necessary sequel even to the best life” (No. 17; Lutz. P. 111).

 

The doctrine of the sage’s “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), his disdain for all “externals,” makes the Stoic sound like a radical individualist. Early Stoics, like Cynics always, underlined the isolation of the sage by dividing all humankind into only two classes, wise persons and fools. There was no middle ground. Chrysippus had remarked that you drown just as surely a few inches beneath the surface as the bottom of the pond (Plutarch, Against the Stoics on Common Conceptions = Moralis 1063A). So, no matter how near one came to moral perfection, one was not yet a sage until one’s virtue progress toward this perfection. In later Stoics idealization of the sage goes so far that Seneca remarked that, like the phoenix, a good perfection is so rare, the philosopher’s concern must practically be with those people in between, who are making progress toward wisdom and goodness. Hence for Musonius as for Plutarch, the struggle to win rational control, which alone produces ultimately the person still engaged in that struggle, is not yet immune to the external restraints that affect all humans, not superior to the duties imposed on all members of society. (Ibid., 50)