Sublime

It’s the study of philosophy that cultivates our reason and ethics so that we can do our job well. We can’t just wing it—too many people are counting on us to do it right.

Even more than Epictetus, Seneca makes it clear that philosophical theorizing and debate, along with engaged problem solving, are essential to the ultimate goal of making human life better.

the primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordinary people live better lives. Stoicism, as we shall see, was one of the most popular and successful of the ancient schools of philosophy.

One of the analogies favored by the Stoics to describe their philosophy was that of a fertile field. Logic was the protective fence, physics was the field, and the crop that all this produced was ethics—or how to live.

The great Jewish scholar Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, had already argued that, intermediate between God and this world, was the divine Logos, the ‘Son of God,’ through whom the world was created and governed; for God himself, in his transcendent majesty, could not come into contact with lower reality.

Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), who employed the Stoic conception of a divine ‘Reason’ (Logos) pervading all things – partially present in all rational intellects – to explain who the eternal Son of God, incarnate in Jesus, was.