Fear is an emotion, and controlling your emotions can be empowering.

I think I have mentioned all the things that the Stoics thought were truly “in our power,” within the realm of our moral purpose, under the control of our free will, save one category. It requires a little different thinking, so I’ve saved it for last. I have introduced it already, in part. The Stoics believed that all human emotions are acts of will. You’re happy because you want to be happy, you’re drained or sad when you want to be sad, and fear is not something that danger forces on you. When you find yourself afraid, it’s time to realize that you decided, wanted, willed that you fear. As I said above, without your having fear, nobody can meaningfully threaten you. In Discourses, there is a dialogue something like this, and it was like old home week to me:

When questioned, I had to give him our escape plans; he threatened me with death; I was compelled, I had no choice….That’s not right; you had a choice and you made it. It may have been justified, I won’t judge that for now. But be honest with yourself. Don’t say you had to do anything just because you are threatened with death. You simply decided it was better to comply. It was your will that compelled you. Refuse to want to fear and you start acquiring a constancy of character that makes it impossible for another to do you wrong. Threats have no effect unless you fear.

Epictetus says: “Will you then realize that this epitome of all the ills that befall man, of his ignoble spirit, of his cowardice, is not death, but rather his fear of death?”

As I said, learning to take charge of your emotions is empowering. When you get there, Enchiridion 30 applies: “No one can harm you without your permission.” And by “harm” Epictetus means, as Stoics always mean, harming your inner self, your self-respect, and your obligation to be faithful. He can break your arm or leg, but not to worry. They’ll heal.

What are some of the guidelines to identifying the good and the evil in Stoic thought?

Well, first, Stoicism goes back to the idea that nature is God’s body, and that it doesn’t do to try to improve on it. In fact, God and Nature are two aspects of the same thing. God’s soul is the Mind of the universe, and Nature is his body. Just as the mind is the active, and Nature is the passive, so our minds are active and our bodies passive. Mind over matter; it all happens in your head, so don’t worry about your body. The perfect man models himself on this operation of the universe. Nothing is ever lost. All remains in the care of Providence. Just as the universe, in which the Mind of God is imminent and indwelling and moves in a manner self-sufficient and self-ruling, so the good man is independent, autonomous, a law unto himself, and a follower of the eternal guidance of duty and conscience.

This is called the coherence of Stoicism, and Cicero used this as the basis of his founding of Natural Law and International Law. “True law is right reason in agreement with nature.”

The Stoics were good citizens. In politics the Stoic would love his country and hold himself ready to die at any time to avert its disgrace or his own. But a man’s conscience was to be higher that any law. A man has a right to be responsible, self-ruling, autonomous.

So on good and evil, where does that leave us? Nothing that is natural can be evil. Death cannot be evil. Disease cannot be evil. Natural disasters cannot be evil. Nothing inevitable can be evil. The universe as a whole is perfect, and everything in it has a place in the overall design. Inevitability is produced by the workings of this mechanism. Events do not happen by chance, they arrive by appointment. There is a cause for everything, and “chance” is simply a name for undiscovered causes.

Neither good nor evil can be abstractions. Epictetus said: “Where do I look for the good and the evil? Within me, in that which is my own.” But for that which is another’s never employ the words “good” or “evil,” or anything of the sort. Goods and evils can never be things others do to you, or for you.

Why not make health or life be good? Because man deserves the good, and it’s better that he not “deserve” anything he does not control; otherwise, he will go after what is not his, and this is the start of crime, wars, you name it.

Another thing. You do not control God. You must not refer to Him as “good” or “evil.” Why not? If you pin these mundane terms on Him, reciting “God is good,” people may become tempted, when things God controls run counter to what they’re trying to do – weather being unfavorable for farmers or the wind being from the wrong direction for sailors – to start calling Him evil, too. And that’s impious. Remember, says Epictetus: “Piety must be preserved. Unless piety and self-interest be conjoined, piety cannot be maintained in any man.”

Now [let me close with] some other things that follow from the assumptions of Stoicism that you might not have thought of. The Stoics say that the invincible man is he who cannot be dismayed by any happening outside of his span of control, outside his will, his moral purpose. Does this sound irresponsible to you? Here you have a man who pays no attention as the world blows up around him, so long as he had no part in causing it.

The answer to that depends on whether or not you believe in collective guilt. The Stoics do not. Here is what The Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about collective guilt:

If guilt, in the proper sense, turns on deliberate wrongdoing, it seems that no one can be guilty for the act of another person – there can be no shared or collective or universal guilt. Guilt is incurred by the free choice of the individual….But many have questioned this. Among them are some sociologists who misrepresent in this way the dependence of the individual on society. But the main location of the idea of collective guilt is religion – many forms of doctrines of original sin and universal sin regard guilt as a pervasive state of mankind as a whole.

Speaking for myself, I think of collective guilt as a manipulative tool. It reminds me of the communist “criticism/self-criticism” technique. Many of the precepts of the Stoics depend on an abhorrence of the concept of collective guilt.

The Stoics believe that every man bears the exclusive responsibility himself for his own good and his own evil – and that leads to their further conclusion that it is impossible to imagine a moral order in which one person does the wrong, and another, the innocent, suffers. Now add all that to Epictetus’s firm belief that we are all born with an innate conception of good and evil, and what is noble and what is shameful, what is becoming and unbecoming, what is fitting and inappropriate, what is right to do and what is wrong, and further, remembering that all Stoic talk refers to the inner man, what is going on “way down in here.” It follows that the perpetrator of evil pays the full price for his misdeed in suffering the injury of knowing that he has destroyed the good man with him. Man has “moral sense,” and he reaps the benefits and pays the price for this inheritance.