Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent: Reconsidering Virtue in the Reformed Tradition1

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2014): 199-227

Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

ROTESTANT THEOLOGIANS have historically affirmed that faith has unique purchase in the Christian life. For Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, the possession or absence of faith plays a crucial role in determining a ChristianP ’s status before God. Because faith is connected to salvation, these theologians resist the notion that faith is a virtue: humans cannot pursue virtue until they have been justified, and faith is a condition for justification and in some sense prior to it.2 Yet consideration of their understandings of faith’s relation to love reveals that faith, when coupled with love in a manner that retains faith’s priority, functions as a virtue, and indeed as the core virtue, in Protestant

1 This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from The Char- acter Project at Wake Forest University and the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Character Project, Wake Forest University, or the John Templeton Foundation. 2 Martin Luther tends to reject the term “virtue” entirely, equating it with the human’s sinful and hopeless quest for a righteousness that can be achieved through our own moral agency independently of God. His The Freedom of a Christian begins with a rejection of the notion that faith is a virtue, insofar as this designation might imply a link between faith and works. Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian, Lu- ther's Works, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (St Louis: Concordia, 1900-1986), 31: 343. Jonathan Edwards rejects the idea that faith is a virtue on similar grounds. See Mis- cellany 682, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Kenneth P. Minkema et al. 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957-2008). Because he understands faith to be a condition for salvation that a human acquires prior to conversion, he is concerned that characterizing faith as a virtue might imply that humans could be virtuous prior to receiving God’s justifying grace. Edwards is clear that prior to conversion, humans lack moral merit so that even though faith is a means through which Christians are justified, this faith is not itself meritorious: “An interest in Christ and a right to his benefits is not given as a reward or from respect to the moral fitness of anything in us” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 243). The phrase “justification by faith alone,” Edwards explains, presumes that justification occurs “without any manner of virtue or goodness of our own” (Justification by Faith, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 19: 149 and 154). 200 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran thought. Recent scholarship in virtue ethics suggests that a virtue is a moral disposition or character trait that benefits its possessor and leads to her flourishing, and through its relation to this end of flourishing, a virtue can be said to make its possessor a “good human being.” Moreover, a virtue is partly constitutive of the end or purpose for which humans exist.3 Although the Protestant tradition affirms that the faith of a sinful human being cannot be deemed virtuous pri- or to justification, after justification this faith functions as a virtue, as a moral disposition through which Christians are formed into the creatures whom they were created to be. This exploration of Protestant virtue benefits from conversation with the Roman Stoics. While dimensions of Stoic thought helped to shape Christian ethics as a whole, Protestant accounts of faith demonstrate a particular affinity with a vision of the moral life characteristic of the Roman Stoics, who conceive virtue as a dispositional stance of assent to divine providence.4 A Roman Stoic account of virtue suggests resources for maintaining the primacy of faith in Protestant thought while exploring the possibility of understanding this faith as a virtue. Roman Stoic virtuous assent has notable similarities to Christian faith. Both assent and faith have a cognitive component, through which an agent intellectually apprehends divine goodness, and a moral component, through which an agent exercises trust in (or consents to) the God who is good. A comparison of Stoic assent to accounts of faith in Luther, Calvin, and Edwards illuminates the ways in which these theologians uphold faith as the primary moral good for humans. At the same time, conversation with the Sto- ics indirectly points toward the importance of preserving a necessary relationship between faith and love (even as love plays a secondary or supportive role) not only to sustain the notion that faith is at the heart of Protestant virtue, but also to preserve the idea (important to

3 These attributes of a virtue are drawn from Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Hursthouse argues that Plato and Aristotle defend two claims central to the meaning of virtue that must be viewed as interrelated: “the virtues benefit their possessor,” and “their virtues make their possessor a good human being” in that “Human beings need the virtues in order to live well, to flourish as human beings, to live a charac- teristically good, eudaimon, human life” (167). She explores and defends these claims about virtue’s relation to human nature in 163-216. MacIntyre emphasizes virtue’s essential relation to the human telos, the end or purpose for which humans exist. See in particular pages 58-9, 202, and 219. 4 A focus on the Roman Stoics, whose ideas are represented most thoroughly in the work of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, is appropriate to this study because of their historical influence on the early modern and modern context in which the Reformed theological tradition emerged. Cicero was also a highly studied thinker at this time, and this article makes reference to select passages from Cicero’s work that represent Stoic ideas. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 201 the Reformers and Edwards) that faith is not merely akin to cognitive belief. For the Stoics, the moral component of assent necessarily generates a disposition of impartial love for the universe as a whole. The idea of faith as a Protestant virtue likewise requires that love be seen as holding an essential relation to faith, even as Luther’s and Calvin’s concerns about the Scholastic formula of “faith formed by love” necessitate preserving faith’s primacy within this relationship.

VIRTUOUS ASSENT IN THE ROMAN STOICS The Stoic account of virtue stands in keeping with Socrates’s conception of the virtues as a unified moral good rather than with an Aristotelian account of the virtues as a multiplicity of interconnected moral qualities.5 Whereas earlier Stoics followed Socrates in defin- ing the virtues as forms of phronesis, the Roman Stoics conceive virtue as a singular moral disposition that assents to God’s providential oversight of the world. Epictetus describes assent to the truth as humanity’s “moral purpose.”6 Although assent has a cognitive component, beginning with an agent’s recognition of indicators of the world’s providential ordering, true assent occurs only as an agent willfully consents to the circumstances divine providence lays out for her. As she lives out this consent, she reorients herself increasingly to embrace the providential ordering of events and to align her character with this ordering so that she may in some sense take part in divine providence’s work in the world.7

5 For more on Socrates’s account of the unity of the virtues developed in Plato’s Protagoras, see Gregory Vlastos, “The Unity of Virtues in the ‘Protagoras’,” The Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 3 (1972): 415-58, at 429. Vlastos’s explanation of different possible interpretations of the “unity thesis” Socrates advances provides a valuable summary of twentieth century scholarship on the subject and offers a co- gent interpretation of how the virtues’ unity can be logically sustained. Christian theologians have advanced accounts of the virtues consistent with both an Aristotelian understanding of the virtues as interconnected and a Stoic or Platonic account of the virtues as having unity. Augustine affirms the unity of the virtues and defines each of the cardinal virtues as a form of love, while Thomas Aquinas, in keeping with Aristotle, upholds a conception of the virtues as interconnected but distinct. For further discussion of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in relation to this debate, see John P. Langan, “Augustine on the Unity and Interconnection of the Virtues,” Harvard Theological Review 72, nos. 1-2 (1979): 81-95. 6 Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, 2 vols, trans. W.A. Oldfather (London: Loeb, 1998), Bk. I, ch. 17, vol. 1,117. 7 While providence is a major point of emphasis in Roman Stoic thought, Stoic and Christian understandings of providence are by no means identical. The Stoics tend to think of the divine nature as immanently involved in the direction of the created order, and the early Stoics and Chryssipus do not believe that providence is concerned with the welfare of individual persons. In a speech describing Stoic thought in On Divination, Cicero affirms, “it is not a Stoic doctrine that the gods concern themselves with individual cracks in the liver or individual bird-songs. That is unbe- coming, unworthy of the gods, and quite impossible.” On divination I.117-18 in The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. Long and Sedley, vol. 1, 261. In contrast, Christian 202 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

Martha Nussbaum’s discussion of the emotions in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions provides a framework for understanding the intellectual dimension of the virtuous assent at work in the Roman Stoics. Nussbaum characterizes Stoic emotions as moral judgments that consist in “assent” to sensory impressions. She contends that the emotions involve both a cognitive perception of a given proposition (or state of affairs) and a judgment about this proposition’s value. For example, she notes that Chrysippus sees grief and other emotions as involving both a rational judgment that perceives a current state of affairs and a more evaluative judgment that this state of affairs calls for a particular moral response; in the case of grief, an agent makes “not only the judgment that an important part of my life has gone, but that it is right to be upset about that.”8 The moral judgment, or act of assent, central to the structure of the emotions is thus both a cognitive perception and an evaluative judgment.9 Nussbaum argues that the judgments that constitute the emotions have a continuous impact on our character rather than func- tioning as momentary events. As sustained judgments, they are “enduring states” which makes them akin to character dispositions. Nussbaum explains that in assent, “although initially there may be an act of acceptance, and judgment is defined in terms of that act, there is also an enduring state, namely of having that content inside, so to speak; one accepts or assents to that proposition continuously.”10 Like Nussbaum’s account of the emotions, the assent central to Roman Stoic virtue is a disposition sustained over time, and this dis-

theology strongly affirms God’s knowledge of and concern for particular persons. W.J. Torrance Kirby therefore recognizes a superficial resemblance between Calvin and the Stoics on providence but argues that Calvin presumes a degree of God’s involvement with individual persons that exceeds the presumptions of Stoic philosophy: Calvin “out-Stoicizes the Stoics in his assertion of the radically immanent involvement of special providence.” Kirby, “Stoic and Epicurean? Calvin’s Dialecti- cal Account of Providence in the Institutes,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 5, no. 3 (2003): 309-22, at 318. Calvin’s account of special providence emphasizes God’s intensive and specific involvement with human events, and Cal- vin explicitly contrasts this view of providence with a Stoic understanding of fate (see Institutes 1.16.3-4 and 1.16.8). Despite these significant differences, Roman Stoic accounts of providence do share with Christian theology a sense that the divine nature orders the material world rationally and benevolently (for its good). Annas attributes a belief that providence is rational to “the later Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus” (161). A.A. Long likewise affirms that Epictetus characterizes God in personal and theistic terms (Epictetus, 156, 177). The Stoic and Christian traditions’ shared understandings of providence as rational and directed toward the good lead toward conceptions of assent and faith that are strikingly similar. 8 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 47. 9 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 27, 30-1. 10 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 46. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 203

position is partly cognitive or intellectual. The cognitive dimension of Roman Stoic assent, like Nussbaum’s assent, couples sensory perception with evaluative judgment. For the Stoics, sensory impressions are a starting point for all knowledge, including moral knowledge. When humans encounter objects in the material world, these objects give rise to cognitive sensory impressions.11 Yet the cognitive dimension of assent is not merely an act of perception of apprehension. Instead, like Nussbaum’s emotions, Roman Stoic assent involves an evaluative judgment. After human senses observe the natural world, human reason determines that this world is providentially directed and judges this direction to be good. Epictetus indicates that an intellectual understanding that “there is a God, and that his providence directs the whole” is a starting point for virtue.12 The faculty of reason builds on and uses sensory impressions to direct humans toward the achievement of virtue. Epictetus explains that intellectual learning must precede the proper “use” of providence’s gifts: “It is not sufficient to wish to become noble and good, but… we are under the necessity of learning something first.… For use is one thing, and understanding another.”13 Reason enables us to recognize the workings of providence in our everyday activities14 and to fulfill the moral purpose for which we exist. Epictetus argues that “God has brought man into the world to be a spectator of Him- self and of His works, and not merely a spectator, but also an inter- preter.”15 Intellectual recognition of God’s presence in the world is an important part of virtuous assent. While achieving a proper understanding of God’s activity in the world and our place within this larger activity is an essential component of virtuous assent, assent has a moral or volitional component as well. Diana Fritz Cates’s discussion of Nussbaum’s account of assent indirectly clarifies the ways in which the Roman Stoic account of virtuous assent differs structurally from Nussbaum’s. For Nussbaum, the emotions are judgments of human reason that can be conceived entirely in the domain of the intellect. Cates contrasts Nussbaum’s account of the emotions, which conceives the emotions as “forms of cognition,” with that of Thomas Aquinas, who conceives the emotions as “appetitive motions” that are sustained only partly by acts of

11 In describing Zeno’s understanding of sensory impressions, Cicero is adamant that such impressions must be cognitive; they can be “true” or “false” insofar as they accurately perceive qualities inherent in the material world. Cicero, Academica 2.77- 8, in Hellenistic Philosophers, 242. 12 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. II, ch. 14, vol. 1, 301. 13 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. II, ch. 14, vol. 1, 301-3. 14 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 6, vol. 1, 39. 15 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 6, vol. 1, 45. 204 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran cognition.16 Aquinas views emotions as movements that draw together intellect and will, and Roman Stoic assent similarly involves both an intellectual component (the work of reason) and a moral or willful component (the work of the prohairesis). It is misleading to suggest that the presence of a “moral” component distinguishes Ro- man Stoic assent from Nussbaum’s position. Nussbaum argues that as an act of judgment, assent is within our power and stresses that assent is volitional or intentional.17 But identifying the “moral” dimension of Roman Stoic assent highlights the ways in which this assent involves a volitional and extended stance of consent to, or trust in, the divine providence a moral agent perceives to be at work in the universe. Reason is central to Roman Stoic virtue, but this virtue is most fully embodied as the moral agent’s prohairesis consents to divine providence in a manner that reorients her character. Most scholars agree that the Roman Stoics’ use of the term prohairesis distinguishes them from earlier Stoics.18 Michael Frede argues that Epicetetus introduces this Aristotelian term into Stoic thought to identify a faculty with a particular capacity to make choices.19 Frede translates prohairesis as “will” and argues that Epic- tetus is one of the earliest defenders of the idea that humans have a will and that this will is free.20 Other scholars are more cautious in translating prohairesis as will. Richard Sorabji uses this translation but stresses that Stoic will is more reasoned than contemporary read- ings of the term “will” might imply.21 Rist argues that Epictetus’s prohairesis is better thought of as the “moral personality.”22 Pro- hairesis, he contends, is “a term used for the whole spiritual being of man” that includes “all the mental activities which have to do with our character.”23 Moreover, Rist suggests that while Seneca uses the term “voluntas” (will), his account of voluntas shares with Epictetus a focus on “moral character” rather than on “willing” in a narrow

16 Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Wash- ington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 62-8. 17 Nussbaum, Upheavals, 27, 30-1. 18 Margaret R. Graver presents an interesting argument that opposes this dominant reading, suggesting the possibility of a form of prohairesis earlier in the Stoic tradition. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 66, 233 n. 12. 19 Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, ed. A.A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 43-6. 20 Frede, 76-7. 21 Sorabji argues that the term “will” is somewhat distorted “since proairesis has more to do with reason and less with will-power than do modern concepts of the will.” Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Chris- tian Temptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 215. 22 J.M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 230, 232. 23 Rist, Stoic, 228-9. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 205

sense.24 Rist acknowledges that in both Epictetus and Seneca (as well as Marcus Aurelius, who follows Epictetus’s use of prohairesis) there is a “voluntarist shift” away from earlier Stoa, which Rist suggests was informed by the introduction of the faculty of the will from the time of Cicero, but this shift is subtle and still emphasizes reason.25 This notion of “moral personality” captures the dimension of assent through which a moral agent consciously and deliberately pur- sues a particular character disposition that is embodied in particular behaviors.26 Through the activity of the agent’s moral personality, a moral agent embodies a trust in (or consent to) divine providence that emerges from awareness of her place within the universe. An intellectual understanding of divine providence motivates her to pursue the good by striving to align her character with the benevolent work of providence, or, as Seneca puts it, “to live according to nature.”27 Epictetus elevates consent to the will of providence as the hallmark of virtuous assent and roots this consent in an understanding that God is at work in all things. Recognition of God’s activity in the world generates a “sense of gratitude” toward God.28 This sense of gratitude encourages us to seek to align our character with God and God’s work within the world. In seeking harmony with divine providence, a moral agent embraces the purposes for which God made her. Humans have “received faculties” from God29 so that we may live in accordance with the nature God has given us. We do this by seeking “a manner of life harmonious with nature”30 through which we recognize that God has made us to be “citizen[s] of the universe,” persons who exist in community with God and others.31 This cognitive understanding of our place in the universe is most fully expressed in consent to God’s will. According to Epictetus, “the good and excellent man,” after considering whether God exists and is concerned with human affairs, “subordinates his own will to him who administers the universe.”32 Marcus Aurelius likewise understands the moral dimension of assent as rooted in intellectual reflection on divine providence and our personal place within the providentially directed universe: “This

24 “[W]hen Seneca talks about willing and the will, what he is really concerned with is our moral character” (Rist, Stoic, 227). 25 Rist, Stoic, 231-2. 26 Rist, Stoic, 230. 27 Seneca, On the Private Life, in Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175. 28 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 6, vol. 1, 39. 29 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 6, vol. 1, 45. 30 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 6, vol. 1, 45. 31 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 9, vol. 1, 63-5. 32 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. I, ch. 12, vol. 1, 89-91. 206 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran must always be borne in mind, what is the Nature of the whole Uni- verse and what mine, and how this stands in relation to that, being too what sort of a part of what sort of a whole; and that no one can prevent thee from doing and saying always what is in keeping with the Nature of which thou art a part.”33 Reflection on the nature of the universe generates a moral response, enabling us to determine “what virtue it calls for from me.”34 Later in the Meditations, Marcus Aure- lius suggests that we act morally by pursuing emotions in keeping with a trust that providence is at work in each situation we encounter. He cautions against certain forms of anger, pointing out that we should instead recognize and accept providence’s oversight of events: “In taking umbrage at anything, thou forgettest this, that everything happens in accordance with the Universal Nature.”35 Virtu- ous assent depends upon an encounter with the universe that brings about our cognitive recognition of the goodness of providence and consent to our place within the providential order. Virtuous assent, then, is grounded in an intellectual apprehension of divine goodness at work in the universe. It is thus a reasonable act centered upon the acceptance of a proposition. But assent simultaneously has a moral component. Humans exercise assent as we are formed in a disposition of trust in the divine nature through which we consent to our place within the universe. This coupling of belief and trust, we will see, is likewise present in Christian faith. Before turning to the Christian tradition, however, it is important to note that assent leads a Stoic sage to pursue a union with providence that brings about growth in a disposition of impartial love. Richard Sorabji describes this disposition in the sage as a feeling of “good will (eunoia), defined as willing good to another for the other’s sake” and notes that affection and love are dimensions of this feeling.36 Trust in divine providence leads a Roman Stoic moral agent toward a love for the universe as a whole, recognizing that all beings are radically interconnected. Julia Annas observes that “The Stoics are the first ethical theorists clearly to commit themselves to the thesis that morality requires impartiality to all others from the moral point of view”;37 Martha Nussbaum likewise maintains that the Stoics treat the cosmos as a whole as humanity’s primary moral attachment, and our particular community as secondary.38 The ancient Stoic Hierocles grounds universal love in a development of

33 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (London: Loeb, 1930), Bk. II, 33. 34 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. III, 61. 35 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. XII, 335. 36 Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 174. 37 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 265. 38 Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 345. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 207

natural instincts toward relational love: as we love particular others, we gradually grow into abilities to love more broadly so that the cir- cle of persons whom we love widens.39 But for the Roman Stoics, impartial love for all beings emerges as our trust in divine providence increases.40 The relation between virtuous assent and impartial love is partly evident in Epictetus’s and Seneca’s accounts of how moral agents image God’s character. Nussbaum observes that for the Stoics, the divine character reveals to us what it means to live virtuously.41 Both Epictetus and Seneca suggest that as a virtuous agent consents to her place in the universe, she strives to align her character with God’s benevolent concern for the universe. Epictetus perceives that God’s character shows us what virtue is, so that we exercise virtue ourselves–and thereby love others properly–by imitating what we observe in God. Epictetus explains that apprehension of divine activity in the world creates a desire to form one’s character to image God. We can pursue this desire only by “learning” of God’s character, for knowledge of God’s character gives us some understanding of the nature of virtue: “The philosophers say that we are first to learn that there is a God, and that his providence directs the whole.… Next we are to learn what the gods are.… If the Deity is faithful, he [a moral agent] too must be faithful; if free, beneficent, and noble, he must be free, beneficent, and noble likewise, in all his words and actions be- having as an imitator of God.”42 Seneca similarly indicates that humans develop virtuous benevolence through an apprehension of God’s mercy toward us that leads us to desire to imitate God’s character in our behavior toward others. On Favors develops this argument by beginning with the contention that all persons benefit in countless ways from “divine munificence.”43 We are morally obli- gated to do favors (which Seneca defines as spontaneous “act[s] of benevolence”44) toward others because this is a virtue that is exemplified in God’s relation toward us: “God confers on us the greatest

39 Annas, Morality of Happiness, 267-9. 40 This characterization is at odds with Annas’s contention that the Stoics’ emphasis on impartiality “does not rest on special features of Stoicism: it rests on strong demands on rationality which are also evident in other kinds of theory. In particular it does not rest on the Stoic view that the universe is an ordered whole of which we are parts, since, as we have seen, this is not a principle from which ethical theses are derived” (274). However, Annas acknowledges that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus differ from earlier Stoics precisely in treating “cosmic nature” as more of a “first principle within ethics,” a move that she suggests is a departure from earlier Stoics (175-7). It is plausible to read the Roman Stoics as deriving moral commitments, including a commitment to impartiality, from a commitment to God. 41 Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 333. 42 Epictetus, Discourses, Bk. II, ch. 14, vol. 1, 301. 43 Seneca, On Favors, Bk. IV, ch. 5, in Moral and Political Essays, 276. 44 Seneca, On Favors, Bk. I, ch. 6, in Moral and Political Essays, 202. 208 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran and most important favors without any thought of return. He has no need for anything to be conferred, nor could we confer anything on him. Doing a favor is therefore something to be chosen for its own sake.”45 For the Roman Stoics, virtuous assent–a disposition of trust in providence rooted in the apprehension of divine goodness– engenders a desire to respond to the goodness of providence by exercising a benevolent concern for others, a life that resembles the divine nature. Marcus Aurelius likewise suggests that virtuous assent establishes a sense of kinship with others in the world that gives rise to an impartial love for other humans. As virtuous persons consent to divine providence, they recognize their place within the universe as a whole: “All that is in tune with thee, O Universe, is in tune with me! Nothing that is in due time for thee is too early or too late for me!… All things come from thee, subsist in thee, go back to thee.”46 This harmony between ourselves and the universe makes us aware that all beings in the universe are interconnected: “All things are mutually intertwined, and the tie is sacred, and scarcely anything is alien the one to the other. For all things have been ranged side by side, and together help to order one ordered Universe. For there is both one Universe, made up of all things, and one God immanent in all things.”47 Within this complex world, humans, as rational creatures, have a particular tie to other humans. To describe this tie, Marcus Aurelius compares individual humans to the limbs of an organism and argues that recognizing our interdependence with other humans is what helps to ensure that we “love mankind from the heart.”48 This “love” for others, even “those who stumble,” necessarily arises from our sense of community with fellow humans through our shared relation to God; this love “follows as soon as thou reflectest that they are kin to thee.”49 Assent, then, logically gives rise to a concern for others. Roman Stoic virtue is a disposition through which an agent consents to God’s oversight of the universe. As a person embodies this consent, she seeks to emulate God’s character and to take part in God’s providential work. In one line of Roman Stoic thought, particularly exemplified in Marcus Aurelius, this twofold assent also promotes a certain kind of love for other human beings. While a Stoic understanding of impartial love falls short of Christian love, particularly in its failure to affirm the value of particular individuals in a manner consistent with a Christian account of God’s knowledge of

45 Seneca, On Favors, Bk. IV, ch. 9, in Moral and Political Essays, 280. 46 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. IV.23, 81. 47 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. VII.9, 169. 48 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. VII.13, 169. 49 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. VII.22, 173-5. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 209

and concern for particulars,50 the relation between assent and impartial love is nonetheless striking. The final section of this article revis- its this relationship and considers its implications for Christian faith.

FAITH IN PROTESTANT THOUGHT Stoic assent and Christian faith are by no means perfectly continuous. One of the most significant differences between the two relates to our natural capacities to achieve virtue. The Stoics believe that humans can pursue virtue through properly honing and developing the natural faculties God has given us. The Roman Stoic understanding of assent underscores the human capacity to pursue virtue through exercising our internal faculties correctly. As Rist notes, Ze- no and Chryssipus contend that the act of assent is “voluntary” and “within our power,”51 and Epictetus makes similar claims.52 Chris- tians, in contrast, affirm that original sin has damaged our natural faculties to a degree that makes it impossible for us to achieve virtue apart from the direct intervention of God’s grace. A commitment to the necessity of divine grace for the acquisition of faith is particularly important to the historical Reformed tradition. Yet despite this significant difference, there remains a structural or formal similarity between Stoic assent and Christian faith. Two dimensions of the structure of faith highlight its similarities to Stoic assent. First, although faith is not restricted to mere academic belief, it is nonetheless rooted in a propositional belief in God’s goodness, just as Stoic assent emerges from intellectual recognition of divine goodness. Robert Adams establishes a link between faith and belief through an argument that places faith in contrast with unbelief. Ad- ams contends that even though humans are “cognitively dependent” and have incomplete knowledge, unbelief can rightly be viewed as

50 A particularly problematic example of this tendency lies in Stoic arguments con- cerning grief that present as a moral exemplar an individual who responds to his son’s death with a calm acknowledgment, “I knew I had begotten a mortal.” See Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 375-6, which attributes this story to Cicero. Margaret Graver, however, argues that Chryssipus’s account of the emotions is compatible with authentic love for family members and friends, as well as romantic love. Mar- garet Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 176-89. Passages from Epictetus support a similar reading of the Stoics on the emotions. At one point, Epictetus criticizes a man who abandons his sick child (Dis- courses I.11, vol. 1, 77-89). Elsewhere he argues that virtue counters self-interest and promotes good interpersonal relationships so that “If, therefore, I am where my moral purpose is, then, and then only, will I be the friend and son and father that I should be (Discourses II.22, vol. 1, 389). 51 Rist, Stoic, 141, 145. 52 Rist, Stoic, 228-9. Epictetus characterizes assent as “up to us,” a phrase important to Frede’s reading of Epictetus as an early advocate of the notion of free will (Frede 76-88). 210 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran sinful.53 The positions of Luther, Calvin, and Edwards explored below underscore this idea that belief in Christian doctrine is an essential part of faith. Second, while faith is propositionally rooted, it is more adequately understood as a disposition of trust in God akin to the moral dimension of assent outlined above. This disposition is rooted in a cognitive belief in God’s goodness, and this belief in divine goodness ensures that our trust in God is not simply an expression of arbi- trary obedience. Yet trust is an exercise of what Calvin calls the “heart” rather than merely an intellectual act. As an exercise of the heart or will, trust re-structures a moral agent’s character. James Gustafson therefore suggests that assessing faith’s import for ethics more properly focuses on “believing” rather than “belief” because the term “believing” better captures ways in which faith is “an expe- riential and affective component of life” involving multiple dimensions of human experience.54 Adams speaks of the trusting dimension of faith as a vehicle through which humans maintain a right relationship with God: “What is the good of faith or trust?… as the world is actually set up, we have to have faith in God in order to be rightly related to him here and now.”55 Adams contends that in an ultimate sense, God requires our complete trust56 so that we can have a relationship with him that is authentic and personal.57 These dimensions of faith are evident in the thought of Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. For these theologians, Christian faith is a stance of trust in God. This trust has a cognitive dimension insofar as the God in whom Christians trust is the God revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ and proclaimed in the Christian Scriptures. Yet faith is not a matter of cognitive belief alone. Faith shapes our character, moving our hearts or wills so that we increasingly come to trust the God who has graciously initiated a relationship with us. In- deed, faith affects our character to a degree that makes its presence or absence definitive of Christian identity and our status before God.

MARTIN LUTHER: FAITH AS TRUST IN THE GOD OF SCRIPTURE Faith is of supreme import for Luther’s account of the Christian life, and this faith bears a remarkable resemblance to the account of virtue that the Roman Stoics affirm. Like Stoic assent, Luther’s faith

53 Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 16-20. 54 James M. Gustafson, Can Ethics Be Christian? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 64, 45. 55 Adams, The Virtue of Faith, 20. 56 “God demands of us the greatest trust, the acceptance of the most complete de- pendence. In death he confronts each of us with a total loss of control over our own destiny” (Adams, The Virtue of Faith, 22). 57 Adams, The Virtue of Faith, 22-3. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 211

is grounded in cognitive belief but is more adequately understood as a moral disposition. Christian faith is a radical expression of trust in God realized in submission of a Christian’s will to the divine will. The connections Luther maintains between faith and Christian belief, his account of the conscience, and his discussion of faith as a relational trust in God highlight the similarities between Luther’s understanding of faith and a Stoic view of virtuous assent. Just as virtuous assent involves cognitive recognition of the goodness of divine providence, Luther’s account of faith has a cognitive dimension. Intellectual belief in the particulars of the Christian gospel is central to Luther’s understanding of Christian faith. In The Freedom of a Christian, Luther aligns faith with belief or “believing” and sin with “unbelief.”58 Lectures on Romans discusses more exten- sively the dimensions of faith that are tied to belief in particular Christian teachings. This discussion points toward Luther’s perception that faith, like Stoic virtue, is a unified and indivisible good. Faith necessarily involves adherence to the entire body of Christian teachings about Christ: “… [T]he faith in Christ by which we are justified is not a matter of believing only in Christ or in the person of Christ, but in all things which pertain to Christ.”59 Christ is present, Luther goes on to explain, in the Word of God, which is lived out in the Church and in the Eucharist, and if we deny Christ’s presence in one of these settings, this denial destroys our faith.60 True faith requires “complete confession” of “all the words which pertain to” Christ precisely because these words represent a good that cannot be divided.61 Though Luther makes clear that God may remedy the im- perfections of our unbelief if we “humble ourselves greatly,”62 the connections he develops between faith and belief demonstrate that the exercise of faith holds a deep connection to the human intellect. Luther’s understanding of conscience further illuminates the points of continuity between the intellectual dimension of Luther’s faith and the cognitive component of virtuous assent. The Stoics emphasize the role of sensory impressions in obtaining knowledge. Our inner faculties perceive objects in the material world, and these per- ceptions give rise to cognitive sense impressions that provide a start-

58 “So let him who wishes to do good works begin not with the doing of works, but with believing, which makes the person good, for nothing makes a man good except faith, or evil except unbelief” (Luther’s Works, 31: 362). 59 Luther, Lectures on Romans, Luther’s Works, 25: 237. 60 Luther, Lectures on Romans, Luther’s Works, 25: 237-8. 61 “But you ask: If denial is so great that having denied in one point, a person has denied in all, why is not the acceptance of equal force, so that when one believes in one point, he believes in all? The answer is that the good is perfect and simple, and thus it is destroyed by one denial. But it is not established by the confession of one thing, unless it be one complete confession without any denial” (25: 239). 62 Luther, Lectures on Romans, Luther’s Works, 25: 238-9. 212 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran ing-point for the pursuit of virtue.63 Luther, in turn, elevates the role of the conscience in our practice of faith, and his understanding of the conscience as a “power (virtus) of the flesh” leads to a view of moral formation that Randall Zachman contends elevates the interpretation of empirical data as a starting point for growth in faith. Zachman affirms that Luther’s conscience has a “strongly empirical orientation: it is oriented toward present, temporal things that are sensible and visible.”64 Luther characterizes the conscience as a faculty that makes judgments, and the close connection he draws between faith and the conscience suggests that faith, like Stoic assent, is rooted in an act of cognitive judgment. This judgment recognizes our actions’ moral inadequacy before God; Luther emphasizes the conscience’s recognition of our failure to do good apart from Christ as crucial to the exercise of faith. 65 Yet even as sensory knowledge plays a role in the pursuit of faith, Luther, like the Stoics, sees this knowledge as insufficient. For the Stoics, virtue cannot be obtained without the assistance of human reason; for Luther, in contrast, faith ultimately requires God’s direct assistance. Luther emphasizes the conscience’s inadequacy to make accurate judgments about a moral agent and her works on the basis of sensory knowledge alone. Through its own natural mechanisms, the conscience may recognize our sins but believe that we can rectify them ourselves: as Luther explains in Commentary on Galatians, although sin “brings with it the sting and remorse of conscience, still we suppose that it has so little weight and force that some little work or merit of ours will remove it.”66 In order to achieve a true recognition of our moral limitations, the conscience must receive from God a proper understanding of humanity’s moral limitations and of the grace and forgiveness God offers in Jesus Christ. Faith has an intellectual dimension, as Stoic assent does, but the knowledge of God central to faith cannot be achieved solely through our natural capacities. While propositional belief in Christian doctrine is an important component of faith as Luther understands it, faith more significantly

63 While the Stoics affirm that reason ultimately guides a human toward virtue, they also suggest that all knowledge, including moral knowledge, is rooted in sense impressions that humans perceive and interpret through internal faculties such as the sensus communis. For further discussion, see Cochran, “Consent, Conversion, and Moral Formation: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics.” Journal of Reli- gious Ethics 39.4 (2011): 623-50. 64 Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 21. 65 Zachman, 24. Zachman contrasts Luther on this point to Augustine, who tends to treat the human will as the primary object of divine grace (2). 66 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26: 33. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 213

establishes a relationship between God and a human agent in which a moral agent recognizes her need for God’s grace and forgiveness and trusts radically in God’s gift of this grace in the person and work of Christ. Faith brings about a relation between humans and God despite the disparity between our sinfulness and God’s goodness. In Commentary on Galatians, Luther describes this relationship as one of our adoption as God’s children: “we miserable sinners, by nature children of wrath (Eph 2:3), may arrive at this honor, that through faith in Christ we are made children and heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17), lords of heaven and earth.”67 In turn, in The Freedom of a Christian, Luther speaks of this relationship as a union between the soul and Christ, a communion that Luther likens to a marriage, in which Christ “swallows up” our sins and allows us to receive his righteousness.68 Faith thus brings about a relationship between God and a moral agent that exceeds a mere cognitive belief in divine goodness. Strikingly, while an affirmation of sin and a human’s need for forgiveness differentiates Luther’s account of a Christian’s relationship with God from a Stoic view of a human’s place within the providential order, the relationship with God that faith establishes results in our growth in a disposition akin to the moral dimension of Stoic assent. In his Commentary on Galatians, Luther characterizes this disposition as “passive righteousness,” a righteousness attained simply through submitting oneself to Christ and accepting what Christ has done in us. Justification is the supreme event in which a person experiences this imputed righteousness, which is, as Gilbert Meilaender puts it, “not a virtue gradually developed and strength- ened bit by bit” but instead “a mathematical point: the self passive before God.”69 Luther opposes the faith through which Christians are justified to both “morality” and “works,” through which humans problematically attempt to pursue good actions apart from God.70 He develops an argument in The Freedom of a Christian that even more explicitly associates faith with a disposition similar to the willful dimension of Stoic virtuous assent. Through faith, Luther explains, the human soul “trusts God’s promises” and therefore “consents” to God’s “will.” Such consent involves a radical trust that renounces

67 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26: 352. 68 Luther, Freedom of a Christian, Luther’s Works, 31: 351-2. 69 Gilbert Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue, 117. Meilaender argues that the implication of elevating justification within the Christian life is that grace, for Lutherans, is “in no sense a power that enables us to become ‘more and more’ what God wills we should be,” as grace is within Catholicism. Rather, grace is something that we receive “again and again” as we return to our supreme acceptance of Christ’s righteousness experienced in justification.” Meilaender, The Freedom of a Christian, 43-4. 70 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26:7. 214 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran our own volition. Recognizing God’s “truthfulness, righteousness, and whatever else should be ascribed to one who is trusted,” the soul “hallows his name and allows itself to be treated according to God’s good pleasure for, clinging to God’s promises, it does not doubt that he who is true, just, and wise will do, dispose, and provide all things well.”71 This passage indicates that trust in divine providence is one essential means through which justified Christians embody the fundamental character of faith. In reflecting on the moral dimension of Luther’s account of faith, it is important to note an additional difference between Luther and the Stoics. Whereas the Stoics suggest that the moral dimension of faith will necessarily motivate a virtuous person to strive for a union with providence that results in universal love, Luther draws a sharp distinction between faith and love. Although Luther’s earlier The Freedom of a Christian suggests that in a “truly Christian life,” faith will indeed be “truly active through love” and other works,72 his later Commentary on Galatians expresses concern about conceiving the relationship between faith and love in a manner that undermines faith’s basic independence from other moral goods. This text develops an extended critique of a position he associates with Scholastic theology, the idea that Christian righteousness consists in “faith active in love.” Luther is concerned to emphasize faith’s intrinsic value, contending that love may follow from faith but does not increase the righteousness of faith; faith has inherent righteousness.73 He criticizes those who believe that love is the “form” of faith, arguing that this position presumes that “faith, that miserable virtue, would be a sort of unformed chaos… a purely passive material. This is blasphe- mous and satanic; it calls men away from Christian doctrine, from Christ the Mediator.… For if love is the form of faith, then I am im- mediately obliged to say that love is the most important and the larg- est part in the Christian religion.”74 Luther goes on to explain that when love is prioritized above faith, we privilege “a moral kind of ‘doing’” over the being or relationality of faith.75 While love may follow from faith, then, Luther is clear that faith is certainly complete without love and superior to love. The priority Lutheran thought places on faith leads Daphne Hampson to the conclusion that Luther- an theology has difficulty sustaining a moral commitment to love for God independent of the trust in God that constitutes faith. The Lu- theran position understands the individual as so fully cleaving to God that “apart from God there is no [human] self” who can take part in

71 Luther, Freedom of a Christian, Luther’s Works, 31: 350. 72 Luther, Freedom of a Christian, Luther’s Works, 31: 365. 73 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26: 269. 74 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26: 270. 75 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Luther’s Works, 26: 270. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 215

the interpersonal and “dialogical” exchange with God that constitutes mutual love. She contends that this position leads to a diminished account of love as merely a dimension of faith in Lutheran theology: “love tends to be reduced to that love which is faith—that is to say, the love which is essentially trust.”76 Luther’s insistence on the singular righteousness of faith is not itself a departure from the Stoics. The Stoics conceive virtue as a uniquely valuable good qualitatively different from other goods; they reserve the word “good” for virtue and describe other apparent goods, such as wealth, as “indifferent.”77 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle argues that the qualitative distinction Luther draws between faith and other goods reflects a Stoic understanding of good and evil as indivisible qualities that must be experienced in their entirety.78 Luther’s separation of faith and love is designed to distinguish faith from other apparent goods, just as the Stoics distinguish virtue from other apparent goods. But the Stoic account of virtue itself suggests a more interdependent relation between faith and love than Luther wishes to preserve. Trust in divine providence generates love, and this love is a mechanism through which a moral agent is drawn into the work of providence. Luther, in contrast, is so concerned to deny the goodness of human works pursued independently of God that he concludes that faith could theoretically stand independent from love. This implicit separation of faith from love diminishes the character of the Christian life in a manner that distinguishes Luther’s position from that of Calvin and Edwards.

JOHN CALVIN: FAITH ENGENDERING LOVE In keeping with Luther, John Calvin upholds an account of faith as an attribute that involves both intellectual belief in Christ and a disposition of trust in God. Faith holds a kind of moral priority within Calvin’s account of the Christian life and is foundational for

76 Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 246-7. 77 Epictetus, for example, delineates categories of goods and evils, and concludes that only virtues and those things that partake in the virtues can properly be called good: “… of things that be, some are good, others evil, and others indifferent. Now good things are virtues, and everything that partakes in the virtues; evil are the op- posite; while indifferent are wealth, health, reputation” (1998, 1:II.9). Good and evil, he reiterates later, both rest in “moral purpose,” and things that “lie outside the domain of moral purpose” are neither good nor evil (1998, 1:II.16). This contention that virtue is the only genuine good is the foundation for the Stoics’ well known claim that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness. See Annas, 430; Lawrence Becker, A New Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 150-5; and Rist, Stoic, 5-8. 78 Boyle suggests that Luther was exposed to this Stoic line of argument in Cicero’s Paradoxia Stoicorum. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Stoic Luther: Paradoxical Sin and Necessity,” Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982): 69-93, at 75-7. 216 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran growth in virtue. At the same time, Calvin departs from Luther by insisting that faith is inseparable from love and hope. He aligns his account of a faith that engenders love with a Scriptural understanding of “assent,” and his description of this assent is deeply similar to a Stoic view of virtuous assent. Calvin’s discussion of faith’s relation to love points toward ways in which Stoic assent can illuminate an integrated view of these attributes at the heart of Christian virtue. Calvin’s understanding of faith, like Stoic assent, involves both the intellect and the overall character of an individual, which Calvin associates with the “heart.”79 Calvin explains that for Christians to embrace the word of God fully, “the mind must be enlightened, and the heart confirmed.”80 Cognitive belief in Christ is one component of faith. Faith consists, Calvin explains, in “the knowledge of Christ,”81 in “a knowledge of the divine favor toward us, and a full persuasion of its truth.”82 But while Calvin recognizes that Scripture sometimes aligns faith with “understanding” or “knowledge,”83 he adamantly argues, to a degree that surpasses Luther, that intellectual belief in God does not sufficiently describe the nature of Christian faith. He criticizes “the Schoolmen” for aligning faith with a belief in God “devoid of the fear of God.”84 They are in error, he explains, to think of faith as “bare simple assent of the understanding… over- looking confidence and security of heart,” because true “faith is something higher than human understanding.”85 Mere cognitive belief is not “true faith,” but simply a “shadow or image of faith… unworthy of the name.”86 In developing this argument that faith exceeds mere intellectual belief, Calvin demonstrates an understanding of the nature of “assent” very much in keeping with the Stoics’ account of virtuous assent. Rather than defending his view by arguing that faith is not simply a matter of intellectual assent, Calvin instead contends that assent itself is not merely an intellectual act. He maintains that a Scriptural understanding of assent “consists in pious affection.” Faith

79 Barry G. Waugh considers a passage from Calvin’s Commentary on Romans that uses the phrase “mind and heart” to describe the extent of fallen humanity’s aliena- tion from God’s righteousness. Waugh argues that Calvin couples the faculties of mind and heart to emphasize original sin’s impact on a Christian’s full character or being. “The terms ‘mind and heart’ are used to express the totality of man’s separation from God and the need for a complete redemption.” Barry G. Waugh, “Reason Within the Limits of Revelation Alone: John Calvin’s Understanding of Human Reason,” Westminster Theological Journal 72 (2010): 1-21, at 15. 80 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.7, 360. 81 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.8, 360. 82 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.12, 362. 83 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.14, 365. 84 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.8, 360. 85 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.33, 377. 86 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.10, 361. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 217

and assent are equivalent for Calvin, and “assent itself… is more a matter of the heart than the head, of the affection than the intellect.”87 Just as Stoic assent involves a consent of the will (that is, the person’s moral faculty) to God’s providence, so does Calvin’s understanding of the assent associated with faith involve the activity of the heart or affections. Faith, like assent, is a disposition that shapes the character of the whole person. Calvin underscores this point by contending that faith must be internalized, an emphasis that Phillip Cary argues distinguishes Calvin and his followers from Luther.88 While Calvin’s faith is partly consti- tuted by a “certainty” regarding God’s mercy that can be contrasted with the “unbelief” toward which humans are prone,89 this faith is only authentic if it is made part of an agent’s inner being. Calvin argues that we need to make God’s “promises of mercy... ours by in- wardly embracing them.”90 By accepting and embracing God’s promises of mercy, we can seek the growth in our hearts of belief in God.91 This internalized belief gives rise to feelings of “full assurance… an assurance which leaves no doubt that the goodness of God is clearly offered to us.”92 Scripture, Calvin notes, “uniformly attributes” these feelings of assurance to faith.93 “Confidence” in God’s mercy is thus a crucial component of faith.94 Calvin explains that we cannot have assurance “without truly perceiving its sweetness, and experiencing it in ourselves.”95 Assurance gives rise to confidence, a term that can be seen as “equivalent” to faith, and this assurance is expressed in “boldness,” an ability and eagerness to “appear calmly in the presence of God.”96 Both Luther and Calvin understand faith to affect the relation between God and humans, as does Stoic assent. Both thinkers also make clear that faith, in contrast to Stoic virtue, is a gift from God rather than something that humans can pursue through proper formation of their natural faculties.97 Calvin departs from Luther, however, in maintaining a necessary relation between faith and love, arguing for a unity among faith, hope, and love. But while this position is a clear departure from Luther’s argument in Commentary on Gala-

87 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.8, 360. 88 Phillip Cary, “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 71 (2007): 265-281, at 273-6. 89 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15, 365. 90 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.16, 365. 91 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.10, 361. 92 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15, 365. 93 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15, 365. 94 Calvin, Institutes, 3.17.11, 535. 95 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15, 365. 96 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.15, 365. 97 Calvin argues that faith is “revealed to our minds, and sealed on our hearts, by the Holy Spirit” (Institutes 3.2.7, 360). 218 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran tians, Calvin shares with Luther an understanding of faith as having priority within the Christian life. He criticizes the Scholastic eleva- tion of love or charity over faith, noting that faith is a necessary foundation for love: “For what the Schoolmen say as to the priority of love to faith and hope is a mere dream… since it is faith alone that first engenders love.”98 While faith cannot be detached from love and hope, both love and hope depend on faith. In criticizing the Scholastic distinction between formed and unformed faith, Calvin argues that in true faith, the Holy Spirit brings about a reconciliation between God and humans that is deeply tied to love.99 As the Holy Spirit enables humans to see God’s goodness (if only in part) in a manner that exceeds the evidence of goodness in the created order, a human mind has been illuminated will necessarily feel intense love for God. Indeed, Calvin suggests that love for God necessarily follows from faith:

But how can the mind rise to such a perception and foretaste of the divine goodness, without being at the same time wholly inflamed with love to God? The abundance of joy which God has treasured up for those who fear him cannot be truly known without making a most powerful impression. He who is thus once affected is raised and carried entirely toward him.100

Love, then, cannot be understood apart from faith and depends on faith for its generation. At the same time, because this faith is spontaneous, faith cannot be detached from love, as it seems that it can be (at least in a theoretical sense) for Luther. Faith and love exist in unity in the Christian life. Calvin is also adamant that faith and hope exist in unity, noting that because of the “affinity” between faith and hope, “Scripture sometimes confounds the two terms.”101 His characterization of the relation between the two virtues is consistent with his account of faith’s relation to love. Faith is the “foundation” for hope, as it is for love, and “of itself [faith] beget[s] and manifest[s]” hope.102 Yet also as with love, faith and hope cannot be detached. Calvin explains that

98 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.41, 382. 99 Hence Calvin explains: “They insist that faith is an assent with which any despiser of God may receive what is delivered by Scripture. But we must first see whether anyone can by his own strength acquire faith, or whether the Holy Spirit, by means of it, becomes the witness of adoption. Hence it is childish trifling in them to inquire whether the faith formed by the supervening quality of love be the same, or a different and new faith. By talking in this style, they show plainly that they have never thought of the special gift of the Spirit; since one of the first elements of faith is reconciliation implied in man’s drawing near to God” (Institutes 3.2.8, 360). 100 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.41, 382. 101 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.43, 383 102 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.42, 382 Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 219

“wherever this living faith exists, it must have the hope of eternal life as its inseparable companion,” and that if we lack hope, then we do not have faith: “where [hope] is wanting, however clearly and ele- gantly we may discourse of faith, it is certain we have it not.”103 Cal- vin’s affirmation of the inseparability of faith and hope suggests that faith may generate hope spontaneously, as with love. At the very least, a Christian’s continued faith depends on hope insofar as hope “nourishes and sustains” faith, “refreshes” faith, and gives faith vig- or.104 Calvin’s emphasis on the priority of faith in the moral life leads him toward an understanding of this attribute that shares noteworthy features with Stoic assent. His characterization of faith as assent reflects his view that assent, by its nature, involves a person’s whole being. Likewise, his understanding of faith as a disposition of “confidence” in God’s mercy is consistent with a Stoic view of assent as a means through which a moral agent recognizes divine goodness and comes to understand herself as having a particular place within God’s providential order. Calvin’s alignment of faith with hope may appear to be a departure from the Stoics insofar as certain Stoic affirmations (such as Seneca’s defense of suicide under certain circumstances) seem to reflect a sort of resignation incompatible with genuine hope.105 Yet Calvin’s connection of faith to the other theological virtues, particularly the virtue of love, ensures a necessary link between the cognitive and moral dimensions of faith that Luther’s separation of faith from love risks undermining. In this sense, Calvin’s account of faith holds more in common with Stoic assent than Luther’s position does, for assent responds to divine goodness in a manner that generates a moral disposition akin to love. In turn, the connections between love and faith that Calvin affirms are even more fully evident in Edwards. A consideration of faith in Edwards’s thought deepens our understanding of a broadly Reformed account of these virtues.

JONATHAN EDWARDS: FAITH AS THE GROUND OF LOVE Whereas both Luther and Calvin speak expressly against an account of the Christian life that prizes love above faith, Edwards develops an ethic that associates virtue with love in a variety of forms. He distinguishes faith from virtue by designating faith as an instanti- ation of “natural goodness,” a category that he employs in The Na-

103 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.42, 382 104 Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.42, 382-3. 105 For example, Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches associate Stoicism with a fatalistic and deterministic worldview. Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 175, see also 216 n. 29. 220 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran ture of True Virtue to distinguish genuine virtue from certain qualities, such as justice and partial, personal loves that possess a goodness that falls short of true moral goodness.106 Faith, Edwards explains, is a human quality “that is really and spiritually good, that is prior in the order of nature to justification.”107 Faith’s goodness is tied to its status as the condition for salvation and consists in its having a “natural fitness,”108 or a “natural agreement and congruity,”109 with the relationship with Christ into which justification draws us.110 In describing faith’s goodness in terms of its “natural suitableness” to salvation, Edwards underscores his rejection of the idea that faith possesses any “moral suitableness” or moral goodness in itself.111 Yet while Edwards clearly characterizes love as the primary virtue, his account of love makes clear that faith is a disposition deeply important to, and indeed definitive for, the Christian life as Edwards understands it. Gerald McDermott observes that faith is, for Ed- wards, the only moral attribute that “can stand alone” in the Christian life. Faith is “the only condition for salvation,” and although saving faith produces Christian virtues, faith does not require these virtues to be sufficient for salvation.112 In addition to its role in conversion, faith is also an abiding attribute that a justified Christian sustains over time as an essential part of the Christian life. Edwards’s sermon “Persevering Faith” and treatise Justification By Faith treat faith as an attribute that abides in a Christian. Edwards explains that Paul’s letter to the Hebrews alludes to the notion of “persevering faith” precisely because salvation presumes and requires extended expressions of faith: “In order to salvation [sic], ‘tis necessary that persons

106 For further discussion, see Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues: A Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (University Park, PA: Penn State Universi- ty Press, 2011), ch. 6. 107 Miscellany 712, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 341. 108 Miscellany 714, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 345. 109 Miscellany 712, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 341. 110 “Faith in its very nature and essence consist in nothing else but a direct according, suiting or closing of the soul with the Savior and his salvation, especially that which may be called fundamental actual salvation, viz. justification by Christ. Though there be an agreeableness between other particular grades and salvation, yet suiting and closing with salvation is not their immediate business, and that wherein the proper nature and essence of them consists, as ‘tis in faith” (Miscellany 714, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 345). 111 “God’s bestowing Christ and his benefits on a soul in consequence of faith, out of regard only to the natural suitableness that there is between such a qualification of a soul, and such a union with Christ and interest in Christ, makes the case very widely different from what would be if he bestowed these things from regard to any moral suitableness” (Miscellany 712, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18: 341). 112 Gerald McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards on Justification By Faith–More Protestant or Catholic?” Pro Ecclesia 17, no. 1 (2007): 92-111, at 102-3. McDermott draws on Miscellany 518 to make this argument. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 221

should believe and trust in Christ in a persevering way.”113 He likewise maintains that justification occurs not simply through a single act (or the “first act”) of faith, but more fully through an expression of faith as a continual disposition, the “perseverance of faith.”114 These arguments suggest that Paul Ramsey is right to affirm that Edwards holds a belief in an “abiding faith” that remains in the heart of a Christian whom love has brought into union with God.115 If this “abiding faith” is distinguished from the faith that justifies, it seems plausible to designate such faith as a virtue even in Edwardsean terms. The parallels between Edwards’s understanding of this abiding faith and a Stoic account of assent are evident in the discussions of faith and love that Edwards puts forth in Charity and Its Fruits and Religious Affections. Like Calvin (and in contrast to Luther), Ed- wards closely aligns faith with love in a manner that underscores the close relations among cognitive recognition of divine providence, trust in God, and a true consent of one’s heart to God that Edwards associates with love. Stoic assent involves both intellectual apprehension and a volitional approval of God that draws a moral agent into the broader workings of divine providence. Edwards’s virtue likewise couples spiritual understanding and trust with a consent of one’s heart to God. Charity and Its Fruits, a collection of sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, develops an account of faith as a disposition that Christians should seek to live out and cultivate in conjunction with their formation in virtuous love. Edwards’s opening sermon, which focuses on love as the sum of all virtue, characterizes faith as a disposition that is inauthentic if detached from love, echoing Calvin’s argument that faith necessarily generates love. Edwards distinguishes between “speculative faith,” an expression of cognitive belief in God, and a “practical faith” that is “true and saving.” Just as Stoic assent involves cognitive belief and a willful expression of trust, so does salvific faith, as Edwards understands it here, unite an “assent” of the understanding with a “consent” of the heart. This salvific faith has a moral dimension through which the soul “accepts and embraces” Christ as savior. Yet Edwards simultaneously suggests that a genuine Christian faith must unite this “act of choice” with a “true spiritual consent of the heart.” At times he aligns the term “consent” with faith, but more often he speaks of consent as love itself.116 In Charity

113 “Persevering Faith,” Works of Jonathan Edwards, 19: 605. 114 Edwards, Justification By Faith, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 19: 206-7; see also 360. 115 “Editor’s Introduction,” Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 103. 116 McDermott notes that Miscellanies 669 and 670 characterize faith as a “‘compre- hensive’ term for the disposition of consent to Christ that by virtue of union with Christ entails every other Christian fruit” (103). But “consent” to being is a notion 222 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran and Its Fruits, Edwards makes clear that “true spiritual consent of the heart” is love, and Edwards indicates that this consent or love is itself a dimension of authentic faith that makes it genuine:

A speculative faith consists only in assent; but in a saving faith are assent and consent together. That faith which has only the assent of the understanding is no better faith than the devils have.… Now the true spiritual consent of the heart cannot be distinguished from the love of the heart. He whose heart consents to Christ as a Savior loves Christ.… For the heart sincerely to consent to the way of salvation by Christ cannot be distinguished from loving the way of salvation by Christ. There is an act of choice or election in true or saving faith, whereby the soul chooses Christ for its Savior, and accepts and embraces him as such. But as was observed before, election whereby it chooses God and Christ is one act of love. It is a love of choice. In the soul’s embracing Christ as a Savior there is love.117

True Christian faith, Edwards explains, requires not simply that a moral agent gives intellectual assent to a propositional belief in God, but more fully that this belief is realized in a love that chooses Christ for a savior. Love is the actualizing principle of a genuine Christian faith: “The working, acting nature of anything is the life of it.… The thing by which faith works is love. It is love that is the active working spirit which is in true faith.”118 Edwards makes clear that a faith that goes beyond mere intellectual understanding is central to the Christian life. Christians are to “live by faith,” and they do this properly through linking faith and love.119 The relation between love and faith that this sermon describes could suggest that love is more central to Christianity than is faith, a position that Luther and Calvin would reject. But a subsequent sermon stresses that love depends on faith so that faith is its foundation. Consistently with a Stoic account of virtue as unified, Edwards explains that it is appropriate to think of all the “graces of Christianity” as interdependent and mutually connected. Faith and love support each other’s growth and development, and a diminishment of one quality damages the other: “All the graces of Christianity always go together, so that where there is one, there are all; and when one is wanting, all are wanting. Where there is faith, there is love and hope and humility. Where there is love, there is also trust; and where there is a holy trust in God, there is love to God.”120 Edwards goes on to

central to Edwards’s account of true virtue, or Christian love, in The Nature of True Virtue (see Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 540-1), and we see below that Edwards identifies consent as love in Charity and Its Fruits as well. 117 Charity and Its Fruits, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 139. 118 Charity and Its Fruits, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 140. 119 Charity and Its Fruits, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 141. 120 Charity and Its Fruits, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 328. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 223

say that faith promotes love, even as love is essential to an authentic faith. Love therefore “depends” on faith even as it reinforces faith:

Faith promotes love, and love is the most essential ingredient in a saving faith. And love tends to promote and cherish faith.… Love is dependent on faith. For a being cannot be truly loved, and especially loved above all other beings, which is not looked upon as a real being. And again love cherishes and promotes faith, because those whom we love we are more apt to believe and give credit to, and disposed to trust in.121

The mutual interdependence of faith and love shows that faith is necessary for the pursuit of love. Although Edwards’s ethic aligns virtue with love, then, he also contends that love depends on faith, underscoring the centrality of faith for his overall vision of the moral life. In keeping with Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards’s 1746 treatise Religious Affections reiterates this claim that faith is a necessary foundation for love. The “religious affections” essential to Ed- wardsean virtue are rooted in an intellectual recognition of God’s goodness. Edwards explains that “all truly gracious affections pro- ceed” from a “knowledge of divine things.”122 They “arise from the enlightening of the understanding to understand the things that are taught of God and Christ, in a new manner.”123 In contrast to the pas- sions, which are sudden impulses that problematically overpower the mind,124 affections are deeply logical, having a close relation both to the understanding and to the will, or heart.125 It is fitting for humans to love God because, Edwards explains, God’s nature is infinitely excellent and worthy of love. Virtuous love to God emerges through a recognition of God’s holiness.126 Edwards calls this intellectual apprehension “spiritual knowledge”127 and affirms that this knowledge gives rise to religious affections and is essential to our experience of them. At the same time, spiritual knowledge is not solely a rational recognition of God’s goodness; it is feasible, Ed- wards explains, that some people might intellectually recognize God’s goodness without being moved by it. True spiritual knowledge of God, the knowledge that gives rise to religious affections, is a perception of the moral beauty of God’s goodness.128 As Leon Chai puts

121 Charity and Its Fruits, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8: 329. 122 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 275. 123 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 267-8. 124 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 98. 125 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 96-97. 126 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 242-3. 127 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 281. 128 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 264. 224 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran it, this perception causes an “attraction,” an “inclination or desire” in the individual who observes God.129 Spiritual knowledge is closely akin to faith, and this knowledge is the foundation of love and its necessary companion. The faith implicit in Edwards’s religious affections is rooted in the intellect but is more fully realized as the human will inclines toward God, underscoring both its close relation to love and its continuity with Stoic assent as a volitional disposition of trust in God. Early in Religious Affections, Edwards aligns affections with the will and says that the two are not distinct faculties,130 which suggests that affections occur through some measure of volition and intentionality. Edwards says later in the text that the affections to which spiritual knowledge gives rise are most properly located in the will because they are a dispositional response to our spiritual knowledge of God’s moral beauty.131 These affections, like lesser affections, are “habitual dispositions” through which humans approve and like something or reject and oppose it.132 Ultimately Edwards identifies two affections —love to God and joy in Christ—as primary.133 These are affections “by which the soul is carried out to what is in view [in this case, God], cleaving to it, or seeking it.”134 But even as love to God is the “fountain” of the other affections,135 virtuous love itself follows from a perception of divine goodness that establishes the very conditions that bring this love about. We love God and God’s creatures and desire their good because we have first come to trust God and to revere God’s excellence.136 This trust, or faith, is sustained as our virtuous love grows, suggesting that Edwards conceives faith and love as complementary attributes that foster each other’s expansion.

FAITH AS A PROTESTANT VIRTUE This consideration of Reformed conceptions of faith alongside Roman Stoic assent provides a starting point for arguing that faith is foundational to a Protestant virtue ethic. Although Protestant theologians have historically been reluctant to designate faith as a virtue, the accounts of faith at work in Luther, Calvin, and Edwards suggest that faith possesses several attributes characteristic of a virtue. A virtue is a sustained character trait that benefits its possessor by making its possessor in some way “good,” and a virtue is partly constitutive

129 Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. 130 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 97. 131 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 281-2. 132 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 98. 133 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 94-5. 134 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 98. 135 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 106. 136 Religious Affections, Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2: 146-7. Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 225 of the end or purpose for which humans exist. Each of these qualities of a virtue is present in a Protestant conception of faith. Faith is not merely an isolated act; instead, its acquisition re-orients one’s character and provides a starting point for growth in a moral disposition that is sustained over time. Moreover, although faith cannot precisely be called “good” because it is an attribute more appropriate to humans (who are inherently sinful) than to God (who alone is good), it is crucial that humans pursue faith for their own well-being. Faith can therefore be designated as a qualified good appropriate to human nature. Moreover, faith benefits human beings by directing them toward the purpose for which God created them. God creates for the purpose of furthering God’s glory, and faith restores a relationship between a Christian and God that allows the Christian to glorify God through her being and actions. Recognizing the continuity between Stoic assent and Protestant faith underscores the plausibility of characterizing faith as a virtue. Assent is the core of Roman Stoic virtue, an enduring disposition through which a moral agent consents to the divine providence that directs the universe. Comparison to Stoic assent also provides tools for reflecting on precisely how the virtue of faith is structured. Like Stoic virtue, a Protestant understanding of faith is a unified good distinct from all other apparent goods. But Stoic virtuous assent simultaneously retains a relation to impartial love that is logical and necessary even as assent itself remains morally primary. This conception of virtue is instructive for reflecting on the differing understandings of faith’s relationship to love in Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. While all three theologians give faith a certain kind of moral primacy (most clearly evident in Luther and Calvin, but to a lesser degree in Ed- wards as well), Calvin and Edwards depart from Luther in affirming an essential and necessary connection between faith and love. Stoic assent provides a philosophical framework that supports this departure by underscoring the necessity of conceiving faith and love as interdependent. While Christian faith and love are not precisely part of Stoic thought, certain arguments implicit in the Roman Stoics’ consideration of assent suggest that detaching faith from love would likewise sever the cognitive and moral dimensions of faith. A Stoic moral agent who exercises virtuous assent will, in embodying this assent, seek a union with divine providence that leads her to exercise an impartial and universal love for other beings in the world. The moral dimension of Stoic assent necessarily fosters a spirit of kinship with others that a moral agent expresses in love. Likewise, a Protestant account of faith as both cognitive and moral cannot be sustained unless love follows from this faith. A conception of faith as mere cognitive belief might not necessarily engender love, but the connection between genuine consent to God and love for God’s creation is more inseverable. Thus, while 226 Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

Luther intends to put forth an account of faith that emphasizes the relational character of Christian goodness, his suggestion that faith is theoretically separable from love runs the risk of overly emphasizing the place of cognitive belief in the moral life. Considering faith in isolation from love increases the importance of intellectual belief, and of human beings’ cognitive capacities to think about and adhere to particular intellectual claims, as definitive of a Christian’s moral status. A strict observance of such a view of faith runs the risk of reserving faith for persons with particular cognitive gifts, a conclusion that stands at odds with Luther’s intentions to prioritize Chris- tians’ relational trust in God above natural human capacities. An affirmation of a close relation between faith and love need not follow the Scholastic formula of faith as formed by love, nor would such a model be true to Luther’s and Calvin’s explicit rejection of this formula. Protestant faith, like Stoic assent, is the unified good that constitutes the core of virtue, and love plays a supporting and sustaining role. But it is imperative that the connection between faith and love be affirmed because authentic trust in God alters a moral agent’s self-understanding in a manner that necessarily re-orders her loves and gives her the capacity to love other persons as creatures of God. If faith were merely cognitive, it would have no necessary ef- fect on an individual’s loving. But the consenting dimension of faith fosters a desire to be conformed to Christ’s character, and Christ is essentially and wholly love itself. Consent to God retains a necessary relation to love for God and love for God’s creatures, a relation that the structure of Stoic assent implicitly underscores.

CONCLUSION An understanding of faith and love as interdependent, even as faith is primary, is ultimately crucial to sustaining a conception of faith as a virtue. A faith that consists in mere cognitive belief less clearly benefits its possessor and less clearly brings about the capacity for relationship with God for which God intends human beings. Moreover, love contributes directly to a moral agent’s ability to sustain and embody faith over an extended time. Detachment from love tends toward an account of faith that is diminished insofar as it overly emphasizes cognitive belief, and it also makes it difficult to sustain the claim that faith functions as a virtue. In light of this difficulty, it seems appropriate to ask whether designating faith as a virtue is appropriate to the Protestant tradition. Faith is certainly not a virtue if it is merely an achievement of natural reason, an acceptance of cognitive propositions regarding God’s nature that provides a condition for justification. But for Luther, Cal- vin, and Edwards, faith is clearly more than this. The similarities between Stoic assent and these theological accounts of faith underscore faith’s moral dimension: faith is a disposition of radical and willful Faith, Love, and Stoic Assent 227

trust in God. The exercise of faith shapes a Christian’s character in a manner that orients her toward God and toward the end for which she was created. When this moral dimension of faith is firmly se- cured through a clear relation to love, faith functions as a virtue central to a Christian’s being and character, a good that defines her relationship with God and her moral capacities. The possession of an abiding faith is foundational to a Reformed vision of the Christian life.