Justified True Belief

(●) A lame slave in Nero’s Rome who taught free men how to be free, and never wrote a line of it down. + There is something almost comic in the arrangement. One of the most quoted teachers of self-command in the ancient world was a man who, for the first part of his life, could be sold. He limped. He owned almost nothing on purpose. He lectured in a provincial town on the Greek coast rather than in a capital, and he wrote no book at all. And yet within a century of his death a Roman emperor was keeping a copy of his lectures at hand and thanking the teacher who had put it into his hands. Epictetus matters to Christian readers for a reason that has little to do with Stoicism as a system. Stoicism was the Greek school of philosophy he taught in, and the short version of it is that the world is run through and through by a divine reason, so that the only thing genuinely worth working at is your own judgment about what happens to you. That is the machinery, and the machinery is not the reason a Christian should read him. He is about as clear a case as pagan antiquity offers of a man who spoke about God as a father, called the slave carrying the water a brother, told his students that they carried something divine about with them, and built a whole discipline out of the difference between what a person can control and what he cannot. Read him alongside Paul’s letter from prison about learning contentment and the family resemblance is startling. Read him a page further and the gap opens, because for Epictetus the resources for a good life were already in the student’s hands, and nothing needed to come down from outside. The strangest fact about him is the one about the writing. Every word we have of him was taken down by a young Roman sitting in his lecture room, a student who then insisted, in a covering letter, that he had not composed anything and had simply written down what he heard. It is worth stopping to feel how thin that thread is. If that young man had gone to a different school, or had been a less careful note-taker, or had thrown the notebooks out when he went off to govern a province, Epictetus would be a name in a list.

(●) c. AD 50: Born a slave in a Phrygian town that Paul’s letter to Colossae had already mentioned by name. + Hierapolis sat on a shelf of white rock above the Lycus valley in what is now western Turkey, where hot mineral springs spill over the cliff and harden into terraces the colour of bone. It was a wool town and a spa town. It was also, by the time Epictetus was a boy there, a town with a church in it: writing to the Christians at Colossae, a few hours down the same valley, Paul commends Epaphras for his hard work "for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis" (Colossians 4:13). The two facts have no known connection. They are simply true at the same time and in the same place, and they are worth holding together. Almost nothing else about the beginning of that life is fixed. Neither the year of his birth nor the year of his death was recorded, so every date attached to him is a convention rather than a fact: scholars put the birth around AD 50 because of where he fits among the people who knew him, and the death somewhere in the 130s. Of his parents nothing at all is known, not a name, not a trade, not a word. Even his own name is a puzzle, since epiktetos is an ordinary Greek adjective meaning "acquired" or "gained in addition," the sort of word a household might use of a purchase. It is natural to wonder whether a man called Acquired was given that name by his mother or by whoever bought him. W. A. Oldfather, who edited the Loeb text, saw little reason to doubt that it was simply his name.

(●) c. AD 60: Owned in Rome by one of Nero’s secretaries, he was sent to a philosopher’s lecture room, and came through those years lame. + His owner was Epaphroditus, himself a freed slave, who had risen to be Nero’s secretary for petitions and who would, in AD 68, hold the blade steady while the emperor killed himself. Domitian later executed him for it. That is the household the boy grew up in: near enough to the throne to hear everything, and owning nothing, including himself. Somewhere in those years Epaphroditus let him attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, the leading Stoic teacher in Rome. Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded at Athens three and a half centuries earlier, and its central conviction was that the universe is ordered through and through by a divine reason, so that a human being’s only real business is to bring his own judgments into line with that order. It was a school for people who expected life to be hard. A slave was an unlikely student and a very apt one. The limp is explained more than one way in the sources, and it is honest to give them all. Celsus, a pagan critic of Christianity writing about a century later, tells a story of a master twisting Epictetus’ leg while Epictetus remarked mildly that the man was going to break it, and then, when the bone gave way, "Did I not tell you that you would break it?" Simplicius, who in the sixth century wrote a commentary on the Encheiridion, the short handbook of Epictetus’ teaching that English readers call the Manual, says something less dramatic: that he was weak in body and lame from early on, and the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda puts the lameness down to rheumatism. Nobody has settled which to believe, and Oldfather thought the older and uglier story the likelier one. What is certain is that he was lame and knew it, because in one lecture he calls himself, in passing and without self-pity, "a lame old man."

(●) c. AD 68: Free at last, he set up as a teacher in the city where he had been property. + The one moment a reader most wants to see is the moment nobody bothered to write down. Not a single ancient writer mentions the manumission, which is the legal act by which a Roman owner set a slave free and handed him back his own life, so we do not know how it came about, or what it cost, or what either man said when it was done. The year of Nero’s fall is the natural guess and no more than a guess. What he did with the freedom is not in doubt. He opened a lecture room in Rome and began to teach the thing he had been taught, and the surviving lectures still carry the atmosphere of that room: young men of good family who had come to acquire a philosophical polish, and a teacher who kept refusing to give them one. A great deal of what survives is Epictetus telling students, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that reciting Stoic doctrine is not the same as living by it, and that a man who can take apart a syllogism, the tidy three-step argument the schools drilled into him, and still cannot keep his temper at the baths has learned nothing worth having.

(●) c. AD 89: An emperor cleared the philosophers out of Italy, and he crossed to Greece and started again. + Domitian did not care for philosophers. They kept turning up at the trials of senators he had condemned, and the Stoics in particular had a habit of praising the memory of men who had defied emperors. By a decree of the senate they were expelled from Rome and from Italy, in a year the sources leave open: 89 and 93 are both defended. Aulus Gellius, a Roman writer of the next century, is the one who records what it meant for this particular philosopher, noting that Epictetus too withdrew from Rome to Nicopolis on account of that decree (Attic Nights 15.11). Nicopolis, "Victory City," had been founded by Augustus on the western coast of Greece to celebrate the sea battle at Actium, and it stood on the crossing between Italy and the East. Travellers put in there. Roman young men bound for a career in the provinces could break a journey and sit in on a course, and many of them did. Epictetus taught in that town for the rest of his life, some forty years, and the school became well enough known that the exile turned out to be the making of it.

(●) c. AD 108: A student wrote the lectures down word for word, which is the only reason any of them exist. + The student was Flavius Arrianus, called Arrian, a Greek from Bithynia who went on to a serious Roman career as governor of Cappadocia and to a second career as the historian on whom almost everything reliable about Alexander the Great depends. As a young man he sat in the Nicopolis lecture room with a notebook. The letter that stands at the head of the collection, addressed to a man named Lucius Gellius, is one of the more attractive documents in ancient literature, because it is an author denying that he is one. "I neither wrote these Discourses of Epictetus in the way in which a man might write such things," he says in George Long’s translation, "nor did I make them public myself, inasmuch as I declare that I did not even write them. But whatever I heard him say, the same I attempted to write down in his own words as nearly as possible." He adds, a little stiffly, that he does not know how they fell into the hands of the public. It would be easy to read that as an author’s modest shuffle, the sort of disclaimer a writer puts at the front of a book in order to be admired for putting it there. The Greek says otherwise. The Greek of the Discourses is spoken Greek, the ordinary language of the streets and the markets rather than the polished prose of the schools, full of interruptions, imagined objections, rhetorical questions fired at a student in the third row. Arrian wrote eight books of them. Four survive, and a passage of Gellius quoting "the fifth book" is the proof that the loss is real rather than an ancient miscount.

(●) c. AD 120: In old age he took a woman into the house so that a child could be raised instead of thrown away. + Epictetus lived alone and unmarried for most of his life, which Lucian turned into a joke in his life of Demonax, a Cynic, one of the ragged street philosophers of the Greek world who owned nothing on principle and said so to anybody within earshot. Told by Epictetus that a philosopher ought to marry and leave someone behind him in the world, Demonax is said to have replied, then give me one of your daughters. The joke is that the man handing out the advice had no daughter to give, and no wife either. Simplicius reports what happened at the end of that long solitude, though he gives no year for it and old age is all anyone can say. A friend of his, too poor to keep the baby, was going to expose it, meaning leave it out to die, which Roman law permitted and Roman custom did not much resent. Epictetus took the child, and took a woman into the house to help him bring it up; whether he married her the sources do not agree. He kept nothing else. Lucian, writing satire in the next generation, sneers in The Ignorant Book-Collector at a rich man who paid three thousand drachmas for "the earthenware lamp of Epictetus the Stoic," a sum that would have kept a labouring family for years, and all of it spent on a clay lamp for no reason except whose table the lamp had once stood on. The joke only works because everyone knew the man had owned a clay lamp and not a bronze one. The Historia Augusta, a late and unreliable set of imperial biographies, says the emperor Hadrian was on friendly terms with him. It may well be true, since Hadrian collected Greek intellectuals, but the source is not one to build on.

(●) c. AD 135: He died leaving no book and no money, and was being read by an emperor within a generation. + Nobody wrote down the year. Oldfather put the whole life at about AD 50 to 120; most reference works now push the death into the 130s, on the strength of the reports that he was still teaching when Hadrian was emperor, and that is where the conventional date comes from. Within thirty years or so of his death a young Roman named Marcus Aurelius, being schooled for the throne, was handed a copy of the lectures by his teacher Junius Rusticus. Marcus never forgot it. Opening the private notebook we call the Meditations with a long list of debts to the people who formed him, he closes the Rusticus paragraph like this, in George Long’s English: "and I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection." An emperor and a slave, one book apart. Two lines passed around in antiquity as Epictetus’ own run, in substance, that he was born a slave, maimed in body, poor as Irus the beggar in the Odyssey, and dear to the immortals. Macrobius quotes the couplet as verses Epictetus wrote about himself, and the Greek Anthology preserves it among the epitaphs; modern scholars doubt he wrote it. As a summary of what his readers thought they had met, it has never been improved on.

What He Taught

(T1) A few things are genuinely up to you, and almost everything else is not. + Think of the last time a flight was cancelled. Standing at the desk, a person has two quite different problems: the flight, and himself. The flight is settled. The weather did what weather does, the airline did what airlines do, and no amount of feeling about it will put the aircraft in the air. What is not settled is whether he is going to spend the next four hours making the queue worse. Epictetus built everything on that division, and he drew the line further in than most people expect. On his side of it, the part that is genuinely ours, are our judgments, our desires, what we go after and what we back away from. On the other side, and he is unsparing here, are the body, money, reputation, office, and other people. Not "hard to control." Not ours at all. His word for the first set is eph’ hemin, "up to us," and the whole of the Manual is an exercise in sorting one from the other before the trouble starts rather than during it. The point of all this is not resignation but relief, and the difference between the two is worth holding on to. A man who has understood the sorting has a small territory and holds it absolutely, because everything eph’ hemin is inside the fence and nothing else is. A man who has not understood it is trying to govern the weather, and there is only one way that ends. Christian readers have heard something familiar here, and something missing. Paul writes from a prison cell that he has learned contentment in plenty and in hunger (Philippians 4:11–12), which sounds like the same discipline until the next line, where the strength for it comes from someone else.

(Q) "There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs." + Source: Epictetus, Encheiridion 1 (Higginson translation). The first sentence of the Manual, and the sentence the other fifty chapters keep coming back to. Arrian assembled the Manual out of the lectures, so this is a distillation of (T1) rather than a separate teaching.

(T2) What upsets you is never the event itself but the verdict you have already passed on it. + Two people are made redundant on the same Friday. One is levelled by it and one is not, and the difference is not in the letter, which was identical, but in what each of them takes the letter to mean about his life. Epictetus makes that observation the hinge of his whole method: it is not things that disturb people, it is the opinions they hold about things. You might well think that this is a fancy way of telling a person to cheer up while the roof is coming off. It is not, and Epictetus is careful about what he is and is not claiming. He is not saying that nothing bad happens, or that pain does not hurt. He is saying that between the event and the distress there is a step, an act of judgment, and that the step is ours. His stock example is death, which cannot be terrible in itself, since Socrates faced it without terror; what is terrible is the opinion that it is terrible. Elsewhere he suggests turning a fear over the way you would turn a mask from a Greek tragedy, which is horrifying to a child and, examined, is painted plaster. See, he says, it does not bite. The practical discipline that follows is a habit of speaking to first impressions before believing them. When something lands, say to it: you are an appearance, and not at all the thing you appear to be. Then ask the one question that matters, whether it belongs to what is up to us or not. It is worth noticing how much of this survives intact in modern cognitive therapy, whose founders took the idea, and often the sentence itself, straight from him.

(Q) "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible." + Source: Epictetus, Encheiridion 5 (Higginson translation). The chapter goes on to grade the student: blaming other people for your own condition is the mark of someone who has not begun, blaming yourself is the mark of someone who has begun, and blaming nobody is the mark of someone who has finished.

(T3) Chains can reach a leg and cannot reach a will. + A man who had been legal property said this, in a room where some of his hearers owned people, and it is worth pausing on that before treating it as a slogan. The lecture stages a confrontation. A tyrant threatens, in the order tyrants use: I will chain you, I will imprison you, I will cut off your head. Epictetus takes each threat and hands back the part of it that is actually true. Chains reach a leg. Prison holds a body. As for the head, when did I ever tell you my head could not be cut off? The threats are all real, and every one of them lands on the territory he had already written off as not his. What the tyrant wants is compliance, and compliance is a movement of the will, and the will is the one thing in the room he cannot get at. This is why Epictetus thought the word "freedom" was almost always used backwards. The many think the free ought to be educated; the philosophers say that only the educated are free. Freedom, on this account, is not the absence of a chain, since a man can be unchained and terrified. Picture somebody perfectly at liberty to walk out of a job, who has not said a true word in a meeting for three years because he cannot afford to lose it. Nobody owns him. He is not free either, and on Epictetus’ accounting the reason is that he has staked his peace on something that was never eph’ hemin to begin with. Freedom is instead the condition of wanting only what is going to happen anyway, which is why he could describe a slave with the right judgments as freer than the master who owned him. Paul says something that sounds close and turns out to be different in kind: the bondservant called in the Lord is the Lord’s freedman (1 Corinthians 7:22). The freedom there is not a state a man reaches by training, but a status conferred on him by someone else.

(Q) "You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower." + Source: Epictetus, Discourses I.1 (George Long translation). The answer to an imagined tyrant who has just said "I will put you in chains." Zeus is named deliberately: not even the god who governs the universe compels a human choice, which for Epictetus is the whole dignity of being rational.

(T4) Every human being carries a fragment of God about with him, so the slave who brought the water is your brother. + The scene is a Roman dining room, and the complaint is a small one. You asked for hot water; the slave has brought it tepid, or has not come at all. Epictetus turns on the man doing the complaining and calls him the slave. Will you not bear with your own brother, he asks, who has Zeus for his ancestor and comes of the same stock as you? And then, quietly, the question that undoes the whole arrangement of the room: will you not remember who you are, and whom you are ruling? He gets there from a doctrine. Human beings are rational, and reason in us is a piece of the reason that orders the world, so that a person is, in his phrase, a portion separated from the deity, carrying a god about inside him without noticing. That is why he can tell a man who has shut the doors and put out the lights that he must never say he is alone, since God is in the room and needs no lamp to see by, and why he thinks impure conduct is a kind of desecration. Two things should be said about where this lands. The first is that it is genuinely close to Scripture and was heard that way: Paul, standing among philosophers in Athens, quotes a Greek poet approvingly to the effect that we are indeed God’s offspring (Acts 17:28). The second is that Epictetus draws a startling social conclusion and stops short of the obvious one. He tells masters that the laws under which they hold human beings are the wretched laws of dead men. He never says the institution should end. Paul does not abolish it either, but he sends a runaway slave home with a letter asking that he be received "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16), and that is a different kind of sentence, because it is addressed to the owner about this particular man.

(Q) "Will you not remember who you are, and whom you rule? that they are kinsmen, that they are brethren by nature, that they are the offspring of Zeus?" + Source: Epictetus, Discourses I.13 (George Long translation). Spoken to a master who has lost his temper with a slave over warm water. The master’s reply is put in his own mouth a line later, and it is the oldest answer there is: but I bought them, and they did not buy me.

(T5) The world is administered, not merely running, and a rational creature’s proper work is to say so out loud. + Epictetus liked small evidence. Never mind the stars, he tells a class: think about the fact that milk comes out of grass, and cheese out of milk, and wool off a skin. Who arranged that? Nobody, you say? He is genuinely indignant, and the indignation is the argument. A person who can watch a thing like that happening every day and feel no gratitude has a defect of attention, not of information. Two Greek words carry the doctrine, and both of them are worth having. Pronoia is providence: the claim that the order of the world is intended rather than accidental, that the grass and the milk and the cheese are an arrangement and not a run of luck. Logos is the reason that does the arranging, present in the world the way sense is present in a sentence, so that a world with no logos in it would be a page of letters in the right shapes with no meaning anywhere. From those two he draws a conclusion about what a human being is for. Animals eat and work and cannot see the arrangement they are part of. We can see it, so the seeing is our job, and the saying so is our office. If I were a nightingale, he says, I would sing like a nightingale; being a rational creature, I ought to praise God, and I will not desert the post. He puts the same thought in a harder key elsewhere. A man is an actor, and the part is not his to choose; a short part or a long one, a beggar’s or a magistrate’s, the author decides, and the actor’s whole business is to play well what he was given. There is real steel in this, and there is a real cost. A man who has taken the part he was handed stops calling anything on the stage his own, and that includes the people he loves.

(Q) "But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God: this is my work; I do it, nor will I desert this post, so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song." + Source: Epictetus, Discourses I.16 (George Long translation). The end of a lecture on providence. A few lines earlier he has asked what else a lame old man like himself could usefully do, and has offered the nightingale and the swan as the two creatures who would praise God in their own way if they could.

(Q) "Never say about any thing, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored?" + Source: Epictetus, Encheiridion 11 (George Long translation). The chapter ends with an image his readers never forgot: while you are permitted to have a thing, take care of it as something belonging to another, as travellers do with an inn. Christian readers have found this the most bracing paragraph he wrote and the coldest, often in the same reading, and both reactions run through the whole history of his reception.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Christianity’s sharpest pagan critic held up his broken leg against the cross, and Origen answered. + About AD 175 a Platonist named Celsus wrote the first full-length attack on Christianity that anyone can still read, and around AD 248 Origen answered it line by line in Against Celsus, quoting so much of his opponent that we can still read most of the attack inside the reply. Twice in that book Epictetus is the man Celsus reaches for. Frederick Crombie’s translation for the Ante-Nicene Fathers gives both passages their familiar English. The first time is an argument about who deserves worship, in Book VII. If you must have a god who suffered, Celsus says, you had better choices than this one, and he runs through them: Orpheus, the legendary singer, Anaxarchus, a philosopher pounded in a mortar, and then Epictetus, who said, smiling and unmoved, while his master twisted his leg, "You will break my leg," and when it broke, "Did I not tell you that you would break it?" Then the sting: "What saying equal to these did your god utter under suffering?" (VII.53). Origen concedes the courage without hesitation, granting that the firmness of Epictetus is justly admired, and answers that the comparison is not a comparison at all, since the words of Jesus have gone on converting the most enlightened of men as well as the simplest in a way that a brave remark in a Roman house has not (VII.54), and since the silence of Jesus under scourging said more for his firmness than anything the Greeks managed in calamity (VII.55). The second mention is a stranger compliment, and it comes from Origen himself. Defending the plain style of Scripture against readers who found it unliterary, he observes that Plato is found only in the hands of those who profess to be literary men, "while Epictetus is admired by persons of ordinary capacity, who have a desire to be benefited" (VI.2). He means it as praise of a book that reaches ordinary people. It is the earliest description of what Epictetus was actually for.

(†) Greek monks copied out his Manual, changed a few of the names, and used it as a rule of life. + Somewhere in the Byzantine centuries a Christian sat down with the Manual and rewrote it for a monastery. The result survives in three separate versions, the oldest of them in a manuscript of the tenth century and another wrongly passed down under the name of Nilus, an ascetic writer of the fifth. The changes are small and tell you everything. Where Epictetus offers Socrates as the model, the paraphrase offers Paul. Where he names Chrysippus, the head of the old Stoic school, the paraphrase names Solomon. The pagan furniture goes, and the discipline stays exactly where it was. It is a peculiar kind of tribute. Nobody paraphrases a book he can take or leave. Monastic life had its own problems of obedience, poverty, the ordering of desire and the government of the tongue, and here was a manual on precisely those subjects, written by a man who had thought harder about them than most and who was safely dead and pagan and therefore no threat to anybody’s doctrine. The Manual came through the Middle Ages twice over, carried along by the sixth-century commentary Simplicius wrote on it and copied out again and again in the version with Paul’s name in it. The Discourses came through once: every known copy descends from a single twelfth-century manuscript now at Oxford, and a blot on one of its pages has left the same words missing from all of them.

(†) Pascal read him as the best of the moralists and used him to prove that moralism cannot work. + Blaise Pascal talked his way through Epictetus in 1655, in a conversation with his director Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy that survives at second hand, in the memoirs of Nicolas Fontaine, de Sacy’s secretary, who was in the room. He set two books side by side. Epictetus is the height of what a human being can say about duty. Montaigne, the great essayist of scepticism, is the height of what a human being can say about weakness. Each of them is right about the half of the truth he can see, and each is ruined by the half he cannot. Pascal is generous first. Epictetus, he says in O. W. Wight’s English, is "among the philosophers of the world who have best understood the duties of man," and then he goes further than anyone since: "I dare say that he would have merited to be adored if he had also known his impotence as well." The praise is exact, and so is the withdrawal of it. What Epictetus lacked was not information about morals but knowledge of his own condition, and the conclusion Pascal draws is that no philosopher could have supplied both halves, because it takes God to teach a man his duty and his helplessness at the same time and not leave him either despairing or proud. That reading has proved durable, and it is the shape in which most Christian writers since have handled him. It is also, in a modest way, a reading Epictetus half invited, since he told his own students that the beginning of philosophy, for the man who comes in by the door, is "a consciousness of his own weakness and inability about necessary things" (Discourses II.11, Long).

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the God inside, the will that needs no help, and a love that will not grieve. + There is another column, and every item in it comes out of what he himself taught and said rather than out of what later readers made of him. - A God who is the order of things. Epictetus speaks of God as father, giver and overseer, and means it. But the God he means is the reason running through the universe, of which a human mind is "a portion separated from the deity" (Discourses II.8). Scripture says something that sounds close and is not: a human being is made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), which makes him a likeness of God and a creature, not a chip off him. Paul can quote a Greek poet on our being God’s offspring (Acts 17:28) precisely because he has just said the Creator does not live in temples and is not served by human hands. - A will that needs nothing. The whole system rests on the claim that God has already given every person everything needed to live well, and that failure is therefore simply misuse. Paul’s report from the inside is the opposite: "I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out" (Romans 7:18–19). Where Epictetus prescribes training, the New Testament prescribes rescue, and salvation comes as a gift rather than an achievement (Ephesians 2:8–9). - The door standing open. More than once he steadies a frightened student by pointing out that if the smoke in the room becomes too thick, the door is open, and no one is compelled to stay alive. He is not reckless about it: elsewhere he tells young men longing to be free of the body to wait for God, and not to depart without a reason. But the exit is genuinely there, and it is not there in Scripture, where a life is a trust to be given back rather than handed back early, and where "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - Affection with the sting drawn. When you kiss your child, he says, remind yourself that you are kissing a human being, so that if the child dies you will not be disturbed. Nothing lost, only restored. It is a discipline built to make grief impossible, and the gospel refuses it at the graveside: Jesus, who knew exactly what he was about to do, wept anyway (John 11:35), and Christians are told not that they will not grieve but that they will not "grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). - The Galilaeans. Christians appear in his lectures exactly once, and not admiringly. Arguing that a person can be made fearless about property and body by madness, "and the Galilaeans through habit" (Discourses IV.7), he asks why reason and demonstration cannot do what those two manage. He had heard of people who would not be frightened out of their faith, and he filed the courage under habit. It is the one moment when the gospel crossed his path, and he did not look twice. None of that cancels the debt. The church kept reading him, in Greek and then in every European language, because he was right that most of what a person frets over is not his, right that the judgment comes between the event and the misery, and right that the man in the kitchen is a brother. Pascal put the balance as well as it can be put: he understood the duties, and not the weakness.