Letter #239: A Sight for Sore Eyes
Round two of Obscure Philosophers Bingo
Dad,
Glad I could catch you for dinner last week as you swept through Nashville on your glamorous book tour. Looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow at 6pm E.T. for our livestream (subscribers only). In the meantime, let’s play another round of Obscure Philosophers Bingo.
There was this one guy, Dionysius (who injured his upper trapezius...OK not really. But that would be funny). Actually Dionysius had an eye disease. There was a lot of that going around in ancient Greece, but rarely with such philosophical significance. Because Dionysius’ sore eyes caused him to give up on Stoicism, the popular school of thought that would eventually make such a big impression on the Romans.
The Stoics had this idea that nothing could really harm you unless it degraded your virtue—not even death. Death was natural, the Stoics taught, and so was pain, which made it an adiaphoron, usually translated in the stilted terminology of philosophers as “an indifferent.” It basically means “something neither good nor bad,” something that can’t truly harm you unless you respond with cowardice or indignity.
But Dionysius, says one biographer, lost faith when his eyes started hurting—“for his suffering was so severe that he was reluctant to say that pain was a matter of indifference.” This earned him the nickname ho Metathemenos, “Dionysius the Turncoat,” from his former colleagues. But I’ve always thought it was an extremely honest and philosophically defensible move on Dionysius’ part. He was a wise and squinty little man.
There’s certainly much truth to the Stoic idea that how we face suffering and death says more of consequence about us than whether we suffer or when we die. This must be the point of Jesus’ instruction to “fear not those who can only kill the body, but the one who can destroy both body and soul.”
Still, one thing Christianity has over Stoicism—and over most other philosophies, it seems to me—is permission to acknowledge that pain is not a matter of indifference and death is not a natural part of life. Much as we might try to rationalize it, Dionysius was right when he faced up to the brute fact that when he was hurting, something was wrong. That’s not how it ought to be.
So many of us spend most of our lives in denial—not of death, so much, as of how atrocious death is, the monstrosity of it. Stoics denied it. Epicureans denied it in a big way. Christians try to look away from it too sometimes: he’s in a better place now. All part of God’s plan.
As true as these claims may be in some distant sense, they evade the hard reality you write about in your book: “faced with death and the dead” we are confronted, as Dionysius was, with “something raw and real, insistent and everlasting.” That something is our birthright to immortality. I wonder how we could ever think to reason it away.
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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This denial of death hits close to home. My dear wife expresses intense dislike of death & the dead. She has stated on several occasions that she does not want an open casket funeral. She cringes at the idea of people seeing her deceased form. Sadly, this distaste kept her from approaching her mother's casket prior to its closing before the funeral service. I, on the other hand, do not share that dread of death. For 11 years I was part of the Greek Orthodox church. The Orthodox do not shy away from death. At a funeral I attended, as part of an Orthodox community, all parishioners processed past the open casket so as to view the body. That body is seen as an Icon, an image pointing to Christ. It was a moving moment as it reminds me now that each person I see, like the Icons in an Orthodox church, is an image intended to remind me of Christ's presence – here & now.
As a therapist who often works with shoulder injuries or post-op shoulder surgeries, you have now made it impossible for me to say Trapezius without having to hold back a guffaw. 🤣