Discourses by Epictetus (good books to read for beginners txt) 📕

But the other expressions here of feeding and exercising God, and the whole of the paragraph, and indeed of the Stoic system, show the real sense of even its more decent phrases to be vastly different from that of Scripture.”

The passage in 1 Corinthians 6:19 is, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God and ye are not your own?” This follows 5:18, which is an exhortation to “flee fornication.” The passage in 2 Corinthians 6:16 is “And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them and walk in them,” etc. Carter has not correctly stated the sense of these two passages.

It is certain that Epictetus knew nothing of the writers of the Epistles in the New Testament; but whence did these writers learn such forms of expression as we find in the passages cited by Carter? I believe that they drew them from the Stoic philosophers who wrote before Epictetus and that they applied them to the new religion which they were teaching. The teaching of Paul and of Epictetus does not differ: the spirit of God is in man.

Emanuel Swedenborg says, “In these two faculties (rationality and liberty) the Lord resides with every man, whether he be good or evil, they being the Lord’s mansions in the human race. But the mansion of the Lord is nearer with a man, in proportion as the man opens the superior degrees by these faculties; for by the opening thereof he comes into superior degrees of love and wisdom, and consequently nearer to the Lord. Hence it may appear that as these degrees are opened, so a man is in the Lord and the Lord in him.” Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom, 240. Again, “the faculty of thinking rationally, viewed in itself, is not man’s, but God’s in man.”

I am not quite sure in what sense the administration of the Eucharist ought to be understood in the church of England service. Some English divines formerly understood, and perhaps some now understand, the ceremony as a commemoration of the blood of Christ shed for us and of his body which was broken; as we see in Thomas Burnet’s posthumous work (de Fide et Officiis Christianorum, p. 80). It was a commemoration of the last supper of Jesus and the Apostles. But this does not appear to be the sense in which the ceremony is now understood by some priests and by some members of the church of England, whose notions approach near to the doctrine of the Catholic mass. Nor does it appear to be the sense of the prayer made before delivering the bread and wine to the Communicants, for the prayer is “Grant us, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.” This is a different thing from Epictetus’ notion of God being in man, and also different, as I understand it, from the notion contained in the two passages of Paul; for it is there said generally that the Holy Ghost is in man or God in man, not that God is in man by virtue of a particular ceremony. It should not be omitted that there is after the end of the Communion service an admonition that the sacramental bread and wine remain what they were, “and that the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ are in heaven and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural body to be at one time in more places than one.” It was affirmed by the Reformers and the best writers of the English church that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a spiritual presence, and in this opinion they followed Calvin and the Swiss divines: and yet in the Prayer book we have the language that I have quoted; and even Calvin, who only maintained a spiritual presence, said, “that the verity is nevertheless joined to the signs, and that in the sacrament we have ‘true Communion in Christ’s body and blood’ ” (Contemporary Review, p. 464, August 1874). What would Epictetus have thought of the subtleties of our days? ↩

The Athena of Phidias was in the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis, a colossal chryselephantine statue, that is, a frame work of wood, covered with ivory and gold (Pausanias, Description of Greece i 24). The figure of Victory stood on the hand of the goddess, as we frequently see in coins. See book I chapter VI at 23, and the note in Johann Schweighäuser’s edition. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii 34. ↩

The great statue at Olympia was the work of Phidias (Pausanias, Description of Greece v. 11). It was a seated colossal chryselephantine statue, and held a Victory in the right hand. ↩

An allusion to the combatants in the public exercises, who used to show their shoulders, muscles, and sinews as a proof of their strength. See book I chapter IV, book II chapter XVIII, book III chapter XXII (Elizabeth Carter). ↩

ἔκκλισιν. See book III chapter II. ↩

“The abuse of the faculties which are proper to man, called rationality and liberty, is the origin of evil. By rationality is meant the faculty of understanding truths and thence falses, and goods and then evils; and by liberty is meant the faculty of thinking, willing, and acting freely⁠—and these faculties distinguish man from beasts.” Emanuel