In the meantime...
"...to respond to yet another call to face the manifold experiences of the world, and to treat as equally 'heaven-sent' the opportunity to experience joy, grief, triumph, or death -- these were the images that summed up the life of the conscientious Stoic.
"To achieve a state of high-hearted readiness, the individual ego had to undergo 'a total transformation of its way of perceiving the world'; the 'inner climate' o the mind itself must change. Every situation was to be perceived for exactly what it was -- not as an occasion to experience fear, frustration, or inappropriate hope, but as an opportunity for joyful service.
"What stood in te way of such a state of lucid and alert availability were what are misleadingly called, in modern summaries of Stoicism, 'the passions.' The 'passions' are best seen as tendencies build up within the ego, which could force the sage to overreact to any situation, cathect it with a charge of personal, egotistic significance that distorted its true meaning. The 'passions' colored perceptions of the outside world with nonexistant sources of fear, anxiety, and hope; or else they bathed it in a false glow of pleasure and potential satisfaction.
"This was an austerely introspective doctrine. The passions might have their distant origin in the body; but it was only when they had brought about a change in the inner climate of the mind that they were to be eradicated. As physical creatures, human beings could not avoid 'urges' -- orexeis. Hunger, dumb fear of extinction, the sensations necessarily associated with sexual desire: these were the unavoidable, muted creakings of the biological self. They could never be abandoned. Consciousness of them rose in the mind like thin vapors. If undispersed by vigilant reflection, such vapors could mist over the entire inner climate of the mind, wrapping it in a thick fog of 'passions.' Only a meticulous rhythm of life, in which the body's stirrings were minutely assessed in terms of what were legitimate and what were illegitimate expressions of its instinctual needs, would enable the sage to maintain the infinitely precious lucidity and serenity associated with the 'passionless state.'
"[Saint] Clement identified himself wholeheartedly with the Stoic notion of apatheia, with the ideal of a life freed of the passions.... It was not not as drastic as it might seem at first sight.... The sage was an artist, working with loving care on mind and body. To 'form' a life, in Clement's circles, ilvolved no harsh buffeting of the body. It was, rather, a process as meticulous, as exacting, as loving as the attention that a literary man (such as Clement himself) might give to the right placing of every word, to the correct tone and balance of every phrase. It was a polishing away of those ugly excrescences that blurred the true, sharp form of the person.... But it was definitely not a process that that demanded the repression of feeling. Passions were not what we tend to call feelings: they were, rather, complexes which hindered the true expression of feelings.
"...What Clement envisioned, in the ideal of apatheia, was a state of final serenity of purpose. No longer held back by the fears and uncertainties engendered by the passions, good actions might spring from right knowledge as gently as the shadow falls from the body."
Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia, 1988), pp. 129-131, with copious footnotes.
"To achieve a state of high-hearted readiness, the individual ego had to undergo 'a total transformation of its way of perceiving the world'; the 'inner climate' o the mind itself must change. Every situation was to be perceived for exactly what it was -- not as an occasion to experience fear, frustration, or inappropriate hope, but as an opportunity for joyful service.
"What stood in te way of such a state of lucid and alert availability were what are misleadingly called, in modern summaries of Stoicism, 'the passions.' The 'passions' are best seen as tendencies build up within the ego, which could force the sage to overreact to any situation, cathect it with a charge of personal, egotistic significance that distorted its true meaning. The 'passions' colored perceptions of the outside world with nonexistant sources of fear, anxiety, and hope; or else they bathed it in a false glow of pleasure and potential satisfaction.
"This was an austerely introspective doctrine. The passions might have their distant origin in the body; but it was only when they had brought about a change in the inner climate of the mind that they were to be eradicated. As physical creatures, human beings could not avoid 'urges' -- orexeis. Hunger, dumb fear of extinction, the sensations necessarily associated with sexual desire: these were the unavoidable, muted creakings of the biological self. They could never be abandoned. Consciousness of them rose in the mind like thin vapors. If undispersed by vigilant reflection, such vapors could mist over the entire inner climate of the mind, wrapping it in a thick fog of 'passions.' Only a meticulous rhythm of life, in which the body's stirrings were minutely assessed in terms of what were legitimate and what were illegitimate expressions of its instinctual needs, would enable the sage to maintain the infinitely precious lucidity and serenity associated with the 'passionless state.'
"[Saint] Clement identified himself wholeheartedly with the Stoic notion of apatheia, with the ideal of a life freed of the passions.... It was not not as drastic as it might seem at first sight.... The sage was an artist, working with loving care on mind and body. To 'form' a life, in Clement's circles, ilvolved no harsh buffeting of the body. It was, rather, a process as meticulous, as exacting, as loving as the attention that a literary man (such as Clement himself) might give to the right placing of every word, to the correct tone and balance of every phrase. It was a polishing away of those ugly excrescences that blurred the true, sharp form of the person.... But it was definitely not a process that that demanded the repression of feeling. Passions were not what we tend to call feelings: they were, rather, complexes which hindered the true expression of feelings.
"...What Clement envisioned, in the ideal of apatheia, was a state of final serenity of purpose. No longer held back by the fears and uncertainties engendered by the passions, good actions might spring from right knowledge as gently as the shadow falls from the body."
Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia, 1988), pp. 129-131, with copious footnotes.