Spiritual Exercises of the Stoics and Neo-Confucians

The term “spiritual exercise” (exercitia spiritualia) was first used by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola, in the 1500s, but it was the French classicist Pierre Hadot who began popularizing the term in the 1950s as a way to describe what ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were actually teaching their students when lecturing on things like ethics and the good life, but also, perhaps surprisingly, on seemingly unrelated matters like physics and cosmology.

Loyola himself had borrowed the idea from his reading of the Stoics, particularly Epictetus’s Enchiridion. Hadot was therefore merely showing that the spiritual exercises promoted by Loyola and the Jesuits were in fact based on a much older philosophical tradition reaching at least as far back as Socrates in the fifth century BCE.

 

The Stoics

The ancient philosophers most associated with the idea of spiritual exercises are the Stoics. The ancient Stoics lasted for about 800 years, from 300 BCE, when their founder Zeno of Citium set up his school in Athens, to 529 CE when all the schools of philosophy were closed by Emperor Justinian at the behest of the Church.

The Stoic school evolved and diversified a lot over that period but its enduring idea was that philosophy was not about the pursuit of abstract knowledge but an inquiry into how best to live one’s life. They also taught things like logic, physics and cosmology but these were subservient to ethics and the question how we should conduct our lives both individually and collectively. Their main idea was that the key to the good life was the pursuit of virtue.

By virtue they meant on the one hand, living in accord with nature, and on the other exercising reason to control our passions. To live according to nature meant recognizing the cosmos as an ordered whole ruled by Logos or Zeus, where every individual had a function. Our place was to live dutifully within the community assigned us at birth, working as much to advance the common good as to advance our own interests.

Subjecting our passions to rational control meant keeping our desire for things like fame, fortune and sexual pleasure in check. Real happiness came from being in control of the passions and training the mind to avoid negative thoughts which erode the quality of good situations in life and make bad situations worse. They counselled cultivating a sense of equanimity (what they called ataraxia) from the prospect of either gaining or losing good fortune. “The surest sign of the higher life is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil” says Epictetus.

The person who embodied virtue the most for the Stoics was the sage. The sage was extremely rare though, existing mostly as an ideal to which we should aspire. To that end, they practiced thinking certain thoughts throughout the day to keep them on track in progressing towards the ideal. These practices are what later scholars like Hadot have come to call spiritual exercises. I define a spiritual exercise as follows:

 

a regular mental activity of contemplating or being inspired by certain spiritual, religious or philosophical ideals to reinforce them in one’s character and practice of life.

 

Scholars Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure in their book Philosophy As a Way of Life have categorized the spiritual practices of the ancients into nine classes. Using their list as a starting point, I have summarized and expanded it into a list of twelve (see below). This is just a first stab and I’m sure there are many refinements and additions that could be made. I indicate the name of each exercise according to Stoic tradition in Greek or Latin.

 

1. Prosochē – Focusing on the present rather than on abstract, distant or irrelevant issues;
2. Enkrateia – Distinguishing and controlling what we can (e.g. emotions and thoughts) from what we cannot;
3. Thauma – Contemplating the wonder and beauty of existence, nature and cosmos;
4. Memento Mori – Remembering you will die;
5. Premeditatio Malorum – Considering the possibility of greater sufferings than at present;
6. Hypomnemata – Assessing one’s good and bad actions over some period, g. a week sometimes by keeping a journal;
7. Anōthen – Framing one’s life problems within the infinite, eternal or immense scales of the cosmos (Hadot called this ‘the view from above’);
8. Pronoia – Feeling gratitude or appreciation for everything good in life and how the cosmos and other people have delivered them to you;
9. Pragmatike Meditatio – Anticipating future difficulties and the virtues needed to manage them well.
10. Amor fati – Loving one’s fate, embracing whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, however hard or unfair;
11. Ataraxia – Dwelling in equanimity, detached from irrational desires and aversions;
12. Autarkeia – Striving for the state of the sage; one of true freedom (eleutheria) governed by reason and complete virtue, rather than being a slave to the passions.

 

The Neo-Confucians

What is notable about the Stoic spiritual exercises, is how much they overlap with practices in quite different traditions like that of Neo-Confucianism in China. Confucius lived circa 551 – 469 BCE but his school had morphed by the mid twelfth century CE to incorporate elements of Buddhism and Daoism, whilst remaining guarded about its own perceived superiority and rationalist credentials.

An expert in this field, Aaron Stalnaker, has written that for all scholars in the Confucian tradition “spiritual exercises were key to human flourishing … seen as the chief means of addressing the general Chinese problematic of xiu shen, or self-cultivation”. A list of exercises from Zhu Xi, one of the pioneers in Neo-Confucian thought, has been compiled by contemporary scholars and includes the following:

 

1. Ju jing – Abiding in reverent composure;
2. Shen du – Prudence in solitude, careful observation of ideas, feelings etc. as they arise;
3. Xing cha – Self-examination, to distinguish good psychic phenomena from selfish ones;
4. Cun yang – Preserving and nourishing good psychic phenomena;
5. Ke ji – Conquering the self, or eliminating bad psychic phenomena, such as selfish desire;
6. Jing zuo – Quiet-sitting, or meditation;
7. Gewu zhizhi – Investigating things i.e. “fathoming the patterns of things and events”, and;
8. Xing – Practice, to put into effect one’s knowledge.

 

Number one on Zhu Xi’s list, “reverential composure” appears to be a kind of mixture of the Greek Thauma and Pronoia. One contemporary Confucian scholar, Stephen Angle, describes it as revering whatever one encounters in daily life for its interconnection and harmony with life and cosmos. He puts it like this,

 

Reverence is not an experience of undifferentiated oneness, but of things fitting together, even if many of these interconnections are beyond one’s ability to perceive or even grasp … The idea of reverential attention is therefore that one is attuned to the broad significance of any situation …

 

Number three on Zhu Xi’s list, xing cha seems to have been a Chinese version of the Stoic Hypomnemata. Stalnaker tells us that daily self-examination was essential, and quotes Zhu Xi, “the noble man studies broadly and each day examines himself asking ‘Have I not been faithful in what I seek for others? Have I not been trustworthy in my dealings with friends? Have I not practiced what I transmit?’.

Zhu Xi’s form of meditation, Jing zuo (no. 6), is different from the Buddhist cultivation of emptiness. It aims instead at tranquil reflection, meaning to ‘sit quietly’. One could compare it to the Stoic Prosochē. 

Another overlap between Stoic and Neo-Confucian ideas concerns the importance of imbibing the idea of fate or “ming”. The early Neo-Confucian Cheng Yi (1033–1107 CE) expressed ideas very close to the Stoic exercise of Amor Fati.

 

Understanding the necessity of fate, one’s heartmind will not be disturbed by poverty, obstacles, or calamity. One will merely enact their virtue of righteousness. If one does not understand fate, they will be afraid when they encounter danger and difficulty and stumble when they suffer poverty, and what they hold on to will be lost. How can such a one fulfill commitment to do good? (Angle 162)

 

The Stoics and Neo-Confucians held quite different metaphysical views, but were united in their striving to become sage-like through a programme of ethical improvement. They both sought to subject their ideas and behavior to rational scrutiny with the aim of becoming not only happier, but better citizens of the world, in harmony with themselves, with others and nature. That was their goal anyway. Spiritual exercises in both traditions were rehearsals before the main performance of life. Us spiritual naturalists have a lot to learn from the spiritual exercises of the Stoics and Neo-Confucians, as we probably do from similar exercises in all the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

All the above exercises come down to dedicating time to remember, reflect upon and feel inspired by wise truths about how to live the best life. To undertake regular spiritual exercise is to give our ideals a toehold in reality, to start on the path to entrenching them as habits and dispositions of everyday behavior. We need to remember though they are not ends or virtues in themselves. One might practice them all day every day for years on end, but if they don’t lead to better outcomes in life, in how we treat ourselves and others, then they’re not doing their job.

 

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References

Adler, Joseph A. “Zhu Xi’s Spiritual Practice as the Basis of His Central Philosophical Concepts”, Dao (2008).

Angle, S. A. Growing Moral: Confucian Guide to Life. Oxford University Press 2022.

Piggliucci, M. “Prosochê as Stoic Mindfulness”, Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation, edited by Rick Repetti, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.

Sharpe, Matthew, and Michael Ure. Philosophy As a Way of Life : History, Dimensions, Directions, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt,  Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Visnjic, Jack. The Invention of Duty: Stoicism As Deontology, BRILL, 2021.

Sellars, John. “Stoic Cosmopolitanism and Zeno’s Republic”, History of Political Thought 28/1 (2007), 1-29.

Kyongju-loi, Shun, “ZHU Xi and the Idea of One Body”, Dao Companion to ZHU Xi’s Philosophy, Kai-chiu Ng, Yong Huang (Editors)

William Theodore de Bary et al., eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.