After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher
By Thomas M. Ward.
Word on Fire Academic, 2024.
Hardcover, 216 pages, $34.95.
365 Lessons from the Stoics
By Andrea Kirk Assaf.
William Collins, 2024.
Hardcover, 256 pages, $19.19
Reviewed by Father Joseph Hudson.
From the beginning of the Republic, Americans have turned to the Stoics for counsel. The Founding Fathers, nurtured on Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, learned in those stern philosophers a discipline of duty and self-command. Long after, in the cataclysm of the Second World War, a young Russell Kirk carried in his sack the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. In today’s unsettled age, the harried businessman and the restless student continue to find solace in its ancient maxims. It is into this enduring tradition that Thomas Ward speaks.
The revival in interest in stoicism should not surprise. Stoic philosophy naturally attracts adherents in troubled times: it summons to duty, educates in constancy, and inspires self-mastery because it speaks to perennial human needs. The core insight is simple but profound: external circumstances do not determine happiness or misery. If fate is out of our control, we can control our response. To locate happiness in wealth, status, or other externals is to set oneself up for disappointment, since those can be lost in an instant. The Stoic, on the other hand, strives for an inner citadel of virtue, her inner calm protected by self-mastery over passions and desires. In every hardship, from the battlefield to the boardroom, the Stoic motto, as repeated by Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, remains: “No situation is miserable unless you think it so.”
Yet thoughtful readers have long sensed that stoicism, for all its nobility, leaves something wanting. John Adams admired the Stoics but judged their system “as imperfect as that of the Christians is perfect.” Russell Kirk, who once remarked that “everything in Christianity is Stoic,” nevertheless styled himself a “Christian Stoic,” confessing that only faith supplied what the ancients sought but could not secure. It is precisely this “something more” that Thomas Ward illuminates in After Stoicism, showing how Boethius—hailed by Edward Gibbon as “the last of the Romans”—affirmed the greatness of Stoic teaching even as he reached beyond it, to the higher promise of enduring happiness found in God.
Thomas Ward begins After Stoicism with a reference to a mysterious stranger, the character known as Meursault in the novel The Stranger by Camus. Carl Jung would like to persuade us that within each of us there is a shadowy side that we are uncomfortable confronting. Meursault is the kind of figure we would rather not meet in a dark alley. He is menacing and dangerous. He represents the darker and stranger side of ourselves. Yet for Camus the stranger has a virtue. He has overcome the fear of the unknown. He possesses a particular type of courage, one that allows him to look into the darkness of reality. He sees there only nothingness and concludes that the universe must simply be “benignly indifferent” to suffering. And in that he finds what most of us would consider a morbid comfort.
Boethius is quite a different character from Meursault, but Ward’s point is well taken. The challenge, if not the solution, is the same. Boethius is confronting the darker side of life. He is peering into the darkness. The question is, to paraphrase Nietzsche, what will stare back? The figure that emerges out of Boethius’s dark night is the character whom he calls Lady Philosophy.
Lady Philosophy, like the Stoic masters, initially chides Boethius for forgetting that his true self is not at the mercy of fickle fortune, and that the vicissitudes of life can be borne with equanimity. She reminds him who he really is—a rational soul—and that his mind is a refuge no dungeon walls can imprison.
Yet even as Boethius regains this Stoic calm, a tension remains in The Consolation of Philosophy. Ward perceptively highlights that mere tranquility in the face of death is necessary, but not sufficient. Yes, indifference to loss can prevent misery, but is the absence of misery the same as true happiness? For Boethius, the answer was no. As the prison dialogues proceed, Boethius begins to press beyond the limits of Stoic doctrine. He hungers for something more positive and transcendent.
While languishing in prison, Boethius naturally wrestled with the question, Why do bad things happen to good people? His own case—punishment for doing the right thing—seemed a prime example. Stoicism could only answer: such is fate; virtue is its own reward, and one must accept what comes. After Stoicism explains Boethius’s answer in a lucid, conversational manner. At its core is the insight that if God is all-good and all-powerful, then evil and suffering, however mysterious, are not beyond meaning. Either they serve as just punishment or as tests and occasions for virtue—but under Providence, no tear is unnoticed. God permits sin and suffering for the sake of a greater order in which our choices matter. In Boethius’s vision (and Ward’s retelling), we can trust that “even when terrible things happen, God is in control and can make good out of that evil.” This conviction goes beyond making the best of a bad situation; it is a confidence that, ultimately, the universe is moral.
One of the strengths of After Stoicism is how it places Boethius in dialogue with today’s “Neo-Stoic” trend. Ward is clearly aware that Stoicism has become a “mega-industry” in our time, as newspapers and commentators have noted. He uses that fact to hook the reader: if Stoic practices of mindfulness and self-discipline are helping people cope with modern life, then surely Boethius—who drew on Stoicism to cope with a death sentence—has something valuable to say to us as well. Early in the book, Ward points out the surge of interest in Marcus Aurelius among young people disillusioned with other institutions of meaning. While he doesn’t dwell on names, one can sense Ward’s conversation with popular Stoic advocates like Ryan Holiday or William Irvine in the background. Such authors champion Stoicism as a complete guide to life, often with an explicit stance that one can have Stoic ethics without any religious faith. Ward gently challenges this outlook by showing the ceilings that Boethius hit within a purely Stoic framework. It’s as if Ward is saying to modern Stoic disciples: “Yes, stoicism is good, but don’t stop there. Even the last Stoic himself didn’t stop there.” The book invites comparison between Boethius’s approach and modern self-help stoicism. For example, whereas a contemporary Stoic guru might emphasize mental exercises to cultivate gratitude or reduce anxiety, Ward highlights how Boethius combined such mental discipline with an openness to grace and transcendent love. Ward also engages, at least implicitly, with critics of stoicism—both ancient and modern. Over the centuries, some have criticized Stoicism for being too cold, too detached, or too pessimistic about the value of emotion and attachment. Boethius’s example provides a rebuttal: he models a warmer stoicism, one that makes room for friendship, love, and even sorrow (Boethius begins Consolation by weeping, after all). Ward emphasizes that Boethius does not denigrate the human feelings of grief or the desire for justice; instead, Boethius integrates them into a larger understanding. In this sense, After Stoicism aligns with those who have argued for a more “humanized” form of stoicism.
Though a professional philosopher by vocation, Thomas Ward wears his erudition lightly, guiding the reader with the clarity and zeal of a true teacher. The volume is modest in length—scarcely more than two hundred pages—yet Ward draws the reader through the text step by step, pausing to reveal the echoes of Boethius in Dante’s vision of Providence and in Aquinas’s theological syntheses. Nor does he shrink from noting the continuities that reach into our own time, from Tolkien’s reflections on the sudden turn of Providence, or eucatastrophe, to the Harry Potter series with its battles between love and despair (with explicit references to soul-sucking Dementors vs. hopeful Patronus charms). These asides are not concessions to fashion, but reminders that the wisdom of the ancients still breathes in our literature, our culture, and our longings. Thus Ward succeeds in rendering a work of fifteen centuries past not as a relic, but as a living fountain of consolation. As Brett McCracken notes, Ward’s book “feels weighty and scholarly while also being totally approachable… philosophy with a human pulse.”
Ward’s contribution, following Boethius, is to gently ask: Is tranquility of soul the final word? Or is there, perhaps, an even deeper source of consolation available to us? The answer given through Boethius is that hope completes the picture. Hope—not a naive optimism that life will be easy, but a belief, grounded in a philosophical understanding of an ordered world, that in the grand scheme, a loving Providence ensures our struggles are not in vain—is the added ingredient that transforms Stoic endurance into something more like Christian hope.
One imagines that John Adams, Russell Kirk, and so many others who have found stoicism compatible with their Christian faith would have appreciated Ward’s book. It vindicates the Stoic impulse, showing how much good it can do, while also vindicating the insight that stoicism finds its completion in a rational belief in the goodness of God and His providence. In an era hungry for stability and meaning, Boethius shows that while Stoicism can steady the soul, fulfillment is grounded in an intelligible worldview and a belief in a God who takes a personal interest in our own well-being.
Readers of Ward’s After Stoicism will find themselves well guided through Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, yet they may notice that Ward rarely pauses to present Boethius’s words at length. His concern for clarity and concision leads him to paraphrase more often than to quote in full. Thus, students will gain a trustworthy account of what Ward sees in the text, but they will have fewer occasions to linger over Boethius’s ipsissima verba. The ones best served, then, will be those who can take Ward’s lucid exposition as a guide, turn to the Consolation itself, and meditate for themselves on the mysteries of Fortune and Providence, of virtue and beatitude. In that act of returning to the text, Ward’s book fulfills its true purpose: not to replace Boethius, but to send readers back to him with new eyes.
A similar observation may be made about Ward’s treatment of the Stoics themselves. His purpose is not to furnish a handbook of Seneca or Epictetus, but to illumine Boethius’s conversation with their philosophy. The result is a guide that clarifies Stoic principles in light of later development at the hands of a Christian author, but one that seldom pauses to let the ancients speak at length in their own accents. For readers who, having finished Ward, wish to sit more directly with the voices of the Stoics, Andrea Kirk Assaf’s 365 Stoic Meditations is an apt companion. The daughter of Russell Kirk, she continues a family tradition of sympathy for stoic wisdom, gathering the maxims of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus into a form that rewards daily reflection. Read alongside After Stoicism, her collection supplies the terse strength of the ancients, while Ward points beyond them to the consolations of a reasonable hope in a personal and loving God.
Fr. Joseph Hudson, OSB, is a Benedictine monk and a doctoral candidate in theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. A former Wilbur Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center, he writes on Thomas Aquinas, deification, moral theology, and the intersection of tradition, culture, and law.
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