18 PAUL AND SELF MASTERY

Stanley K. Stowers

Part I. Self-Mastery in the Greek and Roman Worlds

The Greek notion of self-mastery (E:yKpchElCX, enkrateia) is central to a network of moral discourse that is prominent in Paul's letters and in the broader Greco­Roman culture. This moral discourse of Paul's day first took its characteristic form in classical Greece, although it has older roots in wider Greek and Mediter­ranean folk psychology and moral practices. The classical heritage remained strong in Paul's time because the larger culture looked to the art, literature, phi­losophy and history of the classical period for its dominant cultural models. The notion also has a broader context in the larger arena of ancient Mediterranean cul­tures for which the idea of restraint was important. In a society and economy nearly the opposite of our capitalistic consumer culture that produces new goods and services, all of the land and goods available through the ancient technology were already distributed. Thus the social order was based on maintaining inher­ited social status and property and passing it on to heirs. The morals of the an­cient Mediterranean revolved around an ethic of restraint that could be ex­pressed: "Do not desire more than is your due by your station of birth." Thus the central ancient moral precepts were like the ancient Israelite "thou shall not covet'' and the Greek "in nothing too much."

Self-Mastery in the Greek Ethical Tradition

The Greeks of the fourth and fifth centuries s.c.i::. possessed a very rich vocabu­lary for talking about feeling. emotions, thinking. believing. deliberation, and in

general what we describe as mental activity. The vocabulary was enriched by lit­erature, especially the tragic and comic stage, and by the growing work of med­ical doctors and natural philosophers. But Plato and Aristotle reflect an important broader Greek cultural trend that added a new element to this vocabulary by talk-

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ing about people as political animals and describing citizens as political entities. Greek orators, writen., and philosophers began to use concepts such as that of ruler and ruled, power, authority, stable rule and revolt in order to talk about the person and the self.1

The adjective tyxpaul<; (enkrates, "having control over") originally applied only to political or physical control over something. The noun first appears in Plato and Xenophon and it may have been Socrates who first used the term as an attribute for a person's character.2 Our long Western heritage of such vocabulary runs so deep that it is difficult for us to imagine a time and cultures for which there was no explicit concept of self-control.3 Thus we must exercise our imagina­tions to understand just how revolutionary was Socrates' idea that the person had a distinct self and that there could be a science of the self.

After Socrates, philosophers would articulate teachings about the person, of what the person consisted, and offer techniques that aimed to give people author­ity and control over the directions of their lives as wholes. Socrates also became the great model for sell-mastery and that model had lost none of its power in

Paul's day. According to Xenophon (Mem. 1.2.1), "[R]egarding sexual desire and the stomach he was the most self-mastered [tyiqxxi;fo'ta'tO<;, enkratestatos] of all men; and possessed the most endurance of cold and heat and every sort of toil; and regarding needs he was trained in moderation so that he was content with very little."• Above all, the paradigm of Socrates' self-mastery was his willingness to stand and die for his teachings rather than give into the desires for safety, com­fort, and survival

The opposite of self-mastery was a1<pa0Ca (akrasia), lack of self-mastery. lsoc­rates (15.221), for example, writes that "many people because of their failures of self-mastery [akrasiai) do not abide by their reasonings, but neglect their interests and follow their impulse to pleasure." Plato, and especially Aristotle, analyzed "the problem of akrasin- and "the type of person who lacked self-mash?T}~· thereby establishing themes that became prominent in literature, philo:.ophy, and the common discourse.

Lack of self-mastery (nkrasia) might exhibit itself in psych<H?thical conflict and the great cultural paradigm for such conflict became Medea in Euripedes' Meden. In view of the context in the play, the famous words in 1077-80 should probably be translated along the lines of Christopher GilJ's translation, "I know that what I am about to do is bad, but anger is master of my plans, which is the source of human beings' greatest troubles:1 Here ~ledea affirms that the reasons for her anger, and thus revenge, are persuasive even though her reason also tells her that the plan is horrible. But the Platonic and popular understanding soon came to construe the lines as about irrational passion overcoming reason. The fol­lowing translation along traditional lines captures that view: "I realize what I am