The Corinthian Stoics

What Paul Saw at Corinth Is Happening Again

Last week I argued that the most likely identity of Paul’s opponents in 1 Corinthians 1-4 was a Christianized form of Stoic philosophy that had infiltrated the church. I want to spend this week on what that means — for them, and for us.

Because Stoicism is back.

You can’t open the bestseller table at any airport bookstore right now without bumping into Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic, The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy. There’s a daily Stoic email going out to two and a half million subscribers. There’s a YouTube genre — search “be a Stoic” or “Marcus Aurelius” — full of square-jawed men in white shirts explaining how the philosophy of the Roman emperors will help you achieve inner calm, dominate your career, and become the kind of person whose self-worth doesn’t depend on anyone else’s opinion. Massimo Pigliucci has rebranded the philosophy for the post-religious mainstream in How to Be a Stoic. Donald Robertson has done the same for the cognitive-behavioral therapy crowd in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. There are Stoic men’s groups, Stoic productivity hacks, Stoic dating advice. The four cardinal virtues — wisdom, courage, justice, temperance — get printed on coffee mugs.

The appeal is not mysterious. Modern Stoicism promises three things people in 2026 are starving for. It promises mastery — the ability to govern your own emotions rather than be governed by them. It promises calm — the freedom to be unmoved by outside circumstances. And it promises virtue without religion — a robust ethical framework that doesn’t require you to believe anything metaphysically embarrassing. You can read Marcus Aurelius on the train to work and feel like a serious person without ever risking the social cost of saying you believe in God.

I’m not here to mock any of this. I’ll say something that may surprise you: there’s a great deal in Stoicism worth taking seriously. The Stoics were rigorous moral thinkers. Their psychology of the passions anticipated cognitive-behavioral therapy by two thousand years. Their insistence that virtue is the only true good is a healthier hierarchy than what most of our contemporaries are trying to live by. And their hostility to the slavery of public opinion is, frankly, a fitting rebuke to Twitter.

But here’s the thing. The early church already met this philosophy. It already absorbed this philosophy. And the Apostle Paul, watching the consequences play out in real time, wrote four chapters of fury about it.

I want to walk you through what he actually saw, what he said, and why it should make any Christian who’s reading The Daily Stoic uneasy.## What Was the Corinthians’ Stoicism?

When Paul writes to the Corinthian church in the mid-50s, the city has been a Roman colony for about a hundred years. It was rebuilt by Julius Caesar after lying in ruins for a century, repopulated largely with Roman freedmen and veterans, and seamlessly integrated into the Greek and Roman intellectual currents of the eastern Mediterranean.¹By Paul's day Stoicism was the default philosophical framework for educated Romans. There's solid evidence for a Roman gymnasium in Corinth at this time, where the upper classes would have received standard Stoic-inflected education.²You didn't need to seek Stoicism out. Just being well-educated in Corinth meant absorbing it.

The Stoicism on display in the Corinthian church wasn't, however, the rigorous classical version of Zeno or Chrysippus. It was a popular, watered-down form. In real Stoicism, the "wise man" — the σοφός — was a regulative ideal, almost mythological. Engberg-Pedersen notes that the Stoics themselves regarded the true sage as "as rare as the Phoenix" — perhaps not actually existing at all.³But the Corinthians thought they had already attained that rank. That's why Paul mocks them in 4:8: "Already you have become rich! Already you have become kings!" The pose of the achieved sage, claimed without the difficult work the classical Stoics demanded — that's what Paul is taking aim at.

If you have any doubt that’s what’s going on, look at the parallel passages. In my MTh thesis I lined them up in a table; here are three of them.

In 1 Corinthians 4:8, Paul writes: “Already you have become rich! Already you have become kings!”

In Plutarch, summarizing Stoic teaching: "The wise man is termed an orator, a poet, a general, a rich man, and a king."⁴

In Cicero, on the Stoic σοφός: "For the wise man will have a better claim to the title of King than Tarquin, a better right to be called rich than Croesus."⁵

In 1 Corinthians 4:10, Paul says: “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise [φρόνιμοι] in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong [ἰσχυροί].”

Both adjectives are technical Stoic vocabulary for the sage. Zeno of Citium himself: "The wise one is great and grand and lofty and strong [ἰσχυρόν]."⁶Plutarch on the Stoic position: "the wise man is termed not only prudent [φρόνιμος] and just and brave."⁷

In 1 Corinthians 3:21-22, Paul writes: “For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours.”

Plutarch on the Stoic claim: "If one has got virtue from the Stoa, it is possible to say, 'Ask, if there's aught you wish, all will be yours.'"⁸Cicero: "[The wise man] will most rightly be called king… master… rich. Rightly will he be said to own all things."⁹

This is not a stretch. These are the slogans the Corinthian Christians were using, picked up out of the air of an educated Roman city, and Paul is taking them apart phrase by phrase. He’s quoting back to them the exact terms — king, rich, wise, strong, all things are yours — that they themselves had absorbed from their cultural surround.

And the behavior on display in the church matches the philosophy that produced the slogans. Terence Paige observes:

Just such a callousness of individuals toward others as we find at Corinth, such a disregard for the community dimension of their new existence, would likely be fostered by a Stoicizing influence, which would in fact exalt the individual σοφός at the expense of the community. And a Stoic could behave in this individualistic, community-destroying fashion at the same time that he believes he is pursuing a virtuous life.¹⁰

That last sentence is worth slowing over. A Stoic could behave in community-destroying ways at the same time that he believes he is pursuing a virtuous life. The pursuit of personal virtue, in the Stoic frame, doesn’t necessarily lead you toward your neighbor. It can lead you straight past him. The ethics of the sage are vertical, not horizontal. You climb toward the Phoenix-rare ideal of self-mastery, and the brother whose foot you step on along the way is, well, his problem to bear.

That’s what was happening in Corinth. People who thought they were pursuing wisdom while ripping the body of Christ to pieces.

Paul’s Response

What Paul doesn’t do is interesting.

He doesn’t, point by point, argue against Stoic doctrine. He doesn’t write a tract titled Against the Stoics the way Plutarch did, refuting their positions by working through their syllogisms. He could have. He had the rhetorical training. But he doesn’t.

He also doesn’t try to baptize Stoicism. He doesn’t say, “Look, fellow Christians, much of what the Stoics taught is true; let me show you how to harmonize the two.” He doesn’t, for instance, attempt to map eudaimonia onto Christian flourishing or salvage the four cardinal virtues for use in the church. There’s a long tradition of Christians doing exactly this — Augustine and Aquinas both, in their different ways, tried to receive what was true in classical philosophy. But Paul doesn’t make that move here. The version of Stoicism his congregation has absorbed is not, in his judgment, a partial truth waiting to be completed. It’s a rival story.

What he does instead is a move theologians call out-narrating. The term comes from John Milbank, taken up by Christopher Watkin in Biblical Critical Theory, and it’s the move Augustine makes in City of God when he tells the story of Rome’s rise inside the Christian story rather than against it. Watkin defines it like this:

Out-narrating is not about telling the better story in the sense of being the most gripping or necessarily satisfying: it is about telling the bigger story, the story within which all stories find their place, like Augustine's City of God that "attempts to situate all of human history within a Christian reading of the Bible" and "includes…and explains" the earthly city.¹¹

That’s what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 1-4.

The Stoic story says: there is a wise man who has mastered himself, who is rich and strong and a king, who owns all things, who is φρόνιμος and ἰσχυρός. He is the goal of human existence. Climb toward him.

Paul’s response is not, “No, you’ve got the wise man wrong.” His response is, “There is a wise man — and he was crucified.”

The crucified Messiah is the negation of the Stoic sage at every coordinate. The sage is master of himself; the Messiah is delivered into the hands of his enemies. The sage is rich; the Messiah has nowhere to lay his head. The sage is a king; the Messiah is mocked as one. The sage owns all things by virtue of his interior virtue; the Messiah forfeits his clothing to soldiers casting lots. The sage is strong; the Messiah is described, in the same letter, as “the weakness of God.” The sage commands his passions; the Messiah weeps in Gethsemane and asks for the cup to pass.

You cannot put the Stoic sage and the crucified Messiah on the same shelf. They are not two species of the same genus. They are opposite answers to the question of what a redeemed human being looks like.

And then Paul does something even sharper. He doesn’t just insist on the crucified Messiah as the true σοφός. He insists that the cross itself, the very moment of greatest weakness, is “the wisdom of God” and “the power of God.” The thing that on the Stoic accounting is the most catastrophic failure of self-mastery imaginable — public torture, judicial humiliation, surrender of agency, dependence on God for vindication — is what Paul calls divine wisdom.

That’s not a tweak to the Stoic frame. That’s an out-narration. The Stoic story can’t accommodate it. Stoicism requires the wise man to maintain inner sovereignty. A wise man who hands himself over to crucifixion is, in Stoic terms, not a wise man at all. Paul is not asking the Corinthians to refine their Stoicism. He is asking them to abandon it for a story that the Stoic framework cannot contain.

The Cross as Garbage

This is where I want to pause on something we’ve all but lost the ability to feel.

Glen Scrivener writes:

To us, the cross has become a sacred symbol and, as such, embodies the very opposite of its ancient meaning. Even if we're not religious ourselves, we might understand the cross to be a symbol of redemption, salvation, God's presence even among the lowly, and God's peace even amid our pain. In the ancient world it meant the reverse. It symbolized degradation, worthlessness, unremitting torture and unredeemed love…. Those crucified were garbage.¹²

That last sentence is the one to feel. Those crucified were garbage. In the Roman world the cross wasn’t a metaphor for triumph through suffering. It wasn’t even a metaphor for anything. It was a tool of imperial degradation, used specifically to remind subject populations what happened to anyone who stepped out of line. To die on a cross was to be erased from the human story, and erased deliberately, and erased publicly, and erased slowly.

To suggest, as Paul did, that the power of God could be located on a Roman gibbet was unhinged in the same way that suggesting divine wisdom could be located in a sewage trench would have been unhinged. The Stoic mind couldn’t rotate to it. It was on a different axis entirely.

Now turn around and look at your culture. The cross is a brand. It’s printed on T-shirts and stamped on rosaries; it hangs from earlobes; it crowns church steeples that are mostly architectural ornament; it appears in tattoo flash and album covers; it has been so thoroughly absorbed into the visual vocabulary of the West that even non-Christians find it innocuous, even pretty. Whatever else it has become, the cross has not been “garbage” in any culture’s general imagination for fifteen hundred years.

That’s not necessarily wrong. It is, in a sense, the gospel’s success. The thing that was unspeakable has become unremarkable. But it makes Paul’s argument almost impossible for us to hear at full volume. He’s saying that the worst thing that could happen to you is the place where God shows up. Not “God redeems suffering” in the abstract. Not “God uses our trials to make us better people.” He’s saying the actual instrument of imperial degradation is the place where divine wisdom is exhibited. The garbage is the throne.

The Corinthians couldn’t hear it, because their imagination had been disciplined by Stoic categories. They were reaching for a wise man who wouldn’t suffer. We can’t fully hear it, because our imagination has been domesticated by fifteen centuries of Christian iconography. We’re reaching for a cross that doesn’t smell of blood.

But the gospel is the same gospel. And the rival story is, at this point in 2026, very much the same rival story.

Liturgical Capture

The philosopher James K. A. Smith has a useful term for what was happening at Corinth. He calls it liturgical capture — the process by which a community's worship and imagination get shaped by the liturgies of the surrounding culture rather than the liturgies of the kingdom of God.¹³The Corinthian church wasn't deliberately Stoic. They didn't sit down one day and decide to swap out the gospel for De Officiis. They had simply absorbed Stoic categories so thoroughly through the educational and social structures of their city that, by the time they showed up to worship the crucified Lord, they couldn't help but read his story through the lens of the sage they'd grown up admiring. The wisdom they were importing into the church was the wisdom of the air they breathed.

The reason I’m describing this so carefully is that the same dynamic is, I think, in operation right now. The American Christian who reads The Daily Stoic in the morning and drives to a megachurch on Sunday is not, strictly speaking, deliberately syncretizing two religions. He’s doing what comes naturally in a culture that has made Stoicism cool again — letting the available philosophical apparatus help him make sense of his life. The trouble is that some of that apparatus has been picked up so thoroughly that it’s distorting the gospel in his hands without his noticing.

Some symptoms of liturgical capture by neo-Stoicism in contemporary American Christianity:

A theology of personal optimization, in which the goal of the Christian life is increasingly framed as becoming the best version of yourself. (The Stoic sage looms behind that phrase. Sanctification looks oddly like life-coaching.)

A discomfort with weakness in Christian leaders. Dynamic, decisive, mastered, unflappable, surrounded by competence — the qualities we increasingly demand of pastors are the qualities of a Stoic sage, not a fisherman from Galilee or a tentmaker who described himself as appearing “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Cor 2:3).

An ethic of self-sufficiency that quietly dishonors the body of Christ. We are taught — in books, in podcasts, in the men’s group at church — to be the kind of person who doesn’t need anyone. To master our reactions. To be unmoved. The Apostle Paul never said any of this. He talked openly about being burdened beyond his strength and despairing of life itself, and he asked the church to pray for him as a man whose strength was made perfect in weakness.

A view of the world in which the Christian’s job is to rise above circumstances and remain interiorly calm. Compare this to the Apostle Paul, who wept publicly in Acts 20, who was angry to the point of trembling at the Galatians, who described himself as being “afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within” (2 Cor 7:5). The Stoic sage has mastered his emotions. The Apostle has not. What he has is hope, and he has it in something outside himself.

You can examine your own bookshelf, your own preferred podcasts, your own small-group conversations and ask: how much of this is gospel-shaped, and how much of it is Stoic-shaped wearing gospel clothes?

This isn’t an attack on anyone in particular. It’s an attempt to see clearly. We have inherited a powerful, sophisticated, ancient pagan philosophy that flatters us in particular ways — by promising us mastery and self-sufficiency and the dignity of the achieved sage — and the church in our age has, by and large, adopted it without realizing what we’ve signed for.

Buying the More Enduring Story

There’s a line attributed to St. Columba of Iona, the sixth-century missionary to Scotland, that I keep returning to:

Since all the world is but a story, it were well for thee to buy the more enduring story, rather than the story that is less enduring.¹⁴

The choice the Corinthians faced is the choice we face. Stoicism, ancient or modern, is a story. It’s a coherent, beautiful, austere, in many ways admirable story. But it’s a smaller story than the one in which the crucified Lord exhibits the wisdom and the power of God. The Stoic story can’t include the cross, except as failure. The gospel includes the Stoic story — receiving what’s true in it, naming what’s incomplete, seeing where it ends — and goes further.

You can be the wise man, mastering yourself with stoic resolve, climbing toward the Phoenix-rare sage. Or you can be in Christ — who is to us, in Paul’s own summary, “wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor 1:30). One of those stories ends with you, the achieved hero of your own narrative, surveying what you have made of yourself. The other ends with you, raised in a body you didn’t earn, in a city you didn’t build, made glorious by a glory that was never yours to start.

Buy the more enduring story.

It is not a more flattering one. It is just truer.

1. Terence Paige, "Stoicism, ἐλυθερία and Community at Corinth," in Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church, ed. Edward Adams and David G. Horrell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 210.

2. Timothy A. Brookins, "The Wise Corinthians: Their Stoic Education and Outlook," JTS 62:1 (2011): 58.

3. Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 62.

4. Plutarch, De tranquillitate animi 472A (Helmbold, LCL).

5. Cicero, De finibus 3.75 (Rackham, LCL).

6. SVF 1.216 (author's translation).

7. Plutarch, De tranquillitate animi 472A.

8. Plutarch, Stoicos absurdiora poetis dicere 1058C (Cherniss, LCL).

9. Cicero, De finibus 3.75.

10. Paige, "Stoicism," 215.

11. Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2022), 22. Watkin's quotations are from James Wetzel, Augustine's City of God: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5; and Etienne Gilson, The Metamorphoses of the City of God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 31.

12. Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality (Charlotte, NC: The Good Book Company, 2022), 26.

13. James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 179.

14. St. Columba (Colum Cille), The Judgement of Saint Colum Cille, quoted in Robin Gwyndaf, "A Welsh Lake Legend and the Famous Physicians of Myddfai," Béaloideas 60/61 (1992): 245.