As the most humane of the Stoic writers, Seneca frequently mentions the importance of love, affection, and gratitude. But in Seneca’s writings, we learn the most about the importance of love through how he speaks about others in his life with kindness and affection. As the classical scholar Anna Lydia Motto noted, “Seneca learned much about love, kindness, and generosity from members of his own family.” In his writings, “one detects a deep understanding of the true feeling of love in its different aspects—love for one’s family, for one’s friends, for one’s spouse, for one’s fellow men, for one’s country.”2
We all can relate to love as an emotion, but the Roman Stoics stressed a specific kind of love, philostorgia. This term could be translated as “family love” or “human affection.” This is the kind of love the Stoics applied to humanity as a whole, which is also a form of philanthropy or love for all mankind. Marcus Aurelius mentions this kind of love repeatedly. As he reminds himself often, we are born to love others and humanity itself. “Love those people with whom destiny has surrounded you,” he wrote, “but love them truly.”3
Marcus also wrote to express his gratitude to his various teachers. But in a comment Marcus made about one teacher, the philosopher Sextus, he seemed to sum up the entire Stoic attitude toward love and the emotions. Marcus tells us Sextus never showed the slightest sign of anger or any other negative emotion. Instead, “he was totally free of passion (pathos) and full of human affection.”4 This, indeed, is the Stoic ideaclass="underline" to be full of love for others and totally free of violent, negative emotions.
Finally, the Stoics felt that a person should love freely and with generosity, without expecting something in return. In the words of philosopher William O. Stephens, “One can love another without making that love conditional upon its always, or ever, being reciprocated. This is the conviction that love is to be given freely in pure joy with no admixture of sorrow.”5
STOIC GRATITUDE, ANCIENT AND MODERN
Another Stoic emotion that has been almost entirely overlooked is the natural feeling of gratitude. Gratitude was especially important in Roman culture, and Seneca and the other Roman Stoics stressed the importance of gratitude consistently. Cicero said that “gratitude is not only the greatest virtue, it is the mother of all the rest.”6 Seneca, for his part, wrote that “among our many and great vices, ingratitude is the most common.”7 Seneca wrote a lengthy book, On Benefits, which has been called “the first (and, for many centuries, the only) great treatise on gratitude in Western thought.”8 In part, this writing is about the art of giving, appreciating, and returning “benefits” or “favors.”
In Seneca’s time and before, wealthy Roman patrons had “clients” who would greet them in the morning for benefits or favors—financial, social, or political. They would then walk together through the Forum in Rome. The benefits would often be paid back or returned in some way, so there was an entire social code and cycle that involved giving, receiving with thanks, and returning benefits.9 This was a kind of glue that held society together, especially among the elite citizens of Rome, but it was not the primary focus of Seneca’s writings on gratitude. In fact, in the entire philosophy of gratitude, there was no one who was “as revolutionary and radical as Seneca.” That is because, as philosopher Ashraf Rushdy explains, Seneca transformed the way the entire topic of gratitude would be considered by later thinkers. As Rushdy emphasizes, Seneca discussed all the kinds of gratitude that would occupy the minds of thinkers following him, including sacred gratitude, cosmic gratitude, secular gratitude, personal gratitude, and more.10
As we will see, there are three main types of gratitude, which people have felt for thousands of years. Yet strangely, despite the crucial importance of gratitude in Roman Stoicism, the topic of gratitude in Stoicism has been almost totally ignored.11
Love and gratitude go together because they both involve appreciation. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to love someone without appreciating him or her. Gratitude, too, is a form of appreciation. The Stoic writer Donald Robertson once gave a talk on “Stoicism and Love,” in which he suggested, “It is possible to see Stoicism fundamentally as a philosophy of love.”12 Similarly, we might say, “Appreciation and gratitude frame how a Stoic sees the world.” Even though we, and everyone around us, are mortal beings, a Stoic can still relate to them with love, appreciation, and gratitude.13 While there is nothing mysterious about that, there is another dimension of Stoic gratitude that some readers may find puzzling at first. This “different kind of gratitude” has been called “cosmic” or “nonpersonal” gratitude, and by many other names, because it’s not directed toward a specific person.14
WHEN I STARTED EXPERIMENTING with Stoic philosophical exercises or meditations, I was surprised to discover that they resulted in feelings of gratitude and appreciation, and have noted some of these instances earlier in this book. For example, when I practiced the “premeditation of future adversity” and imagined my house being destroyed by fire or by an earthquake (chapter 6), it made me feel grateful, once again, for a home that I had become bored with through familiarity. Marcus Aurelius even mentioned this kind of gratitude as a goal of Stoic practice. Rather than seeking out something new, he explained how we could experience happiness by appreciating the things we already have. As he reminded himself, “Don’t dream of what you don’t already possess. Instead, think about the great blessings you do have, for which you feel grateful—and remind yourself of how much they’d be missed if they weren’t already yours.”15
My next experience of gratitude came while practicing memento mori: the Stoic meditation of remembering my own death and the fact that my loved ones are mortal too (chapter 11). Walking down the street with my small son during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, both wearing facemasks, feeling the warmth of his hand in my own, I remembered that we are both mortal, and at some point we will be separated for good. But that made me feel a profound sense of gratitude—not just for that very moment of being alive with him, but for whatever remaining time we will have together in the future. By reflecting on our mortality, not only do we treasure life more deeply: it can greatly intensify our feeling of being alive in the present moment.
Another example of Stoic gratitude involved replacing the grief I felt from losing my father with gratitude. I hadn’t started reading Seneca yet, but in a natural process over time, my grief evaporated and was replaced by happy memories. I came to feel grateful for the good times we spent together (chapter 12). Seneca recommends this practice to help people overcome grief. In retrospect, if I had consciously focused on gratitude for his life, rather than just letting time do its work, the pain would likely have diminished more quickly.