Yesterday I attended the funeral of a high school friend. It required me to return to my home town in the Central Valley of California. When I received the message from my brother that this friend had passed, I was in flight to Copenhagen at the end of an extended vacation. It was a punch in the gut not only because he was only two years older than me. It was emotionally affecting because at that moment I realized that he was the first schoolmate that I can truly recall looking up to and wanting to imitate. The funeral was a Catholic ceremony attended by many hundreds of people. The small church couldn’t hold all of us and we spilled out in the the courtyard and the parking lot struggling to hear the words spoken over an inadequate sound system — the busy highway in front of the church didn’t help either.

The theme of the extended eulogy that was this ceremony was the depth and breadth of impact that he had on the many people in his life. As Seneca said of Socrates, he impacted more people through his conduct than his words. This friend was that type of person. What I admired and wanted to imitate was how he comported himself particularly as an athlete. His wife’s remarks emphasized his kindness and calmness in all situations, especially when she was battling cancer and later when he had to battle cancer and finally the heart condition that ended his life. Students and athletes that he coached would say the same things about his kindness and compassion. He was in many ways a perfect person to help teenage kids through the struggles of small town life.

Reflecting on yesterday’s ceremony, I find myself thinking about Christianity and its ability to bring together a community of people to celebrate the passing of a spiritually influential member of that community. The question that spontaneously arrived during the ceremony was whether or not I would consider myself to be a Christian. This is a strange question for me to ponder at this stage of life. I certainly don’t believe in the doctrine encoded in the Nicene Creed. And I certainly don’t believe in the vision of heaven (and by extension hell) that was on offer during the ceremony. I don’t believe that God “called him home” because “his soul was pleasing to God.” That all seems rather silly to me. Yet, the spontaneous answer was not, as it easily would have been only a few months ago, a hard no. In my pausing at the hard no, there was a feeling of to wanting the answer now to be a yes, but this would need to be on very different terms than what Christianity has offered us as the relationship of our souls to other souls.

My hovering between no and yes comes from reading Nietzsche as well as William James. The latter, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, restored to me the possibility of thinking about religion without the kind of condescension I once shared with Dawkins, Harris and other Modern Atheists. If I look at Christianity as a set of spiritual practices that can orient oneself to forces larger than us (what James called “the divine”) and especially to eternity, I find myself acknowledging something important and lasting in Christianity. I find myself wanting to understand what is the baby and what is the bathwater of Christianity. In some ways, I want to be able to say yes to the question of “am I a Christian?” The yes, however, would have to come with a lot of caveats and clarifications about what I think Christianity can be.

As a spontaneous question without an automatic no, some change is occurring for me that I need to be open to and to engage. The answer may not ever arrive at yes, but the journey is worth the effort. In even beginning to undertake answering this question, I find myself going back to trying to understand how Christianity absorbed and transformed the philosophical practices that came before it and lived alongside it in the second, third and fourth centuries. To be clear, my recent reading and appreciation for those practices grant the legitimacy to the question itself. Maybe it is from all that reading that the question arrived. In other words, I can credibly entertain the question of whether or not I consider myself a Christian because Christianity owes a deep debt to the secular philosophical practices of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Stoicism, all of whom have become important to me. Thus the answer to my question hinges, in part, on understanding the value, if any, that Christianity added to these sources. I think that this is the spiritual journey that I am now undertaking as I more fully engage in new lines of thinking traced by authors with a more nuanced approach to religion and philosophy. William James, Henri Bergson, and Pierre Hadot are the (white male) giants, but equally other thinkers (like Simone Kotva and Simone Weil) will likely be important as I go down this road.

In some ways Nietzsche has become a pivotal figure for me in my self-imposed will to answer the question of “am I a Christian?” It is easy to read Nietzsche as issuing forth a withering critique of Christianity. I don’t think that is the right reading, and maybe the question arrives because I want to defend a nuanced reading of Nietzsche on Christianity. It is far too one-sided for anyone with an appreciation of his depth and complexity of thought. Nietzsche’s polemic on the ascetic ideal comes with a depth of respect for what Christianity has accomplished in being able to democratize the soul and grant everyone the power of self-transformation. Everyone can now see him or herself as having a soul worth saving whatever that saving could and would mean. While certainly Stoicism and other ancient schools of philosophical practice provided important antecedents to Christianity, none of them attained the scale that Christianity has managed. Something important happened with Christianity, and a nuanced reading of Nietzsche allows us to understand the good and the bad of what was made possible by its triumph, at least in the Western world:

But all this notwithstanding — man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the “sense-less” — he could now will something: no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. (GM 3.28)

This question of “the will” became the pivotal point around which Christianity built so much of its doctrine and its spiritual practices. Nonetheless, it is incomplete and disingenuous to isolate our focus on the will itself as the Christian legacy. Of course it existed well before Christianity. Stoicism is all about how one manages their will, particularly in relationship to “virtue” and patheia. With Nietzsche we must see the absorption of the will by Christianity within a larger constellation of concepts that drive its spiritual practices. Untangling this is a long-term endeavor, so I must start slowly and cautiously with the understanding that many others have dealt with this with far more facility than I am able to at this moment.

One of the ways that Christianity absorbed and modified ancient philosophy was to introduce grace as a key part of the self. This is well understood. Specifically, if an ancient philosophy such as Stoicism could see the self as the product of one’s effort to make oneself into a virtuous human being, Christianity modified this by saying, “Sure, the effort to transform yourself into a virtuous human being is necessary, but it is insufficient for Salvation.” Grace — the independent action of God granting his mercy to save you from eternal damnation — was equally necessary. While virtue may be up to you, Salvation most certainly is not. Augustine is certainly our Christian signpost here.

What Christianity did with “the will” was to make it necessary but not sufficient. Its necessity was mostly about making one desire Salvation and to be able to recognize grace if it ever shows up. Christian spiritual practices that focus on the will are best understood as preparatory efforts to make one receptive and open to God’s grace entering into one’s soul as the final piece of the puzzle of Salvation. I think that Simone Kotva is right (though I’m certainly not qualified to pass judgment on her work) when she says that our Western philosophical lineage has privileged effort over grace, passivity and openness. We valorize the heroic deeds that require intense and effective effort while denigrating passivity and more humble dispositions to the world and to others. Her purpose in making this argument is not to restore or elevate passivity as an equal player alongside effort, but it is to show how both work together to create a self that is always relational — always in dialog, confrontation, collaboration, collusion and many other conceivable relationships with not only other human souls but with the entire ecology in which we live. This is where I can begin to envision a positive answer to the question of “am I a Christian?”

I struggle and stop short, however, with finding how this relational model of the self shows up in Christianity. Without doubt, Christianity’s absorption of ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism, placed a greater intensity of spiritual practice on receptivity, passivity and openness as fundamental to a properly functioning soul. (As should be clear from other meditations, I see openness and receptivity as critical to Stoic spiritual practices.) But the centrality of the Christian doctrine of Salvation short-circuits a more fully relational model of the soul.

Specifically, the spiritual practices that are used to create the Christian soul have had a more vertical orientation than a horizontal one. While the effort of the will is necessary but not sufficient, grace disconnects one from others and makes the soul a transactional element between the self and God alone. Relationships with others tend to be one dimensional as the focus of Salvation hinges on a relationship between God and an atomized soul whose Salvation depends on reconnecting with God. In Augustine’s Confessions, the primary relationship that holds together the narrative is between himself and God. Other important figures in the narrative either support this relationship (Ambrose, Monica) or they hinder it (Manichee, his companions in the stealing of the pair) or they are themselves on a spiritual journey of their own (his friend Alypius).

The debt owed to neoplatonism is clear. Salvation is a vertical orientation of the self to God as Plotinus’ “the One.” Horizontal relationships with your fellow human beings and your environment are secondary and subordinated to the vertical. I saw this in yesterday’s funeral. My friend was clearly positioned as a “friend of God” (to use Peter Brown’s phrase). His relationship to God and belief in Jesus as the Christ was held to be responsible for his spiritual influence over the others in the community. The vertical, in other words, determined and empowered the horizontal. Or, put differently, his relational impact on others was a byproduct of his verticalized belief in the Christian doctrine. I saw it as quite the reverse. I wanted to see the horizontal as primary where the vertical becomes a context for spiritual practices that serve and empower the horizontal. Put with more nuance, I want to see (through a Heraclitean lens) the horizontal and vertical in collusion with each other as equal partners such that neither is primary but rather they are self-reinforcing.

In order for me to say yes to the question I started with, I’m going to need to find a way to see Christian spiritual practices as a relational mixing of the vertical and horizontal rather than as the primacy of the vertical. Stoicism has a great deal of promise, but only gets part of the way there because of its tendency to atomize the self. This tendency to atomize the individual cuts off a full appreciation of the relational model of the soul that is contained within this school of philosophical practice. I would like to spend some additional time thinking about ways of imagining the soul as relational rather than attaining its purification through atomization and verticalization. What happens if we give full weight to the horizontal such that we take seriously the idea that we can influence each other’s souls in profound ways? Rather than privileging a vertical model of Salvation or an atomizing model of an “art of living” or “care of the self,” what would emerge from a practical understanding of the soul that sees our souls as not originally and essentially our own? What if, as Nietzsche certainly implied, we are not born with souls, but they are created for us as the community in which we are raised passes on its forms of self-reflection and how we pay attention to ourselves and the others (including non-human others) we live with? Imagine being raised in a monastery in the Egyptian desert in the third century. Certainly that would yield a different kind of soul than if the same person were raised in other circumstances. The suggestion here is that the kind of souls we gain are dependent on the way other souls pass on their influences and practices to us. So, our souls are not originally our own but become so through how we live with ourselves and others.

Stoicism is a promising line of thought here, especially if we take seriously the Stoic proposition that our souls (animus, “commanding faculty”) are deeply interwoven with the rest of the substance of the cosmos, which includes being interwoven with other souls? What else could a priest mean when he acknowledges the impact that my friend had on the souls of the people he taught, coached and with whom he shared his life? Isn’t he implicitly telling us that our souls are not completely atomized and that they must be understood as stretching out horizontally to become interwoven with the others we influence and by whom we are influenced? Stoicism would allow me to take this horizontal aspect much further to include a fuller exploration of the soul’s relationship to nature seen not in a Romantic sense but in the ancient philosophical sense of “everything that there is.” (Seneca’s Natural Questions being crucial here).

By taking this line of thinking seriously, might we find a completely different way to think about what it means to be a human with a soul? Might we find a different way to think about how our souls are fluid and interconnected with other souls? Might we find a different way to understand our relationship to the ecosystems in which we live including non-human animals and other non-animal lives?