Since February 2020, I’ve been going to (mostly) bi-weekly counseling appointments. It’s been a tremendously helpful experience—one that I continue to this day and that I would praise and commend to anyone willing to listen and similarly knowing their need. But there have been a number of doubts—although doubts is too strong a word, perhaps instead motivated questions?—that I’ve had along the way about the process. “Is this just a uniquely modern need, in this time of friendlessness and consumerism, that I would pay to have a friend and confidant?” “Why is this a spiritual thing?,” I ask, since I’ve been going to a Christian counselor, “why is it that I’ve burned through pastors in the past trying to have these kinds of conversations, when I still feel like this should be something they’re doing to earn their paychecks, not something I need to spend thousands of dollars on?” And, perhaps less often, especially as of late, “I know you’re smart, counselor, but what do you know that the smart people I’ve read don’t?”
It’s that last question that I’ve suddenly come face to face with anew.
The last couple years have marked, for me, a first encounter with popular psychology. I don’t mean necessarily pop-psychology—I’ve not been reading Cosmo or anything. But in the circles I’ve run with the last few years, there have been lots of discussions of the Enneagram, lots of discussions of Diane Langberg and John Eldridge and Chuck DeGroat, lots of trauma informed this, and trauma informed that. I don’t mean to denigrate any of those things or people. Lord knows that these last few years have been a period where their teachings and their concepts have led to healing and restoration for me which is real and, I hope, lasting. But they’re not my forte, and as someone who was at least philosophy and classics major adjacent, it left me wondering where everything I’d learned and loved to learn fit in.
Two things, two completely unconnected and seemingly random things, started to answer that question for me—although not at all when I expected or was even looking for answers to the question. First, the ITV show of a couple years ago, Victoria, starring the lovely Jenna Coleman. During the first years of Victoria’s reign, Victoria is counseled by Lord Melbourne, PM and erstwhile Private Secretary. While the actual history may be slightly different from what was portrayed, one thing stuck out and was confirmed to have a tinge of veracity: Melbourne was ever eager to leave politics and return to Brocket Hall to write his commentary on John Chrysostom. As the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica puts it, “Not believing that the world could be bettered through politics, he was always more interested in literature and theology.” What a man. The Victorians were certainly more aware of Cincinnatus than we, but still, that got me thinking of the kind of man who is engaged in public life but wistfully desiring the private life of a scholar–and the perennial exemplar of virtue that such a man is.
The other thing came about as a result of my pending reentry into Classical/Koine Greek. Last night, I was reading a bit of Plutarch’s parallel life of Demosthenes, which didn’t speak to me in any particular way, except that I remembered how much I love the classics—the way the authors write, the mastery of life they maintain without having or needing modern certainty or post-modern deconstruction, the simultaneous pride and piety which they show. It led me to wanting to read Plutarch’s Moralia, which I do not own, but when reading some of the essays, I thought of Seneca, pulled my Oxford Collected Works of Seneca off my shelf, and read his On Tranquility.
I saw there a search for that same thing I’d been seeking in counseling: a tranquil mind.
It just so happened that a few hours later, I’d listen to Yale’s Center for Faith and Culture’s podcast For the Life of the World, where they’d be talking about boredom, they’d quote Seneca (along with Kierkegaard and others), and I suddenly knew—the philosophers have been talking about what I’ve been experiencing or seeking to experience in counseling. It’s not all philosophers—not the philosophers obsessed with ontology or metaphysics or epistemology, at least not in the modern discussions which kill the soul—that have these discussions. But for any philosopher concerned with moral philosophy, for any philosopher or poet who’s been up against it in life—for the Platos, the Senecas, the Boetheiuses, the Dantes, the Burkes, all of these know philosophy as therapy because for them philosophy was therapy. Because for them, philosophy was all they had.
We and I have more. We should be thankful that we do, and so much has been learned through empirical science and psychology in the last two hundred years. But as in all things, we must not leave behind what we once knew for what we’ve lately learned. We knew before, and we must remember–for the things which men knew before artifice are more durable and more sure. And so, my hope is that this will be the first post of many that explores a theme I know I love dearly—and which I hope will help me and others too—philosophy as therapy.
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