The American Freedom Network

What We Do In Life Echoes in Eternity, part three

October 20, 2009 – 6:05 pm

Third and last in a series… Part I | Part II

STOCKDALE:  Epictetus faced no comparable crisis to that which either Seneca or Marcus Aurelius did.  His crippled servitude was a chronic, not an acute, condition which he not only learned to live with, but within the confines of which found peace and freedom. His philosophy was put to the test by another man, a disciple separated from him by nineteen centuries.

James Bond Stockdale was 38 years old and a veteran of almost 20 years’ Naval service when he discovered the Stoic philosophy, that had so appealed to the soldierly Roman mind. As preparation for a future Pentagon job, the Navy sent Commander Stockdale, an aviator with carrier squadrons through most of his career, to Stanford University for graduate education in international relations.  Near the end of his time there, he signed up for a course called, The Problem of Good and Evil, taught by a philosophy professor named Phillip Rheinlander.

At the end of the two-semester course covering Job, Camus, Lebintiz, Descartes, Hume and others, Cdr. Stockdale took his farewell of the man who had become his mentor.  As they parted, Dr. Rheinlander took down from a high shelf in his office a worn copy of Epictetus and gave it to his student, saying, “Here is a book that a man in your profession should own.  Keep it and read it from time to time.”

Cdr. Stockdale returned to carriers and leading pilots in the air.  Reading the book, first out of reverence for the giver, later out of conviction of the rightness of its precepts, he found his perspective changing under the impact of epigrams like these:

Men are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them,

and,

Do not be concerned with things that are beyond your power. (14.)

The time came when these principles would be tried in the crucible of war.  Physical courage has been displayed often enough that, while it should be commended, it should also be expected.  Such can be seen every weekend of the football season by players who do their jobs, knowing that they will be hit, and often hurt, in doing so.  The vulgar can show such courage, like Mark Antony, without being ennobled by it.  Cdr. Stockdale was called upon to show that moral courage which Stoicism requires of its adherents.

Leading a mission over North Viet Nam in August of 1965, Cdr. Stockdale’s plane was hit and its pilot forced to bail out.  Landing in an enemy village, he suffered a broken leg and was beaten savagely before soldiers arrived to capture him.  As he floated downward, he told himself two things: ‘It will be five years before I go home, and, I’m entering the world of Epictetus.’(15)  Lame and in bondage like his master, he had to continue the struggle against the Communists with mind and soul, while the body lay in leg irons for years at a time.  As senior prisoner in camp, Cdr. Stockdale took command. This was done by tapping messages in code on the walls, as each prisoner was isolated, some not seeing an American face for five years.

Encouraging each other in coded messages tapped out when the guards weren’t around, they lived by orders issued by Cdr. Stockdale.  These were known by the acronym BACK US: don’t Bow in public; stay off the Air; admit no Crimes; never Kiss them goodbye;  Unity over Self.  In accordance with the US Code of Conduct, they were to render no aid or comfort to the enemy, accept no parole, and continue to resist by any means necessary.  Prison is like a refining fire when the object is not to punish, but to break the human spirit.  Through the centuries, the story is pretty much the same: Boethius, Cerevantes, Solzenetsyn, Victor Frankel, Natan Sharansky, and and others, especially in the century past, filled as it was with utopian dictatorships, movements of national liberation, and other struggles for dominion or freedom, tell the same story as Stockdale, Denton, McCain and the other POWs  in the Hanoi Hilton did.

The moment of crisis for Cdr. Stockdale came when he was to be put to torture until he broke.  Every man has his breaking point; the prisoners were on orders to talk only after torture had been inflicted on them.  But on that autumn day in 1969, on the night that Ho Chi Minh died, Cdr. Stockdale knew that his captors would take nothing less than complete submission? his soul as the price of escape.  Left tied up near a bathroom, Cdr. Stockdale made his way slowly to the bathroom window, broke it, and used a shard of glass to cut open his veins. Found half?dead later in the night, his act of resistance ended the reign of terror in the camp.  He was known to be alive in captivity, and the death of so prominent a prisoner during the Paris peace talks would have been a major propaganda blow.  The ‘Cat,’ Maj. Bui, overseer of the prison, was eventually demoted for failing to break his prisoners, disrupt their chain of command, or wring from them material for propaganda purposes.  The prisoners had jailed their jailer, and their leader received the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor above and beyond the call of duty on that fateful autumn night. (16)

(Epictetus also had a 20^th Century litarary disciple:  Conrad Hensley, one of the protagonists

in Tom Wolfe’s  ”A Man For All Seasons”    [The book's title is a play on an Epicteitus quote.]

Hensley endures misfortune, wrongful imprisonment, and finds his natural stoicism reinforced when he accidentally acquires a copy of Epicteitus while behind bars.  With nothing better to do with his time, he reads the book, decides to dedicate himself to the philosophy, no matter what, and makes the biggest decision of his life based on it’s precepts.)

Cdr. Stockdale, like Seneca, found that a time may come when honor can only be satisfied by the spilling of blood – one’s own.  Like the gladiator with the toilet sponge, he used the means at hand.  Adversity shows Stoicism at its best; the rule of the philosopher?king uncovers its’ greatest failure.  No father’s love can compensate for inflicting a Commodus on a defenseless people.  The system of Zeno, as preached in Rome and practiced by our subjects, is a strong support in adversity, even though it offers no hope of eternal salvation, as the sentiments of Hercules and Oedipus in Seneca make plain.   As we enter more deeply into a world mirroring the characteristics of Hellenism, with its universalization of a national culture over much of the world at the very moment when faith in one of the tenants of that culture – the Polis – failed, in the twilight of simultaneous Western technological triumph and loss of faith, a process now five centuries old, in what made that triumph possible, Stoicism offers a tested haven for minds not infused with the spirit of divine transcendence, and in the case of one like Boethius, who also professed the Christian faith, an able support to that faith in the face of adversity.

-Lloyd A. Conway

ENDNOTES

1.) Gilbert Murray,  Five Stages of Greek Religion, pp. 87-96

2.) Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 186

3.) Tacitus, Annals of the Roman Empire, 14:52-55

4.) Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, (Nero) p. 217

5.) Lives of the Twelve Caesars, p. 234

6.) Seneca, The Phonecian Women, 5?9

7.) The Phonecian Women, 107-111

8.) Seneca, Mad Hercules, 1254-1260

9.) Mad Hercules, 1284-1286

10) Seneca, Letters, XVI

11) Finley Hooper & Matthew Schwartz, Roman Letters, p. 60

12) Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 27

13) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pp.113-128

14) James Bond Stockdale, Epictetus in Uniform, Chronicles of Culture, March,          1987 pp. 12-17

15) James Bond Stockdale, In Love and War, pp. 356-357

16) James Bond Stockdale, The Role of the Pressure Cooker, from Thoughts of  a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, pp. 21-22.