What the Stoics Said About Grief

By Gio White·How sources are checked

This is the subject on which Stoicism is least reliable, and it seems better to say so at the start than to arrange the quotations so the problem does not show.

The tradition contains genuinely useful things about loss. It also contains passages that are cold, a couple that are close to cruel, and an internal disagreement its own authors never resolved. Anyone who tells you the Stoics had grief solved is selling something.

What they do not say

They do not say do not grieve.

This needs saying because the popular version of Stoicism implies it, and because someone in the first weeks of a loss may go looking and come away believing that their grief is a philosophical failure. It is not, and no major Stoic says it is.

Seneca lost his friend Serenus and wrote to Lucilius that his tears fell against his will. He does not present this as a lapse to be corrected. He says explicitly that a wise man who does not grieve is being asked for a hardness beyond human, that we should let tears flow and not command them.

Epictetus, the strictest of the three, tells his students that when someone is grieving you should be willing to groan with them outwardly, and only cautions against groaning inwardly — against catching the judgment underneath. The outward sympathy is instructed, not permitted.

What they do say

That the loss was always going to happen, and knowing that in advance changes it. Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia, written to a woman three years into mourning her son, argues that what wounds most is the part we did not admit was possible. Everything given to us is given on the condition that it will be taken. This is premeditatio malorum at its most demanding, and it is genuinely useful before a loss and largely useless during one. Seneca knew that; his consolations are written to people already grieving, and he mostly leads with other things.

That the thing was borrowed. Epictetus, Enchiridion 11:

Never say of anything, I have lost it, but say, I have given it back.

That is either the most helpful sentence in the literature or the most infuriating, and which one it is seems to depend entirely on how long it has been. Many people find it lands years later and not before.

That grief is proportionate to having had something. Seneca puts it to Marcia: you have lost a son, but consider what you had, and that the alternative to this pain was never having had him. He does not offer this as consolation exactly. He offers it as an accounting.

That you are not being singled out. The Consolation to Helvia, written to his own mother during his exile, does the work of placing a private loss inside the ordinary run of things, which the view from above also does, and which is a comfort to some people and an insult to others.

The passages that read badly

Honesty requires naming these rather than quietly omitting them.

Enchiridion 3 instructs that when you kiss your child you should remind yourself that they are mortal, so that if they die you are not disturbed. Read cold, that is monstrous. Read in context, Epictetus is describing a practice for holding what you love without the false belief that you own it permanently, and he is not proposing that you love the child less. But the sentence as written has done real damage to how this philosophy is received, and it deserves a caveat rather than a defense.

Seneca’s Letter 99, to a man who lost a young son, is worse. It is severe, it hectors, and it tells a bereaved father his tears are excessive. Compare it with Letter 63, where Seneca describes his own grief for Serenus as having gone badly and admits he was overcome. The same author, on the same subject, is patient with himself and impatient with a stranger.

That inconsistency is not something to explain away. It is what happens when a doctrine that makes sense in the study meets a loss, including for the people who wrote it.

What is actually worth using

Not the arguments. Nobody has ever been argued out of grief, and the Stoics who tried were at their least persuasive.

The permission. Grieve. It is not a failure of practice, and the founding texts say so more clearly than their reputation suggests.

The distinction between the loss and the story about it. The Stoic move that transfers cleanly is separating the grief itself from the additional suffering built on top of it: that this should not have happened, that it was unfair, that you should have prevented it. The first is grief. The second is a running argument with reality, and it is the part that can eventually be put down. That is the dichotomy of control applied at the hardest possible moment.

The eventual return to duty. Marcus, who buried most of his children, does not write about grief much. What he writes about is getting up and doing the day’s work. For some people, at some stage, that is the most useful thing available.

If you are in it now

Read Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia, and skip Letter 99. Expect some of it to be wrong for you. Ancient philosophy is not a substitute for people, and a tradition that says we were made for one another would not want it used as one.

What they do not say

What they do say

The passages that read badly

What is actually worth using

If you are in it now

Further reading