25Therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they? 27“Which of you, by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin, 29yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won’t he much more clothe you, you of little faith? 31“Therefore don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ 32For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.
Worry has a way of borrowing from tomorrow and spending it all today. This passage points to the birds and the wildflowers as quiet teachers, living without anxious calculation and still being cared for. It does not ask us to stop planning or working, only to loosen our grip on outcomes we cannot control. Today's work is enough to hold, and the rest can wait its turn.
…if you roll a cylindrical stone over a sloping, steep piece of ground, you do indeed furnish the beginning and cause of its rapid descent, yet soon it speeds onward, not because you make it do so, but because of its peculiar form and natural tendency to roll; just so the order, the law, and the inevitable quality of fate set in motion the various classes of things and the beginnings of causes, but the carrying out of our designs and thoughts, and even our actions, are regulated by each individual's own will and the characteristics of his mind.
John C. Rolfe, 1927
Chrysippus (c. 280–207 BC) was the third head of the Stoic school and its great systematiser. Ancient Stoics said that without him there would have been no Stoa. Hundreds of his books are lost, and his words survive only in quotations. This one comes from Aulus Gellius, a Roman miscellanist of the 2nd century AD, who copied it into his Attic Nights while discussing Chrysippus's views on fate.
Chrysippus faced an old puzzle: if everything has a cause, how can we be answerable for what we do? His answer is the rolling stone. Events give us the push, but the way we move afterward depends on what we are made of. We rarely choose the email, the insult or the bad news that arrives. We do shape what that push turns into, and we shape it by habit, long before the moment comes. That is a sober thought for a Friday, and also a freeing one.
PracticeToday, when something unwelcome pushes you, such as a delay, a sharp word or a change of plan, stop before you answer. Name the push ("this happened") and then your own shape ("this is how I tend to roll"). Then choose your response on purpose instead of by habit.
A seventh-century quarrel over whether Christ had one will or two ended in a mutilation. It also changed how Christians talk about human freedom.
In 662 an old monk of about eighty was led through Constantinople after a second heresy trial. His tongue was cut out, so he could no longer speak. His right hand was cut off, so he could no longer write. His name was Maximus, later called the Confessor. His offense was insisting that Christ had two wills.
The dispute began as a peace plan. By the 620s and 630s the Byzantine Empire was fighting for survival, and it was split by an older quarrel over the Council of Chalcedon, which had said Christ was fully divine and fully human. Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius looked for a formula both camps could accept. They proposed that Christ, though in two natures, acted with a single will. This is called Monothelitism, from the Greek for 'one will'. In 638 the emperor backed it with a decree called the Ecthesis. In 648 his grandson Constans II issued the Typos, which told everyone to stop arguing about it.
Maximus would not stop. His objection was that a Christ with no human will would not be fully human. If the human will was never part of the Incarnation, he argued, it was never healed either. He pointed to Gethsemane, where Jesus prays that the Father's will, not his own, be done. For Maximus that scene shows two wills, with the human one freely choosing to agree. He drafted the canons for the Lateran Council of 649, which Pope Martin I called in Rome and which condemned both imperial documents.
The empire answered with arrests, exile and, in the end, mutilation. Maximus died in exile at Tsageri in Lazica, in present-day Georgia, on 13 August 662. Within two decades the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) taught that Christ had two wills, and it rejected Monothelitism. The emperors had wanted unity. Maximus had argued that a unity bought by trimming Christ's humanity cost too much.
RememberMaximus was mutilated for arguing that if Christ lacked a human will, humanity's own will was left out of salvation, and the church later adopted his position.
Read nextAndrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor