Awhile back I posted a review of one of Michel Foucault’s lectures on what he calls “pastoral power.” I meant to post again from his lectures, but for a variety of reasons I got off track. This post takes back up that line of thought. Here I review Foucault’s discussion of the distinction between Christian and Greek kinds of discipleship and obedience in the ancient world.
Foucault says that Christian pastorate has organized “something completely different” and foreign to the Greek practice. It is the “insistence on ‘pure obedience.’” This “complete subordination” is a relationship of submission. This is the submission of one individual to another. As Foucault put it, “the fundamental principle that Christian obedience is not obedience to a law, a principle, or any rational element whatsoever, but subordination to someone because he is someone.” “One obeys in order to be obedient, in order to arrive at a state of obedience,” or what is called humility and the relinquishing of self will and ego.
In contrast, in Greek obedience “there is always an objective—health, virtue, the truth—and an end, that is to say, there will be a point when this relationship of obedience is suspended and even turned around.” One submits oneself to a Greek philosophy teacher “in order to succeed in becoming master of oneself at a certain moment…to reverse this relationship of obedience and to become one’s own master.” Being a Greek disciple to a Stoic philosopher is a means of eliminating “from oneself all those impulses, forces, and storms of which one is not a master.” Discipleship is a way to “become a master through renunciation” of one’s uncontrolled passions.
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