Contempt of Death
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
contempt of death · despise death · the fear of death
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
The Stoic doctrine that fear of death is irrational and must be overcome to live and die well.
the fear of death, the pain of the body, the interruption of pleasures.
Equally foolish is the man who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years hence.
But did you not think that you would one day come to that toward which you were always going?
Apologeticum
The praised philosophical virtue of disregarding death, permitted to pagans for worldly causes but denied to Christians suffering for God.
to which neither desperate presumption nor desperate persuasion is imputed in the contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity;
Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy could offer, having answered, "Contempt of death," and being exposed unmoved to the tyrant's scourges, sealed his sentence to the death.