You are sitting beneath the white hot studio lights. The Grand Inquisitor, Alex Trebek, has moved to the bonus round intoning: "the difference between Christian detachment and Stoicism". The question: "What is Christ?"
I looked off Steven Riddle's paper for this one; he suggested something along those lines in a cool blog just discovered. Steve describes detachment as a means to the end of a closer relationship with Christ, not an ends in itself or a means towards a self-generated peace as with Stoicism. (Bishop Sheen, by the way, once wrote that his difficulties with chastity were most pronounced when he was least close to Christ.)
Sorrow for sins has to be similarly viewed with respect to Christ. The order of sorrow ought be to 1) God, 2) others 3) ourselves. Legalism, the brother of stoicism, flips the order and skews the priorities. F.H. Buckley, in the latest Crisis, reviews Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons and offers this money quote:
Wolfe's characters inhabit a purely pagan universe, in which we are offered a grim choice between narcissistic abandon and a stoic attention to abstract duty, between joyless vice and unfeeling virtue.The first recognizes others, in their regard for us, but not the self; the second recognizes the self, a soul "without quotation marks," but not others. Neither view holds out much prospect for an integrated life...
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