Speaker 1: This is Jay Dyer from Jay's Analysis. You're listening to
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new eyes as we enter Esoteric Hollywood. Greetings, Welcome back
to Jay's Analysis, My friends, subscribers, especially thank you all
you subscribers out there. Today we're going to talk about
Marcus Aurelius, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and you're listening
to Jay's Analysis. My website is Jaysnalysis dot com and
I deal with philosophy, theology, the esoteric movie reviews, film analysis.
I do a lot of stand up, a lot of comedy,
a lot of impressions. I do all kinds of crazy stuff.
But I also do philosophy talks and lectures. And so
what we're going to do is maybe skip back and
go and talk about some of the older post Greek
stuff into the Roman period because I had some requests. Actually,
people said you didn't ever talk about anything Stoic, what
about the Stoics? And that's interesting because the Stoics are
influenced by the Greeks. They were very interested in continuing
the Greek tradition with that sort of Hellenized period of
the Roman Empire. And Stoicism is interesting. It's not the
best philosophy, I don't think, but it's interesting. And you
had the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius influenced by Stoicism. So
the first thing with that we want to do is,
you know that I'm very much a fan of channeling,
and so I got my hair cut into this fascy
haircut they call it, because we're going to actually channel
Marcus Aurelius the emperor today. You ready, so close your eyes,
put your legs up into a lotus position. And the
way that we channel the Roman emperor is that we
do instead of doing this the way that we might meditate.
We're going to hell Caesar. Hey Caesar, this is a
very controversial hand movement. Now you can do this all day,
fuck the poet, right, you can be a communist Marxist,
but if you dared to do hell Caesar, fascist fascist alert,
fascist alert, anyway, I'm being silly. We're going to delve
into the meditations and part one will be free for
those out there in internet land and then part two.
Of course, you can subscribe at Jays Analysis for four
a month or for sixty dollars a year to get
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elsis so Stoicism is interesting. It gives us the idea
of a philosopher king, right, so they Marcus, especially Marcus,
carries on this notion of Plato's republic being ruled by
the philosopher king, and Marcus sees himself as a philosopher king.
So in many ways it's going to function like Augustine's Confessions,
which is the first idobiography in history, I suppose Western civilization.
It functions as the first known autobiography. And the concern,
first and foremost is with the care of the soul.
So virtue matters, the God within matters, and the God
within here is this idea of what we're going to
deal with called monism, and the Stoics can accurately be
called monists, and Marcus follows the tradition of Epictetus in
the Discourses quite a bit. The reason I troll shows
Meditations is because the Meditations, well number one. I happened
to just pick this book up in the last few weeks,
and I had not read Marcus's disputation. I think maybe
an undergrad we had to read, you know, like a
selection of it or something. But I went in and
read the Meditations, and I thought it is a good companion.
And they're going to see a lot of similarities to
Christian theology early on Biblical theology. We're going to see
similarities to well, it's syncretic, which is interesting. So it
does platonism and maybe even blends aspects of Biblical or
Christian thought as well as the Roman ideas, Roman tradition
and thought, which is very practical, very interested in legalities
and bureaucracy and how to form a coherent, functioning state.
And what we're going to see is that Stoicism functions
very well for the Roman mythos, for the pacx Romana.
It's a lot of aphorisms, aphorisms, and it wasn't apparently
intended to be something published. It was intended to be
his personal diary, and I guess over time it was
eventually published. So a lot of platonic theme is one
of those that's going to be pre eminent is the
control of the passions. The Stoics were at times even
almost ascetics, right. They were very much into sobriety temperance,
and we're going to see that throughout these aphorisms. Another
obvious key point that probably everybody's aware of who's heard
of philosophy in any degree is a Stoicism is concerned
with facing life's ills in terms of what you can
and can't control. If you can't control something, no point
worrying about it. It's out of your control. It's not
something that you even need to worry about. Worry is pointless,
you know. We can think of similarities that, say, the
Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, who of you
by worrying? Can one add one inch to your stature? Right?
I mean, there's not really any point in worry, especially
when it comes to things outside of your control. And
that's the key dictum of Stoicism. So it's aphoristic in
the way that perhaps Nietsi or Wittenstein are aphoristic in
many of their writings. He does see philosophy as the
totality answer to man life and ills. So philosophy is
the path by which you can find solace, find peace,
and find answers. Philosophy promotes the life of virtue. As
we've seen before, again, this is straight out of Socrates
and Epictetus. Many of the early Stoics had a high
views of Socrates. They thought he was great, not so
much a lot of the metaphysics and ontology of Plato,
but rather that within the dialogues you would see Socrates
really laying out what it means to live a philosophical life.
So it's a lot more interested in the esthetic and
what's natural out there in the world, harmony with nature,
and a lot less interested in, you know, these sort
of big skill speculations about metaphysics and justifying your belief
systems and so forth and so on, so that they
don't really care about that. Of course, the first Stoic
that we'll talk about is Zeno, but we also have
to talk about Epictetis, and a lot of it's going
to deal with death, and so some people have called
it an ontology of freedom in the face of death,
which is interesting. You do tend to have this obsession
or this acceptance of death in the Stoic tradition, facing
death as something natural, and that's what we're going to
look at, especially given the fact that we don't believe
death is natural. Death is in fact very unnatural. But
for Stoicism it ends up being pantheistic, as we'll see.
So that is those are the foec i, the focuses
of Stoicism, and the introduction of my copy talks about
it being proto Christian. I don't know about all that
epictetis perhaps, but there were apparently times when Marcus thought
he had mystical visions, and these mystical visions seem to
be connected to the notion of an all pervading providence
over the universe, which is a Christian doctrine, and in
fact some of the other Stoics did. The argument is
often made that they were influenced by Christian theology because
they believed in providence, right, and you don't really have
a sense of providence unless you believe in some kind
of single God or source ruling the universe. Sometimes polytheism
might talk about providence, but it's hard to see how
there could really be providence if you have just a
bunch of warring gods. Right, providence seems to presume or
presuppose a single divine mind or single mind consciousness. So
a lot of interesting stuff here. You know, did he
have mystical visions that tied into his philosophies of stoicism
in the state and all that. Maybe, but that's what
we're going to look at today. So if you want
to see the full thing, come over to Jason Analysis,
and we're gonna do an end up look at the
meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and we're going to talk about
Marcus viewing himself as the philosopher king straight out of
Plato's Republic. And then we're going also, of course, going
to critique the philosophy and look at weaknesses in this
position and whether or not it can accurately give us
the kind of worldview that I think we want that
we all look for as human beings. So, if we
want to talk about the Roman period, and this would
be roughly the period between say Aristotle and the first
few Caesars, Christ's period into the second century, first and
second century, and that's well, actually, what we're gonna do
is we're gonna look at roughly the five schools during
this period, and you really only have a few options.
And that's what's interesting about this. Not many offers from
world views that are out there in terms of what
we might call the secular perspective, and philosophy is a
secular perspective. Now, you might could argue that Plato's philosophy
has elements of the mystery schools or Esoterism or something
like that, and Pythagorianism, but ultimately it's still the vision
of reason, right reason conceived of as an abstract and
personal principle governing the universe. And we're gonna see that
logos principle actually at work in the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.
So you're gonna you're gonna see like five basic schools.
And what's neat is that the modern day philosophy is
of secularism. They don't present anything different than that. We
still only have essentially these same five options in our day,
and I think that's very telling. And with with skepticism,
first of all, we have obviously the idea of no absolutes,
everything is relative. This would be like puro right. The
skeptics and their perspective is based in this idea of
a lot of times empiricism. We only know what's present
to our five senses. That can be deceived quite often,
and so therefore it doesn't make sense to think that
there's any actual objective principles or truths. How could anybody
pertain claim to have access to to these kinds of
lofty ideas when in fact true humility, right opposition to
human hubris, demands that that's absolutely impossible. But it's also
so it's kind of a buffet style approach as well
to philosophy with skepticism. You might take a little bit
of this, a little bit of that, but none of
them are quote true. Now, as I pointed out in
the little brief video that I did yesterday about relativism,
skepticism is relativism. And so this is actually the dominant
kind of philosophy of our day, and the problem with
it is that it starts out contradicting itself on its
own premisses. As we pointed out in that brief video,
it says there's no absolutes, everything is relative, but The
problem is that that claim itself has to also fall
under the dictum of everything being relative, and so it's
self refuting on its own grounds. Right. You can't say
that there's no truth, right, because that claim itself would
then also have to be true. And the problem with
this is that it's not a paradox. It's actually a contradiction.
And there's a difference between a paradox and a contradiction.
Even in formal logic or a history of logic. Addicians
have discussed this topic, even Birch and Russell, right, the
worst man ever, arguably the wickedest dude of all time.
Maybe even Russell noted the distinction between a paradox and
a contradiction. So next we had the school of Epicureanism,
and this is a kind of a materialistic atomistic atomism.
The world is just atom is falling through space. That's
all there is. And it's hedonistic, but it's not hedonism
in the sense of total moral abandon and total licentiousness.
The hedonists actually thought that the best way to live
was to live in a kind of moderated pleasure. So
it's not just bodily sensate pleasures that are the best pleasures.
It's a little bit of wine, a little bit of cheese,
a little bit of Netflix. Right, this is the highest
levels of pleasure, not Dionysian Jam Morrison, you know, pulling
out his schlong on stage and having sex with microphones
right while you're blitzed on Bzillian drugs. That's not what
they mean by hedonism. Of course, we don't really have
any reason to accept that the intellectual pleasures necessarily are
higher than the bodily pleasures on this perspective. I mean,
in other words, Epicurus might prefer the intellectual conversational pleasures
with his philosophical friends, But on what basis are we
supposed to believe that that's actually objectively a better pleasure
than you know, the whorehouse or something, right, I mean,
maybe the eyes wide shut party is a better pleasure
than the philosophical nerd chat right. In the Philosophy one
on one class, do you want to go to the
party with Bill Harford? Or do you want if we're
just gonna live for pleasure right? Or do you do
you want to sit in Philosophy one on one with
the fat guy with stinky armpits and debate the matrix. Right.
So in other words, we don't really get any clear
explication or a reason to believe that that the moderated
hedonism of Epicurus is somehow a higher, more lofty pleasure.
It's just assumed to be so than the pleasures of
moral abandoned. Now, the other school, the third option that
we have in this rough period between say the prophet
Malachi in the second century, is Platonism ul And now
there's there's other options too, in terms of like the
Sibiline cult and the Mythra cult. There's other religious options,
but right now we're just looking at like philosophy, secular
philosophy during this period Platonism. Of course, the Academy at Athens,
we know what Plato and Platonism taught, the three characteristics
of Platonism. If you've heard my lectures, you already know
this stuff. We don't have to rehash this. But for
those that haven't heard the Plato talks I've done in
the last couple of years, including the totality of the republic.
In the Platonic scheme, you have basically dualism of the
body and the soul, or of the realm of the
forms in our world, the realm of the forms being invariant, unchanging,
immaterial in our world being material flux subject to constant becoming.
And then you have rationalism that the mind or the soul,
the news, the reason in man is the highest faculty
that's intended to govern the passions of the body, and
it somehow it taps into the realm of the forms directly,
and so it's it is definitely a rationalist position. Platonism is.
And then you have what we might cause just idealism,
that the highest levels of reality, the absolute, et cetera,
are in fact formal and ideal in an abstract, mathematical
type of sense, not in the realm of the here
and the now. So that is that the three basic
principles that we'll find in Platonism. I got my I
got my fascy haircut today, and I got hair in
my eye, So then aristotelianism. And I got this haircut
as a joke, by the way, because people were making
fun of the last time I got this haircut. So
anytime I get people making fun of things, I always
I always charged forward into the thing that they're making
fun of and saying because I don't care and so Aristotelianism.
We haven't really dived into Aristol yet. We will, I
assure you maybe in the next year or two, we're
gonna get pretty deep into Aristotle, cover some of the
major works. The logic, the metaphysics, the poetics, the ethics.
These are all important to understand in the history of philosophy.
And I had plenty of graduate level Aristotle classes. I've
spent a lot of time in Aristotle. I spent a
lot of time in Aquinas, especially in my twenties. I mean,
very very intense, in depth time in Aquinas is thought.
You know, I've got the whole Suma sitting right over here.
I read a good portion of the Suma as well
as the Suma countries and Telaes. I've read the entire
volume volumes of the of that one, which is more
of an apologetic work. And to do that you have
to be very familiar with Aristotle, There's no question about it.
So we'll do that. We'll also do some Augustine. I've
got some Augustine right here in this stack, right here
by my thumbing. Augustine. We'll do some of that too.
I thought City of God monumental work in the history
of philosophy. It should be analyzed. Nobody does full talks
on the City of God. I will, and you need
not doubt me, because we did a full talk on
Tragy and Hope. So I read the City of God
when I was twenty one and took all those questions
to my Baptist professors and they didn't have any answers,
and they still don't. So you're gonna get that here
for me. You're not gonna get that anywhere. El There's
no other professor is going to take you through the
entirety of the City of God. But I will. So
then Aristotelianism is Aristotle School was located in the Lyceum
as opposed to the Academy, and the Lyceum philosophers were
called the peripatetics. And they're called this because they would
wander around. They would walk around and sort of stroll
about and philosophize. Actually I do this. I don't know.
Maybe I'm a descendant of Aristotle or something. I don't know,
but generally speaking, if I'm doing an interview, if I'm
talking or something, actually I like to be strolling about.
I don't like being confined and having to sit here,
but I'll do it. It's focused on obviously the teleology, right,
which is purpose in the Greek, that things have a
purpose to which they're going moving towards it, trying to attain,
and so everything is in a movement from potentiality to actuality. Right.
So the the acorn becomes the oak tree or whatever.
So the acorn has the potential to become the full
oak tree, the telos. The purpose of that seed is
to transition into that final form. This is what characterizes
Aristotle's philosophy. We could say that Ariostol's philosophy obviously is
a more empirical approach, whereas with Platonism it's kind of
a unless you make the argument that Platonism is ultimately
a mystery school initiatory kind of religious philosophy, which you
could make that argument it kind of is. But if
you consider it just in its in as secular sense,
then it's more focused just simply speaking, in terms of
epistemology on reason, on thought and a priori mathematics or
these these are characteristics that are not generally speaking empirical,
So you know, algorithms, these kinds of things, you know,
large geometric problems, in mathematics, they might have a relationship
to the physical world, but the objects of these disciplines
themselves are not empirical, right, achilleagon is not an empirical
thing out there in the world, but it is a
real geometric thing. And so there's many other examples of this, Right,
a tesseract. There's not something actually out there in the world,
but it's a real mathematical object. And so in that sense,
because Plato believed that in Pythagoras, they believe that these
kinds of mathematical truths were the real, higher true is reality,
ultimately speaking, is more in line with that kind of
stuff than it is the flux and change of matter
and decay and death in this world. And so in
that regard, Aristotle is much more interested in studying the
natural world. He's much more interested in biology than he
is metaphysics. Right, So, I mean, he doesn't have a
problem writing a book about metaphysics, but his metaphysic is different. Right,
So he'll take form. He believes in objective form. He's
a realist, so to speak, but those forms are all
instantiated for him in time and space, in some configuration
of matter. Right, So matter is impressed with some form.
Always there's not an abstract out there, a transcendent realm
where the true formal principles reside, and there is for Plato.
So next we come to Stoicism cynicism, and there's a
similarity between those two schools. We are going to be
talking about Stoicism today, as I said with Marcus Aurelius.
But we have in Stoicism this emphasis on harmony between nature, reason,
and virtue. All of these three are kind of mystically linked,
almost to where if you're living right, you're living in
accord with reason, and reason lives in accord with the
principles that are manifested out there in nature in the
natural world. So virtue is to be natural. Virtue is
to be rational, and to be rational, and natural is
to live according to reason. And so all of these
three are linked. Now how do they get that, Well,
they're all linked because there is, as we said, some
sort of in the mind of the a universal principle.
It's a universal principle that governs all reality. It's a
kind of force of reason or logos. And they will
actually use the term logos now, they don't mean it
in the sense of what John one one is talking
about in the Gospel of John, that in the beginning
was the Word, The Word was with God, the Word
was God. He was in the beginning with God, and
all things are made through Him, for him, by Him,
et cetera, et cetera. That's not what they're talking about,
because they don't believe in creation. For the Stoics, for
the Roman philosophers, they inherit the Greek idea of cycles,
that reality is not created, it's just a kind of
an eternal manifestation of itself extending out forever, never, ever, ever.
And in fact, this is kind of an eternal recurrence
type of view, madam psychosis. You're just going to live
the life that you've lived now over and over and
over again. It's just going to repeat. And they believe
that because they would look out in the world, and
Marcus is going to say this in his Meditations, that
he would say he says that the universal principle mother
Earth slash mother Universe, you know, something kind of what
Plato talks about in the Timaeus, gives birth to all
of these various living forms and living creatures, and then
they have a time period where they exist and then
they die and they return to the natural world, and
so presumably they're just recycled, right, And this is where
we would get the idea of transmigration of souls metempsychosis. Presumably,
when you break down in return to dust, the rational
soul principle that inhabits you your body or whatever is
also presumably going to like meld back into the all
and then be at some point germinated, disperminated the universal shoes.
It's odd, and you will come back into existence at
some point. And this is why, of course all the
traditional what we call pagan religions believed in thetive generative principle, right,
so that the universe is governed by this principle of birth,
cycle of birth, living, your life, death, and then process repeats,
rent and repeat for all eternity. So it's going to
mark these views is no doctrine of creation. Now, there
might be some kind of like mythology of the gods
falling and Titans and this kind of stuff and an
ancient Golden age, but that's not what actually sets the
Biblical theology. For example, apart from these views is that
time is not viewed as a prison. Time is not viewed,
and to be fair to the Stoics, they don't really
view time as like a prison or something necessarily bad,
but they view it as as governed by fate. But
you'll find these inconsistencies in these views where it's like
there's everything's governed by fate, but you also have the
ability to live and act virtuously, which presumes free will.
So you know, it's it's very it's not actually harmonized
with a lot of the things that that it believes.
It's very contradictory in many points. And we're actually going
to see that in the Meditations. I'm going to point
out to you the point the times where Marcus consistently
contradicts himself. That's not to say that it's all bad.
I mean, there's some good points here and there. There's
there's he makes some good arguments, he makes some good
and he has some good insights. Then in many many
ways echo Ecclesiastes. Right. He sounds a lot like Solomon
at times. And you know, since you could argue Solomon
was a kind of philosopher king, a lot of it
will echo the proverbs right, or syrac Ecclesiasticus in the
Deutero Kenon, So I wanted to my notes go back
to this point of understanding that these five rough outlines
of the positions in this time period are really repeats
of the world views that we have today. If you
go to the university and you study philosophy, or if
you are involved in civic discourse or whatever is supposed
to be out there in the world as your options,
you're really only going to get like a handful, Like
this handful is regurgitated and given to you. Again, there's
not a whole lot of other options out there unless
you turn to something, if like a different religious perspective
or something which would probably be classed by most people
under mysticism. Right. So the idea, of course is that
religion is not in the realm of reason and logic
and all this kind of stuff. There's just then there's
like a reason and logic over here, philosophy and world
views and politics and this and that, and then there's
a religion over here which is based on faith and mysticism,
and it doesn't really have any basis. There's no real
coherent reason why people believe it. It's just what they
happen to be believing and growing up in the perspective
obviously that we're going to take that I'm going to
argue for and demonstrate I think hopefully, is that that
that's that's just simply not true, that that the ultimate
foundations of these positions that we want to hold to,
like we want to believe, there is some kind of metaphysic,
there is some kind of epistemology, there is some kind
of ethic. The ultimate foundations of those three basic divisions
of philosophy are ultimately religious in nature, and they can
only be given a coherent basis in the in a
in a certain kind of theology. At least that's the
argument that I'm going to make. But so when we
talk about nothing new under the sun is essentially what
we're trying to say here, right as Solomon says, hearkening
back to Ecclesiastes. And so you only have a finite
number of number of options and worldviews that you can
pick here. I guess you could actually kind of make
the same argument for religion and theology. You don't have
a whole lot of options there. I mean, you can
start with God or theology and say, okay, either I
believe in a personal or an impersonal absolute principle, and
if you choose either, I mean, because there are only
two options there, there's not like a middle If you
choose the middle ground, then the objective principle that you're
choosing is not personal still, right, I mean, And even
if you tried some far Eastern perspective which says, oh,
that's a duality and I don't want either one of those, that, well,
it's still some unknown absolute that has absolutely no connection
to you. Right, So you're still not avoiding the question
by saying that I don't one either one of those. Now,
if you choose neither of those and you say, well,
I don't believe, well, then you're back in the school
of skepticism, agnosticism or something like this, which I believe
is a dead end. So we don't have any many
roads to go down there. It's a dead end pretty
quick again, So only a finite number of religious views
as well as only a finite number of these sort
of secular views, as we're going to see. That's where
we're going to argue here. Stoicism was very popular in
the Empire, and we're going to see why that is,
because it's a perfect philosophy for the Roman imperium it had.
It took over the reputation of the Greeks for scholarship.
They were very interested in me scholarly and they liked
this Hellenized worldview idea, as we said, and it was
kind of a Roman philosophy. For the entirety of the
empire was the governing principle. Here we begin with Zeno
around three twenty ABC, and the school was called this.
They would do their teaching in this area called the stoa,
which is the porch, and they had, as we said,
a very highview of Socrates. Another kind of rival school
around this perier was the Senex, and the Senics were
also students of Socrates, but they again didn't care for
the metaphysics. They were only concerned with the process of
the dialogues and the argumentation, and the Synics believed that
it showed that bad things in life should just simply
be accepted with a kind of cold, calm indifference. And
this is also what the Stoics would hold to too,
so they both share this view. The Synics, though, tended
to be a little more antisocial and were anarchic and
revolutionary at times. They had a kind of anarcho revolutionary perspective,
and the the Stoics didn't didn't agree with that. They
were there were more into high culture and order and hierarchy. Right. Uh.
So Zeno, one of the key early cynics or who
studied there, said, you know what, this this anarchy principle
is stupid. Nothing's there's no there's no there's nothing helpful
to the whole of society out there by trying to
be an anarcho cynic. It doesn't do anybody any good,
and it's really self destructive. It's just you. Uh. You know,
if you want to be a revolutionary and try to
fight everybody and make everybody conform to your ideas, you're
wasting your time. You might as well go just go
live out in the woods. Get over it. It's not
gonna happen. You're not gonna change everybody's mind. So there's
no point in being upset about the stuff that you
can't change, right. I Mean, the whole idea here was
to be indifferent to the things that we can't change.
And if that's the case, why are you trying to
change everybody? Man? It ain't gonna happen. So to live
a calm, virtuous life, you need not try to convince
the entire society of you're wasting your time and energy,
and Zeo trying to convince the society of the rightness
of your cynicism. Now Zeno keeps, however, some of the
ideas of the cynics. He likes this idea of passive,
indifferent acceptance of what comes your way. So that was good,
and he wanted to carry that over and then but
what's interesting about the Stoics with Zeno is that Zeno
he's not a Platonist. He likes the empirical ideas of
Aristotle more than he likes, as we said that, the
metaphysical ideas. And so because Aristotle was an empiricist, you
could argue that Xeno is actually a little more consistent. Now,
I actually do argue this, often criticizing and critiquing Aristotle,
especially given the Roman Catholic and the Tonistic obsession with Aristotle,
Xeno is actually a little more consistent, because if we're
blank slates, and if our experience is just writing impressions
upon the videocamcorder of our mind or whatever, then it
really doesn't make sense to believe that form is out
there in the world, Like Aristotle said, the objects that
you think have form, that formalness that you're talking about Aristotle.
Remember Aristotle, you rejected Plato and the idea of transcendent forms.
That formalness is a construct in here, and your mind
is imposing that on the objects out out there in
the world. Right. I mean, there's nothing about that object
out there in the world that makes you know for
sure that it has formalness. It's your mind constructing this
idea of a form and imposing it upon that object.
So Zeno in this way is kind of a forerunner
to the hardcore empiricis of the Enlightenment period, like a
Locke or a Hume right, or Barkley. So Xeno is
a little more consistent with this idea than Aristotle. I
would say, Now, I don't agree with Stoicism and Zeno,
but I'm just making this this point. Now, where do
here's the Xeno weirdness? Here? Where does what does Zeno
say is the ultimate totality of reality? It's fire? What
did Heraclitus say? Well, this is he's getting this from Heraclitis, right,
So only matter is real, where all of reality is
just atam's falling through space and ultimate reality is just fire.
So you know, again something that he just took from Heraclitis.
And this is where we see that buffet style approach
from from the Stoics. So Stoicism comes from Heraclitis, the
details details come from Aristotle. And it makes no grand
contributions to ontology or metaphysics. In fact, it rejects that stuff.
It's mainly focused on ethical philosophy, which is interesting again,
and you could see why. Because you're not ever going
to get access to forums, there's no point in trying
to do metaphysics. You might as well focus on the
good life. And what's the good life? Living in harmony
with reason, nature and virtue. Knowledge is only good when
it helps us fit into harmony with nature would be
the dictum here. Now, oddly enough, there is a logos
principle that permeates the universe. This logos principle is described
as providence, and that's what we're going to see in Marcus.
It a weird ideas attached onto this, which so law
or maxims within the state are conceived to be in
accord with this logos universal principle. So you can begin
to see why it makes sense for Roman emperor to
adhere to stoicism, you're probably going to encounter tragedy. That's
a Roman emperor. Your buddy, your BFFs might stab you
in the back and take over being Caesar something like this.
This could happen, right, They might murder your family, you
might lose a giant military campaign, maybe thousands of your
soldiers die. You know, you're bound for tragedy in a
pretty extreme sense, probably if you're a Roman emperor. So,
but not only that, it also could appeal to the
to the emperor because it views the state as the
incarnation of the universal principle of reason. And what is
the what is the incarnation of the state, but the Emperor, right,
So the emperor's god because he is the incarnation of
the universal reason principle, which is the universe as a whole.
So the entire universe, the macro causem, is contained in
the micro cosm of the state. The microcosm of the state,
which is the entire Roman imperium, is contained in Isesiza. Right.
So it has an interesting globalist perspective. It says that
all men are brothers under this universal principle of reason,
and all men are brothers because they're all members of
the Roman imperium. Interesting, so from Stoicism comes this idea
of the Cosmopolis, right, not the David Cronenberg movie, but
the Cosmopolis of a giant world city state. Ethically speaking,
everybody has to do their duty, right, and you do
your duty for duty's sake. That's just what you do,
because that's in accord with reason, and it's in accord
with the state. It's in accord with the universal logos principle,
which is not again, Jesus, that's not the logos that
we're talking talking about. The logos we're talking about here
is just this a generic sort of just idea that, oh,
I have reason. There does seem to be order out
there in the world, and so the entire universe must
in some sense have just a rational calculating faculty. But
it's not conceived of as a single divine mind or
God that you could have a relationship with. So it's
very distinct from the kind of the I Am that
we see in Exodus three fourteen of the Bible. Right,
it's not Jehovah God having a covenant relationship with his people,
manifested ultimately in the incarnation with Jesus or anything like that.
It's just an abstract philosophical principle kind of roughly maybe
like what we saw with Plato and the Pythagoreans, how
they viewed mathematics as being a kind of overriding universal
ordering principle. But it's still abstraction act and is still impersonal.
It's not a single omniscient divine creator or anything like that.
So for the citizen, you have all these obligations that
make you a good, virtuous citizen, and that means that
everything's in its place. You live according to your station
in life. You don't need anarchy and revolutions or anything
like that because that's against good order. And you might
as well just, you know, accept your lot in life.
And if you do that with a healthy passive resignation
and live your life with sobriety and and frugality, and
then that's the best way to live, you're gonna be
happiest that way. If it was supposed to be otherwise,
then the gods would have created you otherwise. Right, if
you were meant to rise up in the ranks and
become emperor yourself, or if you were meant to go
from being a plebeian to a patrician, or if you
were meant to be go from you know, being the
poor guy to the to King Midas or something like this,
then the gods would have made you that way. Don't
worry about spending your life exerting all this energy and
trying to increase your station in life, because that's ultimately futile,
and it's ultimately out of accord with the principle of
universal reason. So service to the state ultimately is the
highest good. Here and again, the state is embodied in
the figure of the Roman imperium, embodied in the figure
of Marcus Aurelius. So again, attaining peace of mind, as
we said, is just simply to live in accord with
these principles. Cicero, Epictetus, these are famous Stoics, and again
Cicero was very eclectic in his perspective. Epictetus is around
fifty a d. And what's interesting about Epictetus is that
he seems to be the most sort of kind of Christian.
He appears to have actually been influenced by Christian theology,
and this is why providence plays such a central role
in his stoicism. But it's again, it's still not really Christian.
I mean just you get these sort of generic ideas
of bear and forbear. This is the famous teaching of Epictetus,
and so you bear with what the universe sends you,
and you forbear with your fellow men, and that's just
the best way to be happy. And so when we
come to one twenty one eighty a d. This is
the Marcus Aurelius period. And what we're going to see
is it's we live in a cosmos that is in
perpetual flux and change. Change is the most certain as
the certitude of this life, which doesn't make any sense,
by the way, because if the only certitude is change,
we can do a presubsitional critique of that and point
out that well is it is everything has changed also
subject to change, right, So I mean that the principle
itself would over time not be true, which doesn't make
any sense. May make the same argument which ill we
often do against Darwinian evolutionary thought because they try to
include everything under the principle of evolutionary flux and movement. Well,
does that mean that the principle of evolutionary flux and
movement is also eventually going to evolve to not be true.
I mean, it's just nonsense, right. So looking at my
Marcus Surelius notes here, Yeah, the universe is a living, intelligent,
giant being. It's like, you know, if you think about
Gya as mother Earth, well, this is like Gaya as
mother Universe. The entire cosmos is the giant living organism,
and we're kind of like a little cells on the
body of the giant universal organism, which is kind of
again from Plato and the Tamas, where the universe is
a giant, living being. You can see why the Roman
imperium likes this idea because again we go back to
Plato and Platonism, and even the ancient Egyptians taught this
idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm, that everything that's
in the macrocosm is in a way contained in the microcosm. Now,
we believe that doctrine as it pertains to the incarnation.
This is the teaching of Saint Maximus the Confessor when
he talks about the incarnation. But that's a different topic.
We'll get to that down the road. Now, the Stoics
are all pantheists, and so this universe being this giant
living entity kind of gives birth to itself from itself.
So you are a manifestation, a seminal spermal manifestation that
kind of is birthed out of Mother Universe for your
time period, the allotment of your life, as we said,
and then you die and you kind of go back
into Mother Universe reabsorbs you into her bosom. And so
again that that pantheism we're going to see is very
prominent in meditations changes the fabric of the universe. Uh.
And yet at the same time, you have a share.
Man has a share a spark of natural divinity within him,
and that's his reason. So man Is Marcus says, a
morsel of the divine. You're like a little ligament, little
little this little muscle here of the giant universe being.
That's you, or the little a little nipple being on
Mother Universe, that's you. Man Is oh Man is also
a social civic being, right, So he's not an island.
He's not a hermit normally speaking, he doesn't go live
on his own. He's not anarchic. He needs other human beings.
He needs a social order, and that's what the Roman
imperium is there to provide. True duty is to be
a good Roman citizen. That's your whole duty, that's your
whole your whole existence is to be a healthy, functioning,
staying in your place Roman citizen. And interestingly, the unfortunate
aspect of this, which I think we're going to see,
is that embrace with death and the pro death attitude
in the sense of you should accept your death because
death is natural, it's just part of the natural world.
In this view, is that suicide is a logical component
of this view. And actually Marcus will say, yeah, yeah, actually,
there is a noble aspect to suicide. And we can
see from all of the pagan worldviews that don't believe
in things like resurrection, or they don't believe in creation
and resurrection, which actually go together as revealed doctrines, they're
stuck in fate. They're stuck in the ever never ending
flat circle of time and cycles and reincarnation and metempsychosis.
Death is part of this natural process, right, and you're
going to die. Death is therefore natural, so you might
as well just love and accept death as much as
you love and accept life. They're almost dualistic, two sides
of the same coin, aren't they Because as these pagans
argue death gives life meaning and life gives death meaning. Right, No,
we do not believe that. In fact, we're going to
look at Acts seventeen where Paul goes and deals with
the Greeks and the philosophers who have these kinds of
views and will argue in debate and do apologetics with them.
So I'm gonna be giving you the kind of Act
seventeen approach in answer to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.
So that concludes the sort of overview. And next we're
going to move to the actual text itself and look
at some of Marcus's aphorisms and teachings and doctrines. You've
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