Date: 01/21/03 07:30:59 PM
Name: "Diogenes"
Subject: Opening of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, continued
City/Location: Chicago
Continuing where we left off :
- " To the gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good. Further, I owe it to the gods that I was not pushed into any offense against any of them, though I had a disposition which, if opportunity had offered, might have led me into something of this kind; but, through their favor, there was never such a concurrence of circumstances as put me to the trial.
Further, I am thankful to the gods that I was not longer brought up with my grandfather's mistress, and that I preserved the flower of my youth, and that I did not make proof of my virility before the proper season, but even deferred the time; that I was subject to a ruler and a father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace without wanting either guards or embroidered robes, or torches and statues, and suchlike show; but that it is in such a man's power to bring himself very near the fashion of a private person, without becoming either meaner in thought, or less forceful in action, when things must be done for the public interest in a manner which befits a ruler.
I thank the gods for giving me a brother who was able by his moral character to rouse me to vigilance over myself, and who, at the same time, pleased me by his respect and affection; that my children have not been stupid or deformed in body; that I was not more proficient in rhetoric, poetry, and the other studies, in which I should perhaps be completely engaged, if I had seen that I was making progress in them; that I promptly placed those who brought me up in the station of honor that they seemed to desire, without putting them off with promises, because they were then still young; that I received frequent and clear impressions of what is meant about living in accordance with nature; so that, so far as depended on the gods, and their gifts, and help, and inspiration, nothing hindered me from living according to nature, though I still fall short of it through my own fault, and through not observing the admonitions of the gods, and, I may almost say, their dictates; that my body has held out so long in such a kind of life; that I have never touched Benedicta or Theodotus, and that, after having fallen into some fits of love, I was cured; and though I was often out of humor with Rusticus, I never did anything of which I had occasion to repent; that, though it was my mother's fate to die young, she spent the last years of her life with me; that, whenever I wished to help any man in his need, or on any other occasion, I was never told that I had not the means of doing it; and that to myself the necessity never arrived of receiving anything from another; that I have such a wife, so obedient, and so affectionate, and so simple; that I had an abundance of good masters for my children; and that remedies have been shown to me by dreams, among other things, against blood spitting and dizziness. And that, when I had an inclination to philosophy, I did not fall into the hands of any sophist, and that I did not waste my time on the ordinary philosophers or in solving syllogisms, or investigating appearances in the heavens; for all these things require the help of the gods and fortune. "
(End of part I)
This is not the Roman outlook some of us expect to see : arrogant, unprincipled, superstitious, orgymongering ... a host of vices which so many Christian fundamentalists would attribute to the Pre-Christian Romans, which so many in the New Age would have us think of as being the Roman (and, generally Pagan) virtues, ones which we should make our own. Instead we find a commitment to humility, compassion and honor expressed in terms that sound almost Christian; Roman Catholic to be specific.
It bears mentioning, at this point, that Marcus Aurelius was no Christian. History records him as being a pious worshipper of the gods of the Roman state religion. Yet, what we read here sounds so very Christian. Why is that?
Some might point out that Marcus Aurelius lived well into the Christian era (ie. the AD years), and what we are seeing is the effects of Christian thought being diffused into the Roman mainstream. Chronologically, that has a superficial appeal, until one remembers that he was far from being the first of the Stoics, Stoicism finding its origins in the work of the fourth century BC philosopher Zeno, long before Christ. So, what is happening here?
Part of the answer, perhaps, is for some of us to recognize that what is confusing them is not another culture, but their own. The so-called "American mainstream", that minority culture in the US that thinks of itself as being "the" American culture, is a Protestant one. A major thread in Protestantism, historically, has been a demand for simplicity in religious matters, and a rejection of "Non-Christian" influences in Christianity. Such a commitment to cultural deck sweeping is only reinforced by the ethic of "assimilationism" which calls for pressure to be placed on the immigrant to discard his earlier cultural identity wholly, and to become purely an American.
So used to encountering those who have yielded to such demands are many Anglo-Americans, and many from related cultures, that they forget that it is not inevitable that a culture will develop in this way, nor is it the norm for those that have existed to have done so. The United States, from which most of the residents of the Internet hail, was created in a collective act of will by founding fathers who then decided that their ten minute old country now needed a culture of its own, to give it an identity distinct from that of England. The culture that resulted was a synthetic one, made to order for political purposes.
This is not how most cultures arise. Rome, if you'll pardon the cliche, was not built in a day. It gradually came into being, differentiating itself from the Eruscan dominated world in which it arose over the centuries. Its culture was created, not by a prideful few, but gradually accreted, on cultural layer dropped upon another, by those who were not so afraid of the notion of compromise, as to be unable to live with the notion of tradition. And tradition was one thing that the ancient Greeks and Romans tended to revere.
Really, if a society is typified by a reverence for tradition, then what can its culture be but an accretion of that which each era created, while limited by the need to come to terms with the sum total of what the generations before had done? When the Romans became Christian, they remained Romans, and their values and traditions could not help but come with them, influencing the Catholic culture that arose, forming the newest layer to appear on top of the others.
It is, perhaps, more than slightly relevant in understanding the direction that each post-ancient tradition took, and thus, the filters we see antiquity through, that Christianity reached the ancestors of most of today's Western Protestants when they were in their early iron age, but that the ancestors of todays Roman Catholic Southern Europeans and Central Americans, for the most part, already had developed urban cultures. The more one has to give up, the more reluctant one will be to do so.
This much having been said, we should not blind ourselves to the fact that there are real differences in the viewpoint of Marcus Aurelius and of Christ. Both are motivated by a love of Humanity. ("Man is not made for the Law, but the Law for Man"). But Christ is, in many ways, an angry prophet in the Jewish tradition, who has no love for the time and place he finds himself in, though he does care for the people he finds in it, who he warns of the doom that will come upon them if they don't reform. His love is not for the place that is, but the place that may some day be.
Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, as befits an emperor, does not merely love Romans, but also Rome, herself. He doesn't want to sweep away his society to have it be replaced by a better one, he wants to save it. How sadly ironic that he was the loving father of the notorious emperor Commodus, who ended up doing so much to weaken the Empire, perhaps hastening its final fall.
And yet I would maintain that Marcus Auelius would appear, at least judging from his own testimony in this first chapter, to be a man who would find a place in Christ's Heaven, and perhaps vice versa. Even the tradition loving Roman would acknowledge that there were times and places where a dramatic break with the past is called for, such as when the Tarquins were expelled from Rome, ending the monarchy. And even the most radical of early Christians would have had to acknowledge that there would be no point to building his city of God if it was destroyed almost as soon as it ws built, especially once he knew that the end of the world was at least 2,000 years in the future, and probably far beyond that as well. The question is when is it time to give up on the past, and if there is a way of answering that question other than struggling to keep that past healthy and alive until one's failures reveal the futility of one's efforts, the last two millenia of history have not revealed it.