A Sample from the Correspondence

On the Birthday of John Keats

Rhetoric and the Cur Deus Homo

Hear now a very few points in favour of wakefulness against sleep: and yet methinks I am guilty of collusion, in that I side with sleep night and day without sleeping: I desert him not, nor is he likely to desert me, such cronies are we. But my hope is that he may be huffed at my indictment of him and leave me for a little space, and give me a chance at last of burning some midnight oil. Now for subtle arguments: of which my first indeed shall be this, in regard to which, if you say that I have taken up an easier theme in accusing sleep than you who have praised it—for who, say you, cannot easily bring an indictment against sleep?—I will counter thus: what is easy to indict is hard to praise; what is hard to praise can serve no useful purpose.

Enough of this trifling which I have indulged in more from love of you than from my own faith in it. Now after soundly abusing sleep, I am off to sleep: for I have spun all this out for you in the evening. I hope sleep will not pay me out.

If you carefully consider the scheme of human salvation, you will perceive the reconciliation of the devil, of which you made inquiry, to be impossible. For, as man could not be reconciled but by the death of the God-man, by whose holiness the loss occasioned by man’s sin should be made up; so fallen angels cannot be saved but by the death of a God-angel who by his holiness may repair the evil occasioned by the sins of his companions. And as man must not be restored by a man of a different race, though of the same nature, so no angel ought to be saved by any other angel, though all were of the same nature, for they are not like men, all of the same race. For all angels were not sprung from one, as all men were. And there is another objection to their restoration, viz , that, as they fell with none to plot their fall, so they must rise with none to aid them; but this is impossible. But otherwise they cannot be restored to their original dignity. For, had they not sinned, they would have been confirmed in virtue without any foreign aid, simply by the power given to them from the first. And, therefore, if any one thinks that the redemption of our Lord ought to be extended even to the fallen angels, he is convinced by reason, for by reason he has been deceived. And I do not say this as if to deny that the virtue of his death far exceeds all the sins of men and angels, but because infallible reason rejects the reconciliation of the fallen angels.

In all arts, I take it, total inexperience and ignorance are preferable to a semi-experience and a half-knowledge. For he who is conscious that he knows nothing of an art aims at less, and consequently comes less to grief: in fact, diffidence excludes presumption. But when anyone parades a superficial knowledge as mastery of a subject, through false confidence he makes manifold slips.

Plus Some Thoughts About Archaisms in Writing

There are several passages in this work where Fronto tries his hand at descriptive narrative, and two in which he essays the role of historian. But his view of history, and how it should be written, was thoroughly mistaken. His eyes are not on the facts, but on the best way to show his rhetorical skill in commonplace or panegyric. His efforts therefore in this direction are useless as history and of no account as literature.

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of severer and more laborious kind [than that of his predecessor]. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years he embraced the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. His meditations, composed in the tumult of the camp, are still extant; and he even condescended to give lessons of philosophy, in a more public manner than was perhaps consistent with the modesty of sage, or the dignity of an emperor. But his life was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who excited a rebellion in Syria, had disappointed him, by a voluntary death, of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend; and he justified the sincerity of that sentiment, by moderating the zeal of the senate against the adherents of the traitor. War he detested, as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defense called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns, on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century after his death, many persons preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among those of their household gods.

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honor of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.

This book is proof that Marcus Aurelius is one of history's most overlooked philosophers. He has been completely taken for granted. Putting aside the relative quality of the writing in this book, the notion that the correspondence between a great philosopher and his mentor would survive is unbelievably exciting. Yet this book is buried away, to be read only by hard core fanatics and those that troll the bibliographies of translations of Meditations.

The Loeb translation is worth having and worth reading through. One can watch Marcus grow, be admonished, be encouraged and be taught. Perhaps it is time to combine Volume I and II together as the extra pages of Latin seem to be particularly outdated in 2009. Other than that, this book is a both a helpful tool for understanding one of the best Stoics works of all time and watching a noble man become the figure that towers over all of us.

A Conglomeration of Disparate Thoughts

Epictetus was born a slave in about AD 50 and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek language of his slave mother. At the age of fifteen or so, he was loaded off to Rome in chains in a slave caravan. He was treated savagely for months while en route. He went on the Rome auction block as a permanent cripple, his knee having been shattered and left untreated....

Under the despotic emperors who exacted a sullen obedience from the Senate, Stoicism had been the religion of the opposition; indeed, it was the Stoic temper which made that opposition dangerous. Many chose to die as Stoics rather than live as slaves. For if one’s duty was done, then, as the Stoics put it, “The door is open.” It is highly significant that the philosophy of the opposition in the first century became that of the Antonine emperors in the second. It is also significant that of the two great Stoics of the second century one was an emperor, and the other, Epictetus, a liberated slave, whom the emperor [Aurelius] quotes with respect.

Many people think that Judas was the supreme betrayer of Jesus. But others say Paul has a better right to that title. Judas gave Jesus’ body over to death. Paul, it is claimed, buried his spirit. He substituted his own high-flown but also dark theology for the simple teachings of the itinerant preacher from Galilee. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend William Short that Paul was the “first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” Bernard Shaw said the same thing in the preface to his play Androcles and the Lion: “There has never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations of Paul’s soul upon the soul of Jesus.” This represented a triumph over the four evangelists (“good news bearers”) by what Nietzsche called Paul in The Antichrist— “the Dysangelist” (Bad News Bearer), a man with “a genius for hatred.” Shaw told a correspondent in 1928 that “it would have been better for the world if Paul had never been born.”

Seneca’s career might most generously be described as “checkered.” Born to a family of Roman settlers in Spain around 4 BC, he came to Rome, along with his elder brother Novatus, where both of them made their way up the social and political hierarchy of the city. Novatus really did have contact with Saint Paul [as opposed “to some flagrantly apocryphal correspondence between the philosopher and... Paul”]: his main modern claim to fame derives from his walk-on part in the Acts of the Apostles, when as Roman governor of Achaea he refused to prosecute Paul as the Jews demanded (probably more a sign of his distrust of the Jews than any fondness for Christians).

Seneca himself spent most of his life in the dangerous penumbra of the imperial court, combining the preaching of hard-line Stoic philosophy (renowned for its commitment to unadulterated virtue) with dynastic wheeling and dealing and a taste for the high life.

This was a world embedded in doublethink and doublespeak. Nero entertained his mother lavishly, gave kisses, and said fond farewells on the very evening he planned to kill her. The Senate voted to give divine honors to Nero’s dead baby daughter, although most of them knew it to be ridiculous.... And when the young Britannicus keeled over at the emperor’s dinner party, poisoned on Nero’s orders, it was only his sister, Octavia, who reacted “correctly” —she just went on eating. It was left to the hopelessly naive, untrained in the conventions of autocracy, to give the “natural” response and ask if the poor boy was alright.

Herod was a remarkable figure, thoroughly ruthless and odious. The mere fact that in the conditions of the age he could hold the throne from 40 to his death in 4 BC is proof enough, all the more so when it is remembered that he supported the losing side in the Roman civil war twice—first Cassius, one of Caesar’s assassins, then Marc Antony. His murders and executions cannot be counted. They included all surviving male Hasmoneans; his uncle Joseph (who was also his sister Salome’s husband); his second wife, the Hasmonean Mariamme I, and her mother; his two sons by her, Alexander and Aristobulus; another of Salome’s husbands, named Costobor; and, five days before his own death, his eldest son, Antipater.

“Station in life,” then, can be changed from that of a dignified and competent gentleman of culture to that of a panic-stricken, sobbing, self-loathing wreck in a matter of minutes. So what? To live under the false pretense that you will forever have control of your station in life is to ride for a fall; you’re asking for disappointment....

so also with a long long list of things that some unreflective people assume they’re assured of controlling to the last instance: your body, property, wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, pain, reputation.

Be Still, My Soul

What Paul Meant

[I]t is often said that Jesus' claim in the Gospels that he is the Temple, replacing the old meeting place between God and man, is an invention that grew up only after the actual destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. But here is Paul saying the same thing almost two decades before the destruction of the physical Temple in Jerusalem. He is in perfect accord with the sayings of Jesus, and proves that this tradition was in circulation among the Brothers well before the Temple was destroyed--and even more clearly before the Gospels were written.