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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, with Eric Hutchinson · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: This episode is sponsored by Crossway.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Curated by award-winning hymn writers Keith and Kristen Getty, the Sing Hymnal, a personal edition, features timeless hymns without musical notation to help readers meditate on lyrical excellence and biblical truths.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Find it at crossway.org.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: From my grandfather Veros, good character and a resistance to anger.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: From my father, what I have heard and remember of him.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Modesty and manfulness.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: From my mother, piety, generosity, and an aversion to wrongdoing, the very thought of it.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Also the frugality with which she lived.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Other wealthy people refused to live that way.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: From my great-grandfather, instructions that took place at home with excellent tutors instead of at one of the public institutions.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: The belief that one should spend lavishly on education.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: From my boyhood tutor, to root for no chariot racers, no matter whether they are on the green team or the blue.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: And no gladiators, regardless of whether they fight with a short shield or a long one.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: To endure discomfort and need little.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: From diagnetus.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: That I shun purposeless pursuits.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: That I disbelieve in all that wizards and witch doctors have to say about magic spells and exorcism and such things.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: That I do not involve myself in quail fights and get into a tizzy over sports like that.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: That I tolerate the free speech of others.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: That I have made philosophy my home.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: That I attended the lectures first of Bacchaeus, then of Tandasus and Marcianus.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: That I wrote speeches expressing opposing viewpoints in my youth.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: That I preferred a plank as a mattress.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: An animal hide bedding and all that the Greek training prescribes.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: So wrote Emperor Marcus Aurelius in opening his meditations, completed around A.D.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: 180.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: The excerpt I just read is from the New Translation by Aaron Potigian, Livright 2025.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor for Muir Orthodoxy.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: And today I'm delighted to talk about Marcos Aurelius' meditations and especially Aaron's translation of it with Eric Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: He is a prolific poet and translator himself.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so this seemed like a great pairing.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: So Eric, thank you for being back with me for this conversation.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you for uh thank you for having me.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be here.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: So Marcos Aurelius's meditations have continued to be on the bestseller lists regularly in the 21st century AD.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, one of my college professors, uh Greg Hayes, had a best-selling uh translation of the Meditations years ago as well.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I think this officially makes Marcus Aurelius a classic.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: But what sort of classic is this book?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great question.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think the I think the Meditations is one of uh one of the oddest classics we have.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um because unlike almost unlike almost everything else to which we accord that status, um there's no evidence that this book was ever meant to be seen by anyone else other than its author.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so this is about as as far away from you know the the kind of self-presentation that you get in writers like Virgil or Ovid or um or or any of the any of the other sort of canonical authors that we think of as classic, uh where what we have was sort of rigorously polished up uh and intended for public, I mean, publication is a funny word to use for antiquity, but public uh public reception of some kind.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas this is a a kind of private notebook, um, and which is one of the things that makes it so interesting is that um it it seems to be one of those kind of rare spots where we where we see what uh one of the most famous people in history um was was like in private um and not in as as kind of curated for his uh public image.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I would call it maybe the most unlikely classic that we have from uh from the ancient world, um which is which is I I don't know what to do with this fact, but to link that up with its enduring popularity um is is at least intriguing.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that is an interesting thought, the idea that this was not intended for publication, at least not by Marcus Aurelius himself, because we have plenty of Roman generals leaders leaving their notes, like the genre of the commentari, what Caesar wrote with uh the Gallic War and then the Civil War.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So Caesar very much was writing private notebook, except that private notebook was all along intended to be published.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it was very much a puff piece all along.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, this is not what we have here.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great, great point in bringing up um Caesar's commentaries.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually, you know, we you can do something uh I think kind of illuminating with that.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Caesar's commentaries, while written for other people to read them and and and being very much, you know, uh an effort to present a particular kind of image of himself as general to to the Roman reading public, are all written, you know, they're written in the third person.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like narrating about this guy who just happens to be him and happens to be awesome.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and so there's a strange sort of you're reading here like, wait, this is by Caesar, but Caesar keeps talking about himself in the third person.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's very strange.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I find, I don't know if opposite is the right word, but there's a a very different phenomenon I find when reading uh the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which is that uh that's a book that's written in the second person, almost in almost entirely, not quite entirely, but almost entirely.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: You need to do this, you need to think about that, you need to remember X, Y, and Z.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I find it almost impossible to remember while I'm reading it that the you is actually him, that he's talking to himself.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I find it impossible not to read it as as me, as, as the addressee, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: That this is meant to be a kind of work of exhortation to other people, like, hey, you reader, you need to live a philosophical life.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: You need to do this, you need to do that.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and every time you sort of pause to remember, wait a minute, he's talking to himself.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is he this is sort of self-advice, self-exhortation.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is, you know, it's very alien from what uh Caesar was doing in the commentaries and gives us a completely different portrait of the ruler, I think, uh, from what we get in Caesar.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: So let's take a step back then on this note.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us a little bit about Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire in the second half of the second century AD?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is this context in which he is writing?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you can probably speak to this a lot better than I can, and I'm I'm not a not a historian or anything, but I mean, Marcus Aurelius comes at the end of what we now, I mean, thanks, Ted, we're given think of as the period of the five good emperors um running over the course of the over of the second century.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we have this this long period of peace and prosperity, or mostly peace and prosperity.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um his immediate predecessor and adoptive father was the Emperor Antoninus uh Pius or Pius.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Marcus Aurelius comes at the end of this because he, unlike his predecessors, decided not to uh have an adoptive heir, but instead handed the keys over to um his son Commodus.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and if you've if you've seen Gladiator, even though that there's a large degree of fiction in the movie Gladiator, one thing you definitely get from it is the idea that Commodus was a bad dude.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that part is uh that part is true.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so that sort of marked an end to this period of of peace, prosperity, stability.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um Gibbon calls it something like the you know, that the happiest period or the period of greatest felicity for mankind or something on the earth.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: However, it's it's not the case that um that everything was just fantastic all the time during this period.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there were still wars to be fought, um, and uh Marcus Aurelius actually spent most of his reign on campaign.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'll come back to that in just a second.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there were also other kinds of problems.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and anybody who was uh alive, you know, six years ago will have some familiarity with this.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: There was a there was a a horrific, horrific plague that his soldiers may have brought back from a campaign in the east.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and as far as I know, nobody is is really quite certain yet what it was.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people have thought it was smallpox, but there, but I think there are other other candidates as well.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: But just huge, huge numbers of people died as a result of this plague.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, there's peace and prosperity in some respects, but there's also you know wars and rumors of wars.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's plague and pestilence.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and Marcus ended up spending, as I said, a huge portion of his reign of his reign on campaign, both in the East, um, fighting the Parthians, and also in uh in central what we now think of as Central Europe, um, modern day Austria and places around there fighting uh fighting other groups.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the um and that's where the meditations seem to have been composed.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So some of the books will have headings, you know, r written in, let me see if I can just find one really quickly.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I should have had it marked, but to give you an illustration, um Yeah, like book three, you know, has this heading, written at the fortress of Carnuntum.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so every once in a while we get book two says at the beginning, written on the Grand River, a tributary of the Danube while on campaign against the Germanic tribe, uh the Quadi.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what we what we can envision here is um, you know, an emperor who presumably wanted to do anything but fight, anything but beyond military campaign, um, in his tent, probably at night, I mean who knows, but composing these sort of notes to himself to try to maintain uh his his balance and his um a sort of philosophical cast of mind, which is easy to do in a library, um, but harder to do uh in in the midst of what is ordinarily and perhaps a little bit unfairly called um real life.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to push you a little uh to talk a little bit more about this.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: So here we have this very busy emperor spending much of his career on campaigns.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: Why did he write this?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like what drove him?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I well, based on the the evidence of the meditations itself, it seems to be the case that that Marcus really was serious about wanting to live a philosophical life, wanting to live a stoic life.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: We can talk about that a bit more if if you want to, um, in a very self-conscious kind of way.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, having been trained in uh in literature and philosophy from his youth, which, you know, so many emperors were, but it's not as though they all took it with the same degree of seriousness.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: But he really does seem to be uh that kind of guy.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, he was homeschooled.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: That was sort of clear in uh in your introduction there, and it and he seems to have taken on, you know, some of those, some of those kind of stereotypical homeschool uh uh characteristics.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he um he was very invested in the intellectual life, but not as a kind of abstract um uh game, but always oriented toward this practical purpose of trying to become a better person.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he seems very aware of the fact that that's hard to do.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's hard to do anyway, but it's it's particularly hard to do in in positions of of great power and responsibility.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you have to remember, we have to remember Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the the world that was known to him and to his readers.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: There was nobody above him.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he could functionally do whatever he wanted, um, which is uh presumably a source of great temptation.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think he also was very aware, um this is one of the things that's so great about having this kind of private notebook of his.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he seems very aware of his shortcomings and his flaws and his faults.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and we get this picture of a guy who is often dissatisfied with himself, um, and and discontented with with who he is, with how he behaves sometimes, with the lack of progress that he's making, um, that he knows that, you know, that he has this ideal of living a sort of virtuous and other-oriented life, and he must not have done it with the frequency that he he desired, because he berates himself in the meditations and and kind of asks himself insistently, like, what are you waiting for to be to be a good person?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing is stopping you from doing it right now.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you keep putting it off?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you keep making ex, you know, why do you keep focusing your attention on all the wrong things?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: All of all many things that probably um uh, you know, a lot of his readers have thought, um, have asked themselves before.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is, I think, one of the reasons why the book has remained so enduringly popular, um, is because he asks these hard questions of himself.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And um and that's one of the things that is so that's so neat about it.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Again, he's not asking you, the reader, this primarily, although you often feel like that when you're reading it.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: You remember that he's he's not berating you, he's berating himself.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so I think this, I mean, this really is the the writing of this notebook is an exercise.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, an exercise that Marcus, as a stoic, you know, engaged in um pretty regularly.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you have stoics recommending practices, like at the end of the day, you know, ask yourself what went right, what went wrong, what you did right, what you did wrong, um, and uh, and kind of make an accounting, this sort of continual accounting that you're supposed to take of your actions and your outlook.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and so I think the I've I've gone on too long here.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think the the the best answer to that question is the simplest one, um, which is to say he wanted to be a better person than he was, and this kind of writing out his thoughts was a way of trying to organize uh where he was in life and how he could improve the sort of person that he was.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, similar to what some people do today, the idea of journaling for yourself, for self-improvement.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, you've mentioned Stoics, so this is a good time to kind of pause for a second and talk about Stoicism.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: What is it, and in what ways is Marcos Aurelius a representative of this philosophy?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um Stoicism has its its origins in Hellenistic Greece.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the so the founder of the school of Stoicism is a man named Zeno of Kitium or Psitium.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's this is one of the influential schools of Hellenistic philosophy alongside things like Cynicism and Epicureanism.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so there's a there's a you know, there's a Stoic school of philosophy that uh that goes through several heads, several prominent, um, prominent representatives.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know the the the big divisions of of Stoic philosophy are um physics, logic, and ethics.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Physics in the sense of sort of natural philosophy, the the um uh philosophy of nature.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um the Stoics were uh were materialists, so they believed that all things were were made of matter.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: The cosmos itself is divine, so they're pantheists.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the God isn't personal, but God is uh is essentially the cosmos and um through and is governed by by reason, by logos, sort of capital L logos.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and all human beings participate or share in that logos through their own sort of small L logos.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is of course where we get the word logic from.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we can reasoning, right?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: The the the rational faculty was was man's highest faculty for the Stoics as for ancient philosophy in general.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so the uh the ability to reason, to be rational, was a reflection of man's divine nature.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the ability to reason was also uh a way of organizing and evaluating experience, and so this is closely connected to um the ethical portion of Stoicism.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the main idea here is everybody wants to be happy.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: The only way it to be happy is to be virtuous, because for the Stoics, virtue is really the only the only truly good thing um that we can possess that can't be taken away, uh, that can't be taken away from us.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um because always, you know, basically always in ancient philosophy, happiness is tied to the idea of self-sufficiency, of not needing to be dependent on anything external in order to be happy.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so one's rational faculty is used to evaluate one's sense impressions, the one's response of pat of various kinds of passions like anger and hatred to uh to circumstances that we encounter, um, with the goal of being able to master those passions through um through rational reflection and and practice.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and so, I mean, all these three branches are are uh all closely connected together.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: I should also say, I mean, the Stoics were determinists, so they have this strong view of of fate uh or or or providence.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um the important point there being that the that the universe is rationally um and divinely ordered, governed.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Things are not random.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: The things that happen to us are not random, but they are part of uh of a kind of divine ordering of the world.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: This also has its own important ethical uh application.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: If things are happening to us that we don't like, that we would prefer not to happen uh to us, um it doesn't do any good to sort of shake your fist at the sky and uh and blame the gods for this because for the Stoic, the gods have a purpose that they are um that they are working out, and each individual human being is only one small piece of a much larger and comprehensive and coherent um and coherent whole.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've probably gone on too long.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the Romans, this became very popular among the Romans, and and a number of Romans take up uh take up the philosophy of Stoicism.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um people like Seneca the Younger, um Marcus Aurelius.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are others whose works that we have um in in only fragmentary form.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: The other big Roman Stoic philosopher who whom we have a lot of is Epictetus, um, thanks to his student Arian A-R-R-I-A-N, uh, who recorded a lot of uh a lot of his teaching.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um but anyway, I don't know if that was a good answer to your question or not.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is very helpful.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And especially for first-time readers, I think this is essential to understand where Marcus Aurelius is coming from.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: And what we see is that he's very much a reader, and he's not necessarily an original thinker in this regard.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: He is a student of a popular philosophy of his day.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now, how does this all play out in the meditations?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: Would you walk us through it?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: What sort of book is it, and what are the key themes that he in particular is interested in?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great question again.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: The structure of the meditations I find uh I find somewhat opaque.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, people have made uh arguments that various books are organized in various ways.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um the our our traditional division of the meditations is into twelve books.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it's not twelve, like the Aeneid is also twelve books, but the uh Virgil's Aeneid has a a um a very elaborate structuring principle or set of structuring principles that that tie the books together in various ways.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that's the case with um with the meditations.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm no expert on it.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there have been people have, again, have tried to have made arguments that, oh, look, you know, this is organized in the in the following way, et cetera, et cetera.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't think that's terribly important for uh our purposes.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't actually need to have any kind of structuring principle in order in in mind in order to read it and benefit from it.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um most of the books contain, you know, ethical reflections and exhortations.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the one thing that's really strange about it, and it is pretty unique, I think, in uh in ancient literature, is what you read from at the beginning of this.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the first book is uh is a giant sort of thank you to his parents, his relatives, his teachers, all of these people that he's known who have benefited him over the years.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the the most idiosyncratic part of the meditations and the part that really stands out is the first book where he's saying, basically, I thank, you know, my mom for this, my grandfather for this, my teacher for that.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a and it's a whole catalog of him um, you know, this is an interesting contrast with I mentioned a minute ago that everybody in ancient philosophy is looking for a kind of self-sufficient happiness, which is true, I think, um, and because you want something that nobody else can take away.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's the motivating um uh desire behind that, I think.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: But it it's easy to then make a caricature of that, you know, of a bunch of people out there, like, I don't need anybody, I don't need anything from anybody, I never got anything good from anybody, I just did it my way, I did everything myself, the way that I wanted to do.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the meditations, which again was not written for anybody else to see, opens with this long uh catalog of thank yous that he gives to other people, clear making it pretty clear that he didn't do it on uh on his own.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I think um I think that's worth remarking on and noticing just because it's so bizarre in um the ancient literature that we have.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the rest of it is uh, again, um reflections on uh the challenges of day-to-day life.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, book two.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Many people will perhaps love this at the beginning of book two.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and this is from Puchidjian's translation.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: When you wake up each morning, prepare yourself with these words.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: I will encounter someone meddlesome, someone ungrateful, someone debauched, devious, slanderous, brutish.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Those conditions have occurred in them because they cannot tell what is good from what is bad.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: I am different because I know that the good has a beautiful nature and the bad an ugly nature, and that the nature of a wrong-headed person is kindred to my own, not by blood and birth, but but but because we both have a mind and portion of divinity.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, even just pausing over that.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is something you're supposed to say to yourself in the morning.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, and actually, not you, that he's supposed to say to himself in the morning.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: When you get out of bed, say, I'm gonna encounter people who annoy me today.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's just gonna happen.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because that's the nature of life.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um But then notice what he does.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: They've occurred to them because they cannot tell what is good from bad, whereas I can tell what is good from bad.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's easy to read that and meaning it's like, oh hi, he's just patting himself on the back.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't really think that's what um what he's doing here.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: But he's saying, okay, what these folks are doing when they're annoying me is uh is not intentional, right?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: They they they don't know the difference between uh between what is good and bad, whereas I do, and what is that supposed to make me say?
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, I'm so much better than all of these people.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: The nature of a wrong-headed person is kindred to my own, not by blood and birth, but because we both have a mind and portion of divinity.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: So when that happens, when I get out of bed and go out into the street and immediately encounter people who irritate me, who rub me the wrong way, who do things in a way that I don't want them to do.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um the first thing I'm supposed to tell myself is wait a minute, remember, they come from the same place that I do.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: They have the same portion of divinity that I do, they have the same kind of mind that I do.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I may know the difference between good and bad, and they may not, but in principle they could.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And regardless, they're the same kind of person that I am.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's one big idea that comes up in the meditations over and over again.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: The sort of kinship of the human race.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and Stoics are famously cosmopolitan, meaning that they think of the world as uh the cosmos as a polis, as a city, right?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of the big, uh, the big city.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are individual cities that we all belong to, right?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can be a Roman, you can be um you can be from Londinium, whatever, you can be from wherever.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: But you also are part of the human community as a whole.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a really important emphasis of Stoicism that is meant to say we have this kinship and we should treat each other on that, on that basis.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um he goes on in that same sort of snippet.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: None of the people out there can do me any harm because I won't let them ensnare me in uh in shameful behavior.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is another important emphasis of stoicism, that that other people can't make you do what is bad and shameful.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the only evil really in the world is being shameful, being evil, and that's up to you.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we also get this idea here, very important in in sort of practical stoicism, that what other people do is up to them, and I can't control that, and I shouldn't let it disturb me.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: But what I do is up to me.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I can control that, and I do have a responsibility there to act in certain ways and to avoid acting in certain other ways.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: These are the kinds of themes that we see come up a lot in uh in the meditations.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're not the only ones, but they are some of the really key important ones, I think.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so the rest of the meditations is made up of reflections like this, and mostly in little snippets.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the reasons why it can be such a good book to read, to dip into here and there, because you don't have to read it sitting straight through in one sitting.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can dip into these little paragraphs, usually paragraphs, sometimes a sentence.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're some of these entries are really short.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's something in there, uh, sometimes of an almost sort of aphoristic quality that you can pause over and and reflect on.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh readers might have the experience, like, man, this book is really repetitive.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it is sometimes, but then you go, well, why is this book really repetitive?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer is, I mean, think about the kind of stuff that I just said.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's really easy to say.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really easy to say, I'm gonna remember today.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna remember not to get irritated at people when they don't do what I'm saying.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna remember that.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: But as soon as you walk out the door, you find, oh, that's really hard to actually do.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: So these are things that are easy to say and difficult to do.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason, one of the reasons that the book is repetitive is because uh we are really bad at doing these things often.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't think, I mean, as as as a Christian, of course, I don't think Marcus had a has a a great explanation at the end of the day for why that, or or maybe a really satisfying explanation for for why that is so, but he's certainly observing something that is true.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to be good.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is why he has to keep going back over and over and over the same things.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because whatever the ideal is, um we we very, very, very frequently fail to meet what that ideal is.
• 31:02
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• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: The summit gathers Christians and public service-minded leaders who want to think deeply and work practically for the health of our public life.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Coming together from many places and perspectives, these leaders are united by the conviction that Christianity offers essential contributions for the good of our neighbors, our institutions, and our shared future.
• 31:28
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• 31:46
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• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find that link in the show notes.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a very practical book in this sense, which is unusual for ancient philosophy.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: You read Plato or Aristotle, and you're not gonna come away with an obvious, like, here are things to do today, even though they're certainly pushing you to that reflection.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: But there's none of this, like hit you over the head with clear advice.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And w one of the things that's it that is that's worth remembering here is something that when we hear the word philosophy, we're probably often not thinking of what an ancient person, certainly in the Roman Empire, meant by um philosophy.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: For somebody like um Marcus Aurelius, obviously there is a very strong intellectual component to what he's doing.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we what I mean is we tend to associate philosophy with the academy and with the academic discipline of philosophy.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Or probably most people, when they hear the word, that's they they think of something like that.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in in the ancient world and in the Roman Empire, obviously there is this sort of um small s scholastic or or intellectual um aspect to philosophy.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: But um the emphasis, and especially for the Stoics, but I think this is true of the Epicureans as well.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is I think this is broadly applicable.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you often hear this this phrase philosophy as a way of as a way of life.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that really is what these folks are trying to find is a practical guide to living.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are um philosophy is not primarily academic or intellectual, even though that's an important part of it because we're rational beings, but it is ordered toward practice.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so you get these exercises that um that you are supposed to do.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like the kind of thing that I just read from the beginning of book two, you can think of that as uh as a a spiritual or mental exercise.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: When you wake up each morning, prepare yourself with these words.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like a kind of personal liturgy, like say this.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, say this to yourself when you know, when you get up.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it is sort of relentlessly practical and mundane sometimes.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, remember, this is going to happen.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when it happens, don't let it surprise you like you did the last, you know, like you're prone to do.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Those those kinds of things.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's helpful if we remember that that philosophy, in that sense, is something that anyone can do, and for somebody like Marcus, everyone should uh do, I would say, in in his in his point of view.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um there is it is a it is a kind of practically oriented wisdom, I think.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: So why do you think stoicism, and especially Marcus Aurelius's meditations, uh why is it so appealing and popular for some people today?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like in what ways does it seem so well compatible with modernity?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um I I think the first thing that I would want to say is insofar as um Stoicism is compatible, the the degree to which it is compatible with modernity is the degree to which it is compatible with human nature.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, I think there are things that Stoics were able to observe about human nature, which they believed in, that's one advantage of Stoicism, is that they actually believed there was such a thing as a human nature that was universal and stable.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and insofar as uh as they believed in that there's there's something, I guess, so there's something universal about Stoicism which makes it applicable in practical, concrete circumstances, whether of modernity, pre-modernity.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, because this was also popular uh, you know, from its really from its first, the the first edition of the text in the middle of the 16th century, um, and and has had a pretty, I think, steady uh popularity since then.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: But one specific thing that might give it some sticking power now is that a philosophy like Stoicism is especially suited to times in which individuals um feel small and powerless in the middle of a big and incomprehensible universe, whether that's a political universe, a certain type of political arrangement that um that is structured in such a way that sort of ordinary people don't really have a say in um in what happens in it or any power to really do anything to to change it, or the the um the cosmos as such, a big uh often um often mysterious and incomprehensible universe.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you might say, well, wait a minute, Mark.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Mark's really the most powerful powerful person in the world.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why would he feel um small and powerless?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: But uh there's a sense in which that's before the before the the magnitude of the cosmos itself, there's a sense in which um everybody is is perhaps going to feel that way at certain times, but particularly in lower reaches of society.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we have uh we have former slaves that are some, you know, Epictetus is a former slave, one of the most important stoic teachers of antiquity, and one of the ones whose thought we have best preserved, he's uh a former slave.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and emperor and slave aside, well, I guess I mean one of the things we can see there is there's something about this philosophy that is appealing both to the highest and to the lowest in society, and and probably to all folks in between.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we're thinking of, you know, second century Roman Empire.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's a sort of stoicism is is quite popular in the first and second centuries.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think one of the reasons, again, is uh how do we think about life being meaningful in terms that are different from, you know, or that that are in keeping with our current uh political and social situation.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, stoicism does not arrive, arise in the classical city-state of Athens in in the fifth century BC.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's a sense in which the the way that kind of the meaning of life is structured is different in a city-state like Athens.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, as you know, sort of man's role as a citizen in the polis, that's it.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's everything, or almost everything.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um you have real investment in what happens, you're a member of the assembly, you fight in the wars, all the rest of it.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the political situation of the Roman Empire is very different.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh and the the the roles and responsibilities that an individual can play are very different.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: They are generally not political.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: The sphere, perhaps, of one's actions is drastically reduced to the individual, the household, right?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're one's immediate community, things like that.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's not hard to see parallels to now.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, think if you're an American living in 2026, you live in a in an enormous transcontinental empire with hundreds of millions of people in it.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: The center of power is probably very, very far away from where you live, um, at least if you live in the Midwest, as uh as we do.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um the mechanisms of of statecraft are mysterious, I think often.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there is a giant sort of you know bureaucratic apparatus behind the the or above or enmeshed in the um the representative government that we have, but then you also add in other factors like media, technology, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are all these things that that um make the the world in some ways seem big, vast, alien.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're controlled by forces we don't understand.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we we get that feeling, um I think, or I think many people probably do.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then you add in, you know, other scientific theories that might make us think the same thing.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's this line in one of W.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: H.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Auden's poems about being lived by forces we don't understand.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think there is some of that.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: And in a situation like that, I'm going on too long again, but in a situation like that, a philosophy like stoicism that says, look, the sphere of action that you have is what it is.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't up to you, it wasn't decided by you, and you don't have any control over that.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: What you do have control over is how you act, how you behave, how you think within the sphere that's been given to you.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: So stop complaining, stop, you know, woe is me, because things aren't the way that I wanted them to be.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and exercise your uh your capacities in the sphere that you have to do that.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you will be happy.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: It it's as simple as that.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as simple as that.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I put in quotation marks because as we've discussed, it's actually quite hard.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the I mean, that's the aspiration, I think.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and in that sense, you know, stoicism is a coping mechanism for a uh a world that we often don't understand and that is other than how we would want it to be.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and the Stoic would say, well, fine, but that's not okay, you've said that.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: But now having said that, what are you gonna what are you gonna do about it?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I think that's sort of the impetus to action there.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a podcast for Christians reading classics, of course, and Marcus Aurelius was not a Christian, but a lot of his ideas that you've described uh are compatible with Christianity.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea of human nature, like what he thought about human nature, or even the whole interest in the logos, which of course we know from John 1 in the beginning was the Logos.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um so what would you tell Christians who read Marcus Aurelius in what ways might we benefit from reading him?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: But also what are the limitations?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh good.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there are these areas of of overlap, as as you mentioned.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the idea of of of um of the sort of capital L logos that orders and structures the cosmos, which is found um already in Heraclitus before uh before the Stoics.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Heraclitus is a is a really important um pre-Socratic.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: We only have fragments of Heraclitus that's very provocative, suggestive fragments of Heraclitus that survive, but he's uh he's a very important sort of background figure to um the Stoics.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the the logos, which in Heraclitus seems to be something common that everyone can in principle participate in.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: We find that in uh we find that in the Stoics, and each person has a logos, a reason, a rational faculty that is a kind of divine spark or way of participating in uh in the divine.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um that again, yes, has a definite parallel in the opening of John's gospel, the true light that enlightens everyone, come, you know, is is that that's the logos, that's the that's the word.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um with the with the big, huge, important caveat that in um in John 1, you know, the logos is personal, whereas for Stoics, the divine is always impersonal.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this sort of, so there's similarity and difference.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna find this over and over again.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: So there is this logos, this participation in something that is spread abroad over the the the universe.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: They call this the logos spermaticos or the the um the spermatic or low seed logos that is shed abroad in the cosmos.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the Christian apologist Justin Martyr actually just takes out, uses that uh that phrase to describe.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: The action of the Christian logos in the world.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a big one.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of providence, as I mentioned, now Stoics are fatalists and Christians are not, but there are still areas, so that's the difference, but there are areas of similarity in terms of a providential ordering of life and the universe.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: The emphasis on what you might think of as neighborliness, because all, you know, Christians have the uh the belief that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's something similar to that in Stoicism, in a way, with the this idea of the participation in the logos.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea that we're all kindred in that sense, we all have the same human nature, we all come from the same source, and therefore we ought to treat each other in a way that is consonant with that.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's an area of uh of overlap.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um we see, I mean, one of the best places to see some of these points of contact is in Acts 17, where Paul is uh um speaking before the Areopagus in uh in Athens, and there are these Stoic and Epicurean philosophers um who are there.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and to sort of tie into the book of Acts really quickly, um, the a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius is very opposed to superstition.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he he talks about this in in the meditations.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we remember we remember in Acts the burning of the books of magic.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this opposition to a sort of superstitious um view of the world that involves like magic and and witchcraft and those kinds of things.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um Stoics and Christians are both uh both you know opposed to to those things.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, the idea of living in accordance with uh with with virtue, so the sort of basic moral concerns are are common to both.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um the idea that suffering is an ordinary part of human life, and this is one where I think we can, you know, both draw a similarity and an important difference.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um I find the the view of suffering in uh in stoicism pretty dismal, actually.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um so when something bad happens to you, you're supposed to tell yourself, I mean, you're one small cog in a much in a much bigger machine.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so the advice that you're supposed to give yourself in a situation like that is that um somehow my suffering serves the greater good or the purposes of the cosmos or is is what the universe needs right now.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so it might be bad for me, but if it's good for the whole, since I'm just a part, what's good for the whole is better than what's good for the part.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that it's bad, but it's not actually bad.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually good because it's serving somehow my my suffering is serving the purpose of the good of the universe.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that seems like a practically difficult belief to hold, but that is the that is the general idea.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because the the the Stoics are pantheists, there's no transcendence, there's nothing beyond this universe, there's nothing beyond um this cosmos.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's a kind of self, it's an a self-contained and enclosed, an enclosed whole.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um the Christians too have the idea, like, yes, suffering happens um and is difficult, um, but there's never this idea that like, but the universe needs this.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that you must suffer so that the world, that the universe can be better.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um but instead is is connected to the idea of of the cross and the crosses that we have to bear.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not that that my suffering is somehow like passively is this like mechanistic component that is part of this bigger thing, but that someone else actually did suffer so that the that the cosmos could be uh could be made better.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually did accomplish something real, and that in in sort of before the consummation of that, one's suffering is is uh a participation in the suffering of the cross, which might make it not might, which does make it you know beneficial for the one undergoing it, but not as though um the the universe needs it or something, but because it's still occurring in a situation in which you know sin is still in the world, um things are not uh set right in the way that they will be at one point.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can actually say this feels bad and this is bad.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and the reason that it's okay is because Jesus went through the same thing and more.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I just think the that the the view of suffering that you get is is quite different in the two.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I explained that very well, but but I don't think uh there's a superficial similarity, but but one that kind of breaks down upon um upon closer examination.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: You could do the same kind of thing with views of the afterlife.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the Stoics don't have a personal afterlife, you know, your divine spark sort of returns to the ocean.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, there's no there's no immortality of the soul in that sense, there's no sort of personal continued existence.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they have all these ways of um um trying to prepare oneself for death and the inevitability of death.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's similar to Christianity, but the motive behind it and sort of the end goal is is very different.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um with the moral component as well, there's no judgment after death.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the reason that one is is good in this life is again sort of self-contained, self-enclosed, and doesn't really have anything to do with uh any sort of continued existence after this.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, that was too long.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think this is really helpful, and it's a reminder that the superficial similarities are one thing, but really it's the differences where we uh see the uniqueness of Christianity yet again in a world that was looking.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I think we uh we do see some of these kind kind of common um aspirations or hopes in uh uh in other schools of philosophy and just sort of ordinary existence um in in the ancient world.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I think that's okay and even and even um useful to to point out, you know, that that when Christianity comes on the scene, it really is answering to uh um questions and desires that that people actually had.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um in and the the difficulty of the big scary existence of the of the Roman Empire is just a microcosm.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing sp I mean it we might use that sort of historically to say, ah, so here are the historical and material circumstances that led to the popularity of Christianity, but that's just an instance of a broader phenomenon that can be paralleled in a lot of other places and times.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's really the problem of human, it's not the problem of Roman existence, it's the problem of human existence.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and maybe it's magnified, made acute by certain things that are happening in uh the first and second centuries AD.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, maybe it's easier to put those questions off in the fifth century in Athens when there are lots of things right in front of you that you can do with your life.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and it seems meaningful, and you don't have to kind of work it trying to figure out why am I even here, what am I doing?
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in other sorts of political and social circumstances where that question is much more at the front, uh at the forefront, when you can see all around you all the time, what am I, why am I here?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: What am I doing?
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe those provide a kind of impetus, but the questions are really basic, I think, to um to human existence as such.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, you're right, we can see in um in these philosophical movements um a desire for the kinds of answers that that Christianity gives.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the other side of that, we might say, okay, sometimes the motivation for what the Stoics recommend is not the motivation that um that a Christian would recommend.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, a lot of the practical advice they give is really, really good.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there are things that are really valuable.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I it's a useful sort of um uh passage.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just gonna go back again to that one from the beginning of book two.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's a lot in that that is sort of immediately usable.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: When you wake up, say, things are gonna go today not in the way I've planned.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna encounter things that are uh that are difficult for me.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: And when I do that, I need to remember, yes, I know what this other person did to me was uh was wrong, but I'm not going to be filled with hate and rage because of that, because I'm gonna remember that we come from the same place, the same sort of thing.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then a Christian could easily add the idea, oh, and I'm gonna do that to other people too, because I'm also sinful.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're, you know, we can add these sort of extra qualifications, but the basic idea, I think, is is really sound.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then you find elsewhere in the meditations basically the idea that, like, hey, so you meet these obstacles.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: The obstacle is not the hindrance to the way, the obstacle is the way.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like you you don't go around it, you go through it, and that's how you that's how you grow and get better.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I mean, that's that is or ought to be a a sort of universal idea.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a great thing, you know, I think, like, to tell kids when they encounter things that are that don't go the way that they want them to.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: You, you know, you don't run away from the thing that is difficult, but that you know, it's not like you have to find a way around it.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: That is the way.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: That is the path that you that you often have to go on.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: So things like this, I think, are really sort of immediately uh beneficial for all kinds of people, which to go back to what we were talking about a long time ago is um one of the reasons why it remains so uh so uh popular.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um well Eric, thank you so much.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now for fun, we have a final question to put you on the spot.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: If you were an ancient philosopher, who would you be?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've so I I thought about this because you sent me this question before, and I was thinking thinking like, oh wow, what am I gonna say to this?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I don't really know, I don't have a great answer to this question, but I've been really fascinated for a long time um by uh by the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's who I'm gonna go with.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: So Xenophanes is is kind of the earliest critic of kind of the of basically of the mythological or poetic view of of the gods that we have.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh so there's this critique, you know, of in kind of Homeric and Hesiodic poetry of gods behaving badly, something that we tend to associate especially with Plato, and then the Christians take over the Platonic critique of the gods, but we actually get it before, even before Plato, and he's the first one of the first ones to do it.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's another fragment of his that survives that, like, hey, if horses had uh had hands and feet, they would make gods that looked like horses.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: This like really um prescient sort of critique of man fashioning gods in his own image, right?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh yes, we Greeks, we have anthropomorphic and anthropomorphized gods, but if horses could make gods, horses would do the same thing.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's this idea there that, like, well, there's nothing automatically right.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that we do this doesn't make that we make gods like this doesn't mean that this is the way that the gods or God or any other animal would do the same thing if they had the ability.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: So wait, that must not be what God is like, or we can't start from that as the as the way of thinking about uh thinking about God.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the the way of that that sort of very early critique of of uh man making gods in his own uh image rather than the reverse.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think things like that, again, it's only only fragmentary, um, but uh there are things in there, you know, long before Socrates and before Plato, uh really important ideas, and he doesn't get as nearly as much airtime as Plato and Aristotle and uh and all of the other all the other big Socrates, all the other big famous guys.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna go with Xenophanes on that one.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Eric, thank you so much.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: And how fitting a philosopher who was really a poet.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.