The Life And Times Of Marcus Aurelius

By Rick Frederick Reactions to this essay are welcome at [email protected] Heraclitus: Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one. Living the others' death and dying the others' life. The Life & Times of Marcus Aurelius

INTRODUCTION Attention seeking introduction for a fairly long essay which few people will read unless zinged at the top. The number PI equals 3.1415926535…, ad infinitum. It is the number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter. It can’t be expressed as a fraction, and it goes on forever. It also shows up almost everywhere. Newtonian physics would be awash without it. Here’s the good part, the sum of its first 144 digits equals 666. As you may know, both 144 and 666 are pretty important numbers. 666 is some how or the other associated with the anti Christ, while 144 is 12 times 12, 12 is the number of lunar cycles per year, number of disciples, eggs in a carton, etc. This is not trivial coincidence. It is a manifestation of the historical lineage of many concepts around today, including the technically oriented pi. However, outside of its historical roots, it has no more importance than that of a trivial coincidence. Religious oriented numerology was not born out of thin air. Its birth ground was human kind’s early technological efforts. Our first efforts to accurately observe and advantageously alter our physical environment led us to notice that there are seven visible planetary bodies, twelve lunar cycles, 360 or so days per solar cycle, etc. Likely in accordance with the foregoing, early students of geometry chose to specify that there are 360 degrees in a circle, and the Babylonians chose to use a base six number system, which turned out to be a very efficient choice for a society keeping track of things with scratches on clay tablets. The remnants of numerology are strewn about religious traditions still with us, tending to leave the false impression that their significance is disconnected from the secular world. That may be true today, but the original purpose of religion was technological. Overtly religious thought and thought generally considered secular, circa 0 BCE, overlapped extensively, holding in common much crucial ground, arrived at by the methods of apprehending physical phenomena then prevalent. Those methods can best be summed up as limited to the observations possible to the unassisted eye. The un assisted eye does not see molecular level biological phenomena. It cannot see the physical components of planets and stars, which from their great distance in their movements look to be volitional beings. It did imagine to see volitional characteristics suggesting the presence of a 1

personality in every type of physical system, the wind, the rain, the sometimes good, the sometimes killing, rivers. This essay is a survey of secular and religious writings extant circa 0 BCE, give or take a century or so, which seeks to illustrate this common epistemological thread, which, though not unique to that time only, is far, far different from that of our own. What are today considered as no more than the organizing tools of thought, and thought alone, words and numbers, were inferred by the unassisted eye to embody forces and beings as real, although invisible, as the physical things to which they were applied. Magical names, magical numbers, sacred words, scripture, we today either disregard or label “spiritual”, and carefully keep it separate from, less it interfere with, practical, physical things like finding oil and keeping the lights turned on. Back then, the proper invocation of such things, in reversal of today, was thought to be crucial to keeping the lights turned on. Closer to the earth, for want of empirically grounded technology, their “spiritual” was their technology, leaving them to consider not forces and objects, the concrete and the abstract, but the conflicting interests of the body and spirit, and the heavens of the night sky versus this often very unpleasant earth. Our dichotomy is the objective and the subjective, the concrete and the abstract. Theirs had not yet transformed into that. Theirs was the earthly and the heavenly, body / spirit. If we indulge a label of our era, the nearest parallel to the belief systems of even the most advanced secular thinkers circa 0 BCE, is aboriginal animism. This should not be interpreted as harshly as it may sound. There is something primal in the inner motives of animism which is yet to be explained or satisfied. And the body of literature left to us, may be a superstition riddled artifice, but it is also, even that of the religious writers, a often perspicacious and eloquent treatment of the questions which we cannot resist asking, have never been able, and with the help of God’s benevolently opaque hand, never will be able, to answer. The study of historical schools of thought is mostly a study of the pervasive assumptions and in turn, questions, of the time, which were, in large part, based on the then available methods of perceiving physical phenomena. Accordingly, I have chosen the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as the organizing focal point of this essay. I think of his stuff as being an example of what we might call the cutting edge of the educated mainstream of the time. He wasn’t the brightest candle to ever burn, but was definitely far from the dullest. Of mild interest, is the fact that during his own lifetime he was the politically most powerful man in the world. So privileged, he no doubt had access to the most learned men of his time, the best of libraries and so forth. He was perhaps like Eugene McCarthy’s description of the ideal presidential candidate, who, “like a football coach”, is “smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important”. Reading his stuff in the context of what was around at the time, we find him as we might expect too, certainly able, occasionally eloquent, even approaching originality here and there, but never too far from the avant-garde mainstream of his day. In similar ways, Lyndon Johnson’s “Vantage Point” isn’t a bad read either. …

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Using the Meditations as a sort of baseline, I wander over to selected excerpts from Gnostic writings, Epictetus, canonical and non canonical early Christian writings, Lucretius, Plutarch, Virgil, Tactius, Justin, and some of the other “church fathers”. I have also allowed myself the indulgence of including some of the writings ascribed to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, although their life spans occurred circa 3rd - 4th centuries BCE, by way of the justification that their work was, along with the Greek language itself, a sort of Lingua Franca for many circa 0 BCE. Needless to say, the excerpts selected are those which I consider to be supportive of the points I seek to illustrate. Accordingly, the reader may find the following circular and that the passages not cited, to be as telling as the ones that are. To this, all I can really say is that I have done the best I could. Although starting with many pre conceptions, I did not start with what became my final conceptions. Part I Setting the Stage At least with regards to Marcus Aurelius and his “Mediations”, the enveloping context of our discussion is the comings and goings, and the culture reflected by it, of the Roman oligarchy. The accounts left to us are written from the perspective of those at the top of the heap, having been written by court toadies such as Josephus, Tactius, Plutarch, and Lucan. Accordingly, they are soaked with the self conscious histrionics of a ruling elite believing in a Roman version of “Manifest Destiny”. Their version was even more arrogant than ours. Rather than being based on secular Darwinian theory, as was the 19th century version, the “Fortune of Rome” was thought to be guided by, often dictated by, the Gods. An “expert” in such matters would be likely to find all sorts of omens and signs strewn about by the Gods indicating the nature of what was to come. Of course these things would usually be discovered by us frail humans only after the fact. To what extent these things were actually believed in by the ruling elite, and to what extent they were merely useful tales to tell a credulous public is hard to know: “. I should think it unbecoming the dignity of the task which I have undertaken, to collect fabulous marvels, and to amuse with fiction the tastes of my readers; at the same time I would not venture to impugn the credit of common report and tradition. The natives of these parts relate that on the day when the battle was being fought at Bedriacum, a bird of unfamiliar appearance settled in a much frequented grove near Regium Lepidum, and was not frightened or driven away by the concourse of people, or by the multitude of birds that flocked round it, until Otho killed himself; then it vanished. When they came to compute the time, it was found that the commencement and the end of this strange occurrence tallied with the last scenes of Otho's life. (Tactius, Histories, Book II) These view points did not just exist at the top, but seem to have been energetically embraced by those closer to the bottom of the heap as well. Circa 0 BCE was not a very nice time to be alive. The civil wars pitting Pompeii against Julius Caesar, circa 40 BCE, re erupted circa 65 CE, and coincided with the equally horrific Jewish - Roman war: 3

“Italy, however, was prostrated under sufferings heavier and more terrible than the evils of war. The soldiers of Vitellius, dispersed through the municipal towns and colonies, were robbing and plundering and polluting every place with violence and lust. Everything, lawful or unlawful, they were ready to seize or to sell, sparing nothing, sacred or profane. Some persons under the soldiers' garb murdered their private enemies. The soldiers themselves, who knew the country well, marked out rich estates and wealthy owners for plunder, or for death in case of resistance; their commanders were in their power and dared not check them. Caecina indeed was not so rapacious as he was fond of popularity; Valens was so notorious for his dishonest gains and peculations that he was disposed to conceal the crimes of others. The resources of Italy had long been impaired, and the presence of so vast a force of infantry and cavalry, with the outrages, the losses, and the wrongs they inflicted, was more than it could well endure.” (Tactius, Histories, Book II) During this period, with lives short and brutal, living conditions sparse, the gratification’s of war, not just for those calling the shots at the top, but for the common rank and file living the experience, was often a gratifying distraction. The Romans slaughtered each other in a series of insurrections and counter insurrections throughout much of the 1st Century. Far from all of this can be written off as being a result of this or that general or emperor getting his feathers ruffled or some other such rivalry within the oligarchy. Had that been true, somebody would have risen to the top of popular affections by being an advocate of peace. It may be that a few tried and were shouted down, their careers left unrecorded by the histories left to us by court toadies such as Tactius and Josephus. Still, the carnage is not likely to have happened upon some sea of long suffering, peace loving simple folk, wiser than their pompous, bloodthirsty leaders, but powerless to thwart the powers of the day. Rather, the urge to war was no small part of the culture of the day, both high and low. Revisionist idealizations not withstanding, people, common and ruling, go to war because they enjoy it, or at least think at the start that they are going to enjoy it. Or in the case of the soldiers, sometimes simply out of greed. This was the motive alleged, and it sounded well, but what every one said to himself was this: "The colony, situated as it is on level ground, may be taken by assault. If we attack under cover of darkness, we shall be at least as bold, and shall enjoy more license in plunder. If we wait for the light, we shall be met with entreaties for peace, and in return for our toil and our wounds shall receive only the empty satisfaction of clemency and praise, but the wealth of Cremona will go into the purses of the legates and the prefects. The soldiers have the plunder of a city that is stormed, the generals of one which capitulates." The centurions and tribunes were spurned away; that no man's voice might be heard, the troops clashed their weapons together, ready to break through all discipline, unless they were led as they wished. The intoxicating appeal of war was much more than economic. It involved much more than the usual notions of “glory”, adventure, and all that. For the common soldier “Booty” was more than the seizure of wine and precious metals, or even the seizure of human beings as slaves. Punctuating the boredom of a subsistence lifestyle, it was the 4

experience of pillage. It was the intoxicating, near orgiastic experience of exercising total power over other human beings. Theirs was the power to kill, rape, torture, tease, taunt, humiliate, burn, and in general sadistically toy with other people. Like a frenzied, curious little boy mashing toads with a rock, in order to experience first hand what it feels like to make something dead. Then and today, we all linger between seeking acceptance from others, demanding it, seeking to force it, begging for it, or rejecting it. It’s what we human beings do. All the necessary and normally enriching, but often painful, halting, nuances of human interaction seem to fall away when one party enjoys uncontested power over the other. This is the position sought by the rapist. Imagine then, the orgiastic gratification of the rampaging killer, shielded by the anonymity of a large group and intoxicated by its force. Acting like a member of a sort of God class, doing literally anything he wishes to the bodies and minds of an entire population. Tactius’s account of the sack of Cremona by the armies of Vespasian, is like a literary fossil, bleached and dried of a reality it manifests, but doesn’t really depict. It doesn’t mention flies alighting on split, bloated bodies, or how their plenitude numbed both pillagers and victims to a surrealistic disregard of them. It does not explain that who was butchered or not butchered had nothing to do with “virtue”, “destiny”, or any such thing, but only luck, good or bad. Its stilted, formal tone implies, that as distasteful as the whole thing was, it was simply the “fortune” of the people of Cremona. But when it tell us that the pillaging lasted FOUR DAYS, it tells us a lot. With the wine flowing freely, it was a four day drinking bender involving forty thousand killers, and a good size city full of victims. To understand it, close your eyes, visualize narrow alley ways teeming with some still living, some now dead; slashed, impaled, burnt, and raped bodies Hear an intermingled tumult of drunken and tormented voices. Imagine that you and your family are there, powerlessly trying to stay alive. And imagine living it for four days: Forty thousand armed men burst into Cremona, and with them a body of sutlers and camp-followers, yet more numerous and yet more abandoned to lust and cruelty. Neither age nor rank were any protection from indiscriminate slaughter and violation. Aged men and women past their prime, worthless as booty, were dragged about in wanton insult. Did a grown up maiden or youth of marked beauty fall in their way, they were torn in pieces by the violent hands of ravishers; and in the end the destroyers themselves were provoked into mutual slaughter. Men, as they carried off for themselves coin or temple-offerings of massive gold, were cut down by others of superior strength. Some, scorning what met the eye, searched for hidden wealth, and dug up buried treasures, applying the scourge and the torture to the owners. In their hands were flaming torches, which, as soon as they had carried out the spoil, they wantonly hurled into the gutted houses and plundered temples. In an army which included such varieties of language and character, an army comprising Roman citizens, allies, and foreigners, there was every kind of had a law of his own, and nothing was forbidden. For four days Cremona satisfied the plunderers. When all things else, sacred and profane, were settling down into the flames, the temple of Mephitis 5

outside the walls alone remained standing, saved by its situation or by divine interposition. Such was the end of Cremona, 286 years after its foundation. It was built in the consulship of Tiberius Sempronius and Cornelius Scipio, when Hannibal was threatening Italy, as a protection against the Gauls from beyond the Padus, or against any other sudden invader from the Alps. From the number of settlers, the conveniences afforded by the rivers, the fertility of the soil, and the many connexions and intermarriages formed with neighbouring nations, it grew and flourished, unharmed by foreign enemies, though most unfortunate in civil wars. Ashamed of the atrocious deed, and aware of the detestation which it was inspiring, Antonius issued a proclamation, that no one should detain in captivity a citizen of Cremona. The spoil indeed had been rendered valueless to the soldiers by a general agreement throughout Italy, which rejected with loathing the purchase of such slaves. A massacre then began; when this was known, the prisoners were secretly ransomed by their friends and relatives. The remaining inhabitants soon returned to Cremona; the temples and squares were restored by the munificence of the burghers, and Vespasian gave his exhortations. (Tactius) The memory and anticipation of such a sexually violent four day long euphoria, along with the momentums of custom, went a long ways to offsetting the dangers and deprivations of the campaign. A primary enabling rationalization of such license, the moral indifference of “fortune”, thought to be a nearly independent, volitional deity in its own right, was both convenient to and demanded by the citizens of Rome, high and low, wanting to indulge their most basic lusts and feel good about it, indeed wanting to institutionalize them. This notion of the deity of “fortune” was basic to and deeply characteristic of Roman civil orthodoxy as a whole. It was a partial explanation and personification of unexplained occurrences. With all other events tied to this God or that, these things couldn’t simply be left out to dry. An appropriately ambiguous, yet specific entity was needed, giving us the fickle mistress, “fortune”. This went well with the urge to rationalize Roman “Manifest Destiny”. Ruling the known world was the “Fortune” of Rome, as the battlefield miseries of its victims was theirs. The histories left to us by the academic pets of the oligarchy include massive doses of the idea that history is led by great men embodying national, even racial destinies (“Destiny” being a close cousin of “Fortune”). Of course, the Gods took interest in the doings of the mighty Caesar’s, perhaps even choosing to effect things and reveal future events. This all must have seemed high sounding to the Roman ear, but also fulfilled a much more basic need. It seems the Romans, like most people, simply enjoyed violence, even at times openly disparaging the “miseries of peace”. This was not the whole of the Roman community. It had a good side. A profound side. The idea that the “fate” of a nation is caught up in the destiny of some “great man” is not far from the notion that the fate of a nation is an extension of that ethnic group’s patron deity. In both cases, such notions certainly served the interests of the powers that were and so had a powerful momentum. The self edifying musings of these “great men”, as 6

reported by Plutarch, not only produced a body politic sustaining myth for their own time, but a somewhat new one some 1500 years later in the work of Shakespeare. When the “great men” speak of “virtue”, they speak primarily of what they believed to be the justification of their privileges. Much of their “virtue” seems to have been theatrical skill; the ability to impress and manipulate “the many”, whose souls Socrates imagined would enter into swine’s after their sojourn on this earth. The victors of historical conflicts are said to write “the history”. In this case, those a top the hierarchy have written the history, and the history they left behind is their tale of how they ran things. Oratory, rhetoric, was a technology of how to persuade, and to a lesser degree one of how to reason. In a theocracy, how one might persuade a subject of the rightness of “God’s Word”, and hence of the right of the rulers to rule, is hopefully not too divorced from how one might discover the truth through reason. In the civic orthodoxy of Rome, an orthodoxy which demanded that the emperor be worshipped and frequently deified previous emperors, it was also logically consistent to consider the art of persuasion and the art of reasoning to be nearly congruent. Though we point out the self interest in all of this, at least we can say that the art of persuading “the many” was not taken any further a field from rationality as it is than by say a Nike commercial. The objective of these efforts was not to persuade an individual, that’s a whole different type of interaction and therefore requires a different type of argument. The objective was to persuade groups. The art of persuasion is not a logical one, it is an effort to influence, by whatever means.. The appearance of logic is more often than not a mere trapping. More to the point, the purpose of group belief has to do with the maintenance of the bonds of that group. Whatever logical strength the belief may have, being but just another part of its means to influence, that logic may just as well be contrived as actual. Social beliefs have to do with social allegiances. The stuff of this is trust, faith, reciprocated altruism, in short the stuff of childhood. For Roman civil society, so self important, the inventor of the rule of the letter of law, the result is a beatific infantilism. Many of its themes were martial, and we are reminded of the boastful bravery of the playground. Yet, we are also reminded of the most fundamental realities of human interactions, and hence some of the most important truths. One’s political effectiveness, and thereby one’s claim to a divinely granted, cosmologically necessary destiny, was largely dependent on one’s ability to persuade. So we find left behind reports of resplendent demagoguery such as Mark Antony’s incitement of a riot following the assassination of Julius Caesar. The reputedly greatest demagogue of all, Cicero, is presented to us by Plutarch as a dispenser of the secular “Word”, perhaps almost as impressive as the “12 year old” Jesus figure impressing his elders outside the temple: “But after he had received the news of Sylla's death, and his body, strengthened again by exercise, was come to a vigorous habit, his voice managed and rendered sweet and full to the ear and pretty well brought into keeping with his general constitution, his friends at Rome earnestly soliciting him by letters, and Antiochus also urging him to return to public affairs, he again prepared for use his orator's instrument of rhetoric, and summoned into action his political faculties, diligently exercising himself in declamations and attending the most celebrated rhetoricians of the time. He sailed from Athens for Asia and Rhodes. Amongst the Asian masters, he conversed with 7

Xenocles of Adramyttium, Dionysius of Magnesia, and Menippus of Caria; at Rhodes, he studied oratory with Apollonius, the son of Molon, and philosophy with Posidonius. Apollonius, we are told, not understanding Latin, requested Cicero to declaim in Greek. He complied willingly, thinking that his faults would thus be better pointed out to him. And after he finished, all his other hearers were astonished, and contended who should praise him most, but Apollonius, who had shown no signs of excitement whilst he was hearing him, so also now, when it was over, sate musing for some considerable time, without any remark. And when Cicero was discomposed at this, he said, "You have my praise and admiration, Cicero, and Greece my pity and commiseration, since those arts and that eloquence which are the only glories that remain to her, will now be transferred by you to Rome." Plutarch Cicero, 106 -43 BCE, pg 2, Translated by John Dryden Such was the stuff of greatness. In a world where the “Word” was a subset of the very being of the creator, the ability to wield about words and to declaim with accuracy and expression, like Horowitz on the piano, the arguments of hallowed ancients, or even just the ability to make presentations of one’s own ideas artfully transcendent of an unnoticed pedestrian content, could obtain for one a personal legend. The belief that “rationality” is a divine gift, was held to be much more than mere parlor talk. It could also be the stuff of physical survival. Below, according to Plutarch, the legendary Cato is attacked and nearly killed in an event apparently orchestrated by his competitors in the oligarchy. Granting the very big if, that there is any truth to this report to begin with, it appears that Cato upset the financial transactions of a number of his peers by highlighting the bribery pervading officialdom. In retaliation, his enemies spread rumors asserting that he dispensed his senatorial duties while wearing no underwear, and often while drunk. Even Plutarch accepts this image of a bare bottomed old drunk at face value. At the height of this BCE “Meet the press Moment”, Cato is attacked by a stone throwing little mob, whom he subdues with a batch of well chosen words. Perhaps sounding something like a state of the union address from a bare bottomed drunk of our own time, Cato’s “voice was full and sounding, and sufficient to be heard by so great a multitude, and its vigour and capacity of endurance quite indefatigable, for he often would speak a whole day and never stop.”. The ability to crank out self important histrionics were often a matter of life and death. Today’s politicians meet political death or are able to survive on the basis of how ably they react on their feet to critical, televised, rhetorical moments. Apparently, in the life and death competitions of the Roman oligarchy, political death was usually accompanied by physical death. Cato was made praetor the following year; but, it seems, he did not do more honour and credit to the office by his signal integrity than he disgraced and diminished it by his strange behaviour. For he would often come to the court without his shoes, and sit upon the bench without any undergarment, and in this attire would give judgment in capital causes, and upon persons of the highest rank. It is said, also, he used to drink wine after his morning meal, and then transact the business of his office; but this was wrongfully reported of him. The people were at that time extremely corrupted by the gifts of those who sought offices, and most made a constant trade of selling their voices. Cato was eager utterly to root this corruption out of the commonwealth; he therefore persuaded the senate to make an order, that those who were chosen into any 8

office, though nobody should accuse them, should be obliged to come into the court, and give account upon oath of their proceedings in their election. This was extremely obnoxious to those who stood for the offices, and yet more to those vast numbers who took the bribes. Insomuch that one morning, as Cato was going to the tribunal, a great multitude of people flocked together, and with loud cries and maledictions reviled him, and threw stones at him. Those that were about the tribunal presently fled, and Cato himself being forced thence, and jostled about in the throng, very narrowly escaped the stones that were thrown at him, and with much difficulty got hold of the rostra; where, standing up with a bold and undaunted countenance, he at once mastered the tumult, and silenced the clamour; and addressing them in fit terms for the occasion, was heard with great attention, and perfectly quelled the sedition. Afterwards, on the senate commending him for this, "But I," said he, "do not commend you for abandoning your praetor in danger, and bringing him no assistance."Plutarch, Cato the Younger, pg 17 Exalted oratory was certainly one of the ways to become a great man of affairs. Another way was to be skillful at war. Much more than the X’s and the O’s of military strategy, success was a product of the ability to lead, to inspire the participants of what were close to a sort of armed rugby match. Below, Plutarch offers a no doubt embellished example of how Caesar was able to pull his military and hence political chestnuts out of the fire: “They soon routed his cavalry, and having surrounded the twelfth and seventh legions, killed all the officers, and had not Caesar himself snatched up a buckler and forced his way through his own men to come up to the barbarians, or had not the tenth legion, when they saw him in danger, run in from the tops of the hills, where they lay, and broken through the enemy's ranks to rescue him, in all probability not a Roman would have been saved. But now, under the influence of Caesar's bold example, they fought a battle, as the phrase is, of more than human courage, and yet with their utmost efforts they were not able to drive the enemy out of the field, but cut them down fighting in their defence. For out of sixty thousand men, it is stated that not above five hundred survived the battle, and of four hundred of their senators not above three.” Plutarch, Caesar, pg 9 Jewish armies marching to battle had their horn blowing priests, the Roman armies had their Caesar’s. Like religious figures, the great things that these great men would do was frequently said to be presaged by omens, as Plutarch relates the mixed results that Julius Caesar’s career would bring: “At last, in a sort of passion, casting aside calculation, and abandoning himself to what might come, and using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts, "The die is cast," with these words he took the river. Once over, he used all expedition possible, and before it was day reached Ariminum and took it. It is said that the night before he passed the river he had an impious dream, that he was unnaturally familiar with his own mother.” Plutarch, Caesar, pg 13

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Marcus’s resistance to the doctrine of great men makes him somewhat unique, and justifies us in granting him some sympathy. Most of them took it all too seriously. Even the seditious Spartacus was said to have been marked, albeit in the perception of the slave owners to be “with no happy event”, for future greatness: When he first came to be sold at Rome, they say a snake coiled itself upon his face as he lay asleep, and his wife, who at this latter time also accompanied him in his flight, his countrywoman, a kind of prophetess, and one of those possessed with the bacchanal frenzy, declared that it was a sign portending great and formidable power to him with no happy event.” Plutarch, Crassus, pg 4 Being associated with some distinguished forbearer or god was a very valuable asset for any practicing politician. Mark Antony was said to resemble the paintings and sculptures of Hercules, which was not surprising as it was rumored that the Antonys were descended from the half human half divine Hercules through Anton. Not unlike say Hollywood graduate President Reagan dying his hair, whenever he (Antony) had to appear before large numbers, “he wore his tunic girt low about the hips, a broadsword on his side, and over a large coarse mantle”. In a culture where Cleopatra achieved notice upon her grand entrance by having herself fanned by “beautiful boys”, it may also have come across as pretty sexy. Perhaps realizing that a little roguishness would add to the appeal of his image, Antony is said to have gone rambling about with Cleopatra “to disturb and torment people at their doors and windows, dressed like a servant-woman, for Antony also went in servant's disguise, and from these expeditions he often came home very scurvily answered, and sometimes even beaten severely, though most people guessed who it was.” Plutarch, Antony, pg 10 One of Plutarch’s favorite people seems to have been the tragic figure, Marcus Brutus, “who was descended from that Junius Brutus to whom the ancient Romans erected a statue of brass in the capitol among the images of their kings with a drawn sword in his hand, in remembrance of his courage and resolution in expelling the Tarquins and destroying the monarchy.” Plutarch, Brutus, pg 1 The literary mentor of our secular authors, Socrates, considered himself to be on a mission assigned to him by the Oracle of Delphi, if the writings attributed to Plato are to be believed. Indeed the accounts of his career left to us by Plato, being in lieu of anything actually left by Socrates himself, are somewhat reminiscent of the New Testament texts, the Socratic synoptics as it were. The details of the Jesus figure’s death, as reported by canonical texts are apparently calculated to meet the allegorical needs of the religious debates of the day while Socrates’ last reported act is to satisfy a debt, a detail one could reasonably suppose to have been a calculated fiction designed to respond to Aristophanes’s famous parody of arguments typical of the “thinkery”. We find other details in Socrates “Apology”, including his express denunciations of sophistry and atheism, which also seem pointedly addressed to the criticisms of Aristophanes. The fiction producing hand of a protective admirer is perhaps especially detectable when Socrates is made to speak the words of the ever modest, yet potent martyr: “and now of men who have condemned me I would fain prophesy to you for I am about to die and that is the hour in which men are gifted with prophetic power and I 10

prophesy to you who are my murderers that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you me you have killed because you have wanted to escape the accuser and not to give an account of your lives but that will not be as you suppose far otherwise for I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now accusers whom hitherto I have restrained and as they are younger they will be more severe with you and you will be more offended at them for if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring your lives you are mistaken that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable the easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others but to be improving yourselves this is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have condemned me” Socrates - Apology, pg 18 There seems to be little more reason to believe in the hiristocity of the purported biographical details of these writings than there is for those of the New Testament texts. Both bodies of literature, though they embody worthwhile philosophy, here and there, are largely works of fiction designed to elevate beyond questioning the founders of their respective movements, who plausibly, although not probably, were fictitious themselves. Religious myths, civic traditions, mass persuasive techniques, such as those used by the Roman oligarchs, even philosophical traditions with a social agenda, are all allies with similar, overlapping causes. The identity and form which they take has usually much more to do with the time and place of their origin, than with some internal tautological necessity. And those native, formative perspectives have more to do with, than any other single factor, the manner of the day of apprehending physical realities. Religious writers have their “scriptures”, portions of the “Word” passed down from the divine bodies residing in the sky above, while the Greek philosophers trace their heritage back to the astrology based numerology of the Pythagorean schools, and the self conscious histrionics of the Roman politicians allude to the pillars of the son of man, son of God, Hercules. Like the religious writer, who is awed by the might of God as displayed in nature, our down to earth Romans also find their physical surroundings a source of wonderment. Interestingly, Virgil associates and simultaneously extols the effects of wine and its origins within the bounties of nature: “In torrents of the wine-god; this shall be Fruitful of grapes and flowing juice like that We pour to heaven from bowls of gold, what time The sleek Etruscan at the altar blows His ivory pipe, and on the curved dish We lay the reeking entrails. If to rear Cattle delight thee rather, steers, or lambs, Or goats that kill the tender plants, then seek Full-fed Tarentum's glades and distant fields, Or such a plain as luckless Mantua lost Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan: There nor clear springs nor grass the flocks will fail, And all the day-long browsing of thy herds Shall the cool dews of one brief night repair. 11

Land which the burrowing share shows dark and rich, With crumbling soil- for this we counterfeit In ploughing- for corn is goodliest; from no field More wains thou'lt see wend home with plodding steers; Or that from which the husbandman in spleen” Virgil, The Georgics, Georgic II Wine provides emotional facilitation and hence inspiration. Physical deprivations, such as fasting followed by dehydration, induce hallucinations, and in the minds of some or our authors, inspiration. Our authors had no reason to regard drunken exuberance and hallucination, the dreams of daytime, as being so different from the dreams of night time. In turn, they saw no reason to regard the occasionally innovative thoughts of drunkenness, hallucinations, or the dreams of sleep as intrinsically inferior to the sober consciousness of day. Indeed, the very unreality of such things would often make them seem superior. Obviously not merely of the senses, they might often seem to be superior to mere extrapolations of the pedestrian, sensory data of waking life. It seemed an intuitive truth that the extraordinary is superior to the ordinary. Rather than “the land of milk and honey”, wouldn’t Moses’s wandering nomads have preferred “the land of milk and other animal based proteins”? Perhaps yes, in the realities lived by the authors of the Mosaic texts, but not in the literature itself, because the naturally occurring glucose of nature provides the images for the metaphors of the contrived glucose of the mind. The instant physiological gratification of sweet glucose is equally irresistible to thought as well. Something as good as honey is aptly thought of as a gift of the “birds of heaven”: “He is the lord Of all their labour; him with awful eye They reverence, and with murmuring throngs surround, In crowds attend, oft shoulder him on high, Or with their bodies shield him in the fight, And seek through showering wounds a glorious death. Led by these tokens, and with such traits to guide, Some say that unto bees a share is given Of the Divine Intelligence, and to drink Pure draughts of ether; for God permeates allEarth, and wide ocean, and the vault of heavenFrom whom flocks, herds, men, beasts of every kind, Draw each at birth the fine essential flame; Yea, and that all things hence to Him return, Brought back by dissolution, nor can death Find place: but, each into his starry rank,” Virgil, The Georgics, Georgic, Georgic IV “When heaven brings round the season, thou shalt strain Sweet honey, nor yet so sweet as passing clear, And mellowing on the tongue the wine-god's fire.” Virgil, The Georgics, Georgic IV

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That which pleasures the body also pleasures the mind, and gives it its vocabulary of exultation. The bees are given “Pure draughts of ether for God permeates all”, including the dark rich soil of the earth, which in a miracle of yearly renewal gives us the euphoria inducing wine grape. Our authors, and many of us still now, strongly associate euphoria with divinity. There are of course many definitions of God, but the most common boil down to that of ultimate happiness. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of God which does not include some ultimate fulfillment. which brings with it euphoria. To reach for God through thought is to strive for the philosophical brass ring, the total triumph over all difficulties and questions, everlasting euphoria. Some of our authors like to use words like “peace” and “tranquility”, which are but restful forms of euphoria. Sweet honey, sweet, intoxicating wine, the exuberant release of a “vision” which follows the pains of self deprivation, are all found on the same explorative wave length. These thoughts freely intermingle with, as they should, our emotions. The worship of nature, both the one on this planet and that of “the heavens above”, reverentially sees a benign authority, God, bringing flawless order to everything. This is the emotion love and trust. The beatific infantilism of civic orthodoxy, and the faith of “God’s children”. THE AUTHORS The literature which we study is an attempt to delineate the fundamental whys and wherefores of life by writers who cannot help but feel that the physical phenomena of nature is ascribable to unseen divine personalities, or alternatively some other sort of unseen symmetry, whose origin is to be found in the divinely distant celestial orbs which they saw in the night sky. The elements, literally the blood and guts, of organic matter, was of course observed, but the micro mechanics, the chemistry of it, invisible to the unassisted eye, was not even imagined. The resultant mis conceptions were profoundly integrated into the writings of both the religious and non religious writers of the time and hence there are commonalties in Gnostic, Judaic, early Christian, Socratic, and Stoic traditions, to name but some, which are alien to more recent traditions. Today, most of us prefer to imagine a connection between ourselves and whichever historical tradition we feel ourselves to be continuing. Religions believe themselves derived from some original “scriptures”. Non religious traditions, often anti religious traditions, might feel connected to their favorite Greek philosophers, etc. The truth is that we share more with even those who are seemingly adamantly opposed to us in our own time in how we perceive and describe things than we do with writers of the past, however much we might admire them. Our common awareness of the molecular mechanics of chemistry and our habit of regarding natural phenomena as impersonal physical systems, unites us as inhabitants of our own time, while it greatly distances us from even those circa 0 BCE, whose metaphors we admire and imagine ourselves to be continuing. And that, by and large is what mostly remains from then, the metaphors. Most of us no longer believe that divine volitional personas inhabit and animate physical phenomena, yet we still enjoy and find the resultant images of those personifications heuristically instructive. We find ourselves better equipped to understand the nuances of personalities 13

than the dynamics of impersonal physical systems. We know that these things are things, but find explanative metaphors using individual, familiarly human, personalities easier and more fun to think about. To make these metaphors more believable and hence more enjoyable, we don’t disown, but instead no longer allow ourselves to remember the animistic convictions of circa 0 BCE, as we seek to rationalize our cultural attachments to whichever movement of back then with which our personally favored system of thought is facilely attached to. Anti religious thinkers prefer to think of Epictetus, Lucretius, the Socratic school etc. as being vastly superior to the religious thinking of the day. They weren’t. Religious thinkers who want to believe that their “scriptures”, being a product of divine revelation, are above all this, make the, literally, literal minded proposition that God writes books, which we ought to reference like some sort of of moral recipe book. Hopefully, not too many mind the suggestion that there is a progression occurring in human thought and that therefore the word “primitive” ought to have a positive connotation. However malleable our perception of the past may be, the truth of it is not. There is indeed a non relative truth of what did and didn’t happen, what theories of life were and were not pervasive, although, not having been there, we cannot know it exactly. Indeed, even if we had been there, we would not be able to remember it exactly, or even know it exactly at the moment of occurrence. As we more honestly try to appreciate what we can know, on the basis of the merit of the writings left behind, we should feel enriched, rather than disillusioned. The abandonment of illusion is always enriching, but in the case of the better writers circa 0 BCE, the writings themselves are often cognitively rich and lyrically eloquent, as they seek to paint the realities of our condition which we still consider the most important, and so fire the passion of our imagination. During any given epoch, there are commonalties of the intellectual vernacular, from which the disparate, often antagonistic belief systems of the period initiate their inquests. Every question presupposes its answer, even if that answer only be that the question can or should be answered. These commonalties may be more the questions of the time rather than the beliefs of the time. These questions may be as fundamental as individual words themselves, each word assuming the existence of some corresponding reality, and then wondering through its usage what that reality indeed is. CONCEPTS: BIOLOGICAL CORRUPTION EQUATED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL IMPERFECTION The physical circumstances of our authors, as with people in all times and circumstances, was at the background of their thinking. That circumstance was a physical subsistence consequential to a technology which, even for the very rich, was incapable of fending off the tribulations of physical life on this earth. Staying hydrated, fed, sheltered, and simply clean was ceaselessly difficult, and in the case of cleanliness, we may presume, rare. For us and for them being clean after being physically unclean for a time is exhilarating and refreshing, and is so in a fundamental, psychological sense. We notice dirt and grime in much more than a cosmetic way, we are depressed by it. This never ending acquaintance 14

with and never ending desire to escape, dirt, one may reasonably speculate, is reflected in the cleansing, cross cultural ritual of baptism by water. The continual input of the sensations of physical living experienced by the body is the material out of which the sub conscious is formed, and the intuitions of the subconscious is the material out of which the explanative metaphors of consciousness are groped together. Not far behind is the emotional apparatus identifying what feels good and what doesn’t. Then follows the order imposing lexicon of rationality with its transcendental attempts to elevate those initial preferences to the comfortingly non relative conceptual level of “true’ and “untrue”. Reaching back for sustenance to what our bodies tells us feels good and bad, among the words first associated with true and untrue, vitreous and sinful, appears to have been “clean” and “unclean”. “Cleanliness is next to godliness”, when stated during the times of our authors, was often meant literally. Ultimately a disregard for the needful passions of the body is prescribed as the best approach to the ideal, which, understandably, is thought to be an escape from the trials of our physical existence. “Only by the submission of his soul to all the ordinances of god can his flesh be made clean only thus can it really be sprinkled with waters of ablution only thus can it really be sanctified by waters of purification and only thus can he really direct his steps to walk blamelessly thru all the vicissitudes of his destiny in all the ways of god in the manner which he has commanded without turning either to the right or left and without overstepping any of gods words then indeed he will be acceptable before god like an atonement offering which meets with his pleasure and then indeed will he admitted to the covenant of the community forever” The Manual of Discipline pg 3 Thoughts cannot help but draw reference from the sensory experience provided by the physical existence of the body whose neuro chemical reactions are the events by which they exist, and are the only way by which we may know them. Thought which attempts to arrive at some sort of conclusion, must have a beginning and an end, however intermediate or provisional it might be. It must dare the assertions of its founding assumptions and thereby declare that which it considers to be of value. It appears that humans began those efforts by looking upward. Regally oblivious to the storms and petty strife’s of this world, the majestically orbiting orbs and points of light in the “heavens” above emblazoned in the minds of our authors and their predecessors the ultimate example of cyclical regularity. The seemingly unvarying order of their movements suggest causality, and the notion of time. Marcus Aurelius, regal in his own earthly right, is led to a sort of cosmic pantheism: “I Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.” Marcus - Meditations, Book IV In turn, he arrives at perhaps not a euphoric but at least a serviceable notion of immortality:

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“I am composed of the formal and the material; and neither of them will perish into non-existence, as neither of them came into existence out of non-existence. Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on for ever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on for ever in the other direction. For nothing hinders us from saying so, even if the universe is administered according to definite periods of revolution.” Marcus - Meditations, Book V He even seems quite prepared to accept a notion of physical things, the components of nature, as being without divine breath, merely the inanimate pawns of physics, “THE substance of the universe is obedient and compliant; and the reason which governs it has in itself no cause for doing evil, for it has no malice, nor does it do evil to anything, nor is anything harmed by it. But all things are made and perfected according to this reason.” Marcus - Meditations, Book VI Like those beautifully regular planets and stars, their daughter, physics, is consummately rational: “Frequently consider the connexion of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For in a manner all things are implicated with one another, and all in this way are friendly to one another; for one thing comes in order after another, and this is by virtue of the active movement and mutual conspiration and the unity of the substance. Adapt thyself to the things with which thy lot has been cast: and the men among whom thou hast received thy portion, love them, but do it truly, sincerely.” Marcus Meditations, Book VI Above, Marcus, along with others of his time, regards “Love” as a type of affinity, the binding attraction of the jig saw pieces of a rational construct, being brought together by a benevolent divine design.. Being the leader of the political community of the day, not surprisingly his notion of love as a component of rationality is part and parcel of the human community as well. Reading Epictetus (c.55-c.135 CE.), one of Marcus’s self reported intellectual mentors, we see where much of this comes from: CHAPTER 11 (The Discourses, Book IV) About Purity “Some persons raise a question whether the social feeling is contained in the nature of man; and yet I think that these same persons would have no doubt that love of purity is certainly contained in it, and that, if man is distinguished from other animals by anything, he is distinguished by this. When, then, we see any other animal cleaning itself, we are accustomed to speak of the act with surprise, and to add that the animal is acting like a man: and, on the other hand, if a man blames an animal for being dirty, straightway 16

as if we were making an excuse for it, we say that of course the animal is not a human creature. So we suppose that there is something superior in man, and that we first receive it from the Gods. For since the Gods by their nature are pure and free from corruption, so far as men approach them by reason, so far do they cling to purity and to a love of purity. But since it is impossible that man's nature can be altogether pure being mixed of such materials, reason is applied, as far as it is possible, and reason endeavours to make human nature love” Was this notion only peculiar to emperors and Greek Stoics with an intense need to at least stay on the better side of the Roman intelligentsia? That last bit above that “since it is impossible that man's nature can be altogether pure being mixed of such materials,” said “materials” including presumably earthly ones, while “the Gods by their nature are pure and free from corruption”, and the source of the “reason” that “endeavours to make human nature love”, goes nicely with, arguably is an extrapolation of Socrates injunction that the body is a “mass of evils”. Socrates preceded our other two by 300 years plus, but he was a hallowed figure in the minds of our secular authors, sort of their pedagogic answer to Moses. And we will find some of the Christian / Judaic apologists of the time (i.e. Josephus, Justin) going to some pains to argue that their scriptures were the real inspiration of Socrates, Plato, and a bunch of other folks whose intellectual lineage they thought was worth arguing about.: “CE dispatches, He would not have said, shall devour. And so, too, Plato, when he says, "The blame is his who chooses, and God is blameless,"(5) took this from the prophet Moses and uttered it. For Moses is more ancient than all the Greek writers. And whatever both philosophers and poets have said concerning the immortality of the soul, or punishments after death, or contemplation of things heavenly, or doctrines of the like kind, they have received such suggestions from the prophets as have enabled them to understand and interpret these things. And hence there seem to be seeds of truth among all men; but they are charged with not accurately understanding [the truth] when they assert contradictories..” The First Apology of Justin, Chapter LXIV Socrates himself may not have been contemporaneous to Marcus and Epictetus, but memories and myths regarding him certainly were, were to the point of being part of the conceptual lingua franca of the time. And his point that having to take a poop can be quite the distraction from the contemplation of “airy ether” and such things, is well taken by both secular and religious writers circa 0 BCE. The inherent inferiority of earthly material is also the germane seed of much of religious thought. The earthly body, according to Judaic tradition, among others, derived from clay, is corruptible, it rots. The heavenly bodies are indestructible and seemingly unchanging in their cycles. In contrast, the human body, indeed all things earthly, never stop changing. How could such malleable and perishable material such as is found on this earth ever constitute or produce a universal constant, non relative truth? Not only that, these earthly things do not just change, they rot, or, in the words of our authors, are subject to “corruption”, bringing up, the scary and exhilarating question of mortality:

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“…you are now incredulous because you have never seen a dead man rise again. But as at first you would not have believed it possible that such persons could be produced from the small drop, and yet now you see them thus produced, so also judge ye that it is not impossible that the bodies of men, after they have been dissolved, and like seeds resolved into earth, should in God's appointed time rise again and put on incorruption. For what power worthy of God those imagine who say, that each thing returns to that from which it was produced, a” The First Apology of Justin, Chapter XIX It is only natural that Justin and many another religious thinker considers it self evident that any discovery of absolute truth will include the resolution of this question. The resolution they suggest is the doctrine of salvation and eternal life, which can only occur, of course, by means outside and higher than this corruptible earthly realm. Although he seems to reject the notion that the heavens are of divine design, even fervently anti religious Lucretius, writing circa 50 BCE, ascribes immortality to its most fundamental components, almost pre saging the modern physicist’s belief in the imperishability of matter/energy: “And out of what does Ether feed the stars? For lapsed years and infinite age must else Have eat all shapes of mortal stock away: But be it the Long Ago contained those germs, By which this sum of things recruited lives, Those same infallibly can never die, Nor nothing to nothing evermore return. And, too, the selfsame power might end alike All things, were they not still together held By matter eternal, shackled through its parts, Now more, now less. A touch might be enough To cause destruction. For the slightest force Would loose the weft of things wherein no part Were of imperishable stock. But now Because the fastenings of primordial parts Are put together diversely and stuff Is everlasting, things abide the same Unhurt and sure, until some power comes on Strong to destroy the warp and woof of each: Nothing returns to naught; but all return At their collapse to primal forms of stuff. Lo, the rains perish which Ether-father throws Down to the bosom of Earth-mother; but then Upsprings the shining grain, and boughs are green Amid the trees, and trees themselves wax big And lade themselves with fruits; and hence in turn The race of man and all the wild are fed; Hence joyful cities thrive with boys and girls; And leafy woodlands echo with new birds; Hence cattle, fat and drowsy, lay their bulk 18

Along the joyous pastures whilst the drops Of white ooze trickle from distended bags; Hence the young scamper on their weakling joints Along the tender herbs, fresh hearts afrisk With warm new milk. Thus naught of what so seems Perishes utterly, since Nature ever Upbuilds one thing from other, suffering naught To come to birth but through some other's death. Back on the religious side, Barnabas, tells us that we escape the lot of mortal beings only because “the Lord endured to deliver His flesh unto corruption, that by the remission of sins we might be cleansed,…” Barnabas 5:1 In “Thomas the Contender” we find that “all bodies […] the beasts are begotten”, which, though it is not explicitly pointed out, is a no no for anything aspiring to be the “first cause”, the “unbegotten one”, God. Tellingly, these living but perishable earthly bodies may only sustain themselves for even just their brief duration by consuming other perishable bodies. The synergistic wholeness of it all seemed compelling to the point of being self evident: “The savior said, "All bodies [...] the beasts are begotten [...] it is evident like [...] [...] this, too, those that are above [...] things that are visible, but they are visible in their own root, and it is their fruit that nourishes them. But these visible bodies survive by devouring creatures similar to them with the result that the bodies change. Now that which changes will decay and perish, and has no hope of life from then on, since the body is bestial. So just as the body of the beasts perishes, so also will these formations perish. Do they not derive from intercourse like that of the beasts? If it, too derives from intercourse, how will it beget anything different from beasts? So, therefore, you are babes until you become perfect." THOMAS THE CONTENDER, page 1 On the face of it, for our authors, the proposition that that all the unpleasant dirt and maggot producing blood and guts of this world must be abandoned in favor of the seemingly flawless order of the majestically distant planetary bodies they saw each night in the sky above, if genuine, lasting truth is to be known, is not at all an unreasonable one. Does it not stand to reason that a source of tautological certitude should itself not include any variables or change? The obvious fallibility of mortality has reared its ugly head, and although our authors have moved beyond the epistemological viewpoint (or least have made a good start of it) where the physical forces of nature are animated by capricious, human like, divine personalities, the grip maintained by their observations of physical realities, all limited to those available to the unassisted eye, is as nearly complete. The most modern like writer in our survey, Lucretius, writing circa 50 BCE, addresses the same issues as his religious minded counterparts, though devoutly following the lead of Epicurius, he is adamantly atheist, arriving at what I would call, although he wouldn’t, a sort of functional Deism. Though he argues against the reality of God, he finds no escape 19

from the humbling need to explain infinity, with finite terms. The heavens and hence the origin of our world is comprised of a dynamic, ever changing, yet imperishable universe. “…the fastenings of primordial parts, Are put together diversely and stuff Is everlasting, things abide the same Unhurt and sure, until some power comes on Strong to destroy the warp and woof of each:” (see below). This explains why and how changes occur, without resort to a deity, yet fails to provide an original cause. So everything is endlessly recycled with nothing “returning to naught” (see below). We are not all that far removed from the doctrine of the imperishability of matter and energy proudly proclaimed by 20th century micro physicists. Pretty heady stuff for a guy writing 2050 years ago, when most of those around him considered it self evident that epileptic seizures were the product of demonic possession and resorted to God to explain the origins of dreams as readily as they did to explain the wind. “And out of what does Ether feed the stars? For lapsed years and infinite age must else Have eat all shapes of mortal stock away: But be it the Long Ago contained those germs, By which this sum of things recruited lives, Those same infallibly can never die, Nor nothing to nothing evermore return. And, too, the selfsame power might end alike All things, were they not still together held By matter eternal, shackled through its parts, Now more, now less. A touch might be enough To cause destruction. For the slightest force Would loose the weft of things wherein no part Were of imperishable stock. But now Because the fastenings of primordial parts Are put together diversely and stuff Is everlasting, things abide the same Unhurt and sure, until some power comes on Strong to destroy the warp and woof of each: Nothing returns to naught; but all return At their collapse to primal forms of stuff. Lo, the rains perish which Ether-father throws Down to the bosom of Earth-mother; but then Lucretius, On The Nature of Things, pg 6 The end result, our sustenance and the continuation of our green earth, provokes, commendably, a celebratory chord in Lucretius. Perhaps a rebirth which, like the disillusioned followers of the Jesus figure following the crucifixion, he felt compelled to postulate following the plague of Athens. Upsprings the shining grain, and boughs are green Amid the trees, and trees themselves wax big And lade themselves with fruits; and hence in turn The race of man and all the wild are fed; Hence joyful cities thrive with boys and girls; 20

And leafy woodlands echo with new birds; Hence cattle, fat and drowsy, lay their bulk Along the joyous pastures whilst the drops Of white ooze trickle from distended bags; Hence the young scamper on their weakling joints Along the tender herbs, fresh hearts afrisk With warm new milk. Thus naught of what so seems Perishes utterly, since Nature ever Upbuilds one thing from other, suffering naught To come to birth but through some other's death.” Lucretius, On the nature of things, pg 6 His most heartfelt objection to religion seems not to be so much one of argument, but an objection to the oppressive tyranny of a gloriously terrifying deity: They set the seats and vaults of gods, because Across the sky night and the moon are seen To roll along- moon, day, and night, and night's Old awesome constellations evermore, And the night-wandering fireballs of the sky, And flying flames, clouds, and the sun, the rains, Snow and the winds, the lightning’s, and the hail, And the swift rumblings, and the hollow roar Of mighty menacings forevermore. O humankind unhappy!- when it ascribed Unto divinities such awesome deeds, And coupled thereto rigours of fierce wrath!” Lucretius, On The Nature of Things, pg 145 An interesting thought. That the bloody waste and political absolutism of Theocracy is an expression of the terror of the elements. Differences in social temperament aside, the end of the analysis of our religious and secular authors is the same. This earth is conjoined with and a product of an infinite, imperishable universe. And that in contrast to its source of origination, everything on this earth, is ever changing perishable, and mortal, the exact opposite of the immortal divine. CONCEPTS: ORIGINAL CAUSATION / THE WORD According to reconstructive descriptions of the spoken language of the pre literate Sumerians, attempts to represent something with a symbol, using the sounds made by the human voice, included in its earliest forms, mimicry. Facial expressions, one might suppose, were the first communicative symbols used by people. It appears plausible that the first words used by people were, sensibly, selected in conjunction with an appropriate facial expression. The equivalent in modern language would be uttering the word “yeech” with a contorted facial expression to indicate that something tastes bad. One would also 21

expect that pointing and gesturing might also have been used to add clarity. A very gradual refinement and expansion of these coordinated audio and visual communicative symbols, following this theory, would have taken place. Combinations of sounds, expressions, and gestures would be selected which appropriately reflected the pleasurable, un pleasant, edible, inedible, etc., qualities of the things to be represented. Such was the developmental groundwork for the evolution of written symbols of communication, as described by John A. Halloran below: The Proto-Sumerian Language Invention Process “Written Sumerian contains many examples of homonymy, differently written signs that at least in the Akkadian transcription appear to have been pronounced the same, such as ka, 'mouth' and ká, 'gate'. Also, individual signs show many instances of polysemy, using the same sign or word to mean many things, such as 'flower', 'remote', 'ancient' and 'joy' for the ul sign. This raises the question, "What is a word?" Before the invention of writing, when language was only spoken, a word was something other than a dictionary entry. More primary than words are objects and actions. Early humans faced the task of agreeing on vowel-consonant combinations that would point at all the real objects that existed in their world. The speech sounds upon which they agreed were of a more limited number than the objects at which they had to point. Early humans used words as deictic pointers. Context made it clear at what object or action they were pointing. Prior to speech invention, humans had to be expert at deducing from context the significance of another human's actions, expressions, or gestures. Polysemy could run rampant in early language because listeners would understand from the context at what speakers were using their words to point. By inventing multiple homonymous written signs to represent the more diverse concepts shared by particular consonant-vowel combinations, the Sumerian scribes sought to order, organize, and separate into separate word-signs some of the less related deictic objects of polysemic speech words.” People apparently actively acted out their intended meanings. Given this context, it is not surprising to find that people believed words, written and spoken, to not just represent, but in some mystical way to be the things they represented. It may not be logical, but it certainly makes sense. We have so far been making much of the “unassisted eye”, in this case we should perhaps risk saying something about the pre literate mind. Let us limit ourselves to observing that the ability to distinguish between mere similarity and sameness, the ability to reason by analogy without drawing unjustified “causal” (whatever precisely that problematic word might mean) inferences is greatly facilitated by, perhaps requires, the assistance of thoughts which have been written down, and, presumably, analyzed more than once. If that sounds unreasonable, it may be because we take the opportunity to routinely do that for granted, and anything that is taken for granted, is most always fundamental. Such is the backdrop for our review of the concept of “the Word”, as intended by our authors. Old habits, especially intellectual ones, die hard. We will find that words, first fulfilling their role as symbols by way of their imitative properties, flow easily into a role where they are imagined to not just carry a communicative import, but a causative one. 22

Not unexpectedly, the belief that perfection may only be found somewhere other than this mortal earthly realm extends to the cosmological - creation doctrines as in the following excerpt from a Gnostic creation epic from just prior to or just after 0 BCE: “the living spirit and his entourage of gods separated the mixture from the main mass of darkness then the king of light ordered him to create the present world and to build it out of these mixed parts in order to liberate those light parts from the dark parts to this end the archons who had incorporated the light and thereby became weakened are overcome and out of their skins and carcasses heaven and earth are made though it is said that the archons are fettered to the firmament still fastened to their outstretched skins which form the heavens and though on the other hand earth and mountains are said to have been formed from their flesh and bones the sequence makes it clear that all this neither have they lost their demonic life nor has the darkness in general lost its power to act” PRIMAL MYTHS ED BARBAR SPROUL, The Creation According to Mani Gnostic doctrines such as the one above are generally thought of as “mystical”, with the inference being that their ambiguity belies intuitive insight. However, except for perhaps ambiguous syntax, the subject matter itself is quite specific, one might even say “earthly”. Light enables one to see and darkness precludes it, so light is a truth revealing epistemological facility while darkness is an inability to know. The association is more than metaphorical. What the light illuminates and the darkness hides are the “mixed parts” of gods, earth, “firmaments”, “flesh and bones”, being moved about from here to there, in a way reminiscent of Tiamek’s dismemberment by Marduk (Babylonian creation epic), giving us the final arrangement, reality as we know it. Following shortly in the Gnostic cosmology comes the “Holy Word” or “Logos”, and we are not conceptually or etymologically far from the concept “logic”: 5 “from out of the light a holy word (logos) came over the nature and unmixed fire leapt out of the humid nature upward to the height it was light and keen and active at the same time and the air being light followed the fiery breath rising up as far as the fire from earth and water so that it seemed suspended from it but earth and water remained in their place intermingled so that the earth was not discernible apart from the water and they were kept in inaudible motion through the breath of the word which was borne over them” FROM THE POIMANDRES OF HERMES TRISMEGISTUS , Paragraph IV With the realm of logic and illogic, the dark “bestial” realm and divine realm of the “light”, thus established, the Gnostic account is able to provide an account of the origins of original sin, which is really just another way of putting the whole thing. Marcus and Epipectus tell us that rationality is our gift from, connection to, the divine realm, while similarly, Adam experiences the same connection via “Jesus” and concludes by denouncing his body in a dramatic, yet Socratic fashion: “and Adam examined himself and discovered who he was Jesus showed him the fathers on high and his own self cast onto all things to the teeth of the panther and 23

elephants devoured by them that devour consumed by them that consume eaten by dogs mingled and bound in all that is imprisoned in the stench of darkness he raised him up and made him eat of the tree of life then Adam cried and lamented terribly he raised his voice like a roaring lion tore his dress smote his breast and spoke woe woe unto the shaper of my body unto those who fettered my soul and unto the rebels that enslaved me” The Creation According to Mani Canonical Christianity puts the matter even more directly while adding its notion of salvation through the offices of a mediator between the earthly realm and the heavenly one, the “son of man”: “if you do not eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood, you will not have life in you” John, 6:53 This mediator is necessary for: “god is spirit, and those who worship, must worship in spirit and truth” John, 4:24 The “flesh of the son of man” is available for earthly consumption, being that it belongs to a “son of man”, yet bridges the gap between a god who is “spirit” since “but of god himself, the word was made flesh, he lived among us” John, 1:14 “it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer, the words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life: John, 6:63 The religious asceticism of the Gnostics, John, Barnabas, and Justin, was not just based on a desire to avoid the impure passions of the flesh. It was premised on the belief that the divine, unchanging realm of the firmament above was the only possible source of philosophical correctness. In their vernacular, this was the area illuminated by the light of the holy spirit etc., but not to be seen on this earth. There will therefore have to be a “advocate” which will act as a bridge between this world and the one in the sky: “I shall ask the father, and he will give you another advocate, to be with you forever, that spirit of truth, whom the world can never receive, since it neither sees nor knows him, but you know him because he is with you and in you I will not leave you orphans I will come back to you” John, 14:16 The philosophical mentor of their contemporaneous secular counterparts, Socrates, though perhaps reasoning more systematically than his religious counterparts, is of a similar mind. The seeable world, this world, is obviously continuously changing, leaving only the unseen world as that which might be unchanging and therefore eternal: “well then he said let us suppose that there are two types of existence one seen one unseen let us suppose them the seen is the changing the unseen the unchanging 24

that may also be supposed and further is not one part of us body and the rest of us soul” SOCRATES - PHAEDO EX2 Both our religious and secular authors maintain that immortality is only possible in the “unseen”, “unchanging”, heavens. The concept time is derived from observations of the chronological, season related, cycles of the heavens. Truth is set of rules given down to this piece of rock on which we stand, from the beings and planetary essences observable above. Words, especially the “Word”, is not the subjective means of “I think…”, for it is a tangible thing that comes from the above, the physically above, and as such is an independent entity with properties and powers in its own right. For our author’s, a belief in holy words, magical words, was a self evident part of the natural sciences. “I think, therefore I am”, is instead “God thinks, therefore I am”. The religious “Word” overlaps in function with other divine agents and is therefore linked to the “son” by the “advocate”. In fact, according to John, “in the beginning was the Word: the word was with God and the word was God”. The Word is next described by John as “the light”, which (who) “was made flesh” and is “the only son of the father” that is to become the only path leading from the earthly realm to the domain of immortality in the sky above us. Consistent with the above, Marcus thought the most desired objects of philosophy to the domain of the gods only: “I did not fall into the hands of any sophist, and that I did not waste my time on writers of histories, or in the resolution of syllogisms, or occupy myself about the investigation of appearances in the heavens; for all these things require the help of the gods and fortune.” Marcus - Meditations, Book I Epipectus also acknowledges the gifts of the gods and chastises those who would lose the true meaning of ancient mysteries by becoming over concerned with the conveying symbols, words. “The words are the same: how do the things done here differ from those done there?" Most impious man, is there no difference? these things are done both in due place and in due time; and when accompanied with sacrifice and prayers, when a man is first purified, and when he is disposed in his mind to the thought that he is going to approach sacred rites and ancient rites. In this way the mysteries are useful, in this way we come to the notion that all these things were established by the ancients for the instruction and correction of life. But you publish and divulge them out of time, out of place, without sacrifices, without purity; you have not the garments which the hierophant ought to have, nor the hair, nor the head-dress, nor the voice, nor the age; nor have you purified yourself 25

as he has: but you have committed to memory the words only, and you say: "Sacred are the words by themselves." Epipectus, The Discourses, Book III, Chapter 21 The validity of the Word is tied into the idea of God as an original cause. However, no less sweeping is our secular author’s concept of original cause: “The universal cause is like a winter torrent: it carries everything along with it.” Marcus - Meditations, Book IX All our authors find the Word no less a real and compelling presence than the budding community of natural scientists would find the “laws of nature” to be. That is because they too, like the natural scientist, are basing their thoughts on what they consider to be the realities of nature. Our Gnostic writers bring it all together, taking us back to not just the nature of physical reality, but also its origin, and along with it the origin of rationality, god, the Word, nous and all other corollary concepts: 10 “forthwith the word of god leapt out of the down ward borne elements upward into the pure physical creation (the demiurgical sphere) and became united with the nouws demiurge for he was of the same substance and thus the lower elements of nature were left without reason so that they were now mere matter 11 and together with the word the nous demiurge encompassing the circles and whirling them with thunderous speed set his creations circling in endless revolution for it begins where it ends and this rotation of the spheres according to the will of the nous produced out of the lower elements irrational animals for these elements had not retained the word (air water earth the last two now separated each producing its own animals androgynous ones as appears later)” Gnostic nous ex3 One’s understanding of reality may only be derived from the source of that reality, God’s Word. The nature of human language, not surprisingly, is subordinate to the nature of God’s language. The names of things are not mere labels. They derive from their divine origin and therefore do not just relate, but embody their essential qualities. In the words of Epictetus: “Logic also produces no fruit." As to this indeed we shall see: but then even if a man should rant this, it is enough that logic has the power of distinguishing and examining other things, and, as we may say, of measuring and weighing them. Who says this? Is it only Chrysippus, and Zeno, and Cleanthes? And does not Antisthenes say so? And who is it that has written that the examination of names is” Epictetus, The Discourses, Book I, Chapter 17 Words are not to be taken lightly, especially names. They are the means by which the earthly may gain the divine, immortality. In john, “the son of man”, the mediator, the earthly yet divine bridge from this world to the celestial one, prays to the original cause: “keep those you have given me true to your name so that they may be one like us…I am not asking you to remove them from the world but to protect them from the evil 26

one…consecrate them in the truth your word is truth…I pray not only for these but for those also who through their words will believe in me may they all be one father may they be one in us as you are in me and I am in you…I have made your name known to them and it will continue to make it known so that the love with which you loved me may be in them and so that I may be in them” name 2 john The persuasive metaphor being used is not just a social one but an ontological one. A name is regarded as an inextricable part of the causative origin of what it labels. “God”, in Hebrew, though John as we have it today was written in Greek, is “Yahweh”, “I am that I am”, the closest thing to an expression of original causality that man’s tail chasing syntax can provide. It follows for our religious authors (Justin) that this original cause, “he is that he is”, need only will that things are to be and they are: “How great is the power of God! His bare volition was the creation of the universe. For God alone made it, because He alone is truly God. By the bare exercise of volition He creates; His mere willing was fob lowed by the springing into being of what He willed.” The Second Apology of Justin, Chapter III This is how it must be. “His bare volition”, was the cause of all because any type of volition which requires assistance is not truly independent and therefore purely volitional. A name is a word, which does not just express the essence of its possessor, but embodies it. Other words, also, though to perhaps a lesser extent, do more than just express, especially the “Word”: “CHAP. CXXVIII.--THE WORD IS SENT NOT AS AN INANIMATE POWER, BUT AS A PERSON BEGOTTEN OF THE FATHER'S SUBSTANCE. (The Second Apology of Justin) "And that Christ being Lord, and God the Son of God, and appearing formerly in power as Man, and Angel, and in the glory of fire as at the bush, so also was manifested at the judgment executed on Sodom, has been demonstrated fully by what has been said." Then I repeated once more all that I had previously quoted from Exodus, about the vision in the bush, and the naming of Joshua (Jesus), and continued: "And do not suppose, sirs, that I am speaking superfluously when I repeat these words frequently: but it is because I know that some wish to anticipate these remarks, and to say that the power sent from the Father of all which appeared to Moses, or to Abraham, or to Jacob, is called an Angel because He came to men (for by Him the commands of the Father have been proclaimed to men); is called Glory, because He appears in a vision sometimes that cannot be borne; is called a Man, and a human being, because He appears strayed in such forms as the Father pleases; and they call Him the Word, because He carries tidings from the Father to men: but maintain that this power is indivisible and inseparable from the Father, just as they say that the light of the sun on earth is indivisible and inseparable from the sun in the heavens; as when it sinks, the light sinks along with it; so the Father, when He chooses, say they, causes His power to spring forth, and when He chooses, He makes it return to Himself. In this way, they teach, He made the angels. But it is proved that there are angels who always exist, and are never reduced to that form out of which they sprang. And that this power which the prophetic word calls God, as has been also 27

amply demonstrated, and Angel, is not numbered [as different] in name only like the light of the sun but is indeed something numerically distinct, I have discussed briefly in what has gone before; when I asserted that this power was begotten from the Father, by His power and will, but not by abscission, as if the essence of the Father were divided; as all other things partitioned and divided are not the same after as before they were divided: and, for the sake of example, I took the case of fires kindled from a fire, which we see to be distinct from it, and yet that from which many can be kindled is by no means made less, but remains the same.” During the first two centuries BCE, in both the Hebrew and Roman alphabets, all letters were assigned numerical values. And why not? The purpose of words is to name and classify, and so is that of numbers. The notion of reason and order, as it took on syntactical order, was derived from the observation of the orderly, predictable paths of the heavens, which suggested not only the drama of anthropomorphic myth, but also its somewhat more abstract order providing cousin, numbers. Thinkers of the day, as exemplified by the Pythagoreans, scoured words, particularly those dispensed by the powers of the heavens, “scriptures”, for messages of numerological symmetry perhaps almost as much as they looked for simple grammatical meanings. For them, etymology and numerology were branches of the same science, and a word’s numerological valuation, along with its associative connotations, was as valid a definition, as was the one formed from other words. . Being a forceful entity in its own right, the Word is not to be merely distributed through some neutral, inanimate medium, it is carried downwards by an appropriate messenger, first by an angel called “glory” than by the “son of man” himself.. Nor is the symmetry involved limited to syntax, it “is not numbered (as different) in name oily like the light of the sun but is indeed something numerically distinct…”. Our authors of the first two centuries BCE did not believe that names, words, and numbers possessed special powers and significance as a consequence of some sort of primitive imprecision of thought, but on the contrary, as an extension of a first cause to grave theory of existence, which, though its imagery to us seems the opposite, did not find that much space between the physical and the divine, but instead found them to be connected realities. Simply put, they did not distinguish between the real and the unreal, the abstract and the concrete, the subjective and the objective. They often failed to realize that thought, and in consequence, words, are only tools. CONCEPTS: SOUL / BODY We have been discussing, as best as we can, the birth of ordered thought. It is appropriate, that then, and, hopefully, still now, that that discussion is at least concurrent to if not one with an exploration of the birth of life. Down here we are mortal. Up above a divine they is immortal. We are earthly they are divine. We are “flesh” they are “spirit”. We might call the consequential poetical, intellectual wanderlust, the restlessness born of mortality, the human spirit.

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One of the first orders of business, short of explaining once and for all in an unchallengeable manner the passing breeze of mortality versus the always has been and always will be immortal divine realm, which our authors do in good time get around to, is to explain why some things move, are apparently alive, animate, while others are not. Limited to observations available to the unassisted eye, and so seeing no universally present differentiating factor, all our authors make the very reasonable and correct supposition that there must be present some un seeable intrinsic quality present in the living which is not present in inanimate objects. The names they gave to this unseen quality we translate as “soul”. Those among our authors who found it difficult to impossible to distinguish between the moving, yet non organic, phenomena of nature, such as the wind or rivers, from biological things, must be forgiven. With chemistry and biology but future sciences, how were they to know? And with a need to explain the always ubiquitous, often oppressive, forces of nature perhaps even greater than the need to explore the origin of biological beings, the attribution of “soul” or divine sponsorship to the forces of nature is not at all surprising or unintelligent. When they were talking about divine sponsorship in the context of cosmological origins they were talking about the grand plan for all things. The grand plan, in its course, must include how and why things and events coalesce, or not. In sum, the reason of things. In accordance, Marcus presents the spirit or soul as the repository within the flesh for divinity’s supreme gift to the earthly, rationality: “THESE are the properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, analyses itself, and makes itself such as it chooses; the fruit which it bears itself enjoys- for the fruits of plants and that in animals which corresponds to fruits others enjoy- it obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as in a dance and in a play and in such like things, where the whole action is incomplete, if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it may be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, I have what is my own. And further it traverses the whole universe, and the surrounding vacuum, and surveys its form, and it extends itself into the infinity of time, and embraces and comprehends the periodical renovation of all things, and it comprehends that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor have those before us seen anything more, but in a manner he who is forty years old, if he has any understanding at all, has seen by virtue of the uniformity that prevails all things which have been and all that will be. This too is a property of the rational soul, love of one's neighbour, and truth and modesty, and to value nothing more more than itself, which is also the property of Law. Thus then right reason differs not at all from the reason of justice.” Marcus - Meditations, Book XI Using two concepts rather than one, (positing the reason of things in the “Word” or “logos”), others regarded it as simply that within the body which animates the body, the thing (“beresheim”) which the Yahweh of Genesis breathed into the clay nostrils of Adam to bring him to life. Aristotle called it “De Anima”. He attempted to explain apparent varying degrees of sentience among living things as being attributable to the varying qualities of “De Animia” having been granted to various life forms, with, of course, human kind being the only life form to enjoy all the possible cognitive and volitional aspects that the divine powers that be might grant. This source of movement for animate beings is in 29

the body, but not part of the body. It is “relative to the body”. Its study properly falls within the field of “science”, leading Aristotle to base his investigation on biological observations: “we are puzzled what to say just as in the case of plants which when divided are observed to continue to live though removed to a distance from one another thus showing that in their case the soul of each individual plant before division was actually one potentially many so we notice a similar result in other varieties of soul i e in insects which have been cut in two each of the segments possess both sensation and local movement and if sensation necessarily also imagination and appetition for where there is sensation there is also pleasure and pain and where these necessarily also desire” Aristotle De Anima, Book I In addition to his partiality for observations which might be made on this earth, being a systematic fellow, Aristotle begins his inquires with a survey of the thoughts of his predecessors. Presaging modern predilections he apparently wishes to “stand on the shoulders” of earlier efforts. As we have been attempting to explain, those shoulders involved the perspectives of those finding the origins and model of rational abstractions in the sky above: “it is in the same fashion that Timaeus also tries to give a physical account of how the soul moves its body the soul it is here said is in movement and so owing to their mutual implication moves the body also after compounding the soul substance out of the elements and dividing it in accordance with the harmonic numbers in order that it may possess a connate sensibility for harmony and that the whole may move in movements well attuned the demiurge bent the straight line into a circle this single circle be divided into two circles united at two common points one of these be subdivided into seven circles all this implies that movements of the soul are identical with the local movements of the heavens” Aristotle, De Anima, Book I Physics is the study of motion, which, in turn, is pretty much the study of everything. Among other things, motion is a prerequisite of life. When an attempt is made to understand the rules of motion through an understanding of the resultant shapes, and this effort is enjoined to mathematics, the result is geometry. When key numbers are searched for, what was often selected related to the numbers of the heavens, in this case the number of visible planetary bodies. Derived from it are the number of days required by the God of Genesis to create the world, and, even from the keen minded Timaeus, the “harmonic numbers” of the perfect circle and hence the movements of the soul. Aristotle moves on from all of this, but the result is colored by his presupposition that the questions of Timaeus can and should be answered. Our religious thinkers, still operating within the relatively more primitive perspective where significant numbers are more associated with the constituents of the firmament than with the symmetries of geometry, ironically, tended to handle it all in a more earthly, or literal minded way.

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“it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer, the words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life” john source of life ex3 To be sure, the above also refers to the eternal life which is to be achieved following this time limited earthly one and can be so argued to be metaphorical. Yet, that belief itself was derived from a way of viewing reality which had long ago concluded that the perishable, observably decaying things of this world could not possibly be regarded as the source of, and therefore containing the real essence of, life. Does not the presence of mortality make this self evident? Given this as an epistemological starting point, a readiness to accept miraculous healing stories, such as the one below, or even the story of the resurrection is very understandable: “now at the sheep pool in Jerusalem there is a building called Bethzatha in Hebrew consisting of five porticoes and under these were crowds of sick people blind lame paralyzed waiting for the water to move for at intervals the angel of the lord came down into the pool and the water was disturbed and the first person to enter it the water after this disturbance was cured of any aliment he suffered from” john living water ex3… However, the intellectual currents of the time, even including the religious ones, were starting to move beyond the astrology based physics of religion, and the earnest biological theories of Aristotle, to an abstracted state of mind which puzzles on the questions of existence, not for gain, put only for the sake of truth, even as it is unable to just hypothetically define it. Accordingly, for Marcus the soul is not merely a source of animation, but the source of ethical animation, or the lack thereof. “About what am I now employing my own soul? On every occasion I must ask myself this question, and inquire, what have I now in this part of me which they call the ruling principle? And whose soul have I now? That of a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, or of a domestic animal, or of a wild beast?” Marcus - Meditations, Book V Of course, right behavior must be a rational thing so the soul is to have a role though it and thought are not one and the same: “Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these: for instance, that where a man can live, there he can also live well. B” Marcus - Meditations, Book V Aristotle had written 3 centuries earlier that the soul was not of the body but relative to it. Now Marcus seems to be arguing that the soul is not of thought but relative to it, as a motivating guide. The initial spark, the desire, to do and be in the right, the animating opposite of moral apathy, which provides the motivating essence and goal of rationality, one might say of life, is “soul”. Or as Marcus puts it, the “appetites”: “Body, soul, intelligence: to the body belong sensations, to the soul appetites, to the intelligence principles.” Marcus - Meditations, Book III 31

The thought does not offer an explanation of the origins of being, but it does offer an explanation, quite literally, of the reason of being. A universal source and defining hand is duly postulated: “Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.” Marcus - Meditations, Book IV The problems and dictates of universal causality are the same whether one is authoring an epic which metaphorically details the origins of existence or is positing the nature of reason, likewise, in the heavens. For the religious minded, the solution is the “unbegotten one”, “I am that I am”. Marcus and Lucretius share a belief in the imperishability of matter: “ I am composed of the formal and the material; and neither of them will perish into non-existence, as neither of them came into existence out of non-existence. Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on for ever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on for ever in the other direction. For nothing hinders us from saying so, even if the universe is administered according to definite periods of revolution.” Marcus - Meditations, Book V What is piety without humility? The purpose of our authors was not simply to explain how things have come to be, like taking apart your father’s watch. The desire behind Marcus’s and his contemporaries puzzling over such things as “soul” is to find a purpose consistent with the lot of transitory mortals. The irresistible urge is to bow down, to something. The result is that which belongs to man’s most important possession, his priceless gift from the divine, “the soul is a dream and a vapour”: According to the account in Phaedo, Socrates immediately before his death, describes to his followers the journey the departed soul is likely to make after the death of the body. Depending on it success and purity in its previous life, it will descend or ascend to different levels of existence. These levels of existence, as Socrates relates them, having been revealed to him in what he considers to be an information ally reliable dream, are not some sort of metaphorical and abstract states, but specific locations within a realm of existence, which , in one of her lower “hollows”, includes this earthly realm. During the course of his account, he goes to the trouble of providing no small degree of geographical detail: “also I believe that the earth is very vast and that we who dwell in the region extending from the river phasis to the pillars of Hercules along the borders of the sea are just like ants or frogs about a marsh and inhabit only a small portion only and that many others dwell in many like places for I should say that in all parts of the earth there are hollows of various forms and sizes into which the water and mist and the air collect and that the true earth is pure and in the pure heaven in which also are the stars that 32

is the heaven which is commonly spoken of as the ether of which this is but the sediment collecting in the hollows of the earth but we who live in the hollows are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling above the surface of the earth which is just as if a creature who is at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was at the surface of the water and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and sluggishness and having never lifted his head and seen nor ever heard from one who has seen this other region which is so much purer and fairer than his own now this is exactly our case for we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth and fancy that we are on the surface and the air we call the heaven and in this we imagine that the stars move but this is also owing to our feeblisheness and sluggishness which prevent our reaching the surface of the air for if any man could arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and fly upward like a fish he puts his head out and sees this world he would see a world beyond and if the nature of man could sustain the sight he would acknowledge that this was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true stars for this earth and the stones and the entire region which surrounds us are spoiled and corroded like the things in the sea which are corroded by the brine for in the sea too there is hardly and noble or perfect growth but clefts only and sand and an endless slough of mud and even the shore is not to be compared to the fairer sights of the world and greater far is the superiority of the other now of that upper earth which is under heaven I can tell you a charming tale simmasi which is well worth hearing” Socrates according to phaedo heaven earth ex2 Socrates’ prize student and biographer, in a way his “Paul”, Plato will elegantly expand this with his doctrine of “forms” and “essences”. Socrates, according to Plato, seems to set him on his way by arguing that “beauty” is a non relative essence, which, though it might be used as a descriptive tool for earthly objects, is not to be truly found in any relative earthly thing. An earthly thing might only be sort of beautiful, or less beautiful than some other thing, while the unseen essence, “Beauty”, cannot possibly be thought of as relative. The plot thickens as we hence find ourselves at the edge of Aristotelian like notions of the “subjective” and “objective”. Politician that he is, Marcus takes it to the Barry Manilow stage, “where everything is beautiful in its own way”: “Asia, Europe are corners of the universe: all the sea a drop in the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe: all the present time is a point in eternity. All things are little, changeable, perishable. All things come from thence, from that universal ruling power either directly proceeding or by way of sequence. And accordingly the lion's gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every harmful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not then imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.” Marcus - Meditations, Book VI CONCEPTS: ASCETICISM / ALTRUISM

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Asceticism is one of the necessary prerequisites of altruism. It requires that that “mass of evils” (in the words of Socrates), the body, be kept subordinate to the mind’s search for real value. It implies that value exists exclusively in the realm of the physically intangible heavens. Indulging the body’s lowly, earthly needs is at best distracting, at worst sinful and perverse. It also usually includes the sentiment that physical deprivations may lead to “visions” (hallucinations), which pull open the curtains on heavenly truths. Though not logically connected, but for even more powerful emotionally connected reasons, both altruism and asceticism include, self denial in the service of a higher purpose. The higher purpose pursued by asceticism is the attainment of a higher truth. The self denial of altruism is meant to serve those higher truths through service to others. Arrival at this destination required the crossing of a common psychological threshold which consists of a commitment to serve something outside of and higher than one’s self by means of self denial. Someone inclined to the ethical metaphors of the Anthropologists would characterize this as the birth of a social consciousness where the lot of the transitory, mortal individual, is immortalized through subordination to the immortal social course. This event is then, in their description, the very birth, simultaneously, of ethics and cooperative human community. Aside from this eloquent, yet questionable delineation of social development, it certainly is one of the epochal crossroads in the mystery of an individual’s thought’s coexistence with collaborative belief. Asceticism includes self denial, physical self denial, for the sake of producing hallucinations which are thought to contain divine revelations. Altruism is a form of self denial the purpose of which is the benefit of others. The seed present in both is self denial for the purpose of serving a moral objective above that of the immediate physical environment involved in the self denial. The larger purpose to be served is for Marcus, the titular ruler of his community, of course, social: “ The prime principle then in man's constitution is the social. And the second is not to yield to the persuasions of the body, for it is the peculiar office of the rational and intelligent motion to circumscribe itself, and never to be overpowered either by the motion of the senses or of the appetites, for both are animal; but the intelligent motion claims superiority and does not permit itself to be overpowered by the others. And with good reason, for it is formed by nature to use all of them. The third thing in the rational constitution is freedom from error and from deception. Let then the ruling principle holding fast to these things go straight on, and it has what is its own.” Marcus - Meditations, Book VII Yet this larger, social purpose is predicated on an all enveloping cosmic rationality. To know it one must detach oneself from the immediate yet petty circumstance of one’s body: “Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise thyself about this part of philosophy. For nothing is so much adapted to produce magnanimity. Such a man has put off the body, and as he sees that he must, no one knows how soon, go away from among men and leave everything here, he gives himself up entirely to just doing in all his actions, and in everything else that happens he resigns himself to the universal nature.” Marcus Meditations, Book X 34

Not to forget, this is all grounded in an earnest attempt to understand the mechanics of physics. We owe our ability, our honored privilege, to serve a higher purpose, and transcend the limitations of earthly flesh, to a presence within us of a part of the governing reality of the heavens above, “thy aerial part. Our part, as volitional participants, is to give preeminence to the “universal” within us, while subjugating the “elemental parts” of our body to that service. The denial of one’s immediate physical self interest in service of “the universal”, the ultimate truth, al-truism, will be the means by which “In this manner then the elemental parts obey the universal”: “Thy aerial part and all the fiery parts which are mingled in thee, though by nature they have an upward tendency, still in obedience to the disposition of the universe they are overpowered here in the compound mass (the body). And also the whole of the earthy part in thee and the watery, though their tendency is downward, still are raised up and occupy a position which is not their natural one. In this manner then the elemental parts obey the universal, for when they have been fixed in any place perforce they remain there until again the universal shall sound the signal for dissolution. Is it not then strange that thy intelligent part only should be disobedient and discontented with its own place? And yet no force is imposed on it, but only those things which are conformable to its nature: still it does not submit, but is carried in the opposite direction. For the movement towards injustice and intemperance and to anger and grief and fear is nothing else than the act of one who deviates from nature. And also when the ruling faculty is discontented with anything that happens, then too it deserts its post: for it is constituted for piety and reverence towards the gods no less than for justice. For these qualities also are comprehended under the generic term of contentment with the constitution of things, and indeed they are prior to acts of justice.” Marcus - Meditations, Book XI Then and now we attempt to understand the underlying principles of natural phenomena in order to ameliorate their impact upon our physical bodies and to neutralize our fear of them. Born of the attempt to manipulate our physical surroundings, and to transcend the physically vulnerable flesh, we hypothesize a “universal”. Immediate physical self interest was the seed. The empirical observations of the unassisted eye was the soil. Asceticism’s demand that the flesh be subjugated to heavenly purposes was the seedling And altruistic service, the ethic of love, is what “grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade”. (Mark 4:32) CONCLUSION The point of this whole thing is that thinking circa 0 BCE and that of other eras can be distinguished by then pervasive, but no longer pervasive perceptions of how physical things work. The resultant metaphors remain in use, but their originating misapprehensions of physical realities are long forgotten while today’s practitioners of the metaphors often deny their originating role. The entertainment of a thought is itself, an event in the life of an individual. Both being born of the preferences of the body, emotion and logic are not separate or conflicting. They begin and justify each other, and where one begins and the other ends, is but only an 35

arbitrarily defined spot on a circular developmental continuum. Thinking is not just relatable to human behavior, it is a human behavior. Thoughts do not exist apart from or above other human actions. They are simply but one, very important, area of the whole of a life. And this area has no segregating borders. Thoughts are as much a diary of a life as they may be described as having been a guide. As one moves through a physical existence, those thoughts which are the perceptions of and methods of dealing with the pains and pleasures of physical things, are both the progenies and the fathers of all other thoughts; constituting the organic wholeness of the consciousness of life. Experience and reaction are not really different. They are just different labels and ways of describing aspects of the same thing, being. The being of collective thought, that is those thoughts which reference to the previous thought of others, which is to say, I believe, all thought, is also an inseparable part of the organic wholeness of the community, which includes its apprehensions of physical realities, its technologies. We often choose, primarily to satisfy our vanities, to call some thoughts “ethical”, “moral”, “spiritual” and the like and imagine them as separate from in function and nature, thoughts which address how best to deal with the immediate obvious exigencies of physical things. To deny that the vast differences from one era to another in how physical realities are observed and dealt with will not be correspondingly found in those areas of thought which we vainly call “spiritual”, should immediately strike us as absurd. Nonetheless, we often do, because to not do so would undermine our traditional means of bringing about the wide spread acceptance of our community’s governing ideas. We handle bodies of doctrine, left to us from times long past, which are still the components of our unifying myths, with kid gloves. If we too openly acknowledge their underlying fallible, usually obsolescent, perceptions of physical realities, we fear ourselves losing the basis by which these things are presented as the unquestionable justification of current social arrangements. The whole force of society therefore leans against it, and, much more tellingly, this notion that “scripture” should be accepted as “scripture”, the religious institution creating claim that God writes books, is wrongly thought to be an indispensable component of reverence for human community’s past and continuation. Truth, though not necessarily the perception of it, is by definition, absolute. If it were sometimes so and sometimes not so, or only true with the presence of certain qualifying prerequisites, then it would be, at the very best, but a only sometimes present consequence of a higher truth. When that truth is the founding truth of all other truths, it can only be so, because it is so. It cannot be “begotten”. If it is absolute, it cannot change, and it certainly cannot decay. Ordered thought, where all this begins, knows that if nothing else one thought is to be bequeathed by another thought. When people began to wonder how and why life came to be, the readily observable, seemingly unchanging, cycles of the stars and planets seems to have been a dominant starting point, and apparently provided them with, if not the very notion itself, at the very least their only means of measuring, the most important ordering, sequencing tool of all, time. Lifting their eyes skyward for explanations of the things at our feet was for our authors as much justified by logic as it was by emotion, and the place within our nature where this act occurs could be said to be the well spring of both. If emotions are driven by need, then there is no desire greater than that one understand and therefore be able to rearrange the order of things for the better, the very definition of rational behavior. And even if we may 36

flatter ourselves by supposing that our attempts to understand things are driven not just by self centered need, but by the love of truth, where better to begin than with the struggles of life and death, immortality and mortality, divine perfection and “sin”. Reaching for the most powerful tool possible, we reach for the furthermost embracing abstraction, the largest possible organizing category. So we lift our eyes skyward, literally, as far as we can see. What we believe ourselves to be seeing when we do, we call God. As we do so, confined to the narcissistic circularity of symbols, we define things by their opposites. Earthly things are not merely inferior to heavenly things, being the opposite of heavenly things, they are, in their essence, “sinful”. The flesh is not merely vulnerable to decay, it is Socrates’ “mass of evils” imprisoning the divine soul. This was not mere poetry or metaphor to thinkers of the 1st century CE. To enter the realm of the perfect and immortal, they felt compelled to disavow completely the earthly, by drinking the symbolic blood of the “son of man”, or, following the lead of Socrates and Epictetus, and denying sovereignty to bodily needs. Based on primitive misapprehensions of physical realities, the morality and ethics they produced in adherence to these precepts was a superstition riddled ritual artifice, and much more than that. At its best, it was anything but preoccupied with the mechanics of ritual artifice, but was an articulate and perspicacious treatment of what all peoples have always felt to be those things which are most important, in the process leaving us a heritage which is both a dragging weight of cultural bigotry’s, and a portal to the emergent visions of a now seen, but invigoratingly un reached, freshly visible horizon. . ". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to con-vey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's ex-istence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream alone...." Heart of Darkness” Joseph Conrad

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