Stoicism, Logos & Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - Jay Dyer (Half)

you subscribers out there. Today we're going to talk about Marcus Aurelius, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and you're listening to Jay's Analysis. My website is Jaysnalysis dot com and I deal with philosophy, theology, the esoteric movie reviews, film analysis. I do a lot of stand up, a lot of comedy, a lot of impressions. I do all kinds of crazy stuff.

But I also do philosophy talks and lectures. And so what we're going to do is maybe skip back and go and talk about some of the older post Greek stuff into the Roman period because I had some requests. Actually, people said you didn't ever talk about anything Stoic, what about the Stoics? And that's interesting because the Stoics are influenced by the Greeks. They were very interested in continuing the Greek tradition with that sort of Hellenized period of

the Roman Empire. And Stoicism is interesting. It's not the best philosophy, I don't think, but it's interesting. And you had the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius influenced by Stoicism. So the first thing with that we want to do is, you know that I'm very much a fan of channeling, and so I got my hair cut into this fascy haircut they call it, because we're going to actually channel Marcus Aurelius the emperor today. You ready, so close your eyes,

put your legs up into a lotus position. And the way that we channel the Roman emperor is that we do instead of doing this the way that we might meditate. We're going to hell Caesar. Hey Caesar, this is a very controversial hand movement. Now you can do this all day, fuck the poet, right, you can be a communist Marxist, but if you dared to do hell Caesar, fascist fascist alert,

fascist alert, anyway, I'm being silly. We're going to delve into the meditations and part one will be free for those out there in internet land and then part two. Of course, you can subscribe at Jays Analysis for four a month or for sixty dollars a year to get the full talks, likes and interviews and access to the archives where I've talked to a lot of interesting people and done full lectures on the totality of Tragy and Hope, Plato's Republic, this kind of stuff. The subscribers are all

very happy. Ninety five percent approval for subscribers at Jason elsis so Stoicism is interesting. It gives us the idea of a philosopher king, right, so they Marcus, especially Marcus, carries on this notion of Plato's republic being ruled by the philosopher king, and Marcus sees himself as a philosopher king. So in many ways it's going to function like Augustine's Confessions, which is the first idobiography in history, I suppose Western civilization.

It functions as the first known autobiography. And the concern, first and foremost is with the care of the soul. So virtue matters, the God within matters, and the God within here is this idea of what we're going to deal with called monism, and the Stoics can accurately be called monists, and Marcus follows the tradition of Epictetus in the Discourses quite a bit. The reason I troll shows

Meditations is because the Meditations, well number one. I happened to just pick this book up in the last few weeks, and I had not read Marcus's disputation. I think maybe an undergrad we had to read, you know, like a selection of it or something. But I went in and read the Meditations, and I thought it is a good companion. And they're going to see a lot of similarities to Christian theology early on Biblical theology. We're going to see

similarities to well, it's syncretic, which is interesting. So it does platonism and maybe even blends aspects of Biblical or Christian thought as well as the Roman ideas, Roman tradition and thought, which is very practical, very interested in legalities and bureaucracy and how to form a coherent, functioning state. And what we're going to see is that Stoicism functions very well for the Roman mythos, for the pacx Romana. It's a lot of aphorisms, aphorisms, and it wasn't apparently

intended to be something published. It was intended to be his personal diary, and I guess over time it was eventually published. So a lot of platonic theme is one of those that's going to be pre eminent is the control of the passions. The Stoics were at times even almost ascetics, right. They were very much into sobriety temperance,

and we're going to see that throughout these aphorisms. Another obvious key point that probably everybody's aware of who's heard of philosophy in any degree is a Stoicism is concerned with facing life's ills in terms of what you can and can't control. If you can't control something, no point worrying about it. It's out of your control. It's not something that you even need to worry about. Worry is pointless,

you know. We can think of similarities that, say, the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, who of you by worrying? Can one add one inch to your stature? Right? I mean, there's not really any point in worry, especially when it comes to things outside of your control. And that's the key dictum of Stoicism. So it's aphoristic in the way that perhaps Nietsi or Wittenstein are aphoristic in many of their writings. He does see philosophy as the

totality answer to man life and ills. So philosophy is the path by which you can find solace, find peace, and find answers. Philosophy promotes the life of virtue. As we've seen before, again, this is straight out of Socrates and Epictetus. Many of the early Stoics had a high

views of Socrates. They thought he was great, not so much a lot of the metaphysics and ontology of Plato, but rather that within the dialogues you would see Socrates really laying out what it means to live a philosophical life.

So it's a lot more interested in the esthetic and what's natural out there in the world, harmony with nature, and a lot less interested in, you know, these sort of big skill speculations about metaphysics and justifying your belief systems and so forth and so on, so that they

don't really care about that. Of course, the first Stoic that we'll talk about is Zeno, but we also have to talk about Epictetis, and a lot of it's going to deal with death, and so some people have called it an ontology of freedom in the face of death, which is interesting. You do tend to have this obsession or this acceptance of death in the Stoic tradition, facing death as something natural, and that's what we're going to look at, especially given the fact that we don't believe

death is natural. Death is in fact very unnatural. But for Stoicism it ends up being pantheistic, as we'll see. So that is those are the foec i, the focuses of Stoicism, and the introduction of my copy talks about

it being proto Christian. I don't know about all that epictetis perhaps, but there were apparently times when Marcus thought he had mystical visions, and these mystical visions seem to be connected to the notion of an all pervading providence over the universe, which is a Christian doctrine, and in

fact some of the other Stoics did. The argument is often made that they were influenced by Christian theology because they believed in providence, right, and you don't really have a sense of providence unless you believe in some kind of single God or source ruling the universe. Sometimes polytheism might talk about providence, but it's hard to see how there could really be providence if you have just a bunch of warring gods. Right, providence seems to presume or

presuppose a single divine mind or single mind consciousness. So a lot of interesting stuff here. You know, did he have mystical visions that tied into his philosophies of stoicism in the state and all that. Maybe, but that's what we're going to look at today. So if you want to see the full thing, come over to Jason Analysis, and we're gonna do an end up look at the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and we're going to talk about Marcus viewing himself as the philosopher king straight out of

Plato's Republic. And then we're going also, of course, going to critique the philosophy and look at weaknesses in this position and whether or not it can accurately give us the kind of worldview that I think we want that

we all look for as human beings. So, if we want to talk about the Roman period, and this would be roughly the period between say Aristotle and the first few Caesars, Christ's period into the second century, first and second century, and that's well, actually, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at roughly the five schools during this period, and you really only have a few options.

And that's what's interesting about this. Not many offers from world views that are out there in terms of what we might call the secular perspective, and philosophy is a secular perspective. Now, you might could argue that Plato's philosophy has elements of the mystery schools or Esoterism or something like that, and Pythagorianism, but ultimately it's still the vision of reason, right reason conceived of as an abstract and

personal principle governing the universe. And we're gonna see that logos principle actually at work in the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. So you're gonna you're gonna see like five basic schools. And what's neat is that the modern day philosophy is of secularism. They don't present anything different than that. We still only have essentially these same five options in our day, and I think that's very telling. And with with skepticism, first of all, we have obviously the idea of no absolutes,

everything is relative. This would be like puro right. The skeptics and their perspective is based in this idea of a lot of times empiricism. We only know what's present to our five senses. That can be deceived quite often, and so therefore it doesn't make sense to think that there's any actual objective principles or truths. How could anybody pertain claim to have access to to these kinds of lofty ideas when in fact true humility, right opposition to

human hubris, demands that that's absolutely impossible. But it's also so it's kind of a buffet style approach as well to philosophy with skepticism. You might take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but none of them are quote true. Now, as I pointed out in the little brief video that I did yesterday about relativism, skepticism is relativism. And so this is actually the dominant kind of philosophy of our day, and the problem with it is that it starts out contradicting itself on its

own premisses. As we pointed out in that brief video, it says there's no absolutes, everything is relative, but The problem is that that claim itself has to also fall under the dictum of everything being relative, and so it's self refuting on its own grounds. Right. You can't say that there's no truth, right, because that claim itself would then also have to be true. And the problem with this is that it's not a paradox. It's actually a contradiction.

And there's a difference between a paradox and a contradiction. Even in formal logic or a history of logic. Addicians have discussed this topic, even Birch and Russell, right, the worst man ever, arguably the wickedest dude of all time. Maybe even Russell noted the distinction between a paradox and a contradiction. So next we had the school of Epicureanism, and this is a kind of a materialistic atomistic atomism. The world is just atom is falling through space. That's

all there is. And it's hedonistic, but it's not hedonism in the sense of total moral abandon and total licentiousness. The hedonists actually thought that the best way to live was to live in a kind of moderated pleasure. So it's not just bodily sensate pleasures that are the best pleasures. It's a little bit of wine, a little bit of cheese,

a little bit of Netflix. Right, this is the highest levels of pleasure, not Dionysian Jam Morrison, you know, pulling out his schlong on stage and having sex with microphones right while you're blitzed on Bzillian drugs. That's not what they mean by hedonism. Of course, we don't really have any reason to accept that the intellectual pleasures necessarily are

higher than the bodily pleasures on this perspective. I mean, in other words, Epicurus might prefer the intellectual conversational pleasures with his philosophical friends, But on what basis are we supposed to believe that that's actually objectively a better pleasure than you know, the whorehouse or something, right, I mean, maybe the eyes wide shut party is a better pleasure than the philosophical nerd chat right. In the Philosophy one on one class, do you want to go to the

party with Bill Harford? Or do you want if we're just gonna live for pleasure right? Or do you do you want to sit in Philosophy one on one with the fat guy with stinky armpits and debate the matrix. Right. So in other words, we don't really get any clear explication or a reason to believe that that the moderated hedonism of Epicurus is somehow a higher, more lofty pleasure. It's just assumed to be so than the pleasures of

moral abandoned. Now, the other school, the third option that we have in this rough period between say the prophet Malachi in the second century, is Platonism ul And now there's there's other options too, in terms of like the Sibiline cult and the Mythra cult. There's other religious options, but right now we're just looking at like philosophy, secular philosophy during this period Platonism. Of course, the Academy at Athens, we know what Plato and Platonism taught, the three characteristics

of Platonism. If you've heard my lectures, you already know this stuff. We don't have to rehash this. But for those that haven't heard the Plato talks I've done in the last couple of years, including the totality of the republic. In the Platonic scheme, you have basically dualism of the body and the soul, or of the realm of the forms in our world, the realm of the forms being invariant, unchanging, immaterial in our world being material flux subject to constant becoming.

And then you have rationalism that the mind or the soul, the news, the reason in man is the highest faculty that's intended to govern the passions of the body, and it somehow it taps into the realm of the forms directly, and so it's it is definitely a rationalist position. Platonism is.

And then you have what we might cause just idealism, that the highest levels of reality, the absolute, et cetera, are in fact formal and ideal in an abstract, mathematical type of sense, not in the realm of the here and the now. So that is that the three basic principles that we'll find in Platonism. I got my I got my fascy haircut today, and I got hair in my eye, So then aristotelianism. And I got this haircut as a joke, by the way, because people were making

fun of the last time I got this haircut. So anytime I get people making fun of things, I always I always charged forward into the thing that they're making fun of and saying because I don't care and so Aristotelianism. We haven't really dived into Aristol yet. We will, I assure you maybe in the next year or two, we're gonna get pretty deep into Aristotle, cover some of the major works. The logic, the metaphysics, the poetics, the ethics.

These are all important to understand in the history of philosophy. And I had plenty of graduate level Aristotle classes. I've spent a lot of time in Aristotle. I spent a lot of time in Aquinas, especially in my twenties. I mean, very very intense, in depth time in Aquinas is thought. You know, I've got the whole Suma sitting right over here. I read a good portion of the Suma as well as the Suma countries and Telaes. I've read the entire volume volumes of the of that one, which is more

of an apologetic work. And to do that you have to be very familiar with Aristotle, There's no question about it. So we'll do that. We'll also do some Augustine. I've got some Augustine right here in this stack, right here by my thumbing. Augustine. We'll do some of that too. I thought City of God monumental work in the history of philosophy. It should be analyzed. Nobody does full talks on the City of God. I will, and you need not doubt me, because we did a full talk on

Tragy and Hope. So I read the City of God when I was twenty one and took all those questions to my Baptist professors and they didn't have any answers, and they still don't. So you're gonna get that here for me. You're not gonna get that anywhere. El There's no other professor is going to take you through the entirety of the City of God. But I will. So then Aristotelianism is Aristotle School was located in the Lyceum as opposed to the Academy, and the Lyceum philosophers were

called the peripatetics. And they're called this because they would wander around. They would walk around and sort of stroll about and philosophize. Actually I do this. I don't know. Maybe I'm a descendant of Aristotle or something. I don't know, but generally speaking, if I'm doing an interview, if I'm talking or something, actually I like to be strolling about. I don't like being confined and having to sit here,

but I'll do it. It's focused on obviously the teleology, right, which is purpose in the Greek, that things have a purpose to which they're going moving towards it, trying to attain, and so everything is in a movement from potentiality to actuality. Right. So the the acorn becomes the oak tree or whatever. So the acorn has the potential to become the full oak tree, the telos. The purpose of that seed is to transition into that final form. This is what characterizes

Aristotle's philosophy. We could say that Ariostol's philosophy obviously is a more empirical approach, whereas with Platonism it's kind of a unless you make the argument that Platonism is ultimately a mystery school initiatory kind of religious philosophy, which you

could make that argument it kind of is. But if you consider it just in its in as secular sense, then it's more focused just simply speaking, in terms of epistemology on reason, on thought and a priori mathematics or these these are characteristics that are not generally speaking empirical, So you know, algorithms, these kinds of things, you know, large geometric problems, in mathematics, they might have a relationship to the physical world, but the objects of these disciplines

themselves are not empirical, right, achilleagon is not an empirical thing out there in the world, but it is a real geometric thing. And so there's many other examples of this, Right, a tesseract. There's not something actually out there in the world,

but it's a real mathematical object. And so in that sense, because Plato believed that in Pythagoras, they believe that these kinds of mathematical truths were the real, higher true is reality, ultimately speaking, is more in line with that kind of stuff than it is the flux and change of matter and decay and death in this world. And so in that regard, Aristotle is much more interested in studying the natural world. He's much more interested in biology than he

is metaphysics. Right, So, I mean, he doesn't have a problem writing a book about metaphysics, but his metaphysic is different. Right, So he'll take form. He believes in objective form. He's a realist, so to speak, but those forms are all instantiated for him in time and space, in some configuration of matter. Right, So matter is impressed with some form. Always there's not an abstract out there, a transcendent realm where the true formal principles reside, and there is for Plato.

So next we come to Stoicism cynicism, and there's a similarity between those two schools. We are going to be talking about Stoicism today, as I said with Marcus Aurelius. But we have in Stoicism this emphasis on harmony between nature, reason, and virtue. All of these three are kind of mystically linked, almost to where if you're living right, you're living in accord with reason, and reason lives in accord with the principles that are manifested out there in nature in the

natural world. So virtue is to be natural. Virtue is to be rational, and to be rational, and natural is to live according to reason. And so all of these three are linked. Now how do they get that, Well, they're all linked because there is, as we said, some sort of in the mind of the a universal principle. It's a universal principle that governs all reality. It's a

kind of force of reason or logos. And they will actually use the term logos now, they don't mean it in the sense of what John one one is talking about in the Gospel of John, that in the beginning was the Word, The Word was with God, the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God, and all things are made through Him, for him, by Him, et cetera, et cetera. That's not what they're talking about,

because they don't believe in creation. For the Stoics, for the Roman philosophers, they inherit the Greek idea of cycles, that reality is not created, it's just a kind of an eternal manifestation of itself extending out forever, never, ever, ever. And in fact, this is kind of an eternal recurrence type of view, madam psychosis. You're just going to live the life that you've lived now over and over and

over again. It's just going to repeat. And they believe that because they would look out in the world, and Marcus is going to say this in his Meditations, that he would say he says that the universal principle mother Earth slash mother Universe, you know, something kind of what Plato talks about in the Timaeus, gives birth to all of these various living forms and living creatures, and then they have a time period where they exist and then they die and they return to the natural world, and

so presumably they're just recycled, right, And this is where we would get the idea of transmigration of souls metempsychosis. Presumably, when you break down in return to dust, the rational soul principle that inhabits you your body or whatever is also presumably going to like meld back into the all and then be at some point germinated, disperminated the universal shoes. It's odd, and you will come back into existence at

some point. And this is why, of course all the traditional what we call pagan religions believed in thetive generative principle, right, so that the universe is governed by this principle of birth, cycle of birth, living, your life, death, and then process repeats, rent and repeat for all eternity. So it's going to

mark these views is no doctrine of creation. Now, there might be some kind of like mythology of the gods falling and Titans and this kind of stuff and an ancient Golden age, but that's not what actually sets the Biblical theology. For example, apart from these views is that time is not viewed as a prison. Time is not viewed, and to be fair to the Stoics, they don't really view time as like a prison or something necessarily bad,

but they view it as as governed by fate. But you'll find these inconsistencies in these views where it's like there's everything's governed by fate, but you also have the ability to live and act virtuously, which presumes free will. So you know, it's it's very it's not actually harmonized with a lot of the things that that it believes. It's very contradictory in many points. And we're actually going

to see that in the Meditations. I'm going to point out to you the point the times where Marcus consistently contradicts himself. That's not to say that it's all bad. I mean, there's some good points here and there. There's there's he makes some good arguments, he makes some good and he has some good insights. Then in many many ways echo Ecclesiastes. Right. He sounds a lot like Solomon

at times. And you know, since you could argue Solomon was a kind of philosopher king, a lot of it will echo the proverbs right, or syrac Ecclesiasticus in the Deutero Kenon, So I wanted to my notes go back to this point of understanding that these five rough outlines of the positions in this time period are really repeats

of the world views that we have today. If you go to the university and you study philosophy, or if you are involved in civic discourse or whatever is supposed to be out there in the world as your options, you're really only going to get like a handful, Like this handful is regurgitated and given to you. Again, there's not a whole lot of other options out there unless you turn to something, if like a different religious perspective or something which would probably be classed by most people

under mysticism. Right. So the idea, of course is that religion is not in the realm of reason and logic and all this kind of stuff. There's just then there's like a reason and logic over here, philosophy and world views and politics and this and that, and then there's a religion over here which is based on faith and mysticism, and it doesn't really have any basis. There's no real

coherent reason why people believe it. It's just what they happen to be believing and growing up in the perspective obviously that we're going to take that I'm going to argue for and demonstrate I think hopefully, is that that that's that's just simply not true, that that the ultimate foundations of these positions that we want to hold to, like we want to believe, there is some kind of metaphysic, there is some kind of epistemology, there is some kind

of ethic. The ultimate foundations of those three basic divisions of philosophy are ultimately religious in nature, and they can only be given a coherent basis in the in a in a certain kind of theology. At least that's the argument that I'm going to make. But so when we talk about nothing new under the sun is essentially what we're trying to say here, right as Solomon says, hearkening back to Ecclesiastes. And so you only have a finite number of number of options and worldviews that you can

pick here. I guess you could actually kind of make the same argument for religion and theology. You don't have

a whole lot of options there. I mean, you can start with God or theology and say, okay, either I believe in a personal or an impersonal absolute principle, and if you choose either, I mean, because there are only two options there, there's not like a middle If you choose the middle ground, then the objective principle that you're choosing is not personal still, right, I mean, And even if you tried some far Eastern perspective which says, oh,

that's a duality and I don't want either one of those, that, well, it's still some unknown absolute that has absolutely no connection to you. Right, So you're still not avoiding the question by saying that I don't one either one of those. Now, if you choose neither of those and you say, well, I don't believe, well, then you're back in the school of skepticism, agnosticism or something like this, which I believe is a dead end. So we don't have any many

roads to go down there. It's a dead end pretty quick again, So only a finite number of religious views as well as only a finite number of these sort of secular views, as we're going to see. That's where we're going to argue here. Stoicism was very popular in the Empire, and we're going to see why that is, because it's a perfect philosophy for the Roman imperium it had. It took over the reputation of the Greeks for scholarship.

They were very interested in me scholarly and they liked this Hellenized worldview idea, as we said, and it was kind of a Roman philosophy. For the entirety of the empire was the governing principle. Here we begin with Zeno around three twenty ABC, and the school was called this. They would do their teaching in this area called the stoa, which is the porch, and they had, as we said,

a very highview of Socrates. Another kind of rival school around this perier was the Senex, and the Senics were also students of Socrates, but they again didn't care for the metaphysics. They were only concerned with the process of the dialogues and the argumentation, and the Synics believed that it showed that bad things in life should just simply be accepted with a kind of cold, calm indifference. And this is also what the Stoics would hold to too,

so they both share this view. The Synics, though, tended to be a little more antisocial and were anarchic and revolutionary at times. They had a kind of anarcho revolutionary perspective, and the the Stoics didn't didn't agree with that. They were there were more into high culture and order and hierarchy. Right. Uh. So Zeno, one of the key early cynics or who studied there, said, you know what, this this anarchy principle

is stupid. Nothing's there's no there's no there's nothing helpful to the whole of society out there by trying to be an anarcho cynic. It doesn't do anybody any good, and it's really self destructive. It's just you. Uh. You know, if you want to be a revolutionary and try to fight everybody and make everybody conform to your ideas, you're wasting your time. You might as well go just go live out in the woods. Get over it. It's not

gonna happen. You're not gonna change everybody's mind. So there's no point in being upset about the stuff that you can't change, right. I Mean, the whole idea here was to be indifferent to the things that we can't change. And if that's the case, why are you trying to change everybody? Man? It ain't gonna happen. So to live a calm, virtuous life, you need not try to convince the entire society of you're wasting your time and energy, and Zeo trying to convince the society of the rightness

of your cynicism. Now Zeno keeps, however, some of the ideas of the cynics. He likes this idea of passive, indifferent acceptance of what comes your way. So that was good, and he wanted to carry that over and then but what's interesting about the Stoics with Zeno is that Zeno he's not a Platonist. He likes the empirical ideas of Aristotle more than he likes, as we said that, the metaphysical ideas. And so because Aristotle was an empiricist, you

could argue that Xeno is actually a little more consistent. Now, I actually do argue this, often criticizing and critiquing Aristotle, especially given the Roman Catholic and the Tonistic obsession with Aristotle, Xeno is actually a little more consistent, because if we're blank slates, and if our experience is just writing impressions upon the videocamcorder of our mind or whatever, then it really doesn't make sense to believe that form is out

there in the world, Like Aristotle said, the objects that you think have form, that formalness that you're talking about Aristotle. Remember Aristotle, you rejected Plato and the idea of transcendent forms. That formalness is a construct in here, and your mind is imposing that on the objects out out there in the world. Right. I mean, there's nothing about that object out there in the world that makes you know for

sure that it has formalness. It's your mind constructing this idea of a form and imposing it upon that object. So Zeno in this way is kind of a forerunner to the hardcore empiricis of the Enlightenment period, like a Locke or a Hume right, or Barkley. So Xeno is a little more consistent with this idea than Aristotle. I would say, Now, I don't agree with Stoicism and Zeno, but I'm just making this this point. Now, where do here's the Xeno weirdness? Here? Where does what does Zeno

say is the ultimate totality of reality? It's fire? What did Heraclitus say? Well, this is he's getting this from Heraclitis, right, So only matter is real, where all of reality is just atam's falling through space and ultimate reality is just fire. So you know, again something that he just took from Heraclitis. And this is where we see that buffet style approach from from the Stoics. So Stoicism comes from Heraclitis, the details details come from Aristotle. And it makes no grand

contributions to ontology or metaphysics. In fact, it rejects that stuff. It's mainly focused on ethical philosophy, which is interesting again, and you could see why. Because you're not ever going to get access to forums, there's no point in trying to do metaphysics. You might as well focus on the good life. And what's the good life? Living in harmony with reason, nature and virtue. Knowledge is only good when it helps us fit into harmony with nature would be

the dictum here. Now, oddly enough, there is a logos principle that permeates the universe. This logos principle is described as providence, and that's what we're going to see in Marcus. It a weird ideas attached onto this, which so law or maxims within the state are conceived to be in accord with this logos universal principle. So you can begin to see why it makes sense for Roman emperor to adhere to stoicism, you're probably going to encounter tragedy. That's

a Roman emperor. Your buddy, your BFFs might stab you in the back and take over being Caesar something like this. This could happen, right, They might murder your family, you might lose a giant military campaign, maybe thousands of your soldiers die. You know, you're bound for tragedy in a pretty extreme sense, probably if you're a Roman emperor. So, but not only that, it also could appeal to the to the emperor because it views the state as the

incarnation of the universal principle of reason. And what is the what is the incarnation of the state, but the Emperor, right, So the emperor's god because he is the incarnation of the universal reason principle, which is the universe as a whole. So the entire universe, the macro causem, is contained in the micro cosm of the state. The microcosm of the state, which is the entire Roman imperium, is contained in Isesiza. Right.

So it has an interesting globalist perspective. It says that all men are brothers under this universal principle of reason, and all men are brothers because they're all members of the Roman imperium. Interesting, so from Stoicism comes this idea of the Cosmopolis, right, not the David Cronenberg movie, but the Cosmopolis of a giant world city state. Ethically speaking, everybody has to do their duty, right, and you do

your duty for duty's sake. That's just what you do, because that's in accord with reason, and it's in accord with the state. It's in accord with the universal logos principle, which is not again, Jesus, that's not the logos that we're talking talking about. The logos we're talking about here is just this a generic sort of just idea that, oh, I have reason. There does seem to be order out there in the world, and so the entire universe must

in some sense have just a rational calculating faculty. But it's not conceived of as a single divine mind or God that you could have a relationship with. So it's very distinct from the kind of the I Am that we see in Exodus three fourteen of the Bible. Right, it's not Jehovah God having a covenant relationship with his people, manifested ultimately in the incarnation with Jesus or anything like that.

It's just an abstract philosophical principle kind of roughly maybe like what we saw with Plato and the Pythagoreans, how they viewed mathematics as being a kind of overriding universal ordering principle. But it's still abstraction act and is still impersonal. It's not a single omniscient divine creator or anything like that. So for the citizen, you have all these obligations that make you a good, virtuous citizen, and that means that

everything's in its place. You live according to your station in life. You don't need anarchy and revolutions or anything like that because that's against good order. And you might as well just, you know, accept your lot in life. And if you do that with a healthy passive resignation and live your life with sobriety and and frugality, and then that's the best way to live, you're gonna be happiest that way. If it was supposed to be otherwise,

then the gods would have created you otherwise. Right, if you were meant to rise up in the ranks and become emperor yourself, or if you were meant to go from being a plebeian to a patrician, or if you were meant to be go from you know, being the poor guy to the to King Midas or something like this,

then the gods would have made you that way. Don't worry about spending your life exerting all this energy and trying to increase your station in life, because that's ultimately futile, and it's ultimately out of accord with the principle of universal reason. So service to the state ultimately is the highest good. Here and again, the state is embodied in the figure of the Roman imperium, embodied in the figure

of Marcus Aurelius. So again, attaining peace of mind, as we said, is just simply to live in accord with these principles. Cicero, Epictetus, these are famous Stoics, and again Cicero was very eclectic in his perspective. Epictetus is around fifty a d. And what's interesting about Epictetus is that he seems to be the most sort of kind of Christian. He appears to have actually been influenced by Christian theology, and this is why providence plays such a central role

in his stoicism. But it's again, it's still not really Christian. I mean just you get these sort of generic ideas of bear and forbear. This is the famous teaching of Epictetus, and so you bear with what the universe sends you, and you forbear with your fellow men, and that's just the best way to be happy. And so when we come to one twenty one eighty a d. This is the Marcus Aurelius period. And what we're going to see is it's we live in a cosmos that is in

perpetual flux and change. Change is the most certain as the certitude of this life, which doesn't make any sense, by the way, because if the only certitude is change, we can do a presubsitional critique of that and point out that well is it is everything has changed also subject to change, right, So I mean that the principle itself would over time not be true, which doesn't make

any sense. May make the same argument which ill we often do against Darwinian evolutionary thought because they try to include everything under the principle of evolutionary flux and movement. Well, does that mean that the principle of evolutionary flux and movement is also eventually going to evolve to not be true. I mean, it's just nonsense, right. So looking at my Marcus Surelius notes here, Yeah, the universe is a living, intelligent,

giant being. It's like, you know, if you think about Gya as mother Earth, well, this is like Gaya as mother Universe. The entire cosmos is the giant living organism, and we're kind of like a little cells on the body of the giant universal organism, which is kind of again from Plato and the Tamas, where the universe is

a giant, living being. You can see why the Roman imperium likes this idea because again we go back to Plato and Platonism, and even the ancient Egyptians taught this idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm, that everything that's in the macrocosm is in a way contained in the microcosm. Now, we believe that doctrine as it pertains to the incarnation. This is the teaching of Saint Maximus the Confessor when he talks about the incarnation. But that's a different topic.

We'll get to that down the road. Now, the Stoics are all pantheists, and so this universe being this giant living entity kind of gives birth to itself from itself. So you are a manifestation, a seminal spermal manifestation that kind of is birthed out of Mother Universe for your time period, the allotment of your life, as we said, and then you die and you kind of go back into Mother Universe reabsorbs you into her bosom. And so again that that pantheism we're going to see is very

prominent in meditations changes the fabric of the universe. Uh. And yet at the same time, you have a share. Man has a share a spark of natural divinity within him, and that's his reason. So man Is Marcus says, a morsel of the divine. You're like a little ligament, little little this little muscle here of the giant universe being. That's you, or the little a little nipple being on Mother Universe, that's you. Man Is oh Man is also a social civic being, right, So he's not an island.

He's not a hermit normally speaking, he doesn't go live on his own. He's not anarchic. He needs other human beings. He needs a social order, and that's what the Roman imperium is there to provide. True duty is to be a good Roman citizen. That's your whole duty, that's your whole your whole existence is to be a healthy, functioning,

staying in your place Roman citizen. And interestingly, the unfortunate aspect of this, which I think we're going to see, is that embrace with death and the pro death attitude in the sense of you should accept your death because death is natural, it's just part of the natural world. In this view, is that suicide is a logical component of this view. And actually Marcus will say, yeah, yeah, actually,

there is a noble aspect to suicide. And we can see from all of the pagan worldviews that don't believe in things like resurrection, or they don't believe in creation and resurrection, which actually go together as revealed doctrines, they're stuck in fate. They're stuck in the ever never ending flat circle of time and cycles and reincarnation and metempsychosis. Death is part of this natural process, right, and you're

going to die. Death is therefore natural, so you might as well just love and accept death as much as you love and accept life. They're almost dualistic, two sides of the same coin, aren't they Because as these pagans argue death gives life meaning and life gives death meaning. Right, No,

we do not believe that. In fact, we're going to look at Acts seventeen where Paul goes and deals with the Greeks and the philosophers who have these kinds of views and will argue in debate and do apologetics with them. So I'm gonna be giving you the kind of Act seventeen approach in answer to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. So that concludes the sort of overview. And next we're going to move to the actual text itself and look at some of Marcus's aphorisms and teachings and doctrines. You've

been listening to Jays analysis. You've been listening to Jay's analysis. We've been talking about Marcus Aurelius. This is the first half for free. The second half, of course, you can obtain by subscribing to Jay's Analysis for four ninety five a month or for sixty dollars a year at the PayPal links at my site. You can also get my

book there at my website. Eslotera Hollywood Sex Cults and Symbols and Film, which deals with philosophy and film geopolitics, the Esoteric in relationship to movies from the greats like Kubrick, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, all kinds of popular films. And the book's done really well. It's only been out a month and a half, two months. I've already had forty five star reviews across markets. So avail yourself and get a signed

copy from me, Jay Dyer. You can see the book right here Esoteric Hollywood and you can get that at my side. As I said Jasonalysis dot com, thank you for watching