To Serve the Common Good By Grace F. Knoche The warp and woof of human character is formed slowly, through the ages, by the steadfast meeting of individual responsibility, by the daily conquest of the lesser self by the greater. Now and then, in the lives of a few, the splendor that is man stands revealed, the ugly and disfigured in human behavior transmuted, and the routine of existence seen to be as intrinsic a part of the cosmic design as is the regular orbiting of sun and star. Of late I have been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and have been profoundly moved by the timeless quality that flows through the pages of this small volume. How often it seems as though a sentence or paragraph had been written directly to oneself, and we close the book refreshed, with added strength and even, at times, with practical hints for the task ahead. Of course, these were not really "meditations" at all, if by the word we conjure up a picture of a yogi or would-be chela, whether of India or America, sitting with fixed gaze in ritual posture in the hope that some great Being will vouchsafe him a vision of supernal truth. No, this is the simple record of an utterly candid soul, not sharing personal or historic details of an extraordinary life at an epochal time he was Imperator Caesar of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century A.D. but reminding himself, in the privacy of imperial chamber or military quarters, what it demands of a man to live according to the highest within him. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 A.D.) was a Stoic, by temperament and by choice, and supreme exemplar of the best in Roman Stoicism, itself a late and somewhat modified form of the original philosophy of its founder Zeno of the 4th-3rd century B.C. To the Stoic, as to the earlier Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus and Anaximander, the "primordial source of Being" was Mind, cognate with the most spiritual essence that man could conceive, namely Fire not the fire or heat of earth, but its subtle originant. In short, "Mind-Fire" was the ruling principle behind the cosmos and therefore behind every one of its parts, large or small. Thus a "fiery particle" or an "atom of Mind-Fire" was likewise at the core of man. "All is theos," "all is alive": pan-theism in its pure connotation that divinity was the motivating power within all life forms a theme as familiar to Marcus Aurelius as it was to the whole of antiquity. | |
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