Aurelius×Jesus

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Marcus Aurelius and Jesus. They take up On a project they would have started together if their eras had overlapped.
2. 00:11
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   I have been thinking about your young men. The twelve you chose. Fishermen, tax collectors—not philosophers. When I consider what we might have built together, I think first of this: who would we have invited to learn?
3. 00:26
   Jesusshare moment

   You assume we would have invited anyone. What if they came to us? A man does not light a lamp and put it under a basket.
4. 00:35
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Fair enough. But you chose your twelve deliberately. I wrote my meditations for myself alone, yet here we sit, and others have read them. Neither of us escaped the question of transmission.
5. 00:47
   Jesusshare moment

   Then let me ask you this: what would you have taught in this place we are imagining? You, who ruled an empire—would you have taught rulers, or ruled the teachers?
6. 01:00
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   I would have taught anyone willing to examine their own thoughts before bed each night. Rich, poor, slave, senator—these are costumes. Underneath, the same faculty of reason, the same capacity for self-deception.
7. 01:19
   Jesusshare moment

   You speak of reason as I speak of the Kingdom. Both are within. Both require a kind of poverty—of ego, of pretense—to enter.
8. 01:29
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Yes. Though I confess, I have always mistrusted the language of kingdoms. Too much like the thing I administered. Too easy for others to mistake inner work for outer conquest.
9. 01:41
   Jesusshare moment

   And yet you were a king who wrote that all things are smoke and vapor. I was a carpenter who spoke of thrones. We each borrowed the language we had.
10. 01:54
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    True. So perhaps this school—if we call it that—would need a new vocabulary. Something neither imperial nor messianic.
11. 02:01
    Jesusshare moment

    A new vocabulary for what, though? Name the thing itself before you name the words.
12. 02:07
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    For teaching people to live in accord with nature. To see their own deaths clearly and without terror. To act justly not because a god demands it, but because justice is its own coherence, its own beauty.
13. 02:20
    Jesusshare moment

    You want them to face death without terror. I told my friends I would rise from it. Do you see why our school might have had some tensions?
14. 02:30
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I do. Though I notice you did not promise them they would rise. You went ahead alone, if your followers are to be believed. The rest still die as I will die.
15. 02:42
    Jesusshare moment

    They do. And I wept with them before it happened. I did not teach contempt for grief, Marcus. I taught that grief and love are the same word, differently pronounced.
16. 02:54
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I never taught contempt for grief. I taught that grief should not govern. There is a difference between feeling a thing and being tyrannized by it.
17. 03:04
    Jesusshare moment

    Is there? Or is that a way of governing it so tightly you forget its name?
18. 03:09
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Perhaps. I was emperor. Governing was my task. Even over myself, especially over myself.
19. 03:17
    Jesusshare moment

    And I was no one, which is why I could afford to weep in public. A king cannot kneel in the garden and sweat blood. But I did. So, tell me—what would our school have taught about power?
20. 03:32
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    That it is on loan. That it will be taken back, whether by death or deposition. That the man who clings to it has misunderstood the terms of existence.
21. 03:43
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. And I would add: that the only power worth having is the kind you give away. Feed someone. Forgive someone. Wash their feet if the moment calls for it.
22. 03:57
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I can agree with that, though I washed no feet. I did try to appoint capable men, to listen to advisors, to remember that my breath was no more precious than the breath of the slave who brought me water.
23. 04:11
    Jesusshare moment

    That is also a kind of foot-washing. Perhaps our school, then, teaches humility in different registers—yours philosophical, mine performed.
24. 04:23
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Performed. That word troubles me. I have seen too many performances of virtue. Men who make a spectacle of their charity.
25. 04:31
    Jesusshare moment

    So have I. I said as much about the Pharisees, and it made them no friends for me. But there is a difference between spectacle and sign. I healed on the Sabbath not to be seen, but because the day itself was made for man, not man for the day.
26. 04:49
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    A fine distinction, though I wonder if your followers always understood it. Mine certainly misunderstood me—they made a philosophy of what was only ever a set of reminders to myself.
27. 05:01
    Jesusshare moment

    Then we have this in common: we are both read by people who think we have answers. When really, we only had better questions.
28. 05:11
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. So what question would stand at the entrance to this school? What would we ask of anyone who came?
29. 05:17
    Jesusshare moment

    Are you willing to lose your life to find it?
30. 05:20
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    That is yours. Mine would be: Are you willing to examine what you think you already know?
31. 05:26
    Jesusshare moment

    Both are forms of dying, I think. Yours is the death of certainty. Mine is the death of self. Perhaps the curriculum is the same, just described differently.
32. 05:38
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Perhaps. Though I confess, I am still not certain what resurrection means in your vocabulary. As a Stoic, I can accept the eternal return of matter, the dissolution of the soul into the rational fire. But rising bodily—that seems to me either metaphor or miracle, and I have little use for either.
33. 05:59
    Jesusshare moment

    It was not metaphor. But I will not argue the point, because argument is not how it is known. You asked what we would teach together. Maybe we would teach this: that honest doubt is worth more than dishonest certainty.
34. 06:16
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I can agree to that. My meditations are full of doubts dressed as affirmations. I say 'all is well' because I must convince myself of it each morning.
35. 06:27
    Jesusshare moment

    And I asked, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. I knew what was coming and still wished it otherwise. We are both less sure than our reputations suggest.
36. 06:41
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Then perhaps that is the first lesson of our school: the teachers themselves are still students. The work is never finished.
37. 06:49
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. And the second lesson might be this: that love and discipline are not opposites. You cannot love someone without desiring their flourishing, and flourishing requires work.
38. 07:01
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Agreed. Though I would say virtue rather than flourishing—virtue is the work, and flourishing follows if it follows. We do not do the right thing in order to be happy. We do it because it is right, and happiness, if it comes, is incidental.
39. 07:18
    Jesusshare moment

    I think we are saying the same thing. I called it abundant life. You call it eudaimonia, if I have understood your Greeks correctly. The word changes, the reality does not.
40. 07:31
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. So if we were to build this school—practically, I mean, not as an abstraction—what would a day look like? I governed Rome with early mornings, correspondence, judgments, and always, always, the attempt to remember that I would die.
41. 07:47
    Jesusshare moment

    I walked. I spoke to whoever crossed my path. I told stories, most of them about seeds and soil and debts forgiven. I broke bread with people no respectable teacher would have touched.
42. 08:01
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    That last part would have made administration difficult. I had to dine with senators I despised, but I could not dine with everyone. An empire has logistics.
43. 08:13
    Jesusshare moment

    And I had no empire, which is why I could sit with tax collectors. So maybe our school would require students to do both: to administer something, even something small, justly and without self-aggrandizement. And also to sit with one person they have been taught to despise and share a meal.
44. 08:35
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    A good exercise. Humility and duty, practiced in tandem. I think we could agree on that.
45. 08:41
    Jesusshare moment

    Then perhaps we are building something after all, you and I. Not a place with walls, but a discipline of attention. To oneself. To the other. To what is, rather than what we wish were.
46. 08:56
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Though I think your attention includes a hope for what will be—resurrection, the Kingdom come. Mine ends at what is. The present moment, well-used, is enough.
47. 09:10
    Jesusshare moment

    And yet you also wrote of the common good, of the city of gods and men. That is a future you hoped for, even if you did not name it as I do.
48. 09:19
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Fair. Perhaps hope is simply the name you give to the work I called duty. We both believed the work was worth doing, even if the outcome was uncertain.
49. 09:28
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. So if our school taught anything, it would teach that: do the work because it is yours to do. The harvest belongs to another.
50. 09:39
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The harvest belongs to time, to nature, to the logos. But yes. We do the work. That much is ours.
51. 09:46
    Jesusshare moment

    Then maybe that is enough for one school. Or one conversation.
52. 09:51
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Perhaps. Though I find myself wishing we had more time. There is much I would ask you about suffering, about your certainty in the face of it.
53. 10:01
    Jesusshare moment

    And I would ask you about your children. You lost many, and still wrote that all is as it should be. I wonder if you believed it, or only needed to.
54. 10:13
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Both. Always both.
55. 10:15
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. That is the human position, I think. Belief and need, tangled together like vines. We do our best.
56. 10:23
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    We do. And perhaps that is the only curriculum our school would ever need: do your best, knowing it will not be enough, and do it anyway.
57. 10:32
    Jesusshare moment

    Amen to that. Or, as you might say, so be it.
58. 10:37
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    So be it.