You Need to Know What Happened in 1963 | Dr. Peniel Joseph

In Marcus Aurelius’s time, Roman religion was a hodgepodge of different rituals and ideas, which were evident in Marcus’s own behavior. For instance, he deified his wife and his stepfather Antoninius, but at the same time spoke repeatedly about how this life we are living is all there is. It goes without saying that he also rejected the teachings of the Christians, who he thought of—as a product of his time—as threats to the authority of the empire, but it also turns out that the Stoics and the Christians held beliefs that were much closer than Marcus understood. Particularly as it related to hell.As far as we know, the Stoics didn’t believe in hell. Their writings make only a few vague allusions to the idea of an afterlife. Similarly, the idea of “hell” is not as clear in Christianity as conventional wisdom might dictate. Nowhere in the Bible is there anything close to the hell that believers talk about today—a place where bad people and nonbelievers go after they die to be tortured and punished for their sins for all eternity. Even the word “hell,” which varies from translation to translation, appears only a few times, with different contextual meanings in each case. One of the most frequent occurrences is as the word “Gehenna,” which was an actual, literal place—though admittedly not a good one (there is some thought that it was Jerusalem’s trash dump).What might Jesus and the Christians have been speaking of when they spoke of hell? Perhaps it was the same thing the Stoics spoke of—not a place that we go after we die, but a place far too many people are in right now, based on how they’ve chosen to live. Marcus Aurelius didn’t warn against indulging and cheating and lying and stealing because he thought you’d be punished for it later. He knew these “pleasures” would produce tortures in the here and now. As Rob Bell, the pastor and author, writes in his beautiful book Love Wins:“People choose to live in their own hells all the time. We do it every time we isolate ourselves, give the cold shoulder to someone who has slighted us, every time we hide knives in our words, every time we harden our hearts in defiance of what we know to be the loving, good, and right thing to do.” Whatever you believe—whether you’re closer to Marcus Aurelius or a follower of Jesus—there is something to learn from where these two schools converge. It’s a matter of faith whether hell exists after death. It is a fact that it exists here on earth—in Gehenna and in our souls. If there is hell in the after life, whether or not you go there will be God’s decision. The hell that exists for certain right here and now, you can choose to take up residence in or move as far away from as you possibly can.So what’s it going to be?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Marras 20193min

There was a Stoic named Diotimus who messed up. Like really messed up. Sometime around the turn of the first century BC, he committed what can only be described as an unjustifiable crime. He forged dozens and dozens of letters that framed the rival philosopher Epicurus as a sinful glutton and depraved maniac. It was an act of despicable philosophical slander, and Diotimus was quickly brought up on charges.Some accounts say he was executed for this crime, but that seems unlikely. Chances are he was exiled or fined, which is actually more interesting: What does a Stoic do after they really screw up? What can they do?Perhaps we can take a cue from the name of the podcast hosted by Lance Armstrong, another guy who has made big mistakes. What does Lance call his podcast? He calls it The Forward. Because that’s really the only thing you can do in life: go forward. That’s what Lance is trying to do with his life now. Move on and move forward, as best he can. When you do something wrong, you can’t go back and undo it. When you hurt someone, you can apologize, you can say you didn’t mean to, but you can’t undo the harm, you can’t unring the bell. Ultimately, you can only move forward—and try to make it right by learning from it and not doing it again. The same principle applies when you fall short of your own standards, and you let yourself down. Big or small, crimes and mistakes exist only in the past. They can no longer be touched. All you can do is decide what happens next. All you can decide is how you will write the rest of the story. You can move forward, building on the lessons of your mistake; or you can stay rooted in place, trying futilely to reach back into the past to erase what has been done. This is how cover-ups happen. This is how mistakes get compounded. Lance can tell you about those too—which were probably his biggest mistakes when it was all said and done.We don’t know what Diotimus did next, unfortunately, or how his story ended. Hopefully, he moved forward and never did anything like it again. All we can do is try to learn from his failings, and to improve ourselves accordingly.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Marras 20193min

It’s easy to whitewash history, to look back at a group of people who did an incredible thing and assume they were all on the same page when it happened. We forget the egos and the personality flaws. We forget their struggles and infighting.The Founding Fathers of America are a great example of this. They can seem like a unified group of wise superhumans—beyond the passions or tempers that rule our lives—but, of course, they were anything but. According to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams was the kind of guy who “always governed by the feeling of the moment,” and given his fragile, insecure personality, this did not serve him well. Think of Jefferson himself, whose lust and hypocrisy not only tolerated slavery, but allowed him to justify owning a human being, Sally Jennings, he claimed to love. He was also a bit of a coward, and an ungrateful political intriguer. Hamilton was so ruled by his passions he not only cheated on his wife, but got himself killed in a duel that a wiser, more self-controlled man would have been able to avoid.The list goes on and on. Although George Washington was by no means a perfect human being—he too owned slaves—he found a way to rise above these other men, not just on the battlefield but in everyday life. He lived by a system. By a personal code. He put duty above all else. He would have rather died than betray his sense of honor. It was through this that he managed to achieve greatness far beyond what Adams or Jefferson or Hamilton could even approach. It’s why he is probably the greatest American, if not the greatest statesman, to ever live.That’s what Stoicism is about and what it helps us do. We are all flawed people. We have tempers. We have egos. We have selfish desires. What we need is a system, a code that helps us triumph over them. It gives us a Cato—to quote Seneca’s line and to mention Washington’s hero—to model ourselves after. Something to check our behavior against, to guide us in the moments where emotion or temptation would lead us astray.All of the Founders were great in their own way, all of them contributed to the founding of a nation. But Washington got further, did more—he conquered the British as well as himself. He was in his own power, and would have been even had his army faltered and he had been captured. Which founder will you be? Whose example will you follow? Will you be great, or can you aspire to be more like the greatest?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

31 Loka 20194min

It’s a fitting warning about man’s nature that in the Old Testament, God would command his followers, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” and to resist the pull of the multitude when they persecute someone on false charges, only to find thousands of years later that this would be the fate of the man who claimed to be his sonThis idea that the judgements of the mob were dangerous and must be avoided is a timeless theme in the ancient world—and one that appears both in the Bible and in the writings of the Stoics. Only a few generations before Jesus, the Stoic Rutilius Rufus was brought up on and convicted of obviously false charges by corrupt political enemies. Around the same time, in one of the first signs that the norms of the Roman Republic were collapsing, a mob gathered and stoned to death a man named Saturninus. Marius, the consul who encouraged Rufus’s demise, was powerless to stop the mob justice he had ridden to power on. By Jesus’s time, the mob was a political force in the Roman empire. It could be pandered to. Riled up. Used to do one’s dirty work. It was a feared and ominous presence. Just a few decades after the mob killed Jesus, Seneca would write that “consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. Certainly, the greater the mob with which we mingle, the greater the danger.” Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is filled with admonishments to ignore the jeers and the cheers of the mob, to think for himself, to avoid the violent spectacles they demanded in the form of gladiatorial games, to do the right thing even if everyone else is insisting (or getting away with) the wrong thing.If only this advice was not relevant today. Unfortunately it is. We have a mob which sways our culture—online and in real life. These are people who attend speeches on college campuses with the intent of disrupting and shutting them down. These are people who march with tiki torches and chant slurs and epithets. These are people who use social media to bully and intimidate. These are people who shout for violence and demand retribution. These are people who are incapable of mercy or empathy or forgiveness. It would be nice if their numbers were few—but they are not. They are legion, and they exist on both sides of the political spectrum (indeed, they often hold contradictory views on various issues and share the same nihilism whether they are extreme left or right). In some cases, they are often the majority view and their pressure costs people their jobs, forces them into hiding, or convinces them to keep silent. They claim to be protecting our way of life...as they destroy it before our eyes. Which is why today and every day we should heed these Stoic (and Biblical) reminders to avoid the mob, to think for ourselves and to stand up for what’s right, especially when the mob is doing evil. When you find yourself on the side of the mob, pause and reflect. Ignore their venom. Speak out.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

30 Loka 20194min

The Roman elite were constantly living beyond their means. Leaders like Cicero lived lavishly—he owned something like nine different villas at the same time. Other Romans believed the path to political power lay in essentially bribing the public with extravagant games and public spectacles. Julius Caesar was constantly spending money he didn’t have to impress people he didn’t respect. Even the Roman empire itself was constantly overspending, leaving it to more austere emperors like Marcus Aurelius to pay down the country’s debts by selling off palace furnishings. Seneca, for his part, wrote eloquently about the meaningless of wealth and the importance of the simple life. And yet, money is partly what attracted him to Nero’s service. In 13 years working for a man who was clearly deranged and evil, Seneca became one of Rome’s richest men. This afforded him an incredible lifestyle. He threw enormous parties. He accumulated huge land holdings and impressive estates. But his taste for the finer things meant swallowing a bitter moral pill...and eventually, this association cost him his reputation and his life. If only Seneca and these other spendthrift Romans could have listened to the simple advice in Cato the Elder’s On Agriculture, one of the oldest works in the entire Latin language. There, Cato—the great grandfather of the Stoic Cato the Younger—talks about the importance of managing your money and your tastes. “A farm is like a man,” he wrote, “however great the income, if there is extravagance but little is left.” His advice to the aspiring farmer is to build a house within their means—to put your money into your farm, into something that generates returns, not something that impresses your neighbors or assuages your ego. It was better, he said, to cultivate the selling habit, not the buying habit. Selling meant you were making, buying meant you were consuming. How does a business succeed? By things going out the door, not in the door. It’s easy to acquire. It’s hard to say no. It’s tough to develop limits and to figure out what enough is. But like Cato said and Seneca’s fate painfully illustrates, if you can’t do that, eventually there will be nothing left and nowhere to go.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

29 Loka 20193min

Imagine, one day you’re king and the next day you’re not. Literally. That's the story of Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who was made King of Naples and Spain, only to be forced to flee in exile after the reversal of his family’s destiny. Napoleon was sent to an island prison, but Joseph had to move to New Jersey, where suddenly he was just another regular person—rich, sure, but far from royalty. The same went for Achille Murat, the son of Napoleon’s brother-in-law. Once the heir-in-waiting for the kingdom of Napoli, he ended up living in the swampland of Florida, lording only over some property he called Lipona, an anagram of the kingdom he had lost. He dreamed of leading armies in Italy, but ended up, as one legend has it, the postmaster of Tallahassee. Banished to New Jersey and Florida. Someone in the 19th century knew how to levy punishment. All kidding aside, these stories are almost real-life versions of the lyrics to the Coldplay hit, Viva La Vida:I used to rule the worldSeas would rise when I gave the wordNow in the morning, I sleep aloneSweep the streets I used to ownAnd in turn, all of this is probably the most persistent theme in Stoicism, both philosophically and biographically. Zeno was a wealthy merchant from a prominent family with a fleet of ships, until a storm dashed them all to pieces. He ended up in Athens with nothing in his pockets. Cato was a towering Roman Senator, only to suddenly find himself on the wrong side of a vicious civil war. He was powerful one day, disemboweled the next. The same was true of his rival cum ally Pompey, the general who loved the lectures of the Stoic philosopher Posidonius. A lifetime of victories evaporated in a single hour at the Battle of Pharsalus. Shortly thereafter, he was decapitated by pirates as he tried to go into exile. Seneca was the man behind the throne with Nero...until Nero turned on him. All of our fates and fortunes rest on pillars of sand. Today we are on high, tomorrow can bring us down low...and the day after, lower than we even believed possible. That’s life. It humbles us. It surprises us. It is not inclined to show mercy—or care about our precious dreams.That’s why we must be prepared: premeditatio malorum (an anticipation of the twists and turns of fate) and amor fati (ready to love whatever that fate is) are not just principles to abide, they are tools to deploy in the forging of our inner citadel, in the smithing of an iron spine. They allow us to endure and survive anything. The vagaries of life are why we must be careful of ego (it is the enemy, after all); careful of anything that makes us think what we have right now is actually ours, or that it says anything about us as people. Because if we allow the presence of the things we have and hold dear to  define us, their untimely aSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

28 Loka 20193min

Yes, the Stoics talk a lot about death. How it’s inevitable. How life is fragile. How it can be taken from us at any moment. It’s in our power to live well, Seneca said, but not in our power to live long.It’s easy to take from these commentaries that the Stoics were completely fatalistic about their health, and that’s a mistake—one easily disproved by the evidence. Seneca talked about death, but he also talked about the life-giving powers of taking a cold plunge. He experimented with vegetarianism. He exercised. He ate moderately not only because it was part of his philosophy, but because he knew that gluttons rarely live to see old age. Marcus Aurelius was treated by the famous doctor Galen, and one presumes that he did so because he asked Galen to improve his health, not worsen it.The key exercise in Stoicism, according to Epictetus, was distinguishing what’s in our control and what isn’t. Our genetics are not in our control. But we are not prisoners of them. They are not an oracle. We control our diet and our exercise. We can control how our genetics express themselves and impact our liveDeath can be random and cruel—as it was for the millions who died of the plague in Marcus’s time. Nobody controls that. But we do control whether we drive a motorcycle and decline to wear a helmet. You don’t control whether you get drafted and sent to fight in a war, but you do control whether you go around picking fights in bars or walk through the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time of day. We control whether we make smart decisions or dumb ones, whether we take good care of ourselves or not. We are all mortal. Life is fragile. But that doesn’t mean you kiss all the control up to God or to Fate. You decide whether you’re going to be healthy or not. You decide whether to be stupid or not. You decide the path you walk.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

25 Loka 20192min

Keanon Lowe grew up in a family struggling to make ends meet. His father left when he was nine. When money was tight or when things were hard, his mother would try to encourage him by saying that it was alright. “You’re just where you’re supposed to be,” she said. This would be hard to accept over the years. It was hard to accept his college career at Oregon ended when the team lost in the playoffs to Ohio State in 2015. It was hard to accept when the NFL career he dreamed of ended by getting cut from the Arizona Cardinals after four days, with no more than a pair of gym shorts for his trouble. Then his first year as an NFL assistant ended when the coach who hired him got fired, and his second year ended the same way. Shortly thereafter, one of his best friends from his playing days died of an overdose. This is where he was supposed to be? This is how things were supposed to go? These are the kind of twists and turns of fate the Stoics tell us we’re supposed to love? How could that possibly be right?Well, as Greg Bishop (himself a fellow Stoic traveler) writes in his beautiful Sports Illustrated profile of Keanon, it is right. Because it is all leading somewhere, whether we know it or not. After all those losses and setbacks, Keanon ended up taking a job coaching at Parkrose High School...and working as the school security guard to make money on the side. On May 17th, Keanon was sent to Mr. Melzer’s Government class to grab a student who had been requested by a counselor. It just so happens that the very student he was looking for was working his way toward the classroom with a loaded shotgun. In a moment, they met. Keanon was exactly where he was supposed to be. Instead of running away, he ran towards it. He fought the young man and stopped an active shooter from doing god knows what. Keanon’s mother had been right. The Stoics were right. We have no idea what life has in store for us or what it is saving us for—even as it kicks our ass and breaks our hearts. Whatever we are going through, whatever is happening to us, we must know that: we are where we are supposed to be right now. How’s that?Because we can make it be where we are supposed to be. By the actions we take and the choices we make.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

24 Loka 20193min