Forgive Them, Father...

...for they know not what they do.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 23:34


In his Meditations Marcus Aurelius reminds himself to practice the following:

"Say to yourself in the early morning:

I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men.

All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.

But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is right, and of ill the wrong,
and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own
(not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity),

I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong,
nor can I be angry with my kinsmen or hate him;
for we have come into the world to work together,
like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth.

To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature,
and to be vexed with one another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism."

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations as translated by A.S.L. Farquharson

This seems to be very similar to what Jesus said as he waited to be nailed to the cross. Jesus asks his father to forgive Jesus's murderers and reminds his Father that they do what they do because they are ignorant of the good.

Aurelius reminds himself of the same thing, that the people around him are ignorant rather than evil. He also reminds himself that it is natural for him to work with his fellow humans despite their poor behavior because ultimately we are all of one body. It is the will of the Logos that we work together. Maybe it would be better to say that it is the WAY of the Logos.

Aurelius's thought and Jesus's thought are different in one critical way, though: for Jesus his tormentors require forgiveness from God. For Aurelius his tormentors don't require anything. He must reconcile himself with their behavior. Aurelius must change himself, while God must forgive wrongdoers. To take it a bit further, Aurelius saves himself while Christians are saved by another. For a Christian God is external. For a Stoic we are all a part of God, or the Logos. In this way a Stoic is his own savior, maybe.

It's a beautiful thought either way, and it put me in mind of this excellent essay by Jules Evans entitled "Stoicism and Christianity."

Evans tells us that Stoicism anticipated Christianity* in the following ways:

1. Christians serve the will of God and Stoics serve the will of the Logos (they were also monotheists after the teaching of Heraclitus). Evans notes a unique distinction, though; where Christianity has an opposing force in Satan and his demons and God has heavenly followers in the angels, for Stoics there is only the Logos. Evans also notes that the Logos is used in the book of John.

2. Christians are taught that they can serve God or money, but not both. Stoics are taught that they can serve the Logos or public approval, but not both.

3. Both Christianity and Stoicism advise followers not to be ostentatious in their practice. We shouldn't make a big show of it.

4. Both the early desert fathers and the Stoics believed in askesis, or the deliberate training of the mind.

5. Christians shared the Stoic idea of the Cosmopolis, or City of God. We should serve humanity first and our tribe second.

Evans then goes on to highlight some differences between the two traditions (and Christianity does not compare favorably in the author's opinion), but I'll leave that to you to discover.

An interesting line of thinking, anyway.

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* I am not claiming that Stoics should be Christian or that Christians should embrace Stoicism, or that a Stoic must believe in a God at all. That's really none of my business.

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