Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus

So last time we had begun to take a look at the transformation that was occuring in the eastern Mediterranean around the time of the advent of what was going to become Christianity. Of course, this figures upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a very controversial figure to say the least. As I said, I'm not going to endeavor to claim to give the absolute or exhaustive account of this extraordinary individual, but instead I'm going to try to do what I've done before, which is to show how what he did contributed to our understanding of meaning and wisdom and how that eventually pushed forward the history that has led to the meaning crisis.

So we were talking about one of the core messages of Jesus. Jesus seems to have understood himself, or at least those around him understood him, as Kairos. If you remember, that's a turning point in the course of history, because as we spoke before the Israelites and by this time they were known as the Jews had developed the psychotechnology of understanding history as a cosmic narrative in which there are crucial turning points.

Jesus saw himself as such a Kairos. Whether or not he saw himself as the Kairos that was known as the Jewish Messiash is again controversial, I don't need that for the purposes of my argument. It seems though that he had a sense of himself as deeply participating in the way in which God was directing and involving himself in the course of history. If you remember the model of God we talked about when we talked about the ancient Israelites, the God of the Exodus is a God who is creating into an open future. Human beings participate in that creation by identifying with a particular course, loving it, being shaped by it, as well as shaping / participating in its flow.

Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as having an especially deep participation such that he felt himself to be at one with this God who is capable of altering the course of history and redeeming human beings. He seems to have understood this Kairos as having something to do with a profound way of understanding the participation in God. This participatory knowing is a process in which you're coupled; you're neither making it nor being made by it, but it's this reciprocal revelation in which you are making it and it is making you. The way you participate in your culture, the way you participate in your language, the way you participate in your history. You know this not by gathering beliefs but the way in which your self is fundamentally transformed.

Jesus understood his participation in God as the disclosing of this profound kind of love. We began talked about the kinds of love that human beings experience, and how love is something that deeply transforms who we are and our salience landscape / our character. We talked about how the Greeks have three terms, and it's helpful because by this time the New Testament is being written in Greek. It's helpful to understand these Greek terms:

1. Eros, which is the love of being one with something. It can be just, you know, drinking water so I become one with it. Of course it could become what has become more commonly known as "becoming one with someone" through sexual union. Erotic love.
2. Philia, that's at the core of philosophy. This is the love that is borne of right cooperation. So eros is consumptive, making one with, philia is cooperation, work together. A lot of how we succeed as human being is by the way we work together.
3. Jesus starts to emphasize a new kind of love: agape. This is not the love of consumption or cooperation; this is the love of creation. It's the love that God is demonstrating towards humanity in the way God is an ongoing creation of the open future. So God is creating the future, is creating the historical process and course of that history that makes people possible.

See, agape is the kind of love that creates persons. So the main metaphor for agape is the way a parent love a child. You don't love a child because you want to consume it in some way (that's hideous and vicious!), you don't love your child when you bring it home from the hospital because it's a great friend to you (it can't cooperate! It can't do that at all; in fact isn't not even a person. It's not a morally rationally reflective agent; in fact it's exactly the opposite), you love it precisely because by loving that non-person you turn it into a person. This is a powerful, creative, god-like ability that we have: by participating through love in another being we can transform that being from a non-person into a person; a person that could enter into a community of persons and find meaning, fellowship, belonging.