Guest Post: A Friend's Reply

A friend and student of mine shared with me the following response to my post on Marcus Aurelius. Its gracious and probing manner deserves to be posted in full. Thank you, Guilherme!

I have never read Meditations, but this post has motivated me to get that audio version and listen to it. That quote you provided is an inviting sample: “... A personality in balance ... Neither rash nor hesitant—or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious—but not aggressive or paranoid either.” Hopefully, I can learn some things from Marcus Aurelius’ remarks on people who impacted him, which I can then put into practice, among other things, as I reflect on what I should do with my life.

There are a number of good things in your reflection that can be further unpacked. Maybe you could do a podcast episode on Marcus Aurelius as part of your What I Have Learned From ... series. In fact, maybe you could even write a book with that title at some point.

I appreciate your call to be thankful for the people in our lives. I also believe it could be interesting to explore the interplay between the emotions of gratitude and admiration in one’s engagement with moral exemplars.

Your statement that “recollecting virtuous people might be more valuable than any ethical theory” may be welcomingly humbling to scholars. While you are definitely not dismissing the study of ethical theory, you are touching on a point that should become clearer the more one thinks about it. In a sense, this reality is liberating. On the other hand, the statement is itself a theoretical reflection on how people exercise moral agency, that is, that a moral agent’s reflection upon the lives of people he or she admires may be more important than that agent’s comprehension of how he or she exercises moral agency. While theory is helpful, it is definitely not primary.

Thanks again for sharing. Have a good week!

Guilherme

How Marcus Aurelius Taught me Gratitude and Moral Mindfulness

In the past, whenever I would crack open Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I would instinctively skip Book 1 (“Debts and Lessons”). I would repeatedly dismiss it as a perfunctory foreword, listing that it does all the people that impacted him throughout his life. OK, good, nice, touching, let’s move on. It took an audiobook listening of the same to disabuse me of my ignorance. (It must have been Richard Armitage’s beguiling voice that did it. You have to get that version.) As I allowed the cadence of Aurelius’ gratitude to roll over me, I finally understood what that chapter was about:

1. Good people that come across our path are one the life’s greatest gifts. That ought to occasion unceasing gratitude.

2. Moral exemplars are essential in crafting our identity values and aspirations.

3. Not one person can embody all the potentials of human goodness transformed by grace.

4. Remembering and recollecting virtuous people might be more valuable than any ethical theory, including a theory of virtue.

5. Such recollecting needs to be frequent.

There is nothing here that a Christian needs to object to, including the lessons that Aurelius learned from Maximus:

Self-control and resistance to distractions. Optimism in adversity—especially illness. A personality in balance: dignity and grace together. Doing your job without whining. Other people’s certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice. Never taken aback or apprehensive. Neither rash nor hesitant—or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious—but not aggressive or paranoid either.

Right!

Here, then, is a good project for us, to be completed at some point in the near future. Our personal “Debt and Lessons” chapter to ground us in life, foster gratitude, and dispel any lingering existential rut.