Cynic, Epic, Stoic, Skeptic
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"This time we need to do a little more scene-setting and talk about the different philosophies that are sweeping the world at this point."
Join Greg, Emily, and Rachel as they continue their discussion of the Roman Empire as we quickly move toward the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are quickly approaching in history the birth of our Lord, but not quite yet.
We just talked about the Battle of Actium last time, so this time we need to do a little more scene-setting and talk about the different philosophies that are sweeping the world at this point, or have firmly found footholds in the world, depending. There are mainly four, yes?
Yes, at this point the history books sum up four formal philosophical schools. They have their roots as far back as Alexander, so they follow hard after Aristotle’s passing and all that, but with the great huge giant philosophers out of the way, some not so well-known not so impressive philosophers appear, each with their take on something.
In many ways the catalyst was Alexander because Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates assumed the supremacy of the polis, the local city-state. Alexander just created a world polis, a cosmo-polis – cosmopolitan – empire, so where exactly are our absolutes and our standards coming from? Can I really will and choose the same thing as that Persian guy and that Egyptian guy and that Jewish guy? Is there a framework for law and meaning in all of this. We get four different answers, and by and large the answers are “No. We’re used to the polis thing and if that’s not going to work, let’s just kind of call it a day.”
We start with the Cynics, from the Greek word kynikos for “dog” because these people thought that virtue and manners were highly overrated, and were just wandering around out in the open. Our homeless friends could take a lesson here. They could live without shame because that’s kind of what some of these Cynics did. The ‘without shame’ is the point and why they were called the school of the dog.
Just as dogs perform all kinds of biological functions out in the world without any shame, they felt, “Why not? Why should anything hem us in? The only thing that really matters is self-sufficiency.” On the one hand, yes, being a multibillionaire might qualify. It’s probably easier to be self-sufficient by not needing things or people or places or much of anything.
The most famous of the Cynics was a man named Diogenes who lived at the time of Alexander. He was known for criticizing everything, turning his nose up at everything, deliberately adopting an insulting lifestyle and not caring. He lived in a barrel down by the beach and became famous for all of this somehow.
That is a good observation. You’re right, the same sort of thing. They’re recognized as holy men because…what?
Because somehow they don’t need anything, so they are keeping themselves from anything that could taint them, I guess.
I guess so. There has to be a worldview in place already, but once it’s there – and the Middle Ages was certainly permeated with a Platonic worldview at times – once it’s there sure. “I don’t need the world, I just need…”
But the thing is, the Cynics really weren’t even looking for truth. They were not sure there was much of anything to really pursue. These philosophies tend to have an ethical bent, except their ethics end up in, “How should we then live? Why do we care? We should live like we don’t care,” is kind of the answer they come down to.
Alexander came to visit Diogenes and asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” and Diogenes said, “Yes, stand a little to the left. You’re blocking my sunlight.” That’s not the kind of thing you normally should say to the conqueror of the world, but Alexander was so impressed with his gutsiness that he said, “If I could be any man in the world but Alexander, I would be Diogenes.” And Diogenes replied, “If I could be any man in the world but Diogenes, I would be anybody but Alexander,” and he got away with it.
Yes, so those are the Cynics. Notice there’s not a whole lot about dialectics and forms and ideals. It’s just how are you going to live, and do you actually have a reason for it? Well, the reason seems to be there’s no reason not to. There’s no appeal to some higher absolute or principle or the voice of a god or a voice in your head. It’s just, “Isn’t it obvious? You want to be happy? Don’t be bound down by things.”
That brings us to the Epicureans, who were similar in some ways. Their solutions were very similar. When Paul was on Mars Hill (Acts 17) he encountered both Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans thought that pleasure was the highest good and the proper goal of life. Today the word epicurean in English means someone who enjoys the finest wines, the finest steaks, the finest French food and all that. That wasn’t what they meant. They realized that to become dependent upon food or drink or sex or drugs or anything like that is actually rather enslaving and makes for not-peace because you’re always struggling to meet your addiction or live up to your food bill.
Their take on it was, “We want serenity. We don’t want things to hurt us or trouble us, so the fewest connections, the simpler foods, the things that are not addictive, superficial relationships, that makes for a happy contented life because we’re removing the inward and outward stresses. That’s what it’s all about.”
It seems like satisfaction might be a better word than pleasure, because it’s not thrill-seeking.
No, it’s absolutely not thrill-seeking. It’s serenity, peace, “I’m okay, you’re not bothering me, so that’s all we really need here, isn’t it.”
They did have some words about the gods. They did not deny that the traditional pagan gods or something like them might exist, but they said, “If they’re gods, they don’t care about us. We don’t care about ants. We don’t check in on the ants and see if they’re obeying our rules or anything. We just kind of stomp on them occasionally or just leave them alone. That’s how the gods would be with us if they’re real. They don’t care about us so there’s no particular reason we should care about them or expect anything from them. Why would they help us? If you want to believe in gods or if you want to believe in any of this, it doesn’t matter because it comes down to the same thing. They are transcendent and we’re on our own. Just make it through life without getting too involved in anything either socially, personally, physically, nutritionally, aesthetically or whatever, and that’s the happy life.”
That brings us to the Stoics, who Paul also encountered on Mars Hill. They at least tried for something. Echoing Heraclitus they said the universe/reality is living rational fire – we would say, I suppose, some kind of energy field that comes and goes, is in and out, is kindling and dying out. It’s in perpetual motion, but within it is a law or reason. They used the word logos, the same word John uses of Jesus but they meant something different.
John knew that, so when John writes his gospel he says, “Logos – you all know about the logos. You’re so completely wrong about it. Let me tell you about the Logos.”
For the Stoics, logos was identical more or less with reality, or at least it was the reason or mind imminent within the energetic universe. The Force from Star Wars is as close an analogy as I can come up with in modern times. I suppose pantheism of various forms partakes of it, except that here there was more a belief that there was a rationality. Hinduism really doesn’t do that. The Force comes closer, actually.
How does this differ, or does it, from the Gnostic idea of the central flame sort of being reflected out into lesser spheres?
In this way, as I would understand it. The Gnostics see something as it were behind the scenes or above the scenes, something removed from mundane reality, whereas the Stoics would say, “No, this energy we’re describing, that’s us.”
Take the materialist viewpoint of matter in motion but think energy in motion. That’s all the universe is. We see it as other things, and in that sense you can think of pantheism, but again the Stoics were looking for some kind of divine reason, and that’s in its divine, but so is man because man is part of all. We all share the divinity and we all share the rationality, and man can know because he’s sharing the same mind as God. That’s how man knows and that’s how man discovers law.
There’s one law for the empire because there’s one law for the universe, and all rational men participate in it by being men. We just have to do a little soul searching, a little rational thinking, that is tap the universe and imitate it, and then we can know and we can make rules that apply at our level of awareness.
So unlike the Gnostics who would seek to leave this world behind, they would say, “Well, we’re already God. God is in us, we’re in God, and we just need to do a better job of acting that way down on our level where we’re aware of things,” as far as I can understand what they’re saying.
I think so. Now, when Paul was confronting these two groups on Mars Hill, if you remember his sermon outline, on the one hand he is at pains to say that God is imminent. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” and he actually quotes Stoic poets. In fact, that is a quote from the Stoic poets. “We are also His offspring,” another quote from the Stoic poets.
He quotes them to attack the Epicurean idea that God is far off and remote. A good part of his argument is that, but then he has to turn around and say, “But God is not imminent in the way that He is infused into the creation that we find Him there. He is a sovereign judge who will hold us accountable one day and will judge the world by the man he’s ordained, of whom he’s given notice because he raised him from the dead.”
At that point he’s offended everybody. He’s attacked the virtual Deism, the hyper transcendence of the Epicureans and the hyper immanence of the Stoics. God is not the universe, and yet God cannot be shut out of the universe and he actually is involved and does care.
This is important material when you come to Acts 17, when you come to the Areopagus and Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. He starts out with, “You guys are so superstitious, overly religious. Look at all the idols.” But he comes down to, “You know, you Epicureans don’t believe in idols. You Stoics don’t believe in idols. Why are there idols all over the place? You are condemning yourself. You should be the voices out there telling people to tear these down on your own pagan premises. On your own pagan premises you’re not living up to your ethical standards. How much less by those of the true God who made heaven and earth?” which is why people didn’t want to hear him anymore. “Eh, that’s interesting, Paul. We’ll go our way.”
Their take on life is that man’s virtue or freedom comes from apathetic acceptance of whatever life may bring, because the universe is logical and rational, as rational as a differential equation. You can’t tinker with it or change it. It’s set.
Think of a computer program that runs the universe. Once it’s there, it’s there and it’s going to do what it’s going to do, and we’re part of that. We’re 0’s and 1’s in the outplay of this program but we can’t change anything so don’t try. Just accept that sometimes fate’s going to be good and sometimes it’s not going to be so good. Just go with the flow because there’s nothing else you can do, and you only make life worse by complaining about it and being agitated or fearful or worrying or whatever.
It's interesting that all of these words have passed into English, but they’ve all changed their meaning. When we say cynic today we mean someone who doesn’t believe the party line, questions everything, doesn’t trust anybody’s information. Epicureans are people who enjoy the fine things of life to the point of overindulgence. Stoics are those who show no emotion. The classic example in my generation, of course, was Mr. Spock in Star Trek.
That brings us to the last ones, the Skeptics. Again the philosophers did not mean what we mean. When we say skeptical we mean you’re never believing people. You’re asking for more information. You always think people are lying to you.
Yes. The philosophers were not. The more modern version is David Hume, who simply looked at reality and said, “Well, that’s what my eyes tell me. That’s what my ears and nose and tongue tell me, and I can reach out and touch and it all seems to be so, but given that I have a thing called the brain that’s interpreting data from the outside, how do I know that any of this is real?”
The classic example – and it’s not my favorite movie but I love it because it simplifies philosophical illustrations no end – is The Matrix. How do we know we’re not living in the matrix? How do we not know that we’re just part of a program and that any of this is real. We believe what our brains tell us, but why? What are our grounds for trusting our own senses?
This is a step being agnosticism in that it says not only do we not know, but we cannot know.
We cannot know, yes. It is impossible to know. On the other hand, our senses may be perfectly right, but we’ll never know that in this world.
Speaking of David Hume, when the English dictionary writer Samuel Johnson heard of this philosophy that said, “That rock may not be real,” he walked over and kicked the rock and said, “Ah! It’s real,” which really of course did not solve the problem because the response is, “Well, your brain says that you felt pain, but there’s no way of knowing that there’s a rock out there that caused it. All you know is that you have this sensation of kicking a rock and the reciprocal perception of pain, and you don’t know what’s really out there.”
The Greek Skeptics said a wise man will simply not register opinion. He will remain hyper-agnostic about everything, but for practical purposes – because it seems to hurt less if you believe that that is a cliff and I shouldn’t jump off of it – you’ll follow local custom and law and one assumes the basic laws of Newtonian physics.
Don’t jump off tall buildings, don’t run into a pack of mad dogs, not because you have real doubts or real certainties about the reality, but you know that when your brain says or your mind tells you “Those are mad dogs with snarling teeth and slobbering saliva mouths, and they’re coming after me and barking, and I know by experience that if I just wait here they’re going to tear me to pieces and it’s going to hurt,” it may all be in my head but the pain will be in my head and I don’t want the pain in my head so I’m running. I will pretend that maybe it’s real just to be on the safe side.
These are the ideas that intelligent men – if you want to call them that – people who fancied themselves wise and philosophers, these were the ideas that were popular throughout what had been Alexander’s empire when Jesus came, and they caught on in the Roman empire as well. Rome was lousy at creating philosophies.
Yes. Marcus Aurelius, who you asked about before, was a Stoic. He didn’t invent anything, and the things he says are pretty cliché. He just put them together in little couplets nicely, so others adopted these various philosophies to one degree or another.
The Stoics were the only ones who really answered the question, “How do we frame knowledge, reason, and law for a cosmopolitan empire?” They said because there is this cosmos, this universe, this universal energy field of which we’re all expressions, we all do have something in common and it’s not the local city/state. It’s something metaphysical and behind all of this and underneath it where we can’t see it, but it’s real. And from this reason that we all participate in, that operates in us all, we can make deductions both moral and legal, that are binding on all nations. So once again we have a step in the direction of natural law.
This is not the Christian idea of general revelation where the work of the law remains in us because we’re the image of God. This is an appeal to the deification of mankind. We are part and parcel of God, so of course we’re smart and know stuff, including how to frame laws for the world. These are not the same things, but Christians have had a really, really hard time disentangling them because the issue is a real one and it’s a pressing one.
Rome never dealt with it really, until you get to Justinian where he tries to take the pragmatic Roman law and fuse it with biblical law to give it some cohesiveness. Rome basically just looked at how people did stuff and worked with that. “So this nation doesn’t eat pork. This nation does. Alright, as long as you’re not living next to each other…oh, you visited their country and they offered you a sandwich and it was pork? Well, they didn’t know and you didn’t know so put your knives away.”
Those are the kinds of things that Rome really had to deal with, because when you conquer a world where everybody has their own gods and their own ideas of morality – and some of them are rather odd and farfetched by anybody’s standards – you have to have some kind of system to pull it together, and Rome had been very good. Remember, they actually had an officer who was responsible for creating this universal law of nations and trying to figure out how these things would mesh, because they had to administer it.
Again it was very pragmatic. “We need to make this work because we don’t need rebellions over religious ideas. We don’t need people at war with each other over religious ideas. They can practice their religions all they want, as long as they’re not hurting anybody or disturbing the peace of the empire or threatening our governmental system.” Of course, in time that meant threatening the emperor.
We’ll see as we move forward in time that the emperor for Rome becomes the focus. In him deity is incarnate. Rome was content to license all kinds of religions, as long as you admitted that the stability, the glue that held the empire together, was the deity of the emperor, which meant that the peace of the empire could always trump your religion.
“You want to do that? Not a problem. You want to do that? Not a problem. You want to do that? That’s going to stir up trouble, so no.”
“Tough, get over it. You’re not doing that because the peace of the empire comes first, and you swore that Caesar is lord and you bowed your religion to him, so there we go.”
For Rome it was a political necessity. You’re trying to administer an empire of dozens and dozens of client-states, conquered peoples, people of all classes, slaves, merchants who cross the sea and have to deal with other people. You can’t keep everybody locked up in their country. They’re going to merge and meet and interact, and your judges have to be able to sort it out.
This is the kind of world that Jesus was born into. We have this very pragmatic empire with lots of military force working on a world that has been Hellenized. Although technically the historians say the Hellenistic age ended with Actium, ages don’t end that way, any more than they are born that way. No one walked out after the battle of Actium and smelled the Greek air and said, “I feel the Hellenistic age is over now. I’m not sure why. Some new era is dawning and I can feel the word ‘Rome’ about it somehow.” It doesn’t work that way.
We can see the lingering effects of the Hellenistic age I think very clearly in Pontius Pilate. He was a man of his time. When Jesus says, “I came to bear witness to the truth,” we all know Pilate’s response – “What is truth?” He was serious. He’d been well-educated. He knew what the philosophers said. As far as he was concerned and as far as the best thinkers were concerned there was no truth, and Jesus was being some kind of nonsensical mystic. He was obviously not in touch with reality and therefore no threat to the empire, because that’s what we’ve got.
Again, Paul on Mars Hill confronts Stoics and Epicureans. These ideas and thought forms are continuing to circulate, and they will until finally Christianity enters the empire in force and begins to challenge them, both on an intellectual and a spiritual level.
There were some other things that were grabbing the attention of men. I have five. I borrowed these from Michael Grant, who is the reigning authority on classical Europe. He’s written books on the Romans and the Greeks, and both of them together, and has one of the best books I’ve seen on the Hellenistic age. He’s written about everything.
He lists five things beyond the philosophers that more ordinary people who weren’t readers, weren’t philosophers, and weren’t scientists, things they grabbed onto to try to make sense of their lives. I don’t know if this is his order, but I’ll assume it probably is, since I generally plagiarize in order, assuming that the author knew what he was doing.
Many accepted with dismal faith the all-controlling power of arbitrary fortune – fortune for them. This is something we run into in Augustine’s City of God. Fortune is fate. It is to them the opposite of free will. The Stoics were sort of on that same track.
The universe is set in motion, but whereas the Stoics counted on man’s ability to have some kind of symbiotic knowledge in sync with the universe, most people just said, “What will be will be. All my life is controlled by fortune and I really don’t have choices. I don’t have free will. Maybe I can choose whether I’m having hamburgers or hotdogs for lunch, but beyond that the great things of life are set in motion and there’s nothing we can do, so why worry about it? Why try to change it? It’s just coming. It’s going to smack you upside the head, and if occasionally it gives you something happy, just enjoy it while you can.”
Others, including some of the best-educated, believed in astral determination; that is, they looked at fortune but they said, “Yes, but there’s a reason these things happen and that’s because our destiny is written in the stars.”
Yes, he does. If you haven’t read The City of God, the early chapters, you need to because this is right where he’s starting. “You people are arguing over free will or some kind of determinism?” and astrology was a big deal. They thought if you could look at the stars you could forecast the movements of fate, and you have enough free will to maybe make some minor adjustments and escape the worst of it, and maybe jump on the bullet train of the best of it and get a little more happiness and a little more peace than you would otherwise have. Thus, people flocked to fortune tellers, to those who did horoscopes, which was presented as a very scientific mathematical thing.
This is important as we’re coming up on the Middle Ages before too long, because this is maintained in Christian civilization for a very, very long time, because it was not presented as magic but as mathematics and physics. This continued to be a thing into the Reformation. Some of the reformers, although they were hostile to any kind of magic if they perceived it to be such, were not nearly so hostile to astrology. It was with some effort that astrology died out and astronomy took its place, so this is something that’s going to be in the background and we need to understand that people have not always thought as we have about the study of the stars.
At first glance, the argument for astrology doesn’t seem that far-fetched. The sun is a heavenly body. Does the sun influence us? If it’s clouded over or if it has set, yes. How about the moon? Women know about that one. And of course the sun and moon together, there’s an effect on crops. If the stars also have these kinds of powers, then shouldn’t they also be exercising some kind of influence?
Of course, in those days the stars were identified with particular gods and goddesses, as they sometimes are today by those who do horoscopes. If you were born when Mars was ascendent you’re going to have a war-like disposition, or when Venus is ascendent you’re going to be a lover, and so on.
Again, trying to build the concrete man rather than the straw man, the wise men from the east certainly knew something from their study of the stars.
Something was going on with those stars, yes. So that was something that grabbed a lot of people, and then other people just flat-out turned to magic, as if it were another practical science. It was not the ooey scary weird stuff. It was, “This is simply the way the universe works. As above, so below. As below, so above. The universe is synced together. Learn to read the movements of the universe in its smallest artifacts like tea leaves or the flight of birds or the spots of birds’ livers, or learn to use those little spells and rituals that will move the universe.” It made perfect sense. It was logical to them.
Right. They didn’t think they were consorting with demons or any such thing. They didn’t equate magic with demonism or Satanism, and actually rarely are they exactly the same thing, at least from their point of view. Magicians generally do not claim to be consorting with Satan until you get to the Renaissance and think Doctor Faustus and all that.
Then there were the mystery cults. These were revivals, renewals, and ramped up versions of the dying and rising god that goes back into ancient history. You can think of Horus and Tammuz and Adonis and Persephone. The world has since Babel known many gods who die and rise again, and the secular world has been fond of saying, “See? Christianity is just copying that.”
No, because insofar as we’re even sure that there is historical precedent and they weren’t made up after Christianity was on the scene – Lutheran Satire has a couple things you can check out, one on Horus and one on Easter, I forget exactly what they have – so there are historical questions as to what actually happened. But even if they are ancient, these dying gods died because the universe got them, and yet somehow they managed to come back through some kind of supernatural power and they rose to become gods.
They did not do it for us, and there’s no notion here of sin or guilt or substitutionary atonement. There’s just the will to live, recognizing the divinity immanent in oneself so that you transcend the end. The transcendentalists would have understood this really well. They just didn’t need a dying and rising god to pull it off. They just looked to their own hearts, and that’s kind of the thing. This god has shown us it’s possible. He’s a way-shower, he’s a leader, he’s trod the road ahead of us, but he’s not strictly speaking a savior, and he certainly isn’t dealing with sin. What’s that anyhow? There’s no Creator God. There’s no such thing as sin. There’s just this mean universe that’s out to get us, and the dying and rising god shows us what’s possible.
These mystery cults were wrapped up in secrets and levels of initiates, not unlike Freemasonry and Illuminati and other such groups where you work your way up through stages of knowledge, magical secrets, occult revelations and all this. At some point, with a little help from your friends, you might have a nice drug experience of seeing the face of God and come away saying, “Wow, that’s so great. I want to be just like him someday.” It was hope in a world that had no hope. So these are some of the things that people turned to.
There’s one more. Some people found their escape in utopian fiction. They read fantasy literature about other worlds and other places that were more exciting than theirs. And although that’s not the purpose of Narnia or Middle-earth, it at least will give you an idea of what these people wanted. They wanted a better world, and if they could only live in their books and imagine being there and not here, hey, it’s better than the alternative and safer than drugs.
These are some of the things that the ancient world was experiencing when the gospel broke loose and had to tell people and challenge people, “There’s a real God who holds you really accountable for your actions, and the ways you’re trying to get to him or escape him do not work. Let us tell you about the true Logos. Let us tell you about the true Word of God, the Word of the Father, the God who actually did come for our sins out of love and die and rise again to meet the ethical demands of a just and holy God.”
Christianity had to redefine the intellectual landscape even as it preached Christ, because each of these systems could take Christ and incorporate him into the system, as long as they denied the most basic truths about him, which is still true today. It’s what the cults always do. “We will take Christ. We’ll use the name. We’ll use a few literary images. We’ll speak of death and resurrection and God’s love, but we will so redefine it that it’s no longer Christianity. And when Christians attack us we’ll say things like, ‘Well, that’s just your interpretation,’ and ‘That’s an old ethnocentric European-centric interpretation. The Bible had other things in mind. You’re so narrow-minded,’” and on and on it goes.
There are a couple other things I guess we should say if we haven’t said them already. Pax Romana – with the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, or rather with their suicides, Egypt fell into Octavian’s hands and he declared more or less a Roman empire. At least he declared himself to be the august one, the god-like one, and although he never took the title emperor, that’s in effect what the remnants of the old republic now became.
And yes, for those of you out there who never made the connection, the political system of Star Wars is modeled on Roman history, from the Senate to the collapse of the Senate, to the emperor, the days of the old republic defended by…
Nothing new under the sun, and also the stories that God tells in history are pretty compelling, so when we try to write our own there’s easy source material.
Yes. Those sci-fi writers or fantasy writers who’ve tried to construct an entire universe from scratch generally fail miserably. Even Tolkien didn’t do that. Neither did Lewis. He just borrowed all kinds of things from all kinds of directions without any coherence, and people have never forgiven him for that.
A question back on Roman history. So Octavian is the one that starts the trend of calling the rulers Caesars? Is that correct? Because we had Julius Caesar, but Caesar was his name, versus everyone in the future everybody will become Caesar this, Caesar that. Is it because Octavian was related to Julius Caesar and wanted to keep that alive, or how did that work?
I cannot speak with authority here because I’ve never heard that question before, not that it isn’t an obvious one. Obviously Octavian was the adopted heir of Julius Caesar, and people after his death literally worshipped Julius Caesar despite the assassination and all that. When it was over and said, Julius was elevated to the role of godhood. When Augustus came to the throne, keeping the name assured a continuity of trust and belief.
Virgil comes along and writes the Aeneid as one grand celebration of Rome’s great role in universal salvation or redemption. When Augustus took the throne there was a star that appeared in the sky, and Rome declared an advent celebration because obviously he was the savior come to turn around history and was celebrated by Virgil.
When I was growing up, every time I encountered the word Virgil it was spelled v-i. It was only much, much later, probably in college that I began to see it spelled v-e and I wondered about this because I’d seen it everywhere, not just Christian books particularly but any book always spelled Virgil with v-i-r. Finally I found out what was going on.
Virgil had made some prophecies written not too far in advance of this universal savior who would come and change the world, and when Augustus was revealed as this great emperor, although he never used that word, that was pulling everything together and bringing world peace, that looked pretty good, until he was upstaged by Jesus.
People looked at Jesus as, “Oh! That’s what Virgil was really getting at, so rather than spelling his name V-e-r-g we will spell it V-i-r-g because he foresaw the virgin-born savior and wrote about him in his wonderful prophecies.”
They spelled Virgil so it looked like virgin, not because that’s how he actually spelled it.
Oh, really? Think about how the Greeks changed everybody’s name, and the Romans came along and changed the Greeks’ name to Greek. If you’re in control, you can name people anything you want.
Here’s one for you, just throwing this one out. The proper name of Constantinople, oddly enough, wasn’t Constantinople. Byzantium was its Greek name when it was a little Greek settlement before Constantine enlarged it and made it his second capital, and from then on its name was Constantinople. It was later historians who went back and said, “That smacks of a new Rome and of Constantine. We don’t want that. Let’s go back and use its Greek name and we’ll call it the Byzantine empire.” It was called the Roman empire because Constantinople was the second Rome.
Then you run into those people who say, “By the way, did you know that Rome never fell? It’s still there? This is all a conspiracy of historians to rewrite things in Rome’s way.” Anyway, that’s another story.
We’ve got as far as the Pax Romana. For the next long time, briefly disrupted around AD 70 oddly enough but then restored, the world knows peace. At the very time that Jesus enters it and that the gospel missionaries need to go out and reach the four corners of the empire before AD 70, peace falls on the world, one of those very rare times in the history of the world.
Someone has done the calculations based on our knowledge of history to try to figure out how many times wars have actually ceased in the world, and apparently this is one of the few.
No. The Persians had built great roads so that their post riders moved along them quickly so that neither rain nor snow nor sleet – all of that – but the Romans picked up on the Persian roads and improved them, and then added their own into northern Europe so that you could go very quickly.
They kept the seas free from pirates. You could travel just about anywhere. You couldn’t do anything about storms, as Paul found out more than once, but at least as far as bad guys the oceans were relatively free.
Nations were not fighting, and Roman courts administered justice with a more or less equal hand. That doesn’t mean they were always right or just or nice about it, and they didn’t necessarily like their conquered peoples, but they tried not to favor one group above another because they wanted to maintain peace and order.
With the roads come post riders, what we call the post office or FedEx. For those of you who don’t know, the post office used to deliver letters when people actually wrote them. In those days you could send a message from one city to another and it would actually get there fairly promptly.
Fun fact – FedEx and UPS are heavily regulated, so if you’re thinking they’re the free-market alternatives to the post office you are incorrect.
There was a long time that – and I don’t know if this still holds – but only the post office could deliver letters by federal law. So if you wanted to send letters by FedEx you had to attach them somehow to the package and it gets complicated. Even if you wanted to send letters through the post office you have to tell the people upfront, “And there’s a letter here.”
That works. They haven’t thought of that one yet because they don’t know bibliophiles nearly well enough.
So this is the world into which Jesus came. It was a world of despair. It was a world that was frustrated. It was a world that had no conception of truth, but it was a world that was outwardly at peace, with wonderful roads, a good postal system, people could travel in safety, and you probably would be relatively protected as you journeyed from one province to another. You can think of the times when Paul was actually rescued by the Roman government, or at least not executed out of hand just because someone said it was a good idea.
This is what was going on, and as we look at the prophecies of Daniel in describing the fourth great world empire in Daniel 2, the image of the humanoid statue, Rome is iron. It’s not gold. It’s not silver. It’s not even brass. What do you do with iron? You hit things and break them. That’s pretty much it. It’s tough, it’s strong, and it takes a lot to bring it down.
In Daniel 7 when the same ideas are presented as beasts out of the ocean, out of the Gentile Sea, Rome is a beast like no other, a diverse beast. Again we’ve got the iron nails and the iron teeth, stamping and having its own unique way.
The first beast is like a lion, the next like a bear, the next like a leopard, but Rome can’t be categorized. It’s something brand new because it doesn’t play by the rules. It makes the rules up as it goes and maintains peace not in terms of the Assyrian/Babylonian idea of Babel, but simply by, “We’re here. We’ve got the power. We’re making this work. Shut up. Do what you’re told.” No high philosophical goals.
Virgil stated them in the Aeneid, but people didn’t go around praising the westward course of empire and Rome as the new Messiah. They said it of Augustus, but after that – yes, the Caesars claimed to be gods and that didn’t go well because these Caesars were horrible wicked men and everybody knew that.
At this point paganism is in its last gasp. We’re at the end of an age and we need a savior culturally, politically, but most importantly for man’s deepest needs, for the salvation of soul and body, from sin and its consequences. And I assume that’s where we pick up next time.
That’s all the time we have for tonight so let’s wrap up with some recommendations. Gretchen, do you have any recommendations? Do you have a favorite show?
I am solidly behind this. The Muppet Show is a great recommendation. When our girls were small it was one of the few things that we did show them, although there was one season we avoided because of some of the female types who showed up.
It’s not a kid’s show as a concept. It’s a variety show that happens to have puppets.
Yes. I’m going to go back to one of the podcasts that I enjoyed, which is from Alisa Childers again. This one is her speaking with a mom who is also a writer and various other things on the question of should Christians practice gentle parenting. I’m going to be very controversial and recommend this because their answer is going to be no.
I appreciated it because the lady that she speaks with is Abbie Halberstadt, who’s known on the internet as M is for Mama. She has 10 kids so she claims she has the practical laboratory.
I started that one. She’s been on a lot of the parenting blogs and things so she’s seen a lot of the outgrowth of gentle parenting. I particularly appreciate the story that she tells where one parent comes on a blog and says, “It’s Easter and I don’t know how to explain Jesus’ death to my child because I’ve made it clear to them that there should never be punishment for doing wrong. I don’t know how to tell them about Jesus being punished by God.”
She also describes some of the horrendous answers that people gave, which basically created a whole false gospel that reinterpreted the whole atonement. It has a lot of really good points just practically, but also theologically.
Excellent. I’m going to be far more bland and less controversial and recommend Will and Ariel Durant’s Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization. The Durants write popularly and I have seen them receive flack from professional historians for not being, well, professional historians, whatever that means. They write history books and make money off of them. How is that not professional?
Recommendation: Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman CivilizationHow dare they? It’s like popular history authors like David McCullough. How dare you tell a story that people find compelling and readable and make money.
“We’ve been writing books for years and they don’t sell like this, so there must be something wrong with you.”
The Durants’ books are thick but they’re easy to read if you can stay with the book, but you can always put it down and pick it up later. They’re not Christians, but for background history they’re good. They generally shrink some paragraphs that aren’t as important so you can skip those if you don’t want to know all the details, but at some point we have to start reading histories and here is something that is very accessible for most people. There are probably better books, but one that spans such a wide range of time, very self-consciously knowing that the issue here is between Jesus and Caesar, it’s a good starting point.
There are other books that are more controversial you could read, and of course there’s always R.J. Rushdoony’s Foundations of Social Order where he tackles the theological issues that were involved. And as we go further along I’m sure we’ll have other recommendations, assuming the coming children allow us to keep going. We will see how that works as the time comes.
Recommendation: R.J. Rushdoony’s Foundations of Social OrderThank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. A big thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters who keep the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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