common threads

How interesting when threads from different things I'm reading come together.

In Meister Eckhart's The Talks of Instruction he says

You must observe two things about yourself that our Lord also had to deal with. He, too, had higher and lower powers, each having its own function. By his higher powers, he possessed and enjoyed the bliss of eternity while, at the same time, by his lower powers, he went through much suffering and struggle here on earth, and still this did not inhibit the function of the higher powers. So it should be with you. ...Moreover, we should assign suffering solely to the body...The spirit will not be tempted by suffering, the senses and [concerns of] the lower faculties.

And on page 8 of The American Soul [available for two bucks!], Jacob Needleman cites Marcus Aurelius after noting that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and others were inspired by the Stoicists such as Aurelius and Epictetus:

And in the words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelieus, speaking of the need to accept the desires and sufferings attendant upon being obliged to live in a mortal body on earth and the simultaneous duty to act according to the dictates of one's own inner God: "Nothing will happen to me which is not in conformity with the Nature of the All. [But] it depends on me to do nothing which is contrary to my god and my daimon [inner spirit].

So it seems that Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is next on the reading list.

Update
And today (June 23) I find on A&L Daily this review of Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul by Roy Porter.
Excerpts:

The issue at the center of the body-mind problem is which of the two, body or mind, is supreme, which is at the wheel, which is really in possession of the remote and selecting all the channels? The answer has never been clear. ... Flesh in the Age of Reason examines how the self was understood and transformed by "educated elites--opinion makers--[as they] grappled with anxieties as to their nature, individuality, and destiny as thinking and feeling humans." Without claiming to be representative, let alone definitive, the book also attempts to chronicle how, as Porter puts it, "the demise of the soul came about," by which he means the centrality of the soul in the minds of those thinking about these matters. This will of course come as striking news to many people who continue to believe they possess an undiminished soul, but then another part of Porter's story has to do with philosophers' and scientists' attempt to wrest the domain of the soul from Christian theology and transfer its functions to the mind.

June 22, 2004 10:50 PM