Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.9

In conformity to the Nature of the Universe every single thing is accomplished, for certainly it is not in conformity to any other nature that each thing is accomplished, either a nature which externally comprehends this, or a nature which is comprehended within this nature, or a nature external and independent of this.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

We are drawn to dividing things. This is mine, and that is yours. I am right, so you must be wrong. We are better, and you are all worse.

This is a symptom of the deepest dissatisfaction. It is a moral sickness.

Our love of separation even rises up to the lofty realm of metaphysics. I don’t like this world, so there is surely some other, much better, world. Matter is evil, so there must be a more perfect form of spirit. People disturb me, so I will create for myself the idea of a God who promises to remove what is inconvenient to me. My “-ism” is superior to your “-ism”.

Even as hatred fractures, love will always unite.

No decent human being will ever alienate himself from another. So too, nothing in Nature is alien to anything else. It is all one.

There is nothing “out there” that comprehends what is real. There is no one part within the whole that rules the whole. There is nothing external that manages what is internal. There is only what is real, all things joined together, the less perfect ordered toward what is more perfect. One reality, not many realities.There is what is, and anything else is not.

I have struggled to suggest to some that there is indeed a guiding purpose and principle to it all. I have also struggled to suggest to others that this guiding purpose and principle is never something separate, distant, or obscure. I find myself very rarely making any impression on either end. No matter. I am learning to understand, and I wish it for others as well.

One of those most powerful and influential moments of my life was the opportunity to discover a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions. While all the business, pre-law, and pre-med majors found it clever and amusing, I found it transforming:

And I viewed the other things below You, and perceived that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are they not. They are, indeed, because they are from You. But they are not, because they are not what You are. For that truly is which remains immutably.

Is Divine Reason transcendent or immanent? Yes.

Written in 1/2007