Although Boccaccio’s “Ser Ciappelletto” portrays a man who sins up until his dying breath, it is also an early Renaissance Humanist commentary on life. As Ser Ciappelletto blasphemes the Church by lying to one of its holiest friars, Boccaccio is also making a critique of the Church’s validity. When Ciappelletto dies, he has convinced the friar of his completely (and falsely) sinless nature and attains sainthood on earth. Yet his ultimate fate is unknown. Boccaccio intentionally left Heavenly judgment out to make a point: what matters is the here and now because God and the afterlife are beyond human comprehension.

Boccaccio paints Ser Ciappelletto as a rather amusing fellow who torments the Church, the government, and his fellow Italians. Yet he does this all to amuse himself, not because he is inherently evil. “He would have been greatly embarrassed if one of his legal deeds… were found to be anything other than manifestly false; he would have drawn up as many false documents as were requested of him without any fee, and done it more willingly than one who was paid enormous amounts of money.” His final act in life is to lie the holy friar, convincing the man of God of his purity and piety. Ciappelletto lives a lier and a thief, and dies a Christian and a saint. Obviously the Church is no better judge of this man than anyone else.

In his final act of deception, Ser Ciappelletto solves the dilemma of his caretakers and creates a persona who will inspire people for years to come. Although the fate of his immortal soul is unknown, the legacy he leaves behind in life is the focus of his story. His present relationship with God is what matters, not what happens after his death. A real confession of Ciappelletto’s sins would just condemn him further, and also cause problems for the two brothers and the friar. But as Ciappelletto himself posed the solution, “I have, while alive, done so many injuries to our good Lord, that to do Him one last injury at my death won’t really matter.” His life is the method by which he defines his relationship with God. What happens after our time is unknown, and so it should not be our focus in living.

In life, Ser Ciappelletto sinned; in death, he becomes a saint. Yet just as his sainthood is purely an earthly construct, so too is the entire Church according to Boccaccio. The holy friar does not have any divine powers to discern Ser Ciappelletto’s true nature, and thus is able to be tricked into giving him the highest praise. This goes to show that the Church is fallible - it has no special ability to understand God, and therefore the nature of God is unknown. The only thing a person can be sure of is his lifetime on earth. In one short tale, Boccaccio redefines the human relationship with the Church and the afterlife in a purely Humanist perspective.

One murder is more human than a hundred deadly tsunamis, earthquakes, and eruptions. We find human nature in the individual, not the collective. Rousseau presents the idea of “total alienation of each associate… to the whole community.” These noble words pose an elegant solution to the problem of human society. If only, Rousseau proposes, each person was utterly selfless, the Social Contract would construct a stable and constructive society that would benefit all its citizen components. But human beings are not components, and nor are they selfless. If men were angels, you wouldn’t need government in the first place - society would be a natural utopia. Rashomon shows us a very different picture of our nature, at once more disturbing and more human. It presents humanity without apologies; people who are deeply selfish. It is the human mind that perceives a greater or more evil intent in even our own actions. Yet behind this facade of egotism lies the human heart, the source of love and compassion which may sometimes shine through. Rousseau rests all his arguments on this small jewel of human nature, while Rashomon demonstrates how rare and precious it really is.

There are four stories in Rashomon. The fourth is presumed to be the truth, but the other versions tell the same story - except that each person telling it is presented as the murderer. The bandit, Tajomaru, kills the husband, Takehiro, after challenging him to an honorable duel; the wife, Masako, kills her husband while deliriously begging him to stop looking at with disgust; Takehiro himself commits honorable suicide after having been betrayed by his own wife. Why would they blame themselves? They speak the truth as they see it. None of them believe they are innocent, and so confess their guilt. Yet their versions distort the actual events to place themselves at the center. They each play the tragic hero, led by events beyond their control to a point of no return - led to do the only honorable thing left to do. Kill Takehiro. The reality is that all of their selfish decisions culminate in Takehiro’s death. None of them are honorable; not one stands against Takehiro’s greed, Tajomaru’s lust, or Masako’s hatred. They are all so weak and so selfish that they delude even themselves into believing their angst.

The drives of the characters are not animal emotions, but a deep-seated self-centeredness arising from our own self-consciousness. We are more aware of ourselves than anything else, and so we are the center of our own world. Descartes brought this concept, “I think therefore I am,” into such sharp focus that the West has hardly been able to get beyond it for hundreds of years. Rousseau, at the forefront of Enlightenment thinking, sought to displace this self-centeredness and turn it into “group-centeredness.” But this idea, although it would make for a great society, would reduce us to the state of ants - a hive mind with no individual thought. And that is what makes us human. What makes being human any good at all? It is our ability to ultimately rise above this egocentric thought process. Without abdicating the self, we can embrace others. We can understand others as ourselves, drawing them inward - not giving up the self as Rousseau proposes, but expanding it. Walking away from Rashomon, we see the honest smile of the woodcutter taking home the abandoned baby. This is the rare strength of human nature that makes life powerful even in the midst of selfishness.

The Civil War

The Civil War was fought over the ideology of America. Two distinct cultures arose in the Antebellum, one in the North and one in the South. Northerners turned the idea of American independence into individual independence. Writers and artists trying to find a style unique to their country developed Transcendentalism, a philosophy that believed in the absolute authority of the Self. This led to a conflict with the South, which believed it acceptable to own slaves. Southerners had gone from tobacco farmers hoping to make a quick fortune to America’s equivalent of landed aristocrats. They wanted to revive the old ideas of Europe, and built a social structure that emphasized family and society. Unfortunately, the wealth of this upper class was earned by black slaves. Because of its questionable morality, southern slave-owners avoided the issue until northerners pressured them to abolish it. They had to defend themselves from the invading ideology, while northerners had to confront the institution that violated their beliefs. The conflict over slavery revealed the underlying problem of having two very different systems in one country. America could not have two identities. In its adolescence, the Civil War, Americans would fight and die to decide which role their country would play: old aristocracy, or land of independence.

Northern ideology comes from Transcendentalism, a refinement of the ideas that forged America. The first Europeans that came to America sought independence from their mother country, and in the Antebellum, northerners were seeking independence from European culture, as well. The philosophy that arose from this venture, Transcendentalism, put the individual above all authority. “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” (Emerson) Transcendental writers, like Emerson and Thoreau, believed that society was bad for the individual, that “our life is frittered away by detail.” (Thoreau) This belief in the Self inspired people to see the wrongs of slavery, many calling for its immediate end in the South. “But is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,” said Garrison. (Brinkley 336) He was surely inspired by Emerson’s words, “I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” (Emerson) The ideals of individualism that inspired the American Revolution also fueled the maturation of those ideas, as manifested in Transcendentalism. Northern ideology called for the breaking of tradition, and the independence from society and slavery.

The South, on the other hand, idolized the image of aristocracy. They sought to create an upper class like that in Europe, “true aristocracies, long entrenched.” (Brinkley 301) They felt the most important things were society and family. This class of rich nobles originated from the early colonial farmers, who had built small plantations in the hopes of getting rich on tobacco. (Alsop) The dreams of wealth had been achieved by some, enough to establish a stable hierarchy headed by wealthy southern plantation owners and their families. However, instead of peasants working the fields, slaved provided most of the labor. Southerners avoided the issue because slaves were the basis for the rest of their lifestyle. They wanted to return to the days of chivalry and high society, but the cost was in human freedom.

Northern ideology would not accept slavery, and northerners wanted to put an end to it in the South. Slavery violated the ideals of independence northerners believed in. “Like other reformers, … [Transcendentalists] were calling for an unleashing of the individual human spirit…” (Brinkley 336) This meant freeing the slaves, and the complete abolition of the institution. “Abolitionist writings had been antagonizing white southerners for years,” (370) but writing was not enough to convince them of the evils of slavery and the need for emancipation. John Brown rallied black slaves and white supporters, killing white southerners in the Harpers Ferry raid. (Loewen 173) He was caught and hanged. “Remember Shields Green and Copeland, who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs for the cause of the slave.” (Douglass) Northerners believed in independence, and pressured the South to bend to its moral authority and abolish slavery.

The South, however, resisted all northern threats and defended slavery. At first southerners “harbored reservations about slavery. But by the mid-1830’s, a militant defense of the system was beginning to replace this ambivalence.” (Brinkley 370) Slave-owners were forced to deal with the issue of slavery on a moral basis instead of avoiding it. Under pressure, their arguments were hypocritical. They “secretly feared that their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery.” (Loewen 189) In their defensiveness, they put up a flawed argument, poorly defending slavery when they actually wanted to defend aristocracy. The important thing to them was the lifestyle slavery provided, not slavery itself, but southerners believed “that an assault on one hierarchical system (slavery) would open the way to an assault on another such system (the family).” (Brinkley 305) They defended their culture from pressure from the North by defending an institution which they hoped would also preserve their ideology.

The Civil War began when the South realized that their system was too different from the North’s for there to be a compromise. Slavery became the breaking point between the poles of America, the one point where the two ideologies could not avoid each other. Their Civil War was fought over the identity America was to have, for if it did not happen, the country would have two separate ideologies guiding its behavior. This crisis of ego-identity versus role-confusion identifies it as America’s adolescence in Erickson’s theory of self development. The Civil War was not a conflict over slavery, but over the role of the country. Slavery was the issue that had to be resolved in order to determine America’s ideology, where before there had been two distinct ideologies. The North, with Transcendentalism, wanted individualism and freedom from all society and law. The South hoped to revive chivalry and high society, building an aristocracy of elite planters ruling over the lesser classes. Authority of the individual versus the authority of the hierarchy. Unity between the North and the South broke down as their ideologies matured and they became more willing to fight for those ideals. The realization of those differences, in the form of conflict over slavery, led to the Civil War. It was fought over which identity America would have: northern Transcendentalism or southern aristocracy.

Works Cited

• Alsop, George. Tobacco and Trade in Maryland. 1666.

• Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. Boston, Massachusetts: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

• Douglass, Frederick. Men of Color, To Arms! 21 March 1863.

• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “A Nonconformist.” Self-Reliance. 1841.

• Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

• Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854.

Confucianism may be able to be realized in today’s society, but not without abandoning our entire political system. There is nothing innately wrong with Confucius’ teachings; he describes the perfect model for humanity, not a realistic one. But the United States isn’t just flawed; the traits of our government are those which Confucius singles out as the worst traits to have. If Chun Tzu is the ideal of society, then the United States is its antithesis.Confucius says, “The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.”

A leader ruling by Te (moral example) must show people the way of good through his own actions. “In whatever direction the wind blows, the grass always bends.” In the case of our own government, however, the leaders rule with money. Politicians can start and squelch laws and programs by regulating their funding. In turn, citizens have learned to settle disputes by suing one another. The winner is awarded money, and the loser loses money. The entire political system is run by currency - our leaders are budget managers, and we follow their lead by caring only for profit.

Confucius says that leading by punishment will create citizens who “avoid wrongdoing but will have no sense of honor and shame.” The United States government runs on this system, and its citizens do indeed have no sense of Li, propriety. For example, people don’t see speeding itself as wrong, and the only thing stopping them from speeding is the fear of getting caught. What is the punishment for getting caught? You guessed it - a monetary fine. People should do what is right without reward and stop themselves from doing what is wrong. However, in the current system, with laws specifically stating what is wrong, people see everything unstated as good, and learn only to avoid the law. The only way to control such unruly citizens is to create new laws and more severe punishments. In order to break this cycle, the government must “lead them with virtue and regulate them by the rules of propriety, and they will have a sense of shame and, moreover, set themselves right.”

Confucius says that a good government has “sufficient food, sufficient armament, and sufficient confidence in the people.” When forced to give these things up, the last to go would be confidence, and the first to go would be armament. Our government would only let go of armament as a last resort, and confidence has already been sacrificed. How else can one explain standardized testing? It must represent a lack of confidence in our teachers and students. Courts regulate even minor disputes between people. Doesn’t this show lack of confidence in people’s responsibility? Armament and confidence get mixed up with the Homeland Security Act, which improves defense at the expense of trusting people. Big Brother may keep us safe, but why should we trust our leaders when they don’t trust us?

Our government, our entire political system, is run by money and punishment. It leads to a society verging on the anarchy of Confucius’ own time. He had to imagine an ideal society even at a time when his own society was in chaos. If the United States government matches his worst examples, fits the antithesis of Chun Tzu, then we are indeed close to the same cultural abyss. However, no matter how close to anarchy we actually are, we can still attain true Confucianism. China survived a collapse of order and went on to become a strong empire. Perhaps if we follow Confucius’ examples, we can shape and change our own society so that it can reach Chun Tzu.

The 1920’s should be called the Dreaming Decade. Everyone in America was dreaming of a better future, more freedom, or a safer community. Women had won the vote and now turned to overthrowing old traditions. Blacks migrated north to the promises of a better life. There were also those dreaming of a return to tradition. The Ku Klux Klan and fundamentalists promoted racial purity and stronger faith. President Hoover stated his dream, shared by many Americans during the Roaring 20’s, when he said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” (Zinn 378) Everybody and their dog had a dream, and these dreams were what shaped the country and the world. Things would get better, progress would be made. The Dreaming Decade was full of optimism.

Women began dreaming of independence. In the first year of the new decade, they secured the right to vote. They proceeded to invade the work-place and college campuses. A new type of woman emerged that represented a departure from all previous stereotypes, who felt it “no longer necessary to maintain a rigid, Victorian female ‘respectability.’ They could smoke, drink, dance, wear seductive clothes and makeup, and attend lively parties.” (Brinkley 667) These women were called flappers. They were at the extreme, but their endeavors to become better than their parents’ generation reflected the attitude of many young women of the age.

Marketers were quick to latch onto the dreams of the New Woman. Marlboro began targeting cigarette ads to women. Cosmetics and beauty products, unpopular with the flappers’ mothers, became essential. During this period when women were looking for a new image, products were helping to define it. Advertisements played on women’s new insecurities with their bodies, their beauty, and their age. Women were dependent on media images to define how they should look and behave. The dream of women’s independence failed as its very image became dependent on marketing.

African-Americans also dreamed of freedom and independence from the old ways. Chicago and other northern cities promised to fulfill that dream by offering jobs and a tolerant atmosphere. Most blacks lived in the South as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. When the boll weevil ravaged the cotton crops, they were left with lower wages and unemployment. With the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan, lynchings became more frequent. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down south… you can depend on it that colored people will arrive within two weeks.” (Tuttle 4) Even when black people weren’t being killed, they were being abused, segregated, and forced to live in poor conditions. “I suppose the worst place there is better than the best place here.” (2) The dreams of the North where the beginnings of the Great Migration.

The North held many promises for black people, but Chicago wasn’t always as great as it was made out to be. “Their aspirations for economic, political, and social rebirth were soon shattered by their reception in the city.” (Tuttle 5) The South was not the only place of prejudice. The high concentration of immigrants in the North made it a prime target of the Klan, where many resented the influx of foreigners that took away jobs. Blacks were now foreigners, migrants working along with the immigrants in hard, low-paying jobs. Unions like the AFL “often worked actively to exclude blacks… Most blacks, however, worked in jobs in which the AFL took no interest in at all - as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, domestics, and other service capacities.” (Brinkley 661) Blacks in America had gone from slavery to sharecropping to service-workers. Their dreams of improvement and freedom went unfulfilled, ever after the Great Migration.

The Ku Klux Klan had dreams, too. They wanted racial purity, an America free from black people. The very aspirations of blacks helped fuel the Klan’s rebirth in the twenties, but “fear of the ‘New Negro’ rapidly declined as he either accepted his old place or moved to northern cities.” (Higham 5) This time around, however, the Klan had expanded their dream of “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.” (Colin 1) Jews, Catholics, and foreigners were terrorized. The Klan became widely popular, supported by many that believed that immigrants “undermined the whole economic system.” (Higham 2)

Fortunately or unfortunately, the KKK’s dream was doomed from the start. There were far too many immigrants to lynch or return them all. They had lived in America, some for generations, and had become Americans. “Anti-Klan mobs were beginning to lash back at the organization in areas where immigrants were strongly entrenched.” (Higham 6) There were more people who the Klan worked against than it worked for, and even some of those disagreed with its ways. Everyone had dreams of their own, but the Klan’s dream worked against many other people’s. “Explicitly, racism denied the regnant optimism of the Progressive era.” (Higham 3) Scandals involving high-ranking Klansmen caused distrust in the organization that had been founded on so-called moral principals, and finally led to its downfall. The racial purity they dreamed about was not to be.

Prohibition was another movement that represented the dream to return to tradition. It banned the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in 1920. Alcohol was associated with drunken violence, especially toward women and children in the home. It was also connected to immigrants, to which alcohol was part of everyday life. Many “Drys” were the same sort that supported the Ku Klux Klan, “fundamentalists: provincial, largely… rural men and women fighting to preserve traditional faith and to maintain the centrality of religion in American life.” (Brinkley 673) Prohibition was accompanied by other fundamentalist movements, such as banning the teaching of evolution in schools. The goal of these movements was to promote the dream of a traditional nation.

One of the famous trademarks of the twenties was the violation of Prohibition. Banning alcohol actually caused more problems than it solved. “Since an enormous, lucrative industry was now barred to legitimate businessmen, organized-crime figures took it over.” (Brinkley 671) Gangs used profits to move into prostitution, gambling, and drugs. Prohibition increased alcohol-related violence instead of preventing it. Gangs competed for the control of bootlegging, resulting in 500 deaths in Chicago alone. The drinks themselves were more dangerous - homemade alcohol could cause blindness and death. Still, the demand for it went unabated. Even the police could be bought off by bootleggers. The fundamentalists lost ground in their push for Creationist teachings, as well. The Scopes trial in 1925 revealed them to be narrow-minded and their position anti-progress. The dream of bringing back old traditions and preventing the harm alcohol could bring was crushed by the negative response to Prohibition.

The dreams could not mask reality. Most dreams were never to come true. This was the dual identity of the Dreaming Decade. There were wonderful dreams, but they sowed the seeds for their own destruction. Women sought to create a new image, and found it not in themselves, but in the products sold to them. Black Americans went north to escape the clinging bonds of slavery, but found new shackles, this time in the unfamiliar streets of Chicago. The Ku Klux Klan, whose dream was obviously a horrible nightmare for many, failed nonetheless. Prohibition’s more noble goal ended up causing the problems it tried to fix. Even Hoover’s dream of ending poverty was ridiculous when “the top 0.5 percent of Americans in 1929 owned 32.4 percent of all the net worth of individuals.” (McElvaine 3) The dreams of a nation lay broken at the end of the Dreaming Decade. Perhaps the Great Depression affected people’s spirits so greatly because they had much more than money invested in the failed dreams. The 1920’s were full of hope but devoid of solutions. A fitful and universal name for those years would be the Dreaming Decade - the era of dreams.

Works Cited

• Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

• Gordon, Colin. “The Ku Klux Klan Defines Americanism.” Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945. Houghton Mifflin, 1926.

• Higham, John. “The Tribal Twenties.” Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism. New Jersey: Trustees of Rutgers College, 1955.

• McElvaine, Robert S. “Who Was Roaring in the Twenties? - Origins of the Great Depression.” The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times Books, 1984.

• Tuttle, William M., Jr. “Going into Canaan.” Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

• Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 1980.

Niccolo Machiavelli’s short book, The Prince, is a guide on how to be a successful monarch; “Ruling for Dummies” could be its modern title. One aspect of his advice which is most arguable in its moral implications is that the ends always justify the means. Lying and killing are perfectly acceptable if they keep a Prince in power. In Chapter 17, Machiavelli suggests that a ruler should prefer to be feared than loved. The affection of the people “is held by the tie of obligation, which, because men are a sorry breed, is broken on every whisper of private interest; but fear is bound by the apprehension of punishment which never relaxes its grasp.” The only limit to using fear is when it begins earning the people’s hatred. Machiavelli finds torture and cruelty perfectly acceptable as long as they are effective and do not escalate - people forget cruelty, but continuous terror will eventually lead to hate. When a republic is taken over, The Prince advises that the new ruler destroy it completely to wipe freedom from the minds of the people.

Perhaps the clearest statement of the ends justifying the means is in Chapter 17: “In the actions of all men, and most of all of Princes, where there is no tribunal to which we can appeal, we look to results. Wherefore if a Prince succeeds in establishing and maintaining his authority, the means will always be judged honorable and be approved by every one.” In the end, the stability of the princedom is determined by the firmness of the Prince and he is justified in any means he uses to establish that stability.

Adolf Hitler is perfect example of how Machiavelli’s advice can work out well for a Prince and his princedom–and lead to true immorality and atrocity. Germany had fallen into poverty and depression after World War I. War debts and tributes were high, and many Germans did not accept that they had lost the war in the first place. Hitler came on the scene as a rejuvenating force, providing a new mentality based on a united and superior Aryan race. He boosted both morale and the economy. However, in true Machiavelli form, he could not trust to the love of his people; he distracted them with a war of invasion and expansion (under the name of liberation), and inspired a healthy fear by pointing a finger - and a gun–at the Jewish people.

Hitler’s fascist regime was very successful. Even after the fall of the Nazis, Germany managed to maintain First-World status. It’s arguable that without Hitler, Germany may have remained in its economic slump and become a Second- or Third-World country. But if Hitler was ultimately good for Germany, did this end justify his horrific means? No. The Prince may give practical advice to leaders, but when stability comes at the cost of human lives, the ends can never be justified.

Americans are addicted to the future. Our entire concept of progress is based upon this addiction. If the here and now is unsatisfactory, we believe that we can improve and get better; yet we are never really satisfied with what we have. Even if we attain the goal we started out with, we still want to go farther–buy more stuff, make more money, earn more respect. We graduate from high school to go on to college, from college to a job, from a job to retirement. At every stage of our American lives we look ahead to the next big thing. Our thirst is never satisfied, so we continually long for the future.

The thirst is tanha, and the dissatisfaction it causes is called dukkha. Buddhism is so appealing to America because it solves a problem that faces every middle-class citizen today. Life is suffering, even when we are never truly unhappy. The solution is to live in the moment, not the future. “If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself.” When you always believe you can rectify your dissatisfaction at some future moment, you never live in any moment at all. You live for the future until the future no longer exists. You die never having lived at all.

Enlightenment is the goal, not of the future, but of the present. It is beyond happiness and unhappiness because it is living without the sadness in knowing that this moment will end or the anticipation of some future moment. We forget ourselves, our egos, and become fully involved with the current moment, the Now. Eckhart Tolle preaches equanimity–approaching all moments in life equally because we are exactly the same. We are always present, with no investment in the moment. When we are constant, the moment can no longer affect us. We give up our yearning for change, our addiction to the future. This state can be reached temporarily during a monk’s meditation, a runner’s concentration, or even a software engineer’s “flow.” Enlightenment is to be always in this state of equanimity or mindfulness, escaping dukkha once and for all.

Star Wars shows how this manifests itself even in popular American culture. Qui-Gon says to his young apprentice in Episode I, “Don’t center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan. Keep your concentration here and now were it belongs.” Obi-Wan retorts, “Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future.” “But not at the expense of the moment,” is Qui-Gon’s sage reply. Obi-Wan’s own padawan, Anakin, shows his failure in his own addiction to the future. He is completely consumed by the belief that he can change things. He suffers instead of accepting, full of tanha, and therefore dukkha. Only at the end of his life does he live completely in the Now. He accepts that he cannot evade death, that he cannot change the future; he asks his son to remove his helmet. He no longer lives for the future, and so in his last moment he reaches enlightenment.

The most important message of Jesus is that each of us has the ability to become god-like. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” [Matthew 4:17] for the kingdom of heaven is the divine seed within each human being. No human is no more or less holy than another because every human has this divine spark. In this way all humans are equal, and Jesus’ own humanity shows that all people have the potential to reach the god within them. Although Matthew portrays Jesus as a holy figure, he also refers to Jesus as the Son of Man - not the Son of God. And although Jesus calls God his father, he also calls all those he sits with his brothers and sisters. The metaphor of Jesus coming down from the heavens to save the people and give the faithful eternal life serves only to illustrate how his teachings can lead to reaching the godliness within us.

Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden because God feared that they might eat from the tree of life and become gods themselves. Thus Man became mortal, and our bodies must eventually perish. Our souls, however, are immortal. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” [24:35] Through the words of Jesus, a human can come to know God. By realizing the immortality of our own souls, we understand our own divinity. Jesus not only understood how close he was to God, but also the closeness of all humanity to God. His message is to seek this connection to the divine and embody divinity itself as the Sons (and Daughters) of God.

Jesus teaches us that beyond any superficial differences lies a divine seed that we all share. This message of equality of all people makes it especially important in today’s world of struggling equality between men and women. Even in those countries that have made huge leaps in progress still deal with gender equality issues. Ironically, it often seems that the strongest voice supporting conventional gender roles is the Christian church. However, Jesus made it clear that men and women are equal. He repeatedly forgave even the worst sinners, and made no preference between the genders. He even pardoned a woman taken in adultery. In addition, although the New Testament does not name any female disciples, it the women who stay with Jesus through his crucifixion and first meet him when he is resurrected. While the Disciples sinned, betrayed, and denied, the women were faithful to the end. Jesus taught forgiveness and respect because all people, whether man or woman, have within them a divine seed. The most important message of Jesus is the concept of our potential to reach a state of divinity equal to himself. “I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, … you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.” [21:21]

The ancient Greeks believed that fate was a combination of the gods’ will, human motivation, and the force of the past. The modern definition is the opposite: a future already defined and unchangeable. Homer’s Odyssey shows the contrast between these two views of fate. Our version of fate does not exist in the saga, in which blind prophets, bird signs, and the gods themselves seem to spell out the fate of man. And yet these prophecies are falsehoods or just plain obvious. The humans ultimately determine their own fate in the Odyssey, so our view of fate does not exist in the story while Greek fate controls the plot.

The most important prophecy in the Odyssey is Teiresias’, which turns out to be just good advice. Kirke tells Odysseus to seek out the blind prophet in Hades. There, the dead man tells him that he will “find the grazing herds of Helios… Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent, and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka. But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction for ship and crew” (188). He gives Odysseus fair warning not to upset the gods, or else Helios will get mad. Teiresias then tells him to appease Poseidon by making offerings to him once Odysseus gets home. Neither of these are examples of modern fate. They are advice not to upset the gods, since the gods have great power to seek retribution. Yet the Greeks believed that fate is just that, the actions of humans and the will of the gods.

The Phaiakians feel the wrath of the gods when they give Odysseus asylum and take him home. Alkinoos’ father had prophesied that continuing to ferry people about might incur divine wrath in the form of mountains springing up around their seaport. Poseidon indeed wishes to do just that, but for another reason: helping Odysseus. He doesn’t even mention Alkinoos’ prophecy. If the omnipotent gods don’t recognize a prophecy, it must not be fate. Indeed, the prophecy is not even fulfilled, as Poseidon instead turns the ship to stone. But Greek fate has still been fulfilled since the gods are responding to human behavior, and the force of the past influences all their actions. Odysseus, the hero himself, sees his own destiny in the hands of the gods, and yet it is his cunning that pulls off their plans. Athena disguises him as an old man in order to sneak into his own house unrecognized. However, it is Odysseus who must play the part. Although he says, “it’s light work for the gods who rule the skies to exalt a mortal man or bring him low” (296), he is not brought low by the disguise. He is still cunning, still “the noble and enduring man” (292). And it is not the gods who exalted him in the first place - his reputation for intelligence and perseverance was well earned, and even Athena admires those traits in him. This is the essence of Greek fate: human motivation.

The gods, although flaunted as all-powerful and all knowing, do not act in accordance to our modern view fate. Omens and prophecies only state the present or give advice. Even the most mystical beings show no concrete knowledge of the future. If the gods are not in charge of fate, then mankind must be in charge of its own destiny. Odysseus and his son Telemakhos must defeat the suitors using their own skill and the help of Athena. Yet this is exactly what the Greeks believed fate to be. The actions of humans and gods work together to forge the future. The Odyssey shows the disparity between our own definition of fate and that of the ancient Greeks.

In Marcus’ world, “all things are interwoven with one another.” [7:9] Unity with multiplicity, conformity with individuality. Even this Roman Emperor grasps the Eastern concept of paradoxes, the “mask of eternity” that exists beyond all duality. Individuals are parts of the whole world, and also parts in the divine omnipresent God. To perceive his direction, or Providence, we must seek our own inner reason. This is the search for Enlightenment, Nirvana, Moksha: not to reunite the part with the whole, but to realize the ultimate unity that already exists between the part and the whole. Thus, Marcus Aurelius’ “world-order” is achieved through a synthesis of individualism and conformity.

His “world-order” uses a model similar to that of Hinduism. “Providence is the source from which all things flow… You yourself are a part of that universe; and for any one of nature’s parts, that which is assigned to it by the World-Nature… is good.” [2:3] Your part is your assigned OM, your bit of universal energy. Even trapped like this, it is still part of God: “God is one, pervading all things.” [7:9] However, unlike Brahman-Atman, this God has direction: Providence. Master-reason is the very manifestation of this godliness, and by listening to it, we listen to the direction of God which leads to harmony with Nature.

Providence does not exist in the future or the past, yet it is eternal because it exists beyond time and space. One who listens to master-reason also transcends these limits. The rational soul “can encompass the whole universe at will, both its own structure and the void surrounding it, and can reach out into eternity.” [11:1] While the body and the passions fade away, the human soul can reach immortality by living in harmony with Nature. This immortality is not literally living forever, but rather living fully in the moment. Like Taoism, this means letting “your mind enter fully into what is being done.” [7:30] If we live fully in each moment of our lives, death becomes meaningless. “Regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.” [7:56]

Individual reason is the window into Providence, the director to the harmony of Nature. When we abide by reason, we abide by Nature. Reason is in this way the voice of God - at the same time the voice of our individual godliness and the voice of a universal God. By listening to master-reason in making our own decisions, we may not necessarily come to the same conclusions, but our conclusions will be in harmony. The individual’s part is essential to the whole, yet the whole forms a single comprehensive unit. Thus “uniformity of opinion” is simply individuals living in harmony with Nature. Conformity with Providence by all requires individual acceptance of the “voice of my true self.” [7:19] The harmony of Marus Aurelius’ world-order is achieved through the synthesis of individualism and conformity.