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SOURCE: “The ‘Self’ as ‘Sufferer’,” in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, July, 1992, pp. 265-72.
In the following essay, Perkins contends that Aurelius's obsession with suffering and death indicates that he never gained the self-mastery he sought.
The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities.1 Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological.2 In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.”3 The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, the basis of their...
This section contains 3,491 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
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