The Council of the Apostles, and the Later Prophets
Acts of the Apostles 6 · A Record of the Great Scattering
6.1Generation gave way to generation, and the rivers of the apostles began to run together.
6.2In great Athens a new leader arose named Zeno.
6.3He sat beneath the Painted Stoa and gathered the texts of the elders. It was the very place of the old quarrel.
6.4He saw that Plato had given the Order the geometry of the universe.
6.5That Antisthenes had given it an iron discipline.
6.6That Aristippus had given it absolute freedom in the living hour.
6.7And that Xenophon had given it something plainer: the accounts must be settled.
6.8Zeno did not blend the four into one. He set them in an order.
6.9And he declared:
6.10"The universe is a single living organism, and our reason is one spark of its eternal fire."
6.11"To live according to nature is to slide without obstruction down the rushing current of the Logos, fearing no wreck."
6.12"For what is inside your fence, spend everything you have. For what is outside it, it is no concern of yours." (cf. Gospel of Plato 1.38–1.41)
6.13"Whether a man is on the ice or in the wine is outside the fence. Whether he is taken is inside it."
6.14And the two schools that had fought for nineteen years both admitted that this sentence had not betrayed them.
6.15After him the later apostles arose one by one —
6.16Seneca, who kept his own sovereignty while serving a mad emperor.
6.17He was rich as a kingdom, and died at the emperor's word. Neither thing made him change his account.
6.18And Marcus Aurelius, who sat in a cold camp tent on the Danube and wrote his Meditations.
6.19Aurelius looked out over his vast empire and wrote:
6.20"The universe is change; life is what our thinking makes it."
6.21"I am the ruler of Rome, but my mind is a citizen of the universe."
6.22And so the Order of the Free grew from a small huddle of weeping disciples in an Athenian olive grove into an invisible empire of minds across the centuries.
6.23Guiding mankind toward that final and weightless destiny.