SOURCE: “Marcus Aurelius” in Four Reasonable Men, Wesleyan University Press, 1984, pp. 3-53.

[In the following excerpt, Blanshard analyzes Aurelius's Stoic philosophy and discusses problems with its ways of dealing with emotion, pain, death, and pleasure.]

… THE STOIC WAR ON EMOTION

No one would now deny that reasonable living requires the control of emotion by thought. Unfortunately the Stoics tried not merely to control feeling but to annihilate it. Anger, fear, grief, pity were for them not the allies but the enemies of reason, and it was better to get rid of them altogether than to try to tame and harness them. That so extreme an attitude should be regarded as conformable to human nature is not easy to sympathize with or to understand. It is true that anger often leads to the unleashing of tongue and fists and to vindictive forms of punishment, which the Stoics rejected in principle. But, as McDougall pointed out, anger is sometimes essential, as in putting the fear of the law into those who would take advantage of others. As to fear, it is what such people ought to feel, and the fear of illness, extreme pain, and death are at least eminently natural, even though the Stoics found it easy to show that they were often groundless. It is hardest of all to go along with the Stoics about such emotions as grief and pity. When Anaxagoras was told that his son had died, his detached comment was: “I never supposed that I had begotten an immortal.” The scholar Anthony Birley remarks that what we call “natural affection” was “a quality which the Roman upper-classes lacked—in fact, as Fronto pointed out to Lucius, there was no word for it in Latin.”¹ Pity too was an emotion to be avoided. In Seneca's De Clementia elaborate distinctions are drawn between clemency, as a rational disposition to be moderate in imposing punishments, and pity, which is set down as a feeble emotional flinching at the sight of suffering. “The sage will console those who weep, but without weeping with them. … He will feel no pity. … His countenance and his soul will betray no emotion as he looks upon the withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent and emaciated frame of the beggar.”² He will help the beggar as a suffering human being; but he will not share the suffering himself.

Marcus read Seneca and the other Stoics, and seems to have given a formal assent to this inhuman theory of emotion as disease. He aims at freedom from “passions that estrange from reason's dictates” (2.5); he holds that “to be vexed or angry or afeared, is to make oneself a runaway” (10.25) from the life of reason. But the eyes that peer through this iron mask are those of a warmhearted human being, even while he is preaching his ruthless doctrine. In recounting with characteristic gratitude what he owed to one of his teachers, Sextus, he records: “From Sextus, kindliness; … the universal cordiality, which made his society more agreeable than any flattery, … avoiding all display of anger or emotion, and showing a perfect combination of unimpassioned yet affectionate concern” (1.9). His “whoops of blessing” over his teachers, his “affectionate concern” about his friends shown in the letters to Fronto, his desolation at the loss of his children, and his love for Faustina, apparently maintained through life and death, are not the behavior of a man with a stone where his heart should be.

PAIN

Better known than their attitude toward the emotions is the Stoics' attitude toward pain. Here they faced a supreme test, and they met it, if not with complete wisdom, at least with extraordinary courage. Pain they regarded as an affair of the body; but if intense, it could subvert the equanimity and control of the mind. They did not deny its reality like the present-day Christian Scientists; it was an obtrusively existent bodily evil; but it could be mitigated by prudent strategy. Marcus's main concern about it was that it should not reach and distort his soul, his higher faculties. “In sickness or pain remind yourself that it cannot demean or vitiate your pilot understanding; it does not impair it on the universal or the social side. In most cases you may find support in the saying of Epicurus, that ‘pain cannot be past bearing or everlasting, if only you bear in mind its limits, and do not let fancy supplement them’” (7.64). Again, “the soul can maintain its own unclouded calm, and refuse to view [pain] as evil. For every judgment or impulse or inclination or avoidance is within, and nothing evil can force entrance there” (8.28).

Such philosophic considerations do not seem very powerful as analgesics, and a sharp toothache can end abruptly the profoundest philosophizing. Nevertheless Marcus had hold of an important truth when he said that in the presence of pains we should “not let fancy supplement them.” Pain is a puzzle. Consider that a football player can receive a serious injury and not even be aware of it until after the game is over. What does that say about pain? Surely this, that the mere direction of attention can make a great difference; that when attention is strongly focused in another direction, what would normally arouse intense pain may cause none at all. Surgical operations have been successfully performed under the hypnotic suggestion that they will be painless. On the other hand, persons who go to a dentist with the expectation of intense pain and concentrate on the first prick of the anesthetic needle as its herald are far more likely to experience it. Marcus was surely right in maintaining that the power of thought over pain, though its exact laws are unknown, is much greater than is generally supposed. He went so far as to say: “If you are pained by anything without, it is not the thing [that] agitates you, but your own judgment concerning the thing; and this it is in your own power to efface” (8.47). To be sure, this is Sparta speaking, not Athens. It is a doctrine for heroes, but hardly for plain persons with normal nerves.

The tragedy of Stoicism is that in its very dedication to man's highest faculty, reason, it developed an inhuman scorn for his lower experiences. It made one or two helpful suggestions, as we have seen, for countering pain, but its main suggestion was that of Keble to Pusey about dealing with doubt: put it down by main force. The Stoic heroes were men like Posidonius, who once when he was ill and in much pain was called upon by Pompey in the hope of hearing a lecture on philosophy. When Pompey found the philosopher in such extremities, he saluted him and started to leave, expressing his disappointment that he was not able to hear him lecture. “But you are able,” was the reply, “nor can I allow that bodily pain should cause so great a man to come to me in vain.” Whereupon Posidonius poured out a discourse with his usual eloquence, only pausing occasionally when interrupted by paroxysms of pain to exclaim, “You are making no impression, pain! …”³ Marcus thanks Providence for having introduced him to the works of Epictetus, the knowledge of which he regarded as one of the chief blessings of his life. He must have been familiar with the story of how the slave Epictetus was once being beaten by a sadistically cruel master. He warned his master that continuing might break his leg. The man did go on and did break the leg. Epictetus merely remarked, “I told you you would do so,” but refused to descend to his master's level of anger or abuse, holding that, being what he was, he was bound to act in accordance with his nature. “Not to do likewise,” Marcus observed, “is the best revenge” (6.6).

REASONABLENESS ABOUT DEATH

For most people the greatest of evils is probably not illness or pain, but death. The Meditations are thickly strewn with reflections on the transiency of life and the imminence of death; Marcus seems almost obsessed by them. “A free man thinks of nothing less than death,” said Spinoza;⁴ but to this Marcus is a conspicuous exception. What is interesting about his thought of death is not so much his conception of it, which followed that of other Stoic philosophers, but his inward attitude toward it. The event itself was prosaic enough—earth to earth, dust to dust, oblivion. It was clear that the body dissolved away; the soul too, though invisible, was material, a sort of fiery ether, and was presumably reabsorbed into the cosmic ether. Personality ceased. Marcus obviously did not like this conclusion and hints at the possibility of some kind of survival. “Death, in a universe of atoms, is dispersion; but if all is a unity, death is either extinction or transmutation” (7.32). But what such “transmutation” meant remained a mystery.

Death was in effect a dreamless sleep. Was there anything to be feared in that? Marcus thought not. We knew what it was like; we had spent many nights in it, and before our births many thousands of years in it. Peace and repose deserved welcome rather than fear. Among the pagan philosophers, who for the most part took death as the end, the alternative was the continuance of one's old personality, as Socrates thought; but the idea that this continued life might be one of penance and torture seems not to have entered their heads. It is strange that the introduction of endless terror should have been contributed by Christianity, which, ignoring the doctrine that God is love, consigned all who lacked faith to unending misery. Untroubled by such nightmares, Marcus took death as he tried to take other events, with equanimity. “Dying after all is but one among life's acts; there too our business is ‘to make the best of it’” (6.2). By this he did not mean that we should take it lightly. As an important and certain event, we should prepare for it. He thought, for example, that our higher faculties, those of judgment, analysis, and inference, were the first to go, and that it was prudent, therefore, to make our plans regarding death and its consequences early, while yet those powers were fresh (3.1). On this point of the early decline of the higher powers, Marcus has, I think, been proved wrong: the life of the athlete is a short one, while much of the best work of philosophers has been done in later years. Marcus spoke with more authority when he held that the thought of death was a good medicine for pride. One can hardly be the first man in the civilized world without strong temptations to self-glorification. But “Death put Alexander of Macedon and his stable boy on a par” (6.24). It is the archdemocrat, with no trace of respect for persons.

There is much in the Meditations about how we should live in light of the transiency of life. We do not know when “time's winged chariot,” which is never far behind us, will catch up, and this should lead us to sit down and order our “priorities.” Dr. Johnson grimly remarked that nothing so concentrated the mind as the knowledge that one was to be hanged a day or two later. Johnson himself was terrified of death; Marcus was not; but still he mused on the transiency of life again and again. “He who realizes that at any moment he may be called on to leave the world and to depart from among men, commits himself without reserve to do justice in all his actions, to Nature in all that befalls. To what will be said or thought of him, to what will be done against him, he does not give a thought; but is content with two things only—to be just in his dealings and glad at his apportioned lot” (10.11). Men should so order their affairs as to be ready at any time for their discharge from service. The last of Marcus's jottings is: “Serenely take your leave; serene as he who gives you the discharge” (12.36). And he fortified this serenity by the curiously cogent and simple argument of Epicurus to prove that we never meet death at all: while we are here, it is not, and when it is here, we are not.

Bacon, in his little essay “Of Death,” criticizes the Stoics for making too much of death. It is well, he holds, to think about it enough to make one's peace with it, but not so constantly as to cast a long shadow of morbidity over one's life. Life is for achieving certain great goods, and what is most important about them is their goodness, not the time they last. Death haunts the Meditations and accounts for much of its pervasive melancholy.

Is it permitted us to leave life when we will? According to the Western religious tradition, God has “fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter,” and suicide commonly brings not only disapproval from others but a taint of the macabre that may hang about a family. Things were otherwise in ancient Rome. Life was cheaper and death more familiar; it was called for by the crowds at gladiatorial shows; the rate of infant deaths was appalling; and people were far more helpless against disease. Furthermore death did not bear the eschatological terror that it bore for Jonathan Edwards' “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” If death was repose, the Stoic teachers felt that one had a right to it if for any reason life had hopelessly lost its savor or become a crushing burden to others. Stoicism laid stress on this right to part with life when it had become a liability, and held in admiration, not in contumely, those who exercised that right. Zeno, the founder of the sect, Cleanthes, his successor, Cato the younger, a symbol of probity and courage to the Romans, and Seneca the moralist were all Stoics, and all ended their own lives at the time and in the way that seemed to them fitting. Marcus himself seems to have hastened the end when he saw it was inevitable. Needless to say, he was not in favor of playing fast and loose with life, throwing it away romantically or impulsively; that would clearly be against reason. But sometimes reason approved. “The cabin smokes—so I take leave of it. Why make ado? But so long as there is no such notice to quit, I remain free, and none will hinder me from doing what I will; that is, to conform to the nature of a reasonable social being” (5.29).

PLEASURE AND HAPPINESS

Was life for the Stoic, then, all a matter of grim and military self-control, with no place for spontaneous happiness or pleasure? If these things were taken as ends, after the manner of the fashionable Epicureans, the Stoics did repudiate them. But in order to understand their view, one needs to see that there is a difference between pleasure and happiness: pleasure is the satisfaction of the short-range impulses like hunger, thirst, sex, the seeing of a play, the winning of a game; happiness attends the satisfaction of the long-range endeavors of a life, finding oneself through a vocation, developing a system of thought, raising a family, intercourse with other minds. For a creature endowed with reason, that is, with ability to see what was important and what was not, the deliberate pursuit of the satisfactions of the moment was a prostitution of its powers. Not that one was never to relax in the enjoyment of these things; but man was a being who lived on various levels; pleasure of a sensual kind is something shared with the animals, and belonged on the lower levels of one's constitution. It was the teaching of Zeno that virtue was self-sufficient for happiness, and of Seneca that “Pleasure [or, as we should say, happiness] is the companion, not the guide, of our course.” “We do not love virtue because it gives us pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because we love it.”⁵

Marcus Aurelius took a similar view. To follow reason was to gain the happiness of peace within and a lasting self-respect. “In the constitution of the reasoning being I perceive no virtue in mutiny against justice; in mutiny against pleasure I see self-control” (8.39). And self-control brought the highest happiness. In line with this conviction that man was a stratified creature with reason at the top, Marcus accepted unprotestingly the extreme view of the Stoics that virtue was an affair of all or nothing. Either an act conformed to reason and was therefore perfectly right, or it did not, and then it fell into the dark region where all acts are black. This was not wholly without evidence. If you use your reason to add 7 and 5, there is only one right answer, and if you say 11, you are just as truly wrong as if you say 1,000. So Marcus and his school refused, at least formally, to recognize degrees of virtue, although of course he did not treat others or administer justice in accordance with this theory. Aurelius was obviously a better man and a better ruler than Nero, even though both fell short of perfection. Indeed the Stoics would have been nearer the truth if they had said that all rightness is a matter of degree. A respected former teacher of mine, Professor H. A. Prichard, said he doubted whether he had ever done a right act in his life, and though he was a very good man, this was quite possibly true. A right act depends, in part at least, upon its consequences in the way of intrinsic values, and such consequences extend so far into the future that one can never be sure one has exhausted them or therefore where the action lies on the ethical scale. Probability, as Butler said, is the guide of life.

THE PASSIONLESS SAGE

What would the perfect Stoic be like? He would be the famous “passionless sage,” whose inward life was untouched by the seductions of pleasure or the assaults of pain. He would not be ambitious for wealth or reputation or power or property, for these were unnecessary to the health of the inward man and might prove more distracting than helpful. Anger, envy, jealousy, and malice would be cut off by his understanding that human nature is what it is, and that aberrations will only be worsened by retorts in kind.

A man so minded, and committed finally to the pursuit of virtue, is indeed a priest and minister of gods, true to that inward and implanted power, which keeps a man unsoiled by pleasure, invulnerable by pain, free from all touch of arrogance, innocent of all baseness, a combatant in the greatest of all combats, which is the mastery of passion, steeped in justice to the core, and with his whole heart welcoming all that befalls him as his portion. … He forgets not his bond of brotherhood with every rational creature; nor that the law of man's nature implies concern for all men; and that he must not hold by the opinion of the world, but of those only who live conformably to nature

(3.4).

The Stoic, it must be admitted, sounds at times like the Pharisee who was concerned with nothing but his own inward purity and conformity to law. He was not a good Samaritan, melting with sympathy for suffering, and Christian love remains a blank in Roman ethics. But it did have its own substitute. Marcus wrote of the “bond of brotherhood with every rational creature,” by which he meant that among men there was a network of rights and duties constructed by reason. If I prize a book for the illumination it gives me or a statue for the beauty I find in it, then I must admit, if I am reasonable, that a like illumination or a like experience of beauty in someone else is also to be prized; it is the quality of the experience that makes it good, not the fact that it is mine or yours. If wisdom and beauty are good in my own life, then it is my rational duty to grant they are the same in other's lives; and it is the rational right of others to demand that I do so. And these reciprocal relations of rights and duties do not hold between you and me merely; they hold between all men everywhere. Here in bud is the idea of a world city with a world citizenship, an international brotherhood that knows no fences of nation, sex, or race. “You are part of a social whole, a factor necessary to complete the sum; therefore your every action should help to complete the social life. Any action of yours that does not tend, directly or remotely, to this social end, dislocates life and infringes its unity. It is an act of sedition …” (9.23). “Socially, as Antoninus, my city and country is Rome, as a man, the world” (6.44). It is hardly possible to overrate the importance of this idea. It carries in germ the conception of the brotherhood of men as rational beings, of a United Nations appealing to a common reason, of world law, of a world city or state.

DETERMINISM

Marcus carried much farther this notion of a world community bound together by reason. The whole universe was such a community. Every event that happens issues from converging lines of causation that run back into the infinite past, and every event will contribute to forming an indefinite future. And Marcus believed, truly I think, that the connection of causality is not just one of uniform sequence, or B always following A, though for no intelligible reason. “Subsequents follow antecedents by bond of inner consequence; it is no merely numerical sequence of arbitrary and isolated units, but a rational interconnexion” (4.45). That implies that the world is an intelligible whole, whether we succeed in understanding it or not; indeed that has been the postulate of the great tradition of rationalism in philosophy. Marcus was an emphatic determinist. “Whatever befalls was fore-prepared for you from all time; the woof of causation was from all eternity weaving the realisation of your being, and that which should befall it” (10.5). “Does aught befall you? It is well—a part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning; all that befalls was part of the great web” (4.26).

Now if the world is a system of this sort, there are no rifts in nature, no miracles, no luck good or bad, no accidents, nothing that with sufficient knowledge would not be predictable. Such determinism was for Marcus a ground for general compassion. If you destroyed yesterday a picture or a reputation, and in doing so did what you could have avoided, what the indeterminist says to you is: “You did what was wrong, what you knew to be wrong, and what you need not have done. What ground for compassion do you leave me?” The determinist says: “Poor fellow, given your nature and nurture, I knew you only did what you had to do. There but for the grace of genes go I.”

William James once said in his whimsical way that the best attitude to take toward free will and determinism was to claim freedom for yourself and count everyone else as determined. One can then say of the rest of the world, Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. This is an incoherent position, and it certainly sounds inconsistent for the Stoics to urge determinism while insisting that the passionless sage is free. To this, however, Marcus had an answer. Suppose that what a man wants above all is to behave reasonably; suppose that at a certain point his reason makes the right act clear, and he does it. Did he act freely or not? The answer is, Yes and No. The self that wanted to act reasonably was the highest self, the rational and distinctively human self. It looks forward, sees the greatest good, and is irresistibly drawn to it. Is he determined? Yes, for his choice had been appointed by a rational insight. Is he free? Yes, for his choice issued from his highest self; he has done what that self wanted to do. A self thus acting from rational insight is acting freely. When the mathematician is making his deductions, and his thought is caught up and carried along by logical necessity to a valid conclusion, is he thinking freely? Yes again, though he is under the constraint of the necessity he is following. This is at once a paradox of the rationalist system and its solution, not only for Marcus but for such great successors as Spinoza and Hegel.

It will be clear by now that Marcus Aurelius did have a system of thought, its parts fairly firmly cemented together. But in the one small book he has left us, this system must be read between the lines, developed from stray hints, and woven together from cryptic aphorisms, detached and incomplete sentences, and even exclamations. He was not a philosopher at all in the sense that the other three masters in this book were philosophers. He was a thinker of the intuitive, the Emersonian type. It is said that Emerson in his later years was lecturing on a summer's day when a breeze came in at the window and scattered the leaves of his manuscript on the floor. He leaned down, shuffled them together as they came, without noticing page numbers, and went peacefully on. His utterances did not need to follow any one sequence; they stood on their own feet; why worry? The Meditations is that sort of whole. Marcus was a Roman, not greatly drawn to discursive thought, but fascinated by the problems of action, of dealing with people, of adjustment to work, of maintaining serenity and reasonableness in a whirl of exacting business. He was not one of the “intellectual athletes” whom Arnold admired from a distance and distrusted; he was a moralist whom people read to imbibe more courage and quiet of mind. His book, said one of his admirers, Renan, was “the most human of all books.” It may not have seemed so from our discussion. Let us try to get a more balanced view of it by turning to some of the practical musings that are typical of both the book and the man.

A MISCELLANY OF TEACHINGS

Getting Things Done. Marcus advises himself: “seldom and only when driven to it, to say or write, ‘I have no time’; and not to indulge the tendency to cry off from duties arising out of our natural relations with those about us, on the pretext of press of business” (1.12); “nowhere to be in a hurry or to procrastinate”; “no bustle, complete order, strength, consistency” (1.15, 16, Farquharson). Marcus felt the need, if he were to make decisions wisely, to bring all his powers to bear on a problem; this he could not do in an atmosphere of hurry; so he strove for the inner peace that would enable him to contemplate things clearly.

Serenity. He recognized that many men, to secure this inner peace, need to “seek retirement in country house, on shore or hill”; but such withdrawal was not necessary to one who was master of his own mind. If you attain such mastery, “at what hour you will, you can retire into yourself. Nowhere can man find retirement more peaceful and untroubled than in his own soul; specially he who hath stores within. … Ever and anon grant yourself this retirement, and so renew yourself” (4.3). Marcus could quietly retire into himself amid the roar of the Colosseum and conduct business as if he were at home.

Simplicity. Marcus's serenity was due in part to his insistence on simplicity, the trimming away of superfluities. Arnold translates from the Meditations: “The greatest part of what we say or do being unnecessary, if a man takes this away, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness. Accordingly, on every occasion a man should ask himself: ‘Is this one of the unnecessary things?’ Now a man should take away not only unnecessary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus superfluous acts will not follow after.”⁶

Optimism. The courts of most Roman emperors were sinks of depravity, and even Marcus was surrounded by a motley set of characters. Without being blind to their faults, he had his own way of getting on with them. “At dawn say to yourself first: ‘I shall meet inquisitive, ungrateful, insolent, treacherous, slanderous men.’” But he reminds himself at once of the principle of which Socrates had persuaded him, that these men at least meant well in the sense that they were trying to live up to such light as they had: “all these qualities come from their ignorance of good and evil.” And if a person has his redeeming qualities, why not attend to them rather than to his shortcomings. He tells himself: “think of the good qualities of those around you, when you want to cheer yourself up: the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of another, and so on. For there is nothing so cheering as the images of the virtues shining out in the character of one's contemporaries. …”⁷ And something of the Rembrandt eye shows itself at times: “The old woman and the old man will have an ideal loveliness, as youth its ravishing charm, made visible to eyes that have the skill” (3.2).

Pride and Humility. Lecky, the historian of Roman morals, writes: “Take away pride from the ancient Stoic or the modern Englishman, and you would have destroyed the basis of many of his noblest virtues. …”⁸ One of the most striking things about Marcus was his curious absence of pride—curious because pride was endemic to the people whose boast was civis Romanus sum, and all the more curious in a man who, as head of the civilized world, was greeted on every side with adulation. He knew the danger of pride, even of pride in virtue, and was on his guard against it. “Be just and temperate and a follower of the gods; but be so with simplicity, for the pride of modesty is the worst of all” (12.27).⁹ The only achievement that would have given him genuine pride was reasonableness, but that was an ideal of impossible difficulty, which incited both constant striving and constant failure. “If any one can convince and show me that some view or action of mine is wrong, I will cheerfully change: I seek the truth, which never yet hurt any man. What hurts is persisting in self-deceit and ignorance” (6.21).

The fact is that, as boy and man, he had a singularly docile and teachable spirit; he was the antithesis of an Alexander, a Danton, or a Napoleon. In his correspondence with Fronto, he records receiving in the same post two letters from the master, one of them citing a humiliating list of blunders he had made in a recent essay, the other a letter of unqualified praise. “… I swear to you …,” he writes, “that the first letter gave me the greater pleasure and that as I read it I exclaimed several times ‘How lucky I am!’”¹⁰ He felt lucky in having a master who would frankly put him in his place on his knowledge of Greek. This is an odd reaction of schoolboy to teacher, though there is no reason to doubt its sincerity. On the other hand, his conquest of the things that would turn most people's heads, such as fame or wealth, seemed to him of so little value that he could hardly be called humble about them; he scorned them. He had the greatest fame of any man then living. But he writes: “does some bubble of fame torment you? Then fix your gaze on swift oblivion, on the gulf of infinity this way and that, on the empty rattle of plaudits and the undiscriminating fickleness of professed applause, on the narrow range within which you are circumscribed. The whole earth is but a point, your habitation but a tiny nook thereon …” (4.3). Or was it wealth that was the magnet and source of pride? For that too he cared little or nothing. He delighted in getting back into the woolen tunic of the farmer; in Alexandria he walked the streets in the clothes of the plain citizen; he asked his mother, who was one of the wealthiest women in Rome, to give her fortune not to him but to his sister. He was one of those for whom the forfeiture of fame and wealth seemed hardly humility at all, since they were not things he prized.

Anger and Resentment. The Stoic is the most military of moralists, in that he demands the most inflexible self-control, the most iron courage in the face of peril, poverty, or pain. There is one emotion for which the military man has been not so much admired as indulged, namely anger or resentment, particularly if his honor is involved; failure to feel and act on this emotion has often been read as cowardice. It was with great difficulty that the practice of dueling for offended pride or honor was finally put down; in England it required the execution of the successful duelist and in America the death of Alexander Hamilton to stop the practice. It is the more surprising, therefore, to find that Marcus, himself a military man, considered anger and resentment signs of weakness. “When any one does you a wrong, set yourself at once to consider, what was the point of view, good or bad, that led him wrong. As soon as you perceive it, you will be sorry for him, not surprised or angry” (7.26). “In fits of anger remind yourself that true manliness is not passion, but gentleness and courtesy, the more masculine as well as the more human: this it is, and not irritation or discontentment, that implies strength and nerve and manhood; the absence of passion gives the measure of its power. Anger, like grief, is a mark of weakness; both mean being wounded, and wincing” (11.18). Or more briefly: “Another's error—let it lie” (9.20).

Thus true courage lay in the control of anger and resentment, not in giving them free rein. This was the result partly of Marcus's determinism, partly of his conviction that the wrongdoer was acting in ignorance of his own and others' good. He insisted that “before the eye of god man should not ever cherish resentment or indignation. How can it be an evil for you, to follow the present authorisation of your own [rational] nature, and to accept the seasonable course of Nature? Have you not been set here as an instrument for the advantage of the universe?” (11.13.) It followed, again, that punishment of a vindictive kind was wrong. Punishment of course was necessary, but it must be inflicted only for the sake of deterrence or reform.

The Self. Marcus constantly stressed the fact that the self was invincible, inaccessible, inviolable. And he went so far as to identify the self with reason: “your true self—your understanding” (12.3). When he said that anger and fear and laziness and drunkenness cannot touch the self, he did not mean to deny that these things may destroy men utterly. He meant that so long as this highest part of us retains its clearness of vision, so long as the reason which enables us to understand why men make such fools of themselves is doing its work, then things are not in the saddle and riding mankind; the self remains in command. Impulses are directed toward ends; thought can provide them with the proper ends or, by redirecting attention, deny them their ends until they wither away. Strength of will, as James would put it, lies in control of attention. Far more largely than we realize, the moulding power is intelligence; “for the motions of reason and mind are self-determinant, and refuse subordination to the motions of sense or impulse, both of which are animal in kind. The intellect claims primacy, and will not be brought into subjection; and justly so, for its function is to use all the rest” (7.55).¹¹

TWO FLAWS

These are a few of the maxims with which the Meditations swarm. They do not, as we have said, make an ordered whole, though they lie within the larger framework of the Stoic system. Without subjecting this system to any formal examination, we can see two large flaws in it that stand out clearly in the light of modern knowledge.

First is its defective view of human nature, which is part of the nature to which the Stoics held we should conform. It is not true that man is a junction of two alien elements at war with each other, the animal and the human. The human rests on, continues, and crowns the animal nature. Man is more rightly conceived as a set of impulses, each one of them rooted in our animal past, but each endowed with a cognitive, an emotional, and a conative side. Self-realization is a legitimate aim, but it consists in developing these drives in the fullest and most harmonious way. The truly great of the world—the Leonardos, the Goethes, the Einsteins—are neither Puritans nor sybarites; they are persons of powerful impulses directed to ends that their nature appoints. It is the business of reason to envisage and harmonize the ends of these passions and impulses, to encourage, not suppress them.

Let us not always say
“Spite of this flesh today
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!”
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”

Second, just as the Stoics misconceived the human nature that we must conform to, so they misconceived cosmic nature. “I am in harmony with all, that is a part of thy harmony, great Universe. … All is fruit for me, which thy seasons bear, O Nature!” (4.23). At this even the devoted Renan exclaims, “Ah, this is too much resignation, dear master!”¹² And surely he is right. What nature brings may be causally, even logically necessitated, but what is necessitated is not therefore good. Nature, seen in the large, certainly does not look like the product of perfect justice and goodness. The plague that Marcus's men brought back from the east and spread in Rome—was that a gift for which thanks are due to a benevolent nature? If nature can produce animals mighty as the elephant, which lives on plants, why does it also produce tigers, leopards, and crocodiles, which must tear other animals to pieces if they are to have breakfast? “In sober truth,” says Mill in a masterly essay on Nature,

nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.¹³

If following nature means acting as nature does, rather than using her laws to defeat her indifference toward us and our ends, we are worshiping an illusion.

MARCUS AND THE CHRISTIANS

But probably the criticism most commonly brought against Marcus is not such incoherence of thought, but, strangely enough, a charge of gross cruelty. His attitude in matters religious was tolerant and in some ways so close to that of the Christians that one would expect some sign of sympathy with them. The fact is that there is not only no sign of such sympathy, but on the contrary clear evidence of his persecuting them. It was in his reign that Justin Martyr was put to death, that the aged Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, was burned at the stake, and that scores of Christians in Gaul and on the Danube were also executed. Is there any extenuation for such conduct?

It does not seem at first that there could be. Nevertheless historians have commonly dealt gently with Marcus for these tragedies, and when the circumstances are brought to light, his responsibility for them does wear a different aspect. During his reign the empire was swarming with religious sects, many of them fanatical, many of them hostile both to Roman religion and to Roman rule. The emperors and the Senate had worked out a policy toward such sects that was on the whole singularly tolerant; indeed the Romans accepted in their own pantheon many of the gods of their conquered peoples. Roman religion and theology were very elastic structures, and the attitudes of eminent men ranged all the way from the materialism of Lucretius to the pagan fundamentalism of Julian the Apostate. Marcus himself was tolerant of nearly everything but intolerance. Religion was part of the state; the emperor was at once secular head and the high priest of the Roman people. A rule established by Trajan asked of his subjects the same recognition of the Roman deities that the Romans had accorded to those of their provinces. If such recognition was refused, it was taken as a refusal to accept the Roman governance, and the recusant was found guilty of treason. This decree was followed by the succeeding emperors, including the Antonines. “The charge against Marcus Aurelius,” says Henry Dwight Sedgwick, “is that he suffered the criminal law to take its course.”¹⁴

Unfortunately the one thing that the Romans inflexibly insisted on was something the Christians would not, or could not, do. They refused to cast incense on pagan altars or do anything else that signified acceptance of the Roman deities. It might be thought that in virtue of all they had in common with Marcus, he could grant them exemption, and one can only believe that if he had known them for what they were, he would have found a way of doing so. But this he did not know. Apparently all the information that came to him, directly or indirectly, was adverse to them. Two of his old tutors, Rusticus and Fronto, became provincial governors, and both reported of the Christians most unfavorably. The reputation of the sect with the common people also worked against them. Their services were often held in private houses, which inflamed a pervasive Roman suspicion about conspiracies; they claimed in their meetings to be eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their god, which was easily misread by outsiders; they were rumored to consume the flesh of infants; and since some of their meetings were held at night, admittedly in an atmosphere of what they described as general love, rumors of sexual orgies began to float about them. Furthermore, they were largely Jews, and the Jews had long been troublesome subjects for the Romans; fifty years before Marcus's birth the Roman general Titus had thought it necessary to raze the Hebrew temple at Jerusalem. The Jews' unhappy role as scapegoats was already beginning. When Marcus came home from the east in triumph and his soldiers brought with them a plague that destroyed a large part of the citizenry, the superstition-ridden people, needing to lodge the blame somewhere, fixed upon an obscure Eastern sect whose members refused service in the army and espoused such strange beliefs as that their leader, known to have been put to death, was still alive and would return to assume lordship over the whole earth.

The judges who served on the bench in the Christians' cases would have preferred to save the lives of the accused. When St. Paul was first brought before a Roman tribunal, the judge was Gallo, brother of the famous Seneca, who thought both the charges and the defense so absurd that he “drave them from the judgment seat” (Acts, 18:16). Festus, governor of Judaea, was reluctant to punish Paul and took his case to the court of King Agrippa, but when he heard Paul's explanation of his creed, he said: “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad” (Acts, 26:24). Incidentally, in both these cases the accusations were brought not by Romans but by Jews, who naturally regarded the Christians as apostates; so the little community was surrounded by misapprehension and enmity. Both Tacitus and Pliny later served as Roman governors, and Suetonius as secretary to the emperor Hadrian; all in their official capacity observed the Christians; all had much the same impression of them; all reported that their belief was a “malignant,” “mad,” or “gross” superstition.¹⁵

When men as able as these sent in such unanimous reports, it was difficult for a distant emperor to do anything but what Marcus did. The Christians were given an opportunity not given to other offenders—they could go free if they repented. What distressed Marcus was that they so automatically refused to repent. “O for the soul ready, when the hour of dissolution comes,” he exclaimed, “for extinction or dispersion or survival! But such readiness must proceed from inward conviction, not come of mere perversity like the Christians', but of a temper rational and grave …” (11.3). Such evidence as he had pointed to a spirit of group resistance to the official Roman obeisance to the gods, a spirit so inflexible as to be unmoved even by imminent martyrdom. But of course the tragedy remains that the man perhaps nearest to Christianity in the pagan world should have persecuted a group that he would have admired if he had understood them. He is a vivid illustration of his own teaching that a man may do wrong out of an ardent but uninstructed desire to do right.

MARCUS THE INVALID

In criticizing Marcus for this or any other shortcoming, it should be borne in mind that for much of his life he was something of an invalid. In his youth he was a vigorous horseman and ballplayer, and courted rough conditions; he even speaks lightly about finding a scorpion in his bed. But he was never physically strong, and his scorn of giving in to pain or weakness, combined with continual overwork, wreaked havoc on his health. There is more, no doubt, than fiction in Pater's reference to “one of those pitiless headaches, which since boyhood had been the ‘thorn in his side,’ challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble endurances.”¹⁶ During much of his rule as emperor, Marcus suffered from pain in his chest and his stomach, the latter due probably to ulcers brought on by strain, and from a sleeplessness so constant that he had to fight off permanent low spirits.

Fortunately he had the greatest of living physicians, Galen, as his doctor. Cassius Dio records: “He ate very little food, and that always at night. He could not take anything in the daytime, except some of the medicine called theriac.”¹⁷ This was a medicine containing opium prescribed for him by Galen, which assuaged the pain and helped him to sleep; indeed he took it so often as to become dependent on it. Some historians have tried to find traces in the Meditations of his having become an addict like De Quincey, but their argument does not carry conviction. As the long campaign on the Danube dragged itself out, his longing for Italy increased. He confessed how hard it was to get up in the morning, and exhorted himself to face the new day like a Roman and a soldier. The book that has given so much consolation and strength to others was written by a man himself sorely overburdened.

HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

What is it, in the end, that gives Marcus Aurelius and his book so lasting a radiance in human history? Not, certainly, the acuteness or originality of his thought; he would not have cut an impressive figure in a passage at arms with Socrates, and if set an examination on epistemology in a modern university, with its stress on linguistic nuances and the manipulation of symbols, he would have flunked flatly and serenely. Nor was he a great general or man of action like Caesar, whose effortless adequacy to every situation has made him unique. Neither as a thinker, then, nor as a man of action was Aurelius in or near the first rank.

His greatness lies in a simple fact: he made perhaps the noblest recorded effort to live by the light of reason. Reason for him meant two things: on the one hand the network of necessary linkages that held the world together, on the other hand philosophy, the practice of tracing those connections and bearing them in mind. To enter the tent of Marcus Aurelius is to see the commonplaces of life—its worries, its temptations to revenge, its impatience with stupidity, its complaint over the unfairness of fate, its petty prides, its ill-grounded fears, its ambitions for power, reputation, and wealth—against the background of human history and destiny as a whole. Most people, not excluding philosophers, hold high principles in private, which they tend to forget when they argue their bills with their plumbers or pronounce an opinion about the mayor or the mail service. Marcus lived his principles.

“What then can be his escort through life? One thing and one thing only, Philosophy” (2.17, Farquharson). “To be loyal to philosophy under whatsoever circumstances, and not join the babel of the silly and the ignorant, is a motto for all schools alike” (9.41). He attempted to treat things and people in practice as his philosophy revealed them to be. He had mastered the potent secret that anger, fear, and malice are responses to objects largely of our own making, that we can reconstruct these objects by understanding them, and that when they are so remoulded there is little or nothing left for the emotions to respond to, and they wither on the vine. Understand the man you hate, see him in the light of those causal laws that rule the world, and he becomes an object not of vengeance but of compassion. Be not puffed up: “A little while and your place will know you no more …” (12.21). “Spend your brief moment then according to nature's law, and serenely greet the journey's end, as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it and giving thanks to the tree which gave it life” (4.48).

Reason opened to Marcus Aurelius the freedom of a larger world where he felt emancipated from the pettiness and fickleness of his own impulsive life. “In the universe Asia and Europe are but corners; ocean a drop; Athos a grain; the span of time, a moment in eternity” (6.36). He tried not to live in two worlds, but to see them as one, to bring the breadth of his intellectual vision to bear on himself, on the people around him, and on the daily duties of a great office. If his place is unique in history, it is because he set himself a transcendent aim and came heroically near to reaching it.

Notes

1. Birley, p. 126.

2. W. E. H. Lecky is translating here from De Clementia 2.6, 7, in his History of European Morals. 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 1:190. See his valuable account of Stoicism generally.

3. W. L. Davidson, The Stoic Creed (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1907), p. 149, following Cicero's Tusculan Disputations 2.61.

4. Spinoza, Ethics, 4.67.

5. Seneca, De vita beata, chaps. 8 and 9, cited from Lecky, 1:186-87.

6. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, p. 365

7. Birley, trans., p. 301, of Meditations, 2.1 and 6.48.

8. Lecky, 1:154.

9. Ibid., p. 251 n. Translation by Lecky.

10. Cited by Birley, p. 89.

11. Meditations, 7:55, slightly emended for clarity.

12. Ernest Renan, Marcus Aurelius. The Origins of Christianity, Book 7 (London: Mathieson & Co., n.d.), p. 154.

13. J. S. Mill, “Nature,” in Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1875), pp. 28-29.

14. H. D. Sedgwick, p. 209. He devotes three chapters to discussion of Marcus's dealings with the Christians.

15. Ibid., pp. 215 ff.

16. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (New York: Boni & Liveright, Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 178-79.

17. Cassius Dio 71.6, quoted by Birley, p. 246. …