Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (good books to read .txt) 📕

totally changed. Cause and effect then mean nothing in the sequence of

natural phenomena beyond what I have said; and the real cause, or the

transcendent cause, as some would call it, of each successive phenomenon

is in that which is the cause of all things which are, which have been,

and which will be forever. Thus the word Creation may have a real sense

if we consider it as the first, if we can conceive a first, in the

present order of natural phenomena; but in the vulgar sense a creation of

all things at a certain time, followed by a quiescence of the first

cause, and an abandonment of all sequences of Phenomena to the laws of

Nature, or to the other words that people may use, is absolutely absurd.

Man being conscious that he is a spiritual power or an intellectual

power, or that he has such a power, in whatever way he conceives that he

has it,—for I wish simply to state a fact,—from this power which he has

in himself, he is led, as Antoninus says, to believe that there is a

greater power, which, as the old Stoics tell us, pervades the whole

universe as the intellect pervades man.

God exists then, but what do we know of his nature? Antoninus says that

the soul of man is an efflux from the divinity. We have bodies like

animals, but we have reason, intelligence, as the gods. Animals have life

and what we call instincts or natural principles of action: but the

rational animal man alone has a rational, intelligent soul. Antoninus

insists on this continually: God is in man, and so we must constantly

attend to the divinity within us, for it is only in this way that we can

have any knowledge of the nature of God. The human soul is in a sense a

portion of the divinity, and the soul alone has any communication with

the Deity; for as he says (XII. 2): “With his intellectual part alone God

touches the intelligence only which has flowed and been derived from

himself into these bodies.” In fact he says that which is hidden within a

man is life, that is the man himself. All the rest is vesture, covering,

organs, instrument, which the living man, the real man, uses for the

purpose of his present existence. The air is universally diffused for him

who is able to respire; and so for him who is willing to partake of it

the intelligent power, which holds within it all things, is diffused as

wide and free as the air (VIII. 54). It is by living a divine life that

man approaches to a knowledge of the divinity. It is by following the

divinity within, as Antoninus calls it, that man comes nearest to the

Deity, the supreme good; for man can never attain to perfect agreement

with his internal guide. “Live with the gods. And he does live with the

gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with

that which is assigned to him, and that it does all the daemon wishes,

which Zeus hath given to every man for his guardian and guide, and a

portion of himself. And this daemon is every man’s understanding and

reason” (V. 27).

There is in man, that is in the reason, the intelligence, a superior

faculty which if it is exercised rules all the rest. A man must reverence

only his ruling faculty and the divinity within him. As we must reverence

that which is supreme in the universe, so we must reverence that which is

supreme in ourselves; and this is that which is of like kind with that

which is supreme in the universe (V. 21).

Antoninus speaks of a man’s condemnation of himself when the diviner part

within him has been overpowered and yields to the less honorable and to

the perishable part, the body, and its gross pleasures.

Antoninus did not view God and the material universe as the same, any

more than he viewed the body and soul of man as one. Antoninus has no

speculations on the absolute nature of the Deity. It was not his fashion

to waste his time on what man cannot understand. He was satisfied that

God exists, that he governs all things, that man can only have an

imperfect knowledge of his nature, and he must attain this imperfect

knowledge by reverencing the divinity which is within him, and keeping it

pure.

From all that has been said, it follows that the universe is administered

by the Providence of God and that all things are wisely ordered. There

are passages in which Antoninus expresses doubts, or states different

possible theories of the constitution and government of the universe; but

he always recurs to his fundamental principle; that if we admit the

existence of a deity, we must also admit that he orders all things wisely

and well (IV. 27; VI. 1; IX. 28; XII. 5).

But if all things are wisely ordered, how is the world so full of what we

call evil, physical and moral? If instead of saying that there is evil in

the world, we use the expression which I have used, “what we call evil,”

we have partly anticipated the emperor’s answer. We see and feel and know

imperfectly very few things in the few years that we live, and all the

knowledge and all the experience of all the human race is positive

ignorance of the whole, which is infinite. Now, as our reason teaches us

that everything is in some way related to and connected with every other

thing, all notion of evil as being in the universe of things is a

contradiction; for if the whole comes from and is governed by an

intelligent being, it is impossible to conceive anything in it which

tends to the evil or destruction of the whole (VII. 55; X. 6).

Everything is in constant mutation, and yet the whole subsists. We might

imagine the solar system resolved into its elemental parts, and yet the

whole would still subsist “ever young and perfect.”

All things, all forms, are dissolved and new forms appear. All living

things undergo the change which we call death. If we call death an evil,

then all change is an evil. Living beings also suffer pain, and man

suffers most of all, for he suffers both in and by his body and by his

intelligent part. Men suffer also from one another, and perhaps the

largest part of human suffering comes to man from those whom he calls his

brothers. Antoninus says, (VIII. 55) “Generally, wickedness does no harm

at all to the universe; and particularly, the wickedness [of one man]

does no harm to another. It is only harmful to him who has it in his

power to be released from it as soon as he shall choose.” The first part

of this is perfectly consistent with the doctrine that the whole can

sustain no evil or harm. The second part must be explained by the Stoic

principle that there is no evil in anything which is not in our power.

What wrong we suffer from another is his evil, not ours. But this is an

admission that there is evil in a sort, for he who does wrong does evil,

and if others can endure the wrong, still there is evil in the wrongdoer. Antoninus (XI. 18) gives many excellent precepts with respect to

wrongs and injuries, and his precepts are practical. He teaches us to

bear what we cannot avoid, and his lessons may be just as useful to him

who denies the being and the government of God as to him who believes in

both. There is no direct answer in Antoninus to the objections which may

be made to the existence and providence of God because of the moral

disorder and suffering which are in the world, except this answer which

he makes in reply to the supposition that even the best men may be

extinguished by death. He says if it is so, we may be sure that if it

ought to have been otherwise, the gods would have ordered it otherwise

(XII. 5). His conviction of the wisdom which we may observe in the

government of the world is too strong to be disturbed by any apparent

irregularities in the order of things. That these disorders exist is a

fact, and those who would conclude from them against the being and

government of God conclude too hastily. We all admit that there is an

order in the material world, a constitution, a system, a relation of

parts to one another and a fitness of the whole for something. So in the

constitution of plants and of animals there is an order, a fitness for

some end. Sometimes the order, as we conceive it, is interrupted and the

end, as we conceive it, is not attained. The seed, the plant, or the

animal sometimes perishes before it has passed through all its changes

and done all its uses. It is according to Nature, that is a fixed order,

for some to perish early and for others to do all their uses and leave

successors to take their place. So man has a corporeal and intellectual

and moral constitution fit for certain uses, and on the whole man

performs these uses, dies, and leaves other men in his place. So society

exists, and a social state is manifestly the natural state of man,—the

state for which his nature fits him, and society amidst innumerable

irregularities and disorders still subsists; and perhaps we may say that

the history of the past and our present knowledge give us a reasonable

hope that its disorders will diminish, and that order, its governing

principle may be more firmly established. As order then, a fixed order,

we may say, subject to deviations real or apparent, must be admitted to

exist in the whole nature of things, that which we call disorder or evil,

as it seems to us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general

constitution of things having a nature or fixed order. Nobody will

conclude from the existence of disorder that order is not the rule, for

the existence of order both physical and moral is proved by daily

experience and all past experience. We cannot conceive how the order of

the universe is maintained: we cannot even conceive how our own life from

day to day is continued, nor how we perform the simplest movements of the

body, nor how we grow and think and act, though we know many of the

conditions which are necessary for all these functions. Knowing nothing

then of the unseen power which acts in ourselves except by what is done,

we know nothing of the power which acts through what we call all time and

all space; but seeing that there is a nature or fixed order in all things

known to us, it is conformable to the nature of our minds to believe that

this universal Nature has a cause which operates continually, and that we

are totally unable to speculate on the reason of any of those disorders

or evils which we perceive. This I believe is the answer which may be

collected from all that Antoninus has said.

The origin of evil is an old question. Achilles tells Priam that Zeus has

two casks, one filled with good things, and the other with bad, and that

he gives to men out of each according to his pleasure; and so we must be

content, for we cannot alter the will of Zeus. One of the Greek

commentators asks how must we reconcile this doctrine with what we find

in the first book of the