140. On the question of continued existence after death Aurelius takes up and emphasizes the teaching of Epictetus, ignoring the fact that other Stoic teachers, from Zeno to Seneca, had taken larger views or at least allowed themselves an ampler language. There had been, indeed, a change in the point of view. The early Stoics, occupied with the question of physics, had insisted upon the indestructibility of substance, and the reuniting of the ‘spirit’ (πνεῦμα) with the all-pervading spirit from which it came at the beginning. The Roman school concerned itself more with the question of individuality and personality. Accepting fully the principle that that which is born must die, it comes to the definite conclusion that that which we trace from the mother’s womb through infancy and youth, through success and failure in life, through marriage and the family ties onwards to weakness and dotage, must reach its end in death. The ‘I’ cannot survive the body. The future existence of the soul, if such there be, is no longer (as with Seneca) a matter of joyful expectation, but of complete indifference.
Epictetus had expressed this with sufficient clearness:
‘Death is a change, not from the state which now is to that which is not, but to that which is not now. Shall I then no longer exist? You will not exist, but you will be something else, of which the world now has need; for you also came into existence, not when you chose, but when the world had need of you[139].’
Aurelius constantly repeats the doctrine in varied forms:
‘You exist but as a part inherent in a greater whole. You will vanish into that which gave you being; or rather, you will be re-transmuted into the seminal and universal reason[140].’
‘Death put Alexander of Macedon and his stable boy on a par. Either they were received into the seminal principles of the universe, or were alike dispersed into atoms[141].’
Preparation for death.
141. The saddened outlook of Marcus Aurelius upon life harmonizes well with the resignation with which he contemplates a death, which for himself individually will be the end. Hence it is that his reflections so often make the thought of death a guiding principle of ethics; he who has learnt to look forward calmly to his last act has learnt thereby to abide patiently all the troubles which postpone it. Thus the last message of the princely philosopher, as of his predecessor, is that men should ‘bear and forbear’:
‘Contemn not death, but give it welcome; is not death too a part of nature’s will? As youth and age, as growth and prime, as the coming of teeth and beard and grey hairs, as begetting and pregnancy and the bearing of children, as all other operations of nature, even such is dissolution. Therefore the rational man should not treat death with impatience or repugnance or disdain, but wait for it as one of nature’s operations[142].’