Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius

by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

We do not fare much better when we speak of Causes and Effects than when we speak of Nature. For the practical purposes of life we may use the terms cause and effect conveniently, and we may fix a distinct meaning to them, distinct enough at least to prevent all misunderstanding. But the case is different when we speak of causes and effects as of Things. All that we know is phenomena, as the Greeks called them, or appearances which follow one another in a regular order, as we conceive it, so that if some one phenomenon should fail in the series, we conceive that there must either be an interruption of the series, or that something else will appear after the phenomenon which has failed to appear, and will occupy the vacant place; and so the series in its progression may be modified or 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 wrong- doer. 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.