• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 248 0

heaven.’ Why are you still here?” (5.33). Images of dirt appear in several entries. The world around us resembles the baths: “oil, sweat, dirt, grayish water, all of it disgusting” (8.24). If Marcus contemplates the stars, he does so only in order to “wash off the mud of life below” (7.47). And the objective analysis Marcus prizes often shades over into a depressing cynicism (in the modern sense of the term). “Disgust at what things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth. Or marble as hardened dirt, gold and silver as residues, clothes as hair, purple dye as shellfish blood. And all the rest” (9.36). The human body itself is no more than “rotting meat in a bag” (8.38). “[D]espise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries” (2.2). Perhaps the most depressing entry in the entire work is the one in which Marcus urges himself to cultivate an indifference to music (11.2).

As one scholar has observed, “reading the Meditations for long periods can be conducive of melancholy.” And even those who love the book cannot deny that there is something impoverishing about the view of human life it presents. Matthew Arnold, whose essay on the work reveals a deep respect and affection for Marcus, identified the central shortcoming of his philosophy as its failure to make any allowance for joy, and I think this is a fair criticism. Marcus does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain. The Stoicism of the Meditations is fundamentally a defensive philosophy; it is noteworthy how many military images recur, from references to the soul as being “posted” or “stationed” to the famous image of the mind as an invulnerable fortress (8.48). Such images are not unique to Marcus, but one can imagine that they might have had special meaning for an emperor whose last years were spent in “warfare and a journey far from home” (2.17). For Marcus, life was a battle, and often it must have seemed—what in some sense it must always be—a losing battle.

There are also a handful of points in the text where we have glimpses of a different frame of mind, most obviously when Marcus refers to the gods. From a Stoic perspective, of course, “God” or “the gods” (the terms are used interchangeably by many ancient writers) are merely conventional terms for what we might equally well call “nature” or “the logos” or “Providence,” or simply “how things are.” Marcus stresses the benevolence of this power (what is divine must be good, surely?), but it is clear that he also ascribes to its actions the implacability with which orthodox Stoic doctrine endows it. It is not easy to see why one should pray to a power whose decisions one can hardly hope to influence, and indeed Marcus several times seems to admit the possibility that one should not (5.7, 6.44, 9.40).

It is all the more surprising, then, to find Marcus elsewhere suggesting a more personal concern on the gods’ part. The final entry of Book 1 is the most obvious example. Here Marcus indicates that the gods have aided him quite directly “through their gifts, their help, their inspiration,” just as they have others (cf. 9.11). Their help is curiously concrete. Among the things for which they are thanked are “remedies granted through dreams,” including “the one at Caieta” (1.17; the text is uncertain). The gods also assist other people, he reminds himself, “just as they do you—by signs and dreams and every other way” (9.27). That Marcus himself did believe deeply in the gods, not merely as a figure of speech but as a real force in his own life, is suggested by his refutation of those who doubt their existence: “I know the gods exist. . . .—from having felt their power, over and over” (12.28). How was this personal relationship with the divine to be reconciled with the impersonal logos of the Stoics? The question seems to be played out in the dialogue at Meditations 9.40. “But those are things the gods left up to me,” protests one voice, to which another responds, “And what makes you think the gods don’t care about what’s up to us?” Marcus