Meditations

“The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of Fortune are not independent of Nature or the spinning and weaving together of the threads governed by Providence. All things flow from that world: and further factors are necessity and the benefit of the whole universe, of which you are a part.”

Here, Marcus explains the nature of the cosmos and the place of Fortune, Nature, and Providence. Of particular importance to understanding Marcus’s Meditations is that the cosmos (“the whole universe”) is conceived of as a woven garment, whose design is overseen by divine foresight (11). Everything that is—all matter— is thread that is woven into the whole.

“[L]ooked at in isolation these things are far from lovely, but their consequence on the processes of Nature enhances them and gives them attraction. So any man with a feeling and deeper insight for the workings of the Whole will find some pleasure in almost every aspect of their disposition, including the incidental consequences.”

Marcus has here been discussing the “incidental effects of the processes of Nature”—bread that splits open owing to a failure of the baker’s technique, figs that have split open, ripened olives on a vine (16). They may seem unappealing when viewed out of context but situating them within a larger process enables one to observe their “charm and attraction” (16). Extrapolating from this, Marcus reflects that everything can hold meaning and beauty when seen as part of the divine Whole. Even things that are inclined to trouble him can be reframed as productive.

“You should take no action unwillingly, selfishly, uncritically, or with conflicting motives. Do not dress up your thoughts in smart finery: do not be a gabbler or a meddler. Further, let the god that is within you be the champion of the being you are—a male, mature in years, a statesman, a Roman, a ruler: one who has taken his post like a soldier waiting for the Retreat from life to sound, and ready to depart, past the need for any loyal oath or human witness.”

Marcus continually returns to the importance of interrogating his responses, actions, and beliefs. To live a good life, he must know who he is (“a male, mature in years, a statesman, a Roman, a ruler”), take active responsibility for himself (“let the god that is within you be the champion”), and make no excuses for himself (“Do not dress up your thoughts”) (19). Though he has tremendous power in the context of the Roman Empire, he too is ultimately a single thread in the Cosmos that must be ready to obey what Providence has ordained.

“All is ephemeral, both memory and the object of memory.”

In this section, Marcus has been reflecting on how names that were once famous eventually become obsolete. “All things fade and turn to myth,” he writes, until “utter oblivion drowns them” (30). Thus, it is futile to focus on fame and acclaim in the material world. Change is constant and inevitable, and everything will eventually be reshaped, with its earlier form forgotten. The only thing that befits a rational actor is to accept what is and work to benefit others, in this way serving the ends of the Whole.

“Think always of the universe as one living creature, comprising one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.”

Across the Meditations, Marcus attempts to train his mind to align itself with divine intentions and to shape his thoughts accordingly. His entries return again and again to the idea that all matter is an interconnected whole. Substance, soul, consciousness—all are woven together and of a piece, and he must use his reason to control impulses to act for his own ends rather than for the benefit of the Whole.

“Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.”

This passage speaks, in Meditations and in Stoic philosophy more generally, to the importance of controlling one’s thoughts because thoughts are not detached from actions: Rather, they shape the human soul, in the way divine foresight shapes the Cosmos. In later reflections, Marcus will warn himself not to be “dyed in purple,” meaning not to become enamored of or distracted by the trappings of his office (51).

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

Many of Marcus’s entries are a sentence or sentence fragment with the character of a pithy aphorism. This form suits his drive towards simplicity and truth. Embellishing his thoughts would go against his purpose. Across his Meditations, Marcus repeatedly urges himself not to be troubled by those who criticize or act against him but to keep his thoughts focused on what is good and beneficial instead. This entry captures the essence of his purpose.

“How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple-edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood! […] This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves. Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason.”

This passage exemplifies Marcus’s “stripping” process: using reason to extract embellishments so as to strip a thing down to its essence. In doing so, he is able to reveal to himself the way imagination can distort reality. Here, he describes food, wine, and fancy clothes, but the process can be applied broadly to any circumstance to reveal how thought shapes experience.

“I myself am not yet harmed, unless I judge this occurrence something bad: and I can refuse to do so.”

The flip side of not wanting to cause harm to others, for Marcus, is not wanting to see himself as having been harmed. In both cases, it comes down to how one thinks about an experience. Humans can deploy their imaginations to convince themselves that they are not being harmful, and they can do the same to convince themselves that they have been harmed. Since Marcus believes that everything is determined, and that the Whole would not do anything to harm itself, he strives to align his thoughts such that he can accept whatever happens to him. When he is tempted to feel that he has been harmed, he strives to reconsider how he has interpreted events, always under the assumption that whatever happens must be in some way beneficial to the Whole.

“Happiness is a benign god or divine blessing. Why then, my imagination, are you doing what you do? Go away, in the gods’ name, the way you came: I have no need of you. You have come in your old habit. I am not angry with you. Only go away.”

Many of Marcus’s entries express his struggle in deeply personal and poignant fashion, with little explanation of what specifically fired his imagination to trouble him. Here, he acknowledges the hold his imagination has over him as if it is a bad habit that he has fought to overcome but now feels himself falling back under its influence. This underscores the importance of a dedicated and consistent philosophical practice that exercises his reason: Living a good life requires unwavering attention and must be done day by day.

“A king’s lot: to do good and be damned.”

At first glance, this entry could read like a complaint, as if Marcus resents doing good only to be “damned” for it. Read in light of his philosophical practices, though, it could be a statement of acceptance to himself to remember that it does not matter how others respond to his actions, only whether they accord with his belief in acting to benefit others.

“Look back over the past—all those many changes of dynasties. And you can foresee the future too: it will be completely alike, incapable of deviating from the rhythm of the present. So for the study of human life forty years are as good as ten thousand: what more will you see?”

Though the Cosmos continually reshapes matter, recurring patterns are evident. Marcus suggests that observing these patterns can help put one’s own experiences into a larger perspective, which can in turn bring one into alignment with the inevitability of certain outcomes. Most evident among these is death, which Marcus reflects on repeatedly.

“It is ridiculous not to escape from one’s own vices, which is possible, while trying to escape the vices of others, which is impossible.”

For Marcus, and Stoic philosophy more broadly, the only things that humans can control are their own thoughts and actions. This passage reflects on that in a way that seems designed to help Marcus make peace with his inability to change other people and their behaviors that he might find offensive. Complaining about others’ bad acts is futile. Correcting kindly is a more productive response than anger, but the most beneficial action of all is to focus on what he can change in himself.

“The court of Augustus—wife, daughter, grandsons, step-sons, sister, Agrippa, relatives, household, friends, Areius, Maecenas, doctors, diviners: an entire court dead. Go on now to other cases, where it is not the death of just one individual but of a whole family, like the Pompeys. And there is the inscription you see on tombstones: ‘The last of his line’. Just think of all the anxiety of previous generations to leave behind an heir, and then one has to be the last. Here again the death of a whole family.”

In addition to meditating on the inevitability of death, Marcus here shows how pointless it is to obsess about achieving certain outcomes in the material world, which is transient and ever-changing. It is tempting to apply this entry to Marcus’s own life and the numerous sons he outlived, as only one survived him. He may here be putting his own experiences into a larger context, using reason to align his thoughts with the realities of his life while reflecting on the transience of all things—including power and great family dynasties.

“If you remove your judgement of anything that seems painful, you yourself stand quite immune to pain. ‘What self?’ Reason. ‘But I am not just reason.’ Granted. So let your reason cause itself no pain, and if some other part of you is in trouble, it can form its own judgement for itself.”

In the first book of Meditations, Marcus describes his being as composed of “flesh, breath, and directing mind,” the latter being his capacity for reason (10). In this moment when he is grappling with something that may be inclined to cause him pain, he, as always, breaks his experience down into its component parts. He reminds himself that his reason can be applied to shape his judgment so that he refuses to cause himself pain.

“Erase the print of imagination, stop impulse, quench desire: keep your directing mind its own master.”

Marcus’s entries often read like exhortations to himself, returning repeatedly to the same guiding preoccupations, in the process drawing attention to the difficulty of living a good life, according to his Stoic beliefs and practices. Here, the challenges that he takes up in more detailed entries across Meditations come together in a string of commands to himself. Imagination (the tendency to mask reality), impulse (thoughtless, unregulated drive to action), and desire (appetite for things of the imagination) could all control him if his “directing mind” does not continually engage in philosophical practice.

“One man prays: ‘How can I sleep with that woman?’ Your prayer is: ‘How can I lose the desire to sleep with her?’ Another prays: ‘How can I be rid of that man?’ You pray: ‘How can I stop wanting to be rid of him?’ Another: ‘How can I save my little child?’ You: ‘How can I learn not to fear his loss?’ And so on. Give all your prayers this turn, and observe what happens.”

In this section, Marcus has been discussing the power of the gods. If they have power—and he does believe that they do—the proper request is not to achieve particular material ends—“the presence or absence of this or that”—but “the gift of their freedom from all worldly fear, desire, or regret” (91). Reframing the questions is a way of reframing his thoughts to bring them into accordance with the belief he continually advocates: to submit to the design of Providence.

“My soul, will you ever be good, simple, individual, bare, brighter than the body that covers you? Will you ever taste the disposition to love and affection? Will you ever be complete and free of need, missing nothing, desiring nothing live or lifeless for the enjoyment of pleasure? […] Will you ever be such as to share the society of gods and men without any criticism of them or condemnation by them?”

Here again Marcus questions himself without giving any details about what has caused him to do so. That his meditations never give details about who or what causes him to falter in his intentions may be telling. As he continually reminds himself, the circumstances may change, but the challenge remains the same. To spend time recording his grievances could shape his thoughts in a harmful way, drawing attention to others’ errors that are out of his control rather than his own responses that are within his control.

“Whether atoms or natural order, the first premise must be that I am part of the Whole which is governed by nature: the second, that I have some close relationship with the other kindred parts. With these premises in mind, in so far as I am a part I shall not resent anything assigned by the Whole.”

This entry is one of several instances in which Marcus references the debate between the Epicurean belief in random atoms and the Stoic view of natural design. Some scholars have interpreted these references to suggest that Marcus was philosophically eclectic, drawing upon many different schools, while others insist that Marcus’s view is fundamentally Stoic, since he repeatedly appeals to Providence and the gods. It is possible that Marcus here is reminding himself where he can find agreement with people of opposing beliefs: Whatever they believe, they are part of the same Whole that they must therefore embrace.

“A spider is proud to trap a fly. Men are proud of their own hunting—a hare, a sprat in the net, boars, bears, Sarmatian prisoners. If you examine their motives, are they not all bandits?”

For Marcus, reason is a uniquely human gift that must be employed if one is to live a good life and benefit others. Here, he seems to apply his reasoning process to interrogate his own conquest of the Sarmatians, a Germanic tribe, to which the Sarmatian prisoners are a reference. Romans may take pride in their conquests, but Marcus suggests that this response is better suited to animals than to a rational actor.

“The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city. Let me see, let them observe a true man living in accordance with nature. If they cannot bear him, let them kill him—a better fate than a life like theirs.”

In the final books, Marcus repeatedly speaks of death as a kind of release from material preoccupations, an eventuality that should not only not be feared but also that can be embraced, if it is the only way to remain true to his intention to live according to nature. Earlier in Meditations, he wrote of living his purpose in the life the Fates allotted him, including as a Roman statesman. Here, he emphasizes not the glory of Rome but his place in the truly eternal city, which is the Cosmos as a whole.

“Any movement towards acts of injustice or self-indulgence, to anger, pain, or fear is nothing less than apostasy from nature. Further, whenever the directing mind feels resentment at any happening, that too is desertion of its proper post.”

Of paramount importance to Marcus is that humans accept the lives they have been given and that they do not use their circumstances as excuses to exempt themselves from exercising their reason. Committing unjust and hedonistic acts and experiencing anger, pain, and fear are all signs that one has rejected the life accorded him or her by the divine. Thus, they are harmful both to the individual and to others, which is harmful to the whole since all are one.

“‘No thief can steal your will’—so Epictetus.”

Book 11 ends with a series of entries quoting seventeen prominent philosophers and poets, including several by Epictetus, who had once been enslaved. His quotation speaks to the Stoic belief that freedom is not a material state that can be imposed or revoked from without but a conscious choice by a rational actor.