Marcus Aurelius

“ Marcus Aurelius was the most godly of men, not because he was a Pagan, but because he was a gifted man. He was the honor of human nature, and not of an established religion. Science may yet destroy, in appearance, God and the immortal soul; but the book of the "Thoughts" will still remain young with life and truth.
The religion of Marcus Aurelius is the absolute religion, that which results from the simple fact of a high moral conscience placed face to face with the universe. It is of no race, neither of any country. No revolution, no change, no discovery, will have power to affect it. ”

“ Truly a rare opportunity was given to Marcus Aurelius of showing what the mind can do in despite of circumstances. Most peaceful of warriors, a magnificent monarch whose ideal was quiet happiness in home life, bent to obscurity yet born to greatness, the loving father of children who died young or turned out hateful, his life was one paradox. ”

“ Men came to the throne without seeking it, but also without the right of birth, or in any sense the divine right: men came there understanding themselves, experienced, having been long prepared. The empire was a civil burden which each accepted in his turn, without dreaming of hastening the hour. Marcus Aurelius was made emperor so young, that the idea of ruling had scarcely occurred to him, and had not for a moment exercised its charm upon his mind. ”

“ It was the doctrine of Marcus Aurelius that most of the ills of life come to us from our own imagination, that it was not in the power of others seriously to interfere with the calm, temperate life of an individual, and that when a fellow being did anything to us that seemed unjust he was acting in ignorance, and that instead of stirring up anger within us it should stir our pity for him. Oftentimes by careful self-examination we should find that the fault was more our own than that of our fellow, and our sufferings were rather from our own opinions than from anything real. ”

“ We do not come to Marcus Aurelius for a treatise on Stoicism. He is no head of a school to lay down a body of doctrine for students; he does not even contemplate that others should read what he writes. His philosophy is not an eager intellectual inquiry, but more what we should call religious feeling. The uncompromising stiffness of Zeno or Chrysippus is softened and transformed by passing through a nature reverent and tolerant, gentle and free from guile; the grim resignation which made life possible to the Stoic sage becomes in him almost a mood of aspiration. ”

“ Shall we ignore, in the dazzling life of a few favored extortioners, monopolists, and successful gamblers all that Christianity points out as the hope and solace and glory of mankind? Not thus would we estimate human felicity. Not thus would Marcus Aurelius, as he cast his sad and prophetic eye down the vistas of succeeding reigns, and saw the future miseries and wars and violence which were the natural result of egotism and vice, have given his austere judgment on the happiness of his Empire. ”

“ The book of Marcus Aurelius, having no dogmatic base, preserves its freshness eternally. Every one, from the atheist, or he who believes himself one, to the man who is the most devoted to the especial creeds of each worship, can find in it some fruits of edification. It is the most purely human book which exists. It deals with no question of controversy. In theology, Marcus Aurelius floats between pure Deism, Polytheism interpreted in a physical sense according to the manner of the Stoics, and a sort of cosmic Pantheism. ”

“ The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, to name no other, when, in the straits into which he was fallen at Cotinus, he charged his disasters upon the Christian soldiers, and, they praying prostrate upon the earth for him and his army and empire, he forthwith gained the victory, which before he had despaired of—did then immediately acknowledge that they had a God, and that they should no longer be reviled as atheists; since it was plain that men might believe in a God, and carry about the image of him in their own minds, though they had no visible one. It is thus we are all believers. ”

“ One cannot but feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one has no doubt of the poets. ”

“ Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame. ”

“ The reading of Marcus Aurelius strengthens, but it does not console: it leaves a void in the soul which is at once cruel and delightful, which one would not exchange for full satisfaction. Humility, renunciation, severity towards self, were never carried further. Glory—that last illusion of great souls—is reduced to nothingness. It is needful to do right without disturbing one's self as to whether any one knows that we do it. He perceives that history will speak of him: he sometimes dreams of the men of the past with whom the future will associate him. ”

“ But the sphere of the Roman emperor was far greater than that of the Mediaeval kings. Marcus Aurelius ruled over one hundred and twenty millions of people, without check or hindrance or Constitutional restraint. He could do what he pleased with their persons and their property. Most sovereigns, exalted to such lofty dignity and power, have been either cruel, or vindictive, or self-indulgent, or selfish, or proud, or hard, or ambitious,--men who have been stained by crimes, whatever may have been their services to civilization. Most of them have yielded to their great temptations. ”

“ I shall speak to you of that book resplendent with the divine spirit, that manual of submissive life which the most godly of men has left us,—the Cæsar, Marcus Aurelius Antonine. It is the glory of sovereigns that the most irreproachable model of virtue may be found in their ranks, and that the most beautiful lessons of patience and of self-control may come from a condition which one naturally believes to be subject to all the seductions of pleasure and of vanity. ”

“ Under Antonine and Marcus Aurelius, Rome reached its highest grandeur; its rule of the whole world seemed to be undisputed; no cloud could be seen upon its horizon. The emigration from the provinces, above all from the Orient, was augmented rather than lessened. The Greek-speaking population was larger than it had ever been. All who desired a place in the world aspired to come to Rome: nothing was sanctioned until it had received the stamp of this universal exposition of the products of the entire universe. ”

“ COMMODUS TO ALEXANDER SEVERUS
The day of the death of Marcus Aurelius may be taken as the decisive moment in which the ruin of the old civilisation was determined.
Now after the great effort of reason in high places, after Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, the reign of evil begins again, and is worse than ever. Farewell to goodness, farewell to reason! Now, all hail, folly! All hail, absurdity! All hail to the Syrian and his questionable gods! Genuine physicians have been able to do nothing; the sick man is more sick than ever: send for the charlatans.—Renan. ”

“ Over Vitellius at his banquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa calling in vain on Death, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus among the rose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs. We can even see it looming behind the noble form of Marcus Aurelius, who, amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned in his tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which were powerless to regenerate the world. ”

“ Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed in it faintly and uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from proposing it as a motive. ”

“ Long after his death, his bust was to be seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman Empire. It may be the vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and doings of living sovereigns; it is its nobler part which busies itself with those of the dead. These busts of Marcus Aurelius, in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bore witness, not to the inmates’ frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth. ”

“ We touch here upon one of the most delicate points in the biography of Marcus Aurelius. It is unhappily certain, that, under his reign, Christians were condemned to death, and executed. The policy of his predecessors had been firm in this particular. Trajan, Antonine, Hadrian himself, saw in the Christians a secret sect, anti-social, dreaming of overturning the empire. Like all men true to the old Roman principles, they believed in the necessity of repressing them. ”

“ Never esteem aught of advantage which will oblige you to break your faith, or to desert your honour; to hate, to suspect, or to execrate any man; to play a part; or to set your mind on anything that needs to be hidden by wall or curtain. He who to all things prefers the soul, the divinity within him, and the sacred cult of its virtues, makes no tragic groan or gesture. He needs neither solitude nor a crowd of spectators; and, best of all, he will live neither seeking nor shunning death. Whether the soul shall use its surrounding body for a longer or shorter space is to him indifferent. ”

“ A man had but one moment of life to call his own, wrote Marcus Aurelius. The moment just passed into the score of time’s count, the moment which the hand of the clock trembles over, a hair’s breadth yet to go–these are no man’s to claim. One is gone forever; the other may mark the passing of his soul. Only this moment, this throb of the heart, this half-drawn breath, is a living man’s to claim. The beggar has it; the monarch can command no more. Poor as he was, Dr. Slavens thought, smiling as he worked his foot, into the trampled dust, he was as rich in life’s allotment as the best. ”

“ Solely intent upon his own conduct, ever mindful of his own concurrent part in the destiny of the Universe, he orders his conduct well, persuaded that his part is good. For the lot appointed to every man is part of the law of all things as well as a law for him. He forgets not that all rational beings are akin, and that the love of all mankind is part of the nature of man; also that we must not think as all men think, but only as those who live a life accordant with nature. ”

“ The inheritance of wisdom with a throne is always rare: I find in history but two striking examples of it,—in India, the succession of the three Mongol emperors, Bâber, Hoomâyoon, and Akbar; at Rome, at the head of the greatest empire that ever existed, the two admirable reigns of Antonine the Pious and Marcus Aurelius. ”

“ When you fret at anything, you have forgotten that all happens in accordance with the nature of the Universe, and that the wrong done was another’s. This, too, that whatever happens has happened, and will happen, and is now happening everywhere. You have also forgotten how great is the bond between any man and all the human race, a bond not of blood and seed, but of common intelligence. You have forgotten that the intelligence of every man is divine, and an efflux from God ”

“ The great inconvenience of practical life, and that which renders it insupportable to a superior man, is, that, if one carries into it the principles of the ideal, talents become defects; so that very often the accomplished man is less successful in it than one who is fitted by egotism or ordinary routine. Three or four times the virtue of Marcus Aurelius came near being his ruin. The first fault into which it led him was that of sharing the empire with Lucius Verus, to whom he was under no obligation. ”

“ He employed his evenings in the study of the Scriptures, as Marcus Aurelius meditated on the verities of a spiritual life after the fatigues and dangers of the day. He was not so good a man as was the pious Antoninus, who would, had he been converted to Christianity, have given to it a purer and loftier legislation. It may be doubted whether Aurelius would have made popes of bishops, or would have invested metaphysical distinctions in theology with so great an authority. ”

“ In general, however, the action Marcus Aurelius prescribes is action which every sound nature must recognize as right, and the motives he assigns are motives which every clear reason must recognize as valid. And so he remains the especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward striving men, in those ages most especially that walk by sight, not by faith, but yet have no open vision. He cannot give such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he gives them much ”

“ If then, now that you are near your exit, setting behind you all other things, you will hold alone in reverence your ruling part, the spirit divine within you; if you will cease to dread the end of life, but rather fear to miss the beginning of life according to Nature, you will be a man, worthy of the ordered Universe that produced you; you will cease to be a stranger in your own country, gaping in wonder at every daily happening, caught up by this trifle or by that. ”