Marcus Aurelius
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page 7
MARCUS AURELIUS
A BIOGRAPHY TOLD AS MUCH AS
MAY BE BY LETTERS, TOGETHER
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE
STOIC RELIGION AND AN EXPOSITION OF THE ROMAN GOVERNMENT'S
ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS CHRISTIANITY during marcus's reign
BY
HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
HUMPHREY MILFORD
•
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXXI.
page 11
PREFACE
this little book
my purpose is to provide those people
for whom the Meditations of
IN deep
Marcus Aurelius contain
religious meaning, with such introductory information about him, his character, his religion, and his life,
a
as I think, judging from my own experience, they may desire. So I begin with an exposition of Stoic philosophy,
and, as I believe that philosophy to have been primarily a
religion, I present it as such. And in my defence to sun-
dry criticisms made upon Marcus by ancient and modern
writers, I give by far the most space to the gravest, that
he persecuted the Christians, for I think no accusation
would have surprised him more, or have seemed to him
more unreasonable.
I have not wished to encumber the pages
with notes, and
therefore I have relegated to the appendix most references
to my authority for statements in the text.
Such quotations
in a foreign language as have not been translated in the
text will be found translated in the appendix. Greek phrases
that occur in the letters I have rendered in French.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
October, 1920.
H. D. S.
page 15
INTRODUCTION
saying, "Das Schaudern ist der Menschneed the recommenda-
heit bestes Teil/' does not
GOETHE'S
tion of his name;
it
carries
its
own
authority.
Among the qualities that go to make up character, a sensiawe is the surest sign of the
higher life. It lies deeper than other susceptibilities, sensuous or spiritual. Love, fame, or truth, have greater power
to dazzle and overcome, but awe bestows the more abiding
tiveness to the feeling of
satisfaction ; it sets a man apart from the many, it lifts him
into
communion with what
for
him
is
the highest,
and
ennobles his condition. This sense of awe is the fruit of
the religious life, whether that life be lived in the solitude
of the monastery, library, or wood, in the company of people
consecrated to an ideal, or in the hurly-burly of the world.
But the leaven of religion is not always at work, even in
men of religious life. The spirit bloweth where and when it
listeth. Sometimes the causes that lead men to religion are
close at hand, bereavement, disappointment, sin; sometimes
public calamities turn whole communities to the great fundamental question of life, Is there a God? and, sometimes, a
religious genius comes with healing on his lips and rouses
men, both singly and in multitudes, to perceive the beauty
of a universe in which there is a God, and the desolation of
a universe in which there is none. But religion does not lie
at beck and call;
We cannot kindle when we will,
The fire which in the heart resides.
There are times when the temple of the soul is empty. We
may acknowledge, with our intelligence, the supreme noble-
page 16, segment 1/2
MARCUS AURELIUS
12
ness of that overpowering sense of reverence which turns
a man in upon his heart and fills him with a consciousness
of a presence, interpret that consciousness or that presence
as we will; and yet we cannot conjure it to come.
Awe lies
beyond the reach of the human will. It is in these empty
times, these barren moods, that there is need of some doctrine, some rule of action, that shall serve as makeshift to
occupy the empty place which the sense of awe should
occupy. Such a makeshift is the Stoic philosophy.
Under the long dominion of Christian dogma, chosen
souls have experienced, in a sharper or duller degree, das
Schaudern, the shudder of awe from the consciousness of
what they believed to be a manifestation of the divine presence. But the Christian faith has lost its ancient authority,
and though there are many cries, Lo here Lo there as yet
no new religion has come to preach the gospel of what is
!
to be.
!
And it is not impossible, nor yet unlikely, that the
principles underneath Stoic philosophy may still be of service today, to teach the pilgrim soul to find that support
within himself which he does not find without.
The ancient Stoics were in the same ignorance as seekers*
today who are no longer Christians. They had no authoritative revelation, no word of God, to teach them the nature of
the world in which they found themselves, no divine code
of laws to tell them what to do. They looked about and
beheld sorrow, disease, old age, maladjustments of all sorts,
wars between states, civil strife, contention among neighbors, earthquakes, and tempests. Such was the world then;
it is not very different now. In a world of this sort, what
shall a man do to persuade himself that it is a world of
order and not of chaos, that there is
page 16, segment 2/2
something in it other
than vanity, that it has what the human heart, if the human
heart had spiritual eyes, would pronounce to be a meaning?
The Stoics were honest men and would not go beyond the
evidence of the senses, they turned away from Plato's dream
page 17, segment 1/2
INTRODUCTION
that the soul released from the
13
body may behold divine
beauty, and from Socrates' hope of communion with the
heroic dead, and created what they called a philosophy, but
what we may more properly call a religion, out of the world
as their human senses saw it, a religion, austere and cold, bu t
"
sane, high, an d heroic. I do not pretend that we can go all
the way with them, for their physics were childish, and their
metaphysics not very much better, but I do think we can go
far enough to derive help and consolation, however meagre
and barren both help and consolation shall appear matched
with those offered by Christianity.
ThftSt piVs were monist s. They
men
believed
that
all
the
of one substance, and constitutes a unity, that
are integral parts of the mighty whole, and in their
universe
is
help to accomplish the will of the whole; and from
these postulates, they derived an abiding sense of the serilives
ousness and dignity of
human
life.
They deduced,
as
a
fundamental dogniaj th"at~*a~nian wears, as it were, the uniform of the universe, and must quit himself with wisdom,
for titude^ sobriety and justice. An d, today, many a man,
1
though perhaps not everyone, if he will consider the starry
heavens and the earth with its vast diversity of things, some
instinct with life, some endowed with mind, may bring himself to
feel that the universe is entitled to the adjective
however much that term may evade his attempts at
definition, and that he himself is a comrade of all that
exists, of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, and
divine,
that he is bound, by virtue of that comradeship, to fulfill the
bond of allegiance which the acceptance of life implies, that
is sacred, like the sacramentum of the Roman
and that he, merely
page 17, segment 2/2
because he is a man, must see
the bond
soldier,
to it that his life
is
consecrated.
Of all Stoics Marcus Aurelius is the purest and_ most
sympathetic; indeed he is one of the most gracious figures
out of all history. In the bewilderment of untoward cir-
page 18, segment 1/2
14
MARCUS AURELIUS
bumstance he strove for a theory of the universe that should
command his reverence and excite his awe, and for a practice that should
make him the obedient servant of a divine
Like us, he was hedged about with doubts. Like us,
he confronted the alternative of a universe which, moved by
reason, proceeds toward a rational goal, or of an irrational
will.
universe, propelled by its own blind properties upon a purposeless course. As he says: "Either there is a compound-
and a dispersion, or, there is unity, and
order, and providence. If the former, why care to live on
in such a meaningless turmoil and muddle? Why concern
ing, a confusion,
myself with anything except that sometime I shall 'become
earth'? Why vex myself? For whatever I do, the 'dispersion' will come upon me. But if the latter alternative is
true, I stand reverent, and steadfast, and I trust in my
ruler." (M. A. VI, 10.) From this similarity in situation
comes his power to help us on our way.
There are times in every man's life in which a longing
possesses him to come into right relations with the universe,
to bring his spirit into accord with its laws, his individual
will into unison with the universal will. When sorrow comes,
or the evening of life approaches, the great problems of
humanity knock at the door. It is because Marcus Aurelius
was haunted by these questionings and found the solution,
at least for himself, to lie in innocence of tho ught, in kindIness to his neighbor, in the
of his duty~Txf the
J
performance
a companion and guide to many men.
Ernest Renan, who, however much the fruits of his scholar-
'State, that he is
still
ship may have withered and died, is still among the first
of scholars in his sympathy with human needs, and in his
knowledge of the human
page 18, segment 2/2
heart, truly said:
"Le livre de Marc-Aurele, n'ayantaucunebasedogmatique,
conservera eternellement sa fraicheur. Tous, depuis l'athee
ou celui qui se croit tel, jusqu' a l'homme le plus engage
dans les croyances particulieres de chaque culte, peuvent y
page 19, segment 1/2
INTRODUCTION
15
trouver des fruits d'edification. C'est le livre le plus pure-
ment humain qu'il y ait
ce livre incomparable,
ce
manuel de la vie resignee, cet Evangile de ceux qui ne croient
pas au surnaturel. ... La science pourrait detruire Dieu et
.
.
.
.
.
.
Tame, que le livre des Pensees resterait jeune encore de vie
et de verite. La religion de Marc-Aurele,
est la religion
absolue, celle qui resulte du simple fait d'une haute con.
.
.
science morale, placee en face de l'univers. Elle n'est ni
d'une race ni d'un pays. Aucune revolution, aucun progres,
aucune decouverte ne pourront la changer."
And Renan says no more than what many men have felt,
each in his several way, from the ancient unknown annotator
of the Vatican manuscript, who expressed his gratitude in
verse, down to Frederick the Great, who says, "Marc-Aurele
peut-etre, de tous les humains, a pousse la vertu au degre le
plus eminent," and when false friends betrayed him betook
himself for strength and comfort to the Meditations; down
to
Montesquieu who wrote: "Jamais philosophe n'a mieux
fait sentir aux hommes les douceurs de la vertu et la dignite
de leur etre que Marc-Aurele: le cceur est touche, Fame
aggrandie, l'esprit eleve" down to General Gordon, Matthew Arnold, Frederic W. H. Myers, and many another of
less name. And because so many people of so many sorts
have set great store by this Roman "gospel," and because
meditations about conduct gain in interest from a knowledge
that the writer has lived in full accord with his own ideals,
I have thought that, in spite of the number of books already
written that concern Marcus Aurelius, there might be room
for still another. I have tried to show him, as well as the
materials would permit, not as he appears on the cold
heights of his
page 19, segment 2/2
religious philosophy, but as he was seen hj
;
his contemporaries, in youth, manhood, and in later years.
And I have tried to present Stoic philosophy, not as modern
philosophers interpret
it,
but as
Marcus viewed
it
and
accepted it. And I have also felt it right to justify him in
page 20
MARCUS AURELIUS
16
We
enforcing the law of the land against the Christians.
look back with our knowledge of what Christianity is at its
best, and with our knowledge that it was destined to prevail,
and assume too readily that the pagan opposition was wrong.
Perhaps reason, as well as faith, may justify its partisans.
Marcus Aurelius did the right "as God gave him to see the
right" and in so doing, added a chapter to the history of
tragedy and of life's irony.
H. D. S.
;