The Religious Sentiment of Marcus Aurelius – Episode 47

Everything suits me that suits your designs, O my universe. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is in your own good time. All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O nature. All proceeds from you, all subsists in you, and to you all things return. (Meditations 4.23) The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a deeply spiritual person, and that fact comes across clearly in his Meditations. The American philosopher and religious scholar Jacob Needleman suggests the combination of “metaphysical vision, poetic genius, and the worldly realism of a ruler” within the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius inspire us and give us “honorable and realistic hope in our embattled lives.”[1] As a result, he argues, [The Meditations] deserves its unique place among the writings of the world’s great spiritual philosophers.[2] Needleman elaborates on the spiritual impact Marcus’ Meditations has on many of its readers, Marcus is seeking to experience from within himself the higher attention of what he calls the logos, or Universal Reason, so too the sensitive reader begins to listen for that same finer life within his own psyche. That is to say, the reader— you and I— is not simply given great ideas which he then feeds into his already formed opinions and rules of logic. The action of many of these meditations is far more serious than that, and far more interesting and spiritually practical. In a word, in such cases, in many of these meditations, we are being guided—without even necessarily knowing what to call it—we are being guided through a brief moment of inner work. We are being given a taste of what it means to step back in ourselves and develop an intentional relationship to our own mind.[3] The practice of Stoicism for Marcus was a means to find his place in the cosmos. He sought congruity with Nature and learned to love what fate had in store for him because he trusted in a providential cosmos. As David Hicks asserts, The Stoicism in which Marcus believed is rooted in an all-encompassing nature. Everything in man and in the universe, everything that is or ought to be, everything fated and everything free, and the logos or rational principle that informs everything and ties everything together and is ultimately identified with the deity – all of this is found in nature, and there is nothing else.[4] Stoicism provided Marcus with more than an abstract, intellectual understanding of human and cosmic Nature. The religious nature of Stoic philosophy differentiated it from other philosophies as well as organized religions. I covered the religious nature of Stoicism previously, so I will not address it fully here. However, it is important to understand that Stoicism was more than an intellectual endeavor for Marcus. Stoicism provided a rational form of spirituality for Marcus, and it offers the same for moderns. Stoicism is an alternative for those who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. If you're uncomfortable with the dogmas of organized religion and the nihilism of atheism, Stoicism offers a middle ground. Stoicism provides a spiritual way of life guided by reason. Stoicism relies on our innate connection with the rationality permeating the cosmos to guide our human reason toward a relationship with the divine that inspires us to develop our moral character and thereby experience true well-being. As Mark Forstater wrote in his insightful book The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius: Until the time of Neoplatonism, Stoicism was the most highly spiritualised form of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome. It was so spiritualised that it is as accurate to call it a religion as a philosophy.[5] As Henry Sedgewick points out in his biography of Marcus Aurelius, the traditional religions did not provide what he was looking for, Marcus was seeking a religion, as I have said, but there was none at hand that he could accept. The old Roman religion was a mere series of ceremonies, with nothing sacred except lingering patriotic sentiment, and withal marred by superstitions, such as those at Lanuvium. Foreign religions were no better. Syrian priests, like mountebanks, trundled images of the Magna Mater about the countryside, hoping to wheedle peasants out of their pennies; the worshippers of the Egyptian gods offered sensuous exaltation, and mysteries that disregarded reason. Christianity, as we understand it, was utterly unknown to him. He was compelled to look for religion in philosophy; for there only, as he thought, and perhaps thought truly, could a man, without doing wrong to his reason, find spiritual help to enable him to do his duty and keep his soul pure.[6]  Marcus did not find consolation in the rituals of traditional religions or the mediation of priests. He was looking for psychological strength and consolation which could allow him to keep his mind pure in trying times and under troublesome circumstances. Marcus discovered the personal religious practice he was looking for within the deeply spiritual philosophy of Stoicism.[7] As a result, his life became an example of the power of Stoicism in a person’s inner life. Sedgewick argues, Marcus Aurelius is not a prodigy among men, unheralded by what has come before; on the contrary he is the ripe product of the spiritual movement that expressed itself in the Stoic philosophy, or rather, as it had then become, the Stoic religion.[8] As can be seen in his Meditations, Marcus followed the Stoic path and became his own priest, in service to the gods, For such a man, who no longer postpones his endeavour to take his place among the best, is indeed a priest and servant of the gods, behaving rightly towards the deity stationed within him, so ensuring that the mortal being remains unpolluted by pleasures, invulnerable to every pain, untouched by any wrong, unconscious of any evil, a wrestler in the greatest contest of all… (Meditations 3.4.3) In Meditations 3.16, Marcus draws upon the importance of the divine while discussing four models of human behavior. Body, soul, intellect: for the body, sense-impressions; for the soul, impulses; for the intellect, judgements. To receive impressions by means of images is something that we share even with cattle; and to be drawn this way and that by the puppet-strings of impulse, we share with wild beasts, with catamites, and with a Phalaris or a Nero; and to have the intellect as a guide towards what appear to be duties is something that we share with those who do not believe in the gods, with those who betray their country, with those who will do anything whatever behind locked doors. If you share everything else with those whom I have just mentioned, there remains the special characteristic of a good person, namely, to love and welcome all that happens to him and is spun for him as his fate, and not to defile the guardian-spirit seated within his breast, nor to trouble it with a host of fancies, but to preserve it in cheerful serenity, following God in an orderly fashion, never uttering a word that is contrary to the truth nor performing an action that is contrary to justice. In this passage, Marcus outlined three aspects of the Stoic Self and their corresponding capacities; then, he uses these to delineate four behavior models. First, let’s look at the three aspects of Self: Body (soma)—sense-impressions (phantasia) Soul (pneuma)—impulses (horme) Intellect (nous)—judgments It would be a mistake to impose a Platonic conception of a divided mind here. The mind is a unified whole in Stoicism. As Christopher Gill notes in his note on the Robin Hard translation of Meditations, where Marus used this same language: This threefold division differs from the standard Stoic view that psychological processes are also physical and are functions of an animating ‘breath’ (pneuma); see LS 47, 53. However, the division is probably best taken as an essentially ethical one (Marcus urges himself to identify with his rational and potentially virtuous mind or ‘ruling centre’), rather than indicating the deliberate adoption of a non-standard, Platonic-style view of psychology.[9] In his Introduction to the same translation, Gill wrote: …[Marcus] sometimes stresses that we are, essentially, our ‘ruling’ or ‘governing’ centre (or ‘mind’, hēgemonikon), sometimes contrasting this with other aspects of our self, including ‘flesh’, and, more surprisingly, psuchē (which he uses to mean ‘breath’ or ‘vitality’).25 On the face of it, this looks like a shift towards a Platonic-style dualism, distinguishing between the disembodied mind and the body in a way that is quite inconsistent with the Stoic view that our psychological functions are also bodily ones. But, examined more closely, it is clear that such passages are really making an ethical point, and one that reflects the first Stoic theme noted earlier. What Marcus is stressing (like Epictetus in similar phrases) is that the really important aspect of human nature is the capacity to use the mind, or ‘governing part’, to try to live virtuously, rather than attaching supreme value to ‘matters of indifference’ such as material goods or sensual pleasures.[10] Next, Marcus uses these aspects of the Self to delineate four models of behavior: Those who are driven by sense impressions (phantasia): “To receive impressions by means of images is something that we share even with cattle.” Those who are driven by desires (horme): “Drawn this way and that by the puppet-strings of impulse, we share with wild beasts, with catamites, and with a Phalaris or a Nero.” Those who are driven by their intellect (nous) alone: “To have the intellect as a guide towards what appear to be duties is something that we share with those who do not believe in the gods, with those who betray their country, with those who will do anything whatever behind locked doors.” So far,