Marcus Aurelius

The teaching

Taught from his private notebooks, the twelve books of the Meditations.

The ruling part

Marcus calls the mind the ruling part, and his whole teaching is to keep it free. Things do not touch the soul; they stand outside it, still, and all its trouble comes from the judgement it makes about them. Take away the judgement, I am harmed, and the harm is gone. Nothing can make the mind worse except what the mind does itself; whatever happens either can be borne or cannot, and what cannot be borne does not last long.

So he tells himself to retire into himself. People look for retreats in the country, by the sea, in the hills, but one can withdraw into one's own soul at any hour, and nowhere is there more quiet or more freedom from trouble. He keeps there a few short principles to renew him: that the world is change, that life is opinion, and that things stand outside the mind.

Three tasks for every moment

Marcus gives the work of each moment in three parts. Let the judgement be true, so that nothing is assented to except what is so; let the action serve the common good, the good of the community one was made for; and let the will be content with whatever comes from outside, as given by the whole. These three are enough, because they are all that lies within one's power.

The work of a human being

The morning preparation, in which he names the difficult people of the day ahead and reminds himself that they cannot harm him, is taught on the page of the evening review, among meditation. Its other half is the work. When he does not want to get up, he says to himself: I am rising to do the work of a human being. Was I made to lie under the blankets and keep warm? The plants, the sparrows, the ants, the spiders and the bees all do their own work and help to order the world, and a human being, made for something, would refuse to do what belongs to his nature.

Each act as if it were the last

Do every act of life as if it were the last, free of carelessness, of passion against reason, of pretence, of self-love and of complaint at one's lot. The present moment is all that anyone has and all that anyone can lose: the longest life and the shortest come to the same at death, for no one can lose the past or the future, only the present he holds.

He trains himself to see how brief everything is. Think of the people of Vespasian's time: marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, feasting, trading, farming, flattering, scheming, longing for consulships and kingdoms; that life of theirs is nowhere now. Alexander and his mule driver, once dead, came to the same end. Time is a river of passing things, and a strong current; each thing is no sooner seen than it is swept away, and another is carried past in its place.

Seeing things bare

To be free of false glamour, Marcus describes each thing to himself exactly, in its plain material and its true size. Fine food is the dead body of a fish or a bird or a pig; the purple robe of state is sheep's wool dyed in the blood of a shellfish. Where things seem most worthy of awe, strip them bare, see how cheap they are, and take away the story that dignifies them. At the summit of the world he warns himself not to be turned into a Caesar, not to take the dye.

Bearing with others

Others do wrong, and Marcus keeps a set of reminders for when they do. People were made for one another; they act from their own judgements, and when they do wrong they act from not knowing good and bad, and so against their will. He himself often does wrong and is no better. He cannot always be sure that they have done wrong at all. Life is short and soon over. It is not their acts that trouble him but his own judgement of them, and his anger harms him more than they do. And kindness, if it is real and not a mask, cannot be beaten: what can the most violent do to one who stays gentle?

The best revenge is not to become like the wrongdoer. What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee. His city and country, as Antoninus, is Rome, but as a human being it is the world, and only what helps those two cities is good for him.

The obstacle becomes the way

Nothing outside can stop the ruling part. It turns every hindrance into material for its work, as a fire seizes what is thrown on it and blazes higher. What stands in the way of the action advances the action, and what blocks the road becomes the road. Be like the headland on which the waves keep breaking: it stands firm, and the water falls quiet around it. And do not say, how unlucky that this has happened to me, but, how lucky that I bear it without grief.

Providence or atoms

Whether the world is ordered by providence or is a confusion of atoms, the duty is the same: if gods rule, follow them; if chance, do not be a thing of chance oneself. All things are woven together and the web is holy; nothing is a stranger to anything else. And whoever has seen the present has seen all that ever was and all that ever will be, for everything is of one kind and one form.

Death as nature's work

Death is one of nature's works, like youth and age, the growth of teeth and beard and grey hair, begetting, pregnancy and birth. It is a scattering or a change, and either way nothing to fear. Pass through this little span in keeping with nature and end the journey content, as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the earth that bore it and thanking the tree on which it grew.