Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

66 MARCUS AURELIUS.
against one another then is contrary to nature ;
and it is acting
against one another to be vexed and to turn away. 1
Again :
Consider that a good disposition is invincible, if it be genuine ; and
not an affected smile or acting a part. For what will the most violent
man do to thee, if thou continuest to be of a kind disposition towards
him, and if as opportunity offers thou gently adinonishest him and
calmly correctest his errors at the very time when he is trying to do
thee harm, saying, not so, my child ;
we are constituted by nature for
something else : I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring
And thou must do this not as if thou
thyself, my child. . . .
wert lecturing him, nor yet that any bystanders may admire ;
but
either when he is alone. . . .
2
Now this is no new doctrine in Philosophy. Socrates
lays it down in a noble passage,
the wrong is the injured person,
that the man who does
not the man who suffers
it. But here there is a tenderness in the tone, and a
delicacy in the mode of rebuke which remind one, more
than any other mere heathen utterance, of the words of our
Lord.
A passage in the llth book of the Meditations on Schism
is in true accord with the doctrine of St. Paul.
Here then we have a body of teaching of very
noble tone
and very pure and lofty spirit. Nothing in a higher key
than these thoughts of Marcus Aurelius has issued from
the heathen world. And it is clear that the passages
quoted represent his matured convictions at his best moments.
They would not however give a faithful picture
of Marcus
Aurelius as a Stoic philosopher, unless there were added for
comparison some passages in which the fatal uncertainty
and despondency of all heathen thought appears.
Shortlived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer
and the remembered, and all this in a nook of this part of the world ;
and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself; and
1
Meditations, II. 1.
2 Ibid., XL 18.